Renaissance literary theory and practice

by Charles Sears Baldwin

Viuez, si m’en croyez, n’attendez à demain:

Cueillez dés auiourdhuy les roses de la vie.[28]

Life is short; “gather ye roses while ye may”; the theme is perennial, a lyric commonplace. The rendering of it has often been conventional, but often, as here, individual because intensely realized. The sonnet is direct, immediate, in renouncing all elaboration and all distraction. There are no allusions, only images. Candlelight, hearth, loom, song, spoken words, are the sharper because they are unmodified. There are few adjectives. The lyric is simplified. But the images of attitude and gesture are iterated to lead the mood: “assise auprès du feu, dévidant et filant,” “à demi sommeillant ... réveillant,” “accroupie.” This is the diction of the lyrics that have no date. For the point is not the abstract superiority of the sonnet as a verse form; it is the appeal of form and diction alike to a wider audience, the communication of poetry rather than its exhibition. Ronsard shows this power of direct appeal in his equally popular Mignonne, allons voir si la rose. Included in his first book of odes, this has no Greek strangeness. By 1550, having explored more remote modes to answer the special demand of his circle and his own bent toward learning, he returned to the lyric forms that had become familiar.

The sonnet sequence, the use of the sonnet as a lyric unit in a progress suggesting narrative, was more distinctly developed in England. Though Ronsard’s sonnets appear in series, as addressed to Cassandre, Marie, or Hélène, the enchaining is more evident in Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella and in Shakspere. Spenser, fully aware of the Pléiade, gave himself no such strict schooling as Ronsard’s. He usually stopped short of ancient stanza and of borrowed phrase. But he relied longer on mythological allusions. Thus he decorated not only the Faerie Queene, but even his lyric triumph, the Epithalamion. Ronsard’s later verse makes slighter and more considerate use of such ornament; Spenser’s last poem still turns to the nymphs, to Jupiter and Leda, and to Hesper. The Renaissance lyric experience may be summed up in these two poets. Devoted to national revival of vernacular poetry, nourished by Latin and by Greek antiquity, expert metrists, they show together the limits of imitative classicism. Responding to the special demands of their time, they used the classics to certify their learning. Thus their lyric medium was surcharged. Its forms were sometimes so strange, its diction often so overloaded, as to sacrifice lyric directness, especially the immediate transmission of sensations. Lyric allusiveness was pushed beyond its lyric value. With lesser poets it often sufficed as an end in itself. Renaissance “enrichment” often became mere decorative dilation. But Ronsard, and then Spenser, lived to fuse their experience of classicism in their appeal to coming lovers of poetry.

2. PASTORAL

Pastoral is an old dream. Classified by modern psychology as escape, it has been in various forms the poetry of the city wistful for the country. The word, denoting shepherds, at the same time connotes that its shepherds are not real, but fictitious. Whether allegorized or otherwise manipulated, they are not the actual men who throughout history have tended beasts by day and night in the open, not actual Sicilians, not even the shepherds who in the Nativity plays brought English toys to the infant Saviour. All these are real; the shepherds of pastoral, wearing shepherd’s clothes, sing other songs. Artificial, indeed, pastoral has often been, and is easily, but not always, not necessarily. The city dream of the country “simple life” is after all a recurrent fact. Though it may be sentimentalized, conventionalized, rhetoricated, so may the other dreams. Instead of ruling out this one, we may examine its literary vitality. Besides, it has a special claim. Pastoral, ranging all the way from lyric through narrative to dramatic, and from Alexandrian Greek to Elizabethan English, offered in its Renaissance vogue a wide school of imitation.

Renaissance taste in Greek inclined to that later literature called Alexandrian: to neo-Platonism, to the rhetoric of Hermogenes, to Callimachus oftener than to Pindar, to the Byzantine imitators of Anacreon and the Byzantine Anthology of epigrams, to the descriptive show-pieces inserted in that late oratory called sophistic and in the “Greek Romances,” both the long melodramas narrated by Apollonius, Heliodorus, and Tatius and the idyllic Daphnis and Chloe of that Longus who was called “the sophist.” But the Renaissance literary creed for Latin was classicism. Inclined rather to the dilation of such later poets as Lucan, and even to Ausonius and Claudian, the Renaissance professed its faith in the artistic restraint of Vergil. Now pastoral had the promise of reconciling Alexandria with imperial Rome. It could turn for decoration both to the sophists and to Ovid. It was both Theocritus and Vergil.

The extant poems of Theocritus are by no means all pastoral. Called Idylls, that is little poems, they are love lyrics (II, III, XX); epigrams, that is, inscriptions of the sort collected in the Anthology (XXVIII and the following); myths (I in part, XI, XIII, XXIV-V); encomia (XIV in part, XVI-XVIII, XXII); and mimes, that is, dramatic dialogues (X, XV). Only seven of those that are surely his are such poetry-matches between shepherds as came to be called eclogues (I, IV-VII, X in part, XIV). Though this charming variety has suggested to modern critics hints for later pastoral development, especially toward drama, the vivacious realistic dialogue (XV) between two city women at the festival of Adonis is essentially different from pastoral. Nor is it true to either poet to say that pastoral with Theocritus was fresh and natural; with Vergil it became artificial. Both poets knew the country, Vergil apparently better than Theocritus; but neither gives it that direct, immediate expression which in modern times has been called nature poetry. Theocritus is specific with wild olive, peas, and acorns; sometimes concrete with a smoky hen-roost, waving green leaves, or a crested lark. For an Alexandrian he is exceptionally free from the dilation of descriptive show-pieces; but he has the Alexandrian habit of seeing nature through art. Gorgo and Praxinoa (XV) are conveyed by their chatter; and the dirge to Adonis describes the putti on the ceremonial coverlet as like fledgling nightingales trying their wings. Sicily is romantic for us with blue sea, wild uplands, and volcanic steeps. The shepherds of Theocritus live nearer to sophisticated Syracuse or Agrigentum, or to the other western cities of ancient Greece. Unlike enough otherwise, Theocritus and Vergil are alike in viewing the country through the eyes of the city.

The Bucolics of Vergil established pastoral in its most familiar pattern. One of the few schoolbooks to hold their place from ancient into modern times, they have drilled into successive thousands the poetic scheme of a lyric contest for some rustic prize, and the idea that this contest, symbolizing some other more momentous, may express the poet’s own hopes and fears. Thus in school, as from time immemorial boys got their first notions of worldly wisdom by memorizing Latin beast-fables, so they learned Latin grammar, with Latin verse, from shepherd rivalries typifying wider struggles. Since many Renaissance boys continued to imitate the Bucolics when they grew up, many Renaissance eclogues are published themes. That Vergil’s eclogues have survived all this is evidence of immortality. They need no further praise; but having been used for grammar, they need to be read again for poetry and for literary history.

The inspiration of Theocritus, gracefully acknowledged by Vergil (IV, VI, X), is hardly of style. The avoidance of descriptive dilation, the preference of specific indication to ornament, are Vergil’s own choice.