Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance / A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism

Contents

Donald Lemen Clark

Part First: The General Theory of Rhetoric and of Poetry

Introductory
1. The Distinction between Rhetoric and Poetic
Classical Poetic
1. Aristotle
2. "Longinus"
3. Plutarch
4. Horace
Classical Rhetoric
Classical Blending of Rhetoric and Poetic
The Middle Ages
1. The Decay of Classical Rhetorical Tradition
2. Rhetoric as Aureate Language
Logic and Rhetoric in the English Renaissance
Renaissance Poetic
1. The Reestablishment of the Classical Tradition
2. Rhetorical Elements
Theories of Poetry in the English Renaissance

Part Second: The Purpose of Poetry

The Classical Conception of the Purpose of Poetry
Medieval Ideas of the Purpose of Poetry
1. Allegorical Interpretations in the Middle Ages
2. Allegory in Mediaeval England
Rhetorical Elements in Italian Renaissance Conceptions of the Purpose of Poetry
1. The Scholastic Grouping of Poetic, Rhetoric and Logic
2. The Influence of the Classical Rhetorics
English Renaissance Ideas of the Purpose of Poetry

Index of Names

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Moreover the consensus of conventional opinion in the Roman world was that the study of the poets did succeed in moulding the moral character of the youth. Apuleius, writing of a certain virtuous young man, the hero of one of the episodes of the Metamorphoses, makes the following incidental remark: "The master of the house had a young son well instructed in good literature, and consequently remarkable for his piety and modesty."[298]

Although Lucretius may not have been assured of the moral value, he was so convinced of the seductive powers of poetry that he deliberately utilized them to make palatable the forbidding thoughts of his essay On the Nature of Things. The long passage is worth quoting entire because his comparison is borrowed so frequently by renaissance critics to illustrate the poetic doctrine of pleasurable profit. Lucretius says:

But as physicians, when they attempt to give bitter wormwood to children, first tinge the rim round the cup with the sweet and yellow liquid of honey, that the age of childhood, as yet unsuspicious, may find its lips deluded, and may in the meantime drink the bitter juice of the wormwood, and though deceived, may not be injured, but rather, being recruited by such a process, may acquire strength; so now I, since this argument seems generally too severe and forbidding to those by whom it has not been handled, and since the multitude shrink back from it, was desirous to set forth my chain of reasoning to thee, O Memmius, in sweetly-speaking Pierian verse, and, as it were, tinge it with the honey of the Muses.[299]

From this survey of classical opinion we may conclude that the public looked for two things in poetry: pleasure and profit. Eratosthenes took an extreme view in seeking pleasure alone. Both Aristotle and Horace emphasized the pleasure to be derived from poetry, although neither denied that poetry is beneficial. Horace takes almost a cynical view in suggesting that, as some readers seek pleasure in poetry and others improvement, a poet will be more popular and make more money for the book-sellers if he mingles both elements. The extreme view of the moral value of poetry was taken by the educators of youth. This view is well exemplified in the quotations from Aristophanes, Xenophon, Strabo, and especially Plutarch. But even Plutarch, who goes so far as to suggest emending the poets to make their effect more moral, does not suggest that the purpose of poetry is to afford moral instruction. He distinguishes; some poetry is distinctly immoral and should be enjoyed only for its art. Other poetry is moral in its effect, and consequently should be utilized extensively by the school-master in educating young men. For such purposes no poetry was thought to be better than Homer, whose epics furnish so many examples of heroic conduct.

3. Moral Improvement through Allegory

When the Roman arms conquered a new city, the story runs, the commander of the forces took over in the name of the Emperor the gods; but before the gates of Jerusalem this ceremony proved ineffective. The fathers of the Christian church, Tatian, Hermas, Theophilus, and Tertullian, believing that all the truth was contained in Christianity, utterly condemned the philosophy and religion of the Greeks and consequently the poetry which, according to Greek popular belief, was the inspired vehicle for its presentation. Furthermore, the gods of the Greeks were immoral and furnished their worshippers with bad examples of conduct. Long before Tertullian the moral philosophers of antiquity had already attacked the poetry of Greece and Rome on the ground of immorality. Plato in his day called the war between philosophy and poetry "age-long." The ancient Greeks had considered Homer and Hesiod as the inspired recorders of the facts of religion. They had looked to the poets for moral dogma and example. Of necessity the philosophers condemned the poets for the immorality of their thievish, lying, and adulterous pantheon.

When the Christian fathers were confronted with the Syriac gospel of the youth of Jesus, they called a council to declare it apochryphal. Lest some devout reader should take literally the love poetry of the Canticles, the fathers allegorized it as the love of Christ for his Church. Unfortunately for Greek religion the philosophers did not determine which episodes in the histories of the gods were valid as doctrine and which were fictitious. They did, however, anticipate the fathers in their allegorical interpretations. Socrates in the Phaedrus laughs at allegory;[300] and Plutarch believes that the poets intended to teach a moral idea by example instead of expressing a hidden meaning by allegory. For him allegory involved distortion and perversion. "For some men distort these stories and pervert them into allegories or what the men of old times called hidden meanings ὑπόνοιαι."[301] But allegory none the less flourished. Theognis of Rhegium, Anaxagoras, and Stesimbrotus of Thasos, were assiduous and startling in their interpretations.[302] The Greek allegorical interpretations were of two kinds: one an explanation of the secrets of nature, the other the teaching of morality.[303] Although the practice was very old, the word "allegory" is not recorded before Cicero, who says:

When the imagery of the metaphor is sustained for a long time, the nature of the style assuredly becomes changed. Consequently the Greeks call this sort of thing allegory.... But he is nearer the truth who calls all of these metaphors.[304]

From Cicero on, allegory has a long history as a rhetorical figure--a trope.[305] St. Augustine recommends that students of the scriptures study the rhetorical figures so that they may be able to interpret the tropes in the Bible, such as allegory.[306]

The result will always be the same whenever the poets are considered theologians and moral teachers. They will be condemned or allegorized. Fortunate are the poets when they are not believed. "How much better," exclaims St. Augustine, "are these fables of the poets" than the false religious notions of the Manichees. "But Medea flying, although I chanted sometimes, yet I maintained not the truth of; and though I heard it sung, I believed it not: but these phantasies I thoroughly believed."[307] For it is only when one believes devoutly that Zeus procured access to Danae in a shower of gold, that his action gives a divine sanction to such traffic in beauty on the agora or in the forum.[308] It is only when the poets make no pretense of recounting facts that they can escape the clutches of the philosophers. It was to save the poets from such attacks that Aristotle asserts that poetry deals with the universal, not with the particular.[309] Or, as Spingarn explains his meaning, "Poetry has little regard for the actuality of specific event, but aims at the reality of an eternal probability."[310]

4. The Influence of Rhetoric

Thus the general consensus of classical opinion agreed that poetry has inescapable moral effects on those who listen or read. The moralists, especially the Stoics, when confronted with traditional poetry whose literal significance was immoral, leaned toward allegorical interpretations which brought out a kernel of truth. The greater number, however, of Greeks and Romans in the classical period believed that poetry exerted the most potent influence for good when it enunciated crisp moral maxims and afforded examples of heroic conduct which young people could be induced to follow.

In all these respects the classical view of poetic has much in common with classical rhetoric. Allegory has been shown to have had a long history as an extended metaphor--a rhetorical figure. Maxims are considered fully by Aristotle as aids to persuasion in rhetoric.[311] The exemplum is obviously a stock means of rhetoric.

