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"Examples Are Best Precepts": Readers and Meanings in Seventeenth-Century PoetryAuthor(s): John M. WallaceSource: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Dec., 1974), pp. 273-290Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1342786Accessed: 01/09/2008 16:41

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"Examples Are Best Precepts": Readers and Meanings in Seventeenth-Century Poetry

John M. Wallace

My title is taken from the frontispiece to Ogilby's translation of Aesop (1665); since every Renaissance poet believed the statement to be true, let me start with my own example.

John Denham's only play, The Sophy, published in August 1642, is a tale about the perils ofjealousy. The good prince Mirza, after a miracu- lous victory over the Turks, returns in glory to his father's court, but leaves it shortly thereafter. In his absence, Haly, the evil courtier, follows a friend's advice to "work on [the king's] fears, till fear hath made him cruel"1 and poisons the king's mind with jealousy against his son. Mirza returns only to be brutally blinded and killed, and the emperor soon dies stricken with remorse. Now it happens that Parliament justified all its actions in the months preceding the civil war on the grounds of the "fears and jealousies" that the king had inspired. Charles was incensed by the slogan and claimed angrily that he, if anyone, had the most cause for fears and jealousies.2

1. Sir John Denham, The Poetical Works, ed. Theodore Howard Banks, 2d ed. (Hamden, Conn., 1969), p. 245. The references to fear and jealousy are so ubiquitous in the play that they need not be listed here.

2. On March 1, 1642, in the angriest of his replies to Parliament so far, Charles ex- claimed, "You speake of Jealousies and Feares: Lay your hands to your hearts, and aske

your selves whether I may not likewise be disturbed with Feares and Jealousies: And if so, I assure you this Message hath nothing lessened them" (An Exact Collection of All Remon- strances ... [London, 1643], p. 94). Although phrases like "distempers and jealousies" had been used earlier, Clarendon on two occasions is quite specific that "fears and

jealousies" were "the new words which served to justify all indispositions and to excuse all disorders" in January 1642 (The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, ed. W. Dunn Macray [Oxford, 1888], 1:493; see also p. 535). Taken with other evidence, Clarendon's remarks strongly suggest that The Sophy was written after Coopers Hill, and

during the seven months preceding its publication in August 1642.

273

"Examples Are Best Precepts"

Denham obviously decided that here was the all-consuming topic around which a predominantly royalist drama could be written. He fol- lowed what I believe was the standard practice-the method that Fulke Greville said Sidney used and that Congreve repeated at the end of the

century when he declared of The Double Dealer that "I design'd the Moral first, and to that Moral I invented the Fable."3 He found a plot in Thomas Herbert's Travels into Divers Parts of Asia that recorded some terrible cruelties and catastrophes caused by jealousy, and he added the

point that the emperor's mind had been wrought upon by his counselor. There is no evidence that the play was ever acted, but the most casual reader would have said to himself, "Yes, history reminds us that states

destroy themselves through fears and jealousies, and we should abate our own before it is too late." Had he read a little more closely, however, he would have observed that both the arbitrary ruler and the good prince were largely to blame for their misfortunes, one by letting too much power fall into the hands of evil counselors, the other by absenting himself from the capital at the crucial moment. Charles was guilty of both errors, as his friends lamented.4 There are further uplifting reflections that the play prompts, some of them explicitly pointed to by the author, the remainder left to the reader's talent for drawing infer- ences. Denham set the guidelines for his reader more prominently than a great dramatist would have done, but nevertheless he entangled some of his political messages deeply enough in plot, imagery, and dialogue to

3. William Congreve, The Complete Plays, ed. Herbert Davis (Chicago, 1967), p. 119. And

compare John Donne in Sermons, ed. Evelyn M. Simpson and George R. Potter (Berkeley and Los Angeles 1953-62), 9:274: "All wayes of teaching are Rule and Example: and

though ordinarily the Rule be first placed, yet the Rule it selfe is made of Examples ... for,

Example in matter of Doctrine, is as Assimilation in matter of Nourishment; The Example makes that that is proposed for our learning and farther intruction, like something which we knew before, as Assimilation makes that meat, which we have received and digested, like those parts which are in our bodies before."

4. Parliament repeatedly requested that Charles return to London after he had left the

city on January 10, 1642, and Bulstrode Whitelock wrote that "This was another and great wonder to many prudent men, that the king should leave this city ... and by his leaving the town bring great disadvantages upon himself and his affairs: this was thought not to have been done advisedly" (Memorials of the English Affairs [Oxford, 1853], 1:156-57). Denham had become concerned with Charles' concessions to Parliament at least as early as Sep- tember 1641, and as late as February 1642 Charles misguidedly signed the Bishops' Exclu- sion Bill in the hope of retaining power over the militia. Haly's plot to forge a letter (Banks ed. [n. 1 above], p. 254) has an analogy with the forged letter handed over to the Commons

by Sir Orlando Bridgeman on January 11, 1642. Clarendon (1:513-14) noted that it made

quite a stir but was obviously a forgery to any discerning observer.

John M. Wallace, author of Destiny His Choice: The Loyalism of Andrew Marvell and articles on Milton, Dryden, Denham, Traherne, and Ar- nold, is professor of English at the University of Chicago.

274 John M. Wallace

December 1974 275

make an interesting puzzle, and we cannot always be absolutely certain about his intentions.

