MEDIEVAL RHETORIC AND POETIC

[ii]

[iii]

MEDIEVAL RHETORIC AND POETIC (to 1400)

INTERPRETED FROM REPRESENTATIVE WORKS

BY CHARLES SEARS BALDWIN PROFESSOR OF RHETORIC IN COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

GLOUCESTER, MASS. PETER SMITH 1959

[iv]

Copyright, 1928 By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

Reprinted, 1959 By Permission of MARSHALL W. BALDWIN

[v]

SANCTO THOMÆ AQVINATI PHILOSOPHO POETÆ ARTEM ILLIVS SÆCVLI RHETORICAM ATQVE POETICAM REDINTEGRATAM COMMENDAT INTERPRES

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[vii]

PREFACE

The rhetoric and the poetic of any age, as the complementary theories of composition, are indicative of its habits in education and in literature. Thus their medieval history concerns all students of the middle age. For consecutive interpretation in this single aspect both supplements the more comprehensive surveys and adds significance to many special studies. Whether for initiation, for review, or for suggestions of further inquiry, medieval rhetoric and poetic offer a directly literary guide.

As in my preceding volume, Ancient rhetoric and poetic, conciseness has been sought by proportion. Space is given to those salient tendencies which mark the literary course. Minor relations and collateral studies, indicated no less carefully, are relegated to the notes, but included in the index. Detailing the actual theory and the actual practise of composition, often for the first time, I have tried no less to show their bearing, to make medieval rhetoric and poetic available by interpreting them in historical sequence. Thus are interpreted the tasks of the schools, the poetic developments of and from the hymns, the habits of prose rhythm, the encroachment of logic upon rhetoric and of rhetoric upon poetic, the progress of verse narrative.

Ancient theory being eminent in a few cardinal texts long recognized as representative, the former volume subordinates history to exposition. Medieval theory, on the other hand, being best grasped as development from an inheritance, the plan of the present volume is historical. [viii]Though each aims at sufficiency within itself, the second refers again and again to the first, and the two volumes together offer a history down to 1400. Throughout this history rhetoric and poetic are seen to be indeed complementary. Where they were distinguished, as where they were confused, they are most fruitfully studied side by side. Each illuminates the other because their relations are always significant historically.

Their medieval history must begin with those particular influences from antiquity which were transmitted through the last schools of the Roman Empire, especially through the schools of Gaul. It is a Latin history; for contact with Greek was soon lost and was not widely reëstablished till the Renaissance. But in the imperial centuries before the separation East and West, Greek and Latin, agreed so far in literary ideals and practise that the whole Mediterranean basin had a substantially common system of education through rhetoric. An inert survival of what is known historically as the second sophistic, this was sharply challenged by St. Augustine’s reversion through Cicero to the elder tradition for authority to direct the real oratory of preaching. Nevertheless the schools of Gaul continued the sophistic tradition beyond the fall of Rome.

Nor were the large philosophy of rhetoric in Cicero’s De oratore, the great survey of Quintilian, the later medieval guides. The prevalent textbooks were Cicero’s youthful digest De inventione and a second book universally attributed to him, the Rhetorica ad Herennium. Though the survival of these minor works may be due partly to the accidents of manuscripts, their persistence has other causes. De inventione reduces to summary what the middle age taught least, those counsels of preparation [ix]and ordering which ancient teaching had progressively adjusted to oral discourse, and for which the earlier middle age had less opportunity. The Rhetorica ad Herennium, comparatively summary also as to analysis and sequence, is devoted largely to style, and reduces stylistic ornament to a list so conveniently specific that medieval schools made it a ritual. Though the greater Cicero and Quintilian were known to such original minds as Gerbert in the tenth century and John of Salisbury in the twelfth, they were hardly available for the usual course of teaching.

Medieval rhetoric was generally a lore of style. Here rhetorica tended to coincide with that school study of Latin poetry which was a recognized function of grammatica. The constant quotation of Horace’s “Ars poetica” is one of the signs of the merging of poetic with rhetoric. The conventional doctrine from both was largely of descriptive dilation. Among the effects of this teaching which outlast schooling and reach beyond Latin are certain conventions of vernacular poetry. Conversely, poetic advance in the vernaculars is seen in breaking away not only from school rhetoric, but from rhetoric altogether.

