Commonplaces of rhetoric, from a source commonplace for centuries, why were these put into elegant Vergilian hexameters? Hardly to make the Dauphin a Latin poet; hardly to interpret what was already too well known; hardly to advance poetic. The poem is an exhibition of competence in learning, in teaching, and in Latin verse, a sort of thesis for the degree of humanist. The person that it seeks to establish as a Latin poet is its author.
2. TRISSINO
The seven divisions of poetic (1529, enlarged 1563) by Giovan Giorgio Trissino occupy the first 139 pages of the second volume of his collected works (Verona, 1729). The first four divisions are devoted to diction, metric, and verse forms. The fifth and sixth are substantially an Italian paraphrase of Aristotle’s Poetic[52] with insertions from the “Ars poetica” of Horace. Trissino repeats Aristotle without grasp of his distinctive ideas. He has read also Dionysius of Halicarnassus (105); he has the independence to disparage Seneca (101); and he considers why Dante called his great work Commedia (120); but he thinks that pastoral eclogue is of the same poetic genus as comedy, and he does not make clear that Aristotle’s distinction of dramatic from epic is in composition. Though Trissino had not penetration enough to be constructive, or even suggestive, he opened Aristotle early in the century to the wider circle.
3. GIRALDI CINTHIO
Giraldi Cinthio published together two essays on the composition of romances,[53] comedies, and tragedies (Discorsi ... intorno al comporre de i romanzi, delle commedie, e delle tragedie ... Venice, 1554). In the one on comedy and tragedy (pages 199-287, written in 1543) he moves, as Trissino, over the surface of Aristotle’s Poetic without grasping the import of poetic as a distinct form of composition. For style he even prefers Seneca (220) to the Greeks. In the essay on verse romances (pages 1-198, written in 1549) he speaks of having presented the subject in oral teaching, and refers (4) to Vicentio Maggio’s lectures on Aristotle.
The word romance has the same meaning with us as epic with the Romans (5); and the form originated in France (6). Considering first the plot (favola), as Aristotle bids, we see in Boiardo and Ariosto that romance is the adorning (abbellimento) of the strife of Christians with their enemies (9). Though thus like epic or tragedy in imitating illustrious deeds, romance has not a single action (12), but several, perhaps eight or ten. Its organization (orditura) is unhappily compared to that of the human body: the subject being the skeleton; the order of parts, the nerves; the beautification, the skin; the animation, the soul. This is the plan of the treatise.
A single action is too restrictive for romance (22), whose many actions are more desirable, as conducive to variety (25). But the actions should be connected in a continuous chain (continua catena) and have verisimilitude. The parts should cohere as the parts of the human body. The poem should be fleshed out at suitable places (26) with fillings (riempimenti): loves, hates, laments, descriptions of places, of seasons, of persons, tales made up or taken from the ancients, voyages, wanderings, marvels [in short, anything for sophistic display]. For there is nothing in heaven above, nor in the earth beneath, nor in the very depth of the abyss, which is not at the call of the judicious poet—provided (27) each be appropriate in itself and to the whole.
The appended proviso is irrelevant in theory and was not observed in practice. The age of classicism is faced with the fact that its most evident and most popular poetic achievement is not classical in composition. Renaissance romance does not follow the epic formula. True, Ariosto does begin in mediis rebus (23), as Horace bids; but even that is not obligatory for a “manifold action”; and evidently the action may be not merely manifold, but plural. By “continuous chain” Giraldi means not sequence of the whole, but merely transitions; not connection, but connectives (40, 41).
Our romancers may have learned this from Claudian (41). The breaking off of an action creates suspense; and the main stories remain in suspense to the completion of the whole poem (42). Besides, variety is itself an added beauty. Why must romances be limited to the epic way (44)? Ovid did not follow Vergil (45). But the parts and the episodes must have the connection of verisimilitude (55).
It seems difficult for Giraldi to think in terms of composition. Once more we arrive at verisimilitude; and we go on to appropriateness (il decoro).