Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance Part 7

Bacon's focus of attention on the substance of poetry is in keeping with his attack on mere sophistication of style in rhetoric. Poetry as style does not interest him. Like Castelvetro and Sidney, he considers the vehicle of verse not essential to poetry, which, as a product of the imagination, he considers to be occupied with fiction. To Bacon, perhaps, the imagination seems to be too much the organ of make-believe, imaging things which never were on land or under the sea. Nevertheless his claim for the imagination is fortunate in ruling out those theories of art which set up slavish fidelity to fact, under the name of imitation, as the essence of poetry. Bacon was not concerned with formulating a complete theory of poetry, but his pithy _obiter dicta_ were influential in further establishing the sounder criticism of the Italian cla.s.sicists.

As Spingarn points out, Ben Jonson was first led to cla.s.sicism in poetical theory by the example of Sidney.[244] But during the intervening years the scholars of Holland had supplanted those of Italy; and whereas Sidney derived his Aristotelianism from Scaliger and Minturno, Jonson derived his even more from Ponta.n.u.s, Heinsius, and Lipsius and from the Latin rhetoricians, Cicero and Quintilian.

A Poet (says Jonson) is a Maker, or a fainer: His Art, an Art of imitation or faining, expressing the life of man in fit measure, numbers, and harmony.... Hence hee is called a _Poet_, not he which writeth in measure only, but that fayneth and formeth a fable, and writes things like the truth. For the Fable and Fiction is, as it were, the form and Soule of any Poeticall worke or Poeme.[245]

So convinced was Jonson that the essence of poetry does not lie in verse but in fiction that Drummond reports, "he thought not Bartas a Poet, but a Verser, because he wrote not fiction."[246] Jonson was misled by the false a.n.a.logy of poetry and painting.

_Poetry_ and _Picture_ are Arts of a like nature, and both are busie about imitation. It was excellently said of _Plutarch, Poetry_ was a speaking Picture, and _Picture_ a mute _Poesie_. For they both invent, fame, and devise many things.[247]

This structural and static conception of poetry is well exemplified by his comparisons. Whereas Aristotle cla.s.sified poetry with music and dance, Jonson compares the epic or dramatic plot to a house. The epic is like a palace and so requires more s.p.a.ce than a drama. The influence of Jonson was beneficial, however, in that he did emphasize in poetry the element of structure which the middle ages had largely neglected.[248] In his ideals of style Jonson is rhetorical. In the twelve sections of _Timber_ which he devotes to rhetoric he incorporates a sound treatise on prose style, urging restraint and perspicuity as especial virtues. In his nine sections on poetry he says nothing about style, except to quote Oicero to the effect that "the _Poet_ is the nearest Borderer upon the Orator, and expresseth all his vertues, though he be tyed more to numbers." It would seem that the section on style in oratory was meant to serve for poetry as well. Jonson's own methods of comparison, as related to Drummond, would bear this out: "That he wrote all his (verses) first in prose."[249] From the same authority one may learn that "He recommended to my reading Quintilian, who, he said, would tell me the faults of my Verses as if he lived with me," and "That Quintilian's 6, 7, 8, bookes were not only to be read, but altogether digested,"[250] Though Jonson makes no more distinction than Petrarch, between Horace, Cicero, or Quintilian as authorities on poetical style,[251] his rhetorical cast does not imply the style advocated by Webbe and Puttenham. This was the exuberant style of mediaeval rhetoric, whereas by temperament and scholarly training Jonson threw his influence in favor of the cla.s.sical rhetorical style of the best period.

The influence of Bacon in favor of the sound rhetoric of Cicero and Quintilian, seconded by that of Jonson, finally did away with the mediaeval ideal of rhetoric as being one with aureate language and embroidered style. The stylistic exuberance of the Elizabethans gave place to a more restrained and polished phrase in the reign of Charles. Bolton, for instance, in his _Hypercritica_ (c. 1618) warns the historians against the style of the _Arcadia_. "Solidity and Fluency," he says, "better becomes the historian, then Singularity of Oratorical or Poetical Notions."[252] Henry Reynolds, in his _Mythomystes_ (c. 1633), although he goes wool-gathering with mystical interpretations of poetry, yet evinces the same reaction against the ornate style in terming the flowers of rhetoric and versification as mere accidents of poetry.[253] In his _Anacrisis_ (1634) the Earl of Stirling likewise urges that "language is but the Apparel of Poesy."[254] The "but" marks the difference between the ideals of two ages. Fiction remains for him the essence of poetry, for fiction in prose is poetry. But he will not go the whole way with Jonson and deny the name of poet to one whose material is not fict.i.tious.[255]