The question whether the meaning we find in a text was put there by the author or is foisted on him by ourselves bothered Renaissance read- ers less than it disturbs us, though the question was sometimes raised, because the answer did not really matter very much. Then as now, it was convenient to be able to tell another critic that his readings were strained, far-fetched, and incompatible with the author's intentions, but what mattered extremely was the quality of the work itself, which alone could induce a reader to be moved by it and to pay it attention. Once the explicatory process had begun, then the reader was involved for his own good, and it was immaterial (or only occasionally material) whether one reader's interpretations were the same as another's, or identical with the author's aims. Those of us who toil in the fields of explication-or be-

long to the Scorched Earth school of criticism, as an unkind friend once

put it-are vindicated by a pluralism much older than R. S. Crane's; in our own Scriblerian fashion we are engaged in the process of self- education, which is precisely what a Renaissance poet hoped his work would inspire. If some of our anxieties about authorial intention seem insoluble, he would have said, "Forget it! Get what you can, and as long as what you find is useful to yourself and not dishonorable to me, I welcome all your meanings." Or, as George Sandys explained in the preface to his Ovid, "in the Mythologie I have rather followed (as fuller of delight and more usefull) the variety of mens severall conceptions, where they are not over-strained, then curiously examined their exact proprietie; which is to be borne-with in Fables and Allegories, so as the principal parts of application resemble the ground-worke."5

The wide latitude of response permitted within the pale of unstrained

interpretation is apparent in the scholia on the classics, the compendia of the learned but popular mythographers, and in the growing body of commentary on Renaissance epics. A great deal of it is collected in Don Allen's pandect Mysteriously Meant,6 and it should deter us from the critical presumption about "central themes" which Richard Levin has been attacking in a series of important and entertaining articles.7 Levin has yet to explain how we should read a play like The Sophy which de- monstrably possesses a central theme, or how authors could have re-

5. George Sandys, "To the Reader," Ovid's Metamorphosis Englished, Mythologiz'd, and

Represented in Figures (Oxford, 1632). 6. Baltimore, 1970. 7. See especially "Some Second Thoughts on Central Themes," Modern Language Review

67 (1972): 1-10; "Thematic Unity and the Homogenization of Character," Modern Lan- guage Quarterly 33 (1972): 23-29; "'No Laughing Matter': Some New Readings of The Alchemist," Studies in the Literary Imagination 6 (1973): 85-99.

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276 John M. Wallace "Examples Are Best Precepts"

frained from declaring their themes to themselves, since the principles of rhetoric demanded that all poems be arguments about something -the "something" generally being a moral or philosophical truth; but he must be right to insist that thematic critics all too often limit the

significance of a poem to the poor straightened notion that they happen to have discovered themselves. Renaissance critics, on the contrary, while they never abandoned the idea of an authorial purpose which determined what a work was "about," delighted in the variety of a poem whose topics could be unravelled in different directions. They felt a liberty to expatiate on the implications of a text, and if they devised

expositions of fables and tacitly attributed their inventions to the author, no harm would have been done provided "the principal parts of applica- tion resemble[d] the ground-worke." Allen's book reveals that moral

exegesis predominated throughout the long history of classical commen-

tary, and even a profound allegorizer like Landino rejected most of the

interpretations of the Aeneid that involved arcane laws of physics or "power[s] of nature." Virgil had directed his poem at "the proper con- duct of life and the summum bonum. ... The poem follows a free and continual discourse condemning vice, extolling the beauty of virtue, and

commending the search for truth."8 The fact that other writers believed the Aeneid contained "the highest mysteries of philosophy" does not alter the nature of the reading act. However recondite some of the values attributed to Aeneas appear to be, the mind which finds these meanings "in" or "under" the fictions (and the prepositions were always used) is

engaged in the same activity as the more cautious mind which rests content with a simpler moral analysis. The allegorists themselves could

speak portentously of secrets hidden from the eyes of the profane or claim prophetic powers and hidden sources of inspiration, but their mortal readers were obliged to decode the metaphors in exactly the same fashion as a schoolboy who, following tradition, might decide that

Orpheus stirring the trees with his song meant that "rustics and ignorant men are delighted by poetry," or that the death of Actaeon signified that "a spendthrift wastes his riches most if he supports many favourites."9 The best of the English mythographers, Francis Bacon, explicates the fables both ethically and metaphysically, according to what he believes an individual fiction requires. He is not changing his method, or think-

ing on some higher plane, when he judges that some fables "bear upon morals," whereas others are "big almost to bursting with the secrets and

mysteries of Nature."10 Precepts of good government and sententiae about the follies of pleasure jostle side by side with enigmas concerning the origin of matter and grandiose accounts of natural theology. It is all

8. Allen, p. 147. 9. Richard Wills, De re Poetica, ed. A. D. S. Fowler (Oxford, 1958), p. 121. 10. Francis Bacon, The Works, ed. James Spedding, R. L. Ellis, and D. D. Heath (Lon-

don, 1858-74), 6:741, 709.

December 1974 277

one and the same process of deciphering in which Bacon's "license of

speculation," as he calls it (p. 753), stops short only at the point of

reading Christian dogmas out of the texts. Convinced though he was that they contained "a hidden and involved meaning" (p. 697), no one was more aware than he "what pliant stuff fable is made of, how freely it will follow any way you please to draw it, and how easily with a little dexterity and discourse of wit meanings which it was never meant to bear may be plausibly put upon it" (p. 695).