"Examples," says Aristotle, "are of two kinds, one consisting in the allegation of historical facts, and the other in the invention of facts for oneself. Invention comprises illustration on the one hand and ... fables on the other." Then he tells how Aesop defended a demagogue by the fable of the fox caught in the cleft of a rock. The fox was infested with dog-ticks which sucked his blood. A benevolent hedge-hog offered to remove the ticks, but the fox declined the kind offer on the ground that his ticks were already full of blood and had ceased to annoy him much, whereas if they were removed, a new colony of ticks would establish themselves and thus entirely drain him of blood. "Yes, and in your case, men of Samos," said Aesop, "my client will not do much further mischief--he has already made his fortune--but, if you put him to death, there will come others who are poor and who will consume all the revenues of the state by their embezzlements."[312] "Fables," continues the shrewd master of those who know, "have this advantage that, while historical parallels are hard to find, it is comparatively easy to find fables." Quintilian, like Aristotle, believes in the persuasive efficacy of examples. But Quintilian has less faith in the probative value of fictitious examples than he has in those drawn from authentic history. He thinks that fables are most effective with a rustic and ingenuous audience, which "captivated by their pleasure in the story, give assent to that which pleases them."[313] Thus Menenius Agrippa reconciled the people to the senators by telling them the fable of the revolt of the members against the belly. And Thomas Wilson, in his Arte of Rhetorique, repeats the story, in his section on examples, and ascribes to Themistocles the fox story which Aristotle tells of Aesop.[314]

But Aristotle, Quintilian, and Wilson are talking about rhetoric. Very justly they believe that if one wants to persuade an audience to a course of action, he must interest his audience sufficiently to hold their attention. As Wilson sagely remarks, "For except men finde delite, they will not long abide: delite them and winne them."[315] Cicero expressed in memorable phrase the relationship between proof and pleasure as instruments to persuasion and added a third element. He classified the aims of an orator as "to teach, to please, to move" (docere, delectare, movere). The teaching is the appeal to the intellect of the hearer by means of proof. The pleasure is afforded by a euphonious style, and by fables and stories. The audience is moved to action by the appeal to their feelings.[316]

Not until the renaissance did writers on the theory of poetry carry over Cicero's threefold aim of the orator and make it apply to the poet.[317] But already in post-classical times rhetoric had, as Seneca the father clearly shows, vitiated the Latin poetry of the Silver Age. Under the Empire the declamation schools in Rome had a profound influence on literature.[318] It could not be otherwise in a society where the school of rhetoric was the only temple of higher education, for which the grammaticus, or elementary professor of literature, was constrained to prepare his students. Rhetoric was the organon of Roman education, and declamation was the aim of rhetoric. It was such an educational system which prepared Ovid and Lucan for their careers as poets and men of letters. Seneca the father records the brilliant declamations of Ovid as a schoolboy, quoting at some length his plea for a wife who threw herself over a cliff on hearing of the death of her husband, and calling attention to several passages in Ovid's poems where the poet has borrowed the clever sayings of his professors in the school of rhetoric.[319] Ovid makes his characters prove that they are moved by passion instead of being passionate in word and deed. He vitiates his emotions with his wit. This is characteristic of almost all the poets who attended the declamation schools. They talk about situations and characters instead of realizing them. They write as if they were speaking to an audience. One can almost see the gestures, the wait for applause after the enunciation of a noble platitude. Not only historically, but also in the worst modern sense this is rhetoric. It is not unreasonable to conclude that such a preoccupation with rhetoric, such a sustained search for all possible means of persuasion, should have strengthened rather than weakened the utilitarian theory of poetry. The school-master endeavored to mould the characters of his students by examples from heroic poetry; the teacher of rhetoric, in turn, taught them that to persuade an audience they must prove, please, and move, and that ficticious examples were about as persuasive as historical parallels and much easier to find. When the student left school he continued to seek means of persuasion in canvassing votes, pleading in the courts, or deliberating in the senate. If he became a poet, he did not forget the lessons of his youth; or if he became a teacher of literature or a professor of rhetoric, he perpetuated the tradition.

Chapter II
Mediaeval Ideas of the Purpose of Poetry

With the breaking up of the Empire the stream of classical culture was restricted to a narrow channel--the Church. Opposed as it was to pagan morals and theology, the church could honestly retain classical literature only if it were allegorized. This explains the allegorical nature of mediaeval poetry and of poetical theory.

From the beginning the learning of the Church was of pagan origin. St. Augustine was a professor of rhetoric and the author of a treatise on aesthetics before he wrote the City of God, and his Confessions. In fact, he never quite got over being a professor of rhetoric. Clement of Alexandria was a product of the same rhetoric schools and an excellent teacher of his subject before he recognized the divine origin of Christianity. St. Basil was a college friend of Gregory Nazianzen and of Julian, later emperor and apostate, when the three studied rhetoric at Athens. Indeed, the most cunningly cruel decree which Julian later promulgated against the Christians forbade them the use of the ancient pagan literature of Greece and Rome. This decree Basil bitterly resented. "I forgo all the rest," he says, "riches, birth, honor, authority, and all the goods here below of which the charm vanishes like a dream; but I cling to oratory nor do I regret the toil, nor the journeys by land and sea, which I have undertaken to master it."[320]

But within the Church the lovers of Greek literature did not have it all their own way. Tatian, Hermas, Theophilus, and Tertullian savagely attacked profane poetry, and in defending it Basil, Athenagoras, Clement, and Origen were forced not unwillingly to rely more and more on the traditional moralistic theory of poetry which was so familiar to them. St. Chrysostom records that in the fourth century Homer was still taught as a guide to morals.[321]

1. Allegorical Interpretations in the Middle Ages

Allegorical interpretation was the main weapon of the apologists for poetry. The basis, indeed, of the Gnostic heresies of the second and third centuries was an allegorical interpretation of the Greek poets and philosophers and of the Scriptures. This soon degenerated into an extravagant system of speculative mysticism. Clement of Alexandria and Origen rejected the extravagances, but sought to retain the mysticism of the Gnostics. They reconciled Greek literature and the Scriptures by allegorizing both, much as today Darwin and Genesis are reconciled by allegorizing Genesis.[322] Thus in the declining years of the Roman Empire the rhetoricians had become ecclesiastics, and the Church had adopted pagan literature with allegorical interpretation.

This tradition dominated the middle ages; Lady Theology reigned over the kingdom of the seven liberal arts, and to make Homer and Virgil theological it was necessary that they be interpreted allegorically. As Vossler has shown, theology and philosophy furnished, during the middle ages, the subject matter of poetry; they were the utile of Horace. The dulce became for them too exclusively the pleasing garment of style and story.[323]

Throughout the middle ages, however, many continued to look askance at poetry, and were skeptical as to its value. To Boethius, weeping in prison, came Philosophy to console him. She found him surrounded by the friends of his youth, the Muses, who now were inspiring him to write dreary verses of complaint. But these poetical Muses Philosophy sent packing. "Who has allowed," said she, "these common strumpets of the theatre to come near this sick man? Not only do they fail to assuage his sorrows, but they feed and nourish them with sweet venom. They are not fruitful nor profitable. They destroy the fruits of reason, for they hold the hearts of men."[324] Here Philosophy is voicing the objections of Plato. The arts are attacked because they are not successfully utilitarian, and because they appeal to the emotions instead of to the reason. In a later book Boethius gives a clearer key to the objection. He postulates four mental faculties: sensation possessed by oysters, imagination possessed by higher animals, reason possessed by man, intelligence possessed by God. Consequently man should aspire towards God instead of indulging his faculties of sensation and imagination, which he shares with the lower animals.[325]

But such objections as those of Boethius were usually explained away by allegory. When Isidore of Seville (†633 or 636), for instance, was compiling his book of universal knowledge, the Etymologiae, he incorporated his section on the poets in the chapter entitled Concerning the Church and the Sects. So between a section devoted to the Philosophers of the Gentiles and a section entitled Concerning Sibyls he wrote concerning the poets as follows:

Sometimes, however, the poets were called theologians, because they used to compose songs concerning the gods. In doing this, however, it is the office of the poets to render what has actually been done in a different guise with a certain beauty of covert figures.[326]

The poet, to Isidore, was the inspired bard who sings of the gods and the eternal verities, not directly, but under the veil of a beautiful allegory. Among these allegorical or indirect means of expression used by the poet to veil truth are fables.