The main medieval fields proper to rhetoric were sermons and letters. The former, exploring their rhetoric in the earlier centuries, continued to feel the example, perhaps more than the precept, of St. Augustine. Even the Dominicans had no need to seek a new lore of oral composition. What is distinctive in sermon composition of the twelfth century is oftener poetic than rhetoric. Letters, on the other hand, are at once a legitimate application of ancient rhetoric and a distinctively medieval development. They practically comprehend the medieval rhetoric of written prose. Though ordinary routine was largely content, as in any other time, with correctness, [x]and therefore with recipe and formulary, serious study of both composition and style is evident in the better manuals, and conspicuous in those achievements which are part of medieval literature.

The teaching of poetica, from of old a part of grammatica, included extensive practise in Latin verse. This had early to take account of that dominance of stress which had gradually supplanted the ancient control by time. The characteristic medieval achievements in Latin lyric are the hymns. Radiating into other songs, even into humorous and satirical verse, the hymns were the common lyric fund of medieval Latin. As early as St. Ambrose they had created a new Latin poetry; and the beauty of their various art was not exhausted with Adam of St. Victor. Meantime they opened to the vernaculars those poetic possibilities of stanza which arise from the development of rime. Medieval poetic theory, on the contrary, went but a little way. Mainly pedagogical formulation, it lagged far behind the most characteristic medieval poetic advance, which was in verse narrative. Here is a sharp contrast with the Renaissance. The fifteenth century opens a long series of critical inquiries into poetic. The middle age, merging poetic with rhetoric in the schoolroom, was little concerned to make it tally

with vernacular achievement. With the death in 1400 of Chaucer, whose criticism exposed this lack, the poetic of medieval narrative reaches its term.

I owe to the unstinted courtesy and scholarly interest of a trustee of Barnard College, Mr. George A. Plimpton, the privilege of studying at leisure his manuscript of one of the most important Bolognese dictamina, the thirteenth-century Candelabrum. Far better than Boncompagno or Thomas of Capua, better even than Conrad, [xi]this unprinted manual exhibits dictamen in both scope and method. My other debts are too manifold to rehearse. The bibliographical notes, if they recorded the reading of years, would defeat their proper object of serving further study. Therefore they have been made, as in the former volume, at once specific and strictly selective, applied to each chapter separately, and further indicated both in the index and on a page of recurring abbreviations after the table of contents.

As I record gratefully my obligation for generous help with the proofs to my colleagues Professors Ayres, Clark, Krapp, McCrea, Moore, Perry, and Van Hook, and to my old friend, the Jesuit scholar Dr. Donnelly, I see further in such coöperation great promise for the progress of medieval studies.

C. S. B.

Barnard College Columbia University January, 1928.

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ABBREVIATIONS RECURRING IN THE NOTES

[The abbreviations used in each chapter will be found with the list of references below the chapter heading.]

[1]

CHAPTER I THE SOPHISTIC TREND IN ANCIENT RHETORIC

References and Abbreviations

[2]

A. The Two Historic Conceptions of Rhetoric

Plato’s distrust of rhetoric is a permanent reminder. It is so significantly typical that it recurs throughout the history of education, and must recur. Again and again educational practise has found that it cannot do without rhetoric; again and again educational theory has grudgingly inquired what to do with it. For distrust of rhetoric may be more than the impatience of the philosopher with the orator, of speculation with ordered presentation, of the quest for truth with persuasion. This is involved too; for philosophers have often been impatient of presentation. They have wished to think aloud, or to question and answer, or merely to analyze for themselves, without being held to consecutive explanation. Plato himself falls short of discerning the importance of making truth available and effective for the mass of men incapable of scientific analysis; and this is the ground of Cicero’s rejoinder.[1] But Plato’s distrust is more deeply of rhetoric as he heard it taught. Even in his day Greek rhetoric was largely sophistic, the rhetoric of personal display and

triumph. In the Gorgias[2] Socrates admits the function of a nobler rhetoric, but cannot find it in use. In the Protagoras[3] he asks the vital question, “About what does the sophist make a man more eloquent?” In the Phædrus, which discusses rhetoric more specifically, his satire is most evidently of sophistic. To this the ultimate objection is moral. A man should train himself “not with a view to speaking and acting before the world, but for the sake of making himself able ... to please the gods.”[4] Plato challenges not merely the method of the sophists, [3]but their ideal. Since rhetoric has almost always had some part in education, and since it always ultimately involves morality, Plato raises a leading question.

