Chapter III
IMITATION OF PROSE FORMS, CICERONIANISM, RHETORICS
1. ORATIONS, LETTERS, DIALOGUES
Renaissance classicism is most obvious in adoption of prose forms. Orations, letters, dialogues, first in Latin, then in the vernaculars, studiously conform. Orations were none the less a preoccupation because they had little to do with affairs. Actual Renaissance conduct of government soon left little room for moving the people to action by oratory. Legal pleading, as always, had its special technic. But the oratory of occasion, that third type which marks anniversaries, extols achievements, and commemorates great men, was invited widely and cultivated classically. It embraces most of the published oratory of the Renaissance, and was practiced by most of the humanists in Latin. Leonardo Bruni of Arezzo (Leonardo Aretino) is typical both as official orator of Florence and in his early imaginary orations. Agostino Dati of Siena delivered an encomium of Eusebius (De laudibus D. Eusebii presbyt. Stridonensis et Ecclesiae maximi doctoris, in ejus solemniis publice habita, anno 1446). The funeral of Cardinal Bessarion at Rome had a Latin oration by the Cardinal Capranica. Jacopo Caviceo cast his congratulatory address to Maximilian on the victory (1490) over King Ladislaus of Bohemia in the form called prosopopoeia, that is, of imaginary addresses by Babylon, Troy, Byzantium, Carthage, and Rome (Urbium dicta ad Maximilianum Federici Tertii Caesaris filium Romanorum regem triumphantissimum, Parma, 1491). The Cologne collection, Orationes clarorum virorum,[13] made such oratory available for study and imitation.
Of the Italian orations collected by Francesco Sansovino (Venice, 1561, including some translations) as representative of his time, only one fifth are political, and these only to the extent of being hortatory. The rest are all occasional: nine funeral orations, a Christmas address, two before an academy, a call to high aim, a praise of Italian, four congratulations, and four imaginary addresses (prosopopoeiae). Claudio Tolomei has two imaginary orations, one for, the other against.[14] Such oratory, of course, is perennial. Its Renaissance vogue is distinctive only in being almost exclusive and in being imitative. Bartolomeo Ricci records[15] that on two occasions in his office of public orator at Ferrara he imitated specific orations of Cicero. The habit was general. The desire to sound classical led even to the lifting of Augustan phrases and cadences. Similar conditions had led the decadent Greek oratory called sophistic[16] into archaism as a means of display. Renaissance oratory, even when it was not led further into the sophistic sacrifice of the message to the speaker, was thus habitually literary. In Latin especially it was less often a means of persuasion than an imitative literary form.
What the Latin oration might nevertheless attain was exhibited by the lectures of Poliziano and again in the range of Marc Antoine Muret (Muretus, 1525-1585). From a conventional praelectio on the Aeneid (1579) Muret turned to Tacitus (1580), not only with lively vigor, but with penetrative suggestion and urgent sentences. When he returned to official oratory for the feasts of St John Evangelist (1582) and the Circumcision (1584), he kept the suggestiveness within the obligatory pattern. True to their kind, models of conciseness, these have also their own appeal. Occasional oratory in the Renaissance, then, might be a literary achievement and a literary progress. More generally it was but one evidence of the Renaissance preoccupation with rhetoric.
No less inevitable among the published works of the humanists are their collected Latin letters. Since these had been carefully composed and revised, they might serve not only history, but literature. Sometimes in effect essays, sometimes almost orations, they are sometimes themes. The favorite model is Cicero; and in extreme cases the letter seems to consist of style. It is hardly a letter; it is an exercise. But thus to label Renaissance letter-writing generally would be grossly unfair. Poliziano’s letter to Paolo Cortesi is admirable as a letter, and comes into literary history on that ground. For so letters have entered literature in any time. A Latin letter of John of Salisbury[17] lifts the heart and fills the eyes. Its cadences are studiously conformed to the cursus of the Curial dictamen; its diction is expertly chosen to strike always by appeal and suggestion, never by violence; its hazardous course steers between Scylla and Charybdis because it is constantly shaped to its goal. For all this skill is spent singly on making the truth prevail. A less important, but more famous English letter, Dr Johnson’s to the Earl of Chesterfield, is no less studious of style, no less expertly adjusted, even to the phrasing of the obligatory subscription, and no less single in its aim. Those who make light of such delicacy as mere style have much to learn both of letters and of literature. Among the works of Erasmus none is more important than his collected letters. The Renaissance did well to study Latin letters, and learned much. But it was mistaken in thinking that a letter reaches posterity except by reaching its original address and aim. The Latin letters of the Renaissance often betray a tendency to regard classical style as an end in itself. Such letters, written to be literary, give the impression that the Latin letter is a Renaissance literary form.
