Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance Part 6

If I should undertake to wryte in prayse of a gentlewoman, I would neither praise her christal eye, nor her cherrie lippe, etc. For these things are _trita et obvia_. But I would either find some supernaturall cause whereby my penne might walke in the superlative degree, or els I would undertake to answer for any imperfection that shee hath, and thereupon rayse the prayse of hir commendacion.[197]

By far the greater part of Gascoigne's treatise is devoted to metrics and to style. One can use, he says, the same figures or tropes in verse as are used in prose. It is noteworthy that in this treatise on making verses Gascoigne restricts himself to externals of form and style. When he does discuss the subject-matter of poetry, instead of emphasizing the seriousness of content, he talks about his mistress' "cristal eye."

What has been said about Gascoigne applies almost equally well to the _Schort Treatise_ (1584) of James VI which was modeled on it. Like Gascoigne's _Notes_, it is rhetorical and concerned with only the externals of poetry. The treatise is almost entirely a metrical study, although the author does call attention to three special ornaments of verse, which are comparisons, epithets, and proverbs. The other figures of rhetoric which are so appropriate to poetry James says may be studied in Du Bellay. In both these writers, poetry is treated in the categories of the middle ages. Poetry to them is composed of subject-matter and style.

The characteristic structure and movement of poetry is not considered at all.

2. The Influence of Horace

Thus far there had been no fundamental criticism of poetic in England, no attempt to arrive at the basis of critical theory. Horace had been known long before, but not until Drant's translation of the _Ars Poetica_ into English in 1567 is its influence seen to be definite and extensive in England. One of the earliest published evidences of this influence is George Whetstone's _Dedication to Promos and Ca.s.sandra_ (1578). The pa.s.sage is short, but contains two very important points in the creed of cla.s.sicism. Whetstone inveighs against the English dramatist who "in three howers ronnes throwe the worlde, marryes, gets children, makes Children men, men to conquer kingdomes, murder Monsters, and bringeth G.o.ds from Heaven, and fetcheth Divels from Hel."[198] This is the earliest record in England of an insistence on unity of time and place. Then he urges the claims of decorum in comedy. The poet should not make clowns the companions of kings, nor put wise counsels into the mouth of fools. "For, to worke a comedie kindly, grave olde men should instruct, yonge men should showe the imperfections of youth, Strumpets should be lascivious, Boyes unhappy, and Clownes should speake disorderlye."[199]

It is interesting that this conception of the characters in a drama should ultimately trace back through many perversions to Aristotle's rhetorical theory. There are three kinds of proof, says Aristotle in the _Rhetoric_: the character of the speaker, the production of a certain disposition in the audience, and the argument of the speech itself. The last kind of proof is derived from logic; the first two, from psychology.[200]

Consequently, Aristotle devotes almost a third of his _Rhetoric_, the second book, to an elaborate exposition of the pa.s.sions (p???) of men, so that the orator may know how to excite or allay them according as the necessities of his case demand, and a full explanation of the character (????) of men, that the speaker may know how to impress upon his audience his own trustworthiness, and adapt his arguments to the character of the particular audience which he is addressing. Varieties of character in an audience depend upon its pa.s.sions, its virtues and vices, its age or youth, and its position in life.[201] Aristotle's generalizations on the character of young people and old, of the wealthy, n.o.ble and powerful, display penetrating ac.u.men. That flesh and blood character realizations in drama or story could be attained by this method Aristotle never intended.

He is talking of public address. But the study of characterization as part of the education of an orator became fixed in the curriculum of rhetoric schools. The boys were supposed to study certain types of persons and then write character sketches to show their sharpness of observation.

Theophrastus, Aristotle's favorite student and successor as head of the school in Athens, wrote his _Characters_ to show how it was done, and did it with such ability as to elevate the school exercise to a literary form. These "characters" were epitomized in the Latin rhetorics and the school exercises continued. The rhetoric _Ad Herennium_ calls them _notatio_,[202] Cicero, _descriptio_,[203] and Quintilian, _mores_.[204]

Quintilian furthermore makes interesting comments on the use of the character sketches by the poets. Character (Greek: ????) in oratory, he says, is similar to comedy, as the pa.s.sions (p????) are to tragedy.[205]

Professor Butcher calls attention to the early influence of the character sketches on the middle comedy. Here the "humours," to antic.i.p.ate Ben Jonson, give names not only to the characters of the play, but to the plays themselves.[206] As adopted by the drama, the orator's view that people of a certain age and rank are likely to behave in certain fas.h.i.+ons was perverted to the dramatical law of _decorum_, that people of certain age or rank must on the stage act up to this generalization of what was characteristic. This law of decorum was formulated by Horace in his _Ars Poetica_,[207] whence it was derived by the renaissance. Thomas Wilson, in his _Arte of Rhetorique_, gives a Theophrastian character sketch as an ill.u.s.tration of the figure _descriptio_.

