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Scaliger's Defense of Poetry

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Vernon Hall Jr.
Vernon Hall Jr.*
Affiliation:
Dartmouth College
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Extract

There are as many defenses of poetry in the Renaissance as there are literary critics but the one name that comes most frequently to mind is that of Sidney. The reason is clear. Most critics embodied what they had to say in defense of poetry in formal, critical treatises. Sidney, with a better sense of drama, wrote his as a separate manifesto. It is known that Julius Caesar Scaliger devoted considerable energy in his Poetices Libri Septem to replying to the charges against poetry. What is less well known is that he, too, tried his hand at a separate defense of poetry which he called Contra Poetices Calumniatores Declamatio. This interesting composition is buried in the seldom read edition of his letters and orations first published in 1600, forty-two years after his death. This work deserves to be known because it puts into brief form, and in emotional language, several of the leading ideas of Poetices Libri Septem. Since it breathes defiance of the unpolished slanderers of literature who surrounded him in Agen and hints at the difficulties which he faced there, it is, also, of considerable biographical interest.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 63 , Issue 4 , December 1948 , pp. 1125 - 1130
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1948

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References

1 “The first problem of Renaissance criticism was the justification of imaginative literature”—J. E. Spingarn, A History of Literary Criticism in the Renaissance (New York, 1908), p. 3.

2 As far as I can ascertain this is its first mention in print.

3 J. C. Scaliger, Epistolae et Orationes Nunquam ante hac excusae, quarum serium et ordinem pagina sequens indicabit, ed. Franciscus Dousa (Leyden, 1600), pp. 409–413.

4 Although the city of Agen received Scaliger so well that he spent the last half of his life there, married a daughter of the town by whom he had fifteen children, set up a most profitable medical practice, and was twice elected consul of the city, it was always considered by Scaliger as a place of exile. It was dominated by men more interested in making money than in poetry, and Scaliger hints in this very declamatio that he dare not speculate too freely for fear of being considered heretical. In his second oration against Erasmus—Adversus Desiderium Erasmum (Toulouse, 1621)—he complained that no one in the town was capable of carrying on a literary conversation (pp. 38–39). His poems are full of his complaints of the barbarity of Agen. See Poematae (1600), i, 389–390, 403–404.

5 Institutio Oratorio, ii, x, 1–6.

6 Henri Bornecque, ed., Sénèque le Rhéteur, Controverses et Suasoires (Paris, n.d.), i, xxi–xxii.

7 Les déclamations et les déclamateurs d'après Sénèque le père (Lille, 1902), pp. 114–115.

8 What one would expect here is the statement that this age is worse in allowing the ignorant to talk than other ages. Yet one cannot so translate the Latin. Perhaps the obscurity of this passage can be explained by the fact that Scaliger discovered for himself how dangerous it was to speak about religious matters in Agen. In March 1538 he had an unpleasant brush with the inquisition. He was accused of having forbidden books in his home, of holding that Lent was founded neither by Christ nor by the apostles and that transubstantiation was not an article of faith, and of eating meat on fast days. Further a priest reported that Scaliger had, having read in Tertullian that the Romans received it standing upright, demanded the corpus domini while standing. Fortunately, the men sent by the king to investigate the trouble in Agen were scholars who knew Scaliger either personally or by reputation. They dismissed the charges against him. If the inquest had taken place a year later Scaliger might have been burned alive as was Jerome Vindocin and might have replaced him as the first martyr of the reform at Agen. “Enquête sur les commencements du protestantism en Agenais” (publiée et annotée par M. O. Fallières et le chanoine Durengues) in Société d'Agriculture, sciences et arts d'Agen, 2me série, xvi (1913), 213–299.

9 This defense of superstition is daring. Scaliger seems to imply that if you reject superstition in poetry you will have to reject it in religion, and if you do that you are in danger of destroying religion. It reminds one of the fable of the cloak in Swift's Tale of a Tub. Indeed, he goes on to suggest that rejection of these superstitions (by the Huguenots? by the humanists?) puts one on the road which leads to atheism.

10 This is not the exaggeration it seems. “Atheist” was the favorite epithet to apply to a person with whom one disagreed. It was used even more loosely than “communist” is today. Rabelais writes to Erasmus that Scaliger is an atheist, Scaliger returns the compliment in his poems addressed to Baryoenus, whom De Santi identifies with Rabelais (“Rabelais et

J. C. Scaliger,“ Revue des études Rabelaisiennes, iii, 12–44). A glance at Scaliger's Poemata will show that ”Atheist“ is one of the recurring nouns, applied to persons who were obviously not atheists in the modern sense of the term.

11 Scaliger considered himself superior to writers who used their mother tongue, but he was not completely scornful of them. He was interested in and praised poetry written in French and Italian. For instance he speaks highly of the poetry of Ronsard and the Pléiade in “Scripsit haec pro poetis Gallicanis”, Poemata (1600), i, 191; and the Italian love poems of Bandello in “Matthaeus Bandellus”, i, 304.

12 Fictiles (more frequently fictilia) is used in this sense in Livy: “antefixa fictilia deorum Romanorum” (34, 4, 4).

13 Scaliger's poem “De poetis a Platone ejectis e repub.”, Poemata (1600), i, 13, puts in verse these same ideas:

Mirum ni quae consistuit praecepta poetis

Ridicula admiscens, idem subvertit Homerus.

Quae Dijs attribuit scelerum commenta malorum:

Quae heroum turbae tetro lita facta furore:

Quodlibet horum unum meritis praeponderat illis

Omnibus, unde ambit prima cum laude coronam.

Quo fit, ut e mira Plato pulsum eliminet urbe.

Verum idem quod ait, cunctis hac lege poetis

Deberi exilium, levis exulet ille sibi, cum

Haud contemnendi fuit autor carminis, & quod

Addidit, esse imitatorem, nil praeterea: ergo

Damnat, quae a formis dependent pensilibus. Tum

Non seipsum impugnat?

14 The 1600 text reads Crantoti, an obvious error for Crantori. It is corrected in the 1603 edition of these letters published in Hanover.

15 Horace, Epistolae, i, 2, 1–4.

16 Compare Poemata (1600), i, 13:

Quin etiam vis caelorum, lex, regula, motus,

Consensus, pro concentu, nihil est aliud, quam

Harmonia, et rhythmus, faciesque, colorque poesis.