The single most neglected document in recent accounts of reading habits in the Renaissance is Plutarch's essay on "How a yoong man ought to heare poets, and how he may take profit by reading poemes."'1 Alone

among the surviving rhetorical classics, Plutarch's emphasis was not on

writing or speaking but on reading; not on construction but interpreta- tion. He sought to inculcate that philosophy was "the onely scope whereunto yoong men must tend in reading of Poets," and Holland pointed out in the preface to his translation that the method could be applied not only to ancient poets but to all other profane authors. Plutarch was grappling with the problem that literature, like life, was a mixture of virtue and vice, truth and deception. A reader had therefore to acquire a set of critical attitudes that would defend him from the

damage which poems could potentially cause. He needed antidotes for the poison in poetical flowers, and like the bee must learn to transmute venom into honey.12 Plutarch's opinion of literature could be called ambivalent if his underlying morality were not consistent. He claimed a real educational value of poetry, but most of his essay is an attempt to render it harmless. The reader's profit lay in his powers of discrimina- tion, so that at all times he knew whether to feel raised by the sentiments he encountered or to inoculate himself against their dire effects. Im- munity could be obtained by studying the implicit commentary within a work on the bad deeds and characters, by remembering better state- ments made elsewhere by the author, by paying careful attention to etymological niceties, and so on. If a passage remained impervious to a favorable (i.e., a moral) construction, then it was advisable to tamper with the text or to recall good moral dicta from quite different sources. No young man could have taken Plutarch seriously without becoming thoroughly suspicious of any literary work, and learning to inquire closely into the probable reasons of every speech and action.

11. Plutarch's Philosophie, commonlie called, the Morals, trans. Philemon Holland (London, 1603), p. 17.

12. The image was extremely common and probably suggested the title of Alexander Ross's Mel Heliconium: or, poeticall honey, gathered out of the weeds of Parnassus. Thefirst book ... containing XLVII fictions, out of which are extracted many historicall, naturall, morall, politicall, and theological observations ... (1642). The applications or morals are called "the mysteries" in this book and "the interpreter" in the later Mystagogus Poeticus (1647).

Critical Inquiry

"Examples Are Best Precepts"

A poem for Plutarch enjoyed no special privileges, nor was it exempt from the most ordinary kind of criticism to which persons are subject in real life. It was an object for a youth to learn upon, to try out his moral

ingenuity and stamina, and if its lessons were not clear then it had to be

pondered until a philosophical conclusion could be reached. "True it is," Plutarch remarked, "that this kinde of Doctrine in Homer is after a sort mute & not delivered in plaine & expresse termes: but if a man will consider more neerely, even those fables and fictions in him, which are most blamed & found fault withall, there may be found therein a

profitable instruction & covert speculation" (p. 25). Criticism was the act of turning mute doctrine into explicit philosophical discourse, and no means were barred which helped to further that end. True reading, as

opposed to fanciful allegorical reading, extracted the moral philosophy that good authors mixed with their fictions, or imported it from outside. Hence they who would be learned philosophers, he said, ought not to condemn poetry "but rather search for Philosophie in the writings of Poets: or rather therein to practise Philosophie, by using to seeke profit in pleasure, and to love the same" (pp. 19-20).

Plutarch's recommendations could hardly be more restrictive in their moral emphasis, although he admitted that some men prefer to cull the flowers of history or dwell upon the beauty and arrangement of words rather than concern themselves with the ideas that strengthen character. Yet the narrowness of his moral approach is balanced by the reader's freedom within the given mode. For example, inquiries into the reasons of speeches and actions will involve inventing reasons when an author has remained silent about them, and a doubtful passage will have to be moralized out of its doubtfulness. Critical rightness depended on at-

tributing a sufficiently moral and plausible explanation to every scene, and if several contradictory explanations could be offered, all of them at least deserved a hearing. Plutarch gives examples of much commentary that we should dismiss as amateur psychologizing or plain guesswork, but as it serves to add to the amount of moral significance in a text it needs no further justification. The seductive forms of poetry enticed a reader to make far-reaching investigations into the moral structures that must underlie them, however deeply they might be hidden. A reader trained in such a school would have developed powers of inference quite as subtle as those of our most ingenious modern critics, but he would have been limited to a single kind of answer.

Plutarch nowhere described exactly what a reader was supposed to do with his ethical material after he had obtained it, because he naturally assumed that the more morals a man had, the better off he would be. The young man's commonplace book would grow fatter, and the ac- cumulation of maxims would stand him in good stead at some future

278 John M. Wallace

Critical Inquiry December 1974 279

time. However, in a crucial section, Plutarch referred to an activity on the part of the reader that occurs chronologically after he has analyzed a text, and as he continues to think about it:

There is besides an amplification of that which we read, whereby a sentence may be stretched farther than the bare words import. And thus Chrysippus hath rightly taught us how to transfer and apply that which was spoken of one onely thing, to many of the like kinde, and so to make a profitable use thereof.... And verily, as physitians finding the vertue and operations of a medicine ap- plyed and fitted to one maladie, by the knowledge thereof can skill how to accommodate the same to all others of the like nature, and use it accordingly; even so, when we meete with a sentence that is common, and whereof the profit may serve to many purposes, we ought not to oversee and neglect the manifold use thereof, and leave it as appropriate to one onely matter: but to handle the same so, that it may be applyed to all of like sort: and herein we must inure and exercise yoong men, to see and know readily this com- munion, and with a quicke conceit to transferre that which they find apt and proper in many, and by examples to be practised and made prompt therein, so as they be able to marke at the first hear- ing the semblable. [P. 45]