Unfortunately, for English criticism, Milton wrote very little on the theory of poetry. His casual remarks, however, show such enlightened scholarship and keen insight that what little he did write makes up in importance what it lacks in bulk. In the Treatise _Of Education_ (1644) he refers to the sublime art of poetry "which in _Aristotle's poetics_, in _Horace_, and the _Italian_ commentaries of _Castelvetro, Ta.s.so, Mazzoni_, and others, teaches what the laws are of a true _Epic_ poem, what of a _Dramatic_, what of a _Lyric_, what decorum is, which is the grand master peece to observe."[256] His rhetoric, also, he knew at first hand from the best cla.s.sical sources. He gives as his authorities Plato, Aristotle, Phalereus,[257] Cicero, Hermogenes, Longinus.[258] This is the first time that an English critic mentions the treatise _On the Sublime_ in connection with poetry. It can thus hardly be a coincidence that Milton, while citing the only surviving literary critic of cla.s.sical antiquity who gave proper emphasis to the importance of pa.s.sion in poetry,[259] should himself be the first English critical writer to urge for pa.s.sion the same importance. This he does in his famous differentiation of rhetoric and poetic. In the educational scheme, he says, after mathematics should be studied logic and rhetoric "To which Poetry would be made subsequent or indeed rather precedent, as being lesse suttle and fine, but more simple, sensuous, and pa.s.sionate."[260] Milton has sometimes been thought to be here defining poetry, but he is only distinguishing it from rhetoric. A definition of poetry he never attempted. Meter he deemed essential to poetry,[261] but rime he disliked. Thus, as far as he goes, Milton represents the best in English renaissance criticism. He knew at first hand the best cla.s.sical treatises on poetic and on rhetoric; and he recognized the distinctions which the ancients had made between them.

With the English literary criticism in the second half of the Seventeenth Century, when the influence of French cla.s.sicism was in the ascendant, this study is not concerned. In the period which has just been surveyed three points are noteworthy: the character of the English critics, the slowness with which the cla.s.sical theories penetrated English thought, and the modifications which they underwent in the process. Gregory Smith calls attention to the influence of Sidney and Daniel in establishing "the claim of English criticism as an instrument of power outside the craft of rhetoricians and scholars."[262] Of the English critical writers Ascham is the foremost of the scholarly type; Harvey is the only other example.

Thomas Wilson, although he wrote a rhetoric, wrote a better one in many ways because he was not a professional rhetorician, but a man of affairs.

Gascoigne, Lodge, Spenser, were poets who incidentally wrote on the technic of their art or in defence of its value. Sidney, the poet, courtier, and soldier, wrote not from the musty alcoves of libraries.

Webbe, it is true, was a pedant, but certainly not a scholar. Puttenham was a bad poet, a well-read man, and a courtier. Jonson's scholarship was thorough, but sweetened and ventilated by his activities as poet and dramatist. Bacon was a scholar, but even more a philosopher and a statesman. Milton, our most scholarly poet, during most of his life could not keep his mind and pen from church and national politics. Indeed, during the entire English renaissance there was no professional critic.

Literary criticism was not a field to be tilled, but a wood to be explored by busy men who could find time for the exploit.

This amateur character of English critics accounts in a measure for the slowness with which cla.s.sical and Italian renaissance critical theories filtered into England; for a statesman or a soldier is less likely to be up-to-date on theories of poetry than is a professional critic whose business it is to know what is written on his specialty. Another powerful influence in the same direction was the characteristic English conservatism which preferred the traditional paths of thought to Italian innovations.

This same common-sense conservatism accounts also for the modifications of Italian renaissance critical theories before they were incorporated into the fund of English criticism. Cla.s.sical meters, slavish imitation of the ancients, close adherence to the rules of unity and decorum never made much headway in the English renaissance. Such contaminations of poetic by rhetoric as are clearest seem to arise not from the new Italian influence, but from the mediaeval tradition.

To sum up, cla.s.sical critics had recognized two categories of literature: a fine art, poetic; and a practical art, rhetoric. Poetic they thought characterized by narrative or dramatic structure or movement, and by vividness of realization, and by pa.s.sion. Rhetoric was characterized by a logical structure determined by the necessity of persuading an audience.

