RENAISSANCE LITERARY THEORY AND PRACTICE




                           RENAISSANCE LITERARY
                           THEORY AND PRACTICE

                  Classicism in the Rhetoric and Poetic
                      Of Italy, France, and England
                                1400-1600

                                   _By_
                          CHARLES SEARS BALDWIN
                      _Edited with Introduction by_
                            DONALD LEMEN CLARK

                            GLOUCESTER, MASS.
                               PETER SMITH
                                   1959

                             COPYRIGHT, 1939
                        COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

                             REPRINTED, 1959
                             BY PERMISSION OF
                        COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS




BEATO THOMAE MORO JVDICI CVI STILVM ANGLICVM LATINE REGENTI PERSTABAT IN
REGIA QVAESTIONE PAX ROMANA




INTRODUCTION


When he died in 1936 Charles Sears Baldwin, Professor of Rhetoric
and English Composition at Columbia University, left the unpublished
manuscript which here appears in print. At the request of his family, I
undertook to prepare the manuscript for publication and see it through
the press. As a devoted student, colleague, and friend I have been happy
to do so.

Baldwin’s _Renaissance Literary Theory and Practice_ takes its place as
the continuation of his previously published studies: _Ancient Rhetoric
and Poetic_ (1924) and _Medieval Rhetoric and Poetic_ (1928), both
published by the Macmillan Company. It takes up the story where _Medieval
Rhetoric and Poetic_ left off in 1400 and carries it on to 1600.

The first sentences of his preface to the first study suggest that
Baldwin had the present study in mind before 1924. “To interpret ancient
rhetoric and poetic afresh from typical theory and practice is the
first step toward interpreting those traditions of criticism which were
most influential in the Middle Age. Medieval rhetoric and poetic, in
turn, prepare for a clearer comprehension of the Renaissance renewal of
allegiance to antiquity.”

Like the two earlier studies, it is firmly based on the Aristotelian
philosophy of composition embodied in the _Rhetoric_ and the _Poetic_.
Baldwin adheres to the sound rhetoric which aims at enhancing the subject
and repudiates the sophistic rhetoric which aims at enhancing the
speaker. Rhetoric and poetic are different in aim and different in their
modes of composition. Consequently he considers poetic deviated when it
becomes confused with rhetoric and perverted when controlled by sophistic.

Had he lived, Baldwin would have written more than here appears. He had
planned a chapter on Renaissance education which would have demonstrated
more fully the channels through which poetical theory reached poetical
practice. In the chapter “Sixteenth Century Poetics” he had planned
sections on Castelvetro and Sibillet which were never written. Other
writers on literary theory he deliberately omitted as less typical,
less significant, or less influential than the writers he discusses.
His method was to go directly to the original sources, both for theory
and for practice, to make his own translations, and to ignore secondary
sources, which he rarely cites.

Although Chapters IV, V, VI, and VIII deal with literary forms: lyric,
pastoral, romance, drama, tales, history, and essay, Baldwin was not
attempting a history of Italian, French, and English literature in
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. To have written such a history
would have involved a completeness he never intended. He was assaying
samples of literature for literary values. Especially was he tracing the
influences of sound literary theory on sound literary practice, and the
disastrous results in literature of the misapplication of rhetorical
theory to poetic and the composition of story and drama. As literary
critic and teacher of composition, he saw no good reason why modern
literature, in theory or in practice, should make the same mistakes
that were made in ancient times, the Middle Age, and the Renaissance. He
believed that modern literature, modern criticism, and modern teaching
should learn from the mistakes of others as well as from their own.

Before Baldwin’s death I had read the manuscript in two states as I had
the two earlier works. Further, the manuscript was read and criticized
by Dr. Caroline Ruutz-Rees of Rosemary Hall and Professor William G.
Crane of The College of the City of New York. To these friends, and to
the others whose aid I have been unable to discover, the author’s and
the editor’s gratitude is due. Professor Marshall Whithed Baldwin, son
of Charles Sears Baldwin, read both the galley and the page proofs.
My colleagues, Professors Harry Morgan Ayres and Nelson Glenn McCrea,
advised on the proofs and other details. I join with the Baldwin estate
in gratitude to the generous assistance of the officers and editorial
staff of the Columbia University Press.

                                                        DONALD LEMEN CLARK

Columbia University September, 1939




CONTENTS


      I. THE RENAISSANCE AS A LITERARY PERIOD                       3

     II. LATIN, GREEK, AND THE VERNACULARS                         17
           1. HUMANISTIC LATIN                                     17
           2. GREEK                                                19
           3. THE VERNACULARS                                      27
                (_a_) _Italian_                                    27
                (_b_) _French_                                     31
                (_c_) _English_                                    36

    III. IMITATION OF PROSE FORMS, CICERONIANISM, RHETORICS        39
           1. ORATIONS, LETTERS, DIALOGUES                         39
           2. CICERONIANISM                                        44
           3. RHETORICS                                            53

     IV. IMITATION IN LYRIC AND PASTORAL                           65
           1. LYRIC                                                65
                (_a_) _Latin Lyric_                                65
                (_b_) _Italy and England_                          66
                (_c_) _France_                                     68
           2. PASTORAL                                             78

      V. ROMANCE                                                   91

           1. THE ROMANTIC CONTRAST                                91
           2. SEPARATE ROMANCES                                    95
           3. THE ARTHURIAN CYCLE IN MALORY                        98
           4. THE CAROLINGIAN CYCLE ON THE STREET                 100
           5. PULCI                                               100
           6. BOIARDO                                             102
           7. ARIOSTO                                             111
           8. TASSO AND SPENCER                                   123
                (_a_) _Tasso_                                     124
                (_b_) _Spencer_                                   127

     VI. DRAMA                                                    133
           1. SACRED PLAYS                                        134
           2. TRAGEDY                                             137
           3. HISTORY PLAYS                                       144
           4. PASTORAL AND RUSTIC COMEDY                          146

    VII. SIXTEENTH-CENTURY POETICS                                155
           1. VIDA                                                155
           2. TRISSINO                                            158
           3. GIRALDI CINTHIO                                     158
           4. MUZIO                                               161
           5. FRACASTORO                                          162
           6. PELETIER                                            163
           7. MINTURNO                                            164
           8. PARTENIO                                            169
           9. SCALIGER                                            171
          10. RONSARD AND TASSO                                   175
          11. SIDNEY                                              178
          12. ENGLISH DISCUSSION OF VERSE                         180
          13. PATRIZZI                                            184
          14. DENORES                                             185
          15. VAUQUELIN                                           186
          16. SUMMARY                                             187

    VIII. PROSE NARRATIVE                                         190
           1. TALES                                               190
                (_a_) _Bandello_                                  190
                (_b_) _Marguerite de Navarre_                     194
                (_c_) _Giraldi Cinthio_                           195
                (_d_) _Belleforest, Painter, and Fenton_          198
                (_e_) _Pettie, Lyly, and Greene_                  199
           2. RABELAIS                                            202
           3. HISTORY                                             213
                (_a_) _Latin Histories_                           214
                (_b_) _Vernacular Histories: More; Macchiavelli_  217

      IX. ESSAYS                                                  223
           1. DISCUSSION ON POLITICS AND SOCIETY                  223
           2. MONTAIGNE                                           232

          INDEX                                                   241




RENAISSANCE LITERARY THEORY AND PRACTICE




Chapter I

THE RENAISSANCE AS A LITERARY PERIOD


The word _renaissance_ suggests a state of mind, the sense of recovering
something neglected by one’s literary ancestors. “Ours is a new day,”
says the fifteenth century. “We have escaped from the decadence of our
fathers into the purer poetry. We have recovered the great tradition and
are setting it forward.” So the English eighteenth century, which had
again repudiated “gothic night,” was in turn repudiated in the manifesto
of the _Lyrical Ballads_ and scorned by Keats as “a schism nourished in
foppery and barbarism.” _The_ Renaissance, then, is it only one such
instance of self-consciousness among the many that mark so-called periods
of literature? The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were regarded not
only at the time, but long and widely, as an actual new day, _the_
Renaissance. Histories of literature, no less than those of politics
and society, have treated it as a distinct period. Though more recent
histories have found it less distinct, it still claims attention as a
widespread cult of the ancient classics. Its leading ideas permeated
western Europe; and its new day, though it was bent toward nationalism,
was conceived but secondarily as national progress, primarily as a
general reanimation from ancient ideals long neglected. Thus it is not
only the most familiar example of a typical recurrence in literary
history; it remains the cardinal experience of classicism. Though we may
no longer speak of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as a reawakening
of literature equal to that of painting, we may still speak of _the_
Renaissance.

The common sixteenth-century view of accomplished restoration after
medieval decadence is expressed (1527) by Guillaume Budé.

    The best part, I think, we now have in our hands, saved from
    the deluge of more than a thousand years; for a deluge indeed,
    calamitous to life, had so drained and absorbed literature
    itself and the kindred arts worthy of the name, and kept them
    so dismantled and buried in barbarian mud that it was a wonder
    they could still exist (_De studio literarum_, 1527; Basel ed.
    1533).

In 1558 the sober Minturno is merely less certain as to dates.

    For who of you is unaware that from the time when the Roman
    Empire, for all its power and eminence, began to totter and
    lean, literature was asleep, not to say overwhelmed and
    buried, till the time of Petrarch? From then on, it has been
    so steadily regaining the light that now it has been almost
    recalled from that [medieval] rude and barbarous teaching to
    its ancient cult (_De poeta_, 1559, p. 14).

The _Poetica_ (1561) of Julius Caesar Scaliger surprised no one by
bringing the history of Latin poetry to date without even mentioning
the Middle Age. He might include his own poems; he need not include
the medieval hymns. Scorn of the Middle Age was a Renaissance literary
commonplace. The history of literature has to be rewritten from age to
age, first to satisfy such prejudices, then to dispel them. The art that
survives these reinterpretations, the books or the paintings that still
compel admiration and study, are vindicated, whatever their period, as
classics. Meantime the perception of these has been repeatedly obscured
both by preoccupation with some idealized great period and by pride in
one’s own time.

What, then, has the longer perspective of history shown to be the
literary progress of the Middle Age and the distinctive direction of
the Renaissance? Two answers have been found in the fourteenth-century
borderland: (1) the culmination of medieval development in the literary
triumph of the vernaculars, and (2) the beginning of a new literary
influence in the revival of Greek. Two more belong to the fifteenth
century: (3) the vogue of that humanistic Latin which rejected the
medieval freedom for conformity to the style of an idealized great
period, and (4) the establishment of printing.

The literary triumph of the vernaculars is forecast in Dante. The supreme
achievement of the _Divina Commedia_ is eloquent at once of the Middle
Age and of the literary future. The vogue of Boccaccio and the wider
influence of Petrarch were not of their Latin, but of their vernacular
writings. The traditional superiority of Latin, indeed, as the language
of literature not only lingered; it was upheld by humanism; but the
tradition had gradually to yield to the facts. The fourteenth century
closed with the convincing achievement of Chaucer in English. To French
also, though individual eminence was less, the century promised the
literary future. The long medieval course of Latin had reached its term.
The new literary day was for the new languages. None the less that new
day was medieval, not merely in date, but in being the culmination of a
medieval progress. The language of literature, medieval experience had
learned, must be the language of communication. So it had long been in
Latin; so it had become, within medieval conditions, in Tuscan, French,
and English. No subsequent change through Greek, or humanistic Latin, or
even printing, more affected the outlook and direction of literature than
the medieval rise of the vernaculars from literary acceptance to literary
eminence.

Greek, generally in abeyance through most of the Middle Age, was studied
by both Petrarch and Boccaccio and had its professor at Florence in
1396. Its spread in the fifteenth century was stimulated both by the
movement for the reunion of the “Greek” Church with Rome and by the
influx of Greek scholars after the fall of Constantinople in 1453. But
it never threatened the traditional eminence of Latin. Renaissance
literary dialogues were less often Platonic in form than Ciceronian;
and the direct influence of Theocritus on revived pastoral is hard to
distinguish from the indirect influence through the _Bucolics_ of Vergil.
Still more important to remember is that Greek influence, direct or
indirect, stopped short of Greek composition. Greek dramaturgy, perhaps
the cardinal Greek influence on later times, remained ineffective in the
Renaissance. The _Poetic_ of Aristotle did not oust the “Ars poetica”
of Horace. Slowly grasped, Greek dramaturgy hardly shaped plays before
the seventeenth century. The sixteenth century was still repeating
Horace and following Seneca or carrying on the experience of the miracle
plays or learning by stage experiment. Nor was verse narrative, even
when called epic, attentive to the Aristotelian doctrine of sequence.
The integration of Tasso’s _Jerusalem_, which found its model in the
_Aeneid_, is quite exceptional. The manuscripts circulating in the
fourteenth century and the early fifteenth, as well as the texts later
printed, show as ready a welcome for the decadent Greek literature of
Alexandria as for the great names of Athens. With Homer came in not only
the _Anthology_, but even those “Greek romances” which are aggregations
of melodrama. The Renaissance vogue of Plato involved from its beginning
the cultivation of the neo-Platonists. On the other hand, Greek added to
higher education a language experience that held its place for some three
hundred years and was expected of all scholars.

Renaissance scorn of the Middle Age was not merely a general complacency;
it was especially a repudiation of the freedom of medieval Latin.
Latin style must conform to the habits of its great period; and this
restoration was a prime object of Renaissance classicism. In 1472
Guillaume Fichet, scholar and rhetorician, wrote to another rhetorician,
Robert Gaguin:

    I feel the greatest satisfaction, most learned Robert, in the
    flourishing here at Paris, where they used to be unknown, of
    poetic compositions and all the parts of eloquence. For when
    in my youth I first left the Baux country to study at Paris
    the learning of Aristotle, I used to be much astonished at
    finding so rarely in all Paris an orator and a poet. No one
    was studying Cicero night and day as many do now. No one knew
    how to write verse correctly or to scan the verse of others.
    For the school of Paris, having lost the habit of Latinity,
    had hardly emerged from ignorance in the field of discourse.
    But from our days dates a better epoch; for the gods, to speak
    poetically, and the goddesses are reviving among us the art of
    speaking well.[1]

In 1476 Lorenzo Valla prefaced a manual widely current in the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries, _De elegantia linguae latinae_, with his shame
at medieval Latin and his confidence in the restoration.

    But as I would say more, I am choked and inflamed by grief,
    compelled to weep as I behold from what estate and to what
    estate eloquence has fallen. For what lover of letters or
    of the public weal could restrain his tears at seeing it
    debased as when Rome was captured by the Gauls: everything so
    overturned, burned, dislocated that hardly survives even the
    very citadel? These many centuries not only has no one spoken
    Latin aright, but no one reading it has understood; the books
    of the ancients have not been grasped and are not grasped now;
    as if with the loss of the Roman Empire had been lost all pride
    in speaking and knowing Roman, and the splendor of Latinity,
    faded by mould and rust, were forgotten.... But the less happy
    were those former times which produced no single scholar, the
    more we may congratulate our own times, in which, if we but
    strive a little further, I am confident that not only the
    Roman city, but still more the Roman language, and with it all
    liberal studies, shall be restored.

The Middle Age, then, could not write Latin. Not John of Salisbury, not
Dante, not even Aquinas was really _eruditus_! Fifty years later the
judicious Bembo reports the restoration as accomplished.

    Latin has so far been purged of the rust of the untaught
    centuries that today it has regained its ancient splendor and
    charm.[2]

Renaissance classicism thus ignored the medieval Latin progress. This
deliberate breaking with the past could not, indeed, stop the sun; but
it did put back the hands of the clock. The humanistic cult of Augustan
Latin as a literary norm widely affected all language study. Though
its literary achievement has faded in the perspective of history, its
literary experience has permanent significance.

The rapid diffusion of printing in the late fifteenth century was a
change of so wide and deep consequence to literature as to become a
revolution. The suddenly increased and rapidly increasing availability
of books was by itself enough to make a renaissance. Further it gave
their role to the great publishers: Aldus, Gryphius, the Juntas, Froben,
the Étiennes, Plantin. But one of the first effects of printing was to
prolong or widen the influence of books characteristically medieval:
Boethius and Bede, Alain de Lille, Aquinas, Hugh of St Victor. With
Geoffrey of Monmouth were printed such romances as _Mélusine_ and
_Pontus and the Fair Sidoine_. Even Merlin was resuscitated. Neither
Ariosto for his Carolingians nor Spenser for his Arthurians needed
manuscript sources. Moreover the presses answered continuing demand for
the _Golden Legend_ and for such typically medieval compends as that
of Petrus Comestor, the _Speculum_ of Vincent of Beauvais, and even the
_Etymologiae_ of Isidore. They brought out not only the greater Cicero,
recovered in 1422, but also the elder Seneca, Lucan, Aulus Gellius,
Statius, Ausonius, Claudian, Sidonius, the medieval favorites. They
multiplied for schools Donatus and Priscian, Diomedes and Martianus
Capella. The collection entitled _Auctores_ (or _Actores_) _octo_ set
before boys the _De contemptu mundi_, the _Tobias_ of Matthieu de
Vendôme, an _Isopet_ and _Cathonet_, and the _Proverbia_ of Alain de
Lille. The hackneyed _De inventione_, the _Rhetorica ad Herennium_,
and the hardy perennial “Ars poetica” of Horace had new lease of life.
Medieval courtly verse forms, especially the _balade_, though scorned by
Du Bellay and Ronsard, persisted not only with Villon, but in the huge
printed collection of 1501, _Le Jardin de plaisance_. One of the first
effects of printing was to prolong the Middle Age.

If the recovery of Greek, then, and even the establishment of printing,
did not upset historical continuity, what of the lapse of feudalism?
The most picturesque scene of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries
was such a ducal court as that of Urbino, Mantua, or Ferrara. Its
lavish splendor broke from the ruins of feudalism. It was a triumph of
individual violence amid the dislocation of medieval loyalties. This type
of court, established and maintained by such professional soldiers as Sir
John Hawkwood, became in Elizabethan imaginations a proverb at once of
magnificence and of ruthlessness. Macchiavelli’s realistic statesmanship
was interpreted as diabolic; and Italian dukes were staged with daggers
and poison. Though this foreign prejudice and exaggeration were largely
melodrama, the court poets themselves hint at actual ruthlessness in
contrast to their idealized Carolingian chivalry. Boiardo made the
romantic literary escape frankly; and even Ariosto felt its spell. So
Sir Thomas Malory, who needed no lessons in violence from Italy, escapes
from the bitter Wars of the Roses to Camelot. So a French professional
soldier is idealized as the Chevalier Bayard. With feudal service already
obsolete in the fourteenth century, chivalry had become altogether what
it had always been in part, poetry. There, indeed, was a breach with the
Middle Age; and it is earliest and clearest in Italy. The ducal court is
distinct both from the idealized castle of the medieval romances and from
the actual castle of the Middle Age.

Patrons of painters and architects, the ducal courts had also their
orators and their poets. The orators had the more distinct function
of furnishing on occasion ceremonious letters and addresses; they
might be secretaries and sometimes librarians. The poets devised
the characteristic Renaissance pageants for the solemn entries of
distinguished visitors or triumphing dukes. Both were spokesmen in
obituary, in nuptial greeting, in other encomium. The pervasive encomium
of the Renaissance may have been directly stimulated by the ducal
courts. How important they were as literary centers is more difficult
to determine. Having a poet or an orator on the premises has not always
constituted a literary center. In some cases the courts may have fostered
literature less than they added it to their own adornment; in some cases
a court poet might feel himself rather thwarted than stimulated. At least
they were important enough to become literary fictions. The setting
of one of the most characteristic and influential dialogues of the
Renaissance, Castiglione’s _Cortegiano_ (1528) is the court of Urbino.
Idealized of course, this fixed the type of gracious culture which
offsets Macchiavelli’s realism and the Elizabethan melodrama of lust and
murder. The very name of the book has literary significance. No single
word is more characteristic of Renaissance literature than _courtier_. In
its wider sense it describes not only Ariosto and Tasso, but also Ronsard
and Spenser.

The more permanent literary center of the period of rapid commercial
expansion was first Florence, where the new commercial aristocracy lived
cheek by jowl with the bourgeoisie; then Lyon, commercial for a thousand
years, literary outpost of Italy in France. These are cardinal examples
of the intellectual interests and achievements stirred in Venice,
Bruges, London, and the other commercial cities, by trade and printing.
In Medicean Florence social eminence demanded not only some interest in
the arts, but some acquaintance with them. Nicolao Nicoli, merchant and
scholar, was connoisseur enough to see at a glance that the chalcedony on
a boy’s neck was a “Policreto.” The ideal of educated taste and skill set
up by Castiglione for Urbino is no less clear among the merchant princes
and their courtiers in Florence. The great Cosimo dei Medici commissions
Vespasiano to make him a library worthy of his position, though he
is daringly reminded that libraries should not be made to order. In
Venice Minturno addresses the preface of his _De poeta_ to Gabriel
Vinea, “pride of commerce, delight of scholars” (_mercatorum decus ac
deliciae literatorum_). Lyon had wealthy leisure for the same reason as
Venice. Among the greater publishers of the sixteenth century were its
Gryphius, Rouville, and De Tournes. Its large Italian population had been
swelled by the exile ensuing upon the Pazzi conspiracy. It published the
romances of Alamanni. Its most original author, Louise Labé, wrote some
of her sonnets in Italian. Maurice Scève was the more typically a poet
of his time in composing elaborate pageants for its solemn entries. His
uncle Guillaume’s house was meantime a resort of scholars; and there is
abundant other evidence of lively and various literary interchange. The
literary leadership of Italy, then, was maintained less by the ducal
courts than by the commercial cities. There it had animated the genius
of Boccaccio and of Chaucer. The later influence of Italy on Wiat,
Surrey, and Spenser, its more diffused influence through France, seem
less fruitful for the progress of literature than the end of the Italian
Middle Age.

Tardy recognition of this Italian continuity has led some historians to
include in the Renaissance not only Chaucer, but Petrarch and Boccaccio,
and even to begin it with Dante. But this, though it rebukes the
complacency of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, tends to obscure
the generally received significance of both Middle Age and Renaissance.
The terms are not outworn. The division that they still express, after
much revision of dates, is of general literary habits. It is the change
from the feudal society living by manuscripts and reading aloud, with
Latin for an international language of communication existing beside the
established vernacular, to the rapidly commercializing society living by
printed books amid widening education and nationalist aspirations, with
Latin specialized as the vernacular widens its circle of readers. The
latter is the society of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

The distinctive literary changes, indeed, were hardly attained before
the sixteenth century. Though humanism as a theory was established
in the fifteenth, the literary product of that century was generally
feeble, as of a Middle Age gone to seed. Even the sixteenth century,
conscious of revival, eager for standards, proud of learning, preoccupied
with classicism, is more significant in its theorizing than in its
achievement, in criticism and study than in literary advance. Whereas
medieval poetry ranged far beyond medieval poetic, first in Dante and
last in Chaucer, Renaissance poetry shows less advance in composition. It
has no Dante, no Chaucer. The _novella_ does not seize and carry forward
the more intense narrative found in his various experiments by Boccaccio.
The _Heptameron_ of Marguerite de Navarre is narratively inferior to the
_Decameron_. The chivalric romances show a departure rather in style
than in method from medieval romance; and their literary history from
Ariosto to Spenser is not in terms of narrative art. Spenser is but the
more typical of the Renaissance in that his great achievement of verse
and style suffices without onward movement. The narrative slowness of
his pageantry, the descriptive dilation, descend through the Renaissance
partly from revived Alexandrianism, partly from medieval patterns
discarded by Chaucer. Renaissance poets are not often even concerned with
such a problem of composition as Chaucer’s reconceiving and recomposing
of a long old story, lately retold with new life by Boccaccio, in his
verse novel _Troilus and Criseyde_.

For all its confidence in a new day, Renaissance literary theory repeats
some medieval commonplaces. The _arts poétiques_ of the sixteenth century
prolong the vogue of the “Ars poetica” of Horace. The old doctrine of
poetic inspiration is renamed Platonic. The slighting of composition by
medieval manuals is continued. Renaissance manuals are no less generally
limited to style; for the old preoccupation is confirmed by the new
insistence on style as an accomplishment and as conformity to standard.
Thus the Renaissance long accepted tacitly the medieval confusion of
poetic with rhetoric. Cicero’s _De oratore_ was found to have lessons for
poetry; Bembo, even as Johannes de Gerlandia, transferred from oratory
to poetry the conventional classification of the “three styles”; and
Minturno’s _De poeta_ is by itself a complete identification of poetic
with rhetoric. But Renaissance theory gradually advanced. The successive
reinterpretations of Aristotle’s _Poetic_ finally opened the way for
seventeenth-century French classical drama. The better Renaissance
rhetorics, using Quintilian as well as the greater Cicero to guide the
increasing range and control of sixteenth-century prose, set forth a
sounder and more fruitful classicism. Wherein classicism is typically a
hindrance to literary progress, and wherein it is stimulus and guide, is
amply revealed by the literary experience of the Renaissance.




Chapter II

LATIN, GREEK, AND THE VERNACULARS


1. HUMANISTIC LATIN

The Middle Age had developed Latin style freely as a medium of
communication and variously as a medium of expression. On these terms
Latin had had a progressive history as the literary language of western
Europe. Latin remained the literary language for Erasmus and More in the
early, for Buchanan even in the late, sixteenth century. More habitually
composed in Latin, even when he meant to be printed in English; Erasmus
and Buchanan both composed and published in Latin exclusively. The
literary achievement of the vernaculars had challenged the Latin primacy.
But, thought the humanists, that rivalry had been possible only because
the primacy had been misused. Latin primacy to them was an article of
literary faith, a dogma. It must not lapse; and to restore its authority
all they needed was to restore its classical diction. No, says modern
linguistic science in retrospect, that was a delusion; it could only
segregate Latin farther. In fact Latin declined, slowly and as if
inevitably, from a primary language to a secondary. But those who now
mock the humanists for blindly hastening the decline of Latin to a “dead”
language should remember that throughout the Renaissance itself Latin was
active in every country and with almost every man of letters. It was far
from dead; but it was no longer primary.

Evidently the scholars of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries saw in
the Latin literature of their time the revival of classical standards
after medieval decadence. Rejecting the medieval experience, they were
bent on restoring Latin to its classical eminence by reviving its
classical forms and style. They proposed a new Latin literature in
Augustan phrase.

Keeping its established place as the language of education, Latin
continued to be thought of as a norm of permanence. As late as 1586
Montaigne, remembering his boyhood, says (III. ii): “To me Latin is, as
it were, natural; I understand it better than French.” Later (1586-1588)
he adds (III. ix): “I am writing my book for a few men and a few years.
If there had been any idea of its lasting, I must have committed it to a
language of more stability.” In other words, the vernaculars of course
would continue to shift; not Latin. For by Latin the humanists meant the
Latin of Vergil, Caesar, Sallust, above all of Cicero, the Latin of the
great period. Renaissance humanism was a cult not merely of antiquity
in general, but specifically of Augustan Latin. It sought to revive not
only the ancient forms, but especially the ancient diction. The literary
preoccupation of the Renaissance was with style. For the highest literary
eminence, said the humanists, writing must be in Latin, that is in the
superior language, and in Augustan Latin, that is in the style of the
superior period.

The humanists demanded conformity, then, to Augustan diction. Lorenzo
Valla’s _Elegantiae linguae latinae_ (1476), reprinted again and again,
first of a long line of phrase books, and characteristic in its very
title, was a guide to conformity. Beyond conformity ranged imitation.
Humanistic Latin is imitative in theory, and in practice so various as
to furnish abundance of significant examples. These various degrees
and kinds will appear in subsequent chapters. Meantime the obvious
practical warrant for imitation is in exercises. Imitation in any art
is a recognized means of study by practice; it is not an end. But
Renaissance enthusiasm for revival often made elegant conformity a goal
in itself. An oration might seem an achievement by being Ciceronian, a
pastoral dialogue by being Vergilian. The subject, the idea, the message
of a speech, a letter, a poem might have little claim; nevertheless
publication might be warranted by the style. To exhibit the elegant
diction and the harmonious sentence-forms of the great period might
seem sufficient distinction. “Thus the whirligig of time brings in his
revenges.” Posterity, instead of continuing to read such humanistic
imitations, has long forgotten them. Few literary products have been less
permanent than those of the cult of permanence. A pervasive danger in
this classicism was its encouragement to a literature of themes.


2. GREEK

Even before the humanistic return to classical Latin another vista of
the ancient world had been opened by the revival of Greek. Generally
in abeyance through most of the Middle Age, Greek had been recovered
in the fourteenth century and was well established in the early
fifteenth. It was studied by both Boccaccio and Petrarch. It had its
professor at the Florence _studium_ (1396) in Chrysolaras, who went to
England in 1400. Guarino, his pupil at Constantinople, after bringing
Greek to Florence and Venice, settled (1431) at Ferrara, and attracted
among his many famous pupils the Englishmen Gray, Free, Gunthorpe,
and Tiptoft.[3] Bessarion was at the Council of Constance (1414). The
fall of Constantinople (1453), sending many Greek exiles to Italy,
merely increased opportunities already widely available. Even before
the establishment of printing there was increasing circulation of
manuscripts. Aurispa (1372-1460), for instance, besides being scholar
and professor, was an active dealer. Printing came in the nick of time
to spread the new vogue. There was a Florence text of Homer in 1488, an
Aldus in 1504. Aristotle, besides being translated anew, had a Greek
text in 1495 (Venice), another in 1503 (Paris). Sophocles was printed by
Aldus in 1502. Even the earliest sixteenth century commanded texts of a
considerable variety of Greek authors.

The variety, indeed, is striking. Evidently the humanistic cult of an
ideal period of Latin did not guide the selection of Greek. All was fish
that came to the Renaissance Greek net. Late Greek was as welcome as the
Greek of the great dramatists and orators; Alexandrian, as epic. With the
vogue of Plato in the fifteenth century came that of the neo-Platonists;
with the texts and translations of Aristotle, Hermes Trismegistus; with
Homer, the _Anthology_ and Apollonius Rhodius. Isocrates vied once more
with Demosthenes. Nor did Sophocles oust Seneca, or Thucydides prevail
against Livy. The wide and continued influence of sophistic appears
in the vogue of Athenaeus, Hermogenes, Aphthonius, and even Libanius.
Discrimination, indeed, was sometimes beyond Renaissance scholarship.
Henri Étienne, one of the best Greek scholars of the sixteenth century,
published (1554) a collection of Byzantine imitations which he supposed
to belong to the time of Anacreon. This was the Anacreon that inspired
Ronsard and was translated by Belleau. Since textual criticism was hardly
understood before the seventeenth century, hardly formulated before
the eighteenth, Renaissance printed texts are generally inaccurate.[4]
Nevertheless to have Greek authors, classical and decadent, at first
hand, to read the message in its own style, even imperfectly, was a
literary experience and had some excitement of exploration.

Thus was opened more widely a literature recommended alike by the praise
and by the imitation of the Augustan Romans. Habits of language and
style outside the Latin tradition, for the first time in centuries, were
made generally available. How far they availed, how far Greek operated
as language, especially on the widening vernacular literatures, can
better be gathered from the progress of this history than measured here
in advance. At first view the influence seems extensive. Renaissance
scholars as a matter of course at least professed to know Greek; and
most authors at least professed to be scholars. Poliziano was both; and
his knowledge of Greek seems to have been solid. In 1485 his _Oratio
in expositione Homeri_ thus compliments his university audience on its
command of Greek.

    You are those Florentines in whose city all Greek learning,
    long extinct in Greece itself, has so revived and flourished
    that both your men expound Greek literature in public lectures
    and the youths of your highest nobility, as never has happened
    in Italy for a thousand years, speak Attic so purely, so easily
    and smoothly, that Athens, instead of being sacked and seized
    by barbarians, seems itself, of its own will wrenched away with
    its own soil and, so to speak, with all its furniture, to have
    immigrated to Florence and there entirely and intimately to
    have founded itself anew (Gryphius edition, Lyon, 1537-1539,
    III. 63-64).

The obvious exaggeration of an introductory public lecture does not lead
him to quote Homer in Greek. The abundant examples are given in his Latin
translation. Moreover this encomium of Homer relies not on specific
considerations of Greek language and style, but on such conventional
topics as could be derived equally well from a translation. The writing
of Greek, in spite of occasional published efforts, is probably measured
with his usual justice by Bembo. “We study Greek not to use it, except
for exercise, but the better to explore Latin.”[5] Poliziano, in spite
of his Greek and of his youthful achievement in Italian verse, wrote
the bulk of his work in Latin prose. Rabelais from his monastery at
Fontenay-le-Comte (1521) invoked the help of Budé toward procuring Greek
books; he translated a Greek author who had already been translated;
but how much Greek he achieved is hard to determine. Of Julius Caesar
Scaliger, whose Greek was one of his warrants for vanity, Egger says:
“though he knows much Greek, he seems to know it ill.”[6] The same critic
records of Henri Étienne: “From the age of fifteen he knew and spoke
Greek almost as his native language, and better than Latin.”[7] Ronsard’s
imitation of Greek verse is based on knowledge of the Greek language.
Montaigne, saturated in Plutarch, tells us that he knows no Greek. His
Plutarch is the translation of Amyot; and from Amyot, not from the Greek
text of Longus, is derived the vogue of _Daphnis and Chloe_. Both the
extent and the character of Greek influence may more safely be estimated
thus from individual literary forms and even from individual authors.

One general influence may be guessed from the stimulus given by Greek
to the Renaissance vogue of mythology. Boccaccio had already, in his
_Genealogia deorum gentilium_[8] ranged beyond Ovid; and in the sixteenth
century such manuals as Natale Conti’s (Natalis Comes) _Mythologiae_
(1580) were in active demand. Mythology equipped the poetry not only
of printed books, but also of pageants and solemn entries. It was so
widely pervasive as to seem almost obligatory. But how much of this
vogue was due to Greek? Greek mythology had been in ancient times
largely taken over into Latin. The distinctively Greek habit, that
is the earlier mythological habit, is to feel and treat the myth not
merely as a conventional allusion, but as a perennial story. For the
literary use of mythology is twofold. Either it is decorative, one of
the ornaments of style, or it is itself a form of poetry. The latter,
the perennial recreation of Prometheus or Medea, was less conspicuous
in Latin poetry than in Greek. How far the revival of Greek brought it
back may here and there be divined. It never quite dies. The widespread
medieval story of Mélusine is essentially identical with Medea, though
it did not come through Greek. On the other hand, Ariosto’s Angelica
bound to the rock directly suggests Andromeda, though the myth reappears
also in the popular ballad of _Kemp Owen_. Such myth-making gives a
clue to Boccaccio’s _Ameto_. There is something of it in Poliziano’s
_Orfeo_. It is carefully imitated from Pindar by Ronsard. It somewhat
vaguely animates Spenser. But it is not common in the Renaissance.
For the Renaissance generally, regarding mythology in the more usual
way as a mine of stylistic ornament, was merely more anxious to have
it standardized, to be sure that gods and goddesses wore the correct
classical costumes. Diana in the _Venatio_ (1512) of Adrian, Cardinal
Corneto, is such a figure; and her attendant nymphs are as much part
of the decoration as the chased bowls. Indeed, the Middle Age, frankly
adapting ancient cults to its own time, had been nearer to the Greek
habit. Chaucer had made the temple in his _Troilus and Criseyde_ a
cathedral, and called the Palladion a relic. While Renaissance painting
was handling mythology in this free way, Renaissance literature often
used it merely as archaistic decoration.

Thus it appears in Francesco Colonna’s fantastic allegory
_Hypnerotomachia_ (1467), and in its abundant woodcuts. The main figures,
though they have Greek names, are allegorical in the fashion of the
_Roman de la Rose_. The guide Logistica, for instance, is Reason; the
other guide, Thelemia,[9] Desire or Will. The nymphs met at every turn
serve for erotic suggestion; the Greek inscriptions, for decoration.
Colonna’s diction is studiously deformed by such Greek coinage as
_lithoglypho_, _hypaethrio_, _chariceumati_. The precious style thus
becomes a dilated pedantic jargon. In the whole preposterous book there
is nothing Greek below the surface.

How far did Greek influence Renaissance thought? Aristotle had
dominated the Middle Age in the Latin translations of Boethius and
in Latin versions of the Arabs. The Renaissance retranslated him and
published the Greek text. It restored him to challenge him. Were the
Renaissance translations superior to those of Boethius, who was scholar
and philosopher as well as poet? Did the Renaissance texts convey him
more truly? Renaissance texts are often questionable; and Aristotle’s
_Poetic_, at least, was understood very slowly. The Renaissance welcomed
Plato. Was it Plato? Why is Renaissance Platonism peculiarly difficult
to measure, or even to define? Such questions are relevant here only
to the revival of the Greek language. How far did this revival guide
philosophy? The question comes up incidentally in one of Sperone
Speroni’s earlier dialogues, _Dialogo delle lingue_ (about 1540); and the
answer is so unusual as to be startling. Philosophy has not been advanced
by our study of Latin and Greek; it has been deviated. This sharp turn,
in a dialogue discussing the superiority of Latin and Greek to the
vernaculars, comes as a reminiscence of the teaching of Peretto.

    Peretto (p. 121) used to say that the time spent on learning
    Latin and Greek actually hinders learning and developing
    philosophy. No language (p. 123) has in itself any peculiar
    value. Aristotle, therefore, not only may be studied in Latin,
    but might be studied in Italian. In fact (p. 126), language
    studies may be illusory, as we see around us. “I grieve at
    the wretched condition of these modern times, in which study
    is spent not in being, but in seeming wise.... We think we
    know something well enough when, without comprehending its
    nature, we are able to give it the name given by Cicero,
    Pliny, Lucretius, Vergil, or Plato, Aristotle, Demosthenes,
    Aeschines.”[10]

Hardly more than a parenthesis, this stands out as a challenge both
of the superiority of Greek as a language and, more generally, of
Renaissance confidence in language studies as a means of education.

Such challenges are rare. Bembo, in Speroni’s dialogue, will not
admit any such heresy as the equality of languages; nor, we may well
assume, would Sperone himself admit that language study was hindering
philosophy. For the Renaissance generally agreed that education should
normally proceed through the study of languages. Of this the “new
learning” was no less persuaded than the old. The newness consisted in
revising the traditional Latin and in adding other languages, especially
Greek. Louvain established (1518) the College of the Three Languages
(Latin, Greek, and Hebrew); and the same name was at first commonly
applied to the Collège de France (1530). Though this royal foundation
was effectually new in other aspects that now may seem more important,
its idea and inception came in great part from the movement for Greek
in education. Nor did the movement stop with the individual college.
Nothing more vividly exemplifies Renaissance preoccupation with language
studies than the addition of Greek to the university curriculum.
Thwarted, in a time of bitter controversy, by the association of Greek
with Protestantism, the cause was won before the end of the century. The
prescription promulgated officially in 1600, and the educational theory
behind it, held substantially for three hundred years. There, at least,
is a permanent result of the Renaissance.


3. THE VERNACULARS


(_a_) _Italian_

The humanist assertion of the literary superiority of Latin did not pass
unchallenged even in the fifteenth century. Alberti (1404-1472), scholar
and philosopher, insisted that actual communication, the conveying of
a message, should be in the vernacular, and set an example by writing
many of his learned works in Italian. Though humanists might disparage
even so great a succession as Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, and in the
languid period some promising ambitions might be deviated into Latin,
by the sixteenth century the literary rights of the vernacular were both
recovered in practice and acknowledged in theory. The shift of opinion
is significantly recorded by Bembo. Elegant Latinist, accomplished poet
in the vernacular, judicious critic, he posed in an Italian literary
dialogue (_Prose_, Venice, 1525), Giuliano de’ Medici, Federigo Fregoso,
and Hercole Strozza discussing the capacity of Italian style:

    I. Our vernacular, most explored and perfected at Florence, is
    more intimate to us than Latin, as to the Romans Latin was than
    Greek (i-iv). Yes, but as Greek was then superior, so Latin
    is now. Answer (v): if that implied that the superior should
    always be cultivated, nobody would ever have written well in
    his own language. As Cicero sought to augment the authority
    of his own Latin, so did Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio for
    Italian. Greek (vi) we may dismiss, since it is not a medium
    for us; we study it not to use it, but the better to explore
    Latin. Provençal (vii-xi), though once an important language of
    literature and very influential in our early poetry, has been
    superseded by Italian.

    But if we are to use the vernacular for literature, _which_
    vernacular? (xii) Italian is not uniform. Shall we adopt the
    language of the Papal Court? No; it has not writers enough to
    constitute literary authority. Tuscan (xiii-xv) is best, as
    having shown amplest capacity, and as actually holding the
    literary leadership.

    Shall we incline, then, to its older usage, or to current
    popular speech? Answer (xvi-xvii): we are not limited to this
    dilemma. We may cultivate a diction that remains acceptable.
    Cicero or Demosthenes made himself entirely intelligible to the
    populace without speaking as the populace would have spoken to
    him.

    II. An historical review (xx) of Italian poetry to and from
    Dante finds all its graces united in Petrarch. So (xxi)
    all previous prose writers were surpassed by Boccaccio. No
    subsequent writers have equalled these two. Meantime Latin has
    been so freed from the rust of ignorant centuries that today it
    has regained its ancient splendor and charm.

    In an analysis (xxiii-xxviii) of style under the classical
    headings, Dante (xxiv) is rebuked for base words. He might
    better have left out the things.

    The qualities of vowels and of consonants (xxvii-xxviii), and
    the three kinds of rhyme (xxix), with examples from Petrarch,
    lead to a discussion of rhythm (_numero_, xxxii-xxxiii),
    quantity (_tempo_, xxxv), and variation. The conclusion
    reaffirms the preëminence of Petrarch and Boccaccio.

    III. The noble works of Michael Angelo and of Raphael should
    spur us to a like achievement in literature. This final section
    discusses Tuscan in detail: word-forms, inflection, syntax, and
    especially usage.

The dialogue opens a vista into contemporary thought about style. The
objection to Dante’s base words, startling to us now, was made frequently
then. No less characteristic of the time is the homage to Petrarch as
great poet and as master of style. Giraldi Cinthio expressed the common
view in a flowery simile.

    But the law is not so strict for romances as not to permit more
    license in words than is customary for sonnets and canzoni.
    Long and serious subjects, if the conception is not to be
    warped, need such latitude, which must nevertheless be limited.
    Petrarch shows this clearly in his _Trionfi_. I will not cite
    Dante; for whether through the fault of his age, or because
    of his own nature, he took so many liberties that his liberty
    became a fault. Therefore I find quite judicious that painter
    who, to show us in a fair scene the literary value of the one
    poet and the other, imagined both in a green and flowery mead
    on the slopes of Helicon, and put into Dante’s hand a scythe,
    which, with his gown tucked up to his knees, he was wielding
    in circles, cutting every plant that the scythe struck. Behind
    Dante he painted Petrarch, in senatorial robe, stooping to
    select the noble plants and the well-bred flowers—all this to
    show us the liberty of the one and the judgment and observance
    of the other (_Discorsi_, Venice, 1554, pp. 133-134).

What Bembo calls Tuscan was at once a fact and an ideal. It is the
current name not only for the diction of Tuscany, but for the literary
diction increasingly practiced by all writers in Italian. Castiglione
feels himself bound to defend certain Lombard words. Ariosto anxiously
revises to conform. Tasso has a dispute with the _Accademia della
Crusca_. The most distinct dialect was in Naples. To conform to Tuscan
was for Neopolitans most nearly like acquiring another language. But even
there, and much more readily in other parts of Italy, Tuscan was accepted
and increasingly practiced as literary Italian. Used by scholars who
also wrote Latin, Italian naturally learned from Cicero and Vergil more
logical and rhythmical sentence habits, more adroit shaping of verse.
Thus the best result of humanism, perhaps, was the one least sought by
the humanists, the refinement of the vernacular.

Lodovico Dolce’s _Observations on the Vernacular_ (Venice, 1550) is an
Italian grammar addressed to educated readers and using the classical
headings. A section (157-186) on punctuation shows both the new emphasis
demanded by printing and a shift of control from rhythm toward logic.
Nearly fifty pages are devoted to Italian verse forms. Though there are
many examples from Boccaccio and a few from other authors, the great
exemplar throughout is Petrarch. Petrarch, then, was a model for Italian
poetry, Boccaccio for prose. As humanist Latin had its thesaurus, so
the cult of native models should have wherewith to guide both study and
imitation. Francesco Alunno’s _Observations on Petrarch_ (1539) is a
concordance plus a text of the sonnets and canzoni. His concordance of
Boccaccio’s _Decameron_ (1543) has the significant title _The Riches of
the Vernacular_. Finally _The Frame of the World_ (_Della fabrica del
mondo_, 1546-1548) is entitled further “ten books containing the words
of Dante, Petrarch, Bembo, and other good authors, by means of which
writers may express with ease and eloquence all man’s conceptions of any
created thing whatsoever.” The ten divisions are God, heaven, the world,
the elements, the soul, the body, man, quality, quantity, and hell. On
this grandiose scale the thesaurus carried out for mature writers in the
vernacular the idea of contemporary schoolbooks for Latin themes. It was
indeed a _copia_.


(_b_) _French_

Italian theory of the vernacular being typical generally, and being
moreover quickly known in France, the progress of French thought need not
be detailed. Jean Lemaire allegorized _La Concorde des deux langages_
(about 1512) to urge Frenchmen and Italians together from lower to
higher poetry. No less than Italy France saw its literary future in
the vernacular. But France had not so compelling a literary past. Its
fourteenth century had no such mighty succession as Dante, Petrarch,
and Boccaccio. Its medieval greatness was more remote; its medieval
survivals, generally languid. So the more ardent of coming French poets
were ready to repudiate not only medieval Latin for classical Latin,
but also medieval French verse for a new, classical French poetry. The
promotion of this is the movement called the Pléiade; and its manifesto
is Joachim du Bellay’s _Deffense et illustration de la langue française_
(1549).

The main idea is so to _enrich_ French diction as to establish an
equality with Greek and Latin. This is the meaning of _illustration_ in
the title. More than a century later Dryden used the same Latin root for
the same idea when he said that medieval English poetry lacked _lustre_.
Greek or Latin, Du Bellay urges, has no such linguistic superiority as
to compel our using it as our own literary medium. Cultivation of the
classics as languages leads to pedantry. Philosophy is not a language
study. Those who so pursue it seem more anxious to show learning
than to have it. For a literary career, indeed, one must know Latin
and preferably Greek also, but not as an end and not as a medium of
expression. Latin and Greek, then, have their value in the writer’s
education, not in his writing; but Du Bellay does not draw this inference
explicitly, and seems not to see the further inference that the real
enriching is not of one’s language, but of oneself. For he proposes that
French be improved by classical grafts, and further by imitation of
classical style. Let us enhance French literature, he urges, by making
French language more classical.

Thus to reduce the treatise to its lowest terms is quite unjust to
its suggestiveness. But its intrinsic value at best is less than its
historical. Ignoring a French medieval achievement already forgotten or
misunderstood, it turns humanist imitation toward giving French poetry
classical lustre.

Such manipulation was unchecked by any considerable knowledge of the
actual development of language. Even the learned Benedictine, Périon,
derived French from Greek (_Ioachimi Perionii Benedictini ... dialogorum
de linguae gallicae origine, eiusque cum graeca cognatione, libri
quatuor_, Paris, 1555; dedication dated 1554).

Périon is cautious in his conclusions, as in his title. He has unusual
grasp of phonetic cognates: b, f, p, v (p. 54); t, d, th (p. 107 verso);
c, ch, g, k (p. 125). He admits, of course, the large influence of Latin.
But he seems to think that Gallic derived directly from Greek, and
added its abundant Latin later. What he cites in his parallels is not
Celtic, but French. Though the historical introduction is negligible,
the linguistic proof, even where it is in error, shows both awareness of
language processes and some scientific knowledge.

French is like Greek, he finds, in the habit of articles (p. 107), in
accent (p. 111), in nouns ending -on and te, in having an aorist (p.
134), in using the infinitive as a verbal noun (p. 135). Thus though his
theory and many of his particular derivations are unsound, his method of
observing language habits is ahead of his time. Citing Budé, Baif, and a
few Latin authors, he seems in the main to have worked independently from
his own observations.

