VI. Hypercriticus (7 chapters, 134 pages) is a review of Latin poetry from the sixteenth century back.
VII. Epinomis (11 chapters, 47 pages) is an appendix.
Evidently the division overlaps; and the treatment involves even further repetition. For the book is not a consecutive treatise; it is rather a cyclopedia. Composed generally in short chapters, it indicates the subject of each by a heading, and exhibits all the headings at the beginning in a full table of contents. Thus its vogue may have been mainly for reference. Since it is a guide, not an anthology, the examples are usually brief. Longest naturally in V, the book of parallels, they are elsewhere sometimes only single lines, and rarely exceed ten. Though the great exemplar is Vergil, who almost monopolizes III and IV, they exhibit a wide range.
The object proposed is to form Latin poets: poetam creare instituimus (200); quoniam perfectum poetam instituimus (228). The book sets forth by precept and example not only how to admire and criticize—and correct even famous authors, but how to attain the company of Latin poets, how to make Latin poetry. The history of Latin poetry includes the sixteenth century, though not the Middle Age. Latin poetry has been recovered; and Scaliger, as one of its poets and one of its critics, shows how it is to be carried forward. Surveying it up and down its length, he gives much space to Claudian, Statius, and Silius Italicus, corrects Horace and Ovid, rewrites Lucan (849), estimates his own immediate predecessors. He is a schoolmaster giving praelectiones and correcting Latin themes, extending his instruction by summoning to his desk all authors and all times. He has read everything. Careful to quote the Greeks abundantly in Greek, he asserts the superiority of the Latins. For one author only he has nothing but admiration. His great exemplar, his touchstone, is Vergil.
To pass from Scaliger’s views on individual poets and poetic methods to his view of poetic as a whole is not easy, and is no longer important. As to imitation, his lack of specific precepts suggests that he has no consistent theory. The Aristotelian idea, apparently accepted at the beginning, is misinterpreted in the appendix. The usual Renaissance advice to imitate only with hope of adding luster, rhythm, or other charm (lucem, numeros, venerem adiungere, 700) refers, of course, to the other sort of imitation and offers little guidance. On the other hand, Scaliger laments his own early Ciceronianism (800), and makes some acute incidental observations. The topics of sophistic encomium in III, the stock comparisons in V. xiv, and occasional use of terms throughout show the usual Renaissance confusion of poetic with rhetoric. Though in other passages Scaliger seems able to conceive poetry in its own terms, he does not present poetic consistently as a distinct art of composition. Indeed, what he says about composition of either sort is often meager or formal. His preoccupation, from lexicography to figures of speech, is with style. The great apparatus for the production of Latin poetry remains largely rhetoric.
10. RONSARD AND TASSO
Ronsard’s brief, hasty, and perfunctory L’Art poétique (1565; reprinted, with five prefaces, Cambridge University Press, 1930) shows the Pléiade preoccupation with “enriching” the vernacular,[57] and applies the sophistic recipe for encomium to the poet’s celebration of great persons in odes.
“The true aim of a lyric poet is to celebrate to the extreme him whom he undertakes to praise ... his race ... his native place” ... (29). Enhancing his diction above common speech (41-44), he will amplify, even dilate.
The terms invention and disposition, transferred conventionally from rhetoric, do not open anything specific on composition.