Thus in accord with the mediseval tradition he analyzes poetry into profitable subject matter and style.
3. The Influence of Aristotle
In 1579 the Puritan attack on poetry and the stage began with Gosson's School of Abuse.[[214]] and was answered by Lodge's Defence of Poetry in the same year. The attack and defense both rested on moral, not aesthetic, sanctions and will be discussed in a later section. It is only in Sidney's Defense (c. 1583) and that of his follower Harington that theories of the nature of poetry are included. And with Sidney the Aristotelianism of the Italian renaissance makes its first appearance in English criticism.[[215]]
"Poesie," writes Sidney, "therefore is an arte of imitation, for so Aristotle termeth it in his word Mimesis, that is to say, a representing, counterfeiting, or figuring forth: to speake metaphorically, a speaking picture."[[216]] Thus not only Aristotle's imitation enters English criticism, but Plutarch's speaking picture as well, with all the power of its false analogy. That Sidney himself was not, however, carried away by the analogy is apparent from other passages. Aristotle, classifying poetic with music and dancing as a time art with its essence in movement, had insisted that a poem must have a beginning, a middle, and an end--qualities which do not exist in space. So in the most quoted passage from Sidney's Defense, it is a "tale forsooth," which draws old men from the chimney corner, and children from play,[[217]] and "the narration" which furnishes the groundplot of poesie.[[218]] Thus he introduces into English criticism, as an important element of poetry, the essentially sound idea that the characteristic structure of poetry lies in its narrative and dramatic movement. Poetry cannot lie because it never pretends to fact. He establishes this assertion on Aristotle's "universal not the particular" as the basis of poetic. Sidney had followed Scaliger in classifying poets into three kinds: the theological, the philosophical, and the right poets. The third class, the real poets, he says, "borrow nothing of what is, hath been, or shall be: but range, onely rayned with learned discretion, into the divine consideration of what may be, and should be."[[219]]
In considering the vehicle of poetic Sidney parts company with Scaliger and agrees with Castelvetro that verse is but an ornament and not the characteristic mark of poetry. The Cyropaedia of Xenophon, and the Theagines and Cariclea of Heliodorus are poems, although written in prose, because they feign notable images of virtues and vices, "although indeed the Senate of Poets hath chosen verse as their fittest rayment."[[220]] Proceeding thence, he defends verse as being a far greater aid to memory than prose, borrowing his terminology of "rooms," "places," and "seates," from the mnemonic system of Simonides usually incorporated in the section on memory in the classical rhetorics.[[221]] Furthermore, Sidney is the first in England to insist on the vividness of realization which comes from the poet's being himself moved. Discussing lyric poetry, Sidney says:
But truely many of such writings as come under the banner of unresistable love, if I were a Mistres, would never perswade mee they were in love; so coldely they apply fiery speeches, as men that had rather red Lovers writings, and so caught up certaine swelling phrases,... then that in truth they feele those passions, which easily (as I think) may be bewrayed by that same forcibleness or Energia (as the Greeks call it), of the writer.[[222]]
Sidney's Energia came to him from the rhetorics of Aristotle and Quintilian via the Poetice of Scaliger.[[223]] Energia, the vivifying quality of poetry, had at the earliest age been adopted by rhetoric to lend power to persuasion. Carefully preserved among the figures of rhetoric, it had survived the middle ages, and appears in Wilson's Arte of Rhetoric as "an evident declaration of a thing, as though we saw it even now done."
Sidney makes energia an essential quality of poetic; but even with him it seems to have a rhetorical cast. It is especially to be used, says Sidney, by a lover to persuade his mistress, urging her to yield while yet her beauty endures. This genre of versified oration to one's mistress was unusually popular in Elizabethan England. It may even be one reason for Bacon's classification of lyric poetry as part of rhetoric.[[224]] Although energia does belong to both poetic and rhetoric, as pseudo-Longinus implies,[[225]] there seems to be here a definitely rhetorical conception of poetic style. Sidney, however, keeps the classical distinction between rhetoric and poetic, although he was conscious of their contact in diction. "Both," he says with Aristotle, "have an affinity in this wordish consideration."[[226]] While many renaissance critics interpreted this affinity as permitting rhetorical elaboration in poetry as well as in prose, Sidney with innate good taste pleaded for more restraint. The diction of the writers of lyrics is even worse, he says, than their content.
So is that honny-flowing Matron Eloquence apparalled, or rather disguised, in a Curtizan-like painted affectation: one time with so farre fette words, they seem monsters, but must seem strangers to any poore English man, another tyme with coursing of a Letter as if they were bound to follow the method of a Dictionary; another tyme, with figures and flowers extreamelie winter-starved.[[227]]
Prose writers, he adds, are as badly infected as "versers," even scholars and preachers. That he himself was infected appears in the examples of interminable "tropes" and "schemes" quoted by Fraunce in his Arcadian Rhetoric (1588) from Sidney's own Arcadia. But the concession of his own style to the habit of his age did not involve any fundamental confusion of rhetoric with poetic.