The poets invent fables sometimes to give pleasure; sometimes they are interpreted to explain the nature of things, sometimes to throw light on the manners of men.[327]

His illustrations of a fable show that he is talking about allegory. For instance, the fable of the centaur was invented to show, by the union of man and horse, the swiftness of human life.

It is very natural, then, that Dante should as the supreme poet of the middle ages furnish the supreme example of allegory. In the Convivio (c. 1306), Dante gives a very full and complete exposition of the proper method of interpreting a text. Any writing, he says, should be expounded in four senses. The first is the literal. The second is called the allegorical, and is the one that hides itself under the mantle of these tales, and is a truth hidden under beauteous fiction.[328] The reason this way of hiding was devised by wise men he promises to explain in the fourteenth treatise, which he never wrote. The third sense, he goes on to say, is the moral, as from the fact that Christ took with him but three disciples when he ascended the mountain for the transfiguration we may understand that in secret things we should have but few companions. The fourth sense is the analogical. Here the text may be literally true, but contain a spiritual significance beyond. That to Dante, however, all but the literal sense naturally coalesced as the allegorical is quite clear from the close of the chapter and from the letter to Can Grande, in which he discusses the interpretations of his Commedia. "Although these mystic senses are called by various names, they may all in general be called allegorical."[329] That the "beauteous fiction," the bella menzogna, of allegory is rhetorical in origin is clear from a passage in the Vita Nuova. Dante is defending his personification of Love as one walking, speaking and laughing on the assumption that as a poet he is licensed to use figures or rhetorical colorings. These colorings, however, must have a true but hidden significance. The rhetorical figures are a garment to clothe the nakedness of truth.[330]

2. Allegory in Mediaeval England

England as well as Italy furnished a congenial soil for allegory in the thirteenth century. In his Poetria, John of Garland[331] explains allegorically an "elegiac, bucolic, ethic, love poem" which he quotes. "Under the guise of the nymph," he says, "is figured forth the flesh; under that of the corrupt youth, the world or the devil; under that of the friend, reason."[332] In another illustrative poem, this time introduced to show the proper use of the six parts of an oration, John inserts between the "confirmacio," and the "confutacio," an "expositio mistica" in which the Trojan War is allegorized in this fashion: "The fury of Eacides is the ire of Satan," etc.[333]

As late as 1506 Stephen Hawes's Pastime of Pleasure is as mediaeval as the Romance of the Rose.[334] In this allegory of the education and love adventures of Grandamour the young man sits at the feet of Dame Rethoryke to be instructed at great length in her art. To none other of the seven liberal arts, in fact, does Hawes devote so much space. In the chapter on inventio, however, the lady seems to have forgotten all about her traditional past, for instead of discussing the method of finding all possible arguments in favor of a case, she discusses the poets, their purpose, and their fame.

The purpose of poetry is to her what it had been throughout the entire period of the middle ages. The poet presents truth under the guise of allegory.

To make of nought reason sentencious Clokynge a trouthe wyth colour tenebrous. For often under a fayre fayned fable A trouthe appereth gretely profitable.[335]

This, says Dame Rethoryke, has the sanction of antiquity; for the old poets, who are famous for their wisdom and the imaginative power of their invention, pronounced truth under cloudy figures. This fortified the poets against sloth.

The special treasure
Of new invencion, of ydleness the foo!

Then she addresses herself directly to the poets to laud their virtues.

Your hole desyre was set
Fables to fayne to eschewe ydleness,...
To dysnull vyce and the vycious to blame.

Furthermore she praises them for recording the honorable deeds of great conquerors and for furnishing the modern poets with such illustrious models of the poetic art. This praise of the poets is complementary to a condemnation of the foolish public, whose limited intelligence prevents them from seeing the cloaked truth of the poets. Thus the dull, rude people, when they are unable to understand the moral implications of the poet's allegory, call the poets liars, deceivers, and flatterers. This, she insists, is the fault not of the poets, but of the people. If the people would take the trouble to understand these clouded truths, they would praise and appreciate the moral poets.

The conclusion is not difficult. The mediaeval poets are on the defensive, as their brothers had been through all the past. To justify art, the middle ages had to show its usefulness not only to morals, but to theology. Thus Dame Rethoryke in her talk on inventio, is conducting a defense of poetry on the following grounds: it teaches profound truth under the guise of allegory; it blames the vicious and overcomes vice; it is the enemy of sloth; it records the honorable deeds of great men.

The chapter on style only continues the song. It is the art, says Hawes, to cloak the meaning under misty figures of many colors, as the old poets did, who took similitudes from beasts and birds.

And under colour of this beste, pryvely
The morall sense they cloake full subtyly.[336]

The poets write, he continues, under a misty cloud of covert likeness. For instance, the poets feign that King Atlas bore the heavens on his shoulders, meaning only that he was unusually versed in high astronomy. Likewise the story of the centaurs only exemplifies the skill of Mylyzyus in breaking the wildness of the royal steeds. Pluto, Cerberus, and the hydra receive like explanations. The poets feign these fables, of course, to lead the readers out of mischief. A poet to be great must drink of the redolent well of poetry whence flow the four rivers of Understanding, Close-concluding, Novelty, and Carbuncles. These rivers are translatable into: understanding of good and evil, moral purpose, novelty, rhetorical adornment of figures and so forth.

The poets praised--Gower, Chaucer, and Lydgate--deserve their fame, he says, for their morality. They cleanse our vices. They kindle our hearts with love of virtue. Lydgate's Falls of Princes is an especially great poem,

A good ensample for us to dispyse
This worlde, so ful of mutabilyte.[337]

Other cunning poets are, however, not so praiseworthy. Instead of feigning pleasant and covert fables, they spend their time in vanity, making ballades of fervent love and such like tales and trifles. This, he insists, is an unfruitful manner in which to spend one's efforts.

This unanimous judgment of the middle ages that the purpose of poetry is to teach spiritual truth and inculcate morality under the cloak of allegory was perpetuated far into the renaissance, especially in England, where, as has been shown, the recovery of classical culture made slow progress.[338]

Chapter III
Rhetorical Elements in Italian Renaissance Conceptions of the Purpose of Poetry

In his study of the function of poetry in the literary criticism of the Italian renaissance, Spingarn has shown[339] that the characteristic opinions reflect the ideas of Horace in his famous line,

Aut prodesse volunt aut delectare poetae.

The purpose of poetry, they thought, was to please, to instruct, or to combine pleasure and instruction. He goes further to show that with the notable exceptions of Bernardo Tasso and Castelvetro, who claimed no further function for poetry than delight and delight alone, the general conception was ethical. "Even when delight was admitted as an end, it was simply because of its usefulness in effecting the ethical aim.[340]" This chapter, resuming briefly the results of Spingarn's investigations where they help the reader to understand better the situation in English criticism, will bring into sharper relief than has heretofore been done two influences which affected the renaissance view not a little--scholastic philosophy and the classical rhetorics.

To St. Thomas Aquinas, logic was the art of arts, because in action we are directed by reason. Thus all arts proceed from it, and rhetoric is a part of it.[341] The Thomistic philosophy which included rhetoric and poetic in logic, whereas Aristotle had classified the three arts as coÖrdinate within the same category, seems, says Spingarn, "to have been accepted by the scholastic philosophers of the middle ages."[342] The appearance of this scholastic grouping in the renaissance criticism is parallel with a gradual abandonment of the popular mediaeval preoccupation with allegory, in favor of the classical view which considered example as the best vehicle for moral improvement.