Although most cla.s.sical critics accepted prose as characteristic of rhetoric, and verse of poetry, Aristotle pointed out that the distinction was far more fundamental. As these two kinds of literature had a common ground in diction, there was a tendency from very early times for them to merge. In the artistic degeneracy of late Latin literature both rhetoric and poetic paid less attention to structure and other elements which distinguished them, and more attention to style, which they had in common.

Moreover, under the influence of sophistical rhetoric, preoccupied with style, poetic and rhetoric practiced the same rhetorical artifices. As a result Virgil might be either an orator or a poet. This was the rhetoric which the middle ages inherited. To them rhetoric was synonymous with stylistic beauty. Poetry was a compound of _doctrina_ and _eloquentia_, in other words of theology and style, in verse. In England this mediaeval tradition persisted into the seventeenth century, as the school rhetorics and the treatises on poetry show. The English renaissance poetic never freed itself from this influence of mediaeval rhetoric until the middle of the seventeenth century. With the recovery of cla.s.sical literature and literary criticism, the new theories were interpreted in the light of the old ideas.

On its creative side the renaissance sought to produce in the vernacular a literature comparable to that of Greece or Rome. Thus literary criticism was prescriptive, and the typical treatises were text-books. Rhetoric, which had long been taught, very naturally furnished the methods, the teachers, and in many cases the subject matter for this instruction in poetry. As has been shown in the preceding section of this study, the renaissance theory of poetry was rhetorical in its obsession with style, especially the figures of speech, in its abiding faith in the efficacy of rules; and in its belief that the poet, no less than the orator, is occupied with persuasion. This latter rhetorical view that the poet's office is to persuade will be studied more fully in the following section on "The Purpose of Poetry." The traditional view is that by persuading the reader to adhere to the good and shun the evil the poet achieves the proper end of poetry--moral improvement.

Part Two

The Purpose of Poetry

Chapter I

The Cla.s.sical Conception of the Purpose of Poetry

1. General

To say that poetry has a moral effect on the reader is not the same as to say that moral improvement is the purpose of poetry. The following section of this historical study will be devoted to tracing the subst.i.tution of the second a.s.sertion for the first.

As has been shown,[263] the cla.s.sical critics were in substantial agreement with Aristotle in defining rhetoric as the faculty of discovering all possible means to persuasion. Although the consensus of cla.s.sical opinion agreed that poetry does have a moral effect on the reader, it never defined poetry as an art of discovering all means to moral improvement. As will be shown, such a definition of poetry was not formulated previous to the renaissance. Then by combining Aristotle's definition of tragedy from the _Poetics_[264] with his definition of rhetoric, Lombardus defined poetic as

a faculty of finding out whatsoever is accommodated to the imitation of actions, pa.s.sions, customs, in rhythmical language, for the purpose of correcting the vices of men and causing them to live good and happy lives.[265]

The same definition, derived as Spingarn has shown from the same sources, was formulated by Varchi.[266]

Poetic is a faculty which shows in what modes one may imitate certain actions, pa.s.sions, and customs, with rhythm, words, and harmony, together or separately, for the purpose of removing the vices of men and inciting them to virtue, in order that they may attain their true happiness and beat.i.tude.[267]

I propose, after reviewing the cla.s.sical conception of poetry as an educational agent, to trace briefly the rise of allegorical interpretation of poetry in post-cla.s.sical times and in the middle ages; to exemplify the tendency of renaissance criticism to borrow the terminology of cla.s.sical rhetoric when it a.s.serted that the purpose of poetry is moral improvement; and finally, to study in the literary criticism of the English renaissance those moral theories of poetry which derive from the middle ages, from the cla.s.sical rhetorics, and from the criticism of the Italian renaissance.

2. Moral Improvement through Precept and Example

The ancients believed that great poetry produces moral improvement in the reader. Before the judgment seat of Dionysos, as is recorded in _The Frogs_ of Aristophanes, Aeschylus and Euripides engage in an interesting and instructive dispute. "Come," says Aeschylus, "tell me what are the points for which we praise a n.o.ble poet." Euripides replies, "For his ready wit and his wise counsels and because he trains the townsfolk to be better citizens and worthier men."[268] Aeschylus then goes on to show that he has merited well of his countrymen because he has preached the military virtues and his dramas have been full of Ares. Euripides he accuses of softening the moral fibre of the Athenians by introducing on the stage immoral plots and love-sick women. Such drama Aeschylus a.s.serts to be immoral in its effect. "For boys a school teacher is provided; but we, the poets, are teachers of men."[269]

This represents the well-nigh universal Greek opinion. Poetry inspires, teaches, makes better men. A further example of this idea is furnished by Timocles. "Our spirit," says one of the characters in the drama, "forgetting its own sorrows in sympathizing with the misfortunes of others, receives at the theatre instruction and pleasure at one time."[270]

The real opinions of Plato are here difficult to discover. In the _Protagoras_, however, he puts into the mouth of that famous sophist an exposition of the conventional Greek opinion.