"As in speaking against a covetous man, thus. There is no such pinch peney on live as this good fellowe is. He will not lose the paring of his nailes. His haire is never rounded for sparing of money, one paire of shone serveth him a twelve month, he is shod with nailes like a Horse. He hath bene knowne by his coate this thirtie Winter. He spent once a groate at good ale, being forced through companie, and taken short at his words, whereupon he hath taken such conceipt since that time, that it hath almost cost him his life."[208]

In 1592 Casaubon edited Theophrastus in Latin. Thereafter the character sketch became a literary form, as in Hall, Overbury, and Earle, instead of remaining merely a rhetorical exercise.[209] In the theory of the drama the rhetorical method of characterization, fixed as the law of decorum, flourished throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In England from Whetstone on it was made much of. Thus a rhetorical tradition of cla.s.sical pedagogy, derived ultimately from Aristotle, and a poetical tradition of later cla.s.sical drama, derived from Horace, coincide in the English renaissance.

In _The Epistle Dedicatory to the Shepheards Calender_ (1579), for instance, E.K. praises Spenser for "his dewe observing of decorum everye where, in personages, in seasons, in matter, in speach."[210] The archaisms are defended in the first place, indeed, because they are appropriate to rustic speakers, but in the second because Cicero says that ancient words make the style seem grave and reverend. Further praise E.K.

grants the author because he avoids loose sentence structure and affects the oratorical period. "Now, for the knitting of sentences, whych they call the ioynts and members thereof, and for all the compa.s.se of the speach, it is round without roughness."[211] The "ioynts and members" are the _cola_ and _commas_ of the oratorical prose rhythm. Stanyhurst in the _Dedication_ to his translation of Virgil (1582), like E. K., is concerned with style rather than matter, and of course primarily with the revival of cla.s.sical meters, a subject already so thoroughly investigated that it need not be gone into here.[212] Stanyhurst's praise of Virgil is largely concerned with formal and rhetorical excellences.

Our _Virgil_ dooth laboure, in telling as yt were a _Cantorburye tale_, too ferret owt the secretes of _Nature_, with woordes so fitlye coucht, wyth verses so smoothlye slyckte, with sentences so featlye ordered, with orations so neatlie burnisht, with similitudes so aptly applyed, with eeche _decorum_ so duely observed, as in truth hee hath in right purchased too hym self thee name of a surpa.s.sing poet, thee fame of an od oratoure, and thee admiration of a profound philosopher.[213]

Thus in accord with the mediseval tradition he a.n.a.lyzes poetry into profitable subject matter and style.

3. The Influence of Aristotle

In 1579 the Puritan attack on poetry and the stage began with Gosson's _School of Abuse._[214] and was answered by Lodge's _Defence of Poetry_ in the same year. The attack and defense both rested on moral, not aesthetic, sanctions and will be discussed in a later section. It is only in Sidney's _Defense_ (c. 1583) and that of his follower Harington that theories of the nature of poetry are included. And with Sidney the Aristotelianism of the Italian renaissance makes its first appearance in English criticism.[215]

"Poesie," writes Sidney, "therefore is an arte of imitation, for so Aristotle termeth it in his word _Mimesis_, that is to say, a representing, counterfeiting, or figuring forth: to speake metaphorically, a speaking picture."[216] Thus not only Aristotle's imitation enters English criticism, but Plutarch's speaking picture as well, with all the power of its false a.n.a.logy. That Sidney himself was not, however, carried away by the a.n.a.logy is apparent from other pa.s.sages. Aristotle, cla.s.sifying poetic with music and dancing as a time art with its essence in movement, had insisted that a poem must have a beginning, a middle, and an end--qualities which do not exist in s.p.a.ce. So in the most quoted pa.s.sage from Sidney's _Defense_, it is a "tale forsooth," which draws old men from the chimney corner, and children from play,[217] and "the narration" which furnishes the groundplot of poesie.[218] Thus he introduces into English criticism, as an important element of poetry, the essentially sound idea that the characteristic structure of poetry lies in its narrative and dramatic movement. Poetry cannot lie because it never pretends to fact. He establishes this a.s.sertion on Aristotle's "universal not the particular" as the basis of poetic. Sidney had followed Scaliger in cla.s.sifying poets into three kinds: the theological, the philosophical, and the right poets. The third cla.s.s, the real poets, he says, "borrow nothing of what is, hath been, or shall be: but range, onely rayned with learned discretion, into the divine consideration of what may be, and should be."[219]