Ostensibly Plutarch meant only to suggest that, for example, a generali- zation drawn from a text about the danger of jealousy to the safety of a state could equally well be applied to the dangers of dissension, cruelty, or intolerance, but he implied also that a reader's task was not finished when he had reduced a poem to satisfactory sententiae. A whole train of thought could be initiated by an originally simple observation. Transfer-

ring and applying leaves the door open to all kinds of speculation that will ordinarily follow the first stage of literary analysis. A reader's mind is not turned off once he has seen what an author intended-or has reached a conclusion that an author did not but should have intended; he continues to dwell upon the subject, which may ramify into others, and the greater a reader's involvement in the text, the farther his

thoughts will tend to take him. Since all moral philosophy stands at his shoulder ready to be called upon in the slightest difficulty, there is po- tentially no limit to the number of cross-references that a text can invoke to matters outside itself. When the budding philosopher puts down his poem, his lesson has only begun. It is exactly in this creative or exploratory side of the reader's function, in what is brought to and developed from the poem instead of being merely taken from it, that many of the difficulties lie in reading Renaissance poems. The author who could count on his reader to start "applying" his words could afford to leave many things unsaid, just as Denham never mentioned that Mirza

"Examples Are Best Precepts"

in The Sophy had made a mistake in leaving the court, or that Charles had

idiotically vanished too.

Rhetoric looks very different when seen from Plutarch's rather than Quintilian's perspective. Gone are the infinite number of fine distinc- tions, the paraphernalia about styles, decorums, embellishments, words, proofs, gestures, etc., in which arguments must be embodied. In their

place is the overriding concern to disentangle the ideas from the dress in which the poets had so carefully clothed them. But this was to be ex-

pected. How could a reader, captivated by a good tale and a successful rhetoric, discriminate between good and bad unless he had undone the

poet's work and restored the ideas to their native shape? He could con- tinue to admire the rhetoric (and there is much evidence to show that the

category of readers who "dwel[t] upon the beauty and arrangement of words" was very large), but if he was not to be deceived he must at the same time see through it to the substances beneath. The res had to be detached from the verba, the precept from the example.

Plutarch's preceptual reading is the concomitant of the exemplary nature of historical and fictional compositions. Probably no descriptive term for literature and history was more universal in the Renaissance than "examples," or had a longer history, and the briefest of summaries must serve as a reminder of what "examples" implied. When Aristotle wrote of the proofs common to all branches of rhetoric, he distinguished between the enthymeme and the example and declared that the latter "resembles induction." "Now all orators produce belief by employing as proofs either examples or enthymemes and nothing else." Examples were either historical, "relating things that have happened before," or invented, like Aesop's fables. He explained later that the inventing of fables, like comparisons, would give no trouble to the speaker who knew literature and philosophy, and was often easier than finding suitable historical illustrations. Cicero linked examples more closely to compari- sons (Quintilian was later to identify them both as paradigmata and to break down the distinction almost completely), and he developed the notion of their inductive purpose. Examples to which hearers could give immediate assent were stepping-stones along the road to proving a doubtful proposition. Interestingly enough, in view of the inherent difficulty in reading poetry, he insisted that an interlocutor should not be able to recognize the aim of the first examples (inductiones), or the conclusion to which they led. A series of examples would disguise its purpose so that its latent argument could eventually be revealed with a forceful surprise. The author of Ad Herennium stated that the first use of examples was for clarification, to which he added vividness and the brilliant enhancing of a thought. Examples were like the testimony of a witness which confirmed "what the precept has suggested and only to a

280 John M. Wallace

Critical Inquiry December 1974

slight degree effected"; and, he added, "belief through witnesses is

easy."13

They were these qualities of liveliness, immediacy, and clarity, of course, that the Renaissance most valued whenever it spoke of poetry as

"example." The power of poetry to move its readers depended upon them, and they were the basis of the claim that poetry could teach more

effectively than philosophy. Critics invariably opposed the vitality of

examples to the dryness or hardness of precepts, and as late as the Restoration and the eighteenth century they "unanimously assume[d] that sensuously immediate and concentrated language is more suitable for communicating moral knowledge than flat and colorless language." "No kinde of argument in all the Oratorie craft," said Puttenham, "doth better perswade and more universally satisfie then example." Since the

publication of Mr. William Youngren's brilliant article in 1968,14 from which I have been quoting, one need not belabor the point, but it is

necessary to emphasize even more strongly than he does that examples were examples of something, and that if they were witnesses they had to

testify to a general or moral truth. Because they were speaking pictures they uttered precepts in pictorial form, or, as Sidney put it, the poet framed his example "to that which is most reasonable."'5 The drawing of

"necessary consequence" and "fruitfull doctrine" out of poetry presup- posed that they were everywhere implicit in the work, although the force of examples was such that they could sometimes operate with an instan- taneous persuasiveness that left no time for reflection.

Sidney and his contemporaries knew their oratorical theory by heart, but they were no less familiar with Plutarch. The pages of the standard collection of Elizabethan critical essays are scattered with echoes of his work, and Sidney in the Defence refers to the essay on reading poetry and cites Plutarch frequently. Plutarch also stood behind the celebrated statement that a poem was "an imaginative ground-plot of a profitable invention" (p. 124) because in his essay on listening to lectures he had asserted that "the minde and understanding of man is not of the nature of a vessell that requireth to be filled up: but it hath neede onely of some match (if I may so say) to kindle and set it on fire ... which may ingender in it a certaine inventive motion, and an affection to finde out the truth."'6 Instead of sitting at a lecture (or reading a poem) like a person

13. References for this paragraph are taken from the Loeb Library editions. Aristotle Rhetoric 1. 2. 8-9 and 2. 20. 1-9; CiceroDe Inventione 1. 30. 49 and 1. 32. 53-54; Quintilian Institutio Oratoria 5. 11. Iff., Ad Herennium 4. 1-7. 10, esp. 4. 1. 2 and 4. 3. 5.