Perhaps the most popular of ancient prose forms in the Renaissance was the dialogue; for it was used even oftener in the vernaculars than in Latin, and became a favorite form of exposition. The Middle Age, of course, had many dialogues, but not of this sort. Débat, estrif, conflictus, amoebean eclogue were often allegorical and generally forms of poetry. Renaissance dialogue is typically prose discussion. Its vogue was evidently stimulated by the increasing availability of Plato in both translation and Greek text; but its method is not often his. The Platonic dialogue typically conveys the illusion of creative conversation. As Sperone Speroni observes,[18] it is a sort of prose that takes after poetry. It invites the reader to join a quest for truth, to feel his way with the speakers, to measure this objection, respond to that hint; and often it leaves him still guessing with them, still questing. The other ancient literary type of dialogue is Cicero’s De oratore. This is less conversation than debate with definite argument, rebuttal, and progress to a conclusion.[19] Cicero’s dialogue is not a quest; it is an exposition of something already determined, and it unfolds that by logical stages. Renaissance dialogue, having generally his object, turns oftener to his type; but it does not forget Plato. The more dramatic grouping of friends in converse appealed widely to Renaissance imagination. It was imitated in Platonic academies as well as in writing; and its form of dialogue opened more opportunities for exhibiting one’s literary acquaintance and bringing forward one’s literary friends. Further Renaissance dialogues did not often go with Plato. They stopped with the Platonic setting, or used challenges merely for transition. Even the most popular of them all, Castiglione’s Cortegiano, though its personae are unusually distinct, and though it concludes upon Platonic love, is evidently framed upon the De oratore. Platonic dialogue must be easy to read; it is by no means easy to write; witness the failure of many imitations, both Renaissance and modern. It is a very delicate adjustment of poetic to rhetoric. The grafting of Plato on Cicero demands long preparation. The usual Renaissance compromise of letting Plato introduce the speakers and Cicero rule their discourse was practically sufficient for the better Renaissance dialogues. The inferior ones have nothing but the externals of either. Their rejoinders, neither conversation nor debate, become tedious ceremony;[20] and their composition lacks the Ciceronian sequence. But even these show how widely the dialogue form was imitated from antiquity.
2. CICERONIANISM
The pervasive humanistic imitation was not adoption of forms; it was borrowing of style. The logical extreme of the humanist cult of Augustan Latin is the exclusive imitation of Cicero as the ideal of prose style. In 1422 Gherardo Landriani, Bishop of Lodi, drew from a long-forgotten chest in the cathedral library a complete manuscript of the principal works of Cicero on rhetoric. The De oratore and the Orator are the most mature and suggestive treatment of oratory by the greatest Roman orator. “Summe gaudeo, I have the greatest delight,” wrote Poggio on receiving the news in London; and Niccolo de’Niccoli of Florence promised a copy to Aurispa in Constantinople. So widely was the world of scholarship stirred. For the recovery of the greater Cicero directly stimulated Renaissance classicism. In the Middle Age Cicero had been rather a name of honor than a literary influence. His De inventione, a common source of medieval rhetoric, is only a youthful compend. What was usually added for further study, especially of style, the Rhetorica ad Herennium, was ascribed to him quite erroneously. His greater works on rhetoric were appreciated doubtless here and there, as by John of Salisbury, but not generally. Hence the recovery of the De oratore in 1422 was indeed an event in the history of literature. This and Orator are fine encomia of the higher function of oratory, and of the orator as leader. Neither is a manual. Both in Cicero’s intention are contributions to the philosophy of rhetoric. Without very original or even very specific doctrine they are eloquently persuasive. What did the Renaissance do with them?
Most obviously it carried classicism to the extreme of Ciceronianism, that exclusive imitation which made Cicero the ideal of Latin prose, the perfect model. The doctrine involves certain characteristic assumptions: (1) that Latin, or any other language, attains in a certain historical period its ideal achievement and capacity, (2) that within such a great period style is constant, (3) that a language can be recalled from later usage to earlier in scholastic exercises, (4) that such exercises can suffice for personal expression, (5) that a single author can suffice as a model, even for exercises.