In considering the vehicle of poetic Sidney parts company with Scaliger and agrees with Castelvetro that verse is but an ornament and not the characteristic mark of poetry. The _Cyropaedia_ of Xenophon, and the _Theagines and Cariclea_ of Heliodorus are poems, although written in prose, because they feign notable images of virtues and vices, "although indeed the Senate of Poets hath chosen verse as their fittest rayment."[220] Proceeding thence, he defends verse as being a far greater aid to memory than prose, borrowing his terminology of "rooms," "places,"

and "seates," from the mnemonic system of Simonides usually incorporated in the section on memory in the cla.s.sical rhetorics.[221] Furthermore, Sidney is the first in England to insist on the vividness of realization which comes from the poet's being himself moved. Discussing lyric poetry, Sidney says:

But truely many of such writings as come under the banner of unresistable love, if I were a Mistres, would never perswade mee they were in love; so coldely they apply fiery speeches, as men that had rather red Lovers writings, and so caught up certaine swelling phrases,... then that in truth they feele those pa.s.sions, which easily (as I think) may be bewrayed by that same forcibleness or _Energia_ (as the Greeks call it), of the writer.[222]

Sidney's _Energia_ came to him from the rhetorics of Aristotle and Quintilian via the _Poetice_ of Scaliger.[223] _Energia_, the vivifying quality of poetry, had at the earliest age been adopted by rhetoric to lend power to persuasion. Carefully preserved among the figures of rhetoric, it had survived the middle ages, and appears in Wilson's _Arte of Rhetoric_ as "an evident declaration of a thing, as though we saw it even now done."

Sidney makes _energia_ an essential quality of poetic; but even with him it seems to have a rhetorical cast. It is especially to be used, says Sidney, by a lover to persuade his mistress, urging her to yield while yet her beauty endures. This _genre_ of versified oration to one's mistress was unusually popular in Elizabethan England. It may even be one reason for Bacon's cla.s.sification of lyric poetry as part of rhetoric.[224]

Although _energia_ does belong to both poetic and rhetoric, as pseudo-Longinus implies,[225] there seems to be here a definitely rhetorical conception of poetic style. Sidney, however, keeps the cla.s.sical distinction between rhetoric and poetic, although he was conscious of their contact in diction. "Both," he says with Aristotle, "have an affinity in this wordish consideration."[226] While many renaissance critics interpreted this affinity as permitting rhetorical elaboration in poetry as well as in prose, Sidney with innate good taste pleaded for more restraint. The diction of the writers of lyrics is even worse, he says, than their content.

So is that honny-flowing Matron Eloquence apparalled, or rather disguised, in a Curtizan-like painted affectation: one time with so farre fette words, they seem monsters, but must seem strangers to any poore English man, another tyme with coursing of a Letter as if they were bound to follow the method of a Dictionary; another tyme, with figures and flowers extreamelie winter-starved.[227]

Prose writers, he adds, are as badly infected as "versers," even scholars and preachers. That he himself was infected appears in the examples of interminable "tropes" and "schemes" quoted by Fraunce in his _Arcadian Rhetoric_ (1588) from Sidney's own _Arcadia_. But the concession of his own style to the habit of his age did not involve any fundamental confusion of rhetoric with poetic.

Thus Sidney's _Defense of Poesie_, by domesticating in England the Aristotelian theories of the Italian critics, went far in displacing mediaeval tradition by sounder cla.s.sical criticism. To object that Sidney's criticism contains elements which derive from the middle ages and from the cla.s.sical rhetorics would be captious. It is asking too much to expect that a man can shake off at once the traditional habits of thought which are part of the air he breathes. The important thing is that Sidney inst.i.tuted a tendency toward cla.s.sicism which during the next fifty years established itself in criticism. That this cla.s.sicism tended in some cases toward over-emphasis does not alter the fact that English criticism profited greatly by the return to cla.s.sical poetical theory. It is interesting, however, that Sidney's influence did not at once dislodge the mediaeval tradition. Although the manuals of Webbe and Puttenham do show cla.s.sical influence, their theories of poetry still show a notable residuum of theory characteristically mediaeval.