14. "Generality, Science and Poetic Language in the Restoration," ELH 35 (1968): 158-87.

15. Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry or The Defence of Poetry, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd (London, 1965), p. 110.

16. Plutarch's Philosophie, trans. Holland, p. 63.

281

282 John M. Wallace "Examples Are Best Precepts"

warming himself at another man's fire, the attender to a discourse should "think it necessary to kindle from it some illumination for himself and some thinking of his own."17 The "profitable invention" was the reader's, who used a text as a place in which to discover his own mean-

ings as well as the author's. Poetry, like history, ministered matter to learn upon according to the way a man is affectioned, to use Grynaeus' terms, and the difficulties a reader encountered could be pleasant "to whosoever by labouring about it, findes out the true meaning; for then he counts it an issue of his own braine, and taking occasion from those sentences, to goe further then the thing he reads, and that without being deceived, he takes the like pleasure as men are wont to take from hearing metaphors, finding the meaning of him that useth them."18 A reader

delights in an author's cunning "because by it he discovers his owne." The

poet who coupled the general notion, that is, the moral truth, with the

particular example created a perfect picture that "yieldeth to the powers of the mind an image of that whereof the philosopher bestoweth but a wordish description" (p. 107), and it was every reader's task to exercise those powers in a dissection of the text and a reconstruction of its moral

implications. The philosopher's precepts alone, although they could re-

plenish the memory with infallible grounds of wisdom, "lie dark before the imaginative and judging power" (p. 107) unless figured forth by poetry.

Throughout the Defence Sidney linked the teaching and moving qual- ities of poetry as if they were almost but not quite the same; that poetry moved made it a better teacher than philosophy, but their lessons were identical, and one can see the "imaginative and judging power" as a reflection of poetry's dual role in the mind of the reader. Insofar as his

imagination was fired he was moved instantly toward virtue, but to the extent that he judged he was led to consider more rationally the truths that had affected him. Poetry moved men by its delightfulness but

taught them by "mak[ing] them know that goodness whereunto they are moved" (p. 103). Any attempt to isolate what it was that had moved a reader could not avoid coming up with a moral-philosophical answer. If

poetry was no less philosophical than philosophy itself, then it was im-

possible to say what a poem was an example of, or indeed to discuss its content at all, without falling back on an ethical terminology. On the other hand, if examples were better teachers than philosophy, they

17. Plutarch's Moralia, trans. Frank Cole Babbitt, Loeb Classical Library (London, 1927), 1:259.

18. I have used this and the following quotation from Virgilio Malvezzi's preface to Discourses upon Cornelius Tacitus in an earlier essay, "Dryden and History: A Problem in

Allegorical Reading," ELH 36 (1969): 270, 272. James Howell justified using hieroglyphics, allegories, and emblems in his Dodona's Grove (preface to pt. 2, 1650 ed.) because it is more

"pleasant and precious" if a reader has to re-read and "scratch his head, or bite his lips peradventure."

Critical Inquiry December 1974

could not resemble it or they would lose their status as examples. A

string of precepts in verse would not qualify as poetry at all, although a

string of poetical examples could be expected to exemplify many pre- cepts. The extent to which a poet stooped to truth and moralized his

song depended not only on his sense of how many dicta would com- promise his example but on his faith in his readers to do his moralizing for him. It is my impression that after Sidney's splendid Defence the number of overtly and tediously moralized histories drops off markedly.

Sidney practised what he preached, and the Defence begins with his own reading of an example. From the anecdote about Pugliano a variety of inferences could have been drawn. Had his speeches been successful he would have persuaded Sidney of the precept that "no earthly thing bred such wonder to a prince as to be a good horseman," but in fact Sidney reached the quite different conclusion "that self-love is better than any gilding to make that seem gorgeous wherein ourselves are parties." If we wished we could learn another lesson from Sidney's ex- perience and say that had Pugliano contented himself with "the dem- onstration of his practice"-his example-and omitted his "contempla- tions" of the art of horsemanship, his advocacy would have been more effective; and from thence we could confirm the commonplace that actions speak louder than words, or that a fulsome rhetoric can undo a good cause, or that Italians are better riders than pleaders. A rich and well-told example is an open book from which meanings exfoliate, al- though in this case Sidney selected the implication that would confirm his ethical proof. When he considered Virgil's eclogues later in the Defence he summarized their content as "the misery of people under hard lords and ravening soldiers," or "what blessedness is derived to them that lie lowest from the goodness of them that sit highest"; or again, "contention for trifles can get but a trifling victory" (p. 116). Since Fulke Greville remarked that Sidney in his own fictions had intended "to turn the barren Philosophy precepts into pregnant Images of life,"19 we deduce that as a reader his purpose was to turn the pregnant images back into philosophy again-but not barrenly, however, as he would have been at first moved by the image and then instructed by the exer- cise of describing it. Uttering a preceptual statement about a poem has the instant appearance of limiting the poem's significance, often in ways we should find unacceptable, just as Sidney's observations about the eclogues can raise the objection that Virgil's intentions must have been far more complicated than Sidney suggests and that, in any case, only a small part of the moral content of the poems is covered by his formula- tions. Sidney would have agreed, I think, because his argument never committed him to the practice of stating once for all what a poem was

19. Quoted by Youngren, p. 184.

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"Examples Are Best Precepts"

"about," but, on the contrary, it encouraged the maximum activity for the reader's invention. Each generalization is narrowing, but when they are multiplied our sense of a poem's richness, of its endless capacity to stimulate thought, can only be enhanced.

