This ornament is given to it by figures and figurative speaches, which be the flowers, as it were, and colours that a Poet setteth upon his language of arte, as the embroderer doth his stone and perle or passements of gold upon the stuffe of a Princely garment[[238]].
The figures Puttenham divides according to his own scheme. First come the figures auricular peculiar to the poets, then the figures sensable common to the poets and the rhetoricians, and finally the figures sententious appropriate to the orators alone. After he has explained the first two varieties, however, and enters on the third, Puttenham says:
Now if our presupposall be true, that the Poet is of all other the most auncient Orator, as he that by good and pleasant perswasions first reduced the wilde and beastly people into publicke societies and civilitie of life, insinuating unto them, under fictions with sweete and coloured speeches, many wholesome lessons and doctrines, then no doubt there is nothing so fitte for him, as to be furnished with all the figures that be Rhetoricall, and such as do most beautifie language with eloquence and sententiousness. So as if we should intreate our maker to play also the Orator, and whether it be to pleade, or to praise, or to advise, that in all three cases he may utter and also perswade both copiously and vehemently[[239]].
Puttenham was writing in the same age and with the same tradition which defined Rhetoric as the art of ornament in speech. The only difference between oratory and poetry lay in that the latter was composed in verse.
5. Rhetorical Elements in Later English Classicism
From Puttenham to Bacon no serious contributions were made to the general theory of poetry. Critical attention was absorbed by controversies of Campion and Daniel over native and classical versification, and the flyting of Harvey and Nash. Harvey was a classical scholar and rhetorician who knew that poetry and oratory were different things, and believed verse to be the mark of the first and prose of the latter[[240]]. He preferred the periodic style of Isocrates and Ascham to the tricksy pages of Euphues[[241]]. Chapman, likewise, considered verse the mark of poetry, and prose of rhetoric[[242]].
In the Advancement of Learning (1605) Bacon clears up some of the misconceptions of the English renaissance by judicious borrowing from the Italian. He says:
Poesie is a part of Learning in measure of words for the most part restrained, but in all other points extremely licensed, and doth truly referre to the Imagination, which, beeing not tyed to the Lawes of Matter, may at pleasure joyne that which Nature hath severed, & sever that which Nature hath joyned, and so make all unlawful Matches & divorses of things: It is taken in two senses in respect of Wordes or Matter. In the first sense it is but a Character of stile, and belongeth to Arts of speeche. In the later, it is, as hath beene saide, one of the principall Portions of learning, and is nothing else but Fained History, which may be stiled as well in Prose as in Verse.[[243]]
Bacon's focus of attention on the substance of poetry is in keeping with his attack on mere sophistication of style in rhetoric. Poetry as style does not interest him. Like Castelvetro and Sidney, he considers the vehicle of verse not essential to poetry, which, as a product of the imagination, he considers to be occupied with fiction. To Bacon, perhaps, the imagination seems to be too much the organ of make-believe, imaging things which never were on land or under the sea. Nevertheless his claim for the imagination is fortunate in ruling out those theories of art which set up slavish fidelity to fact, under the name of imitation, as the essence of poetry. Bacon was not concerned with formulating a complete theory of poetry, but his pithy obiter dicta were influential in further establishing the sounder criticism of the Italian classicists.
As Spingarn points out, Ben Jonson was first led to classicism in poetical theory by the example of Sidney.[[244]] But during the intervening years the scholars of Holland had supplanted those of Italy; and whereas Sidney derived his Aristotelianism from Scaliger and Minturno, Jonson derived his even more from Pontanus, Heinsius, and Lipsius and from the Latin rhetoricians, Cicero and Quintilian.