In the age of the Medicis, when refined courts of Italy were so greatly delighted at the recovery of the least edifying literary monuments of classical antiquity, allegorical interpretation had probably so often become but a cloak for licentiousness in poetry that it was becoming discredited. At any rate, Loyola rejected allegorical interpretation of classical literature for the Jesuit colleges. He based moral education on example, and expurgated any element which he thought might have a pernicious effect on young people. For instance, except in the most advanced class, the Dido episode was deleted from the Æneid.[343]

Savonarola rejected allegory and considered logic, rhetoric, and poetic as parts of philosophy. Logic proceeds by induction and syllogism, rhetoric by the enthymeme, and poetic by the example. Therefore the office of the poet is to teach by examples, to induce men to virtuous living by fitting representations. Because our minds delight greatly in song and harmony, the early poets used meter and rhythm better to incline the soul of man to virtue and morality. It is impossible, however, for a person ignorant of logic to be a true poet. A mere concern with rhythm and the composition of sentences profits nothing, for what is the use of painting and decorating a ship if it is going to be swamped in the storm and never come to port? The poets who endeavor to place their poems on a par with the Scriptures overlook the fact that only the sacred writings can have an allegorical, parabolical or spiritual meaning. Since Dante had made all these claims, the inference is that Savonarola declined to accept poetry as part of theology, and rejected both Dante and the popular mediaeval tradition. Poets, he goes on to say, use metaphors because of the weakness of their material. If you took away the verbal ornament, you would not read the poets, because there would be nothing left. The theologian uses metaphor only as an adornment to his solid matter. The poet who sings of love, praises idols, and narrates lies has a very bad effect on young men. He incites to lust and immorality. But poets who describe in verses moral actions and the deeds of brave men should not on that account be condemned.[344]

1. The Scholastic Grouping of Poetic, Rhetoric and Logic

The scholastic grouping of logic, rhetoric, and poetic which Savonarola derived from St. Thomas Aquinas[345] persisted for four centuries, rejuvenated by contact with the richer classical scholarship of the renaissance. B. Lombardus, for instance, in his preface to Maggi's edition of Aristotle's Poetics (1550), differentiates logic, rhetoric, and poetic by the same criteria. Logic, he says, proves by syllogism, and in this is different from both rhetoric and poetic, which use enthymeme and example as more appropriate to a popular audience, while poetic uses example almost entirely and scarcely ever enthymeme.[346]

Spingarn calls attention to a similar distinction in the Lezione (1553) of Benedetto Varchi. Varchi says:

Just as the logician uses for his means the noblest of all instruments, that is, demonstration or the demonstrative syllogism; so the dialectician, the topical syllogism; and the sophist, the sophistical, that is, the apparent and deceitful; the rhetorician, the enthymeme, and the poet, the example, which is the least worthy of all. So the subject of poetry is the feigned fable and the fabulous, and its means or instrument is the example.[347]

This has its ultimate source in the Rhetoric of Aristotle, who made the following distinction between logic and rhetoric: Logic aims at demonstration by the syllogism and by induction; rhetoric aims at persuasion by the enthymeme and the example. The enthymeme is a rhetorical syllogism, usually with the conclusion or either premise unexpressed. Moreover the premises of an enthymeme are likely to rest on opinion rather than on axioms. The example is a rhetorical induction, usually from fewer cases than are necessary to scientific induction.[348]

The same scholastic grouping of logic, rhetoric, and poetic appears in the treatise On the Nature of the Art of Poetry (1647) of the Dutch scholar Vossius, who writes:

As rhetoric is called by Aristotle the counterpart of dialect and that especially because it teaches the manner by which enthymemes may be utilized in communal matters, without a doubt poetic is also to be thought a part of logic, because it discloses the use of examples in fictitious matters.... But rhetoric and poetic seek not only to prove something, but also to delight; they seek not only understanding, but action as well. Wherefore poetic has this in common with rhetoric; that both are the servants of the state.[349]

Vossius thus, like Scaliger, makes poetic and rhetoric one in their end to promote desirable action.

How persistent is this rhetorical view of poetry is well illustrated by the Ars Rhetorica of the Jesuit Martin Du Cygne, first published in 1666, and still used as a text-book in Georgetown University. He is discussing the three kinds of argument: syllogism, enthymeme, and example, or induction.

Induction is delightful and is appropriate to an ignorant audience because of its similitudes and examples. This argument is frequently used by rhetoricians and poets, especially Ovid; because it explains attractively and clearly.[350]

Thus the grouping of poetic with rhetoric and logic naturally tended to make it partake more and more of the nature of the other two. All of them were taken to be occupied with proving something in an effort to make other people good. They differed only because they used different kinds of proof.

2. The Influence of the Classical Rhetorics

A more explicit influence on the renaissance belief that the function of poetry is to improve social morality is readily seen in the definitions of poetry which have already been quoted from Lombardus and Varchi, who formulated their definitions of poetry by combining Aristotle's definition of tragedy with his definition of rhetoric.[351] Another explicit borrowing from classical rhetoric was of Cicero's three-fold aim of the orator: to teach, to delight, to persuade (docere, delectare, permovere).[352] Several important Italian critics carried this terminology over into their theories of poetry along with the purpose which has always animated rhetoric--persuasion.

Making Horace a point of departure, Daniello, in 1536, says that the function of the poet is to teach and delight, but more than that--to persuade. He must move his readers to share the emotions of his characters, to shun vice, and embrace virtue.[353] This extreme rhetorical parallel was further insisted on by Minturno (1559), who defined the duty of a poet as so to speak in verse as to teach, to delight, and to move.[354] And as Aristotle had affirmed in his Rhetoric that the character of the speaker was one of the three essential elements in persuasion,[355] Minturno is constrained to make the moral character of the poet an indispensable quality of his poetry. Thus he borrows Cato's definition of the orator as a "good man skilled in public speech" (vir bonus dicendi peritus) from Quintilian,[356] and defines the poet as "a good man skilled in speech and imitation" (poeta vir bonus dicendi et imitandi peritus).[357]

Like Minturno, Scaliger insisted that poetry must teach, move, and delight.[358] It is thus the result in action which Minturno and Scaliger emphasize. The poet must work on the feelings of his reader so that he shall embrace and imitate the good, and spurn the evil. Philosophy, oratory, and poetry have thus one end--and only one--persuasion.[359] Without the "movere," the incentive to action, of course poetry could not serve its purpose of moral improvement on which the renaissance so sternly insisted. A reader might enjoy a story, play, or poem which presented impeccable examples of virtue rewarded and vice punished, or which abounded in noble platitudes gilded with wit, and still smile and be a villain. It was thus inevitable that an acceptance of the moral purpose of poetry should sooner or later drive any logical minded critic of poetry completely into the camp of rhetoric. There the poet would find a complete panoply of arms forged for the arousing of the feelings in an audience, and for stirring the springs of action. He could make his readers hate sin by the same means Demosthenes made his hearers hate Philip, and love any virtue by appropriating the methods of Cicero Pro Archia. According to this belief, the difference between poetic and rhetoric was minimized. In theory a poem or a speech might indifferently be composed either in prose or in verse. Both endeavored to teach, to please, and to move. Both looked toward persuasion as an object. The speech used the enthymeme and the example as proofs, while the poem used the example to a greater, and the enthymeme to a lesser degree. Both in theory and in practice the example was regarded as being a pleasanter argument than the precept, as well as being more effective. This was the age of Ciceronianism. The school-masters of Europe had recently rediscovered imitation as the royal road to learning, and in their system of language teaching emphasized imitation of classical authors more than following the precepts of the grammarians or of the rhetoricians. The epigram of Seneca, "longum iter per praecepta, breve per exempla," was the popular catchword of the age. The example was popular.

Thus by the end of the sixteenth century, the Italian critics had formulated a logical and self-consistent theory of the purpose of poetry. Inheritors of the allegorical theory of the middle ages, which they in part discarded, and discoverers of classical rhetoric which they carried over bodily into their theories of poetry, they passed on to France, Germany, and England their rhetorical theories. The purpose of poetry, as well as of rhetoric, was to them persuasion--to teach, to please, to move. The instrument of poetry was the rhetorical example.