The ultimate, the only final answer to Plato’s challenge is the Rhetoric of Aristotle. This proceeds from a conception not only larger than the sophistic of Gorgias and Protagoras, but also significantly divergent in aim. The true theory of rhetoric as the energizing of knowledge, the bringing of truth to bear upon men,[5] is there established for all time. Aristotle amply vindicated rhetoric by defining its place among studies, its necessary correlation with inquiry and with policy, its permanent function. He settled the question of rhetoric philosophically. He established its theory. But this theory was oftener accepted than followed. The sophists had, indeed, been put in their place more surely by Aristotle than by Plato; but they continued to thrive, until ancient rhetoric became more and more sophistic.

The conception animating the practise and the teaching of sophistic, far from being limited to antiquity, is medieval as well, and modern. Apparently it is permanent. Rhetoric is conceived by Aristotle as the art of giving effectiveness to truth; it is conceived alike by the earlier and the later sophists and by their successors as the art of giving effectiveness to the speaker. The conceptions are not contradictory. The second may be theoretically included within the first; and actually Demosthenes may learn something from Isocrates. But to embody them in educational procedure, to carry out either as the controlling idea of a course of study, is to discover that sooner or later they become practically incompatible. Ingenuous youth will be devoted either to energizing truth or to [4]exploiting itself. There will come a parting of the ways; for the two conceptions are divergent. What Aristotle discerned as differentiating is differentiating still. The flaw in sophistic is moral. It may not impair technical training; but by deviating motive it tends to impair education.

For Aristotle’s theory is a touchstone. To recall rhetoric to the true function discerned by him has repeatedly been the object of reform in teaching. What has intervened to deviate rhetoric and frustrate its best use has again and again been the preoccupation with giving effectiveness not to the message, but to the speaker. Ancient sophistic is thus typical. It is not merely historical; it is historic. The false conception divined by Plato, and exposed finally by Aristotle’s demonstration of the true conception, led ancient rhetoric through empty personal triumphs into an elaborate art of display, devoid, at its worst, of other motive. As sophistic spread, as its idea of rhetoric became dominant, ancient education was narrowed;[6] and ancient oratory eddied in shallows until it found a new course with the new motive of Christian preaching.

In exorcising the false conception Aristotle removed the false sophistic emphasis from style. He does not despise, nor even slight, technic. He finds analysis of sentence rhythms necessary. But his goal in this, as in his analysis of figures, is beyond the technical means of securing particular effects. He does not classify figures for reference; he seeks in both phrase and cadence the function; and he discusses neither until he has spent some two-thirds of his treatise on the function of rhetoric as a whole course of study. This he finds philosophically necessary. Otherwise [5]rhetoric cannot be justified; otherwise, he clearly implies, it is narrowed and degraded. For him rhetoric is so inextricably moral that it should never be divorced from subject matter of real significance.

But what subject matter of real significance has oratory when it is barred from discussion of present policy? Here appears a strong external cause of the spread of sophistic. The sophistical trend, already marked, was furthered by the narrowing of public discussion. Of the three fields[7] of oratory distinguished by Aristotle, deliberative, forensic, and occasional, the first was restricted by political changes. It faded with democracy. So later it faded at Rome, and still later in other realms. Deliberative oratory presupposes free discussion and audiences that vote. The steady increase of government from above administered by an appointed official class hastened also the tendency of the second kind of oratory, forensic, to become technical, the special art of legal pleading. Thus the only field left free was the third, occasional oratory, encomium, or panegyric, the commemoration of persons and days, the address of welcome, the public lecture. A favorite field even in Plato’s time, it is in any time the freest field for imaginative and emotional appeal and for

personal triumphs. Thus it was early and assiduously cultivated by the sophists. Though it opens, on the other hand, the highest reaches of eloquence, though Isocrates is more than a sophist and Lincoln’s Gettysburg address is as far from sophistic as possible, still its becoming the main field of Greek oratory gave the lead to sophistic. In such conditions sophistic could control education; and its control of education reacted upon the conditions to make a vicious circle. Oratory and the training for it [6]became preponderantly an art of display; and the rhetoric finally bequeathed by the ancient schools was sophistic.