Addressing herself recently to a related problem about the Renais- sance view of form, Marion Trousdale has argued that the Elizabethans, and the humanists before them, did not think of structure-that is, the

ordering of a sequence of events or acts-as determining the meaning of ideas within a work, but asked instead how the commonplaces could be drawn from the tale. In some well-chosen illustrations from the De Copia she shows how Erasmus could moralize the death of Socrates a dozen

ways: the precepts pour out of the tale as if shaken from a cruet, and Trousdale concludes that "when from one story many truths can be drawn, not as different levels of one meaning but as accumulated store, there is a different sense of meaning [from our own] and a different value placed on form." The truths may appear contradictory, "but they are not contradictory to Erasmus ... for the truths are not defined by the

story, nor are they created by it. They precede it and supersede it as part of a common store. To such truths, story is not master but slave."20 In one sense her analysis is correct, and the rhetorical tradition, as well as statements like Dryden's that he had hidden a moral under every charac- ter in Don Sebastian,2 confirm the hypothesis that arguments or precepts must generally precede the images in which they are embodied, and can be detached from them; but is it not also true that both poems and histories generate precepts that may occasionally be quite original, and that they burnish others until they gleam like new? Machiavelli startled the world with the precepts he found in Livy, and there were many more maxims and saws around at the end of the seventeenth century than even Plato and Aristotle had heard of. The Plutarchan reader did not

merely copy the philosopher but practised philosophy on his own ac- count. Let us assume that there existed a political commonplace to the effect that it was unwise for a prince to leave his capital after a great victory, or to absent himself from the seat of government when the senate was too powerful; however Denham's reader formulated the

message to himself, it would probably have struck him as a discovery that had an instant bearing on his country's predicament. The maxim joins the common store, to use Trousdale's terms, and may proceed from it, but the historical source, the play itself, and the historical situation which

20. Trousdale, "A Possible Renaissance View of Form," ELH 40 (1973): 202. Compare one of Erasmus' contemporaries, Giovanni Britannico da Brescia, quoted in Bernard

Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance (Chicago, 1961), p. 93: "For

every poem consists of words and things. The things are these same moral precepts, and the words are the diction itself."

21. Dedication to Don Sebastian, in Works, ed. Sir Walter Scott (London, 1821), 7:300.

284 John M. Wallace

December 1974 285

caused the precept to be revived all serve to give it a dramatic immediacy that amounts, very nearly, to "creating" or "defining" it. The good ex-

ample is also more full of possible meanings than an author may have intended, and Ben Jonson was furious with his readers for inventing ideas and connections that had never occurred to him. He thundered

against the "inuading interpreters" of his plays that "Application, is now, growne a trade with many; and there are [those] that professe to haue a

key for the decyphering of euery thing";22 but he could no more stop application than he could stop reading, although he was entitled to the opinion that the inferences from his works had been misunderstood and

misapplied to contemporary events.

The key, if there is one, for the deciphering of everything-or at least the key to the topical and political "relevance" of much seventeenth- century literature-lies in the axiomatic or preceptual middle between the particulars of poetry and the particulars of contemporary history. As Bacon said,

knowledge drawn freshly and in our view out of particulars knows best the way back to particulars again; and it contributes much more to practice, when the discourse or discussion attends on the example, than when the example attends upon the discourse. And this is not only a point of order, but of substance also. For when the example is laid down as the ground of the discourse, it is set down with all the attendant circumstances, which may sometimes correct the discourse thereupon made, and sometimes supply it, as a very pattern for imitation and practice; whereas examples alleged for the sake of the discourse, are cited succinctly and without particu- larity, and like slaves only wait upon the demands of the discourse.23

Bacon was praising Machiavelli's "Discourse upon Histories and Exam- ples" because his generalized observations did not flatten out the com- plexities of the history from which they were drawn and could therefore be expected to speak with both subtlety and accuracy to the complexities of contemporary history. In former days fables were "substitutes and supplements of examples," and it was the wisdom of the ancients "that as men found out any observation which they thought good for life, they would gather it and express it in some short proverb, parable, or fable." The same principles that governed discourses upon examples governed feigned examples, as Sidney knew when he wrote his fictions, although it was his opinion that the superiority of poetry rested on the attendance of

22. Preface to Volpone, in Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy Simpson (Oxford, 1925-52), 5:18-19. The same preface adds ". . . and last the doctrine, which is the prin- cipall end ofpoesie, to informe men, in the best reason of liuing."

23. Works, 5:56 (see n. 10 above). Following quotation is from the same page.

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286 John M. Wallace "Examples Are Best Precepts"

the example to the discourse. The richer the fable in its wealth of par- ticulars, the better the observations must be that are drawn from it and the more relevant to the present will they be likely to appear. The author who invented a fable knew that his work would be preceptualized and discoursed upon, and it was his rhetorical responsibility to make his

example as vivid and varied as he could. Unless he was writing a parallel like Absalom and Achitophel or a claptrap allegory like Howell's Dodona's Grove with its one-to-one applications, he would understand that his fiction should contain general truths rather than specific references to individual persons and events in his own times. If he wished to moralize about contemporary affairs and yet to write a piece of literature that would be as permanent and universal as a good fable should be, he would first be obliged to generalize topical history; that is, to see in the local incidents the general rules that they typified. Then he had to find his fable, usually in history books, although no source was barred and a

pure invention was quite permissible; and finally-the true test of his art-he must work up his fable with all the expertise at his command. The reader, but only if he wished, would reverse the process, going from

particulars to generals to particulars again. If the generals were valid, then the work would speak to all ages, regardless of the fact that they may have been prompted by the author's thoughts upon particular events. One can see now what John Tatham was doing in The Distracted State, which he wrote in 1650 and claimed on the title page that he had written in 1641. He wished to satirize the Engagers who were arguing for

compliance to a usurping government, and he perceived that their opin- ions could be used to justify a quick succession of usurpers, each invok-

ing providential reasons for his victory. Drawing his fable from Neapoli- tan history, where the recent rebellion of Masaniello gave it an added

point, he confounded the Engagement arguments with a reductio ad absurdum. He ignored the circumstances in England in 1650, realized a

general truth about the nature of providential justifications, and dramatized it in a foreign setting.24