Chapter IV
English Renaissance Ideas of the Purpose of Poetry

In England the Italian interpretations of the literary criticism of Greece and Rome made slow headway against the established traditions of the middle ages. In particular the vogue of allegory did not yield to the idea of the moral example transferred from rhetoric to poetic.

1. Allegory and Example in Rhetoric

When Thomas Wilson published the first edition of his Arte of Rhetorique in 1553, the corpus of Greek criticism in the Aldine Rhetores Graeci had been in print forty-five years, and the commentaries of Dolce, Daniello, Robortelli, and Maggi were available. But Wilson wrote a very good rhetoric with no books before him but Quintilian, Cicero and the rhetoric Ad Herennium, which he thought to be Cicero's, Erasmus, Plutarch De audiendis poetis, and St. Basil. His treatment of poetry is quite naturally, then, that of a rhetorician who had been reared in the mediaeval tradition of allegory.

Allegory in the sense of Quintilian as a trope, an extended metaphor, Wilson mentions only once. His instance will bear quotation:

It is evil putting strong Wine into weake vesselles, that is to say, it is evil trusting some women with weightie matters. The English Proverbes gathered by John Heywood, helpe well in this behalfe, the which commonly are nothing els but Allegories, and darke devised sentences.[360]

Allegory in its more general mediaeval sense of the kernel of moral truth within the brilliant husk of the poet's fables he discusses at greater length elsewhere with full exemplification.

For by them we may talke at large and win men by persuasion, if we declare beforehand that these tales were not fained of such wisemen without cause.

This obvious rhetorical discussion of the use of poetical illustrations by orators leads him to express his conviction of the moral value of poetry. That poetry did have this improving effect he is quite sure.

For undoubtedly there is no one tale among all the Poetes, but under the same is comprehended something that parteineth, either to the amendment of maners, to the knowledge of the trueth to the setting forth of Nature's work, or els the understanding of some notable thing done.... As Plutarch saieth: and likewise Basilius Magnus:[361] In the Iliades are described strength, and valiantnesse of the bodie: In the Odissea is set forth a lively paterne of the minde. The Poetes were wisemen, and wished in hart the redresse of things, the which when for feare, they durst not openly rebuke, they did in colours painte them out, and tolde men by shadowes what they should doe in good sooth, or els because the wicked were unworthy to heare the trueth, they spake so that none might understand but those unto whom they please to utter their meaning.[362]

Wilson seems to mean not only that poetry has a moral effect, but that the moral value is the main intention. He then proceeds to elucidate the story of Danae as signifying that women have been and will be overcome by money. The story of Io's seduction by the bull shows that beauty may overcome the best of women. From Icarus we should learn that every man should not meddle with things above his compass, and from Midas, to avoid covetousness. As a Protestant he explains St. Christopher and St. George in like manner allegorically.

But Wilson is a rhetorician, not a theorist of poetry; he is not concerned with the moral example as the purpose of poetry. In his section on example as a rhetorical argument he shows how stories and fables may enliven and enforce a point. He illustrates by Pliny's story of the grateful dragon, and by Appian's story of the grateful lion, how a speaker may enlarge on the duty of gratitude among men. But though he does not postulate pleasurable instruction as the aim of poetry, he clearly implies it in his comment on the use of stories in argument.

Nor does Roger Ascham in his Scholemaster, written between 1563-1568 and published posthumously in 1570, concern himself with the purpose of poetry. His interest in poetry seems to be confined to prosody. As a school-master himself he is interested in guiding grammar-school boys in their mastery of Latin prose. "I purpose to teach a yong scholer, to go, not to dance: to speake, not to sing."[363] That he is not blind to the fact that poetry does influence the character of a reader, whether that be its purpose or not in the mind of God, he shows by his comment on Plautus. The language, Ascham says, is good and worthy of imitation; but the master must choose only such passages as contain honest matter.[364] And the same fear of the possible evil moral influence of fiction is evinced in his famous condemnation of the Morte Darthur "the whole pleasure of which booke standeth in two speciall poyntes, in open mans slaughter, and bold bawdrye,"[365] and in his attacks on English translations of Italian poems and stories. In this his position is substantially that of Savonarola, Loyola and Vives.[366] Nowhere does Ascham advance the claims of allegory as cloaking moral truth under the guise of fiction. He is too good a classicist and Ciceronian. What he fears from poetry is evil example. If he believed that the purpose of poetry was to teach truth by example pleasantly, at least he does not say so. Ascham represents the advance guard in England against allegory. But since he was not writing on the theory of poetry primarily, he did not endeavor to establish that the function of poetry is to teach by example.

2. Allegory and the Rhetorical Example in Poetic

Thus far we have had to draw inferences from the asides of rhetorician and school-master. But in 1575, five years after the publication of Ascham's treatise, George Gascoigne, a poet, published his Certayne Notes of Instruction Concerning the Making of Verse or Ryme.[367] The title is not misleading. Gascoigne is concerned with the style of poetry, not with its philosophy. His only reference to either example or allegory is in a passage where he recommends methods of avoiding triteness in the praise of his mistress.

If I should disclose my pretence in love, I would eyther make a strange discourse of some intollerable passion, or finde occasion to pleade by the example of some historie, or discover my disquiet in shadowes per Allegoriam.[368]

Slight as this is, it hints at the rhetoric of Ovid and the declamation schools. The poet is "to pleade by example." He is making a speech to his mistress trying to prove to her his undying passion that she may grant him the ultimate favor. The genre is the same that includes the Epistles of Ovid and the Love Letters of Aristenetus. It is the genre of versified speech-making. Wilson recommended the Proverbs of Heywood as furnishing "allegories" useful in the amplification of a point in a speech. In his Euphues Lyly did use such "allegories" in what his contemporaries generally considered a poem. Lyly drew examples, anecdotes, and fables which he used as Gascoigne suggested, not only from Heywood, but from the Similia and Adagia, of Erasmus, and from the Emblems of Alciati.[369]

So far the moral example is counseled or practised only as a recognized device of rhetoric. It is not transferred to poetic until George Whetstone's Dedication to his Promos and Cassandra. For Whetstone asserts that in his comedy he has intermingled all actions "in such sorte as the grave matter may instruct, and the pleasant delight ... and the conclusion showes the confusion of Vice and the cherising of Vertue."[370] That the philosophy of this moral improvement resides in the extreme application of poetic justice he shows as follows: "For by the reward of the good the good are encouraged in wel doinge: and with the scowrge of the lewde the lewde are feared from evill attempts." Whetstone's Dedication was published in 1578, one year before Gosson launched his attack against poetry and poets in his School of Abuse, which was answered by Lodge and Sidney in their Apologies. In this controversy, in which Whetstone later took sides with the anti-stage party in his Touchstone for Time (1584), the age-long conflict between the poets and the philosophers was renewed with vigor and acrimony. But both the attackers and the defenders argued from the same premise, that the purpose of poetry was to afford pleasant moral instruction. Gosson and the Puritans objected that current poetry and plays failed to afford this moral instruction and should consequently be condemned. Lodge, Sidney and the other defenders of poetry retorted that poetry had a noble function--the teaching of morality, and that an occasional poem which did not serve this purpose did not invalidate the claims of poetry as a whole.

Gosson writes:

The right use of auncient poetrie was to have the notable exploytes of worthy captaines, the holesome councels of good fathers and vertuous lives of predecessors set down in numbers, and sung to the instrument at solemne feastes, that the sound of the one might draw the hearers from kissing the cup too often, and the sense of the other put them in minde of things past, and chaulke out the way to do the like.[371]

The benefit, according to Gosson, which poetry should produce is that of good moral example. Moral doctrine, he believes accessible in the churches, and against the poets he urges that the evil social environment of the theatre offsets the benefit to be derived even from good plays. What profits the moral lesson of such a play if after witnessing the performance a man walk away with a woman whose acquaintance he has just made in the theatre.[372] He may drink wine, he may play cards, he may even enter a brothel.