4. Manuals for Poets

Before William Webbe wrote his _Discourse of English Poetry_ (1586) there had been no attempt in England to compose a systematic and comprehensive study of the art. The rhetorical studies of Ascham and Wilson merely glanced at poetry as something related to rhetoric. Gascoigne and James attempted no more than manuals of prosody. Lodge and Harington were primarily interested in justifying poetry on moral grounds against the Puritan attack; and Sidney, though he goes beyond this, still keeps it as a main object. In his _Discourse_ Webbe modestly a.s.serts that his purpose in writing is primarily to stir up some one better than he to write on English poetry so that proper criteria of judgment may be established to discern between good writers and bad, and that the poets may thereby be aided in the right practice and orderly course of true poetry. If as much attention were devoted in England to poetry as to oratory, he thinks, poetry would be in as good state as her sister "Rhetoricall _Eloquution_, as they were by byrth Twyns, by kinde the same, by original of one descent."[228] As an example of the high degree of excellence attained by eloquence, he cites Lyly's _Euphues_.

Whose workes surely in respecte of his singuler eloquence and brave composition of apt words and sentences, let the learned examine and make tryall thereof through all the partes of Rethoricke, in fitte phrases, in pithy sentences, in gallant tropes, in flowing speech, in plaine sence.[229]

Thus rhetoric is considered merely as style; and the implication seems to be that the poets who would improve their style might well imitate Lyly.

Webbe evidently means what he says in identifying poetry and rhetoric in style. He adds:

Thus it appeareth both Eloquence and Poetrie to have had their beginning and original from these exercises, beeing framed in such sweete measure of sentences and pleasant harmonie called ????? which is an apt composition of wordes or clauses, drawing as it were by force the hearers eares even whether soever it lysteth, that _Plato_ affirmeth therein to be contained ???te?a, an inchantment, as it were to persuade.[230]

The confusion thus is carried pretty far by Webbe, who makes poetry and rhetoric the same in style, both aiming at persuasion. Not only have poetic and rhetoric for him a common ground in diction, but the ideal of diction is the same for both. The diction of poetry is the same as the diction of oratory. The only difference to him is that poetry is in verse and oratory in prose.

Poetry, therefore, is where any worke is learnedly compiled in measurable speech, and framed in wordes conteyning number or proportion of just syllables, delighting the readers or hearers as well by the apt and decent framing of wordes in equal resemblance of quant.i.ty--commonly called verse, as by the skylfull handling of the matter.[231]

Webbe organizes his treatise in good rhetorical fas.h.i.+on. First come seventeen pages of history, mentioning with perfunctory comment the best known poets of cla.s.sical antiquity and of England. The remainder of the _Discourse_ is devoted to the theory of poetry, which he divides into matter and form. Matter, which receives nineteen pages, is the mediaeval _doctrina_, for the whole gist of this section is that moral lessons are derivable from the poets. By form he means verse, making no mention of the figures of speech. English rimes receive half of this s.p.a.ce, and cla.s.sical meters the remainder. Webbe's fund of critical opinion is not opulent. His treatise is based on traditional English opinion of the middle ages, with an increment of Horace, of whom he thinks so highly as to append to his treatise an English translation of the "Cannons or generall cautions of poetry," which Georgius Fabricius Chemnicensis (1560) had digested from the _Ars Poetica_, and the _Epistles_.

Perhaps the author of _The Arte of English Poesie_ (1589), generally supposed to be Puttenham, had in mind to be the some-one-better-than-Webbe, whom that worthy tutor hoped to stir up to write a treatise for the benefit of poetry in England. At any rate, Puttenham is primarily concerned with teaching his contemporaries how to write verses. Like cla.s.sical authors of text-books, he calls his treatise an "Arte." Furthermore, as a courtier himself writing for courtiers, Puttenham does not lay down rules for the drama or the epic, but devotes most of his attention to occasional verse: lyrics, elegies, epigrams, and satires. His structure is significant. The first book, 58 pages in the Arber reprint, deals with definition, purpose and subject matter of poetry. The poet, he says, is a maker who creates new forms out of his inner consciousness, and at the same time an imitator. Thus he reconciles Aristotle and Horace.[232] Moreover, Puttenham calls attention to the importance of the imagination in the composition of poetry as well as in war, engineering and politics.[234] That the art of poetry is eminently teachable, Puttenham is entirely convinced, for he defines it as a skill appertaining to utterance, or as a certain order of rules prescribed by reason and gathered by experience.[233] It is verse, according to Puttenham, not imitation, which is the characteristic mark of poetry. This makes poetry a n.o.bler form, for verse is "a manner of utterance more eloquent and rethorical then the ordinarie prose, because it is decked and set out with all manner of fresh colours and figures, which maketh that it sooner invegleth the judgment of man." It is because poetry is thus so beautiful, he says, that "the Poets were also from the beginning the best persuaders, and their eloquence the first Rethoricke of the world."[235]