That so much knowledge of detail should reach so little grasp of the
whole shows the prevailing ignorance of linguistic science.

The last quarter of the sixteenth century raised among the vernaculars
the question of rank. Enthusiasm for the theory and the achievement of
Italian had led some Frenchmen, in spite of the triumphs of Ronsard, to
disparage their own. In 1579, thirty years after Du Bellay’s manifesto,
Henri Étienne (Henricus Stephanus), scholar and editor, sought not only
to vindicate French rights, but to demonstrate French superiority, in
his book on the _Preëminence of the French Language_ (_Project du livre
entitulé De la précellence du langage françois_).[11]

Under the headings weight (_gravité_, p. 196), charm (_grace_, p. 217),
and range (_richesse_, p. 246) he proposes to prove (p. 176) that
“our French language surpasses all the other vernaculars.” Spanish he
dismisses (p. 179) as evidently inferior to Italian, and hence to French.
English is not even mentioned. The demonstration is of French superiority
to Italian.

First (p. 181), French is more stable. We have never needed “grands
personnages” to tell Frenchmen how to use French. Where they have
occasionally done so for pleasure, they have not left us in the dark with
their disputes. The objection that we are not agreed as to which part
of France has standard French, nor as to how it should be spelled, is
rebutted. French and Italian translations of the same original (p. 204)
are put side by side. It is noteworthy that Ronsard (pp. 207-208) in each
case dilates.

In detail, Italian inflectional endings lead to monotony (p. 218); and
Italian word-forms are not consistently adapted from the Latin. French
is richer in diminutives (p. 241), in its legacy (p. 260) from medieval
romances and crafts, and (p. 314) in proverbs. Its facility in adaptation
(p. 280) appears especially in compounds.

An Italian of equal learning could readily counter on each of these
points. Could he disprove the whole? Could he prove the superiority of
Italian? Can any language be proved superior to all others? As between
two modern languages, the preference, many would say, is grounded not
on demonstration, but on taste and habit. Italian cannot be proved
superior or inferior to Spanish, French to English. Each writer naturally
prizes the language that he knows best above another that he knows less.
Étienne’s thesis is not susceptible of proof. Perhaps; but what of Greek
and Latin? Some men even today, far more in the Renaissance, would offer
to prove that Greek is a superior language. For Étienne’s treatise
raises in a new quarter an old question that even now is not answered
unanimously.

Whatever one’s attitude toward this larger question, and however
unconvincing Étienne may seem, his treatise is not absurd; nor is it a
Renaissance _tour de force_. It is both serious and learned. Latinist and
Hellenist, exact in the fine tradition of his house, he had the right to
speak on language. His citing (p. 288) of historical consonant change
shows some inkling, most uncommon in his time, of linguistic science.
But in 1579 he could not know linguistic sufficiently. He assumes, as
Du Bellay does, that processes of language are largely conscious, even
deliberate choice (pp. 224, 400). His assumption that Provençal is
French (Bembo had assumed that it was Italian) is not mere begging of
the question. No one of his time could know the historical processes
by which Provençal, Tuscan, Spanish, northern French, not to mention
other tongues, had evolved from Latin. Even so, some of his citations of
forms still have linguistic value. The larger value is in the literary
discrimination of his wide reading, in the ingenious device of parallel
translations, and in the significance of a dispute that was bound to
recur as each vernacular came to represent more and more a national
self-consciousness.


(_c_) _English_

National self-consciousness became notorious in England with the
Elizabethans. Even with them lingers a certain nervousness as to
the capacity of the English language. Such doubts arose not only
from humanistic exaltation of Latin, but even more from ignorance of
linguistic history. The barren fifteenth century had at least established
the language of London as the English literary norm. The northern speech
indiscriminately called Scotch, though its literary use persisted through
the sixteenth century, came to be regarded as a dialect. The language of
Malory’s _Morte d’Arthur_, and generally of Caxton’s publications, is
substantially the same as that of the _Canterbury Tales_. By the time
of Surrey, England had its Tuscan. Sixteenth-century literary usage in
England, though its emergence from the barren period may seem slower than
in Italy and France, is hardly more lax. The recklessness of Skelton,
as the later recklessness of Rabelais, was individual extravagance. The
vagaries of Spenser are not reckless; they are deliberate archaism.
Where they violate the language of Chaucer, they show merely that a
Renaissance poet who knew Latin and Greek, as well as French and Italian,
might remain unaware of linguistic history, even in his own language. If
the printed texts that he used had been more accurate, he might still
have been too bent on following the lead of the Pléiade in manipulating
language toward a new poetry to notice the difference between an
infinitive and a preterit. For him Chaucer’s words were color and sound,
not forms. But though he misread Middle English, he felt too deeply what
Ascham missed altogether, the tradition of English poetry, to dally long
with classicizing metric. There had been no one to do for Chaucer what
Alunno had done for Petrarch. Nevertheless, even without the help of good
lexicons and grammars, Renaissance English shows a sufficient continuity
of literary acceptance.

Prose, of course, lingered behind verse. Chaucer’s prose rendering of
Boethius, in sharpest contrast to his verse, had been groping. Malory’s
prose was sufficient for narrative, though not for such philosophical
discussion. Prose control in both narrative and discussion seems assured
first in Sir Thomas More; but as late as John Lyly the progress of prose
was still uncertain. The brief vogue of “Euphuism” shows an attempt to
“enrich” the vernacular by Latin sentence figures. Lyly came to recognize
that the vernacular had its own literary ways and its own literary
rights. Finally from being a court writer he turned to whole-hearted
pursuit of the actual vernacular in order to win the larger audience.
For the idea of changing one’s native language by classical grafts or
other literary manipulation, though it was unchecked by any accurate or
extensive linguistic science,[12] gradually gave way before the facts of
literary experience.




Chapter III

IMITATION OF PROSE FORMS, CICERONIANISM, RHETORICS


1. ORATIONS, LETTERS, DIALOGUES

Renaissance classicism is most obvious in adoption of prose forms.
Orations, letters, dialogues, first in Latin, then in the vernaculars,
studiously conform. Orations were none the less a preoccupation because
they had little to do with affairs. Actual Renaissance conduct of
government soon left little room for moving the people to action by
oratory. Legal pleading, as always, had its special technic. But the
oratory of occasion, that third type which marks anniversaries, extols
achievements, and commemorates great men, was invited widely and
cultivated classically. It embraces most of the published oratory of
the Renaissance, and was practiced by most of the humanists in Latin.
Leonardo Bruni of Arezzo (Leonardo Aretino) is typical both as official
orator of Florence and in his early imaginary orations. Agostino Dati
of Siena delivered an encomium of Eusebius (_De laudibus D. Eusebii
presbyt. Stridonensis et Ecclesiae maximi doctoris, in ejus solemniis
publice habita, anno 1446_). The funeral of Cardinal Bessarion at Rome
had a Latin oration by the Cardinal Capranica. Jacopo Caviceo cast
his congratulatory address to Maximilian on the victory (1490) over
King Ladislaus of Bohemia in the form called _prosopopoeia_, that
is, of imaginary addresses by Babylon, Troy, Byzantium, Carthage, and
Rome (_Urbium dicta ad Maximilianum Federici Tertii Caesaris filium
Romanorum regem triumphantissimum_, Parma, 1491). The Cologne collection,
_Orationes clarorum virorum_,[13] made such oratory available for study
and imitation.

Of the Italian orations collected by Francesco Sansovino (Venice, 1561,
including some translations) as representative of his time, only one
fifth are political, and these only to the extent of being hortatory.
The rest are all occasional: nine funeral orations, a Christmas address,
two before an academy, a call to high aim, a praise of Italian, four
congratulations, and four imaginary addresses (_prosopopoeiae_). Claudio
Tolomei has two imaginary orations, one for, the other against.[14] Such
oratory, of course, is perennial. Its Renaissance vogue is distinctive
only in being almost exclusive and in being imitative. Bartolomeo Ricci
records[15] that on two occasions in his office of public orator at
Ferrara he imitated specific orations of Cicero. The habit was general.
The desire to sound classical led even to the lifting of Augustan phrases
and cadences. Similar conditions had led the decadent Greek oratory
called sophistic[16] into archaism as a means of display. Renaissance
oratory, even when it was not led further into the sophistic sacrifice
of the message to the speaker, was thus habitually literary. In Latin
especially it was less often a means of persuasion than an imitative
literary form.

What the Latin oration might nevertheless attain was exhibited by the
lectures of Poliziano and again in the range of Marc Antoine Muret
(Muretus, 1525-1585). From a conventional _praelectio_ on the _Aeneid_
(1579) Muret turned to Tacitus (1580), not only with lively vigor, but
with penetrative suggestion and urgent sentences. When he returned to
official oratory for the feasts of St John Evangelist (1582) and the
Circumcision (1584), he kept the suggestiveness within the obligatory
pattern. True to their kind, models of conciseness, these have also their
own appeal. Occasional oratory in the Renaissance, then, might be a
literary achievement and a literary progress. More generally it was but
one evidence of the Renaissance preoccupation with rhetoric.

No less inevitable among the published works of the humanists are their
collected Latin letters. Since these had been carefully composed and
revised, they might serve not only history, but literature. Sometimes
in effect essays, sometimes almost orations, they are sometimes themes.
The favorite model is Cicero; and in extreme cases the letter seems to
consist of style. It is hardly a letter; it is an exercise. But thus
to label Renaissance letter-writing generally would be grossly unfair.
Poliziano’s letter to Paolo Cortesi is admirable as a letter, and comes
into literary history on that ground. For so letters have entered
literature in any time. A Latin letter of John of Salisbury[17] lifts
the heart and fills the eyes. Its cadences are studiously conformed to
the _cursus_ of the Curial _dictamen_; its diction is expertly chosen to
strike always by appeal and suggestion, never by violence; its hazardous
course steers between Scylla and Charybdis because it is constantly
shaped to its goal. For all this skill is spent singly on making the
truth prevail. A less important, but more famous English letter, Dr
Johnson’s to the Earl of Chesterfield, is no less studious of style,
no less expertly adjusted, even to the phrasing of the obligatory
subscription, and no less single in its aim. Those who make light of
such delicacy as mere style have much to learn both of letters and of
literature. Among the works of Erasmus none is more important than his
collected letters. The Renaissance did well to study Latin letters, and
learned much. But it was mistaken in thinking that a letter reaches
posterity except by reaching its original address and aim. The Latin
letters of the Renaissance often betray a tendency to regard classical
style as an end in itself. Such letters, written to be literary, give the
impression that the Latin letter is a Renaissance literary form.

Perhaps the most popular of ancient prose forms in the Renaissance was
the dialogue; for it was used even oftener in the vernaculars than in
Latin, and became a favorite form of exposition. The Middle Age, of
course, had many dialogues, but not of this sort. _Débat_, _estrif_,
_conflictus_, amoebean eclogue were often allegorical and generally forms
of poetry. Renaissance dialogue is typically prose discussion. Its vogue
was evidently stimulated by the increasing availability of Plato in both
translation and Greek text; but its method is not often his. The Platonic
dialogue typically conveys the illusion of creative conversation. As
Sperone Speroni observes,[18] it is a sort of prose that takes after
poetry. It invites the reader to join a quest for truth, to feel his
way with the speakers, to measure this objection, respond to that hint;
and often it leaves him still guessing with them, still questing. The
other ancient literary type of dialogue is Cicero’s _De oratore_. This
is less conversation than debate with definite argument, rebuttal, and
progress to a conclusion.[19] Cicero’s dialogue is not a quest; it is
an exposition of something already determined, and it unfolds that by
logical stages. Renaissance dialogue, having generally his object,
turns oftener to his type; but it does not forget Plato. The more
dramatic grouping of friends in converse appealed widely to Renaissance
imagination. It was imitated in Platonic academies as well as in writing;
and its form of dialogue opened more opportunities for exhibiting one’s
literary acquaintance and bringing forward one’s literary friends.
Further Renaissance dialogues did not often go with Plato. They stopped
with the Platonic setting, or used challenges merely for transition.
Even the most popular of them all, Castiglione’s _Cortegiano_, though
its _personae_ are unusually distinct, and though it concludes upon
Platonic love, is evidently framed upon the _De oratore_. Platonic
dialogue must be easy to read; it is by no means easy to write; witness
the failure of many imitations, both Renaissance and modern. It is a
very delicate adjustment of poetic to rhetoric. The grafting of Plato
on Cicero demands long preparation. The usual Renaissance compromise of
letting Plato introduce the speakers and Cicero rule their discourse
was practically sufficient for the better Renaissance dialogues. The
inferior ones have nothing but the externals of either. Their rejoinders,
neither conversation nor debate, become tedious ceremony;[20] and their
composition lacks the Ciceronian sequence. But even these show how widely
the dialogue form was imitated from antiquity.


2. CICERONIANISM

The pervasive humanistic imitation was not adoption of forms; it was
borrowing of style. The logical extreme of the humanist cult of Augustan
Latin is the exclusive imitation of Cicero as the ideal of prose style.
In 1422 Gherardo Landriani, Bishop of Lodi, drew from a long-forgotten
chest in the cathedral library a complete manuscript of the principal
works of Cicero on rhetoric. The _De oratore_ and the _Orator_ are the
most mature and suggestive treatment of oratory by the greatest Roman
orator. “_Summe gaudeo_, I have the greatest delight,” wrote Poggio
on receiving the news in London; and Niccolo de’Niccoli of Florence
promised a copy to Aurispa in Constantinople. So widely was the world
of scholarship stirred. For the recovery of the greater Cicero directly
stimulated Renaissance classicism. In the Middle Age Cicero had been
rather a name of honor than a literary influence. His _De inventione_,
a common source of medieval rhetoric, is only a youthful compend. What
was usually added for further study, especially of style, the _Rhetorica
ad Herennium_, was ascribed to him quite erroneously. His greater works
on rhetoric were appreciated doubtless here and there, as by John of
Salisbury, but not generally. Hence the recovery of the _De oratore_
in 1422 was indeed an event in the history of literature. This and
_Orator_ are fine encomia of the higher function of oratory, and of the
orator as leader. Neither is a manual. Both in Cicero’s intention are
contributions to the philosophy of rhetoric. Without very original or
even very specific doctrine they are eloquently persuasive. What did the
Renaissance do with them?

Most obviously it carried classicism to the extreme of Ciceronianism,
that exclusive imitation which made Cicero the ideal of Latin prose, the
perfect model. The doctrine involves certain characteristic assumptions:
(1) that Latin, or any other language, attains in a certain historical
period its ideal achievement and capacity, (2) that within such a great
period style is constant, (3) that a language can be recalled from later
usage to earlier in scholastic exercises, (4) that such exercises can
suffice for personal expression, (5) that a single author can suffice as
a model, even for exercises.

Medieval Latin had departed from classical usage because it was a living
language, so widely active in communication as to grow. Men used it
without being disconcerted by changes from place to place, from time
to time. Such changes are inevitable so long as a language is used
generally. Denotations are extended or contracted, connotations are
modified or superseded, even by written use. Oral use adds changes in
cadence. From the seventh century on through the Middle Age Latin was
accentual. The speech tune of Cicero had faded; and no one had tried
to resuscitate what had been supplanted by other cadences. The Latin
hymns had carried medieval measures to the heights of poetry. Not till
the seventeenth century did humanism succeed in having them revised
classically; and fifty volumes have since been spent in recovering their
medieval forms.[21] The extreme form of Renaissance classicism, by
ignoring the historical development of language, tended to inhibit the
use of Latin in immediate appeal.

So rigid a doctrine did not, of course, enlist all Renaissance humanists.
The more judicious were content to select certain expert habits,
especially Cicero’s strong and supple wielding of sentences. But the
extremists, such as Christophe de Longueil (Longolius, 1488-1522), got
fame; the doctrine continued in teaching and in practice; and as late
as 1583 there was point in Sidney’s scornful allusion to “Nizolian
paper books.” His readers knew that he meant the use of the Cicero
thesaurus as a handbook for composition. Even where it did not enlist
devotees, Ciceronianism confirmed the prevalent idea of the standard
diction of the great period. Yet before the end of the fifteenth century
both the general assumption and the particular cult had been exploded
by Poliziano. As university teacher, in the introductory lecture
(_praelectio_) of his course at Florence on Quintilian and Statius, he
challenged the doctrine of the ideal classical period by a plea for the
pedagogical value of later Latin.

    Finally I would not attach undue importance to the objection
    that the eloquence of these writers was already corrupted by
    their period; for if we regard it aright, we shall perceive
    that it was not so much corrupted and debased as changed
    in kind. Nor should we call it inferior just because it is
    different. Certainly it shows greater cultivation of charm:
    more frequent pleasantry, many epigrams, many figures, no dull
    realizations, no inert structure; all not so much sound as
    also strong, gay, prompt, full of blood and color. Therefore,
    though we may indisputably concede most to those authors who
    are greatest, so we may justly contend that some qualities
    which are earlier attained and much more attainable [i.e., by
    students] are found in these [minor authors]. So, since it is
    a capital vice to wish to imitate one author and him alone, we
    are not off the track if we study these before those, if we
    do some things for their practical use.... [So, he adds, did
    Cicero himself when he turned from the Attic orators to the
    Rhodian and even to the Asiatic.] So that noble painter who was
    asked with what master he had made the most progress replied
    strikingly “With that one,” pointing to the populace; yes,
    and rightly too. For since nothing in human nature is happy
    in every aspect, many men’s excellences must be viewed, that
    one thing may stick from one, another thing from another, and
    that each [student] may adapt what suits him (_Opera_, Gryphius
    edition, Lyon, 1537-1539, III, 108-109).

Perhaps nothing else so pointed and telling against Ciceronianism was
written during the Renaissance as Poliziano’s letter to Paolo Cortesi.

    Nor are those who are thought to have held the first rank
    of eloquence like one another, as has been remarked by
    Seneca. Quintilian laughs at those who shall think themselves
    cousins of Cicero because they conclude a period with _esse
    videatur_. Horace declaims against imitators who are nothing
    but imitators. Certainly they who compose only by imitation
    seem to me like parrots or magpies uttering what they do not
    understand. For what they write lacks force and life, lacks
    impulse, lacks emotion, lacks individuality, lies down, sleeps,
    snores. Nothing true there, nothing solid, nothing effective.
    But are you not, some one asks, expressing Cicero? What of it?
    I am not Cicero. I am expressing, I think, myself. Besides,
    there are some, my dear Paul, who beg their style, as it were
    bread, piecemeal, who live not only from the day, but unto the
    day. Thus unless they have at hand the one book to cull from,
    they cannot join three words without spoiling them by rude
    connection or disgraceful barbarism. Their speech is always
    tremulous, vacillating, ailing, in a word so ill cared and ill
    fed that I cannot bear them, especially when they pass judgment
    on those whose styles deep study, manifold reading, and long
    practice have as it were fermented. But to come back to you,
    Paul, of whom I am very fond, to whom I owe much, whose talent
    I value very highly, I am asking whether you so bind yourself
    by this superstition that nothing pleases you which is simply
    yours, and that you never take your eyes from Cicero. When you
    have read Cicero—and other good authors—much and long, worn
    them down, learned them by heart, concocted, filled your breast
    with the knowledge of many things, and are now about to compose
    something yourself, then at last I would have you swim, as the
    saying is, without corks, take sometimes your own advice, doff
    that too morose and anxious solicitude to make yourself merely
    a Cicero—in a word risk your whole strength (_Opera_, Gryphius
    edition, Lyon, 1537-1539, I, 251).

The writer of that letter, in spite of his youthful triumphs in the
vernacular, gave his mature years to the writing of Latin and the
teaching of Latin and Greek literature. Unfortunately his expert Latin
did not move Renaissance classicism to abandon either the practice of
Ciceronianism or the theory of the ideal great period.

Some forty years after the destructive analysis of Poliziano,
Ciceronianism was still active enough to draw the satire of Erasmus
in the _Dialogus Ciceronianus_ (1528). This _reductio ad absurdum_,
beginning with the error of using a Cicero thesaurus as a handbook
for composing, proceeds to the affectation of using for the Christian
religion the terms proper to classical paganism: Jupiter Optimus Maximus
for God the Father, Apollo for the Christ. Erasmus amuses himself by
thus rewriting the Apostles’ Creed in Ciceronian terms. His point is
not merely the pedantry of such paganism, nor its irreverence, but
its unreality. Only the words can be taken over; the meaning or the
suggestion, in one direction or the other, is violated. The point
had been made more forcibly, because more practically, by Poliziano.
Preoccupation with past usage thwarts the expression of actual present
things and thoughts. Further Erasmus makes his Ciceronian admit that the
cult is illusory, a dream which according to its own adepts has never
quite come true. Incidentally the names thus brought up in the dialogue
are not only of those Ciceronians who had at least a transient fame, but
also of some whom history does not even know.

In spite of this destructive satire, Giulio Camillo reaffirmed
Ciceronianism with undisturbed simplicity.

    Latin is no longer spoken, as our vernacular is, or French; it
    has been shut up in books. Since we are limited to gathering
    it not from actual speech, but from books, why not rather
    from the perfect than from the inferior? Let us first recall
    the language to the state in which we may believe it to have
    been while Vergil wrote it, or Cicero, and then confidently
    use that, even as Vergil did, or Cicero? (_Trattato della
    imitatione_, 1544.)

In 1545 Bartolomeo Ricci, tutor to Hercole d’Este’s son Lorenzo, closed
his treatise _De imitatione_ with a Ciceronian credo and a long defense
of Longolius. Ciceronianism, then, survived both rebuttal and satire.
As late as 1580 Muret, having renounced his own early Ciceronianism,
attacked its major premise, the doctrine of the ideal great period. His
argument is not, as Poliziano’s a hundred years before, pedagogical; it
is a direct challenge to Renaissance competence in judging Latin style.
His previous _praelectio_ had urged the distinctive claims of Tacitus:
practical philosophy, finished economy of style. This second lecture on
Tacitus deals with objections. The preference for Suetonius he merely
dismisses. But Tacitus is accused of inaccuracy. By whom? By Vopiscus;
and who is Vopiscus? Tacitus is hostile to the Christian religion. Shall
we rule out all the pagans? The rest of the lecture deals with style.

    There remain two objections brought against Tacitus by the
    inexpert: that his style is obscure and rough, and that he does
    not write good Latin. When I hear complaints of the obscurity
    of Tacitus, I reflect how easily people transfer their own
    faults to others. [I remember the anecdote of the man who
    complained that the windows were too small, when the real
    trouble was his own failing sight. So a deaf man was heard to
    complain that people did not speak distinctly.]

    But Tacitus, says another, is rough. Alciati, praising his
    friend Jovius, has not feared to call the histories of Tacitus
    thorny. Well, praising Jovius shows as much judgment as blaming
    Tacitus. No two could be more different. Tacitus could not but
    displease a man who made so much of Jovius.... For Jovius is
    all smooth; he has not a trace of that roughness which offends
    Alciati in Tacitus. He not only flows; he overflows.... As
    Alciati is afraid of roughness, I am sick of silliness. Sirup
    for babes; but let me have a bowl of something with a tang.

    Finally, those who grant to Tacitus his other qualities still
    deplore his bad Latin. The first movers of this calumny, each
    of whom had spent much pains in expounding Tacitus, were
    Alciati and Ferret. If they themselves wrote Latin as well as
    they think, perhaps we might be disturbed by their authority.
    Do you make bold, some one may say, to judge such men? They
    have made bold to judge Tacitus.... [If we can know Latin
    (as Camillo says) only from books (and, we may add, from
    comparatively few books), we have the less warrant for judging
    Latin usage.]... Who dare affirm for certain today, when “the
    old authors” are so extolled, that the questioned phrases of
    Tacitus were never used by these “old authors?” (Leipzig ed. of
    1660, vol. II, pp. 108-112.)

Even now, perhaps, though the name of the heresy has long been forgotten,
the Ciceronian perversion of imitation is not extinct. But if this kind
of imitation is not valid, what kinds are valid? Imitation of style may
be suggestive when it remains subconscious, not the recalling of words,
but the adaptation of remembered rhythms. The deliberate conformity
proposed by Ciceronianism can be useful only as exercise, as the learning
of certain effects by trying them. Once learned, these become an added
resource in revision. In composing, in the creative process of bringing
one’s message to one’s audience, deliberate imitation of style has no
warrant. It would at least interrupt, and might deviate or inhibit. In so
far as Ciceronianism confuses two processes normally separate, composing
and revising, it tends to make style stilted.

Further, Ciceronianism narrows imitation by a theory of perfectionism.
The _Imitatio Christi_ (about 1460) is the direct appeal of an author
preoccupied with his message. Sébastien Châteillon (1515-1563) rewrote
its spontaneous Latin in Ciceronian cadences. It was imperfect; he would
make it perfect. If this was pedantic, even absurd, wherein? If the
_Pilgrim’s Progress_ should not be rewritten in the style of Hooker or of
Sir Thomas Browne, why? Because _the_ one ideal style is an illusion.

Finally, imitation need not be of style; it may be of composition;
and for writing addressed to an actual public this is at once more
available and more promising. For real writing, that is for a message
intended to move the public, imitation generally risks less, and gains
more, in guiding the plan, the whole scheme, the sequence. Renaissance
preoccupation with style and tolerance of published themes tended to
obscure the larger opportunity.

But there is no Ciceronianism in Castiglione’s adopting the form of
Cicero’s _De oratore_ for his _Cortegiano_. Though he naturally shows
awareness of Cicero’s expert periods, he is bent not on conformity of
style, but on focusing the typical man of his own time in the literary
frame used by Cicero for the typical Augustan Roman. Renaissance
imitation of Vergil’s style was often futile; but Tasso’s _Jerusalem_ was
animated and guided by Vergil’s epic sequence. Robert Garnier, imitating
the style of Euripides, missed the dramatic composition; but Corneille
caught the whole scheme of a Greek tragedy. Such larger imitation imposes
no restraint on originality. Its recognition of ancient achievement is in
practical adaptation to one’s own conception and object and time. In this
direction the classicism of the seventeenth century became more fruitful
than that of the sixteenth.


3. RHETORICS

Manuals and treatises on rhetoric published in the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries exhibit marked differences in tradition, scope,
and tendency. They range from narrow concentration on style to a full
treatment of the five parts of rhetoric. They exhibit sophistic as well
as rhetoric. Some persist in medieval preconception as others recover the
classical heritage of Aristotle and Quintilian. The works mentioned below
are typical of the many Renaissance manuals.

The _Rhetorica_ (1437?) of George of Trebizond shows in brief the whole
classical scope:[22] _inventio_, the exploration of the subject and the
determination of its _status_; _dispositio_, plan and order; _elocutio_,
style; _memoria_, the art of holding a point for effective placing; and
_pronuntiatio_, delivery. He is most expansive on the first, which had
been both neglected and misapplied by the Middle Age.[23]

The presentation of rhetoric by Juan Luis Vives (_De ratione dicendi_,
Bruges, 1532; reprinted in Vol. II of the Majansius edition of his works)
is both meager and vaguely general.

    Vives urges that rhetoric is not a study for boys, and that it
    should not be confined to diction. But he himself offers hardly
    anything specific about composition. Book I deals mainly with
    sentences (_compositio_), e.g., with dilation and conciseness
    as in the _Copia_ of Erasmus, and with the period. Book II
    offers brief generalizations on type or tone of style, on the
    conventionalized measure of native ability against study and
    revision, on consideration of emotions and moral habits, on
    the threefold task of instructing, winning, and moving, and
    on appropriateness. Book III deals with narration (history,
    exempla, fables, poetry), paraphrase, epitome, commentary.
    History as composition is hardly even considered.

His incidental discussion of rhetoric in _De causis corruptarum artium_
and _De tradendis disciplinis_ (Vol. VI of the collective edition) is no
more satisfying. In Book IV of the former Vives so far misconceives the
classical _inventio_ as to rule it out of rhetoric altogether. Thus he
practically ratifies the procedure of those Renaissance logicians who
classified _inventio_ and _dispositio_ under logic. The classification
was not a reform; it merely recorded tardily the medieval practice
of reducing rhetoric to style by relying for all the active work of
composition on debate. Yet Vives pays repeated homage to both Aristotle
and Quintilian.

On the other hand the concise manual of Joannes Caesarius (_Rhetorica_,
Paris, 1542) returns to the full classical scope. The source cited most
explicitly and quoted most frequently is Quintilian.

But that later ancient tradition called sophistic, which had deviated
the rhetoric of the Middle Age, had also its Renaissance revival. Giulio
Camillo (1479-1550), known in France as well as in Italy, published
together a treatise on the orator’s material, the oratorical fund, and
another on imitation (_Due trattati ... l’uno delle materie che possono
venir sotto lo stile dell’eloquente, l’altro della imitatione_, Venice,
1544-1545). His constant preoccupation is with the topics, headings,
commonplaces (_loci_) which guide the writer’s preparation. Such are the
headings of the sophistic recipe for encomium: birth and family, native
city, deeds, etc. But sophistic had elaborated such obvious suggestions
for exploring one’s material into a system applicable both to material
and to style. Camillo’s source is:

    the _Ideas_ of Hermogenes, who in each considers eight things:
    the sense, the method, the words, the verbal figures, the
    clauses, their combination, sentence-control (_fermezza_),
    and rhythm. But my method is perhaps easier, since I proceed
    not from the forms (_forme_) to the materials, but from the
    materials to the forms.... I have sought how many things can
    combine to produce the forms, and I find (as I have argued
    in my Latin orations) not eight things, as Hermogenes writes,
    but fourteen which may enter to modify any material. They
    are these: conceptions, or inventions (_Trovati_), passions,
    commonplaces, ways of speaking (_le vie del dire_), arguments,
    order, words, verbal figures, clauses, connectives, sentence
    forms, cadence (_gli estremi_), rhythms, harmonies.

This bewildering cross-division might serve as the _reductio ad absurdum_
of the system of bringing on eloquence by topics if Camillo had not gone
even further in a grandiose symbolistic scheme entitled _L’idea del
theatro_ (Florence, 1550). The theater here is not any actual stage; it
is the manifold pageant of the world presented allegorically by topics
for all literary purposes.

    Starting from the medieval, or perhaps the neo-Platonic,
    premise that sacred things are not revealed, but figured, he
    divides his book into seven _gradi_. Seven is the perfect
    number; e.g., seven planets, Isaiah’s seven columns, Vergil’s
    _terque quaterque_, etc. Each _grado_ is named after a planet,
    whose attributes are a mixture of astrology and mythology, as
    in the Middle Age, but again with a suggestion of orientalized
    Platonism. This general scheme constitutes the first section.
    The second is entitled _Il convivio_; the third, _l’Antro_;
    etc. A figure may appear in more than one _grado_.

Referring to this book in his treatise on imitation, he says: “By topics
and images I have arranged all the headings that may suffice to group
and to subserve all human conceptions.” In the same treatise he even
thinks of painting and sculpture as proceeding by topics: genus, sex,
age, function, anatomy, light and shadow, attitude and action, adaptation
to place. Topics can no farther go. Camillo’s system, moreover, hardly
touches composition; all its manifold application is to style. Thus the
more readily he accepts the common Renaissance confusion of poetic with
rhetoric.

Another Ciceronian treatise on imitation is Bartolomeo Ricci’s
(_Bartholomaei Riccii de imitatione libri tres ad Alfonsum Atestium
Principem, suum in literis alumnum, Herculis II Ferrariensium Principis
filium ..._ Venice, 1545). Written ostensibly for the guidance of his
pupil Alfonso, it is a discussion, not a textbook; but in the back
of the author’s mind is the prevalent conception of writing Latin
as writing themes. The examples quote prose and poetry side by side
without distinction of poetic from rhetoric. The usual complimentary
references to contemporaries and to recognized previous humanists
give the schoolmaster opportunity to exhibit his wide acquaintance.
Poliziano is cited as challenging imitation; but his arguments are not
given, nor the fact that his challenge was of Ciceronianism. Instead
of citing his letter to Cortesi, Ricci merely praises Cortesi’s reply
as elegant. The _Ciceronianus_ of Erasmus is similarly dismissed as an
attack on Longueil. The progress of the book is generally from definition
of imitation (I) through application of it in composition (II) to
application in style (III). Ciceronianism, implied throughout, first in
classicism, then by increasing use of Cicero as a model, is explicitly
declared in III and supported by a long defense of Longueil.

    I. Imitation, practiced in all human activities, is accepted
    in literature. Though Catullus in the marriage of Thetis and
    in the desolation of Ariadne said the last word and every
    word, nevertheless Vergil imitated him in Dido; and each has
    his own merits. [The Catullus passages are stock citations of
    the period.] Cicero and Vergil both counseled and practiced
    imitation. Why reduce following nature to following yourself?
    Following nature demands no more than being natural, i.e.,
    verisimilitude. [The quibble here between nature in the sense
    of human nature and nature in the sense of one’s own nature
    (_ingenium_) is unpardonable. Further, it is not clear what
    either has to do with imitation.] Imitate the best authors,
    each in his own kind. There follows a summary of Latin
    literature. [The book supplies no distinct definition of
    imitation as a means of advancing literary control. It shows,
    quite superfluously, that imitation is prevalent in the arts;
    it does not define the limits and the methods of practicing it
    in writing.]

    II. A review of the revival of Augustan diction in a long list
    of humanists proves nothing specific concerning imitation,
    much concerning pride in humanistic Latin. Scholars, however,
    are not well paid. Doctors and lawyers write bad Latin.
    Teachers are incompetent. The vernacular has come even into
    the schools; and even Cicero is translated. Let us all combine
    to save Latin style. Imitation is not repetition, not copy;
    there must be variation. Imitation with Plautus and Terence
    was the taking of Greek plots [a very inexact account]. Vergil
    imitated Homer even to the lifting of passages, and made a
    better tempest. Cicero imitated the Greek orators. Vergil used
    the _Pharmaceutria_ of Theocritus. [He did not imitate it.]
    Vergil’s use of Cato and Varro adds beauty of style. [Is this
    imitation, or simply use of material?] Sallust’s Catiline is
    admirable; but it did not preclude Cicero’s. So, even after
    Lucretius, Ovid and Vergil treated the gods. [Here is mere
    confusion. Cicero did not imitate Sallust; he wrote on the same
    subject.] The exposure of Andromeda is told by Manilius, Ovid,
    and Pontanus; and the last did it best. Comparison of Vergil’s
    Dido with the Ariadne of Catullus is followed by another
    _comparatio_ without enlightening us as to the nature or the
    method of imitation. Rehearsal of literary forms (history,
    exposition, pleading) leads to the assertion that Cicero is the
    best model in all three styles.

    III. Let us take Cicero, then, for our model. Proverbs,
    epigrams, definitions may be lifted as familiar enough to
    be common property. How to make variations on the model is
    exemplified abundantly in sentence form and in diction by both
    prose and verse. The book closes with many analyzed examples
    from Longueil, to rebut the charge that his writing is mere
    _cento_, or _pastiche_, and to exhibit him as the perfect
    Ciceronian. Ricci appends a practical hint from his own
    experience. His habit is to start boys with Terence because the
    plots are interesting, then to add some Cicero, and finally to
    give them Cicero alone.

The demonstration of Longueil’s eloquence is rather an epilogue than a
conclusion. It does not suffice to justify Ciceronianism, much less to
explain imitation. The character of imitation, its limits, its profitable
methods, are left still vague.

Of the same year is Bernardino Tomitano’s _Discussions of Tuscan_
(_Ragionamenti della lingua toscana ..._ Venice, 1545). The sub-title
goes on: “wherein the talk is of the perfect vernacular orator and
poet ... divided into three books. In the first, philosophy is proved
necessary to the acquisition of rhetoric and poetic; in the second
are set forth the precepts of the orator; and in the third, the laws
pertaining to the poet and to good writing in both prose and verse.”

A dialogue in form, with an academy setting, this is largely a
monologue by Speroni with interruptions, and is devoted mainly to “the
perfect orator and poet.” The book is a stilted and diffuse digest of
conventional rhetoric jumbled with poetic, with examples under each
conventional heading. Petrarch is made the exemplar of everything, even
of argumentation. The idea of poetic as a distinct mode of composition
never even enters.

    I. Sperone Speroni, the protagonist, is made to repeat his
    contention that language study is not the gateway to philosophy
    and his epigram: “things make men wise; words make them seem
    so.” Tomitano apparently takes him to mean that philosophy
    feeds style, not style philosophy; for Tomitano goes on to
    exhibit Petrarch as full of philosophy and perfect in style.
    Dante is less careful, but Petrarch is a treasury for all
    writers.

    II. The anxiety to exhibit Petrarch leads to strange rendering
    of the conventional divisions of rhetoric. _Inventio_, “first
    of those five strings on which the orator makes smoothest
    harmony,” is “imagining things that have truth, or at least
    verisimilitude,” and is forthwith confused with _dispositio_
    (_compartimento_). Petrarch exemplifies not only _exordium_
    and _narratio_, but even proof and rebuttal. Of the “three
    styles” of oratory the highest is Boccaccio’s in _Fiammetta_,
    the median in the _Decameron_. But since among verse forms the
    highest are _canzone_, _sestina_, and _madriale_; the plainest,
    _ballata_, _stanza_, and _capitolo_; the sonnet, Petrarch’s
    favorite form, must be median. Under style the doctrine of
    “tone-color” is easily reduced to unintentional absurdity.

    III. The distinction of poet from orator is discovered at
    great length to be—verse. The Ferrarese are best in comedies,
    the Venetians in sonnets, the Marchigiani in _capitoli_,
    they of Vicenza in _ballate_, the Romans in odes and hymns,
    the Paduans in tragedies, the Florentines in blank verse.
    _Inventio_ in poetry is the rehearsal of myths, of which the
    poet is lord and guardian. An interruption! How can you put
    Petrarch above Dante when you began by urging that the poet
    should be a philosopher? Answer (240): Petrarch had all the
    philosophy he needed, and used it more poetically. Though Dante
    was the greater philosopher, Petrarch was the better poet.
    When Aristotle calls Sophocles more perfect than Euripides,
    he does not mean in style [!]. In poetry _dispositio_ is
    evenness, consistency, harmony; and _narratio_ has the same
    rules as in oratory. Horace’s precepts, to begin _in mediis_,
    to combine instruction with charm, to seek advice, and to
    revise, are all repeated. On a request for more about style
    follows a discussion of words, simple and compound, proper and
    figurative, new and old. Finally the company joins in citing
    many examples.

Having run out of headings, Tomitano thus runs down. He had not in the
least profited by the revival of Cicero and Quintilian.

Renaissance Platonism, disputing Aristotle’s philosophy, attacked also
his rhetoric. Francesco Patrizzi (1529-1597) published in his youth a
collection of ten vernacular dialogues on rhetoric (_Della retorica,
dieci dialoghi_, Venice, 1552), “in which,” the sub-title adds, “the talk
is of the art of oratory, with reasons impugning the opinion held of it
by ancient writers.” The Platonic dialogue, followed superficially, is
quite beyond Patrizzi’s achievement. Discussing oratory (I) at large, he
goes on to its materials (II, III, IV), its ornaments (V), its divisions
(VI), the quality of the orator (VII), the art of oratory (VIII), the
perfect rhetoric (IX), and rhetorical amplification (X). Evidently
neither a logical division nor a sequence, these categories are rather
successive openings for attack. Patrizzi appears not only as a Platonist,
but as an anti-Aristotelian. His main quarrels are with the scope of
Aristotle’s _Rhetoric_, with the doctrine of imitation, and with making
rhetoric an art.

    As to scope and materials Aristotle is inconsistent. He says
    both that the orator has no material and that he has all
    materials (25). Why, then, did he spend most of his _Rhetoric_
    on teaching the materials, slighting the ends, the ideas,
    the forms, the instruments, and omitting _status_? [The
    misinterpretation amounts to gross misstatement.] Perhaps we
    lack any clear definition of the orator because professors
    insist on including under a single word all sorts of discourse
    (27). Even the oratorical ornaments are not peculiar to the
    orator. His materials are the same as the economist’s, the
    historian’s, the poet’s (37). Having given oratory so much
    scope, how can Aristotle restrict it to three kinds? (60).
    [Evidently superficial, this is rather quarrel and quibble than
    refutation.]

    As to imitation, Patrizzi holds that a painter represents
    not his conception (_concetto_), but the objects themselves
    [a heresy that reappeared as lately as Ruskin’s “pathetic
    fallacy”]. Taking no pains to understand what the Aristotelian
    imitation means, and ignoring the obvious fact that it is
    applied to poetic, he thus dismisses it by denial.

    Similarly he finds that rhetoric is not an art because Plato
    says it is merely a skill (_peritia_).

The significance of this work is that in 1552 a Venetian seeking
recognition at twenty-two could use some distinguished names in dialogues
smartly rapping Aristotle, and even find a publisher.

The English rhetoric of Thomas Wilson (_The art of rhetorique, for the
use of all such as are studious of eloquence, set forth in English_,
London, 1553 [reprinted down to 1593; ed. G. H. Mair, Oxford, 1909])
covers the ancient scheme practically, using Cicero and Quintilian as
well as the _Rhetorica ad Herennium_, and deriving much from Erasmus.

The _Partitiones oratoriae_ (Venice and Paris, 1558) of Jacopo
Brocardo is exactly described by its sub-title as _elegans et
dilucida paraphrasis_ of Aristotle’s _Rhetoric_. Now translating, now
paraphrasing, it provides in its marginal headings a sufficient table of
contents.

But the revival of the full classical tradition is most obvious in the
comprehensive Italian rhetoric of Bartolomeo Cavalcanti (_La retorica_,
1555; second edition, Venice, 1558/9, reprinted Pesaro, 1574). Through
563 closely printed pages this is strictly and consistently a rhetoric
of the classical character and scope. The exceptional avoidance of
confusion with poetic appears in the bare mention of Vergil and in the
ousting of Petrarch from his monopoly as exemplar of everything desirable
in prose as well as in verse. Plato is rare; Plutarch, rarer. The main
body of analyzed examples is from the orations of Cicero. Demosthenes is
only less frequent. From Livy and Thucydides the examples are usually
of the imaginary harangues to troops. All the examples that are not
themselves Italian are translated. Hermogenes is cited some half-dozen
times; Quintilian, twice as often; but the main source of doctrine is
the _Rhetoric_ of Aristotle and, next to that, his Logic. The book is
constantly and consistently Aristotelian.

    Instead of devoting himself after the Renaissance habit mainly
    to style, Cavalcanti gives it only one of his seven books
    (V). All the rest are spent on composition. Book I is a lucid
    survey of the field; II shows the ways of _inventio_ in each
    of the three types of oratory; III deals with argument; IV,
    with appeal to emotion and to moral habit; V, besides the
    usual lists of figures, has an unusually definite treatment
    of sentence management (_compositio_) and a meager summary of
    _dispositio_; VI presents the typical parts of an oration,
    avoiding the common confusion of _narratio_ (statement of
    the facts) with narrative; VII deals with confirmation and
    conclusion. Its incidental recurrence to _dispositio_ is again
    vague. Cavalcanti had excuse enough in the ancient tradition,
    which is generally weakest in its counsels for sequence.

Fortunately Cavalcanti’s own plan is clear and fairly progressive; and
his adjustment to his own time appears in the prominence given to the
third of the ancient types of oratory, such speeches on occasion as were
the main Renaissance field. His defect is the common Renaissance vice
of diffuseness. Beyond its intrinsic value Cavalcanti’s _Retorica_ has
historical significance. It gave the wider audience a just and distinct
view of classical rhetoric.

The sixteenth century closed with the full classical doctrine operative
in the _Ratio studiorum_ and in the _Rhetoric_ of Soarez.




Chapter IV

IMITATION IN LYRIC AND PASTORAL


1. LYRIC

The lyrics of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries show an extensive
revival of Augustan measures in Latin. Meantime imitation of Petrarch
made him an Italian classic and a European model. Thus, in England,
revival from a meager and languid fifteenth century was stimulated in
the sixteenth by Italy. But France shows the history of vernacular lyric
in clearest stages: (1) in the formalizing of medieval modes by the
_rhétoriqueurs_; (2) in the verse forms and diction of Lemaire and Marot,
seeking variety without rejecting tradition; (3) in the Pléiade program
of revolt from tradition to classicism, and especially in Ronsard’s
experiments with the Greek ode; (4) in the final predominance of the
sonnet.


(_a_) _Latin Lyric_

Latin lyric was both changed in mode by the Renaissance and increased in
volume. The fifteenth century turned from the modes of the medieval Latin
lyric to more direct imitation of Vergil and Ovid, Catullus and Horace.
Meantime the tradition of writing Latin verse in school continued to make
every Renaissance author familiar with this metric. The difference was
that he now used it in his own mature composition. For humanism demanded
even of vernacular poets such Latin stanzas as might introduce the works
of their friends, compliment their patrons, or celebrate state weddings,
victories, and solemn entries. Though even published Latin lyrics
were often themes, they at least promoted and confirmed two pervasive
Renaissance literary habits: control of classical metric, and imitation.
Throughout the Renaissance there is to be assumed in the back of a poet’s
mind a fund of classical measures and phrases.

But Renaissance Latin lyrics are by no means all themes. For some poets
Latin was really the lyric medium. Humanistic anxiety and pretense about
classical diction might, indeed, hinder lyric, but could not suppress it.
Pontano (1426-1503), whose Latin poems fill nearly seven hundred modern
pages, wrote not a few as directly and utterly lyrical as his _Naenia_.
Jan Everaerts of Mechlin, known to literature as Secundus (1511-1536),
even started a lyric vogue in Italy and France, and later in England,
with his _Basia_. Obviously inspired by Catullus, they had a quality and
influence of their own.


(_b_) _Italy and England_

The progress of vernacular lyric was steadiest in Italy because there the
vernacular triumph had been recognized earliest and most consistently.
The medieval lyric forms derived generically from Provençal—_canzone_,
_ballata_, _sestina_, and _sonetto_—had all been explored by Dante;
and one of them, the sonnet, had received from Petrarch a stamp that
gave it European currency. Beside the humanist cult of Augustan Latin
rose a cult of Petrarch as a vernacular classic. From Petrarch himself
and through his fifteenth-century imitators the sonnet became the most
widespread lyric mode both for a single, self-sufficient lyric and as a
lyric unit in a narrative chain.

In England, where the range of medieval stanzas had been narrower,
fifteenth-century lyric was meager. “The age of transition,” as it
has been called apologetically, was a period of medieval decadence,
of stalling in medieval patterns. Without much stir of ideas, without
general sureness in verse technic, it is often diffuse and straggling,
as in Lydgate. Skelton’s Latin learning remained quite apart from his
slack and boisterous English verse; and English fifteenth-century lyric
generally is both conventional and feeble. The sixteenth-century revival
that was sought in Petrarch led here, as elsewhere, to the prevalence
of sonnets. Its pioneer was Sir Thomas Wiat (1503-1542). Starting with
that connection of lyric with music which was to be a preoccupation of
Ronsard, appreciating Chaucer, but reading him in imperfect texts, he
turned early from a few _rondeaux_ of the Marot type to the Petrarchan
sonnet. Two thirds of his sonnets are translations or echoes of Petrarch
himself, or are derived from his imitators. Wiat pursued Italian further
in octaves and _terza rima_ and seems to have read, besides Ariosto,
Alamanni, Navagero, and Castiglione, the _Poetica_ of Trissino (1529).
The previous century had brought Italian influences on English learning;
Wiat brought the first clearly literary influence since Boccaccio’s on
Chaucer. His friend Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517-1547), carried
this forward. Similarly following Petrarch and the Petrarchans, and
experimenting with _terza rima_ and other stanzas, he made Italian
metric more familiar, and in particular helped to establish among the
Elizabethans that form of sonnet which is called Shaksperian.