In his Defence of Poetry (1579), Lodge retreats to the caverns of the middle ages to equip himself with arms. Under the influence of Campano, who died in 1477, he advances allegory as the explanation which makes the apparently light and trifling poets moral teachers of the utmost seriousness. Addressing Gosson he exclaims:

Did you never reade that under the persons of beastes many abuses were dissiphered? Have you not reason to waye that whatsoever ether Virgil did write of his gnatt or Ovid of his fley was all covertly to declare abuse?... You remember not that under the person of Aeneas in Virgil the practice of a dilligent captaine is described; you know not that the creation is signified in the Image of Prometheus; the fall of pryde in the person of Narcissus.[373]

And he quotes Lactantius as comparing poetry with the Scriptures. If either are taken literally, they will seem false. We should judge by the poet's hidden meaning.[374] The purpose of the poets, to Lodge, was "In the way of pleasure to draw men to wisdome." When he defends comedy, Lodge drifts away from allegory. Terence and Plautus he praises for furnishing examples of virtue and vice upon the boards, thus to amend the manners of his auditors. He believed that poetry did amend manners, and correct abuses--if properly used. But he is very quick to admit the very abuses which Gosson attacked.

I abhore those poets that savor of ribaldry: I will admit the expullcion of such enormities, poetry is dispraised not for the folly that is in it, but for the abuse whiche manye ill Wryters couller by it.[375] I must confess with Aristotle that men are greatly delighted with imitation, and that it were good to bring those things on stage that were altogether tending to vertue; all this I admit and hartely wysh, but you say unlesse the thinge be taken away the vice will continue. Nay I say if the style were changed the practise would profit.[376]

Thus he defends poetry bcause it teaches morality by example and by allegory.

With that higher intelligence and learning which have already been contrasted with the unthinking acceptance of his times[377] Sir Philip Sidney wrote his Apologie for Poetrie. In this dignified and vigorous pamphlet, written about 1583, and published in 1595, Sidney presents the best and most consistent argument for the moral purpose of poetry that appeared in England. That the main line of his argument and his best material is drawn from Minturno and Scaliger, as Spingarn has demonstrated,[378] in no way invalidates his claim to distinction. The purpose of poetry is to Sidney, in the first place, to teach and delight,[379] "that fayning notable images of vertues, vices, or what els, with that delightfull teaching which must be the right describing note to know a poet by."[380] But as the end of all earthly learning is virtuous action, in Sidney's mind, he agrees with Minturno and Scaliger in borrowing from rhetoric Cicero's three-fold aim of the orator: to teach, to delight, to move. Sidney says that the poets "imitate both to delight and teach, and delight to move men to take the goodnes in hande ... and teach, to make them know that goodnes whereunto they are mooved."[381] It is incredible that he did not know this terminology as rhetoric. Poetry, he believes, fails if it does not persuade its reader to abandon evil and adopt good.

And that mooving is of a higher degree than teaching, it may by this appeare, that it is well nigh the cause of teaching. For who will be taught, if he bee not mooved with desire to be taught? and what so much good doth that teaching bring forth (I speak still of morall doctrine) as that it mooveth one to do that which it dooth teach?[382]

The effectiveness of poetry, then, in accomplishing this moral end lies in its pleasantness. The poet, says Sidney, in that most famous passage which is too frequently quoted incompletely,

commeth to you with words sent in delightful proportion, either accompanied with, or prepared for, the well inchaunting skill of Musicke; and with a tale forsooth he commeth unto you, with a tale which holdeth children from play, and old men from the chimney corner. And pretending no more, doth intende the winning of the mind from wickedness to vertue: even as the childe is often brought to take most wholsom things by hiding them in such other as have a pleasant tast.[383]

According to Sidney, then, it is the very purpose of poetry to win men to virtue by pleasant instruction. The argument of poetry in accomplishing this end is primarily the example. Sidney compares very elaborately philosophy, history, and poetry in an endeavor to show that poetry is the most effective instrument for forwarding virtue. In the first place poetry is better adapted than philosophy to win men to virtue because it persuades both by precepts and by examples, while philosophy persuades by precepts alone. His sanction for this high opinion of the persuasive power of example is the rhetorical commonplace of the renaissance that the way is long by precept and short by example.[384] To enforce this point he tells the story of how Menenius Agrippa won over the people of Rome to support the Senate by telling them the story of the revolt of the members against the belly. Quintilian[385] and Wilson[386] had already told this story to prove the effectiveness of the example as a rhetorical argument, a device of the public speaker.

The main advantage which poetry possesses over history, Sidney goes on, is that while the historian must stick to his facts, which too frequently are unedifying, the poet can and does create a world better than nature, and presents to his reader ideal figures of human conduct such as Pylades, Cyrus, and Æneas.[387] This is Sidney's application of Aristotle's assertion that history is particular and poetic universal; history records things as they are and poetic as they are, worse than they are, or better. Lest his readers might fear that the arguments of the poet might lose some of their persuasive force from their being fictitious, Sidney hastens to add: "For that a fayned example hath as much force to teach as a true example (for as for to moove, it is cleere, sith the fayned may be tuned to the highest key of passion);"[388] and here he is drawing from Aristotle's Rhetoric.[389] Through admiration of the noble persons of poetry, the reader is won to a desire for emulation. "Who readeth Æneas carrying olde Anchises on his back, that wisheth not it were his fortune to perfourme so excellent an acte?"[390]

Although Sidney believes the principal moral value of poetry to reside in its power to teach and move by the use of examples, he devotes at least half a page to the beneficent effect of parables and allegories. The parables which he uses, however, are all Christian, and the allegories are all the Fables of Æsop. From the allegorical interpretation of poetry current in the middle ages and to a scarcely less degree among his English contemporaries Sidney remains conspicuously aloof.

In answering the specific charges against poetry, that it is a waste of time, the mother of lies, the nurse of abuse, and rejected by Plato, Sidney asserts that a thing which moves men to virtue so effectively as poetry cannot be a waste of time; that since poetry pretends not to literal truth, it cannot lie,[391] that poetry does not abuse man's wit, but man's wit abuses poetry, for "shall the abuse of a thing make the right use odious?"[393] and that Plato objected not to poetry but to its abuse.

Sir John Harington[392] who published his Brief Apologie of Poetrie in 1591, four years before the publication of Sidney's Apologie, based much of his treatise on Sidney. Unfortunately, he did not digest fully the arguments of the manuscript in his hand, and instead of a first-hand knowledge of Minturno and Scaliger had only the commonplaces of Plutarch. In spite even of Plutarch, allegory, not moral example, is his main line of defence. His fundamental basis is the stock Horatian "omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci," or as Harington paraphrases, "for in verse is both goodness and sweetness, Rubarb and Sugarcandie, the pleasant and the profitable."[394] The objection that poets lie Harington meets as Sidney does, "But poets never affirming any for true, but presenting them to us as fables and imitations, cannot lye though they would."[395] At this point Harington parts company with his master and goes back to the middle ages.

