Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance. Donald Lemen Clark

which is not the actuality of science or of practical affairs. It is thus that he distinguishes the poet from the historian: although the historian also uses images, he is restricted to relating what has happened--that is, to fact; while the poet relates what should happen--what is possible according to the law of probability or necessity. Instead of rehearsing facts, the dramatist or the epic poet creates truth. We expect him to be "true to life," and that is what is implied in Aristotle's "imitation of nature."[21] This truth to life controls, according to Aristotle, both the characterization and the action. In the first place

      Poetry tends to express the universal--how a person of a certain type will on occasion speak or act according to the law of probability or necessity.[22]

      Aristotle goes so far as to say that probability, not actuality, controls the structure of a narrative or dramatic plot in that, "what follows should be the necessary or probable result of the preceding action,"[23] even to the extent that the poet should prefer probable impossibilities to improbable possibilities, for by a logical fallacy even an irrational premise in an action may seem probable provided that the conclusion is logical and made to seem real.[24] For instance, the irrational elements in the Odyssey "are presented to the imagination with such vividness and coherence that the impossible becomes plausible; the fiction looks like truth."[25] Such a result occurs only when the characters and action are made real. We believe that which we see, even though we know in our hearts that it is not so.

      How important Aristotle feels it to be that the spectator or reader should see before him the characters and situations of an epic or drama is evinced by his suggestion to the poet on the process of composing. The author, he says, should visualize the situations he is presenting, working out the appropriate gestures, for he who feels emotion is best at transmitting it to an audience.[26] It is only when the poet thus completely realizes his characters and situations that the audience can be induced to feel sympathetically the pity and fear which produces the katharsis, so important a result of successful tragedy. If human beings did not possess that tendency to feel within themselves the emotions of the people on the stage, they would be unable to experience vicariously the fear animating the tragic hero. Thus tragedy, which is the type of all poetic, depends vitally, according to Aristotle, on imaginative realization.

      2. "Longinus"

      Aristotle's theory of poetry, which influenced so profoundly the criticism of the renaissance, was not followed by other classical treatises of the same scope. In fact, very little Greek or Roman literary criticism is concerned with poetical theory as compared with the keen interest of many critics in oratory. Perhaps the most significant and valuable critical treatise after Aristotle is that golden pamphlet On the Sublime erroneously ascribed to Longinus, which, anonymous and mutilated as it is, still holds our attention by its sincerity, insight, and enthusiastic love for great poetry.

      However important its contribution to classical theory of poetry, the treatise is not specifically on poetic. In fact, it sets out as if to treat rhetoric, and actually treats both; for it is mainly a treatise on style, which as Aristotle says in the Poetics[27] is in essence the same both in prose and verse. Nevertheless it does distinguish between rhetoric and poetic and does contribute to the theory of poetry.[28]

      "Sublimitas," misleadingly translated "sublimity," the author defines as elevation and greatness of style. It springs from the faculty of grasping great conceptions and from passion, both gifts of nature. It is assisted by art through the appropriate use of figures, noble diction, and dignified and spirited composition of the words into sentences. It is the insistence on passion, emotion, which makes the treatise On the Sublime stand out above other classical treatises on writing. Both poets and orators attain the sublime, says the author, but passion is more characteristic of the poets.[29]

      Passion moves the poet to intensity, which is attained by selection of those sensory images which are significant. Thus the treatise praises the ode by Sappho which it quotes, because the poet has taken the emotions incident to the frenzy of love from the attendant symptoms, from actuality, and first selected and then closely combined those which were conspicuous and intense.[30] This intensity which is characteristic of the poet he contrasts with the amplification of the orators, which strengthens the fabric of an argument by insistence and is especially "appropriate in perorations and digressions, and in all passages written for the style and for display, in writings of historical and scientific nature." Yet Demosthenes when moved by passion attains the sublimity of intensity and strikes like lightning.[31] Both in oratory and in poetry sublimity is attained by image-making, as when "moved by enthusiasm and passion, you seem to see the things of which you speak, and place them under the eyes of your hearers."[32] It would be difficult to phrase better the conditions of imaginative realization. But the author felt truly that this realization was different in poetry from what it was in rhetoric. In commenting on a quotation from the Orestes, of Euripides, he says:

      There the poet saw the Furies with his own eyes, and what his imagination presented he almost compelled his hearers to behold.

      And after an imaginative passage from the lost Phaethon, of the same author, he says:

      Would you not say that the soul of the writer treads the car with the driver, and shares the peril, and wears wings as the horses do?

      From this the rhetorical imagination differs in that it is at its best when it has fact for its object.[33] Longinus would seem to say that the realization of poetic is untrammeled by fact, while the imagination of the orator is bound by the actual; it is always practical.

      Because the imaginative realization of poetry is characterized by passion, intensity, and immediacy, the author of the treatise feels with Aristotle that the dramatic is the most characteristically poetic. On this basis he judges the Odyssey to be less great than the Iliad. It is narrative instead of dramatic; fable prevails over action; passion has degenerated into character-drawing. This grouping of drama, action, and passion as the qualities of great poetry is significant. Bald narrative can never realize character or situation as can the dramatic form, either in narrative or for the stage, when the whole action takes place before the mind's eye instead of being told.

      The treatise makes this point exceedingly clear by two quotations which bear repeating.

      "The author of the Arimaspeia thinks these lines terrible:

      "Here too, is mighty marvel for our thought:

       'Mid seas men dwell, on water, far from land:

       Wretches they are, for sorry toil is theirs;

       Eyes on the stars, heart on the deep they fix;

       Oft to the gods, I ween, their hands are raised;

       Their inward parts in evil case upheaved.

      "Anyone, I think, will see that there is more embroidery than terror in it all. Now for Homer:

      "As when a wave by the wild wind's blore

       Down from the clouds upon a ship doth light,

       And the whole hulk with scattering foam is white,

       And through the sails all tattered and forlorn

       Roars the fell blast: the seamen with affright

       Shake, and from death a hand-breadth they are borne."[34]

      The first quoted passage is indeed not only "embroidery," but mere talk about shipwrecks, and the terrors of the deep. Homer realizes the situation by sensory images; he makes the reader see the white foam, and hear the wind howl through the torn sails, yes, and shake with the frightened sailors.

      3. Plutarch

      But judgments like those of the appreciative and discerning author of the treatise On the Sublime are rare. Plutarch in his essay On the Reading of Poets, is much more representative of late Greek criticism. This essay is not a treatise on the theory of poetry, but a thoughtful discussion of the place of poetry in the education of young men. Consequently the greater part of the essay is devoted to the moral purpose of poetry, and as such will be treated in the second section of this