(_c_) _France_

France shows most distinctly the whole Renaissance lyric history. The
beginning of the history in the medieval vernacular art of refrain
stanzas had shown there the most systematic elaboration. In 1501 Antoine
Vérard printed at Paris the huge collection of _balades_, _rondeaux_,
and _virelais_ entitled _Le jardin de plaisance et fleur de rhétorique_.
_Rhétorique_, or more specifically _seconde rhétorique_, means the art of
verse; the introduction expounds this in an anonymous treatise. Pierre
Fabri incorporated the treatise in his _Grande et vraie art de pleine
rhétorique_ (Rouen, 1521). The _pleine_ signifies merely the inclusion
of both prose (Part I) and verse (Part II). Fullness in any other sense
is hardly to be found in the _rhétoriques_ of the period. They furnish
mainly figures of speech and verse forms. They are style books; for the
so-called school of the _rhétoriqueurs_ was devoted mainly to verbal and
metrical ingenuities.

But as Villon had shown in the early fifteenth century that the _balade_
was not dead, so as the century waned Jean Lemaire (1473 to about 1520)
was poet enough to be more than _rhétoriqueur_. True, he continued the
jingling iteration. A double virelay composed on two rhymes begins as
follows:

    Hau_tains_ es_prits_ du grand royal pour_pris_,
    Je suis é_pris_ par mouvements cer_tains_
    De bien servir la reine de haut _prix_.
    Mais trop sur_pris_ est mon coeur malap_pris_ ... (p. 128).[24]

But Lemaire usually handled such recurrences with more delicacy.

    Notre âge est bref comme les _fleurs_
    Dont les cou_leurs_ reluisent peu d’es_pace_.
    Le temps est court et tout rempli de _pleurs_
    Et de dou_leurs_, qui tout voit et com_passe_.
    Joie se _passe_; on s’ébat, on so_lasse_
    Et entre_lace_ un peu de miel bénin
    Avec l’amer du monde et le venin ... (p. 17).

Using few of the popular medieval stanzas, he acknowledged Petrarch and
Serafino d’Aquila (p. 238), composed the first part of his _Concorde des
deux langages_ in _terza rima_, and experimented with Alexandrines. The
“enrichment” later proposed by Du Bellay he tried in such Latinisms as
_aurein_, _calefaction_, _collocution_, _oscultation_, _congelative_, and
_glandifère_. Bits of his pastoral decoration might have been written in
the Pléiade.

    A son venir Faunes l’ont adoré,
    Satyres, Pans, Aegipans, dieux agrestes,
    Et Sylvanus, par les bois honoré;

    Nymphes aussi, diligentes et prestes,
    A la déesse ont offert leur service,
    Tout à l’entour faisant danses et festes.

    Les Napées, exerçant leur office,
    Font bouillonner fontaines argentines,
    Créant un bruit à sommeil très propice.

    Puis à dresser les tentes célestines
    Ont mis leur soin les mignonnes Dryades,
    Faisant de bois ombrageuses courtines.

                                  (_Concorde des deux langages_, p. 243).

But the whole allegorical scheme of that poem is as medieval as Chaucer’s
in the _Parlement of Foules_. For Lemaire still uses mythology not for
classical allusion, but medievally as an extension of allegory. Chaos
and the Furies, Hymen, Erebus, Mercury, and Janus are listed (pp.
172-173) with the personifications Honor, Grace, Victory, and Discord.
The medieval adaptation brings from the _Roman de la Rose_ Bel-Accueil
to be a sub-deacon in the temple of Venus (p. 252); for the temple, as
in Chaucer, is a church and has relics. Even Hippolytus is a “_saint
martyr_” (p. 223); and the three goddesses at the judgment of Paris are
domesticated in Flanders by their “_venustes corpulences_.” Jean Lemaire
was not a forerunner of classicism.

Nor was Clement Marot (1495-1544). He learned the sonnet in Lyon and in
Italy without discerning either its distinctive value or its future.
For him it was merely one more form of the epigram type seen also in
the _dizaine_. He continued the _balade_, adapted the _rondeau_, wrote
much encomium without ever proclaiming himself a _vates_. His epistles,
elegies, epigrams, his experiments with Alexandrines, his imitations of
Martial, suggest a more normal development than the Pléiade change of
both emphasis and direction.[25]

For the new day of the sonnet at Lyon we must look to Louise Labé (about
1520-1566). Bourgeoise of the commercial and literary, French and Italian
city of Lyon, composing sometimes in Italian and sometimes in French, she
speaks the choice language of culture without parade. Her sonnets[26]
are directly and utterly lyric. Their literary derivations may, indeed,
be found, but are never put forward. Her few classical allusions are all
familiar. The simple mythology of her prose _Débat de Folie et d’Amour_
is handled in the Burgundian fashion of Jean Lemaire. Her verse is
Petrarchan as it were inevitably, because that was the prevalent mode of
her place and time. To call her a precursor of the Pléiade, then, may be
quite misleading; for she suggests neither school nor date.

French humanism had still to attempt a stricter classicism, not adapting
but imitating, not domesticating but importing. Ancient gods were to be
recalled in the style of Vergil or of Ovid. Odes were to be Horatian, and
might be Pindaric. Lyric diction was to be “enriched” by the interweaving
of correct allusions in classical phrase. The allusive value would thus
be heightened by summoning the hearer’s culture to answer the poet’s.
Since poetry would be elevated by becoming learned, poets should be
_docte_. As for readers insufficiently educated, they were not to be
considered. Ronsard repeated Horace’s _Odi profanum vulgus et arceo_.
Let the poet seek “fit audience, though few.” This whole theory of
poetic allusion seems to our age exploded. It comes to us through that
standardized eighteenth-century poetic diction which was repudiated by
the romantic revolt. Modern readers, consequently out of tune, must
approach many Renaissance lyrics with a resolution of tolerance. Aurora
leaving the bed of Tithonus, though mere decoration in Vergil and
somewhat faded in the Middle Age, was not yet stale to the increasing
audience of the sixteenth century. But if the allusion, far from being
stale, were unfamiliar, even recondite? Instead of rejecting classical
allusions _a priori_ as hindrances to lyric, we may learn to estimate
their value from actual Renaissance experience. That the language of
poetry should be reminiscent of Greece and Rome was a Renaissance
postulate.

Ronsard’s early classicism, revolting from prolonged _rhétorique_, was
reminiscent of Vergil and Ovid of course, of Catullus and his imitator
Secundus, sometimes of Claudian and Pontano, but mainly of the Odes of
Horace. Sometimes he even paraphrases, as when he composes a French _Fons
Bandusiae_; often he adapts phrases; oftenest he follows the Horatian
lyric movement. If he occasionally condescends to a medieval form, he
gives it classical style. Further, his study of Greek under Dorat led him
to imitate Callimachus and then Pindar. The reminiscences of Callimachus
hardly go beyond the usual Renaissance lifting of phrase or allusion,
that verbal classicism which was the habit of the time; but from Pindar
he learned something different.

The extant poetry of Pindar is almost all encomium of victors at the
pan-Hellenic contests. Encomium was a poetic fashion in the Renaissance
too, because it was a means of publication. The Greeks had justified
it by the poet’s mission to confer fame. Though Ronsard adopts the
idea in haughty proclamation of his own high function, he had already
ancient warrant enough in Horace. What he learned further from Pindar
was technical, a wider range of lyric composition. Encomium, reduced to
recipe in late Greek oratory, took definite form earlier in Greek poetry.
The main topics for the Pindaric celebration of an Olympian victor are
his family line and his native city. Each of these is carried into legend
and myth, either by allusions to what the pan-Hellenic audience knew as
common tradition, or in the longer odes by verse narrative. The poem
often ended on exhortation to live worthily of past and present fame.
These conventional motives Pindar carried out metrically in a sequence
of strophes and antistrophes. Without examining how strictly Ronsard
followed the Greek mode, it is enough to say that his French adaptation
proceeds by triads: strophe, antistrophe, epode. Though he usually
followed Pindar’s shorter odes, his Ode to the King on the Peace (1550)
has ten triads; his Ode to Michel de l’Hospital (1550), twenty-four. In
the latter the young Muses sing to Jupiter the battle of the Olympians
with the Titans; and there follows an historical vision of the progress
of poesy. Thus the Greek scheme invited Ronsard to wider adventures in
metric, to more remote recurrences and larger lyric harmonies than were
offered by Horace.

Though the metrical experiment ceased abruptly with Ronsard in 1550,
it had later fruit in Spenser. Longer poems of occasion, thus
introduced from the Greek by so skillful a metrist, were carried by the
Pléiade influence to England. But Spenser’s _Epithalamion_ (1595) and
_Prothalamion_, instead of conforming specifically to Ronsard’s verse
system, follow more generally and more variously the idea of larger
metrical reach by framing a stanza of eighteen lines.[27]

Why did Ronsard drop such measures in 1550 at the age of twenty-seven?
The Pindaric ode recurs sporadically in vernacular poetry, and
occasionally has had a limited vogue. More or less Greek, it is often,
as with Ronsard, learned and often pretentious with airs of inspiration.
One of its rare successes came more than two centuries later in England
with Gray. It has never kept its hold in lyric poetry. Ronsard continued
to print his Pindarics among his collected poems; but he never again
composed in those lyric modes. Had he found them intractable to his
language or to his own bent? Having pushed allusiveness beyond the ken
of any considerable audience, had he learned that lyric is remote at its
peril? We may guess part of the answer from the times.

Renaissance lyric thrived on learning so long as it was addressed to a
special audience and sought reputation with patrons to whom learning
might be useful in their dependents. The poet courtier naturally
flattered princes or their ministers by assuming their familiarity with
the classics as he displayed his own. But the printers had been widening
the audience. Though 1550 was too early for what we now call a reading
public, there was a widening circle, especially in the commercial cities,
of readers who had some culture and desired more. Poets could begin to
address these directly. Forty years later Spenser, still practicing
encomium to win a position in which he could write, felt an English
reading public and harmonized a long stanza without exhibiting Greek
metric. Though Renaissance lyric remained largely aristocratic, even
Ronsard, aristocrat himself, might find the mission of dispensing fame
smaller than the opportunity of wider hearing.

For such wider appeal the readiest mode was the sonnet. Accepting Marot’s
scheme, Ronsard restricted his own practice to a few types especially
suited to music. In thus using the new polyphonic art of voice with
string accompaniment he applied the ancient idea of a sung lyric to the
actual singing of his time. Modulating his many sonnets expertly, he
showed equal control in other stanzas. That these familiar forms became
a fitter pattern for Ronsard than the ode seems to us demonstrated by
literary history. His Pindarics have been relegated to the museum; his
more acclimated Horatian odes have been neglected; but time has not
dimmed:

    Quand vous serez bien vieille, au soir à la chandelle,
      Assise auprès du feu, deuidant & filant,
      Direz chantant mes vers, en vous esmerueillant,
      Ronsard me celebroit du temps que i’estois belle.
    Lors vous n’aurez seruante oyant telle nouuelle,
      Desia sous le labeur à demy sommeillant,
      Qui au bruit de mon nom ne s’aille resueillant,
      Benissant vostre nom de louange immortelle.
    Ie seray sous la terre & fantôme sans os
      Par les ombres myrteux ie prendray mon repos:
      Vous serez au fouyer vne vieille accroupie,
    Regrettant mon amour & vostre fier desdain.
      Viuez, si m’en croyez, n’attendez à demain:
      Cueillez dés auiourdhuy les roses de la vie.[28]

Life is short; “gather ye roses while ye may”; the theme is perennial,
a lyric commonplace. The rendering of it has often been conventional,
but often, as here, individual because intensely realized. The sonnet is
direct, immediate, in renouncing all elaboration and all distraction.
There are no allusions, only images. Candlelight, hearth, loom, song,
spoken words, are the sharper because they are unmodified. There are
few adjectives. The lyric is simplified. But the images of attitude and
gesture are iterated to lead the mood: “assise auprès du feu, dévidant
et filant,” “à demi sommeillant ... réveillant,” “accroupie.” This is
the diction of the lyrics that have no date. For the point is not the
abstract superiority of the sonnet as a verse form; it is the appeal of
form and diction alike to a wider audience, the communication of poetry
rather than its exhibition. Ronsard shows this power of direct appeal
in his equally popular _Mignonne, allons voir si la rose_. Included in
his first book of odes, this has no Greek strangeness. By 1550, having
explored more remote modes to answer the special demand of his circle and
his own bent toward learning, he returned to the lyric forms that had
become familiar.

The sonnet sequence, the use of the sonnet as a lyric unit in a progress
suggesting narrative, was more distinctly developed in England. Though
Ronsard’s sonnets appear in series, as addressed to Cassandre, Marie, or
Hélène, the enchaining is more evident in Sidney’s _Astrophel and Stella_
and in Shakspere. Spenser, fully aware of the Pléiade, gave himself no
such strict schooling as Ronsard’s. He usually stopped short of ancient
stanza and of borrowed phrase. But he relied longer on mythological
allusions. Thus he decorated not only the _Faerie Queene_, but even his
lyric triumph, the _Epithalamion_. Ronsard’s later verse makes slighter
and more considerate use of such ornament; Spenser’s last poem still
turns to the nymphs, to Jupiter and Leda, and to Hesper. The Renaissance
lyric experience may be summed up in these two poets. Devoted to national
revival of vernacular poetry, nourished by Latin and by Greek antiquity,
expert metrists, they show together the limits of imitative classicism.
Responding to the special demands of their time, they used the classics
to certify their learning. Thus their lyric medium was surcharged. Its
forms were sometimes so strange, its diction often so overloaded, as
to sacrifice lyric directness, especially the immediate transmission
of sensations. Lyric allusiveness was pushed beyond its lyric value.
With lesser poets it often sufficed as an end in itself. Renaissance
“enrichment” often became mere decorative dilation. But Ronsard, and then
Spenser, lived to fuse their experience of classicism in their appeal to
coming lovers of poetry.


2. PASTORAL

Pastoral is an old dream. Classified by modern psychology as escape,
it has been in various forms the poetry of the city wistful for the
country. The word, denoting shepherds, at the same time connotes that its
shepherds are not real, but fictitious. Whether allegorized or otherwise
manipulated, they are not the actual men who throughout history have
tended beasts by day and night in the open, not actual Sicilians, not
even the shepherds who in the Nativity plays brought English toys to the
infant Saviour. All these are real; the shepherds of pastoral, wearing
shepherd’s clothes, sing other songs. Artificial, indeed, pastoral has
often been, and is easily, but not always, not necessarily. The city
dream of the country “simple life” is after all a recurrent fact. Though
it may be sentimentalized, conventionalized, rhetoricated, so may the
other dreams. Instead of ruling out this one, we may examine its literary
vitality. Besides, it has a special claim. Pastoral, ranging all the way
from lyric through narrative to dramatic, and from Alexandrian Greek to
Elizabethan English, offered in its Renaissance vogue a wide school of
imitation.

Renaissance taste in Greek inclined to that later literature called
Alexandrian: to neo-Platonism, to the rhetoric of Hermogenes, to
Callimachus oftener than to Pindar, to the Byzantine imitators of
Anacreon and the Byzantine Anthology of epigrams, to the descriptive
show-pieces inserted in that late oratory called sophistic and in the
“Greek Romances,” both the long melodramas narrated by Apollonius,
Heliodorus, and Tatius and the idyllic _Daphnis and Chloe_ of that Longus
who was called “the sophist.” But the Renaissance literary creed for
Latin was classicism. Inclined rather to the dilation of such later poets
as Lucan, and even to Ausonius and Claudian, the Renaissance professed
its faith in the artistic restraint of Vergil. Now pastoral had the
promise of reconciling Alexandria with imperial Rome. It could turn for
decoration both to the sophists and to Ovid. It was both Theocritus and
Vergil.

The extant poems of Theocritus are by no means all pastoral. Called
Idylls, that is little poems, they are love lyrics (II, III, XX);
epigrams, that is, inscriptions of the sort collected in the _Anthology_
(XXVIII and the following); myths (I in part, XI, XIII, XXIV-V); encomia
(XIV in part, XVI-XVIII, XXII); and mimes, that is, dramatic dialogues
(X, XV). Only seven of those that are surely his are such poetry-matches
between shepherds as came to be called eclogues (I, IV-VII, X in part,
XIV). Though this charming variety has suggested to modern critics hints
for later pastoral development, especially toward drama, the vivacious
realistic dialogue (XV) between two city women at the festival of Adonis
is essentially different from pastoral. Nor is it true to either poet to
say that pastoral with Theocritus was fresh and natural; with Vergil it
became artificial. Both poets knew the country, Vergil apparently better
than Theocritus; but neither gives it that direct, immediate expression
which in modern times has been called nature poetry. Theocritus is
specific with wild olive, peas, and acorns; sometimes concrete with
a smoky hen-roost, waving green leaves, or a crested lark. For an
Alexandrian he is exceptionally free from the dilation of descriptive
show-pieces; but he has the Alexandrian habit of seeing nature through
art. Gorgo and Praxinoa (XV) are conveyed by their chatter; and the
dirge to Adonis describes the _putti_ on the ceremonial coverlet as like
fledgling nightingales trying their wings. Sicily is romantic for us with
blue sea, wild uplands, and volcanic steeps. The shepherds of Theocritus
live nearer to sophisticated Syracuse or Agrigentum, or to the other
western cities of ancient Greece. Unlike enough otherwise, Theocritus and
Vergil are alike in viewing the country through the eyes of the city.

The _Bucolics_ of Vergil established pastoral in its most familiar
pattern. One of the few schoolbooks to hold their place from ancient into
modern times, they have drilled into successive thousands the poetic
scheme of a lyric contest for some rustic prize, and the idea that this
contest, symbolizing some other more momentous, may express the poet’s
own hopes and fears. Thus in school, as from time immemorial boys got
their first notions of worldly wisdom by memorizing Latin beast-fables,
so they learned Latin grammar, with Latin verse, from shepherd rivalries
typifying wider struggles. Since many Renaissance boys continued to
imitate the _Bucolics_ when they grew up, many Renaissance eclogues
are published themes. That Vergil’s eclogues have survived all this is
evidence of immortality. They need no further praise; but having been
used for grammar, they need to be read again for poetry and for literary
history.

The inspiration of Theocritus, gracefully acknowledged by Vergil (IV,
VI, X), is hardly of style. The avoidance of descriptive dilation, the
preference of specific indication to ornament, are Vergil’s own choice.

    Pauperis et tuguri congestum caespite culmen (I. 69)

More characteristic of his economy is his use of concrete predicates.

    Molli paulatim flavescet campus arista,
    Incultisque rubens pendebit sentibus uva;
    Et durae quercus sudabunt roscida mella (IV. 28).

More concise than Theocritus in style, and graver, he is quite
independent in composition. The _Pharmaceutria_ (VIII) owes to the second
idyll of Theocritus little but the subject. The encomium of _Pollio_
(IV), instead of following the sophistic recipe item by item, selects
and weaves into an integrated vision of the Golden Age. But such economy
of phrase and movement seems to have had less influence in making his
eclogues models than his use of shepherd rivalries to suggest larger
struggles and personal concerns.

Moralized eclogue was familiar from the schoolbook called _Auctores
octo_. As used at Troyes in 1436, this collection contained, with an
_Isopet_ (Aesop’s fables), a _Cathonet_ (maxims of Cato), and other
medieval compends, a _Théodolet_. The work thus familiarly styled is
_Theodulus_ (or _Liber Theoduli_), _ecloga qua comparantur miracula
Veteris Testamenti cum veterum poetarum commentis_. It matches pagan
with Christian instances in a contest of Falsehood (Pseustis) with Truth
(Alethia) which is judged by Reason (Phronesis). Probably of the ninth
century, it was printed as late as the sixteenth.[29] Literary use of
Latin eclogues during the intervening centuries is sufficiently indicated
by Dante’s in reply to Giovanni di Virgilio. Petrarch’s Vergilian
_Bucolicum carmen_ expresses the actual conflict of Christian with pagan
poetry. Boccaccio’s eclogues are less distinctive than his Italian prose
narrative _Ameto_. Though this is far longer than any previous pastoral
and is dilated with lavish description, it must be remembered not only
for its pastoral setting, but for its alternations of verse and for its
myth. The successive interviews of the shepherd with the nymphs and
demigoddesses symbolize the progress from earthly to heavenly love.[30]

But humanism must have its own eclogues and its own symbolism. The
eclogues (1498) of Mantuan (Baptista Spagnolo, known as Mantuanus,
1448-1513) were lifted out of the humanist throng by being adopted for
use in school. The imitation thus invited through some two hundred
years was the easier because they are far less concise than Vergil’s.
Vicar General of the Carmelites, Mantuan doubtless owed some of his
vogue to his edification. Nevertheless he admits that classicizing
which Erasmus attacked later as paganizing: _Tonans_, for instance,
or _Regnator Olympi_ for God. Eclogue III presents the convention of
hopeless, ill-starred love; IX, the conventional contrast of country to
city; but X makes the shepherds debate the actual controversy over the
Observantists. Eclogue IV finds women still, as of old, _servile genus_,
_crudele_, _superbum_. Most of its examples being classical, boys could
learn simultaneously to recognize allusions and to beware women. Mantuan
occasionally indulges in word-play.

    invida res amor est, res invidiosa voluptas (II. 167).

    Nescio quis ventos tempestatesque gubernat;
    id scio (sed neque si scio, sat scio, sed tamen ausim
    dicere—quid?) (III. 12-14).

    his igitur quae scire nefas nescire necesse est
    posthabitis (III. 41-42).

He may overlook an awkward internal rhyme.

    quae mea s_it_ me cog_it_ amor sententia fari
    liberaque ora fac_it_ (II. 160-61).

But generally he is as accomplished in ease as in classicism.

Six years after Mantuan’s collection, another Italian writer of
Latin eclogues, Jacopo Sannazaro (1458-1530), published a vernacular
pastoral, _Arcadia_ (1504),[31] so widely popular as to become almost
the sixteenth-century type. Though the name is Greek, Arcadia and
Arcadian have been ever since reminiscent of Sannazaro. Through him,
more than through any other single influence, vernacular pastoral
spread over western Europe. For he gathered up in prose narrative with
verse interludes most of what pastoral in its long history had become.
Saturated in Vergil, familiar among the other Latin poets and with Greek,
he had caught the possibilities of Boccaccio’s _Ameto_; and though he
weaves throughout from literature, never directly from life, he was
artist enough to weave originally. The _Arcadia_ shows Renaissance
imitation at its best.

    Apter most often to attract the eye are the tall and spreading
    trees reared by nature on rugged mountains than the cultivated
    plants pruned by expert hands in decorative gardens; and
    much apter to please the ear the wild birds singing on green
    branches amid solitary thickets than among city crowds the
    trained ones in winsome and decorated cages. For which reason
    the woodland songs, too, methinks, inscribed in the stiff bark
    of beeches no less delight the reader than the choice verses
    written on the fair pages of illuminated volumes; and the waxed
    reeds of the shepherds in their flowery valleys offer perchance
    a pleasanter sound than the polished and vaunted instruments of
    the musicians in halls of ceremony. And who doubts that more
    attractive to human minds is a fountain springing naturally
    from the living rock, surrounded by green herbage, than all
    the others made by art of whitest marble resplendent with
    gold? Surely, as I believe, no one. Relying, therefore, on
    this, I may well on these deserted slopes, to the listening
    trees and to such few shepherds as may be there, tell the
    rude eclogues springing from the vein of nature, leaving them
    as bare of ornament as I heard them sung by the shepherds of
    Arcadia to the liquid murmur of their fountains. For to these
    not once, but a thousand times, the mountain gods, won by
    their sweetness, gave attentive ear; and the tender nymphs,
    forgetting to chase their wandering prey, left their quivers
    and bows beneath the lofty pines of Menalus and Lycus. Whence
    I, if I may, would rather have the glory of putting my lips to
    the humble reed of Corydon, given him long ago by Dametas as
    a precious gift, than to the resounding clarinet of Pallas,
    with which the presumptuous satyr challenged Apollo to his own
    destruction. For surely it is better to cultivate well a little
    plot than to leave a great one by ill management foully crowded
    with stubble.

    There lies toward the summit of Parthenio, no mean mountain
    of shepherd Arcadia, a delectable plain, not very ample in
    size, being bounded by the build of the place, but so full
    of fine and greenest herbage that only the sportive flocks,
    feeding there greedily, hinder perpetual verdure. [Follows a
    list of its trees, with appropriate adjectives and allusions.
    In spring, when the glade is at its best, shepherds meet there
    to match their skill with lance or bow, with leap and rustic
    song. At such a time Ergasto, moping apart, was challenged by
    Selvaggio in _terza rima_.]

Such are the prelude to _Arcadia_ and its first eclogue; and so it
continues. For the whole book is an alternating series of prose
descriptions and lyrics. There is no narrative sequence and arrival.
We are bidden to linger in Arcadia, to move only from one grouping to
another. The alternation of prose and verse, as old as Boethius, was
new for pastoral. For its time the fluent rhythmic prose, at once easy
and regulated, was the distinctive achievement. The verse is competent
in a considerable range of meters. Both prose and verse, whether in
reminiscence of pastoral hexameters or in feeling for a rhythm natural to
Italian speech, are largely dactylic. Meter XII ends with a dactyl every
one of its 325 lines; but Sannazaro’s habit is no such _tour de force_.
His dactyls are not insistent; they are merely predominant in a pleasant
variety. For he is studious of variation. In the first eclogue Ergasto’s
reply links some ten tercets by internal rhyme (lines 61-91):

    Menando un giorno l’agni presso un fi_ume_,
    Viddi un bel l_ume_ in mezzo di quell’_onde_,
    Che con due bi_onde_ trezze allor me str_inse_,
    Et me dip_inse_ un volto in mezzo al c_ore_,
    Che di col_ore_ avanza lacte e r_ose_;
    Poy si nasc_ose_ immodo dentro all’_alma_,
    Che d’altra s_alma_ non me aggrava il peso.

and then resumes the _terza rima_. In Meter II, lines 86-96, the
responses begin by repeating the rival’s last line, somewhat as in the
refrains of popular poetry. Sannazaro is a careful artist.

The diction achieves a pretty balance between ease and suggestiveness.
Easy with conventionally appropriate adjectives and fluent cadences,
it is full of echoes. At once we are reminded of Vergil, soon of Ovid,
Horace, Theocritus, Catullus, and also of their imitators. The great
range of this appropriation can be measured by the crowded footnotes
of the commentators; but without measuring, sometimes without distinct
recognition, we hear a constant accompaniment. Renaissance allusiveness,
too often paraded, is here subdued to serve the pastoral mood. Vergil was
in this glade. Theocritus set such a jar for the rustic prize. This myth
is prettiest in Ovid. But though an allusion lurks under every bush, it
will not leap out to detain us. Whatever pastoral poets we know help to
make us yield ourselves with at least a wistful “Et ego in Arcadia vixi.”
Tasso, indeed, was to outdo him with _Aminta_; but the difference is in
degree, not in method. In 1504 Sannazaro succeeded at the Renaissance
task of making literature out of literature.

Dramatic pastoral was one of the forms of Renaissance pageantry. It put
shepherds, nymphs, and satyrs on the stage to enhance the celebration
of court festivity with scenic device and music. It gave mythology
representation without changing the pastoral type.

Though carefully limited in time to secure consecutive action, Tasso’s
_Aminta_[32] is much less dramatic than pastoral. It weaves within the
dramatic frame the pastoral tissue of wistful reminiscence. It revives
the ancient dream of the Golden Age, not only through scenery and the
music of instruments and of verse, but by constant allusiveness of style.

Within twenty-five pages Solerti’s notes record echoes of Sappho,
Theocritus, and Achilles Tatius; of Lucretius, Vergil (oftenest),
Horace, Catullus, Tibullus, Propertius, Ovid, Seneca, Claudian, Statius,
Nemesianus, Calpurnius, Cornelius Gallus; of Dante, Petrarch (oftenest),
Boccaccio, Poliziano, Sannazaro, Bembo—but why go on? Even so heavy a
charge of reminiscence is managed without overloading. The _Aminta_ is
the most consistent, as it is perhaps the most accomplished, example
of this form of Renaissance borrowing. Tasso makes discreet use of
alliteration and of word-play. His musical verse should be heard, not
merely read. The pervasive harmony, various and subtle, can be but
suggested by underlining a few recurrences in the opening scene.

    L’acqua e le ghi_and_e ed or l’acqua e le ghi_and_e,
    Sono cibo e bev_and_a.

    Che tu dim_and_i am_ant_e ed _i_o nem_i_co
    La v_it_a s’avv_it_icchia a’l suo marito.

The delicate weaving of sound and sense, allusion and image, has not
faded. Few works of the Renaissance have had more modern admirers than
the _Aminta_.

The continuance of the type and the spread of its vogue appear in the
twelve eclogues of the _Shepherds’ Calendar_ (1579). Spenser turned to it
as to the established European form in which to prove oneself classical
and offer one’s poetic encomium. It was the obvious medium by which to
win rank as a poet. But at once appears a marked difference. Instead of
relying on the pastoral fund of allusion, Spenser provides an apparatus
of explanation: a dedicatory epistle, a general argument for the whole
series, a prefatory argument for each eclogue, and a gloss. The last
explains even obvious classical allusions, interprets the allegory,
indicates that this phrase is taken from Theocritus and that from Vergil,
and sometimes adds learned references. Did English readers need all this?
The answer is not that Sidney, Leicester, Raleigh, Burleigh, Elizabeth
herself, had not read Vergil and Mantuan, but rather that Spenser, even
while he must still depend for a living on the court, was conscious of a
wider audience. There were already English lovers of poetry, and there
were soon to be more, who, having less culture than they desired, were
glad to be guided in Arcadia.

The gloss also supports Spenser’s attempt to make his pastoral English.
It explains his deliberate archaism; for he tries to recall the language
of Chaucer without quite understanding it himself. Though of course he
caught Chaucer’s drift, he did not always catch his rhythms, nor even his
grammar. Archaism, dubious enough in itself, is thus doubly dubious here.
The diction of pastoral has an added strangeness. Sidney deplored this in
his _Defense of Poesy_: “That same framing of his stile to an old rustick
language I dare not alowe, sith neyther _Theocritus_ in Greeke, _Virgill_
in Latine, nor Sanazar in Italian did affect it.” Ben Jonson’s dismissal
may be blunt; but it is precise: “Spenser in affecting the ancients writ
no language.” If such diction may occasionally suggest actual country
speech, it is but the farther removed from the pastoral mood.

Spenser’s eclogues are English also in their nationalist fear and
scorn of Rome. Cultivated by government policy, this was so widespread
as to assure him a response. Moreover pastoral had always expressed
controversies beyond shepherds. But pastoral allegory has been most
acceptable when it is least local. Mantuan’s Observantist discussion
and Spenser’s “Papists” have long been tedious. We might look them up
in the footnotes, if they did not seem too remote from the concerns of
the Golden Age. For pastoral at its best is not English, nor French, nor
Italian; it is Arcadian, translatable readily into any language because
it has no country. Its allusiveness breaks down when it sends us to a
guidebook.

Otherwise Spenser’s eclogues are not distinctive. Their verbal mythology
is discreetly limited to familiar deities; their imitation, except for
one paraphrase of Marot, is of the usual authors; their pattern is the
Vergilian type. If the April encomium of Elizabeth is fulsome, that
was the habit of her court. If the metric is sometimes disappointing
with crowded stresses, or padded rhymes, or even jingle, that is
because Spenser was experimenting. The significance of the _Shepherds’
Calendar_ is not its pastoral achievement, but its use of the mode to win
recognition and its attempt to push pastoral farther than it would go.

In spite of its pastoral title, Sir Philip Sidney’s _Arcadia_ (c. 1583)
has a different pattern. Though it has incidental pastoral, its design is
that of the long, loose, complicated, melodramatic tales of Alexandria
known as the Greek Romances. These decadent Greek prose stories had wide
circulation in the Renaissance; and one, the _Daphnis and Chloe_, is both
better organized than most of them and clearly reminiscent of pastoral.
Since its vogue was increased by the French translation of Amyot, it
may be counted among Renaissance pastoral influences. For pastoral has
appeared again and again not as the main intention of a whole work,
but as an incidental interest. Though Renaissance imitation was thus
sometimes of style, sometimes merely of decoration, it was also quite
clearly the study of an ancient literary form.




Chapter V

ROMANCE


Sixteenth-century poetic has no specific relation to Renaissance
development of verse narrative. The more pervasive counsels and habits
of imitation agree in exalting Vergil. Vergil did, indeed, guide the
narrative sequence of Tasso; but narrative sequence is not a general
Renaissance concern. Malory, Boiardo, Ariosto, Spenser, seek other
narrative values. What they have in common preoccupation and common
achievement is romance. Romance in a period of classicism, romance
written in spite of humanism and sometimes by humanists—what should it
be? It was response to the special audience of the courts; for, whatever
humanism might say, the courts liked romances. It was response also
to the wider audience steadily increased by printing. The response,
both in medieval continuance and in distinctive Renaissance direction,
constitutes an important chapter in literary history.


1. THE ROMANTIC CONTRAST

The good old times recreated by poetry for refuge and inspiration were
found by Malory and Spenser at the court of Arthur; by the Italian
romancers, at the court of Charlemagne. These, of course, are the two
main medieval fields of romance, _matière de Bretagne and matière du
roi_; and into either of them may enter incidentally the matter of Troy
with the progeny of Aeneas or “Hector’s arms.” Though the Charlemagne
tradition may be somewhat more distinct with its twelve paladins and
its one traitor, the two are essentially alike in being, for the actual
world out of joint, kingdoms of chivalry. Thither the Renaissance turned
from the Wars of the Roses or the hired soldiers of Italy. Gunpowder had
abolished single combat; feudalism was gone; chivalry had been reduced
to ceremony. Therefore romance was out of date. No; the fact that
romance survived the Renaissance shows that it has no date. The romantic
_therefore_ is that poetry must once more revive ideals. Sinister
violence in Warwickshire or Ferrara denies chivalry; romance revives it.

This fundamental motive strikingly unites the two fifteenth-century
soldier romancers Malory and Boiardo.

    Sir Thomas Malory (1394?-1471) was attached in his young
    manhood to the retinue of the great Richard Beauchamp, Earl of
    Warwick, widely celebrated as a pattern of chivalry. After much
    military service he sat in the Parliament of 1445. Arraigned in
    1451 before a local court at Nuneaton on the charge of breaking
    into the abbey of St Mary at Coombe and robbing it, and further
    of ambushing the Duke of Buckingham, he was remanded to the
    King’s Bench and imprisoned for most of his last twenty years.
    In Newgate Jail he finished his _Morte d’Arthur_ (1469-1470).
    These few facts, opening much inference, tell us surely that he
    was imprisoned for violence in a time of violence. The chivalry
    that he celebrates in the greatest English literary work of a
    sterile period has the relief of contrast.

    Matteo Maria Boiardo (1434-1494), usually called “the Count,”
    was brought up at the brilliant ducal court of Ferrara. He was
    sent on embassies, married a Gonzaga, was gentleman of honor
    to Eleonora, and governor (_Capitano_), first (1480) of Modena,
    and then (1487, the year in which he published the first two
    books of his _Orlando innamorato_) of Reggio. Tradition has
    him genial and easy-going, and adds picturesquely that when
    he found a sonorous name for one of his Carolingian heroes he
    volleyed his castle bells.

    His writing was abundant, various, characteristic of his time:
    ten Latin eclogues and several Latin epigrams; many Petrarchan
    sonnets, with _canzoni_ and madrigals; ten Italian eclogues;
    _capitoli_ on fear, jealousy, hope, love, and excellence
    (_virtù_); a five-act comedy, _Timone_, drawn from Lucian;
    translations from Herodotus, Xenophon’s _Cyropaedia_, the
    _Golden Ass_ of Apuleius, and the _Lives_ of Cornelius Nepos.

Different enough in fortune, the two had the same experience of actual
war, and turned from it with the same literary motive, a wistful and
generous desire to animate the dislocated and groping present with the
courage and devotion of an idealized great past. Poetry of escape, this
is also poetry of faith. It lifts Symphorien Champier’s clumsy _Gestes
ensemble la vie du preulx chevalier Bayard_ (1525) with the ideal of a
knight “sans peur et sans reproche.” It will seize upon the death of Sir
Philip Sidney as romantic. It will survive the allegorizing of Spenser.
It is the refuge from the industrial age in Tennyson’s _Idylls of the
King_. If fighting and politics remain as ugly as in the fifteenth
century, Edwin Arlington Robinson will not be the last poet of romance.

Boiardo makes the contrast very explicit.

    [The robber replied] “What I am doing every great lord does in
    your upper world. They make havoc of their enemies in war for
    aggrandizement and to cut a bigger figure. A single man like
    me makes trouble for seven, perhaps ten; they rage against ten
    thousand. And they do still worse than I in that they take what
    they do not need.” [Said Brandimarte] “It is indeed a sin to
    take from one’s neighbor as my world does; but when it is done
    only for the state, it is not evil; it is at least pardonable.”
    [The robber replied] “A man is more easily pardoned when he
    frames the charge himself. And I tell you, and make full
    confession, that I take what I can from any one who can less”
    (II. xix. 40).

    O Fame, attendant of emperors, nymph so singing great deeds in
    sweet verse that thou bringest men honor even after death and
    makest them eternal, where art thou fallen? To sing ancient
    loves and tell the battles of giants. For the world of this thy
    time cares no longer for fame or for excellence (II. xxii. 2).

    Then with choice rhymes and better verse shall I make combats
    and loves all of fire. Not always shall the time be so out of
    joint as to drag my mind from its seat. But now my songs are
    lost. Of little avail to give them a thought while I feel Italy
    so full of woe that I cannot sing, and hardly can I sigh. To
    you, light lovers and damsels, who have at heart your noble
    loves, are written these fair stories flowering from courtesy
    and valor. They are not heard by those fell souls who make
    their wars for despite and rage (II. xxxi. 49-50).

The distinctive difference between the two fifteenth-century romancers is
that Malory translates; Boiardo rewrites. Malory may contract or expand,
adapt or add; but in general he follows what he calls “the French book.”
Boiardo, finding the Italian versions vulgarized (_tra villani_, II. xii.
3), wishes to make the old tradition once more literary. To restore their
dignity, he gives the paladins more than verse. So romance throughout
the Renaissance, as before and since, both survived and was changed.
It was rehearsed, translated, printed in its medieval forms; and it was
shaped to a distinctive Renaissance pattern.


2. SEPARATE ROMANCES

What the presses most readily carried on from the Middle Age was the
separate romances that had not been merged in one of the cycles. The
old fairy-mistress story told by Jean d’Arras as _Mélusine_ (1387) was
printed at Geneva in 1468. _Pontus and the Fair Sidoine_, translated into
German in 1468, was printed in French at Lyon in 1484 and in German at
Augsburg in 1548. _Amadis of Gaul_ traveled from Brittany to Spain and
Portugal and back to France. The French prose version printed in 1540 and
again in 1548,[33] typically romantic in love, adventure, and chivalry,
deserved its popularity also by narrative skill. With some lyric dilation
of love and an occasional allusion to classical mythology, the style
is generally restrained to the narrative purpose. Description, rarely
dilated, is often cleverly inwoven. Dialogue adds not only liveliness,
but some characterization. Though the simple transitions sound like
Malory’s (“Now the author leaves this and returns to the treatment of
the child”), this shifting is not frequent; often it does not really
interrupt; and generally the composition has distinct narrative sequence.
The knighting of Amadis is not merely a scene in a series; it is a
situation, prepared and pointed as at once fulfillment and promise. So
the complication of the rings (Chapter XI) is carried out before our eyes
through suspense to solution.

In such separate romances the Middle Age had advanced the art of verse
narrative. Not only in Chaucer’s masterpiece _Troilus and Criseyde_, but
also in the contemporary _Gawain and the Green Knight_, the story is
carried forward in consistent sequence to a distinct issue of character.
The Renaissance, though generally it had other preoccupations, caught
some of this vigor in the telling of single romances. One of these,
loosely related to the Arthurian cycle without ever being embodied,
is of Giron; and this was put into Italian stanzas by Luigi Alamanni
(1495-1556). An industrious and capable man of letters,[34] who spent
much of his life in France, he was a convinced classicist. His _Gyrone il
cortese_ (Paris, 1548; Venice, 1549), though it was written long after
Ariosto had secured fame by quite other methods, shows that he felt the
obligation of a single story, distinct from a cycle, to keep narrative
sequence.

    Alamanni’s Dedicatory Epistle, after relating the Arthur
    stories to history, and mentioning some dozen of the Arthurian
    heroes, expounds tournaments and the quests of errant knights,
    and offers his Gyrone, as Caxton offers his Malory, to educate
    toward true valor. Confessing that he has not always followed
    his source in detail, he promises later “another new work of
    poetry ... made in the ancient style and order and imitating
    Homer and Vergil.” [This was fulfilled in the last years of his
    life by his _Avarchide_.]

    The first five books proceed as follows. After preliminary
    adventures, Gyrone goes to his bosom friend Danain at
    Malahalto. On news of a tournament they decide to go disguised
    in black arms (II). But Danain’s wife languishes for love of
    Gyrone and gains permission to go thither also under escort
    while the two friends lodge with a hermit. After combats on the
    way, they arrive at the tournament as Sagramor is victorious
    in the first jousts. The beauty of Danain’s wife arouses the
    jealousy of the other ladies and the passion of the Greek king
    Laco. His ardor and his threats to seize her are overheard by
    Gyrone, who courteously rebukes him in a lecture.

    Further description of the combats at the tournament (III)
    leads to the final victory of Gyrone and Danain. While Laco
    still yearns (IV) toward Danain’s wife, a messenger arrives to
    conduct her to a neighboring castle. Laco parts from Meliadus,
    as Gyrone from Danain. Thus Laco and Gyrone are left sighing
    for the same lady in the same forest. They meet, express their
    admiration of each other, and sleep side by side in the wood.

    In the morning Laco routs single-handed the lady’s whole escort
    (V). The lady appealing eloquently to his honor in vain, Gyrone
    arrives and fells him. While the lady debates with herself
    whether to reveal her love, and Gyrone is torn by the conflict
    of his own with his loyalty to Danain, they are irresistibly
    drawn together. In a flowery mead by a spring they prepare for
    love. But Gyrone’s lance falling knocks his sword into the
    spring. When he has retrieved it, he reads as never before
    its inscription summoning to honor, and turns it in shame on
    himself. A peasant supervening betrays their sad plight to Laco.

Thus the story is brought definitely to a situation of character. Obvious
as the Renaissance manipulation is in the space given to love, the
handling makes this not merely lyric interlude, but story motive. Though
Alamanni is unwilling, or unable, to carry this through the 28,000 lines
of his twenty-four books, though he often fails to give that salience to
critical situations which is evident here, he nevertheless achieves what
the Renaissance cyclical romances generally ignored, narrative sequence.
All he needed to make his _Gyrone_ shorter, tighter, more compelling, was
firmer control of fourteenth-century narrative art.

For a classicist Alamanni is remarkably sparing of the fashionable
Renaissance allusions. He does, indeed, use that paganizing phrase which
was satirized by Erasmus. “In the consecrated temples, devoutly about the
sacrifices in accordance with true example, they listened, adored, and
besought the immortal Father”; when Malory would say, “They heard their
Mass and brake their fast.” But in spite of many Vergilian similes and of
occasional orations to troops, Alamanni’s classicism is not intrusive.
Apparently he thought it had small place in romance.


3. THE ARTHURIAN CYCLE IN MALORY

Among Renaissance romances presenting a traditional cycle in medieval
form the most distinguished is Malory’s _Morte d’Arthur_. Caxton’s
preface is a manifesto of romance; and his table of contents displays
most of the stories that had gradually been brought together by the
Middle Age at the Round Table. Between the “_enfances_” of the first
book and the last great battle in the west are Balin and Tristan; that
Percival, here called Gareth or Beaumains, who was reared apart in the
wildwood; the mighty Lancelot, his mistress the Queen, and Elaine who
died for love of him; the quest of the Grail; the traitor Modred. They
are not composed in a narrative sequence. Balin, Gareth, Tristan, for
instance, remain separate stories. For there is no real connection
in Balin’s glimpse of an earlier Grail story not used in Malory’s
Grail books, or in Gareth’s coming to Camelot and his knighting by
Lancelot. But there is no confusion. The separate stories are told
straightforwardly; the main persons become familiar; and the exposure
of Guinevere makes a crisis contributing to the subsequent ruin of the
goodly fellowship. The _Morte d’Arthur_ is not merely a series. But its
distinction is in style. Malory’s prose follows that medieval habit which
may be called pure narrative, the telling of a story singly for its story
values. It was not the only medieval narrative habit; nor is he the
only fifteenth-century author to follow it; but it stands out both in
contrast to classicism conceived as ornamental dilation and in his own
quiet mastery. Without parade, without pause for ornament, he maintains a
grave simplicity that ranges from homeliness to eloquence. His rhythm—he
has little other sentence art—lingers or quickens with the action, and
answers the emotion.

    Is that knyght that oweth this shelde your love? Yea truly,
    said she, my love he is. God wold I were his love (XVIII. xiv).

    Than syr Bedwere cryed: “Ah! my lord Arthur, what shal become
    of me now ye go from me and leve me here allone emonge myn
    enemyes?” “Comfort thy self,” sayd the kyng, “and doo as wel
    as thou mayst; for in me is no truste for to truste in. For I
    wyl in to the vale of Avylyon to hele me of my grevous wounde”
    (XXI. v).


4. THE CAROLINGIAN CYCLE ON THE STREET

The other cycle, the Carolingian, was popularized in Italy by street
story-tellers, who seem to have been, on the piazza before audiences of
artisans and shopkeepers, somewhat like the medieval _jongleurs_ before
their successive groups of pilgrims. Their narrative art can be only
guessed; for it was oral. But the guess is helped by the persistence,
even to the present time, of the Carlomagno marionettes. The recital
animated by these large puppets—for it is recital, not drama—is of a
traditional version called _I paladini di Francia_, and goes on day after
day by mere aggregation, and with many tirades.


5. PULCI

Italian literary manipulation of the Carolingian cycle in verse romances
began with Luigi Pulci (1432-1484). His _Morgante maggiore_ (1481, though
largely written by 1470)[35] is selective. Though it bulks large with
more than 30,000 lines of verse, it does not rehearse the deeds of the
paladins by the serial method of installments. At the end of Canto 5 two
main stories, Orlando’s and Rinaldo’s, are brought together. At the end
of Canto IX, having meantime moved together, the two arrive, with the
other persons whom they have picked up on the way, for the relief of
Montauban and of Carlomagno at Paris. There is narrative progress from
salience to salience. The dialogue is lively. Though it does not amount
to characterization, it suffices for speed and for mood.

    Said Rinaldo, “Wilt thou be so obtuse as not to look at that
    damsel? Thou wouldst not be acceptable as a lover....” Said
    Oliver, “Thou art ever for thy jokes. Yonder is something more
    serious than word-play” (IV. 61).

    Oliver looked at Rinaldo, hardly able to hold his gaze for
    weeping, and said: “’Tis true that man cannot hide love and
    coughing. As thou seest, dear brother, love has caught me at
    last with his claws. I can no longer hide this desire. I know
    not what to do, what to decide. Cursed be the day on which I
    saw her. What am I to do? What dost thou advise?” Said Rinaldo,
    “Believe me, thou wilt leave this place. Leave the lady,
    marquis Oliver. Our intention was not to yearn, but to find
    Orlando” (IV. 88-90).

The naughty machinations of Malagigi are, indeed, comic interpolations;
nothing comes of them; but the machinations of Gano have narrative
function. There is hardly any separable description. Love laments are
sketched, not dilated. Pulci is interested, and interests us, in his
story as a story. To this end he takes a free hand with events. We have
the usual paynim siege of Paris or of Montauban, but no attempt to
include all the items of tradition. Pulci takes what he wishes and puts
it where he wishes.