In sum, the sophistic tendency, which may be found in any highly developed literature, was confirmed in Greek by causes both intrinsic and extrinsic. Becoming a habit, it became a scheme of education. Against this Plato represents Socrates in fundamental opposition. Aristotle does more than oppose it; he establishes constructively a rhetoric whose persuasion shall be more than personal appeal and personal triumph. But the rhetoric nobly and philosophically conceived by him did not succeed in supplanting the tendency seen at its best in Isocrates. The conception of Isocrates in Philostratus, though inadequate, is not wrong essentially.

The siren which stands on the tomb of Isocrates the sophist—its pose is that of one singing—testifies to the man’s persuasive charm, which he combined with the laws and habits of rhetoric. Balances, antitheses, rimes, though he was not their discoverer but only the skilful user of what had been discovered already, he put his mind to, and also to amplitude, rhythm, sentence-movement, beat. These things prepared the diction of Demosthenes, who was a pupil, indeed, of Isæus, but a disciple of Isocrates. Philostratus, Lives of the Sophists, I. 17 (Wright’s translation, page 50, modified).

The Isocratean ideal of eloquence, influential even upon its critic Dionysius of Halicarnassus, even upon so great an orator as Cicero,[8] became more sophistic in the practise of the schools. In the first century of our era sophistic had won its place, by the second century an eminence undisputed till Christian preaching returned to the sound ancient tradition.

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For sophistic is the historic demonstration of what oratory becomes when it is removed from urgency of subject matter. Seeking some inspiration for public occasions, it revives over and over again a dead past. Thus becoming conventionalized in method, it turns from cogency of movement to the cultivation of style. Cogency presupposes a message. It is intellectual ordering for persuasion, the means toward making men believe and act. Style, no longer controlled by such urgencies of subject, tends toward decoration and virtuosity. A necessary study in any rhetoric, it had been highly cultivated during Greek democracy; but under monarchy and Empire it became a preoccupation, almost a monopoly. Sophistic practically reduces rhetoric to style. The old lore of investigation (inventio), paralyzed by the compression of its trunk nerve, has little scope beyond ingenuity. Organized movement[9] (dispositio), similarly impaired at the source, tends to be reduced to salience and variety, or to be supplanted by pattern. Memory becomes verbal. But style and delivery, becoming the main

reliance, are elaborated into a systematic technic to a degree almost incredible to-day. In sheer virtuosity the second sophistic has hardly a parallel in earlier or later centuries. It is more like the art of Paderewski or Bernhardt than like that of Demosthenes.

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B. The Second Sophistic[10]

1. Philostratus, The Lives of the Sophists[11]

The Lives of the Sophists by Philostratus derives the “new” sophistic of his day from the old. New, says he, it is not. We may call it a second sophistic; but it keeps an old tradition. Far from apologizing for sophistic, old or new, Philostratus is proud of it. He sets out to celebrate it as a great tradition. Gorgias is not defended from Socratic exposure; he is claimed as a distinguished ancestor.[12] That rhetoric is not what Aristotle urged, that it is after all sophistic, Philostratus assumes. Nor is the assumption merely provincial vanity; it was widespread and secure. There was no need to vindicate what was generally accepted. Moreover the facts justify not only the assumption of Philostratus, but his history. Though he is not historical in method, his assertion of continuity from Gorgias down to the platform artists of his day has been approved by studies really historical, and affirmed for the fourth century as well. The Lives of the [9]Sophists, therefore, exhibit the second sophistic as the fixing of an old tendency in habitual practise and teaching.