The ancient Poets have indeed wrapped as it were in their writings divers and sundry meanings, which they call the senses or mysteries thereof. First of all for the litteral sence (as it were the utmost barke or ryne) they set downe in manner of an historie the acts and notable exploits of some persons worthie memorie: then in the same fiction, as a second rine and somewhat more fine, as it were nearer to the pith and marrow, they place the Morall sence profitable for the active life of man, approving vertuous actions and condemning the contrarie. Many times also under the selfesame words they comprehend some true understanding of naturall Philosophie, or sometimes of politike government, and now and then of divinitie: and these same sences that comprehend so excellent knowledge we call the Allegorie.[396]

Nothing could be more specifically mediaeval. He then proceeds to explain the historical, moral, and three allegorical senses of the story of Perseus and the Gorgon--the highest allegory being theological. Further, to defend the allegorical senses of poetry, which conceals a pith of profit under a pleasant rind, Harington explains fully how Demosthenes, Bishop Fisher, and the Prophet Nathan enforced their arguments by allegorical stories. To Harington, then, poetry is useful as an introduction to Philosophy. Paraphrasing Plutarch On the Reading of Poets, he says:

So young men do like best that Philosophy that is not Philosophie, or that is not delivered as Philosophie, and such are the pleasant writings of learned Poets, that are the popular Philosophers and the popular divines.[397]

A Discourse of English Poetrie (1586) by the laborious but uninspired tutor, William Webbe,[398] is not a defense; but interspersed among his remarks advocating the reformed versifying, and his arid catalog of poets, ancient and modern, is a good deal about the moral purpose and value of poetry. A thoroughgoing Horatian, he cannot forbear to quote at length and comment upon the "miscere utile dulci," of his master. Poetry, in Webbe's conception, therefore, is especially effective in its "sweete allurements to vertues and commodious caveates from vices."[399] In appraising the methods of producing the moral effect, Webbe fails to share with his contemporaries their high opinion of moral example and their depreciation of precept. Poetry, he says, contains great and profitable fruits for the instruction of manners and precepts of good life[400]. And he finds much profit even in the most dissolute works of Ovid and Martial because they abound in moral precepts. He does not, however, entirely discount the moral effect of example. Ovid and Martial should be kept from young people who have not yet gained sufficient judgment to distinguish between the beneficial and the harmful, and Lucian should not be read at all. But he seems to fear the moral effect of bad example more than he applauds the effect of good. Thus his main reliance is upon allegory. The Metamorphoses of Ovid, for instance,

though it consisted of fayned Fables for the most part, and poeticall inventions, yet being moralized according to his meaning, and the trueth of every tale beeing discovered, it is a worke of exceeding wysedome and sounde judgment [and the rest of his writings] are mixed with much good counsayle and profitable lessons, if they be wisely and narrowly read.[401]

Perhaps because he was not pledged to defend poetry against the attacks of the Puritans, Webbe thus allows himself to admit "the very summe or cheefest essence of poetry dyd alwayes for the most part consist in delighting the readers or hearers with pleasure." Aside from his emphasizing allegory, which Plutarch had rejected, Webbe is thus closer to the doctrines of Plutarch than he is to the Italians. Poetry has, he believes, a moral effect, but he does not establish this moral effect as its motivating purpose[402]. And again, after descanting on the exhortations to virtue, dehortations from vices, and praises of laudable things which characterized the early poets, he defines the comical sort of poetry as containing "all such Epigrammes, Elegies, and delectable ditties, which Poets have devised respecting onely the delight thereof.[403]

Like Webbe, the author of The Arte of English Poesie (1589) ascribed to Puttenham,[404] believes much in the pleasure of poetry. He does not, however, advance pleasure as the purpose any more than he does profit. Instead of endeavoring to discover what the end or purpose of poetry may be, Puttenham explains why certain forms of poetry were devised, or what may be the intention of certain poets in certain poems. The passage is worth quoting at length. The use of poetry, says Puttenham,

is the laud, honour, & glory of the immortall gods (I speake now in phrase of the Gentiles); secondly, the worthy gests of noble Princes, the memoriall and registry of all great fortunes, the praise of vertue & reproofe of vice, the instruction of morall doctrines, the revealing of sciences naturall & other profitable Arts, the redresse of boistrous & sturdie courages by perswasion, the consolation and repose of temperate myndes: finally, the common solace of mankind in all his travails and cares of this transitorie life; and in this last sort, being used for recreation onely, may allowably beare matter not alwayes of the gravest or of any great commoditie or profit, but rather in some sort vaine, dissolute, or wanton, so it be not very scandalous & of evill example.[405]

The poems of "this last sort" which Puttenham had in mind were anagrams, emblems, and such trifling verse especially, which, as he says, have been objected to by some grave and theological heads as "to none edification nor instruction, either of morall vertue or otherwise behooffull for the commonwealth." These trifles "have bene in all ages permitted as the convenient solaces and recreations of man's wit."[406] But Puttenham does not advocate that these poems whose only aim is recreation should be released from the restraints of accepted morality. They may be vain, dissolute or wanton, but not very scandalous. They should not offer evil examples, nor should their matter be "unhonest."

Not all poetry, according to Puttenham, is given over to refreshing the mind by the ear's delight. Although the poet is appointed as a pleader of lovely causes in the ear of princely dames, young ladies, gentlewomen, and courtiers,[407] none the less much poetry has a didactic purpose. Satire was first invented to administer direct rebuke of evil, comedy to amend the manners of common men by discipline and example, tragedy to show the mutability of fortune and the just punishment of God in revenge of a vicious and evil life, pastoral to inform moral discipline, for the amendment of man's behavior, or to insinuate or glance at greater matters under the veil of rustic persons and rude speeches.[408] Here Puttenham pays his respects to all accepted methods of poetical instruction: in satire, to precepts; in comedy and tragedy, to example; in pastoral, to allegory. Yet it is in historical poetry, which may indifferently be wholly true, wholly false, or a mixture, the moral effect of example is most potent. Speaking of examples in poetry, he says, "Right so no kinde of argument in all the Oratorie craft doth better perswade and more universally satisfie then example."[409] It is on this account that historical poetry is, next the divine, the most honorable and worthy. For the historians have always been not so eager that what they wrote should be true to fact as that it should be used either for example or for pleasure.

Considering that many times it is seene a fained matter or altogether fabulous, besides that it maketh more mirth than any other, works no less good conclusions for example then the most true and veritable, but often more, because the Poet hath the handling of them to fashion at his pleasure.[410]

This conception of history as moral example is common enough. To BudÉ all history was a moral example[411] and Puttenham's inclusion of didactic fiction is in line with much renaissance thought, which regarded the two as almost interchangeable.[412]

Puttenham, like Webbe, was more in accord with Horace in admitting both the pleasant and profitable effects of poetry than he was with Minturno, Scaliger, and Sidney. He grants that some poetry exists only for pleasure, but he puts his emphasis on poetry as a power of persuasion[413] accomplishing the moral improvement of society. As late as the Hypercritica (1618) of Bolton, history is defined as nothing else but a kind of philosophy using examples. Bolton enforces his view by quotation from Bede, William of Malmesbury, and Sir Thomas North.[414]

3. The Displacement of Allegory by Example

A most interesting view of the purpose of poetry was evolved in the brain of Francis Bacon--that baffling complexity of mediaeval tradition and penetrating original thought. To him the use of feigned history, as he defines poetry, "hath beene to give some shadowe of satisfaction to the minde of man in those points wherein the Nature of things doth deny it."[415] That is, poetry represents the world as greater, more just, and more pleasant than it really is. "So as it appeareth that Poesie serveth and conferreth to Magnanimitie, Moralitie, and to delectation." Here Bacon seems to imply that the essential pleasure of poetry is in affording vicarious experience through imaginative realization. Poetry does this by "submitting the shewes of things to the desires of the minde." It truly makes a world nearer to our heart's desire. But while Bacon derives the moral benefit of poetry from examples of conduct and outcomes of events more nearly just than those of actual life, when he analyses poetry into its kinds, he makes a place for allegory. In this division he provides for narrative, drama, and allegory. But with penetration he sees what few renaissance critics had noted before--that allegory is of two varieties. The first variety is essentially the same as a rhetorical example; it is an extended metaphor used as an argument to enforce a point and thus persuade an audience. The fables of Aesop are such allegories or examples; and they are useful because they make their point more interestingly than other arguments and more clearly. The other sort of allegory, says Bacon, instead of illuminating the idea, obscures it. "That is, when the Secrets and Misteries of Religion, Pollicy, or Philosophy, are involved in Fables or Parables." He then gives political allegorical interpretations of the myths of Briareus and of the Centaur and suddenly adds: "Nevertheless in many the like incounters, I doe rather think that the fable was first and the exposition devised than that the Morall was first and thereupon the fable framed."[416] Bacon's final conclusion seems to be that, although allegorical poetry does exist, allegory is not essential to poetry and that the wholesale allegorizing of the middle ages was far off the mark. In his suspicion that in most cases the fable was first and the interpretation after, Bacon was in complete agreement with Rabelais in the prologue of Gargantua.[417] At any rate Bacon seems to have given the coup de grace to allegory in England.