To call the poem a burlesque is misleading. The incidental farce, as
in Boiardo and Ariosto, is rather appeal to Renaissance fondness for
the grotesque as contrast. Though Pulci may have wished to pierce the
inflation of the Carolingian street tirades, he was too clever to think
of holding parody through 30,000 lines. Reducing the medieval aggregation
to an intelligible story, he also, with an art more delicate than
burlesque, reduced the style. Turning from both medieval gravity and
Renaissance luster, he brought romance down to earth. Oliver falls in
love promptly, utterly, and successively. The humor of this in real life
Pulci frankly seeks. When two knights dare each other, he renders their
speech not as oration, but as homely flyting. He is irreverent in the way
of fashionable conversation. But his main object and achievement, as it
is not parody, so it is not satire. It is pleasant, often humorous story
of familiar antiquated persons in traditional events and setting, but in
daylight.


6. BOIARDO

Boiardo, indignant at the degradation of the Carolingian heroes among the
vulgar—how did he proceed toward elevation?

    Who will give me the voice and the words, and utterance
    magnanimous and profound? (I. xxvii. 1).

    Till now my song has not ventured far from shore. Now I must
    enter upon the great deep, to open immeasurable war. All Africa
    lies beyond that sea; and all the world flashes with men in
    arms (II. xvii. 2).

The poet seems to nerve himself, as Vergil at the opening of _Aeneid_
VII, for loftier diction. The average Renaissance poet of the next
century would invoke the Muses for that “high style” which had come down
from classical through medieval rhetoric. But the words of Boiardo’s
invocation are not heightened thus; nor is his diction generally. He not
only omits the Muses here; he is very sparing with classical allusion
throughout.

Book I mentions the Cyclops, Circe, Thyestes, Medusa, the Centaurs,
Vulcan, Atalanta, the dragon’s teeth, and Hercules; Book II, a faun,
the easy descent to Hades, the god of love, Pasithea, Narcissus, the
Laestrigonians and Anthropophagi, the goddess Fame, Arion, and the Sibyl.
Hector’s arms are brought in as a piece of medieval derivation from Troy.
Classical similes are inserted here and there, as if conscientiously: the
meeting of two winds, fire in grain, a boar or bear at bay, two bulls or
two lions. Nor does Boiardo strive for other ornament. His heightening is
rather the sheer extravagance of epic brag.

    Their blows were heard nearly a mile in the wood (I. iii. 59).

    They came with such a battle-cry as made earth tremble, and sky
    and sea (I. iv. 51).

    The moat brimmed with the blood of the slain (I. xi. 32).

    Fire came to his heart and his face, and flamed from his
    helmet. He ground his teeth. His knees so clamped Brigliadoro
    that the mighty steed sank in the path (I. xv. 19).

    The grinding of his teeth could be heard more than a bow-shot
    (I. xv. 33).

Otherwise his words are usually as simple as Malory’s. So far, classicism
has made no headway in Renaissance verse narrative.

Boiardo’s sentences, as Malory’s, are typically aggregative, sometimes
even crude. Instead of tightening a sentence or a stanza, he remains
frankly diffuse. Fluent, sometimes slack, he runs on as if orally. His
verse is pleasantly varied. Though he hardly ever lets a line end with a
down-beat, he freely begins either up or down, or shifts to a dactyl. A
stanza rarely runs over; but it is often linked with the next by refrain,
as in popular poetry. Here and there the closing line of his octave
sounds like an experiment in the direction followed later by Spenser.
Inferior in stanza control to Boccaccio and to Ariosto, diffuse, somewhat
careless, he is always agreeably and sometimes charmingly fluent.

Yet description, which became a regular Renaissance cue for dilation,
Boiardo handles economically. Even where he is conventional he does not
dilate; and usually he is both distinct and concise.

    That spring was all adorned with white and polished alabaster,
    and so richly with gold that it shone in the flowery mead (I.
    iii. 33).

    A fair rich palace made of marble polished so smooth as to
    mirror the whole garden (I. viii. 2).

    Secret gardens of fresh verdure are above on the roofs and
    hidden on the ground. Gems and gold pattern all these noble and
    joyous places. Clear springs unstintingly fresh are surrounded
    by shady thickets. Above all, the place has an odor to give
    oppressed hearts their joy again (I. viii. 5).

His stories pictured on walls (_depintura istoriata_) whether fresco or
mosaic, have a literary source. They are from the Troy stories pictured
on the walls of Dido’s palace in _Aeneid_ II. Boiardo’s briefer rendering
may have been suggested by the “epigrams” of the Greek _Anthology_, or
by survivals in southern Italy of such pictures with verse inscriptions.
Certainly his palaces and gardens often recall the Norman-Arab art of
Sicily. For it is art that he pauses to note oftener than scenery.
In all this his classicism is both discreet and artistic. He does not
borrow; he adapts.

The larger scene, the field of the traditional struggle of East with
West, receives more definite geography. The haze over medieval Ermonie
had been often pierced by merchant voyagers. Though there are still the
Isole Felice or Lontane, we read now of Aragon and Barcelona, Granada,
Toledo, Seville, Valencia, and Gibraltar; of Agrigentum and Mongibello
as well as of Sicily at large; of Cyprus, Crete, and Rhodes; of Aigues
Mortes, Bordeaux, Gascony, Languedoc, Perpignan, and Roussillon; of
Damascus, Niniveh, Trebizond, and Tripoli.

The traditional chivalric equality of Saracen knights with Christian, as
in Malory, is emphasized.

    King Charles the Great with genial face had seated himself
    among his paladins at the round table. Before him were also
    Saracens, who would not use chair nor bench, but lay like
    mastiffs on their rugs, scorning the usage of the Franks (I. i.
    12-13).

    The paynim king Balugante, divining Rinaldo’s irritation
    at some of his fellow Christians, sends him a courteous
    and discerning message. Saracen knights are armed, titled,
    respected as are Christian, and mingle with them freely. Their
    bravery is not merely admitted; Rodomonte is a legendary demon
    of force, and Ruggiero in his pagan days is a pattern of both
    force and courtesy.

The traditional echoes of folklore are repeated. Feraguto’s strength
revives when he touches earth. A child stolen in infancy is recognized.
Herbs are gathered under a new moon. Ruggiero, as Percival, is brought
up beyond sight of arms. There are waters of forgetfulness, a loathly
lady waiting to be restored by a kiss, a magic steed, a white hart, a
monster adversary transformed, and a retreat under water.

Grotesque interludes, barely touched by Malory, found occasionally
elsewhere, and quite regular in Italian popular versions, are not only
admitted by Boiardo; they are dwelt upon with evident relish. Thus
Rinaldo fights with a giant.

    Of no avail the furious assault; of no avail the baron’s nimble
    skill. He could not reach so high. Suddenly Rinaldo dismounted
    and with one bound leapt upon the giant’s croup when he was
    not looking. He knocked his helm and his steel cap to pieces
    and, redoubling his strokes as if he were hammering iron at the
    furnace, he split the great head in two. Fell the giant with a
    rush that made the earth shake (I. iv. 64-65).

Orlando leapt even higher, so that again and again he met his giant face
to face—in the air. Angelica threw into a monster’s mouth a cake that
stuck his teeth together, so that Rinaldo might safely, though with
enormous effort, strangle him. Rodomonte bare-headed at sea hears his
hair rattle with ice. Astolfo is beguiled to board a whale, and Rinaldo
follows, both on horseback.

    On Bayard he plunged into the sea after the great fish in
    desperation. That whale went slowly, slowly; for it is very
    large and by nature grave (II. xiii. 65).

Marfisa, the woman knight, had her horse stolen and pursued the thief
long in vain. The conception is grotesque; the execution, pure farce.

    A fortnight had she followed him, nor was fed meantime on
    aught but leaves. The false thief, who was most astute, sped
    his flight with quite different food. For he was so quick and
    so bold that every tavern he saw he would enter and fall to
    eating, and then flee without paying his shot. And although the
    taverners and their waiters were after him with their pitchers
    and jugs in their hands, off he was, wiping his mouth and
    grinning (II. xv. 68-69).

Love, announced in the title _Orlando innamorato_ and frequently
asserted, has little more scope in Boiardo than in Malory. Whether the
title expresses an original intention abandoned, or an appeal to court
ladies, or merely a certain period in the hero’s life, Boiardo’s interest
was elsewhere.

    Long time Morgan, Alcina, and their magic wiles have kept me
    waiting; nor have I shown you a good sword-stroke (II. xiv. 1).

The good sword-stroke is what he gives with both hands, even as Malory.

Since the main interest is single combat, and all the fighters, even the
Saracens, are memorable, there is a long roll of persons. Of the hundred
mentioned in the first five cantos about a third never reappear; few are
characterized consecutively; none is consecutively in action for any
considerable period. The long poem is frankly a series, not a sequence.
Boiardo’s usual method is to carry one of his stories to a crisis, leave
it to pick up another, and so on.

    Let us now return to Astolfo, who remained, you know, alone at
    the fountain (I. ii. 17).[36]

As the Carolingian recitals on the piazza, or behind the marionettes, the
_Orlando innamorato_ may be entered at almost any point. What is there
heard or read is interesting mainly for itself, very little as arising
from previous action and characterization or as preparing for what
follows. To say, then, that it fuses the two cycles is quite misleading.
Boiardo brings in an Arthurian name, Tristan or Lancelot, as simply as he
adds another Carolingian. He puts Merlin’s well in the forest of Ardenne.
He interpolates Morgan le Fay among the Orlando stories. But fusion,
whether of these Arthurians or of his own Carolingians, is not in all his
thoughts. He is engaged not in composing the Carolingian story, but in
rehearsing the Carolingian stories.

Boiardo’s _Orlando_, then, is a collection of heroes fighting in the
struggle between East and West. Within that frame, as within the frame of
Arthur’s Round Table, tradition had collected many stories. Boiardo finds
room for them, and even for others quite unrelated. Those of the greatest
knights, Orlando, Rinaldo, Oliver, and their ladies and friends, the
obligatory stories, he can tell by installments because they are familiar
and have been already connected. The others he inserts here and there for
variety. Not only does he accept the medieval cyclical aggregation, he
ignores the later medieval achievement of narrative sequence in smaller
scope through characterization.

A certain Tisbina, who has nothing to do with Charlemagne, is in much
the same dilemma as Chaucer’s Dorigen in the Franklin’s Tale; and her
Iroldo’s response is much the same as that of Dorigen’s Arveragus.
Chaucer’s solution is convincing, in spite of impossible marvels,
because it is motivated by Dorigen’s character. Boiardo’s solution is
inferior because it is quite extraneous and casual. His Tisbina is not
characterized sufficiently to motivate the story toward any convincing
issue.

Much less is Boiardo concerned to motivate his whole story. His Orlando
in love is even removed for long stretches from the great struggle; and
Boiardo interrupts both the love and the struggle to tell of Tisbina and
Iroldo or insert a _fabliau_.[37] True, his poem remained unfinished; but
evidently he had no idea of making it a coherent whole. His Latin and
Greek did not suggest to him the shaping of verse narrative. Discernible
in his style, though never intrusive, they do not move his composition;
for composition was not his concern. Ignoring alike the medieval progress
and Pulci’s narrative cleverness with his own material, he was content
with abundant activity, variety, and fluency.

But in another use of the classics he forecast the Renaissance habit of
encomium. Ruggiero, legendary ancestor of his Ferrara patrons, brought up
in paganism and remote from deeds of arms, is sought by Agramante for his
great expedition against the Christian West. Ruggiero’s aged tutor warns
Agramante against the ultimate consequences of taking the marvelous youth
into France. Charlemagne, he says, may be defeated, and our pride and
courage enhanced;

    ... but afterward the youth will become Christian, and—ah!
    traitress house of Maganza, which heaven should not tolerate on
    earth—in the end Ruggiero shall have through thee his death.

    Would that were the final grief! But his descendants shall
    remain Christian, and come to honor as great as any the world
    knows today. They shall keep all, all generosity, all courtesy,
    sweet love and joyous state in a house the flower of the world.

    I see Hugo Alberto di Sansogna descend to the Paduan plain,
    expert in arms, in intellect, in all the ways of glory,
    generous, noble, and above all humane. Hear, ye Italians: I
    warrant you. He who comes with that standard in hand brings
    with him all your redemption. Through him shall Italy be filled
    with prowess.

    I see Azzo I and Aldobrandino III, nor know which to call the
    greater; for the one has killed the traitor Anzolino; the other
    has broken the Emperor Henry. Behold another Rinaldo paladin. I
    say no more of him than Lord of Vicenza, of Treviso, of Verona,
    who strikes the crown from Frederick.

    Nature shows forth her treasure. Lo! the marquis who lacks no
    point of honor. Blest the age, and happy they who shall live in
    a world so free! In his time the golden lilies shall be joined
    to that white eagle whose home is in heaven; and his domain
    shall be the flower of Italy from the one fair seacoast to the
    other.

    And if the other son of Amphitryon, who there appears in habit
    of a duke, has as much mind to seize dominion as he has to
    follow good and flee evil, all the birds—not to say the men who
    act in this great play—would flock to obey him. But why should
    I gaze further into the future? Thou destroyest Africa, King
    Agramante (II. xxi. 54-59).

With reminiscence, perhaps, of Dante, this is obviously patterned on
Vergil. The historical vision of the house of Este has its model in the
vision of the Augustans. Encomium with Boiardo is neither so frequent nor
so fulsome as it was to become with Ariosto and with Spenser. Was that,
perhaps, one reason for his double eclipse? He was first superseded by
Ariosto and then rewritten by Berni.


7. ARIOSTO

The brilliant _Orlando furioso_ (1516) of Ludovico Ariosto (1474-1533)
is one of the most typical verse narratives of the Renaissance, as it
was the most popular. More accomplished than Boiardo in diction, verse,
and composition, and more responsive to the Renaissance, Ariosto still
follows the same serial plan. The two poets differ more in degree than
in kind. Both were trained in the classics; both began by writing Latin;
both offer romance as inspiring contrast with actuality.

    O great hearts of those ancient knights! They were rivals;
    they differed in religion; they still felt the rude and wicked
    strokes aching throughout their bodies; and yet through dark
    woods and crooked paths they went together without distrust (i.
    22).

    [War has been debased through the diabolical invention of
    artillery (xi. 22-25)]. How foundest thou ever place in human
    hearts, O invention criminal and ugly! Through thee military
    glory has been destroyed, through thee the craft of arms
    dishonored, through thee valor and prowess so diminished that
    oft the knave seems better than the good soldier.

    And though Rinaldo was not very rich in cities or treasure,
    he was so affable and genial and so prompt to share with them
    whatever he had that not one of his meinie was drawn away by
    offer of more gold. A man of Montauban never forsakes it unless
    great need constrains him elsewhere (xxxi. 57).

    O famished, deformed, fierce Harpies, who in blinded and
    misguided Italy, perhaps as punishment of ancient sins, bring
    to every table divine judgment! Innocent children and faithful
    mothers drop with hunger while they see one feast of these foul
    monsters devour what might have kept them alive.... [Italy
    cries] Is there no one of you ... to free your tables from the
    filth and the claws ... as the paladin freed that of the Ethiop
    king? (xxxvi. 1-3).

Encomium with Ariosto becomes pervasive. Animated of course by the
personal ends of a court poet, it serves also the literary end of
magnificence, the first aspect in which the Renaissance viewed epic.

    Who will give me the voice and the words fit for a subject so
    noble? Who will lend me wings strong enough to attain my lofty
    conception? Far greater than its customery heat must be the
    poetic furor in my breast. For this part I owe my lord, since
    it sings of the noble line from which he sprang.

    Among the illustrious lords issued from heaven to govern the
    earth, never seest thou, O Phoebus who surveyest the wide
    earth, a race more glorious in peace or in war, nor any whose
    nobility has been kept longer, and shall be kept, if that
    prophetic light which inspires me errs not, so long as the
    heavens revolve about the pole (iii. 1-2).

The Vergilian vision of Augustan Rome is heard again in Merlin’s
prophecy. Epic rolls of honor muster the English warriors, the women of
Este, even the painters. Besides these are many incidental references,
especially at canto openings.

    Of courtesy, of nobility, examples among the ancient warriors
    were many, and few are there among the moderns. But of impious
    ways enough was seen and heard in that war, Hippolito, whose
    captured standards thou hast used to adorn our temples, as thou
    broughtest to thy ancestral shores their captive galleys laden
    with prey (xxxvi. 2).

The mission of the poet to confer fame, proclaimed by Ariosto and
repeated by Ronsard, is also seen in bitter contrast. The speaker is St
John the Evangelist.

    So worthy men are snatched from oblivion worse than death by
    poets. O intelligent and wise princes who follow the example
    of Augustus in making writers your friends, and thus need not
    fear the waves of Lethe. Poets, as singing swans, are rare,
    poets not unworthy of the name; for heaven prevents too great
    abundance of famous ones by the great fault of stingy lords,
    who by oppressing excellence and exalting vice banish the noble
    arts. We may suppose that God has deprived these ignorant men
    of their wits and darkens their light of reason in making
    them shy of poetry, that death may quite consume them. For
    wicked as their ways might be, if only they knew how to win
    the friendship of Apollo they might rise from their graves in
    sweeter odor than nard or myrrh.

    Aeneas was not so pious, nor Achilles so mighty, as their fame,
    nor Hector so brave. There have been thousands and thousands
    who might with truth have been put before them; but the palaces
    or great villas bestowed by their descendants have given them
    sublime honors without end at the honored hands of writers.
    Augustus was neither so holy nor so benign as sounds the
    trumpet of Vergil; but his having good taste in poetry brings
    him pardon for his unjust proscription. Nor would he who had
    against him earth and hell have the less fame, perhaps, if he
    knew how to keep the writers his friends.

    Homer made Agamemnon victorious, the Trojans cowardly and dull,
    and Penelope constant to her husband through the thousand
    persecutions of the suitors. If you wish to uncover the truth,
    convert the story to its contrary; that the Greeks were routed,
    Troy the victor, and Penelope a harlot. On the other hand hear
    how fame leaves Dido, whose heart was so chaste, to be reputed
    a baggage, only because Vergil was not her friend. Wonder not
    that I am oppressed thereat, and that I speak of it at such
    length. I love writers and pay them what I owe; for in your
    world I too was a writer (xxxv. 22-28).

This strange parenthesis of satire, dubious in its humor, shocking in
its irreverence, sounds today like encomium reduced to advertisement.
It sounds also like the bitter retort of realism to that fiction of the
courtier which was to have literary vogue through Castiglione. Bitter and
foul the actual wars of Italy in contrast to old chivalry; but bitter
also the trade of those who sing them.

Though often oratorical, Ariosto rarely seeks his magnificence by
elaboration of style. He has too much taste, too much concern for popular
appeal. He even admits the appeal of the traditional epic brag. Rodomonte
alone sacks a city; Grifone throws a knight over the wall; great rocks
are hurled from ships; and—triumph of rodomontade—the fragments of a
combat fly up to the sphere of fire and come down lighted.

There are a few reminiscences of the _Aeneid_, fewer of Horace,
fewest of Dante and Petrarch. Classical allusion has become a common
decoration. Aurora is already obligatory for dawn. Occasionally a
classical periphrasis (“Hardly had the Licaonian seed turned her
plow through the furrows of heaven” xx. 82) is obscure; or there is
incongruity in combining Avernus and the Sibyl with Merlin’s grotto,
or the Fates with Death, Nature, and St John. But allusion is neither
paraded nor often intruded. Classical similes, much more frequent than
with Boiardo, are evidently sought for decoration. They are one of the
signs that Ariosto’s time thought of epic in terms of style. But they
are used also for vividness; and they range widely. Besides those drawn
conventionally from beasts of prey or from storm, there are many quite
sharply individual: wood steaming in a fire, grass ebbing and flowing
in the wind, a pile-driver, and a mine cave-in. Ariosto’s decoration
is rarely a hindrance, rarely even elaborate. He is easy to read. The
bearing of a passage here and there may be dubious because of looseness
in the narrative, but never its meaning. He has reconciled dignity with
popularity. Instead of posing as literary, he makes his readers feel
literary themselves. He puts them at ease in fine company.

In sentence and stanza movement Ariosto has made his poem easy to read by
diffuse and various fluency. Writing for entertainment, he uses balance
or other word-play only as occasional means of variety. He is neither
sententious nor pretentious. His metrical skill, remarkable in range
and control, is not put forward for exhibition; it is an accompaniment
so flexible to mood as constantly to enhance the connotation. Rarely
lengthening the final line of the stanza often using refrain to link
stanzas, and sometimes within stanzas, he is most characteristic in
making the _ottava rima_ run on not only from line to line, but from
stanza to stanza. This fluent ease is by no means impromptu spontaneity.
It is the work of ten years. His diffuseness, then, is not carelessness;
it is adjustment alike to the immediate audience of the court and to the
increasing readers of the press.

Especially significant, therefore, is his handling of description. His
landscape is often both brief and conventional.

    Winsome thickets of pleasant laurel, of palms and gayest
    myrtle, of cedar, of orange with fruit and flowers woven in
    forms most various and all beautiful, make a refuge from the
    fervid heat of summer days with their thick parasols; and among
    these branches in safe flight nightingales go singing.

    Among the purpled roses and the white lilies, which the warm
    air keeps ever fresh, rabbits and hares are seen at peace, and
    deer, heads high and proud, without fear that any one may kill
    or take them, feed or chew their cud at rest. Swift and nimble
    leap the harts and goats that abound in those country places
    (vi. 21-2).

But he has a way of animating convention with a sharp word of his own.

    When the trembling brooks (_trepidi ruscelli_) began to loosen
    the cold ice in their warm waves (xii. 72).

Architecture and decoration often remain generalized, or offer few
details. Ampler is pageantry.

    With triumphal pomp and great festivity they return together
    into the city, which is green with branches and garlands.
    All the streets are hung with tapestries. A shower of herbs
    and flowers spreads from above and falls upon and around the
    victors, cast in handfuls from loggias and fair windows by
    ladies and damsels.

    In various places where they turn a corner they find improvised
    arches and trophies displaying pictures of the ruins and fires
    of Biserta and other worthy deeds; elsewhere, balconies with
    divers games and spectacles and mimes and plays; and at every
    corner is inscribed the true title: To the Liberators of the
    Empire.

    With sound of shrill trumpets and mellow clarinets, with
    harmony of every instrument, mid laughter and applause, joy and
    favor of the people, who could hardly come close enough, the
    great Emperor dismounted at the palace, where several days that
    company stayed to enjoy itself with tournaments, _personnages_
    and farces, dances and banquets (xliv. 32-34).

This is a preciously distinct picture of actual Renaissance pageantry.
More vividly detailed is the funeral of Brandimarte. Even these, however,
are not dilated. They are appropriate to their narrative function. The
long descriptive summary of Astolfo’s journey through the Valley of the
Moon is an interlude of satire; and Orlando’s battle with the monster
Orc is pure grotesque. He rows into the Orc’s mouth, casts anchor there,
and, when the monster plunges, tows him ashore. Moreover, both these are
narrated; neither is a descriptive pause.

Ariosto does pause, however, to dilate description of the beauty of
women. Seven stanzas enumerate the charms of the enchantress Alcina (vii.
10-16).

    The fair palace excelled not so much in surpassing the richness
    of every other as in having the most delightful folk in the
    world and the noblest. Little did one differ from another in
    flowered age and in beauty; only Alcina was most beautiful of
    all, as the sun is more beautiful than any star.

    In person she was as well formed as the industry of painters
    can imagine: her blond hair long and tressed; gold is not more
    splendid and lustrous. Rose mingled with hawthorn white spread
    over her delicate cheek. Of polished ivory was her joyous
    forehead, and of just proportion.

    Beneath two black and fine-spun brows are two black eyes, as
    two clear suns, sympathetic in gaze, frugal in movement, about
    which Love seems to sport and fly, and from which he empties
    his quiver and visibly steals hearts. Thence descends a nose in
    which Envy herself could find no fault.

    Beneath this, as between two valleys, the mouth besprent
    with native cinnabar, wherein are two rows of choice pearls,
    enclosed or opened by fair, sweet lips, whence issues speech
    of courtesy fit to soften even a base heart, and whence rises
    the winsome laughter that brings paradise to its place on earth
    [and so on for three more stanzas].

This is the conventional description called by the Middle Age _blason_.
It is used again for Olimpia bound to the rock, where the situation
itself is conventional. A bit of very old folklore, and coming down
also through classical mythology as Perseus and Andromeda, it was a
commonplace for dilation.

But what Ariosto dilates oftenest is emotion. His characteristic pauses
are lyric. Thus he interpolates the medieval _compleint d’amour_ not only
again and again, but for long exhalations. Bradamante alone utters a
whole series of these laments. The second begins as follows:

    Then shall it be true (said she) that I must seek him who
    flees me and hides? Then must I prize him who scorns me? Must
    I implore him who never answers me? Shall I endure to hold at
    heart him who hates me, who thinks his qualities so rare that
    an immortal goddess must descend from heaven to kindle his
    heart with love?

    In his pride he knows that I love him, that I adore him; nor
    will he of me for lover nor for slave. In his cruelty he knows
    that I yearn and die for him; and he waits till after death to
    give me help. And lest I tell him of my martyrdom, fit to move
    even his stubborn will, he hides himself from me, as the asp
    who to keep her venom refuses to hear the charm.

    Ah! Love, stay him who hastes so free beyond my slow running,
    or restore me to the state whence thou hast taken me, when
    I was subject neither to thee nor to any other. Alas! how
    deceitful and foolish is my hope that ever prayers should move
    thee to pity! For thou delightest to draw streams of tears from
    our eyes; nay, thereon thou feedest and livest (xxxii. 18-20).

Substantially the same is the famous madness of Orlando. Though Ariosto
cleverly gives it narrative enough to relieve its prolongation through
twenty-five stanzas, it is a dilated lyric interlude.

The art that dilates these lyrics is rhetoric. Thus they answer not only
the learning, but the taste of the Renaissance. With Alcina’s charms and
Olimpia’s, they were the favorite passages of the Pléiade. Ronsard, using
them often, was especially fond of Orlando’s madness. Beyond the Pléiade,
they open a long vista toward Italian opera. To look the other way, back
to the Middle Age, is to meet the sharp contradiction of Dante. Paolo and
Francesca, or Ugolino, is the poetic antithesis to Bradamante and Orlando.

Such dilated interludes would interrupt any progress of the whole story;
and they are not the only interpolations. Traditionally the cyclical
romances might pause to add incidental stories, usually told by errant
damsels seeking help. Ariosto inserts these freely, and quite as freely
others having even less relevance. The story of Ginevra, Ariodante,
and Polinesso (Canto V), for instance, though it falls among Rinaldo’s
adventures, has its own intrigue and motivation. Equally separable,
the _fabliau_ of Fiammetta is told for sex, and prolonged by appended
dialogue and comment. “Ladies,” it begins, “and you who hold ladies
in esteem, for heaven’s sake give no ear to this story.... Omit this
canto; for my story needs it not and will be no less clear without it.”
Evidently Ariosto has not planned his cantos as chapters.

A mere glance through the summaries prefixed to each canto will show that
the many interruptions are not breaks in the sequence of the whole. There
is no such sequence. The poem is a collection of parallel stories taken
up in turn, and only thus combined, not integrated in a single scheme.
Accepting Boiardo’s method, he uses the same frank transitions.

    But to another time I will defer the story of what ensued from
    this. I must return to the good King Charles, against whom
    Rodomonte was coming in haste and whose folk he was killing
    (xviii. 8).

He even turns them to humor.

    I am reminded that I ought to tell you (I promised to, and then
    I forgot) of a suspicion that the fair lady of the grieving
    Ruggiero had concerning the other lady less pleasing and more
    wicked and of sharper and more venomous tooth, so that through
    what she heard from Ricciardetto it devoured the heart in her
    breast.

    I should have told you, and I began something else because
    Rinaldo intervened; and then Guidone gave me enough to do,
    so that he held me off a bit on the way. From one thing
    to another I became so involved that I hardly remembered
    Bradamante. I remember her now, and I am going to go on with
    her story before I tell of Rinaldo and Gradasso.

    Before I speak of her, need is that I speak a bit of Agramante
    (xxxii. 1-3).

Such narrative art as Ariosto exhibits is in detail, not in the
onwardness of the whole story. The close is both interrupted and delayed.

Canto XXXVI, which finally brings Ruggiero and Bradamante together,
ends without their actual reunion. There is no meeting, no dialogue.
Canto XXXVIII takes Ruggiero from her, to support his honor; “and
that, ladies, is strange.” Canto XLIV still postpones, as lesser
issues have been postponed, _the_ issue, their marriage. Canto XLVI
ends characteristically on description of the wedding and encomium
of Ariosto’s patron Ippolito; but that the poem may conclude as the
_Aeneid_ with the defeat of Turnus, it gives Ruggiero one more victory.
Boccaccio’s art of the long narrative poem, to say nothing of Chaucer’s,
is ignored.

This is not careless; it is intentional. Some of the delay at the close
was added in the final revision of 1532. Ariosto designed not sequence,
but abundance and variety. His opening _Arma virumque cano_ is: “I sing
the ladies, the loves, the courtesies, the bold emprise of the time when
the Moors crossed the sea from Africa and did such harm in France....
Of Orlando too will I tell, how for love he went mad.” These loves,
traditional in still subscribing to _amour courtois_, are more various
than Boiardo’s. But though much of the appeal is by amorous descant,
the staple of this Carolingian romance is still single combat. As for
Orlando’s love madness, announced in the title and in the opening lines,
it is not reached till Canto XXIII; and once his fury is spent, he
disappears once more for some six cantos. He is hardly even a leading
character. The principal role, for encomium of the house of Este, belongs
to Ruggiero. Stories of the other paladins are often brought into
connection, sometimes skillfully, sometimes ingeniously, rarely to the
extent of making a situation, never in such an onward scheme as Chaucer’s
_Troilus and Criseyde_. For that demands what Ariosto never sought,
consistent motivation by progressive characterization from scene to
scene. Such characterization as Ariosto offers remains separate. Zerbino
has more space than is warranted by any distinct function. Oliver, coming
in casually, is less a person than a great traditional name. Astolfo’s
miraculous journey, with its interesting geographical list has so little
visible function that it might as well have been made somewhere else,
or by some one else. Leone, one of the most distinct characterizations,
comes in only toward the end. Even Ruggiero meets Bradamante when he
least expects or deserves her.

Ariosto is a typical example of the popular poet gauging and answering
his public. His elegant ease is flattering. His decoration is distinct.
His diffuseness relieves us of all coöperative thinking. A scene is
dilated through every phase of its emotion, and then discharged as
finished in and for itself. The next will be pleasantly different, or,
if unpleasantly, may be skipped. The dilation, the variety, that Vergil
turned his back upon, and after him Tasso, Ariosto frankly sought.
He has no care for poetic sequence beyond neat transitions, no poetic
austerity of sustained single purpose. Renaissance poets, for all the
cult of classicism, often revived the ancient world in Alexandrian
decadence, saw in Vergil only his high style, conceived poetic as
rhetoric, and ran after the “Greek Romances.” Ariosto was one of these
Alexandrians.


8. TASSO AND SPENSER

The contrast between Tasso and Spenser is heightened by the fact that
they were closely contemporary. Spenser’s birth was eight years after
Tasso’s; his death, but three years. Tasso began his _Gerusalemme
liberata_ in his twenties, published it at thirty-one, kept it on his
mind throughout his working life, and finally rewrote it. Spenser
published three books of his _Faerie Queene_ at thirty-eight, three more
at forty-three, and left it unfinished. Tasso’s is the shortest of the
Renaissance verse romances; Spenser’s was to be the longest. Tasso turned
away from Ariosto toward Vergil; Spenser moved even farther than Ariosto
from epic sequence. Allegory, hardly more than a figure of speech with
Tasso, is announced by Spenser as his plan. Religion having more place
in these two romances than in any of the others, Tasso’s is conceived
as uniting western Europe, Spenser’s as nationalistic. Tasso’s poem is
one of the greater European books, and has been widely read in England;
Spenser’s great reputation has been very slow to cross the Channel. The
latter years of the sixteenth century, then, carried on verse romance
in two distinct directions: the classical direction from Aristotelian
theory and Vergilian practice toward narrative singleness and sequence;
the allegorizing of the medieval cycles toward a series of counsels for
individual and social conduct.


(_a_) _Tasso_

Tasso’s is the only one of the Renaissance romances of chivalry whose
title is its subject. Malory’s subject is far more than the death of
Arthur, Pulci’s than Morgante. Boiardo’s subject is not Orlando in
love, nor Ariosto’s Orlando mad for love. Spenser’s title merely makes
his encomium part of his allegory. But Tasso’s _Jerusalem Delivered_
exactly sums up his scope and his theme. The Carolingian tradition,
still furnishing the scene and the persons, no longer furnishes the
pattern. The persons are fewer; and they are recreated to function in a
continuous story. Thus Soliman and Peter the Hermit have definite roles;
and Godfrey becomes the protagonist. The time is idealized to assemble
the heroic past about the medieval enterprise of deliverance, to bring
into one sequence the _chansons de geste_, the Carolingian cycle of
romance, and several crusades. The struggle of the West with the East, no
longer background or setting, is brought forward. It appears much less
as the exploits of individuals, much more as an enterprise in common.
Further it is an enterprise of religion, to rescue the holy places from
unbelievers, to restore them to Christendom as a shrine of pilgrimage. It
is animated by _pietas_, the Vergilian motive Christianized, the sense
of mission. The individual warriors, no longer adventurers, are soldiers
of the Cross. Though the actual crusades were medieval, they were still
in men’s minds as unfinished. Boiardo laments the postponement of a
recent proposal to revive them. Tasso writes not to further this, or any
other present movement, but to present crusade as historic. He focuses
all crusades in one historic action. His narrative of Godfrey and the
paladins is controlled by the idea of crusade as deliverance.

Such singleness of purpose naturally reduces encomium. The expected rolls
of honor celebrating the house of Este, are fewer and more detached.[38]
Reduced also, with one important exception, are lyric interludes. Turning
conventional themes to beauty, Tasso pauses less often to dilate emotion
with Ariosto than to interpose reflection or the escape of pastoral.

    [In the garden of Armida] See how the rose pricks modest and
    virgin from the green. Half-open yet, half-closed, the less she
    shows herself the fairer she. Lo! bold already, she reveals her
    breast naked; lo! again it droops and is not seen. It is not
    seen which had been desired by a thousand maids and a thousand
    lovers.

    So passes, at the passing of a day,
    Of mortal life the flower and the green.
    April cannot be halted nor return
    To flower again, to green a second spring.
    Gather we roses handsome as the morn
    Of this our day, which soon will lose its calm,
    Roses of love. Ah! let us love betimes,
    When loving we may still be loved again (xvi. 14-15).[39]

Scenery, handled with the usual Italian restraint, is often woven
expertly into the narrative. We are made to feel Jerusalem before it is
described; and the grave and restrained description of the great Mass is
inseparable from the action. Tasso’s subordination of literary means to
literary function dominates his style. The frequency of his classical
similes is apparent only on review; it does not challenge attention, much
less interrupt. His classical allusions are not extraneous decoration,
much less parade. His word-play is used oftenest to mark the close of a
stanza. His verse is harmonized. These are various aspects of artistic
conscience. Tasso never plays the virtuoso; he is too great an artist.

The onwardness of the whole story, which is most distinctive in this
achievement, could hardly be carried out in Tasso’s time with entire
consistency. Though there is none of the former easy shifting from tale
to tale, though tactics and strategy are made to control and subordinate
the traditional single combats, there are a few interpolated tales:
Sofronia and Olindo in Canto II; Sven, isolated and picturesque in Canto
VIII; Clorinda’s origin in Canto XII. Canto X is less a stage than a
pause to tell what was said and thought on one side and on the other. The
enchantment of the wood in Canto XIII is a parenthesis in the siege. The
most serious deviation is for Rinaldo and Armida. Armida has too much
stage—as Dido has in the _Aeneid_, yes, but with less warrant. While
the siege waits, Cantos XIV and XV detail the infatuation of Rinaldo
and linger over the journey for his recall. Nothing of this counts for
the sequence of the poem but his defection at a critical point and his
return. The rest is dilated for its own picturesqueness and passion.
But the flaw is conspicuous only because Tasso’s sequence is beyond any
previous attempt. The Rinaldo episode could be added without disturbance,
here or there, in Boiardo’s poem, Ariosto’s, or Spenser’s. Tasso has
taught us to expect more.

To a degree hitherto unattained in the romances, and rarely even
attempted, his persons are characterized for their function. Even Armida
thus functions early (Canto V) in the whole scheme as disintegrating.
She is more than a type of enchantress, more than a personification
of lust. Though toward the end her despair at losing Rinaldo may be
too oratorical and too much like Dido’s, her revenge breaks down for
love. In other cases, too, magic and demons are more acceptable because
the visible human motives and action reduce them almost to figures of
speech. For instance, the magic borrowed from the _Aeneid_ in Canto X
is merely a device for having Soliman present, acting in his own fate.
Personifications are rare; and even the stock hermit has more distinct
function. Godfrey is much more than Arthur or Charlemagne. His largeness
of view is at once intelligence and faith. A cardinal example of Tasso’s
art is the creative use of the archangel St Michael. He comes as light
and allies the heavenly host to the earthly. _Jerusalem Delivered_ is
not only the integration of the traditional hero stories; it is also the
realization of the Renaissance dream of epic.


(_b_) _Spenser_

Spenser’s most obvious peculiarity of style is archaism. Some of the
_arts poétiques_ repeat perfunctorily the rhetorical advice to revive
old words; but none of the other romancers follows it with conviction.
Though archaism is historically one of the habits of sophistic oratory,
with Spenser it was animated rather by the desire to revive the English
poetic tradition. Failing in this through ignorance of language, he but
made his diction more difficult.

The style of the _Faerie Queene_ is of its time in decorative classical
similes. In classical allusions Spenser leans more heavily on legend
and mythology. Sometimes he inserts lore gratuitously. Throughout he
throws together classical and medieval, Christian, and pagan.[40]
Occasionally mythology is made a vehicle for contemporary politics and
religion. Usually decorative, his mythology is generally incidental, not
functional. Thus his angels, too, are disappointing beside Tasso’s.

Following thus generally the Renaissance habit of learned elegance,
Spenser shows his own hand in concreteness. He is less often content
with mere epithet. He specifies even the details of a kitchen; and he
specifies habitually in abundant sensory images, even of ugliness.

    Therewith she spewd out of her filthie maw
    A floud of poyson horrible and blacke,
    Full of great lumps of flesh and gobbets raw,
    Which stunck so vildly that it forst him slacke
    His grasping hold, and from her turne him backe:
    Her vomit full of bookes and papers was,
    With loathly frogs and toades, which eyes did lacke,
    And creeping sought way in the weedy grass.
    Her filthie parbreake all the place defiled has (I. i. 20).

Oftener picturesque, such vividness decorates even the traditional
extravagance.

    Thus long they trac’d and traverst to and fro,
    And tryde all waies, how each mote entrance make
    Into the life of his malignant foe;
    They hew’d their helmes, and plates asunder brake,
    As they had potshares bene; for nought mote slake
    Their greedy vengeaunces but goary blood,
    That at the last like to a purple lake
    Of bloudy gore congeal’d about them stood,
    Which from their riven sides forth gushed like a flood (VI. i. 37)

For Spenser’s diction is habitually overloaded.

The verse is surcharged with alliteration.

    O how great _s_orrow my _s_ad _s_oule a_ss_aid (I. ii. 24).

    Sometimes her head she fondly would a_g_uize
    With _g_audy _g_irlonds or _f_resh _f_lowers dight
    About her necke, or _r_ings of _r_ushes plight (II. vi. 7).

    Day and night keeping _w_ary _w_atch and _w_ard
    For _f_eare least _F_orce or _F_raud should unaware
    Breake in (II. vii. 25).

    That her _b_road _b_eauties _b_eam great _b_rightness threw (II.
        vii. 45).

Spenser’s metric, often obscured by fanciful spelling or uncertain
pronunciation, is expertly varied. The Spenserian stanza, undoubtedly
skillful, is nevertheless inferior to the Italian octave for narrative.
It carries on with less ease. The sheer metrical task of the six
completed books (3,732 stanzas, or 33,588 lines) was beyond Spenser’s
revision. Some rhymes remain forced by stilted transposition, or upon
insignificant words, as in the last line of the first example above, and
in:

    And henceforth ever wish that like succeed it may (I. i. 27).

    And each the other from to rise restraine (II. ii. 64).

Though he uses expertly the variation of throwing together two stresses,
he has also left many lines clogged with more than can be uttered without
scanting or even stumbling. Thus in the second canto of the first book:

    And to him calls “Rise, rise! unhappy swaine” (l. 4).

    He could not rest; but did his stout heart eat (l. 6).

    Did search, sore grieved in her gentle brest (l. 8).

    O too deare love, love bought with death too deare! (l. 31).

In both style and verse the _Faerie Queene_ is the least facile of the
chivalric romances.

For the composition of the whole, Spenser’s scheme is not narrative.
The most descriptive of all the romancers, he has made his total effect
not merely abundant separable ecphrasis but pageantry. For holding the
pageantry together he proposes in his preface moral allegory, “fashioning
a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline.” This end,
Caxton’s preface to Malory proclaims, is attained without allegory, by
the romances themselves as stories. But now romance, having been first
rewritten in Renaissance style, and then recomposed as Vergilian epic,
is to be moralized. Further, the allegory is political. Artegall is Lord
Grey de Wilton; Duessa and Radegund, Mary Queen of Scots; Archimago, the
Pope. The poem is anti-Catholic with the Elizabethan political bias.
Its attacks on abuses of the Church, no louder than those of _Piers
Plowman_, are essentially different in that Elizabethan England has
broken with the medieval vision of unity. Spenser speaks for the most
self-sufficient of the rising nations, and makes its national mission
his own. For the divine mission of the poet in Renaissance classical
phrase means practically the claim of the poet to support by the court.
The new nationalism but intensifies encomium. Spenser was a court poet
in the same way as Ariosto, and to an even greater degree. He celebrates
not only England, but the Queen and his immediate patrons. He prefixes
a letter to Raleigh and seventeen poems to lords and ladies; and he
interposes the usual references and allusions. None of the chivalric
romances is more devoted to encomium than the _Faerie Queene_.

To weave all these strands into any large single sequence is probably
beyond the capacity of allegory, and certainly beyond Spenser’s
achievement. The legendary history of Britain in Book II has little
enough to do with the theme of constancy; the long pastoral in Book
VI with the theme of courtesy. Even single books, then, do not always
hold together. Within a single virtue we have at most a medieval series
of _exempla_. Even if Spenser had lived to subsume all his virtues in
Magnificence, the Renaissance _virtù_, he would have achieved only the
summary of a series. The earlier critics of the _Faerie Queene_ were
embarrassed by their obligation to consider it as epic. Spenser’s quoting
of the Horatian _in mediis rebus_ “A poet thrusteth into the middest”
in his preface, and his beginning thus “A gentle knight was pricking on
the plaine” are merely superficial. No long poem is farther removed from
epic than the _Faerie Queene_. Dryden, in a digression of his _Essay
on Satire_ (1693), said more significantly: “There is no uniformity of
design in Spenser.”

Instead of being ruled out as merely Dryden’s preoccupation with French
seventeenth-century “regularity,” this may well be pondered. Later
criticism of the romantic period, indeed, was inclined to reply: “What
of it? The _Faerie Queene_ offers so much else that we are content to
dispense with uniformity of design.” But still later criticism has not
been so sure; and, what is more important, many readers have balked. The
poem does not carry through. Today those who have read the six books are
inclined to boast. Doubtless the forming of a gentleman has less appeal
as an idea than Tasso’s common enterprise of deliverance. Certainly
the poetic machinery of knight errantry allegorized as the triumphs of
virtues over vices has less appeal than crusade. Motive and method are
insufficient to integrate the _Faerie Queene_ and carry it forward.
Its very timeliness has faded into insularity. _Don Quixote_, full of
seventeenth-century Spain, is significant to the whole western world; the
_Faerie Queene_ is sometimes significant only in terms of Tudor politics.
But probably the main reason for the waning of the _Faerie Queene_ is
the insufficiency of the conception to animate a long poem and of the
composition to carry it forward. Beside _Paradise Lost_, to say nothing
of the _Divina Commedia_, it is seen to have “no uniformity of design” in
the sense of lacking effective integration.




Chapter VI

DRAMA


Revival of drama is not a Renaissance achievement. The Renaissance has
no drama distinctively its own. Even the sixteenth century prolonged a
period of transition. Elizabethan comedy found new ways only in its last
decade; Elizabethan tragedy, French tragedy and tragicomedy, matured
in the seventeenth century. Medieval sacred plays continued, and the
moralities proved too feeble dramatically to survive. Court shows of
various kinds and degrees did, indeed, experiment dramatically with
mythology, pastoral, and even rustic realism; but quite generally they
lingered in allegory and pageantry, and their dramatic successes did not
widen dramaturgy till 1590. While it practiced popular drama in _mystère_
and _miracle_, the Middle Age had repeated that definition of drama which
made it not so much a distinct form of composition as a style. This
conception persisted through the Renaissance, especially in tragedy.
Tragedy was still the fall of a prince; and it was rather a dialogue in
high style than a sequence of action on the stage. Renaissance tragedy
was classicized, indeed, in style; but in composition it remained as
immune to the example of the Greek tragedians as the poetics[41] to
the theory of Aristotle. It still imitated Seneca and quoted the “Ars
poetica” of Horace. Often it was not even intended for the stage.

Comedy had better auspices and somewhat earlier development. Plautus and
Terence, already familiar to the Middle Age, had the great advantage of
being acted. Latin school plays, translations, imitations, kept before
the Renaissance the pattern of Latin Comedy. Narrow and conventional, but
definite and stirring, this had been found adaptable to the _fabliau_
situations of medieval farce, and was still active. Indeed, it was the
starting point of many a Renaissance dramatist. Until Greek tragedy
finally became active in dramaturgy, the only classical model for play
composition that went beyond Seneca was Latin Comedy.


1. SACRED PLAYS

The most widespread stage drama of the fifteenth century was medieval.
_Mystère_ and _miracle_, _sacre rappresentazioni_, continued, indeed,
well into the sixteenth century. The _Annales d’Aquitaine_ of Jean
Bouchet is quite specific.

    The King of France, by his letters patent issued the 18th day
    of January, 1533, commanded all the nobles of Poitou ... to
    appear with such [troops and equipment] as they owed for his
    service in the following May; and the review (_monstres_) was
    before the Seneschal of Poitou in the city of Poitiers....
    On the 14th of July the mayor, échevins, and bourgeois of
    Poitiers also gave their review for the king’s service in
    the aforesaid city. And on the morrow were made joyous and
    triumphal presentations (_monstres_) of the mysteries of the
    Incarnation, Nativity, Passion, Resurrection, and Ascension
    of our Savior Jesus Christ, and of the mission given by the
    Holy Spirit, which mysteries were played for a fortnight in
    the old market of the aforesaid city, in a theater built most
    triumphally around it (_en un théatre fait en rond, fort
    triomphant_). And the aforesaid play began on Sunday, the 19th
    day of the aforesaid month, and lasted continuously for the
    eleven days following, wherein were very good actors and richly
    costumed.... The Passion and Resurrection were played also
    three weeks afterward, or thereabouts, in the city of Saumur,
    where I saw excellent acting (page 473 of the edition of 1644).

This description applies in essentials to the English Corpus Christi
cycles, which we have in fifteenth-century texts, and to the general
European tradition. What was that tradition in terms of drama? Typically
a saint’s legend (_miracle_) is less available for a play than a Bible
story. The external life of a saint represented as a series of trials
may be unwieldy or monotonous. The great moments of the Magdalen,
indeed, have as clear stage possibilities as the sacrifice of Isaac;
but generically the _miracles_ yielded less effective drama than the
_mystères_. The distinction between the two soon ceased to be current
in England; there the word _miracle_ came to be applied to either.
_Mystère_, applied as above to Incarnation, Nativity, Passion, and so
forth, refers more properly to a series than to a single play. Was there
drama, then, in a whole series of sacred plays?

