Like Minturno, Scaliger insisted that poetry must teach, move, and delight.[[358]] It is thus the result in action which Minturno and Scaliger emphasize. The poet must work on the feelings of his reader so that he shall embrace and imitate the good, and spurn the evil. Philosophy, oratory, and poetry have thus one end--and only one--persuasion.[[359]] Without the "movere," the incentive to action, of course poetry could not serve its purpose of moral improvement on which the renaissance so sternly insisted. A reader might enjoy a story, play, or poem which presented impeccable examples of virtue rewarded and vice punished, or which abounded in noble platitudes gilded with wit, and still smile and be a villain. It was thus inevitable that an acceptance of the moral purpose of poetry should sooner or later drive any logical minded critic of poetry completely into the camp of rhetoric. There the poet would find a complete panoply of arms forged for the arousing of the feelings in an audience, and for stirring the springs of action. He could make his readers hate sin by the same means Demosthenes made his hearers hate Philip, and love any virtue by appropriating the methods of Cicero Pro Archia. According to this belief, the difference between poetic and rhetoric was minimized. In theory a poem or a speech might indifferently be composed either in prose or in verse. Both endeavored to teach, to please, and to move. Both looked toward persuasion as an object. The speech used the enthymeme and the example as proofs, while the poem used the example to a greater, and the enthymeme to a lesser degree. Both in theory and in practice the example was regarded as being a pleasanter argument than the precept, as well as being more effective. This was the age of Ciceronianism. The school-masters of Europe had recently rediscovered imitation as the royal road to learning, and in their system of language teaching emphasized imitation of classical authors more than following the precepts of the grammarians or of the rhetoricians. The epigram of Seneca, "longum iter per praecepta, breve per exempla," was the popular catchword of the age. The example was popular.
Thus by the end of the sixteenth century, the Italian critics had formulated a logical and self-consistent theory of the purpose of poetry. Inheritors of the allegorical theory of the middle ages, which they in part discarded, and discoverers of classical rhetoric which they carried over bodily into their theories of poetry, they passed on to France, Germany, and England their rhetorical theories. The purpose of poetry, as well as of rhetoric, was to them persuasion--to teach, to please, to move. The instrument of poetry was the rhetorical example.
Chapter IV
English Renaissance Ideas of the Purpose of Poetry
In England the Italian interpretations of the literary criticism of Greece and Rome made slow headway against the established traditions of the middle ages. In particular the vogue of allegory did not yield to the idea of the moral example transferred from rhetoric to poetic.
1. Allegory and Example in Rhetoric
When Thomas Wilson published the first edition of his Arte of Rhetorique in 1553, the corpus of Greek criticism in the Aldine Rhetores Graeci had been in print forty-five years, and the commentaries of Dolce, Daniello, Robortelli, and Maggi were available. But Wilson wrote a very good rhetoric with no books before him but Quintilian, Cicero and the rhetoric Ad Herennium, which he thought to be Cicero's, Erasmus, Plutarch De audiendis poetis, and St. Basil. His treatment of poetry is quite naturally, then, that of a rhetorician who had been reared in the mediaeval tradition of allegory.
Allegory in the sense of Quintilian as a trope, an extended metaphor, Wilson mentions only once. His instance will bear quotation:
It is evil putting strong Wine into weake vesselles, that is to say, it is evil trusting some women with weightie matters. The English Proverbes gathered by John Heywood, helpe well in this behalfe, the which commonly are nothing els but Allegories, and darke devised sentences.[[360]]
Allegory in its more general mediaeval sense of the kernel of moral truth within the brilliant husk of the poet's fables he discusses at greater length elsewhere with full exemplification.
For by them we may talke at large and win men by persuasion, if we declare beforehand that these tales were not fained of such wisemen without cause.