Although with good taste as well as classical erudition Ascham preferred Sophocles and Euripides to the oratorical and sententious Seneca, his view was not shared by the renaissance. Scaliger, preoccupied as he was with style, found his ideal of tragedy not in the plays of the great Greeks, but in the closet dramas of the declamatory Spaniard. Seneca appealed to the renaissance not only on account of his verbal dexterity and point, but also on account of his moral maxims or sententiae. In England the two greatest literary critics, Sidney and Jonson, followed Scaliger in this high regard for Seneca. Sidney found only one tragedy in England, Gorbuduc, modeled as it should be on his dramas. Its speeches are stately, its phrases high sounding, and its moral lesson delightfully taught.[[178]] And Jonson conceived the essentials of tragedy to be those elements found in Seneca: "Truth of argument, dignity of person, gravity and height of elocution, fullness and frequency of sentence."
The middle ages conceived of poetry as being compounded of profitable subject-matter and beautiful style. The English renaissance never entirely evacuated this position. Consequently the Aristotelian doctrine that the essence of poetry is imitation was either entertained simultaneously, as in Sidney, or interpreted to mean the same thing, as in Jonson. The commoner renaissance idea of imitation is not that of Aristotle, but that of Plutarch, whose speaking picture so often appears in the critical treatises.
Robertelli thought poetic might be either in prose or in verse if it were an imitation; Lucian, Apuleius, and Heliodorus were to him poets.[[179]] Scaliger, on the other hand, insisted that a poet makes verses. Lucan is a poet; Livy a historian.[[180]] Castelvetro probably came nearest to Aristotle in asserting that Lucian and Boccaccio are poets though in prose, although verse is a more fitting garment for poetry than is prose.[[181]] Vossius anticipates Prickard's explanation of Aristotle by defining poetry as the art of imitating actions in metrical language. To him verse alone does not make poetry. Herodotus in verse would remain a historian; but no prose work can be poetry.[[182]] These are only a few examples typical of the general tendency which Spingarn has so thoroughly studied.
2. Rhetorical Elements
This tendency to follow Aristotle in allowing that the vehicle of verse was not characteristic of poetry tended to preclude any vital distinction between rhetoric and poetic. The renaissance had inherited from the middle ages the belief that poetry was composed of two parts: a profitable subject matter (doctrina) and style (eloquentia). If the definition goes no further, then the only difference between the poet and the orator lies in the Ciceronian dictum that the poet was more restricted in his use of meter. Consequently, when Aristotle's theory that poems could be written in either prose or verse was accepted, there remained no stylistic difference at all. In fact, there is very little. But throughout the middle ages this common focus on style had led to undue consideration of style as ornament. In the renaissance this same tendency appears in Guevara, for instance, and in Lyly. The Euphuistic style, as Morris Croll has pointed out, is more largely than was formerly supposed to be the case, derived from mediaeval rhetoric.[[183]]
In the theoretical treatises on poetry produced on the continent there is frequent use of rhetorical terms. It was to be expected that scholars whose education had been largely rhetorical should carry over the vocabulary of rhetoric into what was on the rediscovery of the Poetics practically a new science. The rhetorical influence is readily recognized in Vida's preoccupation with the mechanics of poetry and in Scaliger's over-analysis and extensive treatment of the rhetorical figures, the high, low, and mean styles, the three elements (material, form, and execution) of poetry. Lombardus makes poetry include oratory.[[184]] Maggi[[185]] and Tifernas[[186]] echo Cicero that the poet and the orator are the nearest neighbors, differing only in that the poet is slightly more restricted by meter. J. Pontanus insists that epideictic prose and poetry have the same material,[[187]] that poets should learn from the precepts of rhetoric to discriminate in their choice of words.[[188]]
As an interpretation of classical doctrine this is not illegitimate; but Pontanus runs into confusion by applying to the narrative of epic the narratio of classical rhetoric, which meant the lawyer's statement of facts. Confusing the narratio of oratory with narrative, Pontanus says:
There are three virtues of a narration, brevity, probability and perspicuity. The epic poet should diligently strive to attain the second and third, and may learn how to do it from the masters of rhetoric.[[189]]
Thus a poet should seek in an epic the same qualities which an orator is supposed by classical rhetorics to strive for in the statement of facts of his speech.[[190]] Furthermore, says Pontanus, one can write very good poetry by paraphrasing orations in verse.[[191]] No wonder Luis Vives complained in his De Causis Corruptarum Artium,
The moderns confound the arts by reason of their resemblance, and of two that are very much opposed to each other make a single art. They call rhetoric grammar, and grammar rhetoric, because both treat of language. The poet they call orator, and the orator poet, because both put eloquence and harmony into their discourses.[[192]]