When a boy has learned his letters and is beginning to understand what is written, as before he understood only what was spoken, they put into his hands the works of great poets, which he reads sitting on a bench at school; in these are contained many admonitions, and many tales, and praises, and encomia of ancient famous men, which he is required to learn by heart, in order that he may imitate them and desire to become like them.[271]

It is in the _Republic_, of course, that Plato enunciates his capital objections to poetry. The first objection is that poetry as an imitative art is three removes from truth. The divine powers, for instance, create the idea of a table--the only true table. A carpenter makes a particular table which is not the real, but only an appearance. A graphic artist making a picture of this appearance is only an imitator of appearances.

"And the tragic poet is an imitator and therefore thrice removed from the king and from the truth."[272] The second objection which Plato raises against poetry is that poetry is addressed to the pa.s.sional element in man. The man of n.o.ble spirit and philosophy will not lament his misfortunes, especially in public, while the lower orders of intellect are likely to express all their feelings with greater freedom, and thus furnish the poet with easier subjects for imitation. Consequently poetry has the power of harming the good, for a good man will be in raptures at the excellences of the poet who stirs his feelings most by representing a hero in an emotional condition. As a result, when he himself suffers sorrow or is moved by his own pa.s.sions, it becomes more difficult for him to repress his feelings.[273] Plato thus examines the popular contention that the study of poetry educates the moral character of a man, and still maintaining that it should be a moral force for good, demonstrates to his own satisfaction that it fails to have the supposed beneficial effect because it is three removes from truth, and because it encourages unrestrained emotionalism in conduct. Plato's moral standard of poetry is even better ill.u.s.trated, perhaps, by the kind of poetry which he does not ban from his ideal commonwealth. "We must remain firm in our conviction,"

he says, "that hymns to the G.o.ds and praises of famous men are the only poetry which ought to be admitted into our state." As his utmost concession to poetry, he will admit her if her defenders can prove "not only that she is pleasant, but also useful to states and to human life."[274] According to a later view, to be sure, Plato has been thought to justify pleasure of a most refined and exalted variety as an end of art. "The view which identifies the pleasant and the just and the good and the n.o.ble has an excellent moral and religious tendency."[275] In view, however, of other p.r.o.nouncements, such an endeavor to father upon him the hedonistic theory of the purpose of art seems strained and ineffective.

It was to justify poetry against the attacks of Plato that Aristotle advanced a hedonistic view of poetry and propounded his theory of katharsis. Nowhere in the _Poetics_ does Aristotle explicitly state that the function of poetry is to give pleasure. Indirect evidence, however, is plentiful. For instance, Aristotle justifies poetry as an imitative art because children learn by imitation and the pleasure in imitation is universal.[276] Furthermore, plot in tragedy is more important than character; for in painting, a confused ma.s.s of colors gives less pleasure than a chalk drawing of a portrait.[277] Beauty in any art depends in a measure on magnitude; therefore a play must not be too short.[278] Most of the tragic poets of Greece derived their plots from a limited number of well known stories. But Aristotle justifies Agathon for departing from this custom and making both his plot and characters fict.i.tious, for the plays of Agathon give none the less pleasure.[279] But not all pleasure, he says, is appropriate to tragedy. In comedy we are pleased to see enemies walk off the stage as friends, but in tragedy the "pleasure which the poet should afford is that which comes from pity and fear through imitation."[280] Marvels, too, and wonders in poetry he justifies because "the wonderful is pleasing; as may be inferred from the fact that everyone tells a story with additions of his own, knowing that his hearers like it.

It is Homer who has chiefly taught other poets the art of telling lies skilfully."[281] And at the very end of the _Poetics_, where he is endeavoring to prove that tragedy is a higher art than epic, he does so by showing that drama has all the epic elements, and in addition music and spectacle, which produce the most vivid of pleasures. Moreover the drama is more compact; "for the concentrated effect is more pleasurable than one which is diluted."[282] Thus, in the _Poetics_, Aristotle takes a non-moral att.i.tude toward literature, although in the _Politics_[283] he grants that poetry and music are eminently serviceable in conveying moral instruction to young people. His mature att.i.tude is well ill.u.s.trated in contrast with that of Aristophanes. Aristophanes criticises Euripides severely as a perverter of Athenian morality. Aristotle mentions Euripides about twenty times in the _Poetics_, and frequently criticises him adversely, not, however, for his evil moral influence, but because he uses his choruses badly, and is faulty in character-drawing.

