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and English Composition at Columbia University, left the unpublished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.