Yes, abstractly in idea, as when we speak of the drama of the Terror
in France. But the dramatic values of a whole period can be only
suggested; they are rather pervasive than controlling. The suggestion was
heightened for the medieval audience by familiarity with the habit of
conceiving the Old Testament as a prefiguration of the New and by typical
characterization. In sculpture, glass, or poetry the Baptist is not only
the immediate forerunner; he is the last of the prophets. The burning
bush is not only a portent for Moses; it prefigures the Virgin kindled
but intact. Piers Plowman, besides being a particular person in a poem,
is typically the _bon laboureur_; and on the higher plane he is the Good
Shepherd. The medieval audience, alive to such suggestions, more readily
saw in a given play the larger drama behind the particular action, felt
the communal emotion, and took the typical experience to itself.

The series as a whole, however, sacred history presented as a scheme
of divine providence, offered no specific training to a playwright.
Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac should suggest the great sacrifice; but that
would not make it a play. The immediate task was the realization of the
immediate dramatic values: Isaac’s growing fear, Abraham’s cumulative
struggle. Though the series included items intractable to representation,
it offered many situations worthy of the highest skill. These the
medieval dramatists had abundant practice in handling as distinct plays.
The unknown authors show real dramatic experience and sometimes clear
dramatic achievement. The English evidence is especially convincing.
The guild, of course, keeping the scrip of a given play along with the
costumes and properties, was free to revise or even to supersede. Some
of the devices, such as the comic struggle with Noah’s wife, evidently
arose from the actual performance. None the less certain plays stand out
as dramatically composed: the admirable progress of the Brome _Abraham
and Isaac_, the diction of both Mary and Joseph so purely answering the
action of the York _Nativity_, the rapid, direct, free handling of the
Towneley _Secunda Pastorum_. The sacred plays, then, constituted within
limits an important dramatic tradition; and that tradition was still
active in the sixteenth century.


2. TRAGEDY

The tragedies of Seneca are so oratorical as to suggest rather
declamation than acting.[42] The great persons of Greek tragedy, Oedipus,
Medea, or the house of Atreus, are revived not to interact toward their
doom, but to make speeches. Nevertheless the vogue of pieces so inferior
as drama, holding over from the Middle Age, had long and wide Renaissance
authority. There is no clearer example alike of the preoccupation with
oratory and of the habit of conceiving poetic as rhetoric. The printing
of the great Greek plays, and even their translation, were slow in
counteracting Seneca. Nor was Seneca altogether a hindrance. Encouraging
the fustian or dullness of lesser men, he invited the magnificence of
Marlowe. But he delayed the progress of dramaturgy by confirming the
Renaissance neglect of composition for style.

“There is no one in France,” says Turnebus in a note[43] to his friend’s
tragedies, “with any pretensions to the humanities but knows George
Buchanan.” The humanists, lest after all their eminence in Latin should
not be ratified by posterity, prudently praised one another. Joseph
Scaliger called Buchanan the first Latin poet of Europe (_ommes post se
relinquens in Latina poesi_), as Heinsius was to call Joseph Scaliger
the greatest scholar and man of letters. The complacent certitudes have
suffered so much from the irony of time that we should be careful to give
the sixteenth-century humanists their due. The type of international
scholar for whom Latin was the literary language persisted in Buchanan
(1506-1582). Spending some thirty years in France, he may have been
more familiar with French than with his northern vernacular; but all
his writing was in Latin. Such a humanist might well sustain his rank
in Latin poetry not only by lyric verse and didactic, but also by
dramatic (_Georgii Buchanani Scoti ... opera omnia_, ed. Ruddiman,
Edinburgh, 1715; Vol. II, “Poemata,” dated 1714), and is quite typical of
Renaissance tragedy in Latin.

His Latin translation of the _Medea_ of Euripides seems to have been
presented by students at Bordeaux in 1543.[44] His _Jephthes_, printed at
Paris in 1554, recalls the passage of the Red Sea classically.

    Quum, te jubente, pigra moles aequoris
    Posuit procellas, mobilis stupuit liquor
    Cursu coacto, et vitreus crystallino
    Muro pependit pontus hinc et hinc, viam
    Praebere jussus (p. 5).

Serial iteration is sharpened by antithesis.

    Ut trudit undas unda, fluctus fluctui
    Cedit sequenti, pellitur dies die;
    Sempee premuntur praeterite novis malis;
    Dolor dolori, luctui est luctus comes (p. 2).

The capable verse rises to metrical skill in the choruses. In _Baptistes_
(1576) the first chorus points with epigram the Sapphic familiar to the
Middle Age.

    Occulit falsus pudor impudentem,
    Impium celat pietatis umbra,
    Turbidi vultu simulant quieta,
            Vera dolosi (p. 19).

Classicism is even certified by pagan phrase; but there is no classical
dramatic composition. In all its declamation and debate _Jephthes_ has
little dramatic movement. The long speeches of _Baptistes_ hardly achieve
even characterization. If Buchanan had learned from Euripides what made
_Medea_ a play, he was not making one himself; he was casting Latin
poetry in dialogue and dividing oratory into five acts. In this he is
typical of humanistic Latin tragedy. Learned, allusive, competent in
style, it is not drama.

Classical tragedy in the vernacular is sufficiently exemplified by Robert
Garnier (1544-1590, _Œuvres_, ed. Lucien Pinvert, Paris, 1923, 2 vols.).
Knowing Greek tragedy as well as Seneca, appreciative, capable in style,
making some dramatic advance in his seven tragedies from 1568 to 1583, he
yet stopped short of the Greek type of composition, the dramaturgy that
reduces a story to its crisis in order to move the play by compelling
sequence of action. For his tragedies, though some of them may have been
presented, were poems written to be read.

The argument of _Porcie_ (1568) closes thus:

    “Here, then, is the summary of the history on which I have
    planned this tragedy. You will find it in Dio’s 47th book,
    in Appian’s 4th and 5th, and in Plutarch’s lives of Cicero,
    Brutus, and Antony. I have also interwoven the fiction of the
    death of the Nurse, to involve it further with gloom and sorrow
    and make the catastrophe more bloody.”

    Act I consists of (1) a monologue by the Fury Mégère, a fine
    piece to say, and (2) a chorus of six rhymed stanzas. It is
    rather a prelude than an act.

    In Act II Portia’s monologue is followed by a chorus imitating
    Horace’s second Epode, and the Nurse’s monologue by their
    dialogue and another Horatian chorus. There is no action. The
    dialogue gives a hint of characterization when Portia in her
    doubt and fear regrets the death of Caesar.

    Act III. Upon a Senecan monologue by Areus breaks Octavius to
    announce the rout and death of Brutus. The ensuing dialogue of
    balanced contrasts passes to Senecan speeches. After a chorus
    Antony vaunts the deeds of his mythical ancestors and his own
    prowess. The only function of Ventidius is to listen. Antony,
    Octavius, and Lepidus, in balanced dialogue, then in longer
    speeches, agree to divide the world. The chorus of soldiers
    rejoices in the prospect of booty.

    Act IV brings the rout and death of Brutus to Portia by
    messenger. Her long tirades culminate in her speech on
    receiving the urn of ashes, and are followed by a chorus.

    Act V is an epilogue. The Nurse reports the death of Portia,
    and engages in responsive lyrics with the chorus of soldiers.

Not really five acts, then, but three frame a piece without dramatic
action. Though it is focused on a brief period, it does not thereby
realize dramatic sequence. Consisting of oratory and lyric, it is
conceived as a poem, not as a play.

The style, careful in the balances of the dialogue, has effective
oratorical iteration: “C’est trop, c’est trop duré, c’est trop acquis.”

    Jupiter, qui _voit tout, voit_ bien qu’il ne te reste
    Pour avoir _tout_ ce _rond_ que la _rondeur_ céleste.
    _Il ha peur_ pour soymesme, _il hi peur_ que tes bras.... (I. 21).

The more pervasive suggestion of internal rhyme is combined with this
again in the fifth act.

    _Or’_ il est t_em_ps d’_ou_vrir la p_or_te;
    Il est t_em_ps de m_ou_rir, l_an_g_ou_reuse vieillesse,
    Vieillesse lang_ou_reuse, hélas! qu’att_en_s-tu plus? (V. 82).

Of the same type are the two tragedies of 1574, _Hippolyte_ and
_Cornélie_.

    Act I of _Cornélie_ is again a prelude consisting of a fine
    monologue and a chorus. In II Cornelia and Cicero remind each
    other of the past and moralize on human life. The theme of
    mutability, carried out in the chorus, ends on the hope of
    another deliverance from tyrants. In III the chorus continues
    this theme after dialogue with Cornelia and her receiving
    of Pompey’s ashes. IV brings on first Cassius and Brutus,
    then Caesar and Antony. V, though more nearly an act, makes
    extravagant use of the messenger.

_Marc-Antoine_ (1578), surer perhaps in its oratory and finer in its
lyric, is no more dramatic.

    Philostratus, a minor person, is added (II. i) merely to
    expound the situation in a monologue. Octavius and Agrippa
    appear only in IV. Lucilius is in III only to receive the
    exhalations of Antony; and Charmion has little more function in
    II and V. Once more V is mainly a series of tirades. Act II,
    scene iii adds to Cleopatra’s oratory a flash of jealousy and
    the suggestion of Diomedes that she save the situation by using
    her fatal beauty on Caesar; but neither is carried out.

In _La Troade_ (1579) Garnier turned to Euripides.

    Act I, for the first time more than a prelude, consists
    nevertheless, after Hecuba’s opening monologue, of responsive
    lyrics between her and the chorus. The envoy Talthybius arrives
    toward the end. Act II, mainly a debate between Andromache
    and Ulysses, introduces Helen and Astyanax and closes with a
    chorus. Act III, bringing back Hecuba and Talthybius, adds
    Pyrrhe, Agamemnon, Calchas, and Polyxena. Act IV brings
    together Hecuba and Andromache. The murder of Astyanax and
    the death, already forecast, of Polyxena are announced by
    messenger. Act V gives main place to Polymestor, who appears
    for the first time. The act is in effect an appendix, adding
    the _Hecuba_ of Euripides to Seneca.

Evidently Garnier has not grasped the composing habit of Greek tragedy.
At most he has managed somewhat more interaction between such groups
of persons as he had begun by keeping apart in separate acts. He is
working at literature, not at drama. Hence his evident intelligence
carries his experience only so far. The argument of _Antigone_ (1580)
cites the Theban plays of all three great Greek dramatists, and adds
Statius to Seneca. The plot generally uses Seneca for the first three
acts, the _Antigone_ of Sophocles for the last two. The combination is
rather piecing than fusion, and shows no appreciation of the dramaturgy
of Sophocles. In 1582 Garnier was adventurous enough to attempt a
dramatization of Ariosto. _Bradamante_, which he calls a tragicomedy,[45]
is hardly more than a division of certain parts of the _Orlando_ into
scenes which are far from being dramatic units. As in the earlier plays,
the five acts are in effect three. Some characterization is achieved
in the minor persons Aymon and Beatrix. Bradamante herself is chosen,
of course, for those lyric tirades with which Ariosto had delighted the
century.

But Garnier lived to vindicate tragedy within his own limits. _Les
Juifves_ (1583) has more values for representation and, in the pervasive
suggestion of the inextinguishable mission of Israel, a certain unity
of tone. “The subject is taken,” says the argument, “from the 24th and
25th chapters of the fourth book of Kings, the 36th chapter of the second
book of Chronicles, and the 29th chapter of Jeremiah, and is more amply
treated by Josephus in the 9th and 10th chapters of his Antiquities.”

The persons are the Prophet, Nebuchadnezzar, Nabuz, and Amital; the
Jewish Queens and Nebuchadnezzar’s Queen; a Duenna and a Provost; and the
frequently appearing Chorus. Two other main persons, Zedekiah and the
High Priest, appear first in IV; the Prophet, only in I and V. As in the
earlier tragedies, I is a monologue of lamentation on the Captivity plus
a chorus, that is, an expository prelude; and V, reporting the slaughter
of the children, is an epilogue urging submission to the will of God and
the hope of deliverance by Cyrus. Though the groups are somewhat better
combined, there is little change in the habit of composition.

Such effectiveness as this tragedy has beyond spectacle is mainly lyric.
The abundant choruses and responses are both expert as verse and inspired
by Psalms and Prophets to eloquence: Adieu, native land (II. v); How
shall we sing in a strange land? (III. iii); Wretched daughters of Sion
(IV. i). Though there is some interaction of plea and refusal, some
suspense, all the decisions have been made beforehand. There remain to
animate a play the sight and sound of communal fortitude. _Les Juifves_
is a noble poem; its literary type is still clear in the nobler _Samson
Agonistes_ of Milton.

That Garnier’s classicism is thoroughly of his time is vouched by forty
editions in less than thirty years. He was classical superficially in
following the custom of mythological ornament. He was classical further
in imitations on classical themes with classical persons, and still
further in going from Seneca to Euripides and even to Sophocles. But his
classicism kept sixteenth-century limits in looking away from composition
to style. As to the Middle Age, dramatic meant to his time not a
distinctive movement, but a certain style. Though he was intelligent and
serious enough to use Seneca in his own way, less than the Elizabethans
for melodrama, more for moral urgency, he did not see beyond the Senecan
conception of drama as oratory plus lyric. He found his own oratory,
his own lyric; but his progress was rather in tragic diction than in
tragedy.[46]


3. HISTORY PLAYS

The most distinctive Elizabethan stage experiments of the waning
sixteenth century were the “histories.” Generally lacking focus,
series rather than sequence, often made over, sometimes nationalistic
propaganda, they still keep some of their Elizabethan stir. For the
putting of great men on the stage not only satisfied a story appetite
growing too fast for print; it showed prowess, as no story can quite
show, in action. Thus a history play, though it might be tragedy only in
the medieval sense of the fall of a prince, though it might be Senecan
enough in style, might teach stage values beyond Seneca. Widening
the field of tragedy beyond Greek legend to the opening East and to
national history, it also opened other methods of characterization and
other dramatic forms than were taught by either the Greek or the Latin
tradition.

The story play, then, should not be ruled out as _a priori_ undramatic.
Aristotelian theory and classical experience exhibit dramatic movement
as typically distinct from narrative, not the telling of the story, but
the compelling of its crisis to an emotional issue. In this aspect the
Greek tragic theater exhibits sharp contrasts to the Elizabethan: the one
vast, open, removing the audience so far as to compel orotund delivery
and preclude facial expression, the other small, closed, bringing the
audience so near as to invite facial play and even aside; the one limited
to a few persons, the other inviting many; the one unifying plot for
the sake of unbroken, cumulative sequence to an inevitable issue, the
other dispersing it over time and space for narrative values and for
individualizing characterization; the one crisis play, the other story
play. But the contrast is not absolute, nor does it establish exclusive
superiority. Greek tragedy is too great in its kind to need any cult
of it as the _beau idéal_. The sixteenth century might have progressed
faster for understanding that dramaturgy; but Shakspere came before
Corneille and by another road. Elizabethan drama, often bungling,
sometimes sprawling at first, and slow to master the essentially dramatic
method of interaction, was yet a school of various experience. Though the
experience of the “histories” was valuable mainly as preparatory, it also
vindicated the dramatic validity of a story play.

Marlowe’s _Tamburlaine_ (1587) is poetry not only in what the Middle
Age called high style, but in dramatic conception. Though his sequel
failed to make it a tragedy, it is history brought home in heroic action.
The fourth act, indeed, lapses into spectacle; the fifth pushes the
ruthlessness beyond credibility, and the close is a formal gesture;
but for three acts we are in the thick. Not sustained as a sequence,
this activity is nevertheless dramatic to the extent of being typically
distinct from Seneca. For all its oratory, _Tamburlaine_ is story in
action. Thus was opened the way for Shakspere’s “histories” of the 90’s.
We shall do his revolting _Richard III_ more justice if we neither excuse
it as carrying over an earlier appeal of blood, nor blame it for failing
to focus the monster in a tragedy. _Richard III_ is not tragedy dulled by
dispersion; it is dramatic story, dramatic in the interactions of that
princely world poisoned by treachery, story in cumulative damnation.
Shakspere had written the _Merchant of Venice_ and was writing _As You
Like It_, when he put on another “history” in _Henry V_ (1599).


4. PASTORAL AND RUSTIC COMEDY

Before the dramatic experience of the “histories” bore its best fruit
in a widening of tragedy, another sort of story enriched comedy.
Dramatic training through Latin comedy had been continuous from the
Middle Age through the Renaissance. As Ariosto had begun with _I
suppositi_ in 1509, so Shakspere wrote the _Comedy of Errors_ in 1591.
In Latin and in vernacular, in translation and in imitation, the quick,
smart formula of Plautus and Terence[47] continued its lessons. But
the abundant Renaissance pageantry of solemn entries, the court shows,
and the vogue of pastoral, had yielded here and there some dramatic
experience. This is evident as early as Poliziano,[48] whose _Orfeo_ is
classical in its pagan gods and demigods, specifically pastoral in its
shepherds. It is also myth, both in the original story of Orpheus and
Eurydice and in Poliziano’s shaping. His myth is effective spectacle;
his dialogue more than conventional responses. He has action enough
to conclude upon vociferous melodrama. _Orfeo_ is a play so far as it
goes; but it is too brief to make its dramatic sequence convincing.
Mythological drama is rather opened than established. In 1573 Tasso,
fulfilling a similar commission for a court show at Urbino, conformed
his _Aminta_[49] strictly to unity of place and time. But its sequence,
though uninterrupted, is hardly dramatic. It proceeds oftener by musical
recitative than by action. Lovely to see and hear, it gives more hints
for opera than for drama. Battista Guarini (1538-1612), professor of
rhetoric and poetic at Ferrara, and chief court poet after the withdrawal
of Tasso, spent years on his pastoral drama _Il pastor fido_.

Begun in 1580, finished in 1583, read aloud, revised, it was finally
published at Venice 1589/90. Apparently it was first staged in 1595. The
Venice edition of 1602 is the twentieth. Called tragicomedy, tragedy in
its crisis of life and death, comedy in its satyr and in its happy issue,
it is above all, in its persons, its scene, its mythology, consistently
pastoral. A prologue celebrating Arcadia as a blest retreat of peace,
and Caterina d’Este as worthy of her illustrious house, is spoken by
the river Alfeo. Besides this personification, and four choruses, there
are eighteen personae. Of these the majority are servants or companions
serving merely as interlocutors. Three, the temple officiant Nicander,
Corisca’s lover Corydon, and a messenger, are quite superfluous. No
person is characterized except as a type: the hero Mirtillo as a
devotedly faithful lover, the heroine Amaryllis as virtuous, Corisca as a
plotter. All are duly paganized.

    I. The play opens with old Linco’s advice to athletic young
    Silvio: go love betimes. A dialogue between Mirtillo expounds
    the plot. Corisca’s monologue tells the audience that she is
    in love with Mirtillo, and must have revenge for his disdain.
    Three elders, Tityrus, the priest Montano, and Dameta, further
    expound the situation in reminiscence. A satyr, in a monologue
    on love, vows to seize the tricky Corisca. The persons having
    been thus presented in separate sets, the act ends with a
    chorus.

    II. Mirtillo tells Ergasto how he fell in love forever with
    Amaryllis. Dorinda in vain woos Silvio by detaining and
    restoring his hound. Corisca’s monologue exults in the outlook
    of her plot, and her dialogue misleading Amaryllis ends with
    soliloquy. The satyr seizing her, she cajoles, insults, and
    finally breaks away, thus providing action for the first time.
    The concluding chorus moralizes the past.

    III. Mirtillo, after apostrophizing spring and love, is
    brought, through a game of nymphs devised by Corisca, to
    Amaryllis, declares his passion, exchanges longer and longer
    speeches, and finding her obdurate, vows to die. In a monologue
    she tells the audience that she loves him nevertheless. Corisca
    tricks them separately into seeking a cave. Each exhales a
    monologue on the way. This is the complication. The satyr
    unwittingly furthers it by blocking the cave with a rock, thus
    imprisoning the two innocents. The chorus meditates on love.

    IV. At this point all that remains of the action is to disclose
    Corisca’s trick, correct the mistaken identity, and reveal the
    true intent of the oracle. But since the play must have five
    acts Guarini reserves all this to V, and makes IV a stalling
    interlude of monologues, reports, and choruses. The only action
    is in the last scene (ix), where Silvio, accidentally wounding
    Dorinda, begins to fall in love with her.

    V. Mirtillo’s foster-father, arriving from far, finds him about
    to be sacrificed, having offered himself in place of Amaryllis.
    The disclosure that these two are the fated couple meant by the
    oracle is made gradually through five scenes, and capped by the
    arrival of the blind seer Tirenio in vi. Silvio is reported
    duly in love with the healed Dorinda. Even Corisca is pardoned;
    and the play ends with hymeneal choruses.

The play is not moved by the actions of its persons. Complication,
indeed, comes through Corisca, who is the only person carried through the
play; but the solution is through persons brought in at the end solely
for that purpose. As with Garnier, the persons are presented in separate
groups; and they are on the stage to talk. The style is expertly careful.
Guarini has learned from Tasso how to modulate his verse. The notes
record constant reminiscences of the classics, both Greek and Latin, and
many borrowings; but the surcharging, again after the example of Tasso,
is discreetly harmonized. Pastoral drama, then, rather prolonged pastoral
than advanced drama. But its opportunities for spectacle, dance, music,
and imaginative suggestion were among the motives finally woven into a
play by Shakspere.

Meantime real rustics also, actual farmers, laborers, villagers, had long
been dramatized for gentlefolk and bourgeois by amateurs and increasingly
by professional companies. Angelo Beolco (1502-1542), called from one of
his favorite impersonations Ruzzante, even localized them on the stage in
Ferrara and Venice by Paduan dialect. As the shepherds of the Towneley
_Secunda pastorum_, his rustics are presented realistically. Here is
the essential difference from pastoral. The actual rudeness of such
impersonations, may, indeed, be dramatically exaggerated; but it must
always seem actual. Ruzzante’s vivid realizations transcend his Paduan
dialect by the appeal of actual peasant life, rudeness, shrewdness,
lewdness unveiled by the social conventions of a higher society, talking
in their own terms. Such rustic drama in time helped to discover a
dramatic interest beyond types in individuals. Types remain useful in
comedy because they are readily recognizable, the braggart soldier or the
clever rascal; and dramatic theory urges nothing more. But the stage
attempts with rustic persons sometimes opened in comedy of manners the
further appeal of characterization. The verisimilitude and propriety of
the theorists gave way to dramatic creation. As later in the “histories,”
so in rustic comedies, theory was widened by stage experience.

Ruzzante’s life was too short to bring his art to maturity. At forty,
though he had already triumphed in single characterizations, he was still
groping in the forms of Plautus. Much of his work is what is now called
sketch, rather dialogue or even monologue than play.

A characteristic piece is his _First Dialogue_. A soldier, reminiscent
here and elsewhere of the _miles gloriosus_, but characterized with some
individuality, is returning from the war ragged and wistful, but still
boastful. Catechized by an old friend, he gives his experiences, his
theory of life, and something of himself. So far the form is hardly more
than monologue; for the friend merely listens, questions, and comments.
There is no interaction. The effect, however, even in print, is dramatic
to the extent of vivid representation. The racy language has constant
suggestions of manner, gesture, stage business. It differs essentially
from the diction of Garnier. We come to know this man.

Then the soldier meets his wife. She is interested, not moved. Having had
to shift for herself in his absence, she cannot now break off convenient
relations for sentiment. Here is interaction, even a situation, and the
lines given to the man and to the woman clearly suggest it; but more than
lines are needed to make it a play. So Ruzzante took this second part
for the motive of his _Second Dialogue_. He saw the situation; he gave it
some complication, and closed upon violent action; but he did not sustain
the interaction of man and woman, and his third person, her senile lover,
remains almost separate.

So Ruzzante’s collected pieces[50] generally show less achievement
than promise. He was learning rapidly from the stage itself. Imperfect
playwright at his untimely death, he was already famous as a writer and
actor of “parts.” These Italian stage experiments of the 1530’s were
essentially like the Elizabethan fifty years later in giving to an old
field new stage values. Though they had rather a local success than any
general influence, they are significant now for what they opened.

In 1586 John Lyly gave the persons of his _Endymion_ Greek or Latin
names. But the myth suggested by his title does not take shape as
plot. Indeed, there is hardly any action, none that is dramatically
determining. The persons are on the stage to talk, the main persons in
orations, the Latin-comedy servants in repartee. Endymion’s dream is
presented by a dumb show in Act II, and recounted in Act IV. The close is
flatly by Cynthia’s fiat. The allegory, clearer of course to the audience
than to us, seems to be both personification of qualities and suggestion
of actual persons, as in Spenser’s _Faerie Queene_. In both aspects it
now makes a dull play duller.

Peele’s _Old Wives’ Tale_ is as random as its title, adding rustics to
classics and allegory to folklore. Not a story play, it is a collection
of little shows, each rather for itself than for any sequence. The
folklore material and the rustics are interesting; the play is not. That
anything so shapeless could have gained the stage in 1590 is sufficient
evidence of Elizabethan willingness to experiment. Within five years
Shakspere found the dramatic solution of myth and pastoral, folklore
and rustics, for court show in the _Midsummer Night’s Dream_. Forthwith
Lyly’s pedantic encomium and clumsy dumb show, Peele’s jolly rustics
and half-fairies, become as antiquated as the many Elizabethan gropings
through the moralities and pastoral. The court show has arrived at
fairyland. For this is all faery: the ancient heroic world from Boccaccio
and Chaucer, and the sprites with classical names. The classical story
of Pyramus and Thisbe is transmitted by rustics; and Bottom himself is
translated. Through all hovers the authentic elfin minister Puck.

_Midsummer Night’s Dream_ is a complete fusion, not only of style as
Tasso’s _Aminta_, but also in dramatic movement. As Theseus, Puck, and
Bottom, the lovers and yokels, are all conformed to the same world, so
they all interact in a single sequence toward a uniting issue. Even
the place is single. Such slight shifts as there may have been in the
Elizabethan theater are negligible; for of all its many presentations the
most convincing have stayed on a lawn before a green thicket. _Midsummer
Night’s Dream_ is a one-act play, Greek dramaturgy beyond Garnier’s or
Tasso’s. But instead of saying that Shakspere conformed to the dramatic
unities, we should rather say that he learned the dramatic importance of
holding fairyland together. Sixteenth-century stage experience, then, as
well as classical theory and imitation, opened the great drama of the
seventeenth century. The experience of court shows with the feebleness of
allegory, the escape of pastoral, the vitality of rustic realism, opened
the way for both romantic and realistic comedy. The experience of the
“histories” opened a new appeal in tragedy. For Corneille, as well as
Shakspere, was a man of the stage.




Chapter VII

SIXTEENTH-CENTURY POETICS


The revival of classical Latin was promoted by manuals and discussions,
and accompanied by still others directed to vernacular poetry. Though
none of these ranks as a poetic in the sense of a contribution to the
theory of poetry, not a few reveal or define habits of thought and taste,
directions of study, literary ideals and methods. Thus their importance,
far beyond their intrinsic values, is in their clues to literary
preoccupations and trends, their indications for a Renaissance weather
map.


1. VIDA

The ecclesiastic, Marco Girolamo Vida, addressed his three cantos of
Latin hexameters _De arte poetica_ (1527) to the Dauphin, son of Francis
I, with due invocation of the Muses.

    Sit fas vestra mihi vulgare arcana per orbem,
    Pierides, penitusque sacros recludere fontes,
    Dum vatem egregium teneris educere ab annis,
    Heroum qui facta canet, laudesve deorum,
    Mentem agito, vestrique in vertice sistere montis.

It invites noble youth to write Latin poetry. The doctrine is mainly an
expansion of the “Ars poetica” of Horace;[51] the exemplar is Vergil.

    I. Though heroic poetry is the highest, choose according to
    your talent heroic or dramatic, elegiac or pastoral. Let the
    great work wait while you sound and explore it; but meantime
    seize those parts that come at once, and make a prose sketch of
    the whole. The preparation of schooling in poetic and rhetoric
    is necessary as training in appreciation. [The rest of the
    canto is addressed, over the pupil’s shoulder, to teachers.]
    Greek, established in Italy by the Medici, and especially
    Homer, stimulate comparison. Of the Latins, the Augustans,
    especially Vergil, have first claim. The others may wait till
    taste has been matured by these. The master’s function is to
    awaken and guide love of the best poetry without forcing it.
    Even recreation may be pointed by classical suggestions. Calf
    love must be handled with care. So soon as young ardor has
    penetrated through passion to poetry, the boy should study its
    monuments and taste the other arts. Though travel is useful,
    and some experience of war, the central thing is unremitting
    study of the poets. Thus metric, instead of remaining merely a
    set of rules, becomes the testing of one’s own adjustments by
    memories of reading, the oral revision of a mind full of great
    poetry. Young ambitions should not be quelled by too severe
    criticism, nor lack the privilege of retirement and freedom.
    The world that grudges these owes its glory nevertheless to
    poets, who have sacrificed worldly rewards to live in their own
    peace. As the fire stolen by Prometheus, poetry is a divine
    gift.

    II. The second canto repeats Horace’s counsel: begin on a
    subdued tone and at the crisis (_in mediis_). The action,
    planned as a whole and clearly forecast, should control the
    description. Greek is more tolerant of descriptive dilation
    than is becoming to us Latins. Need I caution against the
    dilation that comes from gratuitous display of erudition?
    The detail of Vulcan’s shield for Aeneas has the point of
    exhibiting the history of Rome. Variety has its claims;
    but rolls of kings, legends, myths, comic relief, though
    delightful as description, should not deviate. Be careful of
    verisimilitude. Do not plan for length. Work day and night
    on a conception limited and tried out this way and that. If
    amplification seems desirable afterward, Vergil shows many
    ways. [The citations are mainly descriptive.] Inspiration comes
    when it will, and does not obviate revision. Study nature: the
    ways of age, of youth, of woman, of servants and of kings, for
    appropriateness, as in Vergil; for so you learn to move, as
    Vergil by Euryalus. Study in others, especially in the ancient
    Greeks, their conceptions (_inventa_) without hesitating to
    borrow as Vergil from Homer. So may Rome ever excel in the arts
    and teach the world. Alas for our discords and the bringing in
    of foreign tyrants! though distant nations had already honored
    Tuscan Leo and the Medici. The crusade against the Saracens
    became only a dream.

    III. Flee obscurity; let poetry be clear in its own light. Vary
    to avoid repetition. Figures give vividness to both poetry
    and oratory; but verse is freer with hyperbole, metonymy,
    personification. Figures should avoid display, incongruity,
    dilation. Style must always be appropriate. Follow the
    classics, use suggestions from other poets, adapting the old
    to the new, even borrowing. As a poet need not fear new words
    that are already recognizable, so he may go to Greek, as his
    classical ancestors before him. He may venture cautiously on
    archaism, periphrasis, compounds, adaptations. Never let words
    carry you beyond your meaning, except to serve the music of
    verse. Verse is a shrine closed to the mass of men, open to the
    few by a narrow way. For it must range beyond mere correctness
    to harmony with the persons, with the scene, with each of
    the three styles. Such counsels, sure as they are, will not
    guarantee high achievement. That can be given only by Apollo.
    Let us close by celebrating the supreme poet Vergil.

Commonplaces of rhetoric, from a source commonplace for centuries, why
were these put into elegant Vergilian hexameters? Hardly to make the
Dauphin a Latin poet; hardly to interpret what was already too well
known; hardly to advance poetic. The poem is an exhibition of competence
in learning, in teaching, and in Latin verse, a sort of thesis for the
degree of humanist. The person that it seeks to establish as a Latin poet
is its author.


2. TRISSINO

_The seven divisions of poetic_ (1529, enlarged 1563) by Giovan Giorgio
Trissino occupy the first 139 pages of the second volume of his collected
works (Verona, 1729). The first four divisions are devoted to diction,
metric, and verse forms. The fifth and sixth are substantially an Italian
paraphrase of Aristotle’s _Poetic_[52] with insertions from the “Ars
poetica” of Horace. Trissino repeats Aristotle without grasp of his
distinctive ideas. He has read also Dionysius of Halicarnassus (105);
he has the independence to disparage Seneca (101); and he considers why
Dante called his great work _Commedia_ (120); but he thinks that pastoral
eclogue is of the same poetic genus as comedy, and he does not make clear
that Aristotle’s distinction of dramatic from epic is in composition.
Though Trissino had not penetration enough to be constructive, or even
suggestive, he opened Aristotle early in the century to the wider circle.


3. GIRALDI CINTHIO

Giraldi Cinthio published together two essays on the composition of
romances,[53] comedies, and tragedies (_Discorsi ... intorno al comporre
de i romanzi, delle commedie, e delle tragedie ..._ Venice, 1554). In the
one on comedy and tragedy (pages 199-287, written in 1543) he moves, as
Trissino, over the surface of Aristotle’s _Poetic_ without grasping the
import of poetic as a distinct form of composition. For style he even
prefers Seneca (220) to the Greeks. In the essay on verse romances (pages
1-198, written in 1549) he speaks of having presented the subject in oral
teaching, and refers (4) to Vicentio Maggio’s lectures on Aristotle.

    The word _romance_ has the same meaning with us as epic
    with the Romans (5); and the form originated in France (6).
    Considering first the plot (_favola_), as Aristotle bids,
    we see in Boiardo and Ariosto that romance is the adorning
    (_abbellimento_) of the strife of Christians with their
    enemies (9). Though thus like epic or tragedy in imitating
    illustrious deeds, romance has not a single action (12), but
    several, perhaps eight or ten. Its organization (_orditura_)
    is unhappily compared to that of the human body: the subject
    being the skeleton; the order of parts, the nerves; the
    beautification, the skin; the animation, the soul. This is the
    plan of the treatise.

    A single action is too restrictive for romance (22), whose
    many actions are more desirable, as conducive to variety
    (25). But the actions should be connected in a continuous
    chain (_continua catena_) and have verisimilitude. The parts
    should cohere as the parts of the human body. The poem
    should be fleshed out at suitable places (26) with fillings
    (_riempimenti_): loves, hates, laments, descriptions of places,
    of seasons, of persons, tales made up or taken from the
    ancients, voyages, wanderings, marvels [in short, anything for
    sophistic display]. For there is nothing in heaven above, nor
    in the earth beneath, nor in the very depth of the abyss, which
    is not at the call of the judicious poet—provided (27) each be
    appropriate in itself and to the whole.

The appended proviso is irrelevant in theory and was not observed
in practice. The age of classicism is faced with the fact that its
most evident and most popular poetic achievement is not classical in
composition. Renaissance romance does not follow the epic formula. True,
Ariosto does begin in _mediis rebus_ (23), as Horace bids; but even that
is not obligatory for a “manifold action”; and evidently the action may
be not merely manifold, but plural. By “continuous chain” Giraldi means
not sequence of the whole, but merely transitions; not connection, but
connectives (40, 41).

    Our romancers may have learned this from Claudian (41). The
    breaking off of an action creates suspense; and the main
    stories remain in suspense to the completion of the whole poem
    (42). Besides, variety is itself an added beauty. Why must
    romances be limited to the epic way (44)? Ovid did not follow
    Vergil (45). But the parts and the episodes must have the
    connection of verisimilitude (55).

It seems difficult for Giraldi to think in terms of composition. Once
more we arrive at verisimilitude; and we go on to appropriateness (_il
decoro_).

    This he has touched earlier in reprehending Homer (31) for
    letting Nausicaa wash clothes. Here (63-65) he insists that
    romance, in bringing on kings as well as shepherds and nymphs,
    must make each consistent with his type. After pausing to
    disagree with the Italian followers of Hermogenes, he passes
    to style (83-159), including verse. The section on verse,
    sometimes dubious, is often suggestive, as on Ariosto’s
    admirable facility (145) in making verse run as easily as
    prose [i.e., without inversions]. Petrarch is cited (147) as
    the ideal combination of weight and ease.

    The concluding section (160-184) on the soul of the poem
    manages to lean even more on rhetoric. In oratory _anima_
    depends on delivery; in poetry, not only on this, but on such
    expressive words as put things before our eyes (_energia,
    sotto gli occhi_). An appendix (188-197) repeats the Horatian
    counsels on advice and revision.

The main significance of the treatise in 1549 is its recognition of the
actual difference of romance from epic. Giraldi’s attempts at reconciling
the two in theory seem evasions because he misses Aristotle’s controlling
view of poetic as having its own ways of sequence, distinct from those of
rhetoric.


4. MUZIO

Muzio published among his Italian poems a poetic in verse (_Rime diverse
del Mutio Iustinopolitano: tre libri di arte poetica ..._ Venice, 1551).
Diffused through some 1,600 lines (pages 68-94), it is often thin and
sometimes vague, the sort of treatise written not to teach, nor much to
theorize, but to express the author’s culture and taste via Horace’s
“Ars poetica.” What individuality it has transpires for the most part
incidentally; but the treatment of metric is fairly distinctive.

    Why use Greek terms: ode, hymn, epigram, elegy (71*)? Why
    talk of dactyls and spondees (72)? The difference between
    quantitative and accentual verse forbids the transfer. You will
    make a hodgepodge like Coccai’s.

    Non puote orecchie haver giudicio saldo
    Di quantità & di tempo ove la lingua
    De l’accente conviene esser seguace. (72*)

    “The ear cannot respond surely to quantity and time where the
    tongue must follow the stress” is at once penetrative and, in
    the face of the classicists, daring. After conventional remarks
    on verse as expressing that harmony which in nature we see to
    be divine, and on the ancient relation to the dance, he finds
    the joining of lyre with song in _ottava rima_ (77) and in
    _stanza_ (86). The Greeks and Romans, using hexameter for all
    “three styles,” did not even adapt their verse to tragedy or
    to comedy (88*) by the length of the line. Our unrhymed verse
    (_versi sciolti_) is appropriate to proud and lofty emprise
    (88*). For purity of style it is not enough to be born in
    Tuscany. Seek usage in books (70*). Tuscan is not confined to
    Petrarch. He was pure and fluent above all others—and perhaps
    more timid than becomes a poet (71).

The treatment of imitation (69*, 70, 82) and of sentences (68*, 90*, 91,
93) is conventional. Sophistic appears in the recipes for verisimilitude
through appropriateness (77-78) and in the recommendation of show-pieces
(Aetna, winter, spring, etc. 83). But Muzio at once makes a significant
addition. “You might yourself look at nature, not merely seek it in
books. Learn what to dilate, what to compress.” As examples of the force
of restraint (84) he cites Vergil’s mating of Dido and Aeneas in the cave
and Dante’s Paolo and Francesca.


5. FRACASTORO

A Latin dialogue (1555) by Girolamo Fracastoro discusses poetry as a
form of eloquence, merging poetic in rhetoric (_Hieronymi Fracastorii
Naugerius sive de poetica dialogus ..._ with an English translation
by Ruth Kelso and an introduction by Murray W. Bundy, University of
Illinois Press, 1924). Ciceronian in type, it is clearly ordered and
composed, and agreeably fluent in style. Fracastoro’s motive is not
professional. Scientist and philosopher, he turns to poetry as to an
important item in culture and a suggestive topic for discussion. So
approached by not a few Renaissance scholars, it imposed no obligation to
advance critical theory.


6. PELETIER

_L’Art poétique_ of Jacques Peletier du Mans is a similar excursion of
a scholar into literature. Philosopher and mathematician as Fracastoro,
interested in languages, professor, promoter of normalized spelling,
he was known, by that adjective dear to the French Renaissance, as
“docte Peletier.” His literary associations were first with Ronsard
and Du Bellay under Jean Dorat at the Collège de Coqueret; later he
had associations in Lyon, where Jean de Tournes published his treatise
in 1555 (_L’art poëtique_ ... publié d’après l’édition unique avec
introduction et commentaire [par] André Boulanger, Paris, 1930).

His editor, regarding it as the best formulation of the Pléiade movement,
notes that it relies on Horace’s “Ars poetica” [which Peletier had
translated ten years before], Cicero, and Quintilian, that it uses no
Greek source and of the Italians only Vida, that the great model is
Vergil, and that the section on dramaturgy is slight and feeble. He sums
up the doctrine as: (1) use your vernacular and enrich it; (2) imitate
the ancients; (3) imitate nature; (4) cultivate the high poetic forms
urged by the Pléiade.

The little that Peletier has to say on poetic composition is all
rhetoric. He makes, for example, the usual transfer of the counsels for
_exordium_ to the opening of a poem. He shows the sophistic slant in
turning to encomium the Horatian commonplace that poets are givers of
fame (71, 82, 89, 176) and in the stock show-pieces (127). He is more
distinctive on rhyme (149), on classification of meters by the number
of syllables (153), and on imitation of classical verse forms (159). He
occasionally cites Ariosto (103, 201) and discusses both the sonnet and
the ode (169, 172).


7. MINTURNO

Minturno made his more comprehensive and influential Latin dialogue
on classical poetic, _De poeta_, a collection of six monologues, or
essays, with enough question and objection for occasional reminder of
the literary form, but with little real discussion (_Antonii Sebastiani
Minturni de poeta ... libri sex_, Venice, 1559). The setting, a villa
by the sea, is elaborately described in the introduction. The style,
oratorical and inclined to Ciceronianism, is throughout elaborate and
diffuse, each noun being habitually escorted by two adjectives. What is
thus conveyed with much repetition is generally Horace’s “Ars poetica”
once more, Cicero, and Quintilian; but there is also considerable use,
though little comprehension, of Aristotle’s _Poetic_. Aristotle’s
conception of poetry as a distinct kind of composition has not yet
arrived; and poetic style, which is Minturno’s actual subject, is
conceived in the terms of rhetoric. The spokesmen are: Book I Sincerus
(Sannazaro) on What is poetry?; Book II Pontanus (recalled, not present)
on What is poetic?; Book III Vopiscus on tragedy; Book IV Gauricus on
comedy; Book V Carbo on lyric; Book VI Sincerus on style. The quotations
adduced on the first two hundred pages show the following proportions:
Vergil above all (_Bucolics_, 55 lines; _Georgics_, 10 lines; _Aeneid_,
512 lines); Seneca, 101; Horace (mainly “Ars poetica”), 99; Euripides (in
Latin), 68; Sophocles (in Latin), 23.

    I. What is poetry? It is a _furor coelestis_. Wisdom and
    eloquence being one, all who had it used to be called poets
    (Moses, Theseus, Lycurgus, Solon); for poetry was the only art
    of speech. Recovering now from medieval darkness, we see Vergil
    as the exemplar of everything, Homer as comprehending all
    philosophy. Poetry is imitation of nature [apparently conceived
    as description]. Therefore Plato’s exclusion is rejected.
    The imitation is narrative in epic, through _personae_ in
    dramatic poetry, and a combination of the two in melic. That
    poetry is like painting (Horace’s “ut pictura poesis”) is
    agreed. Poets seek variety rather than sequence, and prefer
    violent or otherwise disturbed states of mind, considering
    the [rhetorical] headings of appropriateness to habit, place,
    and time. Plato’s preference of epic is approved against
    Aristotle’s of tragedy.

    II. What is poetic? [The implication of this book, as
    throughout, is that poetic is rhetoric.] The ancient poets
    thought their distinction to be not in verse, but in lore of
    astronomy, optics, music, logic, history, geography. In _ratio
    dicendi_ historians are likest to poets. Vergil was expert in
    rhetoric and logic as well as in cosmogony, morals, law and
    polity, medicine, athletics, etc. Poetry belongs under _ratio
    civilis_. Its object is to teach, to delight, to move [the
    stock summary for oratory]. It must command the “three styles”
    in order to be always appropriate. The natural objection of
    Traianus that this seems to be all rhetoric is answered by
    citing the distinction of verse, by slipping back to the “three
    styles,” and, as in a sort of desperation, by saying that the
    poet’s distinctive gift is to move men to wonder (_admiratio_).
    [Not only is this pure sophistic, but Minturno’s floundering
    is due to his seeing no distinction at all. He always falls
    back on rhetoric.] The poet, no less than the orator, must
    command _inventio_, _dispositio_, _elocutio_, _memoria_,
    _pronuntiatio_. Tragedy is discussed as a poem with parts
    like those of a speech and with descriptive amplification.
    Its _personae_ are to be fashioned through the headings of
    rhetoric. “The other parts of an oration with which the orator
    is concerned, division, confirmation, rebuttal, conclusion,
    peroration, must also be observed (_tenendae_) by the poet.”

A book inquiring what poetic is, including tragedy, and quoting
Aristotle, has not the faintest suggestion of a distinctive poetic
composition! It can translate Aristotle’s complication and solution
without seeing that his mainspring is sequence, and consider his
“recognition” as a means of display.

    Once more we are told that characterization must be true in
    the sense of being true to type: Aeneas consistently _pius et
    fortis_, Achilles _iracundus et magnanimus_, Ulysses _prudens
    et callidus_, according to the headings of rhetoric. After a
    few vague precepts on arrangement, and one more reminder of the
    “three styles,” a close is at last found in the epic eminence
    of Vergil.

    III. (Tragedy) is again conventional. With little use of
    Aristotle, it reverts to Horace and Seneca, and repeats the
    rhetorical doctrine of types. Tragedy is found to consist of
    plot, character, words, and pregnant sentences (_fabula_,
    _mores_, _verba_, _sententiae_). Its externals are described,
    its parts enumerated, its origin summarized. It should have
    five acts of not more than ten scenes each. Its style should be
    graphically vivid. [To this counsel of rhetoric, which applies
    to drama only in the reports of messengers, no hint is added of
    the distinctive quality of dramatic dialogue.]

    IV. (Comedy) after a review of the history of comedy and an
    enumeration of its typical _personae_, is devoted largely to
    a long list of figures used for comic effect, and closes with
    enumeration of its parts.

    V. (Lyric) after a long introduction on _convivium_, with
    quotations from the poets, distinguishes melic from dithyrambic
    and nomic, and finds that lyric has as many components as drama
    (_fabula_, _mores_, _verba_, _sententiae_!). Its forms are
    ode (with epode and palinode), satiric iambs, elegy (nenia,
    epicedium, epitaphium, epithanatium), epigram in the Greek
    sense, and satire.

    VI. (Style) is a summary of the section on style in any
    classical rhetoric, with classified examples and with the usual
    lists of figures.

What is the result of these 570 pages? Five men of letters, besides the
author, have roles in a sort of published academy; and several others at
least take a hand. They have no new ideas, except certain Aristotelian
inklings that hardly seem to fit. But they are learned in rhetoric. They
begin with the convention of the original dominance of poetry; they end
with sixty-two figures of speech. The subject is reviewed; it is not
advanced. As guidance for Latin poets—but that is hardly intended. As
inspiration this oratory is much feebler than Poliziano’s; and it never
even approaches that brief, anonymous ancient prose poem περι ὕψους, _De
sublimitate_, “on reaching up.”[54]

Minturno’s other treatise, _Arte poetica_ (1563), reduces the dialogue
form to catechism (_L’arte poetica del signor Antonio Minturno, nella
quale si contengono i precetti eroici, tragici, comici, satirici ..._
Naples, 1725). Though there is some debate in Book I on the validity of
_romanzo_ narrative, elsewhere the single interlocutor assigned to each
book merely asks the right questions. The work is not a discussion; it is
a manual of vernacular poetry so analyzed under headings and sub-headings
as to be a book of reference. Systematic and detailed, its doctrine is
classical in referring everything ultimately to ancient principles. Its
exemplification is abundant, with the usual preference for Petrarch.

    Book I, discussing epic, includes the _Divina Commedia_ and
    Petrarch’s _Trionfi_, and insists that the lack of unity in
    Ariosto’s _Orlando_ is a cardinal fault. If the teaching of
    the ancients “and the example of Homer’s poetry is true, I do
    not see how another, different from that, is admissible; for
    truth is one. Therefore the variation of later times will not
    suffice as a warrant for letting a poem treat more than one
    action, entire and of just compass, to which everything else
    should be contributory” (35). What offends Minturno especially
    is Ariosto’s interruption and resumption.

    Book II, discussing drama, though it gives a better account of
    Aristotle’s theory than the _De poeta_, still cites Horace,
    calls actors _recitanti_, and does not comprehend the idea of a
    play as a sequence of action.