Within the limits set by his increasing royalism and his growing detes- tation of the war party in the House of Commons, Denham also tried to be objective about the breakdown of the constitution. It was not entirely the fault of one side, as the details of his play exposed. Not only did he distribute features of Charles I into both the good prince and the tyran- nical emperor, but in his two most passionate speeches (famous enough to have been reprinted separately in the eighteenth century) he ex- coriated the bishops for loosing the king's conscience from the law, and

24. See my "The Case for Internal Evidence (10): The Date of John Tatham's The Distracted State," Bulletin of the New York Public Library 64 (1960): 29-40.

December 1974 287

the Puritans for the excesses of their religious enthusiasm.25 The

speeches present no difficulties, although it is odd that Denham has never been given enough credit for seeing both sides of the religious questions. But what is one to make of the most puzzling and dramatic scene in the play: Mirza's long struggle with his conscience over the

temptation to murder his daughter, and thus to revenge himself on his father, whose favorite she is? In Denham's literary source the murder

actually occurred, but Denham probably did not wish to compromise Mirza's high reputation so completely. Charles positively never con- ceived such an atrocity, so the scene cannot be simply a transposition of events from London to Persia. If we moralize the episode, however, we have several alternatives, such as "a good prince under great pressure can contemplate a wicked act of unnatural violence," or "kings who have

just cause to wish revenge may conceivably commit acts of criminal

folly," or once more, "unnatural wrongs and passions breed similar

thoughts in good princes," or "even a king whose chief fault is that he is too virtuous (one of the terms most frequently applied to Mirza) can out of insane jealousy commit violence." All of these are possible and non- exclusive "meanings" that the scene contains, and it hardly matters ex-

actly how the reader articulates them to himself, because a reader in 1642 would have leaped with one movement of the mind to the recollec- tion that Charles, driven by fears and jealousies of his own, besides those of his counselors, had committed an act of violence that even his closest friends admitted was a tragic mistake. By his Attempt on the Five Mem- bers on January 4, 1642, he lost the sympathy of most of the country overnight, never to regain it sufficiently thereafter.

It was highly fitting that after his reconciliatory and georgic poem in the autumn of 1641 Denham should have shifted to the tragic mode as the onset of civil war became inescapable; but granted, for the sake of

argument, that Denham had written his play before the Attempt on the Five Members, the applicability of his general truth would have confirmed the brilliance of his insight into the laws of government. His-

tory would continue to confirm its validity whenever political pressure caused rulers to commit rash deeds, and in a merely technical sense Denham achieved a timeless work of art. The ingredients of all civil wars are in The Sophy, superficially disguised, but revealed at the moment when the reader exercises his philosophic capacities and applies his dis-

25. Banks ed. (n. 1 above), pp. 270-71. The accusations in the second speech especially are more strongly reminiscent of the events in 1642 than in 1641. Denham's view of the

relationship between the constitutional and religious issues in 1642 is probably to be heard in Morat's conclusion: "Thus whether Kings or people seek extreams, / Still conscience and

religion are their Theams: / And whatsoever change the State invades, / The pulpit either forces or perswades. / Others may give the fewel, or the fire; / But they the breath, that makes the flame, inspire."

Critical Inquiry

"Examples Are Best Precepts"

coveries to the times. Denham may also have intended further reflections to be made when he caused the overvirtuous prince to be blinded by the arbitrary monarch, as if one aspect of Charles's nature deceived the other, but the evidence of the play is inconclusive.26 Den- ham might have accepted the interpretation, although he would have been very angry indeed if an invading interpreter with the key to every- thing had suggested that the young Sophy's succession at the end of the

play meant that the outbreak of war could be averted only by the death of the king and the crowning of his heir. No doubt his inveterate enemy George Wither could have believed such a meaning to be intended. It is an arbitrary choice, I believe, whether we classify the play as an allegory or not. Historians rarely allegorized history, on which playwrights gen- erally based their plays, and The Sophy works well as a deliberately chosen historical example, quite different from the present but related to it by application. Denham's first readers, however, were probably happy enough to call it an allegory, on the grounds that one thing was said and another meant. To readers in later years who had forgotten all about the

Attempt on the Five Members, Mirza's projected crime would continue to exemplify a general truth, but in 1642 the topical inferences would have made the whole play appear allegorical. Poets had the advantage over the historians in that they could allegorize history in the same way that they allegorized myths.