Rhetoric to Puttenham is beauty of speech: and because poetry is more beautiful than prose, as being in this sense more rhetorical, it is better able to persuade. The remainder of the book explains the nature and history of the various poetical forms, as lyric, epic, tragedy, pastoral, and so on. The second book, _Of Proportion_, 70 pages, is a treatise on metrics. The first half, like the section in Webbe, is devoted to English versing, dealing with stanza forms, meters, rime, and conceited figures such as anagrams and verses in the form of eggs. The second half is devoted to cla.s.sical meters. In his third book, _Of Ornament_, 165 pages, Puttenham gives an exhaustive and exhausting treatment of the figures of speech. Of the 121 figures which Puttenham defines and ill.u.s.trates, Professor Van Hook has traced 107 to Quintilian's rhetoric[236]. Professor Sch.e.l.ling refuses to treat this third book in his _Poetic and Verse Criticism in the Reign of Elizabeth_, because, he says, it does not fall within the scope of his purpose, being made up of matters rhetorical, as applicable to prose as to verse[237]. That Puttenham did include it, however, is most significant evidence that both the author and his reading public considered these adornments an essential part of poetry. As the ladies of the court, be they ever so beautiful, should be ashamed to be seen without their courtly habiliments of silks, and tissues, and costly embroideries, even so poetry cannot be seen if any limb be left naked and bare and not clad in gay clothes and colors, says Puttenham.

This ornament is given to it by figures and figurative speaches, which be the flowers, as it were, and colours that a Poet setteth upon his language of arte, as the embroderer doth his stone and perle or pa.s.s.e.m.e.nts of gold upon the stuffe of a Princely garment[238].

The figures Puttenham divides according to his own scheme. First come the figures _auricular_ peculiar to the poets, then the figures _sensable_ common to the poets and the rhetoricians, and finally the figures _sententious_ appropriate to the orators alone. After he has explained the first two varieties, however, and enters on the third, Puttenham says:

Now if our presupposall be true, that the Poet is of all other the most auncient Orator, as he that by good and pleasant perswasions first reduced the wilde and beastly people into publicke societies and civilitie of life, insinuating unto them, under fictions with sweete and coloured speeches, many wholesome lessons and doctrines, then no doubt there is nothing so fitte for him, as to be furnished with all the figures that be _Rhetoricall_, and such as do most beautifie language with eloquence and sententiousness. So as if we should intreate our maker to play also the Orator, and whether it be to pleade, or to praise, or to advise, that in all three cases he may utter and also perswade both copiously and vehemently[239].

Puttenham was writing in the same age and with the same tradition which defined Rhetoric as the art of ornament in speech. The only difference between oratory and poetry lay in that the latter was composed in verse.

5. Rhetorical Elements in Later English Cla.s.sicism

From Puttenham to Bacon no serious contributions were made to the general theory of poetry. Critical attention was absorbed by controversies of Campion and Daniel over native and cla.s.sical versification, and the flyting of Harvey and Nash. Harvey was a cla.s.sical scholar and rhetorician who knew that poetry and oratory were different things, and believed verse to be the mark of the first and prose of the latter[240]. He preferred the periodic style of Isocrates and Ascham to the tricksy pages of Euphues[241]. Chapman, likewise, considered verse the mark of poetry, and prose of rhetoric[242].

In the _Advancement of Learning_ (1605) Bacon clears up some of the misconceptions of the English renaissance by judicious borrowing from the Italian. He says:

Poesie is a part of Learning in measure of words for the most part restrained, but in all other points extremely licensed, and doth truly referre to the Imagination, which, beeing not tyed to the Lawes of Matter, may at pleasure joyne that which Nature hath severed, & sever that which Nature hath joyned, and so make all unlawful Matches & divorses of things: It is taken in two senses in respect of Wordes or Matter. In the first sense it is but a _Character_ of stile, and belongeth to Arts of speeche. In the later, it is, as hath beene saide, one of the princ.i.p.all Portions of learning, and is nothing else but _Fained History_, which may be stiled as well in Prose as in Verse.[243]