Renaissance literary theory and practice

by Charles Sears Baldwin

1. HUMANISTIC LATIN

The Middle Age had developed Latin style freely as a medium of communication and variously as a medium of expression. On these terms Latin had had a progressive history as the literary language of western Europe. Latin remained the literary language for Erasmus and More in the early, for Buchanan even in the late, sixteenth century. More habitually composed in Latin, even when he meant to be printed in English; Erasmus and Buchanan both composed and published in Latin exclusively. The literary achievement of the vernaculars had challenged the Latin primacy. But, thought the humanists, that rivalry had been possible only because the primacy had been misused. Latin primacy to them was an article of literary faith, a dogma. It must not lapse; and to restore its authority all they needed was to restore its classical diction. No, says modern linguistic science in retrospect, that was a delusion; it could only segregate Latin farther. In fact Latin declined, slowly and as if inevitably, from a primary language to a secondary. But those who now mock the humanists for blindly hastening the decline of Latin to a “dead” language should remember that throughout the Renaissance itself Latin was active in every country and with almost every man of letters. It was far from dead; but it was no longer primary.

Evidently the scholars of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries saw in the Latin literature of their time the revival of classical standards after medieval decadence. Rejecting the medieval experience, they were bent on restoring Latin to its classical eminence by reviving its classical forms and style. They proposed a new Latin literature in Augustan phrase.

Keeping its established place as the language of education, Latin continued to be thought of as a norm of permanence. As late as 1586 Montaigne, remembering his boyhood, says (III. ii): “To me Latin is, as it were, natural; I understand it better than French.” Later (1586-1588) he adds (III. ix): “I am writing my book for a few men and a few years. If there had been any idea of its lasting, I must have committed it to a language of more stability.” In other words, the vernaculars of course would continue to shift; not Latin. For by Latin the humanists meant the Latin of Vergil, Caesar, Sallust, above all of Cicero, the Latin of the great period. Renaissance humanism was a cult not merely of antiquity in general, but specifically of Augustan Latin. It sought to revive not only the ancient forms, but especially the ancient diction. The literary preoccupation of the Renaissance was with style. For the highest literary eminence, said the humanists, writing must be in Latin, that is in the superior language, and in Augustan Latin, that is in the style of the superior period.

The humanists demanded conformity, then, to Augustan diction. Lorenzo Valla’s Elegantiae linguae latinae (1476), reprinted again and again, first of a long line of phrase books, and characteristic in its very title, was a guide to conformity. Beyond conformity ranged imitation. Humanistic Latin is imitative in theory, and in practice so various as to furnish abundance of significant examples. These various degrees and kinds will appear in subsequent chapters. Meantime the obvious practical warrant for imitation is in exercises. Imitation in any art is a recognized means of study by practice; it is not an end. But Renaissance enthusiasm for revival often made elegant conformity a goal in itself. An oration might seem an achievement by being Ciceronian, a pastoral dialogue by being Vergilian. The subject, the idea, the message of a speech, a letter, a poem might have little claim; nevertheless publication might be warranted by the style. To exhibit the elegant diction and the harmonious sentence-forms of the great period might seem sufficient distinction. “Thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.” Posterity, instead of continuing to read such humanistic imitations, has long forgotten them. Few literary products have been less permanent than those of the cult of permanence. A pervasive danger in this classicism was its encouragement to a literature of themes.

2. GREEK

Even before the humanistic return to classical Latin another vista of the ancient world had been opened by the revival of Greek. Generally in abeyance through most of the Middle Age, Greek had been recovered in the fourteenth century and was well established in the early fifteenth. It was studied by both Boccaccio and Petrarch. It had its professor at the Florence studium (1396) in Chrysolaras, who went to England in 1400. Guarino, his pupil at Constantinople, after bringing Greek to Florence and Venice, settled (1431) at Ferrara, and attracted among his many famous pupils the Englishmen Gray, Free, Gunthorpe, and Tiptoft.[3] Bessarion was at the Council of Constance (1414). The fall of Constantinople (1453), sending many Greek exiles to Italy, merely increased opportunities already widely available. Even before the establishment of printing there was increasing circulation of manuscripts. Aurispa (1372-1460), for instance, besides being scholar and professor, was an active dealer. Printing came in the nick of time to spread the new vogue. There was a Florence text of Homer in 1488, an Aldus in 1504. Aristotle, besides being translated anew, had a Greek text in 1495 (Venice), another in 1503 (Paris). Sophocles was printed by Aldus in 1502. Even the earliest sixteenth century commanded texts of a considerable variety of Greek authors.

The variety, indeed, is striking. Evidently the humanistic cult of an ideal period of Latin did not guide the selection of Greek. All was fish that came to the Renaissance Greek net. Late Greek was as welcome as the Greek of the great dramatists and orators; Alexandrian, as epic. With the vogue of Plato in the fifteenth century came that of the neo-Platonists; with the texts and translations of Aristotle, Hermes Trismegistus; with Homer, the Anthology and Apollonius Rhodius. Isocrates vied once more with Demosthenes. Nor did Sophocles oust Seneca, or Thucydides prevail against Livy. The wide and continued influence of sophistic appears in the vogue of Athenaeus, Hermogenes, Aphthonius, and even Libanius. Discrimination, indeed, was sometimes beyond Renaissance scholarship. Henri Étienne, one of the best Greek scholars of the sixteenth century, published (1554) a collection of Byzantine imitations which he supposed to belong to the time of Anacreon. This was the Anacreon that inspired Ronsard and was translated by Belleau. Since textual criticism was hardly understood before the seventeenth century, hardly formulated before the eighteenth, Renaissance printed texts are generally inaccurate.[4] Nevertheless to have Greek authors, classical and decadent, at first hand, to read the message in its own style, even imperfectly, was a literary experience and had some excitement of exploration.

Thus was opened more widely a literature recommended alike by the praise and by the imitation of the Augustan Romans. Habits of language and style outside the Latin tradition, for the first time in centuries, were made generally available. How far they availed, how far Greek operated as language, especially on the widening vernacular literatures, can better be gathered from the progress of this history than measured here in advance. At first view the influence seems extensive. Renaissance scholars as a matter of course at least professed to know Greek; and most authors at least professed to be scholars. Poliziano was both; and his knowledge of Greek seems to have been solid. In 1485 his Oratio in expositione Homeri thus compliments his university audience on its command of Greek.

You are those Florentines in whose city all Greek learning, long extinct in Greece itself, has so revived and flourished that both your men expound Greek literature in public lectures and the youths of your highest nobility, as never has happened in Italy for a thousand years, speak Attic so purely, so easily and smoothly, that Athens, instead of being sacked and seized by barbarians, seems itself, of its own will wrenched away with its own soil and, so to speak, with all its furniture, to have immigrated to Florence and there entirely and intimately to have founded itself anew (Gryphius edition, Lyon, 1537-1539, III. 63-64).