It was this ethical and civilizing function of poetry which was first in the minds of the humanists. Action being the test of all studies,[20] poetry must stand or fall in proportion as it conduces to righteous action. Thus, Lionardo Bruni[21] speaks of poetry as "so valuable an aid to knowledge, and so ennobling a source of pleasure"; and Æneas Sylvius Piccolomini, in his treatise De Liberorum Educatione (1450), declares that the crucial question is not, Is poetry to be contemned? but, How are the poets to be used? and he solves his own question by asserting that we are to welcome all that poets can render in praise of integrity and in condemnation of vice, and that all else is to be left unheeded.[22] Beyond this, the humanists urged in favor of poetry the fact of its antiquity and divine origin, and the further fact that it had been praised by great men of all professions, and its creators patronized by kings and emperors from time immemorial.
There were then at the end of the Middle Ages, and the beginning of the Renaissance, two opposing tendencies in regard to the poetic art, one representing the humanistic reverence for ancient culture, and for poetry as one of the phases of that culture, and the other representing not only the mediæval tradition, but a purism allied to that of early Christianity, and akin to the ascetic conceptions of life found in almost every period. These two tendencies are expressed specifically in their noblest forms by the great humanist Poliziano, and the great moral reformer Savonarola. In the Sylvæ, written toward the close of the fifteenth century, Poliziano dwells on the divine origin of poetry, as Boccaccio had done in his Vita di Dante; and then, after the manner of Horace, he describes its ennobling influence on man, and its general influence on the progress of civilization.[23] He then proceeds to survey the progress of poetry from the most ancient times, and in so doing may be said to have written the first modern history of literature. The second section of the Sylvæ discusses the bucolic poets; the third contains that glorification of Virgil which began during the Middle Ages, and, continued by Vida and others, became in Scaliger literary deification; and the last section is devoted to Homer, who is considered as the great teacher of wisdom, and the wisest of the ancients. Nowhere does Poliziano exhibit any appreciation of the æsthetic value of poetry, but his enthusiasm for the great poets, and indeed for all forms of ancient culture, is unmistakable, and combined with his immense erudition marks him as a representative poet of humanism.[24]
On the other hand, the puristic conception of art is elaborated at great length by Savonarola in an apology for poetry contained in his tractate, De Divisione ac Utilitate Omnium Scientarum,[25] written about 1492. After classifying the sciences in true scholastic fashion, and arranging them according to their relative importance and their respective utility for Christianity, he attacks all learning as superfluous and dangerous, unless restricted to a chosen few. Poetry, according to the scholastic arrangement, is grouped with logic and grammar; and this mediæval classification fixes Savonarola's conception of the theory of poetic art. He expressly says that he attacks the abuse of poetry and not poetry itself, but there can be no doubt that, at bottom, he was intolerant of creative literature. Like Plato, like moral reformers of all ages, he feared the free play of the imaginative faculty; and in connecting poetry with logic he was tending toward the elimination of the imagination in art. The basis of his æsthetic system, such as it is, rests wholly on that of Thomas Aquinas;[26] but he is in closer accord with Aristotle when he points out that versification, a merely conventional accompaniment of poetry, is not to be confounded with the essence of poetry itself. This distinction is urged to defend the Scriptures, which he regards as the highest and holiest form of poetry. For him poetry is coördinate with philosophy and with thought; but in his intolerance of poetry in its lower forms, he would follow Plato in banishing poets from an ideal state. The imitation of the ancient poets especially falls under his suspicion, and in an age given up to their worship he denies both their supremacy and their utility. In fine, as a reformer, he represents for us the religious reaction against the paganization of culture by the humanists. But the forces against him were too strong. Even the Christianization of culture effected during the next century by the Council of Trent was hardly more than temporary. Humanism, which represents the revival of ancient pagan culture, and rationalism, which represents the growth of the modern spirit in science and art, were currents too powerful to be impeded by any reformer, however great, and, when combined in classicism, were to reign supreme in literature for centuries to come. But Savonarola and Poliziano serve to indicate that modern literary criticism had not yet begun. For until some rational answer to the objections urged against poetry in antiquity and in the Middle Ages was forthcoming, literary criticism in any true sense was fundamentally impossible; and that answer came only with the recovery of Aristotle's Poetics.