Under the influence of Pico della Mirandola it was resurrected from its tomb by Henry Reynolds; but it was a much less moral allegory and a more mystical. In his Mythomystes (licensed 1632) Reynolds admits, that the ancients mingled moral instruction in their poetry, but reprehends this as an abuse. Prose is the proper vehicle of moral doctrine and should have been employed by Spenser. The true function of poetry, then, is to give secret knowledge of the mysteries of nature to the initiated. Thus the story of the rape of Proserpine signifies, when allegorically interpreted; "the putrefaction and succeeding generation of the Seedes we commit to Pluto, or the earth."[418] This is the most plausible example of mystical interpretation to be found in the whole treatise.

To the allegorist, the fable or plot in epic or dramatic poetry was only a rind to cover attractively the kernel of truth. It was a means to an end, not an end in itself. As the influence of Aristotle's Poetics spreading through Italy, Germany, France, and England, gave the plot or fable more importance, allegory lost its hold on the minds of the critics. When Ben Jonson writes in his Timber "For the Fable and Fiction is, as it were, the forme and Soule of any Poeticall worke or Poeme"[419] the change had come. Jonson, like Sidney, was steeped in classical criticism as interpreted and spread abroad by the sixteenth-century critics of the continent. But while Sidney made a place for allegory in his scheme of poetry, Jonson does not so much as mention it. His idea of the teaching power of poetry, for to him poetry and painting both behold pleasure and profit as their common object,[420] is rhetorical--depending on precept and example--and attaining its true aim when it moves men to action. Poesy is "a dulcet and gentle Philosophy, which leades on and guides us by the hand to Action with a ravishing delight and incredible Sweetnes."[421] Jonson evidently knew that he was merging oratory and poetry in their common purpose of securing persuasion; for he says:

"The Poet is the neerest Borderer upon the Orator, and expresseth all his vertues, though he be tyed more to numbers, is his equal in ornament, and above him in his strengths: Because in moving the minds of men, and stirring of affections, in which Oratory shewes, and especially approves her eminence, hee chiefly excells."[422]

In his dedication to Volpone he says this power of persuasion which the poet possesses to so eminent a degree is to be applied to the moral well-being of men, "to inform men in the best reason of living."[423] Himself a writer for the theatre, Jonson is naturally more concerned with comedy and tragedy than he is with any narrative forms of poetry. And to him the office of the comic poet is "to imitate justice and instruct to life--or stirre up gentle affections."[424] In Timber he iterates the same praise of poetry as being no less effective than philosophy in instructing men to good life, and informing their manners, but as even more effective in that it persuades men to good where philosophy threatens and compels. In order to accomplish this beneficial effect on public morals, the poet must have an exact knowledge of all virtues and vices with ability to render the one loved and the other hated.[425] As a natural result of this conception, so similar to Cicero's demand that the orator must know all things and in line with Aristotle's Rhetoric, Jonson concludes that the poet, like Quintilian's orator, must himself be a good man; for how else will he be able "to informe yong-men to all good disciplines, inflame growne-men to all great vertues, keepe old men in their best and supreme state."[426]

Aside from Sidney and Jonson no English critic, however, thought through to the logical conclusion that in moral purpose rhetoric and poetic are identical. The others continued to echo Horace, or lean toward allegory, or see profit in poetry from its moral example. For instance in his preface to his second instalment of Homer entitled Achilles' Shield (1598) Chapman dwells at length on the moral value and wisdom contained in the Iliad,[427] and enunciates the same idea in his Prefaces of 1610-16.[428] Peacham, in his Compleat Gentleman (1622), repeats the usual commonplaces to the effect that poetry is a dulcet philosophy, for the most part lifted from Puttenham.[429] In his Argenis (1621) Barclay reminds his reader of the children who for so many centuries had shunned the cup of physic until the bitter taste had been removed by sweet syrop. Thus also, says he, is it with the moral value of poetry disguised with sweet music. "Virtues and vices I will frame, and the rewards of them shall suite to both"; for it is on the moral example of poetic justice that Barclay depends. The models of virtue will be followed.[430]

The Earl of Stirling, in Anacrisis (1634?) acknowledges the works of the poets to be the chief springs of learning, "both for Profit and Pleasure, showing Things as they should be, where Histories represent them as they are." Consequently he has a high opinion of the Cyropaedia of Xenophon, the Arcadia of Sir Philip Sidney, and other such poems, as "affording many exquisite Types of Perfection for both the Sexes."[431] These types the reader is expected to imitate in his own conduct, guided by the moral precepts with which the poet must not neglect to decorate his work.

Within the period of this study two views were taken of the moral element in poetry. With the exception of Sidney and Jonson, who knew the theories of the Italian renaissance, the English critics believed with Horace that poetry was at once pleasant and profitable, and agreed with Plutarch that poetry, if rightly used, would be of benefit in the education of youth. But there was little tendency to follow this to the conclusion of asserting that because poetry has a moral effect on the reader, it is the purpose of poetry as an art to exert this moral effect for the good of society. Most of these critics believed that the moral effect which poetry did exert came through allegory. In this respect, as has been shown, they were carrying on the traditions of the middle ages.

The opposing view derived ultimately from the classical rhetorics, and entered England through the criticism of the Italian scholars--particularly Minturno and Scaliger. Starting from the saying of Horace that poets aim to please or profit, or please and profit together, these critics borrowed from rhetoric Cicero's three-fold aim of the orator: to teach, to please, to move, and applied these three aims to the poet. Accordingly, to them the poet has the same aim as the orator--persuasion. He pleases not for the sake of giving pleasure, but for the sake of winning his readers so that he may better attain his real object of teaching morality and moving men to action in its practice. The emphasis on the example as the means of attaining this end was further derived from scholastic philosophy which, as has been shown, classed logic, rhetoric, and poetic together as instruments for attaining truth and improving the morality of the state. Furthermore, according to this scholastic view, the three arts differed only as they utilized different means to attain this end. Logic used the demonstrative syllogism and the scientific induction, rhetoric used the enthymeme or rhetorical syllogism and the example or popular induction, poetic used the example alone. According to the renaissance developments of this last view, allegory was emphasized less and less as the example was felt to be more appropriate. Thus Sidney and Jonson, the outstanding classicists in English renaissance criticism, exhibit to the highest degree the influence of the most rhetorical of Italian renaissance critics. They alone in England assert that the purpose of poetry is to move men to virtuous action.

Thus a study of rhetorical terminology in English renaissance theories of poetry throws into sharp relief the fact that all criticism of the fine art of literature in England in the 16th century and the first half of the 17th century was profoundly influenced by rhetoric. This influence was two-fold. On the one hand the less scholarly critics perpetuated the popular traditions of rhetoric which they inherited from the middle ages. These traditions of allegory and the ornate style were, as has been shown, in turn derived from post-classical rhetoric. On the other hand the more scholarly critics applied to poetry the canons of classical rhetoric which they derived in part from the classics themselves and in part from the critics of the Italian renaissance.

In one sense this has been a study of critical perversions. Although many of the critics of the English renaissance are remarkable for their wisdom and discerning judgments, their writings are far less valuable than those of Longinus and Aristotle. But Aristotle and Longinus did not allow their theories of poetry to be contaminated by rhetoric. The best modern critics have studied and understood the classical treatises on poetic and have consequently avoided the confusion between rhetoric and poetic into which many renaissance critics fell. Others have not been so fortunate. For these the object-lesson of renaissance failure should serve as a warning.

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