Given the pliant stuff of fable, when poems and plays and histories resound with meanings, when good authors cover their tracks, and when all excellent examples can be moralized until one's head swims; when it is not infrequent for some passages to be merely digressive, and others (but not all) to be topically applicable, it is a presumptuous critic who will assert that he has found the true reading, or who will not concede that he has probably been overingenious in some readings and missed the

point completely elsewhere. A reader there has to be, however, if the

latency of Renaissance poems is to be realized. Thus far we must agree with Stanley Fish, the new imperialist of seventeenth-century readers. Without the reader the general truth lies buried in delightful rhetoric of no necessary consequence except to those who study the beauty and arrangement of words. Only a reader can see, for example, that the fate of Anne Killigrew in Dryden's ode is likely to be the fate of James II if the

military ambition of the monarch is not moderated. Although Dryden "refers" to Anne's belligerence and "alludes" to James's love of conquest-and those are the words we always used in the days when

26. However, the evil emperor himself makes the punishment symbolic: "Since blinded with ambition, he did soar / Like a seel'd Dove; his crime shall be his punishment / To be

depriv'd of sight" (p. 265). Denham's criticism of the vacillations of the royal policy found its most succinct expression in the precept he added to Coopers Hill in 1655 (lines 299-300): "uncertain waies unsafest are, / And Doubt a greater mischief than Despair."

288 John M. Wallace

December 1974 289

emphasis was on the work rather than the reader-he neither refers nor alludes to the connection that the reader is supposed to make between them, nor to the train of thought about England's proper place outside the European community which will inevitably follow once the implica- tions have been recognized. The principal meanings of the ode are

closely attached to the idea that it is the fate of all warlike minds to be wrecked at home-an ancient precept if ever there was one-but the

applications of the meaning that Dryden, in my opinion, unquestionably intended are left to the reader's inference, and we cannot prove empiri- cally that he intended them. Nor do the political implications exhaust the other meanings, one of which is a straightforward eulogy of Anne's

genuine virtues. The example of Anne's life contained as many precepts as Dryden chose to find in it, and as many as the reader chooses to find in the ode.

It is surely impossible to recapture fully what could be called "a

seventeenth-century way of reading." Readers have always varied, and

only sometimes do we catch glimpses of how a single poem was read by an individual person. It would not be desirable, either, to restrict our own readings only to those which approximate most closely to an histori- cal model that could itself never be more than tentative. Yet a model would still be useful if it enabled us to recapture some of the implications that works probably had for their authors and some of their readers. We need to cultivate the kind of awareness exhibited by a listener to the

Bishop of London at St. Paul's Cross in 1620, when the attack on the Palatinate was pending. The bishop had been forbidden to touch on

politics, and ostensibly sought to raise money for the repair of St. Paul's, but

as he spoke of the necessity of prayer and action on behalf of the spiritual Zion, and exhorted his hearers to nourish the truth of the Gospel in every place, there were probably many present who would have responded to the words with which one of the bystand- ers recorded his impressions. "The Bishop," he wrote, "said that there was not the poorest hewer of wood who would not give one penny out of twopence to build up the walls of Zion. He did not, he durst not apply it; but gave every man liberty to make the applica- tion; but I believe his heart was then in Bohemia."27

Geoffrey Bullough has recently suggested that Donne employed the same obliquity while preaching at Whitehall on the eve of the fall of Francis Bacon, who was the exact but unmentioned example of Donne's

27. S. R. Gardiner, History of England, 1603-1642 (London, 1896-1901), 3:342; also

quoted by Helen Gardner in her edition of Donne's Divine Poems (Oxford, 1952), pp. 124-25. I owe both references to Mr. James Feldstein.

Critical Inquiry

"Examples Are Best Precepts"

theme.28 Puritan sermons habitually concluded with the "application" or "uses" of doctrine, although they too could leave work for the

congregation's imagination and reflection. Poetry was more systemati- cally indirect, but its interpretation was basically similar. No

seventeenth-century reader, however, would have understood Stanley Fish when he identifies the meaning of a poem solely with the reader's

experiencing it; nor would he have comprehended an interpretative method that "refuses to answer or even ask the question, what is this work about."29 That was the very question that would probably have first come to his mind, and the second would have been, "how can the moral be applied?" Works of literature, whether Fish likes it or not, were recep- tacles of moral truth and "repositories of properties and meanings," but this did not signify that they were all "self-satisfying" or that the reader was excused from doing his part. Not guilty readers, but highly moral, awakened and experienced readers were required, trained in the kind of "pleasant talkes" that Roger Ascham said he had had with Cheke and Watson, which they spent "in comparing the preceptes of Aristotle and Horace de Arte Poetica, with the examples of Euripedes, Sophocles, and Seneca."30 Any intelligent reader can hope to arrive at the general mean-

ing of a Renaissance poem, but only an historical criticism has any chance of reconstructing its original applications, including those that

figured among the author's intentions. And we should all take heed of the concluding precept in a poem entitled "Fair Warning":

In Afsop's new-made World of Wit, Where Beasts could talk, and read, and write, And say and do as he saw fit;

A certain Fellow thought himself abus'd, And represented by an Ass;

And AEsop to the Judge accus'd That he defamed was.

Friend, quoth the Judge, how do you know Whether you are defam'd or no?

How can you prove that he must mean, You, rather than another Man?

Sir, quoth the Man, it needs must be, All Circumstances so agree, And all the Neighbours say 'tis Me.

That's somewhat quoth the Judge, indeed; But let this Matter pass,

Since 'twas notAEsop, 'tis agreed, But Application made the Ass. 3

28. "Donne the Man of Law," inJust So Much Honor, ed. Peter Amadeus Fiore (Univer- sity Park, Pa., 1972), pp. 90-93.

29. Stanley E. Fish, Self-consumingArtifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1972), p. 399.

30. Roger Ascham, English Works, ed. William Aldis Wright (Cambridge, 1904), p. 284. 31. Poems on Affairs of State, vol. 2, The Second Edition (London, 1716), pp. 48-49. Mr.

James Keough called the poem to my attention.

290 John M. Wallace