    Book III, dealing with lyric forms, is especially ample as
    to _canzone_. The triad of Pindar’s odes he calls _volta_,
    _rivolta_, _stanza_. His own praises of Charles V consist of
    five such triads. “As Pindar,” he goes on, “narrates the myths
    of Tantalus and Pelops, so I told the landing of Aeneas in
    Africa and Hannibal’s invasion of Italy, with due reference to
    the Trojan origin of the Romans and of the princely ancestors
    of Charles” (183-184). After due citation of Dante the book
    goes on to _sonetto_, _ballata_, and other forms with both
    quotation and analysis, and even devotes a page to reminder of
    the Latin hymns.

    Book IV analyzes style under the headings of the classical
    _elocutio_ and _compositio_, and with detailed consideration
    of metric. The counsels for imitation, though tolerating the
    usual Renaissance closeness, stop short of Ciceronianism. The
    concluding advice for revision is drawn from Horace.


8. PARTENIO

Bernardino Partenio devoted five books to _Imitation in poetry_ (_Della
imitatione poetica ..._ Venice, 1560). A vernacular dialogue of the _De
oratore_ type, it achieves little interchange of views and interposes
much delay by ceremonious introduction and interruption. At Murano,
near Venice, the main speakers are two elders, Trifone and Trissino,
and two younger, Paolo Manutio and Lunisini. The literary fiction is of
instructing the latter; but whereas Lunisini remains most of the time
silent, Manutio speaks often and sometimes at length. A few other persons
pass across the background.

    I. After the conventional introduction of poetry as the
    original philosophy, poetic composition is left to Aristotle
    and Horace, and poetic style is proposed (7) for discussion by
    a most confusing division: (1) _inventioni_ through topics; (2)
    _assontioni_, which also should mean topics, but are further
    described as _commenti_ and _fittione poetiche_ (mythology);
    (3) _ordine_, conceived as amplification and variation; (4)
    _affetti_, passions and moral habit; (5) _epiteti_.

    Imitation (11-13) is common, natural, even necessary, in spite
    of objectors and of Pico’s assertion that what we should follow
    is the _idea_, not the form. We may imitate a whole subject
    (17), or particular _sententiae_, or words, changing the order,
    amplifying or restricting, modifying. So did the ancients (24);
    so Bembo imitated Petrarch (25); and Terence defended his use
    of Menander (28). Camillo’s topics (34) for poetical _inventio_
    are set forth with many examples. Partenio’s application seems
    to amount to (1) mere periphrasis, (2) concrete specification,
    (3) amplification.

    II. The next book makes plainer that imitation is dilation,
    especially in the direction of sophistic show-pieces (as in
    the use of Catullus, 73). The book is not really distinct from
    I. Perhaps that explains the padding (80 seq.) with discussion
    of poetic diction: compounds, polysyllables, figures. It
    closes with a survey of Sannazaro, Pontano, Fracastoro, Vida,
    Navagero, and the chief of vernacular poets, Bembo (86).

    III. Imitation may mean the expression of human life; but
    specifically it is directed toward elegance of diction (93-95),
    and may involve the lifting of phrases (98). The awareness
    of style which comes from reading should be so confirmed
    by imitation (105) as to insure a poetic fund (_copia_).
    Imitation of style has always been legitimate (106), but with
    variations (110). Boccaccio’s Ser Ciapeletto is dilated by a
    list of specifications (119), and concludes, as it should, with
    a _sententia_. But dilation demands also the use of topics
    (_assontioni_). These are exhibited in tabular view (123) and
    exemplified from Vergil, Horace, Catullus, and Petrarch.

    IV. Further examples lead into mythology. Order of items in the
    encomium recipe may be varied (155). Imitation of passions is
    exemplified in Vergil’s Turnus.

    V. discusses appropriateness of style (_decoro_) under the
    seven _ideas_ of Hermogenes (175), the nine _sensi_, and the
    eight instruments.

We have also learned earlier in this confusion that art not only comes
from nature, but is a surer and more definite guide (35). Better take
epithets from the ancient poets than hunt for them (162). Orators must
use common speech; not so poets. Poetic diction should be not only
appropriate and sonorous, but remote from daily speech (80).

Partenio’s main significance is the propagation of Camillo’s doctrine
of topics derived from Hermogenes[55] and transferred to poetic. Thus
it exhibits the common confusion both of poetic with rhetoric and of
composing with writing a theme. Its abundant examples are misapplied
to show how poetry may be brought on by dilation, which belongs not
to poetry, but to oratory. The whole treatise might be called an art
of dilation. It has hardly anything to do with writing poetry, almost
everything to do with poetifying themes.


9. SCALIGER

Julius Caesar Scaliger achieved the longest Renaissance Latin poetic
(_Julii Caesaris Scaligeri viri clarissimi poetices libri septem ..._
1561).[56] Its complacency must have been sometimes startling even to the
Renaissance. The prefatory letter to his son Sylvius is magisterial.

    To this art we have applied the sanctions of philosophy, which
    are the executives of all nature. That for lack of them it has
    hardly been an art before us is evident from our discussion
    (iii).

    Horace, though he has written an “ars poetica,” teaches with
    so little art that almost the whole work seems nearer to
    satire. The commentaries of Aristotle, as we have them, are
    incomplete. The prudent Vida gives much good advice toward
    making a poet more wary, but takes him as already accomplished
    to lead him to perfection. We have led him by the right way
    through all paths to the very end (iv).

From time to time he inserts reminders of his magistracy.

    Thus far Aristotle; but a more accurate account is as follows
    (46).

    For thus, with more penetration than Aristotle’s ... (201).

    No one before us has reduced figures to definite classification
    (307).

    So much for _inventio_. With greatest toil amid many
    difficulties we have elaborated these precepts, which before us
    either were not explained at all, or, scattered without art or
    order, were merely implied, or were in substance or expression
    inept (432).

    The Greeks are mistaken if they think we have taken anything
    from them except to improve it (598).

    As if we were servants of the Greeklings, and not correctors
    (623).

His learning is too large to be limited to the subject. “Not to omit
anything that makes for erudition” (170), he inserts, for example, a long
chapter (I. xviii) on dancing, and another (III. ci) on Roman marriage
customs. He is even from time to time autobiographical.

    We too have labored not a little that this glory [of _hymnus_
    in its ancient sense] might be less obscure among the Latins
    (123).

    We too celebrated our father, brave as he was unfortunate, in
    pastoral (129).

    Under the title Senio we had written such a _fabula_, and
    sustained the tone with Batavian chime and with such novelty of
    invention as might suffice for seven Erasmuses, to say nothing
    of one (374).

    As we wrote in the epitaph of those who fell at Vienna in the
    war against the Turks (426).

His longest quotation (VI. 781-784) is an entire poem of his own.

The seven books of this vast poetic in 310 chapters and 944 pages are as
follows.

    I. _Historicus_ (57 chapters, 136 pages) presents poetic forms:
    pastoral, comedy, tragedy, mime, _satira_, dance, Greek games,
    Roman festivals, lyric.

    II. _Hyle_ (_Materia_, 42 chapters, 64 pages) is mainly devoted
    to verse-forms.

    III. _Idaea_ (127 chapters, 238 pages) discusses under the
    sophistic topics (sex, occupation, moral habit, fortune,
    endowments, etc.) the _personae_ of the poet’s creation; sets
    forth the four poetic virtues (_prudentia_, _efficacia_,
    _varietas_, _figura_); and adds precepts for the several poetic
    forms.

    IV. _Parasceve_ (49 chapters, 98 pages) discusses the qualities
    of style, with additions on figures.

    V. _Criticus_ (17 chapters, 227 pages) is mainly a series of
    comparative parallels (_comparationes_), first by authors
    (Homer with Vergil, Vergil with Theocritus, etc.), then by
    topics (691-717).

    VI. _Hypercriticus_ (7 chapters, 134 pages) is a review of
    Latin poetry from the sixteenth century back.

    VII. _Epinomis_ (11 chapters, 47 pages) is an appendix.

Evidently the division overlaps; and the treatment involves even further
repetition. For the book is not a consecutive treatise; it is rather
a cyclopedia. Composed generally in short chapters, it indicates the
subject of each by a heading, and exhibits all the headings at the
beginning in a full table of contents. Thus its vogue may have been
mainly for reference. Since it is a guide, not an anthology, the examples
are usually brief. Longest naturally in V, the book of parallels, they
are elsewhere sometimes only single lines, and rarely exceed ten. Though
the great exemplar is Vergil, who almost monopolizes III and IV, they
exhibit a wide range.

The object proposed is to form Latin poets: _poetam creare instituimus_
(200); _quoniam perfectum poetam instituimus_ (228). The book sets forth
by precept and example not only how to admire and criticize—and correct
even famous authors, but how to attain the company of Latin poets, how
to make Latin poetry. The history of Latin poetry includes the sixteenth
century, though not the Middle Age. Latin poetry has been recovered; and
Scaliger, as one of its poets and one of its critics, shows how it is to
be carried forward. Surveying it up and down its length, he gives much
space to Claudian, Statius, and Silius Italicus, corrects Horace and
Ovid, rewrites Lucan (849), estimates his own immediate predecessors. He
is a schoolmaster giving _praelectiones_ and correcting Latin themes,
extending his instruction by summoning to his desk all authors and all
times. He has read everything. Careful to quote the Greeks abundantly in
Greek, he asserts the superiority of the Latins. For one author only he
has nothing but admiration. His great exemplar, his touchstone, is Vergil.

To pass from Scaliger’s views on individual poets and poetic methods to
his view of poetic as a whole is not easy, and is no longer important.
As to imitation, his lack of specific precepts suggests that he has no
consistent theory. The Aristotelian idea, apparently accepted at the
beginning, is misinterpreted in the appendix. The usual Renaissance
advice to imitate only with hope of adding luster, rhythm, or other charm
(_lucem, numeros, venerem adiungere_, 700) refers, of course, to the
other sort of imitation and offers little guidance. On the other hand,
Scaliger laments his own early Ciceronianism (800), and makes some acute
incidental observations. The topics of sophistic encomium in III, the
stock comparisons in V. xiv, and occasional use of terms throughout show
the usual Renaissance confusion of poetic with rhetoric. Though in other
passages Scaliger seems able to conceive poetry in its own terms, he does
not present poetic consistently as a distinct art of composition. Indeed,
what he says about composition of either sort is often meager or formal.
His preoccupation, from lexicography to figures of speech, is with style.
The great apparatus for the production of Latin poetry remains largely
rhetoric.


10. RONSARD AND TASSO

Ronsard’s brief, hasty, and perfunctory _L’Art poétique_ (1565;
reprinted, with five prefaces, Cambridge University Press, 1930) shows
the Pléiade preoccupation with “enriching” the vernacular,[57] and
applies the sophistic recipe for encomium to the poet’s celebration of
great persons in odes.

    “The true aim of a lyric poet is to celebrate to the extreme
    him whom he undertakes to praise ... his race ... his native
    place” ... (29). Enhancing his diction above common speech
    (41-44), he will amplify, even dilate.

    The terms _invention_ and _disposition_, transferred
    conventionally from rhetoric, do not open anything specific on
    composition.

Ronsard refers early to the relation of lyric to music. Except for a few
such references, he has been content to gather commonplaces on style.
The only importance of the treatise is in showing one of the foremost
sixteenth-century poets driven, when asked for theory, as it were
inevitably to rhetoric.

Tasso’s poetic, on the other hand, is the most serious, concise, and
penetrative of the Renaissance. Composed in 1568 and 1570 to be read
before the Ferrara Academy, the _Discorsi dell’arte poetica ed in
particolare sopra il poema eroico_ were later amplified, in _Poema
eroico_ c. 1590 and _Discorsi dell’arte poetica_, 1587, for Tasso’s
theory was no less studious than his practice. Though he too uses the
headings of rhetoric _inventio_ and _dispositio_, he applies them to
distinctively poetic conception and poetic movement. For he discusses
poetic specifically and consistently as movement and as poetic movement.
The inspiration is the _Poetic_ of Aristotle. Working independently,
Tasso grasped Aristotle’s animating ideas at about the same time as
Castelvetro in his illuminating commentary (1570).[58] The following
references are to Solerti’s edition of the _Discorsi_ (1901).

    The epic poet should move in his own Christian faith and
    history, not among pagan deities and rites (12). His field must
    not be too large (23-25); his narrative scheme (_favola_), as
    Aristotle says, must be entire, of manageable scope, and single
    (28). For unity (33), in spite of critical disputes, in spite
    of Ariosto’s success without it and of Trissino’s failure with
    it, is vital. Ariosto prevails (46) not through lack of unity,
    but because of his excellence in other directions. Variety
    (47) is desirable only if it does not risk confusion; and,
    properly considered, it is compatible with unity. [A clear and
    just rebuttal; there is no value in variety unless there is
    something from which to vary.]

    Part III (Style), opening with the rhetorical tradition of
    the “three styles,” finds the third, _magnifico_ (the Latin
    _grande_), appropriate to epic (52). [Tasso’s own practice of
    _magnifico_ is neither florid nor dilated.] Ariosto’s style is
    _medium_; Trissino’s, _tenue_. Tragedy (53), relying oftener on
    specific words (_proprio_), is less _magnifico_; lyric is more
    flowered and adorned; epic, though ranging between the two, is
    normally _magnifico_.

    Adding (55-60) a summary of the rhetoric of style, including
    figures, Tasso finds Boccaccio’s prose over-rhythmical. His
    appreciation of the force of exact words in Dante is refreshing
    after the earlier disparagement. He closes with an illuminating
    comparison (63) of epic style in Vergil with lyric in Petrarch.

Even contributions so distinctive as these are less important than the
work as a whole. Tasso’s treatise is so consecutive and so well knit as
to be worth more than the sum of its parts. Alike in his order and in his
sentences he is firmer and more severe than his time. These _Discorsi_
are carefully planned and adjusted for teaching. They seek neither
the conversational ease of Castiglione nor the seriatim analysis of
Macchiavelli; and they are far removed from the discursive suggestions of
Montaigne. They constitute a reasoned, consecutive poetic.


11. SIDNEY

Sidney’s _Defense of Poesy_ (about 1583; edited by Albert S. Cook,
Boston, 1890) exhibits its moral function from mere moralizing, through
winsome teaching, to incitement toward higher living.

    The reminiscences of rhetoric are not accidental. Sidney makes
    the usual Renaissance transfer to poetry of the traditional
    threefold function of oratory: to teach, to delight, to move
    (9, 11, 13, 22, 26). Toward the end (55) he apologizes. “But
    what! methinks I deserve to be pounded [imprisoned] for
    straying from poetry to oratory. But both have such an affinity
    in the wordish consideration ...” [i.e., in diction; but the
    main defect of the treatise is in leaving vague the distinctive
    character of poetic composition].

Moralizing, deviating to rhetoric, Sidney is nevertheless suggestive and
sometimes penetrative.

    He cites Plato’s dialogues (3) as poetical. His lively account
    of poetry as imaginative realization (4-6) and as insight into
    human life makes clear Aristotle’s saying that poetry “is more
    philosophical and more studiously serious than history” (18).
    He satirizes Elizabethan ignoring of the dramatic unities (48),
    and sees through Ciceronianism (53). His section (55-56) on the
    character and capacity of English verse, all too brief, has
    real importance.

But he is so far from grasping Aristotle’s idea of imitation that he
renders it thus:

    Poesy, therefore, is an art of imitation, for so Aristotle
    termeth it in his word μίμησις, that is to say, a representing,
    counterfeiting, or figuring forth; to speak metaphorically, a
    speaking picture, with this end, to teach and delight (9).

We leap away from Aristotle to Horace’s _ut pictura poesis_, and so to
rhetoric. This is not merely misinterpretation; it indicates Sidney’s
lack of any controlling poetic principle. Though he tidily provides
summaries at the ends of his sections, he has little advance of thought.
His work is what it is called, a defense[59] of poetry, not a reasoned
theory.

    There is occasional significance in the usual Renaissance
    array of names. Paying his respects to the Cardinals Bembo
    and Bibbiena (44), Sidney immediately offsets them with the
    Protestants Beza and Melancthon. He calls Fracastoro and
    Scaliger “learned philosophers”; Pontano and Muret, “great
    orators”; and refers twice to the Latin tragedies of George
    Buchanan. His praise of l’Hospital (45) is probably reminiscent
    of Ronsard’s ode; for Sidney is acquainted with the Pléiade.
    Boccaccio, Petrarch, and Ariosto he merely mentions; but
    he knows the greatness of Dante and of course the charm of
    Sannazaro. Of the ancients, Plato is cited oftenest, then
    Aristotle, Plutarch, Horace of course, and Pindar. He speaks of
    “the height of Seneca’s style” (47), mentions Apuleius (50),
    and cites the “Greek Romances” in an extraordinary miscellany:
    “so true a lover as Theagenes, so constant a friend as Pylades,
    so valiant a man as Orlando, so right a prince as Xenophon’s
    Cyrus, so excellent a man every way as Virgil’s Aeneas” (8).
    His review of English poetry (45-47) scorns the intrusion
    of “base men with servile wits,” finds that Chaucer “did
    excellently”—for his time, and gives vague praise to Surrey and
    Spenser. The reading of the English gentleman poet has been
    wide, creditably classical, undiscriminating.


12. ENGLISH DISCUSSION OF VERSE

George Gascoigne’s _Certaine notes of instruction concerning the making
of verse or rime in English_, written at the request of Master Edouardo
Donati (1575; reprinted in G. Gregory Smith’s _Elizabethan Critical
Essays_, I, 46-57) is a brief primer of English verse usage. Though it
bungles in detail, it is fairly true to the English tradition of rhythm
determined by stress.

The last years of the century prolonged in England a proposal to
classicize English metric. William Webbe’s _Discourse of English Poetrie_
(1586; Gregory Smith, I, 226-302. References are to these pages.) harps
uncertainly on classical prosody.

    What shoulde be the cause that our English speeche ... hath
    neuer attained to anie sufficient ripeness, nay not ful auoided
    the reproch of barbarousness in poetry? (227) ... What credite
    they might winne to theyr natiue speeche, what enormities they
    might wipe out of English Poetry ... if English Poetrie were
    truely reformed (229).

A traditional preface on the origin of poetry leads from divine
inspiration through early bards to Ovid moralized, Horace, and Mantuan
(231-239). After dismissing medieval rhymed Latin as “this brutish
poetrie,” Webbe proceeds to a review of English achievement.

    “I know no memorable worke written by any Poet in our English
    speeche vntill twenty yeeres past (239).

    “Chawcer ... was next after [Gower].... Though the manner of
    hys stile may seeme blunte and course to many fine English
    eares at these dayes, yet ... a man shall perceiue ... euen a
    true picture of perfect shape of a right poet.... Neere in time
    ... was Lydgate ... comparable with Chawcer (241). The next ...
    Pierce Ploughman ... somewhat harsh and obscure, but indeede a
    very pithy wryter ... the first ... that obserued the quantity
    of our verse without the curiosity of ryme” (242). A review of
    the sixteenth century surrounds Surrey and Sidney with an array
    of second-rate poets.

    Taking a fresh start with the division into “comicall,
    tragicall, historiall,” Webbe finds that Chaucer (251), even as
    Horace (250), mingled delight with profit. After a vague word
    for John Lyly (256) he returns to Golding’s translation of Ovid
    (262). “Somewhat like, but yet not altogether so poetical” is
    Chaucer, whom he seems to have on his conscience. “But nowe yet
    at the last,” and comparable with the best, is Spenser (263).
    A brief return to the ancients proceeds from Hesiod through
    Vergil to Tusser and Googe (265).

    But Webbe still wishes that rhyme were not habitual. “Which
    rude kinde of verse ... I may not vtterly dissalowe [266]. I am
    perswaded the regard of wryters to this hath beene the greatest
    decay of that good order of versifying which might ere this
    haue beene established in our speeche” (274). He even finds in
    English a “rule of position” (281), and that _-ly_ is short in
    adverbs, long in adjectives (282). Stubbornly he closes his
    stupid book with an appendix (290): “Heere followe the Cannons
    or general cautions of poetry, prescribed by Horace, first
    gathered by Georgius Fabricius Chemnicensis.”

Deaf to the tradition of English verse, Webbe is blind to the development
of English poetry.

Puttenham’s more pretentious _Arte of English Poesie_ (1589; reprinted in
part by G. Gregory Smith, II, 1-193), after the obligatory rehearsal of
ancient seers, reads history thus.

    “How the wilde and sauage people vsed a naturall poesie in
    versicle and rime as our vulgar is” (chapter v); and “How the
    riming poesie came first to the Grecians and Latins, and had
    altered and almost spilt their maner of poesie” (chapter vi).
    Classification into heroic, lyric, etc., and then into comedy,
    tragedy, ode, elegy, etc., is followed (chapter xxxi) by a
    review of English poetry as meager for a roll of honor as it is
    undiscriminating in criticism.

    Book II, Proportion Poeticall, is a misguided prosody.
    “Proportion” is exhibited (chapter ii) in “staff” (i.e., stave
    or stanza); (iii) in “measure” (i.e., feet) estimated by the
    number of syllables without assigning a distinct function to
    “accent”; (v) in caesura ranged with “comma, colon, periodus,”
    terms transferred from rhetoric to serve as aspects of rhythm;
    (vi and following) in “concord,” which includes rime, accent,
    time, “stir,” and “cadence”; (xi) in “position”; and finally
    in “figure,” square stanzas, triangles, ovals, suitable to
    emblems and other devices. Through this confusion and deviation
    the typical English stress habit glimmers so faintly as never
    to be distinct. “How Greek and Latin feet might be applied
    in English” (xiii) leads in the closing chapters to “a more
    particular declaration of the metrical feet of the ancient
    poets.”

    Book III, Ornament, is a long and elaborate classification of
    figures of speech.[60] It ends conventionally with typical
    faults, with decorum, and, in tardy caution, with Horace’s _ars
    celare artem_.

At the end of the sixteenth century, then, these Englishmen could still
assume, with Ascham fifty years earlier, that English poetry had no
valid tradition of its own, still seek to revive it by classicism. That
classicism should be not only revival of ancient stanza and imitation of
ancient style, as with the Pléiade, but even conformity to ancient metric
might rather have been proposed in France or Italy, where vernacular
verse had kept much of the Latin rhythmical habit. In England, where
the vernacular tradition determined the verse pattern by the Germanic
habit of stress, the proposal was foredoomed as futile. The insistence
of the classical cult nevertheless lingers in serious discussion. The
correspondence of Gabriel Harvey with Spenser on this point may be
playful, or even partly satirical; but Harvey was a fanatic, and even
Spenser sometimes read Chaucer’s verse strangely, sometimes in his
poetical youth made strange experiments. The item that lingered longest
in discussion, perhaps because it was common to both verse traditions,
is rhyme. Thomas Campion’s _Arte of English Poesie_ (1602)[61] attacked
this specifically and with more understanding of English rhythms than
Webbe had or Puttenham. Samuel Daniel replied with a correct but feeble
_Defence of Ryme_ (1603).[62] Classicism could attempt to deviate English
verse the more easily when even poets and men of some learning did not
understand the linguistic development of their own vernacular.


13. PATRIZZI

Patrizzi’s poetic (_Della poetica di Francesco Patrici la deca disputata
..._ Ferrara, 1586) renews the quarrel with Aristotle begun in his
rhetoric.

    The sub-title goes on: “in which by history, by arguments,
    and by authority of the great ancients is shown the falsity
    of the opinions most accepted in our times concerning poetic.
    There is added the _Trimerone_ of the same author in reply to
    the objections raised by Signor Torquato Tasso[63] against his
    defence of Ariosto.” The ten sections severally inquire: I
    concerning poetic inspiration (_furore poetico_), II whether
    poetry originated in the causes assigned by Aristotle, III
    whether poetry is imitation, IV whether the poet is an
    imitator, V whether poetry can be written in prose, VI whether
    plot (_favola_) is rather distinctive of the poet than verse,
    VII whether Empedocles as a poet was inferior to Homer, VIII
    whether poetry can be made from history, IX whether ancient
    poems imitated by harmony and rhythm, X whether the modes of
    imitation are three.

The divisions obviously overlap, and there is confusion in VII (152)
between the origin of poetry and its essential character, in VIII (168)
between historical material and history. Section VIII also misses the
point of Aristotle’s creative characterization for poetic consistency.
These misinterpretations, common enough at the time, are due with
Patrizzi to his missing Aristotle’s idea of imitation as the distinctive
poetic form of composition. Aristotle thinking of composition remains
dark or wrong to Patrizzi thinking of style.[64] Thus he is typical of
that general Renaissance difficulty with Aristotle which came from
looking the other way. Even after Tasso and Castelvetro, Renaissance
poetic kept its preoccupation with style.


14. DENORES

Jason Denores, on the contrary, made his _Poetica_ a digest of Aristotle
with a tabular view at the end of each section (_Poetica di Iason
Denores, nella qual per via di definitione & divisione si tratta secondo
l’opinion d’Aristotele della tragedia, del poema heroico, & della comedia
..._ Padua, 1588). The book has no critical grasp.

    Section I (Tragedy) classifies characterization by types
    (good rulers, bad rulers, etc.) and by the sophistic headings
    for encomium. “Appropriateness of the traits of the tragic
    personae consists in conformity (_decoro_) to age, emotion,
    sex, country, profession” (folio 24, verso). In a word, it is
    consistency. Chapter IX sums up what makes “una perfettissima
    tragedia”; and the concluding chapter (X) exemplifies an ideal
    tragic plot (_argomento_) by a novella of Boccaccio.

    Section II (Epic) imposes the obligation of a single action
    as against the _Achilleis_ of Statius, the _Metamorphoses_ of
    Ovid, “and many of the romances of our time” (58). The _Aeneid_
    has not one action (63) and is not so well extended (_distesa_)
    as the _Odyssey_ (66). Denores thinks that Aristotle intends
    the same demands as to plot (_favola_, Chapter I) and even as
    to component parts (Chapter VI) as for tragedy. Reviewing as
    before in Chapter IX, he again demonstrates in Chapter X by a
    story of Boccaccio.

    Section III (Comedy) is merely an adaptation of the headings
    for tragedy. Denores even makes bold to say: “But since
    Aristotle seems to intend that the parts of comedy should be
    as many as for tragedy, therefore we have for convenience
    attributed to comedy prologue, episode, exode. The chorus we
    have not included, since in general it seems not to have been
    used” (folio 138, verso). This section, too, is concluded by a
    review and a demonstration from Boccaccio.


15. VAUQUELIN

The poetic of the Sieur Vauquelin de la Fresnaye is important mainly for
confirmation at the end of the century (_L’Art poétique de Vauquelin
de la Fresnaye, ou l’on peut remarquer la perfection et le défaut des
anciennes et des modernes poésies_; text of 1605 edited by Georges
Pellissier,[65] Paris, 1885). Conceived in 1574 and embracing the ideas
of the Pléiade, it was still unfinished in 1585 and finally published at
Caen only two years before the gentleman poet’s death. The latter part of
the sub-title refers to the addition of a sort of _catalogue raisonné_
of poets. Seventeen hundred and sixty Alexandrine couplets survey poetry
in three books as style and metric; for composition enters rarely and
in terms of rhetoric. Though Aristotle is cited, the base is once more
the “Ars poetica” of Horace. Once more poetry is “speaking pictures” (I.
226); once more the Pléiade repudiates _balades_ and _rondeaux_ (I. 546).
The doctrine of appropriateness (_bienséance_, _il decoro_) indicates
characterization by type (II. 330; III. 499); and the ideal poetic
combination is of instruction with delight (III. 609, _utile-dulce_).
Instead of saying that Vauquelin outlived his age,[66] we may rather
reflect that change in doctrine had been slow and was not yet recognized
generally.


16. SUMMARY

In the variety of these poetics appear certain habits and tendencies
significant of the period. First, the Renaissance gentleman scholar
finds it becoming not only to write verse, especially Latin verse, but
to discuss poetic. Sound taste and informed judgment in poetry, as
in painting and sculpture, give him rank as accomplished. The people
assembled by Castiglione to discuss the ideal courtier agree on this;
and indeed several of them might have written the dialogues examined
above. Modern readers impatient at the willingness to talk from the book
without independent thinking should beware of disparaging the value of a
general obligation to be informed about poetry. But even the Renaissance
gentlemen who were in the stricter sense scholars seem content with
learning for itself. Instead of interpreting and advancing, they exhibit.

The confusion about imitation is too general to be attributed to the
stupidity of individuals. It reflects the clash of two conceptions:
Aristotle’s idea of imitating human life[67] by focusing its actions
and speech in such continuity as shall reveal its significance, an idea
of composition; and the humanist idea of imitating classical style. As
ideas, the two have nothing to do with each other; but they tripped
each other in fact. For the first was new, not yet understood either
exactly or generally; and the second was a widespread habit of thought.
Imitation suggested classicism. Aristotle, being an ancient, must in some
way be reconciled to this. Meantime it is evident, especially from the
more commonplace discussions, that though the theory might not be clear,
the practice inclined toward dilation and borrowing. Ciceronianism,
even while it waned, had spread far beyond Cicero. Bembo’s imitation of
Petrarch was not a reproach; it was an added virtue.

The cult of the great period does not preclude citation of Claudian,
Statius, Silius Italicus; and Scaliger adds Ausonius and Sidonius.
Even Apuleius is not excluded; and space is occasionally found for the
dullness of Aulus Gellius and Macrobius. The “Greek Romances” of Achilles
Tatius, Apollonius or Heliodorus find place not only with Cinthio,
Scaliger, and Vauquelin, but also with Ronsard and Sidney. Indeed, those
poetic habits summed up in the term Alexandrianism and corresponding to
the decadent rhetoric called sophistic, crop out often enough to suggest
a considerable vogue. The sophistic recipe for encomium is accepted by
Ronsard; and there is common approval, in doctrine as in practice, of
parenthetical dilation by descriptive show-pieces. So the rhetoric of
Hermogenes, embraced by Camillo and Partenio for poetic, is mentioned
elsewhere with respect. Alexandrianism is at least an inclination of the
Renaissance.

But the commonest sign of the times is the unabated vogue of Horace’s
“Ars poetica”. It is gospel as much to the Renaissance as it had been to
the Middle Age. The cynical explanation would be its very shallowness
and conventionality; but probably the deeper reason is that Renaissance
thinking on poetic, as Horace’s, was essentially rhetorical. Here, at any
rate, is the main significance of these poetics. Various as they may be
otherwise, they have this in common. Tasso stands out as an exception,
in theory as in practice, by his clear view of poetic as a distinct
art of composition; and he is supported by Castelvetro’s penetrative
interpretation of the _Poetic_ of Aristotle. But Vauquelin has not heard
them; and even Sidney, though he sees the distinction, still falls back
on rhetoric. Even to the end of the sixteenth century, Renaissance poetic
was largely rhetoric.[68]




Chapter VIII

PROSE NARRATIVE


1. TALES

Nothing is more characteristic of the Renaissance than the abundance of
tales. Printed in large collections, they evidently answered a steady
demand; and they furnished many plots for the Elizabethan stage. Often
significant of Renaissance taste in stories, they are generally less
interesting in narrative art.


(_a_) _Bandello_

Bandello dedicates each of his 224 _novelle_ to some friend in a
prefatory letter which usually represents it as actually told in his
hearing by a person whom he names (_Le quattro parti de le novelle del
Bandello riprodotte sulle antiche stampe di Lucca_ [1554] _e di Lione_
[1573] _a cura di Gustavo Balsamo-Crivelli_, Turin, 1910). The stories
are further documented by proper names; or Bandello tells us that he has
substituted fictitious ones to shield well-known families. _Novella_ 16,
for instance, of Part I “happened last winter in this city of Mantua.”
Though this and many others are conventional _fabliaux_ or stock friar
tales, they are all alike told for their news value, as striking or
exciting. Bandello seems more intent on finding good stories than on
making stories good. Hence he is more significant of the appetite and
taste of his time than as a story-teller.

The Elizabethans, who often hunted in his collection, often through
French or English translations, created from some of his persons
characters as convincing as Juliet and the Duchess of Malfi; but
characterization rarely detains Bandello himself. Since he may be content
with a mere clever retort or a dirty trick, many of his tales are brief,
and many of these are mere anecdote. Even so the obligatory introduction
summarizing the situation may occupy a fourth, or even a third; and the
rehearsal of the facts may suffice without the salience that would give
them narrative interpretation.

    _Novella_ 9 of Part I in ten pages exhibits a husband so
    jealous as to violate the confessional and thereupon murder his
    wife. First displaying the luxury of Milan, the scene of the
    story, and even pausing to comment on the Milanese dialect, it
    proceeds to slow exposition of the situation, with dialogue of
    minor persons not active in the story, and with lingering over
    minor details. The only scene developed before our eyes is the
    violated confession. Thus bungled, the ugly story becomes more
    tedious than tragic.

Lack of salience, though not often so flagrant, is habitual. Without
salience, without sufficient motivation, Bandello’s tales are oftener
a mere series of events than a sequence of scenes. They are not
consistently developed by action. Instead of revealing themselves
progressively before our eyes, his persons make speeches or even think
aloud. Their speeches are far oftener oratory than narrative dialogue.
Indeed, they may repeat what has been already thought or done. The very
inequality in the collection betrays Bandello’s weakness in narrative
composition. His ornate style is fairly constant in elegant fluency;
but his composition is hit or miss. He has no steady command of story
management.

Nor is his art sure in the eighteen longer tales. Of these, twelve (Part
I. 5, 17, 21, 34, 45, 49; Part II. 24, 28, 36, 40, 41, 44), averaging
about twenty-three pages, have essentially the same slack composition as
the shorter tales. The remaining six deserve more attention.

    I. 2 (26 pages) Ariobarzanes, proud and generous courtier,
    endured from Artaxerxes a series of humiliations, and emerged
    triumphant. The tale begins with the posing of a question: is
    the life of a courtier essentially liberality and courtesy, or
    obligation and debt? The series of trials is cumulative enough
    to give a certain sequence; but that it involved a struggle
    against detraction is not disclosed until the final oration,
    and thus does not operate as motivation.

    I. 15 (23 pages) Two clever wives conspired to outwit the
    intrigues of their husbands, delivered them from prison, and
    reconciled them to each other. Here are complication and
    solution, but through a plot as artificial as it is ingenious.
    Though the detail is livelier, the action is slow. It halts
    in the middle; and the dénouement comes finally through a
    long oration rehearsing the whole story in court. The only
    characterization is of a third lady in the sub-plot.

    I. 22 (25 pages) Timbreo, betrothed to Fenicia, repudiated
    her through a dastardly trick of his rival. The lady, who was
    supposed to be dead of shame, hid herself in a villa. The rival
    repenting and confessing, both men vowed to set her name right.
    At the request of her father marrying “Lucilla,” Timbreo found
    her to be Fenicia. The rival married a sister, and the King
    adorned the wedding with royal festivities, dowries for the
    brides, and posts for the men. Here again are complication and
    solution. Though some of the scenes are realized, there is not
    that salience of critical situations which leads a narrative
    sequence onward. The royal wedding at the end, for instance,
    has as much space as the repudiation. Fenicia is presented with
    some hints of characterization.

    I. 27 (27 pages) Don Diego and Ginevra, two very young country
    gentlefolk, falling in love utterly at sight, the girl turned
    so violently jealous as to deny all attempts at reconciliation;
    and the boy in despair went far away to end his days as a
    hermit in a cave. An old friend of both families, finding his
    retreat, reasoned with him in vain, but roused his hope by
    promising to move the girl. The girl was so far from being
    moved that she planned to elope with an adventurer. The old
    friend frustrated this and, in spite of the girl’s fury,
    carried her off toward the boy’s cave. Her pride remaining
    quite obstinate, the old friend finally lost patience and
    told her to go her own foolish way; but the boy, coming to
    meet them, showed so deep and unselfish devotion that she
    fell on his neck. This tale, which Bandello had from Spain,
    has not only complication and solution, but, in spite of some
    unnecessary interruption, an engaging narrative progress.
    Besides the constant motivation of the persons’ youth, there is
    definite characterization of the old friend, of the boy, and
    especially of the girl. No other tale of the collection equals
    this in narrative composition.

    II. 9 (35 Pages) The now familiar tale of Romeo and Juliet is
    told straight through with little salience and with little
    characterization.

    II. 37 (48 pages) Edward III, suing a lady long in vain, at
    last had to marry her. The lady’s first high-spirited and
    intelligent response has some distinct characterization; but
    the situation is repeated again and again with cumulative
    urgency until this longest of the tales becomes tedious.

Even these better longer tales, then, are quite unequal in story
management. Bandello seems to take his stories as he finds them. His
literary fiction of writing a story that he has heard seems essentially
true in that sense. As he has not discerned in Boccaccio the various
achievement of a narrative artist, so he does not see what makes his own
best tales good, much less shape others accordingly. He is not creative.


(_b_) _Marguerite de Navarre_

The collection of tales made by Marguerite de Navarre, probably with
her literary household, and now known as the _Heptameron_, was first
printed as _Les Amants fortunés_ in 1558. Obviously patterned on
Boccaccio’s _Decameron_, it uses the literary frame of an aristocratic
house party more realistically. The dialogue in comment on the stories
is developed to characterize each person. Thus the collection is made a
series of cases (_exempla_) for social comment. But the tales themselves
are inferior. Told simply, without much flavor, “for fear” says the
preface, “that beauty of style might prejudice historical truth,” they
are usually lucid, somewhat conversational, often lax. There is no
mastery of narrative movement. The steadfast purity of the wife is,
indeed, a constant motivation in II. 3; but the few salient scenes
hardly constitute a sequence. The mere series of events in III. 1 makes
eighteen pages tedious and ends in mere reversal. The dialogue of the
retold _Châtelaine de Vergi_ (VII. 10; 20 pages) is oftener oratory than
narrative. The longest of the tales (I. 10; 32 pages), a romance covering
years, has so little salience that it might as well have ended earlier.
Most of the tales are either anecdote or _fabliau_ of about seven
pages. Put forward as actual, they are sometimes stock medieval tales,
especially of the stupidity or brutality of friars, and where they appear
to narrate facts, sometimes merely report them without realizing any
moment as a scene. Boccaccio, too, has simple anecdotes, in which all the
charm is of style; he too prolongs some of his stories without salience;
but among his many experiments are five _novelle_ (I. 4, II. 1 and 2,
VIII. 8, IX. 6) intensified by their sequence. Far from noticing this
difference, the writers of the _Heptameron_ show little awareness of
narrative composition. The accompaniment of discussion is better managed
than the stories themselves.


(_c_) _Giraldi Cinthio_

The collection _Hecatommithi_ (hundred fables) of Giovan-Battista
Giraldi, known as Giraldi Cinthio,[69] accumulated through years.
Begun apparently in his young manhood, it had reached seventy tales in
1560,[70] was published in 1565, and reprinted in 1566, 1574, 1580, and
1584.[71] (_Hecatommithi, ouero cento nouelle, di M. Giovanbattista
Giraldi Cinthio_, nobile ferrarese: nelle quali, oltre le diletteuole
materie, si conoscano moralità vtilissime a gli huomini per il benviuere,
& per destare altresi l’intelletto alla sagacità; potendosi da esse
con facilità apprendere il vero modo di scriuere toscano ... 4th
edition, Venice, 1580.) Thus the moralizing suggestion of the title
is confirmed by the sub-title. Here are offered one hundred—indeed,
with the preliminary decade, one hundred and ten—_exempla_. Nor is
the collection made less formidable by being classified: ten tales to
exhibit the superiority of wedded love, ten to show the risks of dealing
with courtesans, ten on infidelity, ten on chivalry, etc. Nevertheless
the tales are not all moralities, and in some the moral is not even
clear; for here once more are both _fabliaux_ and anecdotes. The frame
is once more Boccaccio’s. Young aristocrats, escaped from the sack of
Rome (1527), board ship and on a slow cruise entertain one another with
tales. The style, though sometimes slack and diffuse, is not dilated for
decoration. There is a leisurely introduction; each tale is prefaced by
comment on the preceding; and each decade has an epilogue of discussion
and verse. The whole ends with a roll of fame commemorating some hundred
and fifty men of letters in _terza rima_, and adding a list of eminent
ladies.

    Running generally from three pages to ten, the tales, even the
    few that run to fourteen, remain scenario. II. ii. recounts in
    fourteen pages a Persian tale of Oronte and Orbecche. V. x.
    tells at the same length how the virtuous wife of Filogamo,
    shipwrecked, resisted the Prince of Satalia, and that he was
    thereupon expelled. In X. viii two quarreling nobles come
    to blows, are imprisoned by King Louis, and subsequently
    reconciled by the courtesy of one. Even the tale of the Moorish
    captain, which has hardly more than eight pages, is not
    developed narratively. Looking back to it from _Othello_, one
    distinguishes the motivation discerned by Shakspere; but in
    Giraldi’s tale this is either generalized or merely hinted; it
    does not conduct the narrative.

The composition, then, is generally scenario. If the dialogue sometimes
rises to narrative economy, it also becomes sometimes mere oration.
Character, often merely typical, rarely suffices for motivation.
Unnecessary spreading of the time-lapse betrays a carelessness of focus.
There is no habit either of realizing scenes concretely in action, or of
conducting them in a sequence.

    A typical example is I. v. Pisti, condemned in Venice for
    killing a man that had sought to debauch his wife, escaped to
    Ferrara and was banned. The situation is first propounded, and
    then recounted by his wife. She and his daughter being left
    in poverty, he wrote anxiously, urging them to maintain their
    honor. He was betrayed into captivity by two supposed friends,
    that their father, who was also under Venice ban, might by
    delivering him up reinstate himself. The father, refusing to
    take advantage of their treachery, liberated Pisti on condition
    that he forgive them. Pisti, returning secretly to Venice, bade
    his wife denounce him to the Signory and claim the reward for
    his head. She refused in an oration so fervent as to attract
    the guard, who thereupon arrested him. Going with him to
    court, she so told the whole story that the Signory pardoned
    Pisti, restored his property, gave the reward to his daughter
    for dowry, and even pardoned his false friends’ father. The
    motivation of an ingenious complication and solution is all
    here—in the abstract. But the tale in eight pages merely sums
    up or orates instead of realizing it in scenes. The _novella_
    thus remains an _exemplum_ of generosity, instead of becoming a
    story of Pisti’s wife.

Thus Giraldi, seeking with Bandello news interest and therefore
melodrama, proposing an edification often quite dubious, ignored the
deeper narrative values. Reporter, manipulator, moralizer, he is not a
creator.


(_d_) _Belleforest, Painter, and Fenton_

The collections of tales, then, show Renaissance story-telling as a
regression from the fourteenth century. The narrative art of Boccaccio,
to say nothing of Chaucer, has suffered eclipse. Far from being advanced,
it is not even discerned. Renaissance story-telling is generally as
inferior as it is abundant. The few well managed stories stand out
in sharp relief against the mass of convention and of bungling. But
this is not all. Bandello’s tales as rendered (1566-1576) in French by
Belleforest and in English through him by Painter and Fenton, are not
merely translated; they are dilated and decorated to the point of being
actually obscured as stories. Bandello’s forty-ninth tale, already
doubled by Belleforest, is trebled in Fenton’s first. Livio and Camilla,
told by Bandello in 1,500 words, has nearly 11,000 in Belleforest’s
twenty-second, and 16,731 in Fenton’s second. The dilation is by
show-pieces of description, by oratory, by moralizing, by allusions to
classical mythology and to the “natural” history derived from Pliny, and
by those balanced iterations known generically in English as euphuism.
Belleforest in his preface (1568) begs the reader’s pardon for not
“subjecting” himself to the style of Bandello. “I have made a point,” he
says, “of recasting it.” His _Continuation_ informs the Duc d’Orléans in
a dedication that he has “enriched with maxims, stories, harangues, and
epistles.” So Painter must pause to describe.

    There might be seene also a certain sharpe and rude situation
    of craggy and vnfruictful rocks, which notwithstanding yelded
    some pleasure to the Eyes to see theym tapissed with a pale
    moasie greene, which disposed into a frizeled guise made the
    place pleasaunt and the rock soft according to the fashion of
    a couerture. There was also a very fayre and wide Caue, which
    liked him well, compassed round about with Firre trees, Pine
    apples, Cipres, and Trees distilling a certayne Rosen or Gumme,
    towards the bottom whereof, in the way downe to the valley, a
    man might haue viewed a passing company of Ewe trees, Poplers
    of all sortes, and Maple trees, the Leaues whereof fell into a
    Lake or Pond, which came by certaune smal gutters into a fresh
    and very cleare fountayne right agaynst that Caue. The knight
    viewing the auncientry and excellency of the place, deliberated
    by and by to plant there the siege of his abode for performing
    of his penaunce and life (Vol. III, p. 222, of the 1890
    reprint).

Description for itself, without function, and even more plainly the
other habitual means of decoration, show not only the general habit of
dilation, but also the general carelessness of narrative values. So is
smothered even the Spanish tale of Don Diego and Ginevra,[72] which
Bandello had the wit, or the luck, to repeat in its original sequence.
Evidently these versions were looking not to composition, not to the
conduct of the story, but only to style.


(_e_) _Pettie, Lyly, and Greene_

William Pettie’s _A Petite Pallace of Pettie His Pleasure, containing
many pretie histories by him set forth in comely colours and most
delightfully discoursed_ (1576) iterates the medieval balance figures
and reënforces them with alliteration. Thus his rendering of the tale
of Scylla and Minos, after an expository summary and due moralizing,
presents:

    one Nisus, who had to daughter a damsel named Scilla, a proper
    sweet wench, in goodliness a goddess, in shape Venus herself,
    in shew a saint, in perfection of person peerless, but in deeds
    a dainty dame, in manners a merciless maid, and in works a
    wilful wench.... But to paint her out more plainly, she was
    more coy than comely, more fine than well-favoured, more lofty
    than lovely, more proud than proper, more precise than pure.

If there be any place for such style, surely it is not in story. The
story is hardly told; it is decorated, moralized, generalized without
narrative salience. The decoration thus abused by Pettie became a vogue
through John Lyly (1553?-1606). His _Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit_ (1578)
and _Euphues and His England_ (1580) made the _schemata_ of sophistic,
especially isocolon, parison, and paromoion,[73] a main item in the
curious style called euphuism.

    Come therefore to me, all ye lovers that have been deceived
    by fancy, the glass of pestilence, or deluded by women, the
    gate to perdition; be as earnest to seek a medicine as you
    were eager to run into a mischief. The earth bringeth forth as
    well endive to delight the people as hemlock to endanger the
    patient, as well the rose to distil as the nettle to sting,
    as well the bee to give honey as the spider to yield poison
    (Croll’s ed., p. 93).

    Yet if thou be so weak, being bewitched with their wiles,
    that thou hast neither will to eschew nor wit to avoid their
    company, if thou be either so wicked that thou wilt not or so
    wedded that thou canst not abstain from their glances, yet at
    the least dissemble thy grief. If thou be as hot as the mount
    Aetna, feign thyself as cold as the hill Caucasus, carry two
    faces in one hood, cover thy flaming fancy with feigned ashes,
    show thyself sound when thou art rotten, let thy hue be merry
    when thy heart is melancholy, bear a pleasant countenance with
    pined conscience, a painted sheath with leaden dagger (Ibid.,
    p. 104).

The tiresome heaping of balances and allusions so cumbers narrative that
these books keep little semblance of story.

Nevertheless the habit was continued in the longer English tales,
sometimes called novels, of the 1580’s and 90’s. Greene’s _Carde of
Fancie_ (1584-1587) decorates emotion with allusion and supplies balances
by handfuls.

    He manfullie marcht on towards her, and was as hastilie
    incountred by Castania, who embracing Gwydonius in her armes,
    welcommed him with this salutation.

    As the whale, Gwydonius, maketh alwaies signe of great joye
    at the sight of the fishe called _Talpa Marina_, as the Hinde
    greatlie delighteth to see the Leopard, as the Lion fawneth
    at the view of the Unicorne, and as he which drinketh of the
    Fountaine Hipenis in Scithia feeleth his mind so drowned in
    delight that no griefe, though never so great, is able to
    assuage it, so, Gwydonius, I conceive such surpassing pleasure
    in thy presence, and such heavenlie felicitie in the sight of
    thy perfection, that no miserie though never so monstrous, is
    able to amaze me, no dolour though never so direfull is able
    to daunt me, nor no mishap though never so perillous is able
    to make me sinke in sorrow, as long as I injoy thy presence,
    which I count a soveraine preservative against all carefull
    calamities.