III. The Final Justification of Poetry
The influence of Aristotle's Poetics in classical antiquity, so far as it is possible to judge, was very slight; there is no apparent reference to the Poetics in Horace, Cicero, or Quintilian,[27] and it was entirely lost sight of during the Middle Ages. Its modern transmission was due almost exclusively to Orientals.[28] The first Oriental version of Aristotle's treatise appears to have been that made by Abu-Baschar, a Nestorian Christian, from the Syriac into Arabic, about the year 935. Two centuries later, the Moslem philosopher Averroës made an abridged version of the Poetics, which was translated into Latin in the thirteenth century, by a certain German, named Hermann, and again, by Mantinus of Tortosa in Spain, in the fourteenth century. Hermann's version seems to have circulated considerably in the Middle Ages, but it had no traceable influence on critical literature whatsoever. It is mentioned and censured by Roger Bacon, but the Poetics in any form was probably unknown to Dante, to Boccaccio, and beyond a single obscure reference, to Petrarch. There is no question that for a long time before the beginning of the sixteenth century the Poetics had been entirely neglected. Not only do the critical ideas of this period show no indication of Aristotelian influence, but during the sixteenth century itself there seems to have been a well-defined impression that the Poetics had been recovered only after centuries of oblivion. Thus, Bernardo Segni, who translated the Poetics into Italian in 1549, speaks of it as "abandoned and neglected for a long time";[29] and Bernardo Tasso, some ten years later, refers to it as "buried for so long a time in the obscure shadows of ignorance."[30]
It was then as a new work of Aristotle that the Latin translation by Giorgio Valla, published at Venice in 1498, must have appeared to Valla's contemporaries. Though hardly successful as a work of scholarship, this translation, and the Greek text of the Poetics published in the Aldine Rhetores Græci in 1508, had considerable influence on dramatic literature, but scarcely any immediate influence on literary criticism. Somewhat later, in 1536, Alessandro de' Pazzi published a revised Latin version, accompanied by the original; and from this time, the influence of the Aristotelian canons becomes manifest in critical literature. In 1548, Robortelli produced the first critical edition of the Poetics, with a Latin translation and a learned commentary, and in the very next year the first Italian translation was given to the world by Bernardo Segni. From that day to this the editions and translations of the Poetics have increased beyond number, and there is hardly a single passage in Aristotle's treatise which has not been discussed by innumerable commentators and critics.
It was in Aristotle's Poetics that the Renaissance was to find, if not a complete, at least a rational justification of poetry, and an answer to every one of the Platonic and mediæval objections to imaginative literature. As to the assertion that poetry diverges from actual reality, Aristotle[31] contended that there is to be found in poetry a higher reality than that of mere commonplace fact, that poetry deals not with particulars, but with universals, and that it aims at describing not what has been, but what might have been or ought to be. In other words, poetry has little regard for the actuality of the specific event, but aims at the reality of an eternal probability. It matters not whether Achilles or Æneas did this thing, or that thing, which Homer or Virgil ascribes to either, but if Achilles or Æneas was such a man as the poet describes, he must necessarily act as Homer or Virgil has made him do. It is needless to say that Aristotle is here simply distinguishing between ideal truth and actual fact, and in asserting that it is the function of poetry to imitate only ideal truth he laid the foundations, not only of an answer to mediæval objections, but also of modern æsthetic criticism.
Beyond this, poetry is justified on the grounds of morality, for while not having a distinctly moral aim, it is essentially moral, because it is this ideal representation of life, and an idealized version of human life must necessarily present it in its moral aspects. Aristotle distinctly combats the traditional Greek conception of the didactic function of poetry; but it is evident that he insists fundamentally that literature must be moral, for he sternly rebukes Euripides several times on grounds that are moral, rather than purely æsthetic. In answer to the objection that poetry, instead of calming, stirs and excites our meanest passions, that it "waters and cherishes those emotions which ought to wither with drought, and constitutes them our rulers, when they ought to be our subjects,"[32] Aristotle taught those in the Renaissance who were able to understand him, that poetry, and especially dramatic poetry, does not indeed starve the emotions, but excites them only to allay and to regulate them, and in this æsthetic process purifies and ennobles them.[33] In pointing out these things he has justified the utility of poetry, regarding it as more serious and philosophic than history, because it universalizes mere fact, and imitates life in its noblest aspects.
These arguments were incorporated into Renaissance criticism; they were emphasized, as we shall see, over and over again, and they formed the basis of the justification of poetry in modern critical literature. At the same time, this purely æsthetic conception of art did not prevail by itself in the sixteenth century, even in those for whom Aristotle meant most, and who best understood his meaning; the Horatian elements, also, as found in the early humanists, were elaborated and discussed. In the Poetica of Daniello (1536), these Horatian elements form the basis for a defence of poetry[34] that has many marked resemblances to various passages in Sir Philip Sidney's Defence of Poesy. After referring to the antiquity and nobility of poetry, and affirming that no other art is nobler or more ancient, Daniello shows that all things known to man, all the secrets of God and nature, are described by the poets in musical numbers and with exquisite ornament. He furthermore asserts, in the manner of Horace, that the poets were the inventors of the arts of life; and in answer to the objection that it was the philosophers who in reality did these things, he shows that while instruction is more proper to the philosopher than to the poet, poets teach too, in many more ways, and far more pleasantly, than any philosopher can. They hide their useful teachings under various fictions and fabulous veils, as the physician covers bitter medicine with a sweet coating. The style of the philosopher is dry and obscure, without any force or beauty by itself; and the delightful instruction of poetry is far more effective than the abstract and harsh teachings of philosophy. Poetry, indeed, was the only form of philosophy that primitive men had, and Plato, while regarding himself as an enemy of poets, was really a great poet himself, for he expresses all his ideas in a wondrously harmonious rhythm, and with great splendor of words and images. This defence of Daniello's is interesting, as anticipating the general form of such apologies throughout the sixteenth century.
Similarly, Minturno in his De Poeta (1559), elaborates the Horatian suggestions for a defence of poetry. He begins by pointing out the broad inclusiveness of poetry, which may be said to comprehend in itself every form of human learning, and by showing that no form of learning can be found before the first poets, and that no nation, however barbarous, has ever been averse to poetry. The Hebrews praised God in verse; the Greeks, Italians, Germans, and British have all honored poetry; the Persians have had their Magi and the Gauls their bards. Verse, while not essential to poetry, gives the latter much of its delightful effectiveness, and if the gods ever speak, they certainly speak in verse; indeed, in primitive times it was in verse that all sciences, history, and philosophy were written.[35]