Renaissance literary theory and practice

by Charles Sears Baldwin

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

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

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

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

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

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

(c) English

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

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