It is not necessary to regard this as quite serious to see that balanced
iteration and learned allusion had become epidemic, and that both arise
from the habit of dilation. For even plain Thomas Deloney must decorate
his clothier Jack of Newbury (1597) with myth and marvel. That such
perversion of narrative, owing something now and then, perhaps, to the
_Hypnerotomachia_ or to Apuleius, is imitated more specifically from the
Greek Romances is plainest in Sidney’s _Arcadia_.[74] It is one of the
clearest instances of Renaissance Alexandrianism.


2. RABELAIS

Émile Egger was once moved to protest: “The actual French usage of 1530
shows nowhere in either speech or writing the diction of Rabelais.”[75]
Every student of Rabelais will recognize this observation as a lead. It
means much more than the truisms that every eminent author has his own
style, and that study of style is the most constantly fruitful study of
literature. It means that Rabelais makes the special demand of compelling
attention always to his style. His vocabulary[76] ranges from Latinizing
to dialect and jargon; his word-play from reckless puns to various
iteration; his cadences from the clausula of Cicero to mere lists. His
volubility flashes with picturesque concreteness. He is popular, yes,
but rarely in being simple, usually in talking with his readers and in
stimulating them by extravagance. The fifteenth-century extravagance of
Skelton, showing a similar volubility, has less display. Rabelais will
not let us ever forget his style.

    Pantagruel rencontra un escolier tout joliet.... “Mon amy,
    dond viens tu à ceste heure?” L’escolier luy respondit: “De
    l’alme, inclyte, et celebre academie que l’on vocite Lutece.”
    “Q’est ce à dire?” dist Pantagruel à un de ses gens. “C’est,”
    respondit il, “de Paris.” “Tu viens donc de Paris,” dit il.
    “Et à quoy passez vous le temps, vous autres estudiants audit
    Paris?” Respondit l’escolier: “Nous transfretons la Sequane au
    dilucule et crepuscule, nous deambulons par les compites et
    quadrivies de l’urbe, nous despumons la verbocination latiale,
    et comme verisimiles amorabonds captons la benevolence de
    l’omnijuge, omniforme, et omnigene sexe feminin.... Et si par
    forte fortune y a rarité ou penurie de pecune en nos marsupies,
    et soient exhaustes de metal ferruginé, pour l’escot nous
    dimittons nos codices et vestes oppigncrées, prestolans les
    tabellaires à venirdes penates et lares patriotiques.” A quoy
    Pantagruel dist “Quel diable de langage est cecy? Par dieu,
    tu es quelque heretique.” “Segnor no,” dist l’escolier; “car
    libentissimement des ce qu’illucesce quelque minutule lesche
    de jour, je demigre en quelqu’un de ces tant bien architectés
    monstiers, et là, me irrorant de belle eau lustrale, grignotte
    d’un transon de quelque missique precation de nos sacrificules.
    Et submirmillant mes precules horaires, elue et absterge mon
    anime de ses inquinamens nocturnes. Je revere les olympicoles.
    Je venere latrialement le supernel astripotens.” Je dilige
    et redame mes proximes. Je serve les prescrits decalogiques,
    et selon la facultatule de mes vires n’en discede le late
    unguicule.... “Et bren, bren,” dist Pantagruel, “Qu’est ce
    que veult dire ce fol? Je croy qu’il nous forge icy quelque
    langage diabolique, et qu’il nous charme comme enchanteur.”
    A quoy dist un de ces gens: “Seigneur, sans nul doubte ce
    gallant veult contrefaire la langue des Parisiens; mais il ne
    fait que escorcher le latin, et cuide ainsi pindariser; et
    luy semble bien qu’il est quelque grand orateur en françois
    parce qu’il dedaigne l’usance commun de parler.” A quoy dist
    Pantagruel, “Est il vray?” L’escolier respondit: “Segnor
    missayre, mon genie n’est point apte nate à ce que dit ce
    flagitiose nebulon, pour escorier la cuticule de nostre
    vernacule gallique; mais vice-versement je gnave, opere, et par
    veles et rames je me enite de le locupleter de la redondance
    latinicome.” “Par dieu,” dit Pantagruel, “je vous apprendray à
    parler” (II. vi).

The parody is of that Latinizing “enrichment” of the vernacular which was
a wide preoccupation and the special creed of the Pléiade. Rabelais, as
Erasmus, ridicules its paganizing. The larger satire is the rendering of
the conventions of student wildness in an iterative learned jargon. For
the iteration is not careless. Thus he prolongs a mere play upon the word
_Sorbonne_:

    ... ces marauds de sophistes, sorbillans, sorbonagres,
    sorbinigenes, sorbonicoles, sorboniformes, sorbonisecques,
    niborcisans (II. xviii).

Thus he prolongs a parody of legal citations.

    Ayant bien veu, reveu, leu, releu, paperassé, et feuilleté
    les complainctes, adjournemens, comparitions, commissions,
    informations, avant procedés, productions, allegations,
    intenditz, contredits, requestes, enquestes, repliques,
    dupliques, tripliques, escritures, reproches, griefz,
    salvations, recollements, confrontations, acarations, libelles,
    apostoles, lettres royaulx, compulsoires, declinatoires,
    anticipatoires, evocations, envoyz, renvoyz, conclusions, fins
    de non proceder, apoinctemens, reliefz, confessions, exploictz,
    et autres telles dragées et espiceries d’une part et d’autre,
    comme doibt faire le bon juge selon ce qu’en a _not. spec.
    de ordinario § 3 et tit. de offic. omn. jud. § fin. et de
    rescript. praesentat., § 1_ (III. xxxix).

Thus the resolution of Diogenes to do his part in the defense of Corinth
lets Rabelais stop to amplify the commonplaces of a siege.

    When Philip threatened siege, the Corinthians prepared for
    defense. Some from the fields to the fortresses brought
    household goods, cattle, wine, food, and necessary munitions.
    Others repaired walls, raised bastions ... [and so through
    a series of 25 predicates]. Some polished corselets [and so
    through another catalogue of particulars]. Diogenes girt his
    loins, rolled up his sleeves, gave his manuscripts to the
    charge of an old friend [and so through another series of
    details].... “Icy beuvant je delibere, je discours, je resouldz
    et concluds. Aprés l’epilogue je ris, j’escris, je compose,
    je boy. Ennius beuvant escrivoit, escrivant beuvoit. Eschylus
    (si à Plutarche foy avez in _Symposiacis_) beuvoit composant,
    beauvant composait. Homere jamais n’escrivit à jeun. Caton
    jamais n’escrivit qu’aprés boire.” Thus the resolution gives
    occasion for eight pages. (Prologue to Tiers Livre.) As here,
    the amplification is often oratorical.

This various diffuseness, parody of Latinizing, legal iteration,
oratorical amplitude, is gift of gab, oral expansiveness, passion for
words; it is satire; and ultimately it is search for a reading public.
Taking his cue from the almanacs and giant stories, Rabelais was
exploiting the grotesque. He was clever enough to see that he could amuse
not only the _bon bourgeois_ who bought almanacs, but also those who had
some pretensions to studies. Both, as Ariosto knew, found relaxation in
the grotesque. The latter would appreciate technical jargon more; but the
former would catch enough of its satire and get some amusement from its
very strangeness. Both he could feed also with the marvels of voyages.
For the grotesque is an adult fairyland.

Rabelais takes us in and out of it, back and forth. Though the work is
largely narrative, it is not progressive story. The persons, often
vividly realized at a given moment, are not advancing to a destined
issue. There is much description, much discussion; and each has its
effect rather by itself than in a reasoned sequence. Thus the disgusting
story of the lady haunted by dogs, one of the most notorious of his
incidental _nouvelles_, is told quite as much for its own shock as for
any turn it gives to the larger story.

On the whole, Rabelais’ writing is _conte_, though usually involving
some exposition in aim and some actual comment. The series of _exempla_
and opinions as to whether Panurge shall marry (III. xxi, seq.) reaches
neither a decision on the marriage nor a conclusion of character. We
find ourselves discussing the mendicant friars, listening to a discourse
on devils, and ending on sheer lore about the herb Pantagruelion (III.
xlix, seq.). All the while the concreteness of the rendering is vivid
in contrast to the conventional generalities of the collections of
tales. The dialogue, instead of being exchange of orations, sometimes
flashes with narrative interaction. Rabelais takes us traveling, as it
were, through many excitements with a group of voluble grotesques whose
ideas are not developed in sequences of paragraphs, nor their habits in
sequences of chapters. He opened both novel and essay without achieving
the form of either. For he was moving toward that other kind of story and
discussion which ripened in journalism. Integration and continuity are
less important to attract readers than abundance and animation. Instead
of making a point, he often hovers around it with many suggestions.
Instead of giving a scene distinct significance to lead into the next, he
plays it with many overtones. Unsystematic as his various abundance is
certainly, and sometimes confusing, it must be recognized as creative.
Rabelais is not content merely to rehearse, paraphrase, or decorate.
Charged with various lore, his work is never second-hand. What he seizes
he animates.

The satire of Rabelais, as distinct from his more descriptive ridicule,
is directed oftenest against pedantry. The idea that he satirizes the
Middle Age as an apostle of Renaissance enlightenment extends a dubious
contrast beyond the evidence. For Rabelais is in some aspects medieval.
He was a wandering scholar, a _vagans_; he was something of a _goliard_;
and in the way of Godescalc he was a _mauvais clerc_. His satire on monks
and friars is medieval literary stock. Indeed, it is much less attack,
still less reform, than excitement. Against medieval education he does
not urge Renaissance enlightenment except in irony.

In a letter of June 3, 1532, he raised a disconcerting question.

    How comes it, most learned Tiraqueau, that in the abundant
    light of our century, in which by some special gift of the gods
    we see all the better disciplines recovered, there are still
    found everywhere men so constituted as to be either unwilling
    or unable to lift their eyes from the more than Cimmerian
    darkness of the gothic time to the evident torch of the sun?[77]

The irony of this is iterated and underlined in the oft-quoted eighth
chapter of his _Pantagruel_, where Gargantua recalls his youth.

    As you may easily understand, the times were not so suited, so
    convenient for literature, as the present, and had few such
    teachers as you have had. The times were still dark, and still
    exhaled the awkwardness and ill luck of the Goths, who had
    destroyed all good literature. But by divine goodness light and
    dignity have been restored to literature in my time; and I see
    such improvement that at present I should hardly be received
    in the beginning class, though as a man I used to be reputed
    the most learned of my time. I say this not in vain boasting,
    though I might legitimately do so in writing to you (see Marcus
    Tullius _De senectute_ and Plutarch in the book entitled _How
    to praise oneself without reproach_), but to show you my deep
    affection.

    Nowadays all the disciplines have been restored, the languages
    reëstablished: Greek, without which ’tis a shame for any one to
    call himself learned, Hebrew, Chaldee, Latin; printed editions
    as elegant as correct in usage, which were invented in my time
    by divine inspiration, as artillery by suggestion of the devil.
    The whole world is full of scholars, of most learned teachers,
    most ample libraries; and it seems to me that neither the
    time of Plato nor that of Cicero offered such convenience for
    study as is seen now. Hereafter we need not find in office or
    in society any one unpolished by the shop of Minerva. I see
    brigands, executioners, adventurers, stableboys of today more
    learned than the doctors and preachers of my time. Nay more,
    women and girls have aspired to that praise and celestial manna
    of good instruction.

What is pierced here is not medieval ignorance, but Renaissance
complacency. The pedantry that Rabelais satirizes is of both ages. His
quarrel with the Sorbonne of his own day may have been edged by the
banning of _Pantagruel_. The book was banned as obscene. It is obscene.
Let us no longer pretend that he attacked obscurantism as a champion
of enlightenment. For whatever his motive, Rabelais remained singularly
detached. He was far from being an apostle of enlightenment, or of
anything else.

Yet he is still cited in some histories as forecasting modern education.
An educational theory has been extracted from him, even a scheme. To
support this, his conventional or picturesque ridicule of university
teaching and of student manners is at most negative. A positive
contribution has been found in his abbey of Thelème (I. lii-lviii).

Thelème, the ideal abbey that is the scene of the so-called scheme of
education, takes its name probably from that preposterous allegory
_Hypnerotomachia_,[78] wherein the hero forsakes the guidance of Reason
(Logistica) for that of will (Thelemia). Its architecture and landscape
gardening, again reminding of Colonna’s pseudo-classical elaboration,
receive, with the furniture and accessories, ten times as much space as
the studies. It has 9,332 suites. Its library abounds in Greek, Latin,
Hebrew, French, Tuscan, and Spanish (omitting English and German); and
its frescoes are of “antiques prouesses.” Outside are fountains, a
hippodrome, a theater, swimming pool, garden, labyrinth, tennis court,
and park. Inside it is supplied with costumers and furnishers. Its
community of men and women, all handsome, richly dressed, and commanding
the six languages well enough to compose in prose and verse, has no
community obligation. Living in luxury, with the six languages among
their pastimes, freed from the world and from all duties to one another,
these privileged souls have for their community device “Fais ce que
voudras.”

The humor of this, which ought to be discernible even to those
preoccupied with schemes of education, might more easily be taken to
imply that irresponsibility plus command of languages is not a sufficient
educational formula even in an ideally luxurious environment. Since
this would be a shrewd satire on the Renaissance, it may well be what
Rabelais meant. Certainly he did not mean to propose Thelème for adoption
as an idea, much less as a scheme. Do as you please, provided you live
in luxury and command six languages. Is that an educational idea? Is it
by any tenable interpretation an educational scheme? To range Rabelais
with such pioneers of the fifteenth century as Guarino and Vittorino, or
with such coming leaders as Vives and Loyola, is not only to misinterpret
him; it is to do him wrong. His satire is not limited to the loud and
boisterous; he is master also of irony. Let Thelème rest as he left it,
an ironical fantasy.

Nor should Gargantua’s studious day (I. xxiii), no hour unfilled, no
subject neglected, be called a program of education.[79] Rabelais
must have been aware that for educational reform he had no warrant.
Whatever else may be laid to his charge, he was not pretentious. His own
education, interrupted, never carried through in any field, but widely
ranging, gave him not a system, but a singularly various fund. His
reputation for scholarship, recently urged, is hardly borne out by the
few contemporary compliments. Rather their fewness and their vagueness,
in a period of mutual admiration among scholars, suggest that he was less
famous than he has been made to appear. He was not Latinist enough to
detect the fabrication of the so-called _Will of Lucius Cuspidius_, which
he published in 1532.[80] His Greek, extending to the translation of
certain well-known Greek works of medicine,[81] may have been fortified
by previous Latin translations. His knowledge of law is vouched by his
abundant use of legal terms, evidence rather of his friendship with
lawyers and his appetite for jargon. He knew medicine enough to be
house physician at the Lyon Hôtel Dieu and personal physician in the
suite of the Cardinal du Bellay. Certainly this is evidence, almost the
only specific evidence, of his achievement in learning. But it should
not imply that he was a scientist. At most he did not advance the
narrow limits of the medicine current in his time. He was an acceptable
practitioner in a period of prolonged ignorance.

But such generalizations are less suggestive than what has been
laboriously pieced together of his very meager chronology. In 1530 he
was matriculated in medicine at the University of Montpellier. In 1532
he was practicing medicine at Lyon and publishing the Latin letters
of the Italian physician Manardi, the _Aphorisms_ of Hippocrates, the
fabricated Cuspidius, and his own _Pantagruel_. This in two years. Within
the two years preceding 1530 it is suggested that he may have studied
law at Poitiers and visited other universities. Even if the suggestion
could be brought to the dignity of an inference, what would it guarantee
of learning? Except for a single undated letter from the priory of
Ligugé, we have no documentation on Rabelais from 1521 to 1530. But if
indeed he did study law at Poitiers and did visit other universities
before he turned to medicine, or if he picked up some medicine on the
way, then he was superficially experimenting toward versatility. The
issue is sometimes dodged by calling him a humanist.[82] But though he
had humanist friends, he was obviously not a classicist. Or again, his
learning, because his allusions are astonishingly various, is called
encyclopedic. As a compliment to learning, the adjective is dubious;
but in another sense it is suggestive of his intellectual curiosity and
his acute awareness of words. Knowing that there is much to be learned,
as Dr. Johnson said, from the backs of books, he was alert to pick up
a little of everything. He found that for his new readers bits of lore
had the interest of news. While they liked his samples of learning
and relished his satire on the pedantries of humanism, the humanists,
seeing more in the joke, relished it none the less. It was gay, but also
thoughtful, escape from the solemn Renaissance fictions of classicism.
Rabelais already knew his readers well enough to carry them wine on both
shoulders.

The insistent and various extravagance anticipated journalism in that
it was the cultivation of style as advertisement. Besides perennial
excitements of substance he uses dialect, slang, jargon, parody, oratory,
not in ebullience, not in occasional outbreak, but in constant parade of
style. He is a sensationalist; his readers are to be shocked and amused.
So he turned to the grotesque, and so he pursued it. He has no winsome
persons; his satire has no indignation; his laughter, no sympathy.
In this aspect a most suggestive contrast is offered by Cervantes.
“Cervantes laughed Spain’s chivalry away” is unjust because it is
shallow. From the beginning and throughout, _Don Quixote_ thrives on what
Rabelais precludes, geniality. The grotesque of Cervantes is human enough
to make us feel a certain social service beyond laughter in attacks on
windmills; and his great achievement is the creation of a grotesque whom
we come to love.


3. HISTORY

History straddles the fundamental division of composition into the forms
of discussion or persuasion on the one hand and, on the other, those
of story or play. For history is now one, now the other, and now both
together. Earlier chronicles, more or less epic, hardly discuss at all;
some recent histories are so bent on analysis as hardly to narrate at
all; and some of the greater histories, ancient or modern, Thucydides,
Tacitus, Macchiavelli, bring the two into effective combination. In any
age this last is so difficult as to demand superior grasp. Livy, for
instance, being generally content with narrative, hardly makes even
his imaginary orations to troops expository. But Thucydides, narrating
effectively, is no less concerned to instruct his readers in the issues.
His “Expedition against Syracuse” thus became both tragedy and sermon.


(_a_) _Latin Histories_

The fifteenth century shows the advance of history beyond chronicle in
the Latin of Leonardo Bruni, of Arezzo (1369-1444; _Leonardi Aretini
historiarum florentini populi libri XII_, Florence, 1855-1860, 3 vols.,
ed. by Mancini, Leoni, and Tonietti, with the Italian translation of
Donato Acciajuoli). Chronicles nevertheless persisted; for they still
had, perhaps still have, the values realized by Herodotus. But Bruni
undertook and fairly accomplished something more: “history, which in
so many simultaneous events must keep the longer sequence, explain the
causes of single facts, and bring out the interpretation” (I. 52). Not
quite Thucydides or Tacitus, perhaps, he has clearly moved in their
direction. His style is periodic in habit without often conforming
strictly, humanistic without being laboriously imitative or diffuse,
intelligently Ciceronian without being inhibited by Ciceronianism. The
orations inserted after the fashion of Livy show, indeed, that he felt
bound to such amplitude, variety, and classical allusion as should
climb the high style; but they are neither frequent nor conventionally
decorative, and some of them are both lively and urgent pleas. The
following examples are typical.

    Book III: Pope Gregory to the Florentines for peace through the
    restoration of the exiles; and the Florentine speech of refusal.

    Book IV: Ianus Labella for insuring the republic against the
    pride of the nobles.

    Book VI: Debate of the Perugian envoys with the Florentines.

    Book VIII: The Florentine envoys to the Pope; the Pope’s reply
    and Barbadoro’s indignant rejoinder.

    Book XII: The Milanese legates at Venice against the
    Florentines, and the Florentine reply.

Bruni puts orations oftenest into the mouths of envoys to develop issues
which he has already summarized. Generally they are terser than the
speeches of the fashionable dialogues; and sometimes, for he had often
been an envoy himself, they are warm with actual debate. In this way his
narrative is interpreted by exposition. Remaining narrative in plan, it
indicates the animating considerations and interprets the outcome.

    Book I, for instance, closes a summary of ancient history with
    a survey of Italian cities after the invasions, and Frederick
    II’s fatal widening of the breach between Empire and Papacy.
    Book II shows Florence in full republican career thwarted by
    factions; Book IV, the creation of the _vexillifer justitiae_
    as a republican means of checking the selfish ambitions of the
    nobles. The increasing use of mercenaries shown in Book VII
    leads to chronic difficulties detailed later. The last three
    books present the war with Milan not only in its succession of
    events, but also as a single enterprise.

Finishing his first book in 1416, his sixth in 1429, Bruni solemnly
presented nine books to the Signory in 1439, and lived to finish his long
labor before 1444.

_De bello italico adversos gothos gesto historia_ (1441), an
amplification of the summary in the first book of his History of
Florence, has less interpretation. The steady, concise narrative, with
little comment, has sometimes too little salience. But to attentive
reading the story of battle after battle, now victory, now defeat,
gradually gives some grasp of the military operations to hold Italy for
Justinian. The main figure is Belisarius. Except in occasional concrete
description, this history is more like Caesar’s, and is an experiment in
that expository narrative later mastered by Macchiavelli. Belisarius is
clearly exhibited not only as marvelous in military science, but as an
intelligent organizer and administrator. When he feels himself let down
by Justinian, and is approached by the Goths toward a joint kingdom,
he will not commit himself to any disloyalty. His triumphal return to
Justinian reports his intelligent discipline in Italy. Later his recall
to Italy after other generals had meantime failed finds the task of
reorganization hopeless in the disaffection of the imperial soldiers so
long unpaid and ill led. With very little comment or review Belisarius
emerges clearly from the narrative itself.

Bruni’s histories are evidence of a sober earlier humanism immune to the
extravagances of Ciceronianism and to that allusive display that led to
dilation. They go about their business. Oratory is kept subsidiary to
the story and the message. This tradition of Latin history continues in
the _Scotorum historiae_ (1526) of Hector Boece, and again in the _Rerum
scoticarum historia_ (1582) of George Buchanan. Both wrote Latin history
seriously as European scholars. Buchanan, sometimes arid and partisan,
was nationalist, indeed, only in his later years. Meantime he had taught
for many years in France, had written Latin tragedies, and had been
saluted by Joseph Scaliger as the foremost of Latin poets. History, then,
kept alive among the humanists the medieval tradition of international
Latin. Its classicism, more restrained and more intelligent, less of
style than of method, was the more valid imitation.


(_b_) _Vernacular Histories_


MORE

Sir Thomas More’s study of Richard III (_The History of King Richard
the Thirde ... Writen by Master Thomas More ... 1513_, ed. J. R. Lumby,
Cambridge, 1883) shows these preoccupations in both Latin and English.
Though it is unfinished, it is not fragmentary, nor merely descriptive;
it is a thoroughgoing interpretation. All the more conspicuous,
therefore, is its concrete vividness. Though judge and afterward
pamphleteer, More cast this history as story. He makes us understand
largely by making us see. Thus the Queen surrenders her son.

    All this notwithstanding, here I deliuer him, and hys brother
    in him, to kepe into your handes, of whom I shall aske them
    both afore God and the world. Faithfull ye be, that wot I wel,
    and I know wel ye be wise. Power and strength to kepe him if
    you list neither lacke ye of yourself nor can lack helpe in
    this cause. And if ye cannot elsewhere, than may ye leue him
    here. But only one thing I beseche you, for the trust that his
    father put in you euer and for the trust that I put in you now,
    that as farre as ye thinke that I fere to muche, be ye wel ware
    that ye fere not as farre to little. And therewithall she said
    vnto the child: Farewel, my own swete sonne; God send you good
    keping; let him kis you ones yet ere ye goe, for God knoweth
    when we shal kis togither agayne. And therewith she kissed him
    and blessed him, turned her back and wept and went her way,
    leauing the childe weping as fast. When the lord Cardinal and
    these other lordes with him had receiued this yong duke, thei
    brought him into the sterrechamber, where the protectour toke
    him in his armes and kissed him with these wordes: Now welcome,
    my lord, euen with al my very hart. And he sayd in that of
    likelihod as he thought. Thereupon forthwith they brought him
    to the kynge his brother into the bishoppes palice at Powles,
    and from thence through the citie honorably into the Tower, out
    of which after that day they neuer came abrode (40).

The three pages devoted to the episode of Shore’s wife, lively at once
with irony and with image, pass to calm estimate and moral reflection.

    And for thys cause as a goodly continent prince, clene and
    faultles of himself, sent out of heauen into this vicious world
    for the amendment of mens maners, he caused the bishop of
    London to put her to open penance, going before the crosse in
    procession upon a Sonday with a taper in her hand. In which she
    went in countenance and pace demure so womanly, and albeit she
    were out of al array saue her kyrtle only, yet went she so fair
    and louely, namelye while the wondering of the people caste a
    comly rud in her chekes, of whiche she before had most misse,
    that her great shame wan her much praise.... But me semeth the
    chaunce so much the more worthy to be remembred in how much she
    is now in the more beggerly condicion, vnfrended and worne out
    of acquaintance, after good substance, after as gret fauour
    with the prince, after as gret sute and seking to with al those
    that those days had busynes to spede, as many other men were in
    their times, which be now famouse only by the infamy of their
    il dedes. Her doinges were not much lesse, albeit thei be much
    lesse remembred because thei were not so euil (53).

The conversations of the Duke of Buckingham with Cardinal Morton,
functioning as exposition, close at the end of More’s manuscript almost
as a scene in a play.

    The duke laughed merely at the tale, and said: My lord, I
    warant you neither the lyon nor the bore shal pyke anye matter
    at any thyng here spoken; for it shall neuer come nere their
    eare. In good fayth, sir, said the bishop, if it did, the thing
    that I was about to say, taken as wel as afore God I ment it,
    could deserue but thank; and yet taken as I wene it wold, might
    happen to turne me to litle good and you to lesse. Then longed
    the duke yet moch more to wit what it was. Wherupon the byshop
    said: In good faith, my lord, as for the late protector, sith
    he is now king in possession, I purpose not to dispute his
    title. But for the weale of this realm, wherof his grace hath
    now the gouernance, and wherof I am my self one poore member,
    I was about to wish that to those habilities wherof he hath
    already right many litle nedyng my prayse, it might yet haue
    pleased God for the better store to haue geuen him some of
    suche other excellente vertues mete for the rule of a realm as
    our Lorde hath planted in the parsone of youre grace (91).

More’s diction is discreetly popular, both choice and homely, pointed
with proverbs, occasionally reminiscent of popular poetry.

    The Quene her self satte alone alowe on the rishes all desolate
    and dismayde (20).

The management of sentences is less expert. More, as many other
humanists, was bilingual to the extent of composing habitually in Latin
even when he meant to publish in the vernacular. _Richard III_ he
composed in both. This may partly explain his frequent use of what are
now subordinating conjunctions to begin sentences. _Wherefore_ is often
used in sixteenth-century English, as Latin _quare_, where modern use
requires _therefore_. But when allowance is made for this, there still
remains some uncertainty as to sentence boundaries, some doubt as to
whether an added clause is subordinate or independent. Writing racy
English for the larger audience, More tolerated the looser aggregative
habit of English prose in his time. But his English, as well as his
Latin, shows clear grasp of the period, and even occasional strict
conformity. Current English still lagged in this respect throughout the
century. Before Hooker English prose is generally less controlled than
Italian. On the other hand, More uses balance and epigram discreetly, not
for decorative display, but strictly for point; and his shifting from
longer aggregations to sharp short sentences gives pleasant variety.


MACCHIAVELLI

Narrative and exposition are perfectly fused in Macchiavelli (_Istorie
fiorentine, testo critico con introduzione e note per cura di Plinio
Carli_, Florence, Sansoni, 1927, 2 vols.). His history of Florence (1532)
not only has an insistent moral; it is at once narrative and expository.
While we see the events, we see into them. His analytic narrative carries
the orator’s art of _narratio_,[83] the statement of the facts involved
in an argument, to greater scope. We follow Macchiavelli not merely as
assenting to his conclusions, but as reaching them ourselves. The more
distinctively narrative values of vividness and directness he brings
out often enough to show his control. But his ultimate object is not
imaginative realization; it is rather persuasion. The sequence is not
only of events, but of ideas. The admirable orations given to leaders
at crises are not merely conventional, nor mainly to characterize the
speaker as a person in a play, but to expound the situation. Livian in
model, they are oratory of a higher order, both acutely reasoned and
persuasive.

Macchiavelli’s exposition is sometimes separate, as in the essay that
prefaces each book, or in those _sententiae_ that from time to time open
vistas of thought.

    Beyond doubt rancor seems greater and strokes are heavier when
    liberty is recovered than when it is defended (II. xxxvii. 123).

    For a republic no law can be framed which is more vicious than
    one that looks to the past (III. iii. 136).

    No one who starts a revolution in a city should expect either
    to stop it where he intends, or to regulate it in his own way
    (III. x. 148).

    Between men who aspire to the same position it is easy to
    arrange alliance, but not friendship (VI. ix. 34).

    For men in power shame consists in losing, not in crooked
    winning (VI. xvii. 81).

    Thereupon arose in the city those evils which oftenest spawn in
    a peace. For the young, freer than usual, spent immoderately on
    dress, suppers, and such luxuries, and being idle, wasted their
    time and substance on gaming and women. Their study was to
    appear splendid in dress, sage and astute in speech; and he who
    was quickest with biting phrase was wisest and most esteemed
    (VII. xxviii. 155).

    Force and necessity, not written promises and obligations, make
    princes keep faith (VIII. xxii. 198).

But most of his exposition is not added; it is welded. The narrative
itself is made expository by a constant chain of cause and effect. It
is clear both in its events and in their significance for policy. We
learn at every turn not only what Florence did, but why; and we forecast
the result. Stefano Porcari, lamenting the decay of the Church (VI.
xxix. 101), is inspired by Petrarch’s “Spirto gentil.” The account of
the conspiracy nipped by the Pope is rather a story plot than a story.
Macchiavelli is content to suggest that it was operatic. He is not
concerned to work out its story values; he is bent on its historical
significance. The spectacles at the wedding of Lorenzo to Clarice (VII.
xxi. 148) are not elaborated descriptively; they are summed up as
indicative of the habit of the time. So is handled (VII. xxxiii. 162)
Professor Cola Montano’s doctrinaire enthusiasm for republics and scorn
of tyrants. His pupils find the issue in assassination. The splendid
audience of the Pope (VIII. xxxvi. 218) to the ambassadors of Florence
for reconciliation is at once description and argument. Thus the progress
of the _Istorie fiorentine_ is simultaneously of facts and of ideas. It
is analyzed narrative.

Fused also is the style. Heightened for the orations (II. xxxiv; III. v,
xi, xiii, xxiii; IV. xxi; V. viii, xi, xxi, xxiv; VI. xx; VII. xxiii;
VIII. x), it is never decorated, never diffused, so ascetically conformed
to its message as never to obtrude. This is not negatively the art that
knows how to conceal itself, but positively the art that is devoted
singly. True in the choice of words, it is expert in the telling emphasis
of sentences. Its reasoned balances suffice without the empty iteration
of English euphuism. They are played never for display, always for
point. The Latin period, welcome to the habit of Macchiavelli’s mind, is
rarely pushed to a conformity that would in the vernacular have seemed
artificial. Macchiavelli’s sentences are in logic fifty years ahead of
the French and the English; but they do not force his own vernacular.




Chapter IX

ESSAYS


1. DISCUSSIONS ON POLITICS AND SOCIETY

Two Italian books of the early sixteenth century became so famous as
to be almost proverbial. Written about the same time, Macchiavelli’s
_Principe_ (1513) and Castiglione’s _Cortegiano_ (1514) are
complementary. Macchiavelli expounds princely policy in war and in the
truces between wars; Castiglione leads princely leisure into culture.
The policy and the culture are parts of the same Italian world; but the
two books are in sharpest contrast. Macchiavelli’s facts are strictly
analyzed; Castiglione’s are habitually idealized. Macchiavelli’s
style is stripped and so fused with the message as to be inseparable;
Castiglione’s is ample, manipulating the decorative diffuseness of its
time and its setting to elegance. Macchiavelli’s economy is insistent,
urgent; Castiglione’s is gracious, deliberate, suggestive, rising to
oratory. Both men used their thorough control of Latin to shape their
writing of Italian prose; but Macchiavelli was applying rather such
compression as that of Tacitus, Castiglione the composition of Cicero.

It is Macchiavelli’s triumph that consideration of his doctrine has quite
submerged his style.

    I have not adorned nor distended this book with ample cadences,
    nor with precious or magnificent words or any other extrinsic
    charm or ornament, such as many are wont to use for descriptive
    decoration; for I have wished that nothing might win it praise,
    in other words that it should be acceptable only for the truth
    of its matter and the gravity of its subject (Dedication to
    Lorenzo).

    Since my object is to write something useful to him who
    understands it, I have thought it more fitting to follow rather
    the effectual truth of the thing itself than its concept
    [immaginazione] (Opening of xv).

His name soon became a byword; for Englishmen and Frenchmen found it
easier to denounce Italian statecraft than to explain wherein their own
was different. Formulated for Italian despots, his doctrine that the
safety and independence of the state are paramount over any consideration
of justice or mercy became more and more sinister in terms of the
rising new national monarchs beyond his ken. In the composition of the
whole Macchiavelli was still young. He had not yet achieved the sure
control felt in his _Istorie fiorentine_. Masterly already in expository
analysis, eloquent in its close, the _Principe_ has not a compelling
logical sequence.

In sequence and in detail the _Cortegiano_ is more mature than
Macchiavelli’s _Principe_. Castiglione kept it by him ten years. The
final revision (Codex Laurentianus, Rome, 1524) was published at Florence
in 1528. All this care left the diction unpretentious. Scholarly without
pedantry, Castiglione even forestalls the Tuscans by openly proclaiming
his right to Lombard words. “I have written in my own tongue, and as I
speak, and to those who speak as I do.” Thinking often of rhetoric,
feeling the Latin period and attentive to _clausula_, he applies his
lore to Italian sentences without stiffness or formality, happily
reconciling gravity with ease. Encomium, inevitable in his subject and
his time, is oftener implied than dilated. The plan of the dialogue is
taken from Cicero’s _De oratore_. Reminiscence in detail is negligible.
Castiglione’s imitation is not the common Renaissance borrowing of
passages; it is the adaptation of Cicero’s plan for presenting the
typical Roman statesman to survey of the typical Italian. Thus the
dialogue is Ciceronian in proceeding logically from point to point.
Within the frame of Cicero the conduct of the book expands the dialogue
toward conversation. This is not dramatic dialogue; nor is it imitation
of the Platonic quest. Rather Castiglione’s intention was to realize the
human scene, to flavor the point with the speaker; and his achievement in
suggesting the gracious interchange of the court of Urbino has been found
quite as significant as the conclusions of his debates.

For the _Cortegiano_ is one of the few Renaissance books that have
endured the test of time. Details of place and time have been made to
carry so much larger human suggestion that it has been reprinted again
and again; it has been widely translated; it has today an audience not
only of special students, but of the many more who love literature.
Though the very term “courtier” is obsolete, though the particular
social function soon faded, the book endures. It is not only the best of
Renaissance dialogues; it is a classic.

The _Utopia_ (1516) of Sir Thomas More, beginning as a dialogue on
certain social evils in England, passes to descriptive exposition of
a state organized and operated solely for the common weal. Though the
name _Utopia_ means “nowhere,” this polity is described as the actual
experience of a returned traveler. The literary form is thus reminiscent
of Lucian, whom More ten years before had translated with Erasmus. It
is reminiscent also of Plato, of the travelers’ tales popular in that
age of discovery and explanation, and more faintly of those distant or
fortunate isles (_îles lointaines_) which had often been posed as abodes
of idealized communities. But though these hints were doubtless intended,
they are incidental. They fade as we read on.

Unfortunately for More’s literary reputation, most of us read his
best-known book only in a pedestrian translation (Ralph Robinson, 1551;
second edition, 1556). Keeping much of the vivacity of the diction, this
is quite unequal to More’s flexible Latin rhythms.[84] For More, as for
Poliziano and Leonardo Aretino, Erasmus and Buchanan, Latin was a primary
language. But whereas Erasmus had, so to speak, no effective vernacular,
More’s literary achievement in English is both distinguished in itself
and ahead of his time. In spite of some uncertain ascriptions, we may be
fairly sure that the English version of his _Richard III_,[85] as well as
the Latin, is his own.

Continued discussion of the prince and the state moved Sir Thomas Elyot
(1490?-1546) to make an English compilation for the widening circle of
readers, _The Governour_ (1531, ed. H. S. Croft, London, 1883, 2 vols.).
“I have nowe enterprised,” he says in a proem to Henry VIII, “to describe
in our vulgare tunge the fourme of a juste publike weale, whiche mater I
have gathered as well of the sayenges of moste noble autours (grekes and
latynes) as by myne owne experience.” But the “governour” and the “juste
publike weale” receive no consistent discussion.

    The opening chapters, postulating _order_, proceed thence
    to _honour_ (i.e., rank), and so to _one sovereign_. Their
    review of history is very slight; and from Chapter iv Book I
    is occupied rather with the education of a gentleman. Book
    II is composed mainly of _exempla_ to illustrate the virtues
    appropriate to high position; and Book III adds little more
    than further classified aggregation.

With no further design, without even a distinct idea, _The Governour_
has of course no logical progress. Lawyer and something of a diplomat,
Elyot was not a thinker. Reading widely without discrimination, and
sometimes apparently at second hand, he compiled under headings. His
later _Bankette of Sapience_ (second edition? 1542) is a collection
of _sententiae_ arranged alphabetically under abstinence, adversity,
affection, ambition, authoritie, amitie, apparaile, almsdeede,
accusation, arrogance, etc. His _Governour_, though its headings have
more logic, is hardly consecutive. In sources as in topics the book is a
miscellany.

    I. vii, viii, for instance, on a gentlemanly, not a
    professional knowledge of music, painting, and sculpture,
    suggest the _Cortegiano_; xii inquires “why gentilmen in
    this present time be not equal in doctryne to the auncient
    noblemen”; xiv proposes _exempla_ for law students. After
    finding England deficient in the fine arts (140), he returns to
    law students with a recommendation of rhetoric, and thereupon
    itemizes it (149) under _status_, _inventio_, etc. By the end
    of the book he has passed from prudence to chess, archery,
    tennis, and bowls.

Elyot’s diction, though he wishes to “augment our Englysshe tongue,”
is Latinized sparingly. _Copie_ in the sense of the Latin _copia_, was
fairly common in his time. He adds, e.g., _allecte_ and _allectyve_,
_coarted_, _fatigate_, _fucate_, _illecebrous_, _infuded_, _propise_, and
_provecte_. His generally unpretentious habit is sometimes concretely
racy.

Jean Bodin’s treatise on historical method (_Methodus ad facilem
historiarum cognitionem_, 1566),[86] giving high praise to Guicciardini,
differs from him in conception. For Bodin, history is less a progress in
time than a thesaurus of _exempla_.

    Dividing it into human, natural, and divine, he would have us
    begin with a chronological reference table (ii), proceed to a
    more detailed survey, such as Funck’s or Melanchthon’s, advance
    to the histories of particular nations, Jews, Greeks, Romans,
    and then to such smaller communities as Rhodes, Venice, and
    Sicily, with constant attention to geography.

    In iii, _De locis historiarum recte instituendis_, the topics
    are first the commonplaces of encomium: birth, endowments,
    achievements, morals, culture. From the family, which for Bodin
    is the starting point of history, we are to proceed to the
    organization of the state and the developments of the arts.

    _De historicorum delectu_ (iv) has many specific and acute
    estimates of both ancients and moderns. “Somehow those who
    are active in wars and affairs (44) shy at writing; and those
    who have given themselves somewhat more to literature are so
    possessed with its charms and sweetness as hardly to think in
    other terms.” Bodin himself is broad enough to praise both
    Plutarch and Tacitus.

    _De recto historiarum iudicio_ (v), beginning with geography,
    proceeds to regional traits. The approach is suggestive; but
    the development is little more than aggregation under those
    dubious headings Northern and Southern, Eastern and Western.

    At this point (vi) Bodin begins the analysis of the state:
    the elemental family, the citizen, the magistrate, the king.
    “Macchiavelli, indeed, the first after some twelve hundred
    years since the barbarians to write on the state, has won
    general currency; but there is no doubt that he would have
    written several things more truly and better if he had
    added legal tradition (_usus_) to his knowledge of ancient
    philosophers and historians” (140). Monarchy is found to be the
    ideal form of government. The golden age of primitive peace and
    happiness is proved to be a senile fancy (vii). Let us rather,
    relying on the science of numbers, _De temporis universi
    ratione_ (viii), compute the recurrence of historical “cycles.”
    Strange conclusion to so much hard reasoning!

Systematically analytical, the book is easier to consult than to follow;
but its Latin style is of that sincere, capable, unpretentious sort which
had been established for history by the Italians. The political ideas
of the _Methodus_ are carried out by the same systematic analysis in
Bodin’s second book, _Les Six Livres de la république_, 1576.[87] Greek
and Latin political usage is made by a long wall of citations to support,
with other proofs from history, the theory of absolute monarchy.

Such support of the new monarchies by a reasoned theory based on ancient
history did not pass unchallenged. George Buchanan, with more literary
competence in Latin, though with less knowledge of politics, offered for
his little Scotland a theory of monarchy answerable to the people (_De
jure regni apud Scotos dialogus_, 1579).[88] The preface, addressed to
James VI, keeps a tutorial tone, as of one still laying down the law. The
occasion put forth for the Ciceronian dialogue is French reprobation of
Scotch politics. How shall this be met? The method is evident from the
first three points.

    To distinguish a king from a tyrant, we must remember that
    society is founded not only on utility, but on natural law
    implanted by God. A king is typically shepherd, leader,
    governor, physician, created not for his own ends, but for the
    welfare of his people (1-6).

    Kingship, being an _ars_ based on _prudentia_, needs guidance
    by laws (8). Objection: who would be king on these terms?
    Answer: ancient history and doctrine show motives higher than
    lust for power and wealth (9).

    These two points being iterated in summary for transition, the
    third is the need not only of laws, but of a council (11-14).

The many _exempla_ from ancient and modern history confirming or
challenging the _a priori_ progress of the dialogue do not touch the
recent events that raised the question. Scotch history is used even less
specifically than ancient to confirm the theory of limited monarchy. But
though Buchanan does not prove that recent politics were an application
of his theory, he makes the theory itself interesting and sometimes
persuasive.

The Latin style has more liveliness, expertness, and range than
Bodin’s. But the argument, though urgent as well as scholastically
ingenious, remains unconvincing. After debating general considerations
inconclusively, it falls back at last on the particular customs and needs
of Scotland. These are not applied specifically enough to be determining.
The expertness of the dialogue is rather literary than argumentative.

Brought down to the market place by printing, controversy by the end of
the century was learning the ways of journalism in pamphlets. Meantime
printing had opened such compilation as Elyot’s, samples of learning for
those eager readers who had not gone to school with the Latin manuals of
Erasmus.

The best of these sixteenth-century discussions, the piercing urgency of
Macchiavelli, the charming exposition of Castiglione, the philosophical
survey of More, the systematic analysis of Bodin, the hot attack of
Buchanan, are all essays in that modern sense of the word which applies
it to consecutive exposition involving argument. They show essay-writing
of this kind—which was to move more surely in the seventeenth
century—already on a firm footing. They recognize the Italian tradition
of history in abjuring the decorative dilation which was habitual in
other fields. They show Latin and vernacular side by side, and vernacular
prose gaining point and finish from the Latin commanded by all their
writers. They are a solid literary achievement of the Renaissance.


2. MONTAIGNE

The other kind of essay, the literary form that has kept the original
meaning of attempt, sketch, experiment, had its pace set late in the
sixteenth century by Montaigne. Nothing could be farther removed than his
habit from tidy system or consecutive argument. Devoted to the reading
of history, and eager to share its profits, he had no mind to follow
the Italian tradition of writing history. _Essai_ in his practice is
not the settling of a subject, but the trying. He makes one approach,
then another, suggesting relations that he does not carry out. With many
_exempla_ he invites us to accumulate philosophy of living. If we do not
coöperate, if we do not think them over, his essays remain collections
of items in memorable phrase, without compelling sequence of ideas. For
Montaigne is not the kind of philosopher who integrates a system; he
is a sage. He has the sage’s oral habit. No writing conveys more the
impression of thinking aloud. Again and again he writes as if making up
his mind, not before utterance, but by the very process of utterance.
Macchiavelli, or Bodin, having made up his mind fully and finally, tries
to convince us; Montaigne, as if making up his in our company, throws out
suggestions.

True, some few of his essays are more consecutive developments of what he
has concluded. His early and widely quoted _Education of Children_ (II.
xxvi) has even some logical progress.

But logical sequence is not Montaigne’s habit. His many revisions[89]
show him leaning more and more on the aggregation of separate
suggestions. He changes words, he adds instances, but he does not seek a
stricter order.

    But I am going off a little to the left of my theme.... I, who
    take more pains with the weight and usefulness of my discourses
    than with their order and sequence, need not fear to lodge
    here, a little off the track, a fine story (II. xxvii).

    This bundling of so many various pieces is made on condition
    that I put hand to it only when urged by too lax a leisure, and
    only when I am at home (II. xxxvii, opening).

His usual lack of sequence, then, is not careless. The careless fumbling
that comes from muddled thinking he ridicules.

    They themselves do not yet know what they mean, and you see
    them stammer in bringing it forth, and judge that their labor
    is not in childbirth, but in conception, and that they are only
    licking what is not yet formed (I. xxvi).

As to sequence he even catechizes himself.

    Is it not making bricks without straw, or very like, to build
    books without science and without art? The fantasies of music
    are conducted by art, mine by chance.

And his answer is very earnest.

    At least I have this from my course of study (_discipline_),
    that never a man treated a subject that he understood and knew
    better than I do the one that I have undertaken, and that in
    this subject I am the most learned man alive; secondly, that no
    one ever penetrated farther into its material, nor peeled more
    sedulously its parts and their consequences, nor reached more
    precisely and fully the end that he had proposed for his job.
    To accomplish this, I need bring no more than fidelity. That I
    have, the most sincere and pure that is to be found (III. ii).

Montaigne’s method, then, is deliberate.[90] If he passes, as in _Des
coches_ (III. vi), from examples of lavish display to the cruelty of
Spanish conquest in Mexico and frankly begins his last paragraph with
_retumbons à nos coches_, that is because he usually prefers to take us
on a journey around his idea. Hundreds of readers have found the talk of
such a guide on the way more winsome than the conclusions of others after
they have come home.

The art of growing an idea by successive additions sets the pace also
for his sentences. Knowing Latin, he tells us, as a native language,
and better than French, he puts aside Cicero for Seneca. This is more
than the rejection of Ciceronianism, more than preference for Seneca’s
philosophy; it is in detail the same aggregative method that he uses for
the composition of a whole essay. That vernacular sentences were commonly
more aggregative than those of Augustan Latin may have been a reason for
his choosing the vernacular. At any rate, he keeps the two languages
quite apart. Instead of applying his Latin to the pointing of his French
sentences, he prefers to let them accumulate as in talk.

    (1) They do still worse who keep the revelation of some
    intention of hatred toward their neighbor for their last will,

    (2) having hid it during their lives,

    (3) and show that they care little for their own honor,

    (4) irritating the offense by bringing it to mind,

    (5) instead of bringing it to conscience,

    (6) not knowing how, even in view of death, to let their grudge
    die,

    (7) and extending its life beyond their own. (I. vii.)

The sentence might easily have been recast in a Latin period; Montaigne
prefers to let it reach its climax by accumulation.