In answer to Plato's second objection to poetry, that it encourages unrestrained emotionalism, Aristotle propounded his theory of katharsis.

"Tragedy," he says, "is an imitation of an action ... through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions."[284] That Aristotle had in mind an a.n.a.logy with medicine is better understood from a pa.s.sage in the _Politics_ which describes the beneficial effect of music on patients suffering from religious ecstasy. The stimulating music furnishes the patient with an outlet for the expression of his religious fervor. Afterwards, says Aristotle, the patients "fall back into their normal state, as if they had undergone a medical or purgative treatment."[285] Thus the theory of katharsis seems to have the same basis as the modern psychological theory which encourages the expression of emotions in their milder form lest, if inhibited, they gather added power and finally burst disastrously through all restraints. Consequently, although hedonist theorists have been anxious to establish katharsis on a purely aesthetic foundation, it seems that the theory has inescapable moral implications. To be sure, Aristotle in the same section of the _Politics_ says that the emotional result of katharsis is "harmless joy,"

and in the _Poetics_ he says that pity and fear produce the appropriate pleasure of tragedy. Nevertheless Aristotle is answering Plato's objections to unrestrained emotionalism, and by his theory of katharsis endeavors to show not only that the emotional excitation of tragedy is harmless to the spectator, but that it is actually good for him.

But if the spectator is to derive these emotional excitations from tragedy, his aesthetic experience cannot be pa.s.sive. Aristotle recommends as the ideal tragic hero a man not preeminently good nor unusually depraved, but a man between these extremes; "for pity is aroused by unmerited misfortune, fear by the misfortune of a man like ourselves."[286] Evidently, then, through his imagination the spectator must in a lively fashion partic.i.p.ate in the action of the drama. Not only is he present at the action, even when he reads the drama, but he identifies himself with the hero and vicariously experiences his emotions.

But neither the hedonism of Aristotle, nor his defense of poetry on moral grounds through his theory of katharsis, is usual in Greek criticism.

Isocrates and Xenophon adhere to the usual opinion. Isocrates believes that Homer was prized by the earlier Greeks because his poems instilled a hatred of the barbarians, and kindled in the hearts of the readers a desire to emulate the heroes who fought against Troy.[287] One might think that the hatred of the barbarians was not the highest degree of morality, but perhaps for the political integrity of Greece it was. That Homer especially was supposed to have a moral influence is ill.u.s.trated also by Xenophon. Niceratus, in the _Symposium_, is telling the diners of what knowledge he is most proud. "My father," he says, "in his pains to make me a good man, compelled me to learn the whole of Homer's poems."[288]

Strabo in a famous pa.s.sage records an exceptional hedonism in Greek thought and goes on to expound the conventional belief.

Eratosthenes says that the poet directs his whole attention to the amus.e.m.e.nt of the mind, and not at all to its instruction. In opposition to this idea, the ancients define poesy as a primitive philosophy, guiding our life from infancy, and pleasantly regulating our morals, our tastes, and our actions. The Stoics of our day affirm that the only wise man is the poet. On this account the earliest lessons which the citizens of Greece convey to their children are from the poets; certainly not for the purpose of amusing their minds, but for their instruction.[289]

This same moral and educational view of poetry so permeates Plutarch's essay _On the Study of Poetry_ that it is difficult to quote from him without reproducing the whole treatise. The young man who is being taught poetry, Plutarch believes, should be made "to indulge in pleasure merely as a relish, and to seek for the useful and the wholesome,"[290] in his reading. Some believe that, because some of the pleasures of poetry are pernicious, young men should not be allowed to read. This, Plutarch believes, would be every whit as foolish as to cut down the vineyards because some people are addicted to drunkenness. Young men should be taught to use poetry intelligently. "Poetry is not to be scrupulously avoided by those who intend to be philosophers, but they are to make poetry a fitting school for philosophers, by forming the habit of seeking and gaining the profitable in the pleasant."[291] The profit of poetry he believes to come from two sources: maxims and examples. He praises very highly such _sententiae_ as "Virtue keeps its l.u.s.ter untarnished," and "know thyself."[292] Indeed, the moral value of such precepts weighed so heavily with Plutarch that he advocated emending the poets to bring them in more strict accord with the ethics of the Stoic philosophy. For instance: