Read an Excerpt
Hermogenes and the Renaissance
Seven Ideas of Style
By Annabel M. Patterson PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1970 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-05182-6
CHAPTER 1
"Imitation of Great Masters": Decorum of Style
Hic. ... Why should you leave the lamp
Burning alone beside an open book,
And trace these characters upon the sands?
A style is found by sedentary toil
And by the imitation of great masters.
Ille. Because I seek an image, not a book.
(William Buder Yeats, Ego Dominus Tuus)
WE BELONG to a generation which has made mighty efforts to get inside the mind of the Renaissance and to fit together, whether out of envy, condescension, or pure heroic magnitude of mind, the pieces of a world picture so much neater than our own. But one of the more obvious sections of this pattern has not yet been properly investigated, and that is the whole area of stylistic decorum, the concept which controlled everything which we now regard, frequently with a derogatory glance, as technique. The work of Gregory Smith and Rosemond Tuve in this area has been incidental to other matters and necessarily brief. Modern critics who are interested in technique have not gone back into decorum, but forward into linguistics; and what seems to have been omitted altogether is any relevant study of the ancient rhetorician to whom decorum was the most important of all criteria. This neglected rhetorician, neglected only since the seventeenth century, is Hermogenes of Tarsus, who made decorum apprehensible in terms of style, and by so doing became to the Renaissance an authority to rival Cicero and Quintilian.
Hermogenes' Life and Works
Hermogenes of Tarsus lived during the second century A.D., and according to Philostratus was at the age of fifteen already so famous that Marcus Aurelius requested to hear his lectures. Very little else is known about his life except that he had written several works of rhetoric by the time he was twenty, and that this early precociousness was followed by an equally premature and extreme senility; as one of his seventeenth-century editors puts it, he was "in pueritia senex: in senectute infans." Legend has it that at his death his body was cut open, and his heart was found to be completely overgrown with hair. His life is oddly paralleled by the fortunes of his rhetoric, which was rediscovered in Europe toward the middle of the sixteenth century, had some sixty years of considerable popularity, and gradually disappeared from view during the later part of the seventeenth century. Hermogenes has been virtually ignored by Renaissance scholars of our own century, partly because it has been assumed that his influence was limited to the schools and depended upon his Progymnasmata, or exercises in Invention. The other main reason, one suspects, is that his Art of Rhetoric ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) has never been translated into English.
The Art of Rhetoric consists of three major parts: [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], Concerning Status, a treatise on the "status" or basis of arguments; [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], Concerning Invention, a loosely organized treatise in four books which deals with the structure of an oration and methods of ornamentation; and [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], Concerning Ideas, a treatise on style. The Art of Rhetoric also includes a fourth short work of sometimes questioned authenticity, [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], On the Method of Gravity, which is little more than a catalogue of rhetorical figures. These treatises are available today in the modern editions of Spengel, Walz and Rabe (all my references are to Rabe's edition, published in 1913), but the language barrier prevents them from being readily available. It was the discovery of Renaissance editions with Latin translations, as well as a series of translations and commentaries in Italian, which made this book not only possible but necessary; for the very existence of these editions and commentaries pointed to an interest in Hermogenes far beyond what had so far been allowed by the standard guides to Renaissance rhetoric. The view of Hermogenes, then, which is presented in this book is essentially that of the Renaissance editors and commentators, with judicious additions and corrections from the editions which are now standard; and wherever a classically trained eye detects distortions of the original Hermogenic theory it will also, hopefully, discover the source of that distortion in some sixteenth-century need.
It is the purpose of this book to show that the interest in Hermogenes in the Renaissance focused not on the Progymnasmata, but on the most mature and original section of the Art of Rhetoric, the treatise about style which is called Concerning Ideas. In the two books of this treatise, Hermogenes analyzes discourse into Seven Ideas, or categories of style. The Seven Ideas are those of Clarity ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]), Grandeur ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]), Beauty ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]), Speed ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]), Ethos ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]), Verity ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]), and Gravity ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]), with subsections thereof. Hermogenes illustrates his definitions of the Ideas by referring to Demosthenes, Plato, Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Isocrates, and also, significantly, to Homer and lesser poets. His constant emphasis on illustration to clarify precept was probably influential simply as a method among Renaissance critics like Minturno and Scaliger, but the most important aspect of the Ideas can be perceived simply by looking at their names, and recognizing their conceptual richness as compared to other stylistic schemes. By their names alone, Beauty, Speed, and Verity, for example, stimulate the imagination while they instruct. Any scheme based on high, middle, and low, on the other hand, invites a mathematical approach to style, and its conceptual basis is limited to the relationship between style and genre. "What is the nature of Speed?" is a far more interesting question than "How do I measure the height of a style?"
The main concern of this book, then, is to define the scope and influence of Hermogenic Ideas on the European Renaissance, and to show that they filled a great gap in the art, not of Invention, but of Persuasion. It is important to remember, at the outset, the earlier intellectual movement in which rhetoric was of primary importance, and the fact that the work of Hermogenes served for nine hundred years or more as the foundation of Byzantine rhetoric. Whether it was because the extreme schematization of his work appealed to the Byzantine teachers, or because the potential Platonism of the Ideas suggested a Christian synthesis, rhetoric to the Byzantines meant primarily the rhetoric of Hermogenes. How it was transferred from Byzantium to Europe, one can only guess, but presumably the manuscripts came with the refugees from Constantinople to Italy, many of whom took shelter with the Medicis. There is at least one fifteenth-century manuscript of the Art of Rhetoric recorded in the library of Lorenzo de Medici. Curiously enough, the Ideas apparently did not come to the attention of the Platonic Academy which developed under Lorenzo; at least, there is no evidence in the work of Ficino and Pico della Mirandola that they knew them, although they were later seized upon by Neoplatonists like Torquato Tasso and Fabio Paolini, and related ex post facto to the work of the Academy.
The Ideas and Decorum
Whatever may have been the reasons for the Byzantine interest in Hermogenes, this whole section of the tradition is only introductory to our purpose. It serves to explain how the manuscripts survived from the second century A.D. to the beginning of the sixteenth, when they were first printed, along with some of the major Byzantine commentaries. But Hermogenes became important to the European Renaissance in a way which, as far as one can tell, has no precedent in his Byzantine history. In Byzantium, the ideas were assimilated to the concepts and needs of Christianity; in Europe, they were assimilated to the concept and needs of decorum. In Europe, the importance of the Ideas depends on the function of the Seventh Idea, that of [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] or Gravity, which is both a mighty style in its own right and, more importantly, an ideal of total eloquence by which all the other Ideas are rightly used. The concept of [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] as the right use of all other styles corresponds, without any forcing, to the Renaissance concept of literary decorum, and is indeed so identified by Sturm, one of the most famous editors and commentators on Hermogenes in the sixteenth century. And the fact that Her mogenes himself allowed [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] to stand for simultaneously the best, gravest style, and the right use of all styles, required a synthesis which Renaissance literary theory and practice were able to produce: the gravest style, and the right use of all styles — both are possible in an epic poem. Hermogenes himself had used the epics of Homer to illustrate his concept of [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]; and it is not surprising therefore that an age which saw the national epic as the culmination of international literary theory should be fascinated by [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] as the principle of epic style, and should require that no poet embark on an epic until he had mastered decorum.
The full treatment of [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] or Gravity as the best, gravest style, and also the principle of decorum in epic writing, will be deferred to the end of this book, as is appropriate for the last of the Seven Ideas. The rest of this introductory chapter will be concerned instead with decorum of style in a more general sense, as applicable to all genres and all details of literary technique; and it will also demonstrate how often, and how naturally, writers and critics of the late sixteenth century turned to Hermogenes as a guide to decorum of style. Finally, it will suggest some reasons for the gap in the art of Persuasion, and why it could be better filled by the Ideas than by any other rhetorical scheme.
Decorum of style is, of course, only a part of the much larger philosophical concept so elegantly defined in George Puttenham's Arte of English Poesie (1589). In true Renaissance manner, Puttenham comes at his subject by various etymological paths:
The Greekes call this good grace of everything in his kinde, [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] the Latines [decorum] we in our vulgar call it by a scholasticall terme [decencie] our owne Saxon English terme is [seemelynesse] that is to say, for his good shape and utter appearance well pleasing the eye. ... Now because this comelynesse resteth in the good conformitie of many things and their sundry circumstances, with respect one to another, so as there be found a just correspondencie betweene them by this or that relation, the Greekes call it Analogie or a convenient proportion. This lovely conformitie, or proportion, or conveniencie, betweene the sence and the sensible hath nature her selfe first most carefully observed in all her owne workes, then also by kinde graft it in the appetites of every creature working by intelligence to covet and desire.
In other words, Puttenham regards decorum not only as an organic unity which gives aesthetic pleasure, but as part of the total mysterious pattern of the universe which rational creatures can observe and desire to imitate.
Decorum of style, then, is but one aspect of the whole "lovely conformitie," and to place the patterns of language within the larger patterns of the universe was in itself an act of "decencie" and sometimes of devotion. The commentary of Sturm on the Ideas of Hermogenes actually makes such an analogy: as in the whole and superior man the first requirement "is sanity and lucidity, then a good-sized frame, then the beauty of members and features, then a matching speed and agility in action, then that all things be joined with virtue and probity, but a truthful, not a feigned virtue, and finally that all parts have proportion and decorum." So for a total eloquence Sturm says, Hermogenes required first Clarity, then Grandeur, then Beauty, then Speed, then Ethos, then Verity, and finally that Gravity which is itself decorum of style.
Since Gregory Smith's and Rosemond Tuve's discussions of decorum, and more recently since Thomas Kranidas has gathered together an impressive array of Renaissance comments on its use, no one doubts that the term was of continuing interest to writers. One of the most revealing signs of how the term came to be at least on the tip of every poet's tongue is its use in the sixteenth century as an excuse for technical errors or clumsiness. Thus in the Mirror for Magistrates we have attempts by Baldwin and his fellow compilers to explain away the less metrically "regular" tragedies. Baldwin reports how the editorial committee of the Mirror listened critically to "The Blacksmith," in which there is considerable freedom of line length, and one of their number complained: "It is a pitie ... that the meter is no better seing the matter is so good: You maye doo verye well to helpe it, and a littell fyling would make it formall." But Baldwin, as editor-in-chief, replied that the author could have done that himself, had he wished, but instead had requested "that it may passe in such rude sorte as you have heard it: for hee observeth therein a double decorum both of the Smith, and of him selfe." And when they come to the tragedy of King James IV of Scotland, Baldwin remarks that "hee is paste mending, hee is to olde; for it seemes by the copy, that it was pende above fifty yeares agone." And again, "I like him (quoth one) the better: for if hee should bee otherwise, it would not well beseeme his person, nor the place whence he comes." Here it is clearly understood, by mid-sixteenth-century writers, that verse which appears primitive to them can be accepted in terms of the decorum of primitive or uneducated speakers — an ignorant blacksmith, and a king who not only died two generations earlier but was a Scot to boot!
An engaging variant of the apologetic approach to decorum is introduced at the end of the century by the author of Willobie his Avisa, who, though working in a six-line octo-syllabic stanza, at one point produces this:
How can I love, how can I live, 8
Whilst that my hart hath lost his hope, 8
Dispaire abandons sweet reliefe, 8
My love, and life have lost their scope: 8
Yet would I live thy features to behold, 10
Yet would I love, if I might be so bold. 10
And in the margin we are told that "These verses exceed measure, to show that his affections keepe no compasse, and his exceeding love." This replaces the decorum of crudity with that of unruly emotion, and its interest lies in the fact that it is not a rationalization after the event, as in the case of King James, who was "paste mending." It must be a deliberate variation introduced for the amusement or instruction of the reader, since, once noticed, it would have been easier to mend than to annotate; and its very smallness indicates the extent to which decorum of style branches out into the finest details of diction, meter, and rhythm.
This interpretation is borne out by the far longer and more suggestive comments by Thomas Watson about the relationship between emotional and metrical disturbances. The preface to the Hekatompathia (1582) leaves no stone unturned to win the indulgence of "the frendly Reader":
I hope thou wilt in respect of my travaile in penning these love passions, or for pitie of my paines in suffering them (although but supposed) so survey the faultes herein escaped, as eyther to winke at them, as oversightes of a blinde Lover; or to excuse them, as idle toyes proceedinge from a youngling frenzie; or lastlie, to defend them, by saying, it is nothing Praeter decorum for a maiemed man to halt in his pase, where his wound enforceth him, or for a Poete to falter in his Poeme, when his matter requireth it. Homer in mentioning the swiftnes of the winde, maketh his verse to runne in posthaste all upon Dactilus: and Virgill in expressing the striking down of an oxe, letteth the end of his hexameter fall withall. ... Therefore if I roughhewed my verse, where my sense was unsetled, whether through the nature of the passion, which I felt, or by rule of art, which I had learned, it may seeme a happie fault; or if it were so framed by counsell, thou mayest thinke it well donne; if by chaunce, happelie.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Hermogenes and the Renaissance by Annabel M. Patterson. Copyright © 1970 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