    (1) Nature has furnished us, as with feet for walking, so with
    foresight to guide our lives,

    (2) foresight not so ingenious, robust, and pretentious as the
    sort that explores (_invention_),

    (3) but as things come, easy, quiet, and healthful,

    (4) and doing very well what other people say,

    (5) in those who have the knack of using it simply and
    regularly,

    (6) that is to say, naturally. (III. xiii.)

So his epigrams are comparatively few and simple. His many memorable
sayings are not paraded as _sententiae_.

    It is not a soul, not a body, that we are educating; it is a
    man (I. xxvi).

    Unable to regulate events, I regulate myself, and adjust myself
    to them if they do not adjust themselves to me (II. xvii).

    The teaching that could not reach their souls has stayed on
    their lips (III. iii).

    Between ourselves, two things have always seemed to me in
    singular accord, supercelestial opinions and subterranean
    morals (III. xiii).

For Montaigne’s shrewd summaries prevail less often by balanced sentences
than by concrete diction.

    I am seldom seized by these violent passions. My sensibility
    is naturally dense; and I encrust and thicken it daily by
    discourse (I. ii).

    Anybody’s job is worth sounding; a cowherd’s, a mason’s, a
    passer-by’s, all should be turned to use, and each lend its
    wares; for everything comes handy in the kitchen (I. xxvi).

Such sentences, such diction, are not only his practice; they are part of
his literary theory.

    The speech that I like is simple and direct, the same on paper
    as on the lips, speech succulent and prompt (_nerveux_), curt
    and compact, not so much delicate and smoothed as vehement and
    brusque—_Haec demum sapiet dictio quae feriet_—rather tough
    than tiresome, shunning affectation, irregular, loose, and
    bold, each bit for itself, not pedantic, not scholastic, not
    legal, but rather soldierly (I. xxvi).

    The urgent metrical sentence of poetry seems to me to soar far
    more suddenly and strike with a sharper shock [The figure is of
    a falcon] (I. xxvi).

    These good people (Vergil and Lucretius) had no need of keen
    and subtle antitheses. Their diction is all full, and big with
    a natural and constant force. They are all epigram, not only
    the tail, but the head, the stomach, and the feet.... It is an
    eloquence not merely soft and faultless; it is prompt and firm,
    not so much pleasing as filling and quickening the strongest
    minds. When I see those brave forms of expression, so vivid, so
    deep, I do not call it good speaking; I call it good thinking
    (III. v).[91]

So he cannot stomach that Renaissance imitation which ran to borrowing,
nor that display of Latin style for itself which published even private
letters.

    Those indiscreet writers of our century who go sowing in their
    worthless works whole passages from the ancients to honor
    themselves (I. xxvi).

    But it surpasses all baseness of heart in persons of their rank
    that they have sought to derive a principal part of their fame
    from chatter and gossip, even to using the private letters
    written to their friends (I. xl).

So he is impatient with the unreality of romance.

    Going to war only after having announced it, and often after
    having assigned the hour and place of battle (I. v).

    Those Lancelots, Amadis, Huons, and such clutter of books to
    amuse children (I. xxvi).

Reviewing contemporary criticism of poetry, he says: “We have more poets
than judges and interpreters of poetry; it is easier to make it than to
know it” (I. xxxvii). “You may make a fool of yourself anywhere else,” he
warns, “but not in poetry” (II. xvii). So there is no room for mediocre
poetry.

    Popular, purely natural poetry has simplicities and graces
    comparable with the eminent beauty of poetry artistically
    perfect, as is evident in the Gascon villanelles and in songs
    brought to us from illiterate peoples. Mediocre poetry, which
    is neither the one nor the other, is disdained, without honor
    or even esteem (I. liv).

Dismissing in a scornful phrase “the Spanish and Petrarchist fanciful
elevations” (II. x), he exactly estimates the Latin poets of his
time as “good artisans in that craft” (II. xvii). Perhaps a certain
significance, therefore, attaches to his repeating the current
complacency with regard to French poetry.

    I think it has been raised to the highest degree it will ever
    attain; and in those directions in which Ronsard and Du Bellay
    excel I find them hardly below the ancient perfection (II.
    xvii).

Elsewhere, and habitually, Montaigne’s attitude toward the classics was
quite different from the habit of the Renaissance. He sought not so much
the Augustans as Seneca and the Plutarch of Amyot.

    Je n’ay dressé commerce avec aucun livre solide sinon Plutarque
    et Seneque, où je puyse comme les Danaides, remplissant et
    versant sans cesse (I. xxvi).

These, and even Cicero and Vergil, he sought not for style, but for
philosophy and morals. That sounder classicism of composition which,
through the Italian tradition of history, had animated Renaissance
essayists of the stricter sort he put aside. He was not interested in the
ancient rhetoric of composition, nor, to judge from his slight attention
to it, in that field of ancient poetic. He quotes both Dante and Tasso,
but not in that aspect. He is not interested in the growing appreciation
of Aristotle’s _Poetic_. In this disregard of composition, indeed, he
was of the Renaissance; but he rejected and even repudiated Renaissance
pursuit of classicism in style. There he adopted the sound doctrine of
Quintilian and scornfully, to use his own word, abjured borrowed plumes
and decorative dilation. If we use the word classical in its typical
Renaissance connotation, we must call Montaigne, as well as Rabelais,
anti-classical. Unlike as they are otherwise, they agree in satirizing
Renaissance classicism.

The positive aspect of this rejection is Montaigne’s homely concreteness.
Trying to teach his readers, not to dazzle them, he is very carefully
specific. To leave no doubt of his meaning, he will have it not merely
accepted, but felt. Therefore he is more than specific; he is concrete.
Imagery for him is not mythology; it is of native vintage.

“In this last scene between death and us there is no more pretending. We
have to speak French; we have to show how much that is good and clean is
left at the bottom of the pot” (I. xix). Such expression strikes us not
as wit, not as an aristocrat’s catering to the new public, but as the
sincere use of sensory terms to animate ideas. If it reminds us sometimes
of popular preaching, that is because Montaigne was a sage.




FOOTNOTES


[1] In H. Chamard, _Les Origines de la poésie française de la
Renaissance_ (Paris, 1920), p. 256.

[2] Bembo, _Prose_, II. xxi (Venice, 1525).

[3] Allen, _Age of Erasmus_, p. 121.

[4] É. Egger, _L’Hellénisme en France_ (Paris, 1869), pp. 358-359; see
Monnier, II, 134 for modern estimate of Renaissance Greek texts.

[5] _Prose_, I, vi (1525).

[6] Egger, p. 398.

[7] _Ibid._, p. 205.

[8] Edition of Osgood, pp. 119, 193.

[9] Probably the source of Rabelais’s Abbey of Thelème. He had read the
book.

[10] Page references to 1596 edition.

[11] Edited by Louis Humbert, Paris, 1914.

[12] Sir John Cheke, however, spoke as a scholar when he wrote to Hoby:
“I am of opinion that our own tung shold be written cleane and pure,
vnmixt and vnmangeled with borrowing of other tunges.” Quoted in Arber’s
Introduction to Ascham’s _Scholemaster_, p. 5.

[13] Parodied by _Orationes obscurorum virorum_ (before 1515), which was
part of the Reuchlin-Pfefferkorn controversy.

[14] This is the exercise called by the ancients _declamatio_. See ARP
(_Ancient Rhetoric and Poetic_) and a letter of Erasmus, May 1, 1506.

[15] _Bartholomaei Riccii De imitatione libri tres_ (Venice, 1545), folio
38 verso. See below, Chapter III, Sect. 3.

[16] MRP (_Medieval Rhetoric and Poetic_) I and II.

[17] Ep. 221 in Migne’s _Patrologia latina_ (Vol. 199, p. 247), which
dates it 1167; Ep. 223, p. 389, in the collection of the letters of
Gerbert, John of Salisbury, and Stephen of Tournay printed by Ruette
(Paris, 1611). The letter is translated MRP 209.

[18] _Apologia dei dialoghi_, opening; p. 516 of the Venice, 1596,
edition.

[19] For _De oratore_, see ARP.

[20] Minturno, _Arte poetica_, is mere catechism. Perionius hardly
achieves dialogue at all; his interlocutors merely interrupt.

[21] _Analecta hymnica._

[22] For the pattern of the classical rhetoric, see ARP.

[23] MRP.

[24] Paul Spaak, _Jean Lemaire_ (Paris, 1926).

[25] Pierre Villey, _Les Grands Écrivains du xviᵉ siècle_, I, 83-97,
110-148.

[26] _Evvres de Louize Labé, Lionnoize_, revues et corrigées par la dite
dame, à Lion, par Jean de Tournes, MDLVI (dedicatory epistle dated 1555).

[27] Each stanza of the _Epithalamion_ ends with a longer line (6
beats), which is the common refrain. The other lines have generally five
beats, but the sixth and eleventh have only three; and this variation
is occasionally extended. Generally there is a rhyme-shift after the
eleventh line, but not a break (11 lines on 5 rhymes [or 4] plus 7 lines
on 3 rhymes [or 4]). A few stanzas are lengthened to nineteen lines
(11 plus 8). Thus the typical variations in this triumph of metrical
interweaving are as follows, the underlined letters indicating the lines
of three beats:

  Stanza I            a b a b c _c_ b c b d _d_ / e f f e  e   g  g
         II           a b a b c _c_ d c d f _f_ / g h h g  g   h  h
         IV           a b a b c _c_ d c d e _e_ / f g g h _h_  i  i
         III. & VIII  a b a b c _c_ d c d e _e_ / f g g f  h  _h_ i i
  (19 lines)

[28] _Œuvres complètes de P. de Ronsard_, ed. par Paul Laumonier (Paris,
1914-1919), I, 316.

[29] London, Wynkyn de Worde, 1515.

[30] For Petrarch and Boccaccio, see Carrara, _La poesia pastorale_, pp.
88-111.

[31] Edited by M. Scherillo (Torino, 1888).

[32] Written 1573; published 1580; edited by Angelo Solerti (Torino,
1901).

[33] _Le Premier Livre d’Amadis de Gaule_, publié sur l’édition originale
par Hugues Vaganay (Paris, 1918), 2 vols.

[34] For Alamanni, see Henri Hauvette, _Un Exilé florentin ..._ Luigi
Alamanni (Paris, 1903).

[35] Edited by G. B. Weston (Bari, 2 vols.).

[36] So I. iii. 31, 51; v. 13, 56; vi. 54; ix. 36; xi. 46; and throughout
the poem.

[37] I. xxii is _fabliau_; and so, in various degrees, the stories
inserted at I. vi. 22, xiii. 29, xxix. 3; II. i. 22, xiii. 9, xxvi. 22;
III. ii. 47.

[38] E. Donadone, _Torquato Tasso_ (Venice, 1928).

[39] The stanzas are adapted by Spenser, FQ, Book II. xii. 74-75.

[40] Diocletian-giants-Brutus-Hogh-Gormet-Hercules, II. x. 7;
Tristan-nymphs-Latona’s son, VI. ii. 25.

[41] Chapter VII.

[42] For Seneca, see ARP.

[43] _Opera_, II, 2.

[44] “Acta fuit Burdegalae Anno MDXLIII” in the colophon can hardly mean
merely that the play was finished in that year.

[45] On tragicomedy, see H. C. Lancaster, _The French Tragicomedy, Its
Origins and Development from 1552 to 1628_ (Baltimore, 1907).

[46] For Garnier in England, see A. M. Witherspoon, _The Influence of
Robert Garnier on Elizabethan Drama_ (New Haven, 1924).

[47] For Plautus and Terence, see ARP.

[48] “Politian was in 1471, at the request of Cardinal Francesco Gonzaga,
despatched to Mantua by Lorenzo de’ Medici to prepare an entertainment
for the reception of Duke Galeazzo Maria Sforza. The _Orfeo_, a lyric
pastoral in dramatic form, prophetic of so much that was later to come,
was the contribution of the brilliant humanist and poet to the Duke’s
entertainment. It stands close to the fountainhead of European secular
drama.” H. M. Ayres, preface to his translation of the _Orfeo_ in
_Romanic Review_, XX (January, 1929), 1.

[49] See Chapter IV.

[50] Alfred Mortier, _Un Dramaturge populaire ... Ruzzante_. Œuvres
compl. traduites pour la première fois (Paris, 1926).

[51] ARP and MRP.

[52] For Aristotle’s _Poetic_, see ARP.

[53] For discussion of the romances, see Chapter V. For Giraldi’s
_novelle_, see Chapter VIII, 1, c.

[54] ARP.

[55] For Hermogenes, see MRP, pp. 23 ff.

[56] References are to the second edition of 1581. See also F. M.
Padelford, _Select Translations from Scaliger’s Poetics_ (New York, 1905).

[57] See above, Du Bellay, Chapter II, pp. 3, 6.

[58] See H. B. Charlton, _Castelvetro’s Theory of Poetry_ (Manchester,
1913).

[59] Lodge’s feebler _Defence of Poetry_ (1579) has little other interest
than the historical, i.e., as a reply to Gosson’s attack on the stage.

[60] In Smith’s reprint shortened by summary.

[61] Gregory Smith, II, 327-355.

[62] Gregory Smith, II, 356-384; Arthur Colby Sprague, _Samuel Daniel,
Poems and a Defence of Ryme_ (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1930).

[63] Patrizzi’s refutation of Tasso, 68, 116, 144/5, 173, 175.

[64] Nevertheless two of his references (V. 116; VI. 125) suggest,
perhaps without his intention, a relation between Plato’s _Symposium_ and
Aristotle’s idea of creative imitation.

[65] Pellissier’s long introduction and valuable notes, though they need
a few corrections by later studies, remain one of the most important
surveys of the French development of poetic in the sixteenth century.

[66] But Vauquelin with Tasso bids poets leave pagan myth for Christian
themes, though perhaps he refers only to subject; and he recognizes the
place of Montemayor’s _Diana_ among pastorals.

[67] For Aristotle’s _imitation_, see ARP, pages 139 ff.

[68] D. L. Clark, _Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance_ (New York,
1922).

[69] Cf. in Chapter VII Giraldi’s theory of the romance.

[70] This is inferred from a commendatory letter of Bartolomeo Cavalcanti
prefixed to this fourth (1580) edition.

[71] For editions and translations, see Louis Berthé de Besaucèle, _J.-B.
Giraldi_ (thesis at the University of Aix-en-Provence, Paris, 1920), pp.
109, 255, 258; for the French translator, Gabriel Chappuys, see p. 261.

[72] See above, p. 198.

[73] For the Gorgian figures, see MRP and Croll’s introduction to his
edition of _Euphues_.

[74] Samuel Lee Wolff, _The Greek Romances in Elizabethan Prose Fiction_
(New York, Columbia University Press, 1912).

[75] _Op. cit._, pp. 173 seq. The quotation is at p. 177.

[76] H. Brown, _Rabelais in English Literature_ (Harvard Press, 1933), p.
19.

[77] _Cf._ Budé, Chapter I, for Renaissance complacency.

[78] Above, Chapter II.

[79] J. Plattard, _François Rabelais_ (Paris, 1932), p. 194.

[80] _Ibid._, p. 140.

[81] _Ibid._, pp. 115 seq.

[82] Plattard, p. 117.

[83] For _narratio_, see ARP.

[84] In the prefatory epistle to Petrus Aegidius about two-thirds of the
first hundred clauses conform to the _cursus_ of the curial _dictamen_
(MRP). These clauses compose about twenty sentences ending: _planus_,
6 (30%); _tardus_, 2 (10%); _velox_, 7 (35%); unconformed, 5 (25%).
Inconclusive, this may be worth further study.

[85] See above, Chapter VIII.

[86] Citations are from Jacobus Stoer’s edition of 1595.

[87] The fourth edition, cited here, by Gabriel Cartier, 1599. Meantime
Bodin had published in 1586 a revised edition in Latin, _De re publica
libri vi_.

[88] Edition cited Edinburgh (Freebairn), 1715, _Opera omnia_, ed. Thomas
Ruddiman, Vol. I.

[89] See F. Strowski, _Montaigne_ (Paris, 1931).

[90] “Qu’il n’est rien si contraire à mon style qu’une narration estendue
(i.e., _narratio_, sustained exposition); je me recouppe si souvent à
fault d’haleine; je n’ay ni composition ny explication qui vaille” (I.
xxi).

[91] This is the doctrine of Quintilian, whom he quotes. ARP.




INDEX


  _Abraham and Isaac_, 136

  _Accademia della Crusca_, 30

  _Achilleis_ (Statius), 185

  Achilles Tatius, 79, 87, 188

  Acciajuoli, Donato, 214

  _Actores octo_, _see_ _Auctores octo_

  Adrian, Cardinal Corneto, 24

  _Aeneid_, 102, 104, 114, 121, 126, 127, 165, 185

  Aeschines, 26

  Alain de Lille, 9, 10

  Alamanni, Luigi, 13, 67, 96-98

  Alberti, Leone Battista, 27

  Aldus Manutius, 9, 20

  Alexandrian literature, 7, 78, 90

  Alexandrianism, 123, 188

  Allegory, 123, 130, 133

  Alliteration, 87, 129, 199

  Alunno, Francesco, 31, 37

  _Amadis of Gaul_, 95

  _Amants fortunés, Les_, 194

  _Ameto_ (Boccaccio), 82, 84

  _Aminta_ (Tasso), 87, 147, 153

  Amyot, Jacques, 23, 90, 238

  Anacreon, 21, 79

  _Annales d’Aquitaine_ (Bouchet), 134

  _Anthology_, 7, 21, 79, 104

  _Antigone_ (Garnier), 142

  _Antigone_ (Sophocles), 142

  Aphthonius, 21

  Apollonius Rhodius, 21, 79, 188

  Apuleius, 93, 179, 188

  Aquila, Serafino d’, 69

  Aquinas, 8, 9

  _Arcadia_ (Sannazaro), 83-87

  _Arcadia_ (Sidney), 90, 202

  Aretino, Leonardo, _see_ Bruni, Leonardo

  Ariosto, 9, 11, 24, 30, 67, 91, 96, 101, 104, 111-23, 131, 142, 143,
        147, 159, 160, 164, 168, 177, 179, 184, 205

  Aristotle, 15, 20, 25, 26, 53, 55, 61, 62, 63, 133, 145, 158, 159,
        164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 172, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179,
        184, 185, 186, 187, 189, 238

  “Ars poetica” (Horace), 10, 15, 133, 155, 158, 161, 163, 164, 165,
        171, 186, 188

  _Arte of English Poesie_ (Campion), 183

  _Arte of English Poesie_ (Puttenham), 182

  _Arte poetica_ (Minturno), 44_n_, 168

  Arthurian cycle, 96, 98

  _Art of rhetorique, The_ (Wilson), 62

  _Art poétique, L’_ (Peletier), 163-64

  _Art poétique, L’_ (Ronsard), 175

  _Art poétique, L’_ (Vauquelin de la Fresnaye), 186

  _Arts poétiques_, 15, 127

  Ascham, Roger, 37, 38_n_, 183

  _Astrophel and Stella_ (Sidney), 77

  _As You Like It_ (Shakspere), 146

  Athenaeus, 21

  _Auctores octo_, 10, 81

  Augustan Latin, 18, 44, 58, 65, 234

  Aulus Gellius, 10, 188

  Aurispa, 20

  Ausonius, 10, 79, 188

  _Avarchide_ (Alamanni), 96

  Ayres, H. M., quoted, 147_n_


  Baif, 34

  _Balade_, 10

  Balsamo-Crivelli, Gustavo, 190

  Bandello, Matteo, 190-94, 197, 198-99

  _Bankette of Sapience_ (Elyot), 227

  _Baptistes_ (Buchanan), 139

  _Basia_ (Secundus), 66

  Bede, 9

  Bellay, Cardinal du, 211

  Bellay, Joachim du, 10, 32, 34, 69, 163, 238

  Belleau, Remi, 21

  Belleforest, 198

  Bembo, 9, 15, 22, 26, 28, 30, 31, 36, 87, 170, 179, 188

  Beolco, Angelo, _see_ Ruzzante

  Berni, 111

  Besaucèle, 195_n_

  Bessarion, Johannes, 20, 39

  Beza, 179

  Bibbiena, Cardinal, 179

  _Blason_, 118

  Boccaccio, 5, 6, 13, 14, 15, 20, 23, 27, 28, 29, 31, 32, 60, 67, 82,
        84, 87, 104, 121, 153, 170, 177, 179, 185, 186, 194-96

  Bodin, 228, 229, 230, 230_n_, 231, 232

  Boece, Hector, 216

  Boethius, 9, 25, 37, 85

  Boiardo, Matteo Maria, 11, 91, 92, 93, 94, 101-11, 120, 124, 125,
        127, 159

  Bouchet, Jean, 134

  Boulanger, André, 163

  _Bradamante_ (Garnier), 142

  Brocardo, Jacopo, 63

  Brome _Abraham and Isaac_, 136

  Brown, H., 202_n_

  Browne, Sir Thomas, 52

  Bruni, Leonardo, 39, 214-17, 226

  Buchanan, George, 17, 137-39, 179, 216, 226, 230, 231

  _Bucolics_ (Vergil), 80, 165

  _Bucolicum carmen_ (Petrarch), 82

  Budé, Guillaume, 4, 22, 34, 207_n_

  Bundy, M. W., 162


  Caesar, 18, 216

  Caesarius, Joannes, 55

  Callimachus, 72, 79

  Calpurnius, 87

  Camillo, Giulio, 50, 55, 56, 170, 171, 188

  Campion, Thomas, 183

  Capranica, Cardinal, 39

  _Carde of Fancie_ (Greene), 201

  Carolingian cycle, 100, 101, 124

  Cartier, Gabriel, 230_n_

  Castelvetro, 176, 185, 189

  Castiglione, Baldassare, 12, 30, 43, 53, 67, 114, 177, 223-25, 231

  _Cathonet_, 10, 81

  Cato, 58, 81

  Catullus, 57, 58, 65, 66, 72, 86, 87, 170

  Cavalcanti, Bartolomeo, 63, 195_n_

  Caviceo, Jacopo, 39, 40

  Caxton, William, 37, 96, 98, 130

  _Certaine notes of instruction concerning ... verse or rime ..._
        (Gascoigne), 180

  Cervantes, 132, 213

  Chamard, H., 8_n_

  Champier, Symphorien, 93

  _Chansons de geste_, 124

  Chappuys, Gabriel, 195_n_

  Charlton, H. B., 176_n_

  Châteillon, Sébastien, 52

  _Châtelaine de Vergi_, 194

  Chaucer, 5, 13, 14, 15, 24, 37, 67, 70, 89, 96, 108, 121, 122, 153,
        180, 181, 183, 198

  Cheke, Sir John, 38_n_

  Chemnicensis, 181

  Chivalry, 11, 92, 124, 130, 131

  Chronicles, 214

  Chrysolaras, Manuel, 20

  Cicero, 10, 15, 18, 26, 28, 30, 40, 41, 43-45, 53, 62, 63, 163, 164,
        169, 175, 178, 188, 202, 214, 216, 223, 225, 230, 234, 238

  Ciceronianism, 44, 45, 48, 49, 51, 53, 57

  Cicero thesaurus, 46, 49

  Cinthio, Giraldi, 29, 158-61, 188

  Clark, D. L., 189_n_

  Classicism, 3, 7, 9, 39, 45, 79, 187, 239

  Claudian, 10, 72, 79, 87, 160, 174, 188

  Colonna, Francesco, 25, 202, 209

  Comedy, 133, 134, 146-54

  _Comedy of Errors_ (Shakspere), 147

  Comes, Natalis, _see_ Conti, Natale

  _Compleint d’amour_, 118

  _Concorde des deux langages_ (Lemaire), 31, 69

  _Conflictus_, 43

  Conti, Natale, 23

  Cook, Albert S., 178

  _Copia_ (Erasmus), 54

  Corneille, 53, 145, 154

  _Cornélie_ (Garnier), 141

  Corpus Christi cycles, 135

  _Cortegiano_ (Castiglione), 12, 43, 53, 223, 224

  Cortesi, Paolo, 41, 48

  Court shows, medieval, 133, 147

  Croft, H. S., 227

  _Cursus_, 42

  Cuspidius, 211

  Cyclical romances, 98, 100, 101, 119

  _Cyropaedia_ (Xenophon), 93


  Daniel, Samuel, 183

  Dante, 5, 8, 13, 14, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 60, 66, 82, 87, 110,
        114, 119, 132, 158, 162, 168, 169, 177, 179, 238

  _Daphnis and Chloe_ (Longus), 23, 79, 90

  Dati, Agostino, 39

  _De arte poetica_ (Vida), 155-58

  _Débat_, 42

  _Débat de Folie et d’Amour_ (Labé), 71

  _De bello italico adversos gothos gesto historia_ (Bruni), 215

  _Decameron_ (Boccaccio), 14, 60, 194, 195

  _De causis corruptarum artium_ (Vives), 54

  _De contemptu mundi_, 10

  _De elegantiae linguae latinae_, 8, 19

  _Defence of Ryme_ (Daniel), 183

  _Defense of Poesy_ (Sidney), 89, 178-80

  _Defense of Poetry_ (Lodge), 179_n_

  _Deffense et illustration de la langue française_ (Du Bellay), 32

  _De imitatione_ (Ricci), 50, 57

  _De inventione_ (Cicero), 10, 45

  _De jure regni apud Scotos dialogus_ (Buchanan), 230

  _De laudibus D. Eusebii_ (Dati), 39

  _De linguae gallicae origine_ (Périon), 33

  Delivery, 54

  Deloney, Thomas, 202

  Demosthenes, 21, 26, 28, 63

  Denores, Jason, 185

  _De oratore_ (Cicero), 15, 43, 44, 45, 53, 225

  _De poeta_ (Minturno), 13, 15, 164-67;
    excerpt, 4

  _De ratione dicendi_ (Vives), 54

  _De re publica_ (Bodin), 230_n_

  _De senectute_ (Cicero), 208

  _De studio literarum_ (Budé), 4

  De Tournes, 13

  _De tradendis disciplinis_ (Vives), 54

  _Dialogo delle lingue_ (Speroni), 26

  Dialogues, 6, 39, 42, 225

  _Dialogus Ciceronianus_ (Erasmus), 49

  _Diana_ (Montemayor), 186_n_

  _Dictamen_, 42

  Diomedes, 10

  Dionysius of Halicarnassus, 158

  _Discorsi dell’ arte poetica ..._ (Tasso), 176-78

  _Discorsi ... intorno al comporre de i romanzi, delle commedie, e
        delle tragedie_ (Cinthio), 158-61;
    excerpt, 29

  _Discourse of English Poetrie_ (Webbe), 180

  _Discussions of Tuscan_ (Tomitano), 59

  Discussions on politics and society, 223-32

  _Dispositio_, 54, 60, 64, 176

  _Divina Commedia_ (Dante), 5, 132, 158, 168

  Dolce, Lodovico, 30

  Donadone, E., 125

  Donati, Edouardo, 180

  Donatus, 10

  _Don Quixote_ (Cervantes), 132, 213

  Dorat, Jean, 72, 163

  Drama, 12, 87, 133-154, 190

  Dramaturgy, 6, 134, 137

  Dryden, 13, 132

  Du Bellay, _see_ Bellay

  _Due trattati_ (Camillo), 55


  Eclogues, 81 ff.

  _Education of Children_ (Montaigne), 233

  Egger, Émile, 21_n_, 23_n_, 202

  _Elizabethan Critical Essays_ (Smith), 180

  Elizabethan drama, 12, 133, 144 ff., 152, 190

  _Elocutio_, 54

  Elyot, Sir Thomas, 227, 231

  Empedocles, 184

  Encomium, 55, 72, 75, 90, 111, 112, 131, 188

  _Endymion_ (Lyly), 152

  English language, 36-38

  English lyric, 66

  _Epithalamion_ (Spenser), 74, 77

  Erasmus, 17, 40_n_, 42, 49, 54, 57, 63, 83, 98, 173, 204, 226, 231

  _Essay on Satire_ (Dryden), 132

  Essays, 223-39

  _Estrif_, 42

  Étienne (printers), 9

  Étienne, Henri, 21, 23, 34

  _Etymologiae_ (Isidore of Seville), 10

  _Euphues_ (Lyly), 200

  Euphuism, 198, 200, 222

  Euripides, 53, 61, 138, 139, 144, 165

  Euryalus, 157

  Eusebius, 39

  Everaerts, Jan, _see_ Secundus

  _Exempla_, 131, 194, 196, 231, 232

  _Exordium_, 60


  _Fabliau_, 109, 120, 134, 190, 194, 196

  Fabri, Pierre, 68

  _Fabrica del mondo, Della_ (Alunno), 31

  _Faerie Queene_ (Spenser), 77, 123, 128-32, 152

  Fenton, 198

  _Fiammetta_ (Boccaccio), 60

  Fichet, Guillaume, 7

  _Fons Bandusiae_, 72

  Fracastoro, Girolamo, 162, 163, 170, 179

  _Frame of the World, The_ (Alunno), 31

  French language, 31-36


  Gaguin, Robert, 7

  Gallus, Cornelius, 87

  Garnier, Robert, 53, 139-44, 150, 151, 153

  Gascoigne, George, 180

  _Gawain and the Green Knight_, 96

  _Genealogia deorum gentilium_ (Boccaccio), 23

  Geoffrey of Monmouth, 9

  George of Trebizond, 53

  _Georgics_ (Vergil), 165

  Gerlandia, Johannes de, 15

  _Gerusalemme liberata_ (Tasso), 7, 53, 123, 124-27

  _Gestes ensemble la vie du preulx chevalier Bayard_ (Champier), 93

  Giovanni di Virgilio, 82

  Giraldi Cinthio (Giovan-Battista Giraldi), 195-97

  Golden Age, 87, 89

  _Golden Ass_ (Apuleius), 93

  _Golden Legend_, 9

  Googe, 181

  _Governour, The_ (Elyot), 227

  _Grande et vraie art de pleine rhétorique_ (Fabri), 68

  Gray, Thomas, 74

  Greek dramaturgy, 6, 134, 137

  Greek exiles in Italy, 20

  Greek language, revival, 5 ff., 19-27, 35

  Greek Literature, 7, 78, 79, 90, 137, 145, 179, 188

  Greek oratory, 40

  Greene, Robert, 201

  Grotesque, 101, 106

  Gryphius, 9, 13

  Guarini, 148 ff.

  Guarino da Verona, 20, 210

  Guicciardini, 228

  _Gyrone il cortese_ (Luigi Alamanni), 96


  Harvey, Gabriel, 183

  _Hecatommithi_ (Giraldi Cinthio), 195-97

  Heinsius, 138

  Heliodorus, 79, 188

  _Henry V_ (Shakspere), 146

  _Heptameron_ (Marguerite de Navarre), 14, 194

  Hermes Trismegistus, 20

  Hermogenes, 21, 55, 63, 79, 160, 170, 171, 188

  Herodotus, 92, 214

  Hesiod, 181

  Hippocrates, _Aphorisms_, 211

  _Hippolyte_ (Garnier), 141

  _Historiarum florentini_ (Bruni), 214-17

  History, 213-22

  History plays, 144-46

  _History of King Richard the Thirde, The_ (More), 217-20, 226

  Homer, 7, 20, 22, 58, 96, 156, 157, 160, 165, 168, 173, 184, 185

  Hooker, Richard, 52, 220

  Horace, 65, 71, 72, 73, 86, 87, 114, 131, 156, 160, 161, 166, 168,
        169, 170, 174, 179, 180, 181, 182, 189;
    “Ars poetica,” 10, 15, 133, 155, 158, 161, 163, 164, 165, 171, 186,
        188

  Howard, Henry, Earl of Surrey, 13, 37, 67, 180, 181

  Hugh of St. Victor, 9

  Humanism, 14, 17-19, 30, 39, 71, 82, 137, 138

  Humanistic Latin tragedy, 139

  Humbert, Louis, 34_n_

  _Hypnerotomachia_ (Colonna), 25, 202, 209


  _Idea del theatro, L’_ (Camillo), 56

  _Ideas_ (Hermogenes), 55

  _Idylls of the King_ (Tennyson), 93

  Imaginary addresses, 40

  _Imitatio Christi_, 52

  Imitation, 19, 39-90, 187

  _Imitatione poetica, Della_ (Partenio), 169-71

  _Inventio_, 53, 54, 60, 63, 176

  Isidore of Seville, 10

  _Isocolon_, 200

  Isocrates, 21

  _Isopet_, 10, 81

  _Istorie fiorentine_ (Macchiavelli), 220-22, 224

  Italian language, 27-31, 35

  Italian orations, 40


  _Jardin de plaisance, Le_, 10

  Jean d’ Arras, 95

  _Jephthes_ (Buchanan), 138, 139

  _Jerusalem Delivered_ (Tasso), 7, 53, 123, 124-27

  John of Salisbury, 8, 42, 45

  Johnson, Samuel, 42, 212

  Jonson, Ben, 89

  _Juifves, Les_ (Garnier), 143

  Junta, 9


  Kelso, Ruth, 162


  Labé, Louise, 13, 71

  Ladislaus, King, 39

  Lancaster, H. C., 142_n_

  Landriani, Gherardo, 44

  Latin language, 6, 7, 14, 17, 26, 27, 46, 155, 216, 232

  Latin literature, 5, 17-19, 39, 41, 45, 46, 65, 79, 134, 138, 139

  Lemaire, Jean, 31, 65, 68, 69, 71

  Letters, 39, 41, 42

  Libanius, 21

  _Liber Theoduli_, 82

  Livy, 21, 63, 213, 214

  Lodge, 179_n_

  Longueil, Christophe de (Longolius), 46, 50, 57, 59

  Longus, 23, 79

  Loyola, 210

  Lucan, 10, 79, 174

  Lucian, 93, 226

  Lucretius, 26, 58, 87, 236

  Lumby, J. R., 217

  Lydgate, John, 67

  Lyly, John, 38, 152, 153, 181, 200


  Macchiavelli, 10, 12, 178, 213, 216, 220-24, 229, 231, 232

  Macrobius, 188

  Maggio, Vicentio, 159

  Mair, G. H., 62

  Malory, Sir Thomas, 11, 36, 37, 91-99, 103, 105, 107, 130

  Manilius, 58

  Mantuan (Baptista Spagnolo), 82, 88, 89, 180

  Manuals, 15, 53

  _Marc-Antoine_ (Garnier), 141

  Marguerite de Navarre, 14, 194

  Marionettes, Carlomagno, 100

  Marlowe, Christopher, 137, 146

  Marot, Clement, 65, 67, 70, 75, 90

  Martial, 70

  Martianus Capella, 10

  Matthieu de Vendôme, 10

  _Medea_ (Euripides), 138, 139

  Medici, Cosimo dei, 12

  Medici, Lorenzo de’, 147_n_

  Melanchthon, 179, 228

  Melodrama, 12, 144

  _Mélusine_ (Jean d’ Arras), 9, 95

  _Memoria_, 54

  Menander, 170

  _Merchant of Venice_ (Shakspere), 146

  _Metamorphoses_ (Ovid), 185

  _Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem_ (Bodin), 228

  Metric, 180

  Michael Angelo, 29

  _Midsummer Night’s Dream_ (Shakspere), 153

  Migne, 42_n_

  _Mignonne_ (Ronsard), 77

  Milton, 132, 144

  Minturno, 13, 15, 44_n_, 164-69

  _Miracle_, 133, 134, 135

  Miracle plays, 7

  Montaigne, 18, 23, 178, 232-39

  Montano, Cola, 222

  Montemayor, 186_n_

  More, Sir Thomas, 17, 37, 217-20, 226

  _Morgante maggiore_ (Pulci), 100-102

  _Morte d’Arthur_ (Malory), 92, 98-99

  Mortier, Alfred, 152_n_

  Muret, Marc Antoine, (Muretus), 41, 50, 179

  Muzio, 161-62

  _Mystère_, 133, 134, 135

  _Mythologiae_ (Conti), 23

  Mythology, 23, 77, 87, 147, 198


  _Naenia_ (Pontano), 66

  _Narratio_, 60, 64, 220

  Narrative, prose, 190-222

  _Nativity_ (York), 137

  Navagero, 67, 170

  Nemesianus, 87

  Neo-Platonists, 7, 20

  Nepos, Cornelius, 93

  Nicoli, Nicolao, 12

  “Nizolian paper books,” 46

  _Novella_, 14

  _Novelle_ (Bandello), 190-94, 198-99


  _Observations on Petrarch_ (Alunno), 31

  _Observations on the Vernacular_ (Dolce), 30

  _Ode to Michel de l’Hospital_ (Ronsard), 73

  _Ode to the King on the Peace_ (Ronsard), 73

  Odes, Pindaric, 72 ff.

  _Odyssey_ (Homer), 185

  _Old Wives’ Tale_ (Peele), 152

  _Oratio in expositione Homeri_ (Poliziano), 22

  _Orationes clarorum virorum_, 40

  _Orationes obscurorum virorum_, 40_n_

  Orations, 39, 40, 41, 61

  _Orator_ (Cicero), 44, 45

  _Orfeo_ (Poliziano), 147

  _Orlando furioso_ (Ariosto), 111-23, 142, 168

  _Orlando innamorato_ (Boiardo), 93, 102-11

  Ovid, 23, 58, 65, 71, 72, 79, 86, 87, 160, 174, 180, 181, 185


  Padelford, F. M., 171_n_

  Pagan terms used for Christian religion, 49

  Pageantry, 87, 133

  _Paladini di Francia, I_, 100

  _Pantagruel_ (Rabelais), 207, 211

  _Paradise Lost_ (Milton), 132

  _Parison_, 200

  _Parlement of Foules_ (Chaucer), 70

  Parody, in Rabelais, 204

  _Paromoion_, 200

  Partenio, Bernardino, 169-71, 188

  _Partitiones oratoriae_ (Brocardo), 63

  Pastoral, 78-90, 146-54

  _Pastor fido, Il_ (Guarini), 148 ff.

  Patrizzi, Francesco, 61, 184

  Peele, 152, 153

  Peletier, Jacques, 163-64

  Pellissier, Georges, 186

  Périon, 33

  _Petite Pallace of Pettie His Pleasure, A_ (Pettie), 199

  Petrarch, 5, 6, 13, 20, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 37, 60, 65, 66, 67,
        68, 69, 71, 82, 87, 114, 161, 162, 168, 170, 177, 179, 188,
        222, 237

  Petrus Comestor, 10

  Pettie, William, 199

  _Pharmaceutria_, 58, 81

  Pico, 170

  _Piers Plowman_, 131

  _Pilgrim’s Progress_, 52

  Pindar, 71, 72, 79, 168, 179

  Pindarics, 72 ff.

  Plantin, Christophe, 9

  Plato, 7, 20, 25, 26, 43, 44, 62, 63, 165, 178, 179, 226

  Platonic dialogue, 43, 61

  Platonism, 25, 61

  Plattard, J., 210_n_, 211_n_, 212_n_

  Plautus, 58, 134, 147, 151

  Plays, sacred, 134-37

  Pléiade, 32, 37, 65, 69, 70, 71, 74, 119, 163, 175, 183, 186, 204

  Pliny, 26, 198

  Plutarch, 23, 63, 140, 179, 208, 238

  _Poema eroico_ (Tasso), 176

  Poetic, confusion with rhetoric, 15, 188

  _Poetic_ (Aristotle), 15, 25, 158, 164, 176, 189, 238

  _Poetica_ (Scaliger), 4, 171-75

  _Poetica_ (Trissino), 67, 158

  _Poetica dialogus_ (Fracastoro), 162

  _Poetica di Francesco Patrici ..._, 184

  _Poetica di Jason Denores_, 185

  Poetics, sixteenth-century, 155-89

  Politics, discussions on, 223-32

  Poliziano, 22, 41, 47-49, 50, 57, 87, 166, 226

  _Pollio_ (Vergil), 81

  Pontano, 58, 66, 72, 170, 179

  _Pontus and the Fair Sidoine_, 9, 95

  Porcari, Stefano, 221

  _Porcie_ (Garnier), 139

  _Praelectio_, 41, 47, 50

  _Preëminence of the French language_ (Étienne), 34

  _Principe_ (Macchiavelli), 223

  Printers, 9

  Printing, effect on literary progress, 5, 9, 30, 231

  Priscian, 10

  _Project du livre entitulé De la précellence du langage françois_
        (Étienne), 34

  _Pronuntiatio_, 54

  Propertius, 87

  _Prose_ (Bembo), 28

  Prose forms, imitation of, 39-64

  Prose narrative, 190-222

  _Prosopopoeia_, 40

  _Prothalamion_ (Spenser), 74

  Provençal, 28, 36, 66

  _Proverbia_ (Alain de Lille), 10

  Publishers, 9, 13

  Pulci, Luigi, 100-102, 109

  Puttenham, 182, 183


  Quintilian, 15, 47, 53, 55, 62, 63, 163, 164, 236_n_, 238


  Rabelais, François, 22, 25_n_, 37, 202-13, 239

  _Ragionamenti della lingua toscana_ (Tomitano), 59

  Raphael, 29

  _Ratio studiorum_, 64

  Religion, in Tasso and Spenser, 123, 124

  _Rerum scoticarum historia_ (Buchanan), 216

  _Retorica, Della_ (Patrizzi), 61

  _Retorica, La_ (Cavalcanti), 63

  Rhetoric, confusion of poetic with, 15;
    of Hermogenes, 188;
    recovery of Cicero’s works on, 44;
    Renaissance preoccupation with, 41

  _Rhetoric_ (Aristotle), 62, 63

  _Rhetoric_ (Soarez), 64

  _Rhetorica_ (Joannes Caesarius), 55

  _Rhetorica_ (George of Trebizond), 53

  _Rhetorica ad Herennium_, 10, 45, 63

  Rhetorics, 53-64

  _Rhétoriques_, 68

  _Rhétoriqueurs_, 65, 68

  Rhythm, English tradition of, 180

  Ricci, Bartolomeo, 40, 40_n_, 50, 57

  _Richard III_ (More), 217-20, 226

  _Richard III_ (Shakspere), 146

  _Riches of the Vernacular, The_ (Alunno), 31

  _Rime diverse del Mutio Iustinopolitano ..._ (Muzio), 161-62

  Robinson, Edwin Arlington, 93

  Robinson, Ralph, 226

  Romance, 91-132;
    Arthurian cycle in Malory, 98;
    Carolingian cycle, 100, 101, 124;
    Greek, 7, 90, 179, 188;
    separate romances, 95-98

  _Roman de la Rose_, 70

  Romantic contrast, 91-95

  Ronsard, Pierre de, 10, 21, 23, 34, 35, 65, 67, 71-75, 77, 113, 119,
        163, 175, 179, 188, 238

  Round Table stories, 98, 108

  Rouville, 13

  Ruddiman, Thomas, 230_n_

  Ruskin, John, 62

  Rustic and pastoral comedy, 146-54

  Ruzzante (Angelo Beolco), 150 ff.


  Sacred plays, 133-37

  _Sacre rappresentazioni_, 134

  Sallust, 18, 58

  _Samson Agonistes_ (Milton), 144

  Sannazaro, Jacopo, 83-87, 165, 170, 179

  Sansovino, Francesco, 40

  Sappho, 87

  Satire, of Rabelais, 207

  Scaliger, Joseph, 137, 138, 188, 216

  Scaliger, Julius Caesar, 4, 23, 171-75, 179

  Scève, Maurice, 13

  _Schemata_, 200

  Scholars, gentlemen, 187

  _Scholemaster_ (Ascham), 38_n_

  _Scotorum historiae_ (Boece), 216

  _Secunda Pastorum_, 137, 150

  Secundus, Joannes, 66, 72

  Seneca, 10, 21, 87, 133, 134, 137, 142, 144, 145, 146, 158, 159, 165,
        166, 179, 234, 238

  _Sententiae_, 221

  Shakspere, 145, 146, 147, 150, 153, 196

  Shaksperian sonnet, 68

  _Shepherd’s Calendar_ (Spenser), 88-90

  Sidney, Sir Philip, 46, 77, 89, 90, 178-80, 181, 188, 189, 202

  Sidonius, 10, 188

  Silius Italicus, 174, 188

  _Six Livres de la république, Les_, (Bodin), 230

  Skelton, 37, 67, 202

  Smith, G. Gregory, 180, 182

  Soarez, 64

  Solerti, Angelo, 87, 176

  Sonnet, 66, 68, 77

  Sophistic, 21, 40, 53, 55, 188, 200

  Sophocles, 20, 21, 61, 142, 144, 165

  Spagnolo, Baptista (Mantuan), 82, 88, 89, 180

  _Speculum_ (Vincent of Beauvais), 10

  Spenser, 9, 13, 14, 24, 37, 73, 74, 75, 77, 88-91, 111, 123, 127-32,
        152, 180, 181, 183

  Speroni, Sperone, 26, 43, 59, 60

  Sprague, Arthur C., 183_n_

  Statius, 10, 47, 87, 142, 174, 185, 188

  _Status_, 54

  Stephen of Tournay, 42_n_

  Stoer, Jacobus, 228

  Story-tellers, street, 100, 101

  Story-telling, _see_ Tales

  Strowski, F., 233_n_

  Style, literary preoccupation with, 18, 29, 52, 137

  _Suppositi, I_ (Ariosto), 147

  Surrey, Henry Howard, Earl of, _see_ Howard, Henry


  Tacitus, 41, 50, 213, 214, 223

  Tales, 190-202

  _Tamburlaine_ (Marlowe), 146

  Tasso, 7, 30, 52, 87, 91, 123-27, 148, 150, 153, 176-78, 184, 185,
        189, 238

  Tatius, _see_ Achilles Tatius

  Tennyson, 93

  Terence, 58, 134, 147, 170

  Theocritus, 58, 79, 81, 86, 87, 88, 173

  _Theodulus_, 82

  Thesaurus, 46

  Three styles, 15, 165, 166, 177

  Thucydides, 21, 63, 213, 214

  Tibullus, 87

  _Timone_ (Boiardo), 93

  _Tobias_ (Matthieu de Vendôme), 10

  Tolomei, Claudio, 40

  Tomitano, Bernardino, 59

  Tournes, Jean de, 163

  Towneley Plays, _Secunda Pastorum_, 137, 150

  Tragedy, 133, 134, 137-45

  Tragicomedy, 133, 142, 148

  _Trattato della imitatione_ (Camillo), 50

  _Trimerone_ (Patrizzi), 184

  _Trionfi_ (Petrarch), 168

  Trissino, Giovan Giorgio, 67, 158, 159, 177

  _Troade, La_ (Garnier), 141

  _Troilus and Criseyde_ (Chaucer), 15, 24, 96, 122

  Turnebus, 137

  Tuscan, 28, 30

  Tusser, 181


  _Urbium dicta Maximilianum_ (Caviceo), 40

  _Utopia_ (More), 226


  Valla, Lorenzo, 8, 19

  Varro, 58

  Vauquelin de la Fresnaye, 186, 188, 189

  _Venatio_ (Adrian), 24

  Vérard, Antoine, 68

  Vergil, 18, 26, 30, 53, 56, 58, 63, 65, 71, 72, 79, 80, 82, 84, 86,
        87, 88, 96, 98, 110, 114, 122, 123, 155, 156, 157, 160, 162,
        163, 165, 166, 170, 173, 174, 177, 179, 181, 236, 238;
    _Aeneid_, 102, 104, 114, 121, 126, 127, 165, 185

  Vernaculars, 5, 17, 27-38, 68-78

  Verse, English discussion of, 180-84

  Verse narrative, medieval, 7, 10, 91, 96

  Vespasiano, 12

  Vida, Marco Girolamo, 155-58, 163, 170, 172

  Villon, 10, 68

  Vincent of Beauvais, 10

  Vinea, Gabriel, 13

  Vittorino, 210

  Vives, Juan Luis, 54, 210

  Vopiscus, 50


  Webbe, William, 180, 183

  Weston, G. B., 100_n_

  Wiat, Sir Thomas, 13, 67

  Wilson, Thomas, 62

  Witherspoon, A. M., 144_n_

  Wolff, Samuel Lee, 202_n_

  Wyatt, Sir Thomas, _see_ Wiat, Sir Thomas


  Xenophon, 93


  York Plays, _Nativity_, 137