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school-he was aware that this included Bossuet-that the century produced; " and Malebranche proposed to correct the too-imaginative prose of the age of Montaigne and Bacon by applying to it its own rationalistic criticism with a rigor that Montaigne and Bacon never dreamed of."

In short, though this was the period when the Isocratean model was revived by Bossuet, the critics were all on the side of the severer style, and most of them were either hostile or indifferent to oratory in all its forms. The doctrine of the genus humile was taught everywhere.

Up to this point we have not mentioned the word Attic, which is the object of the discussion. We have considered only the two great modes of style, the grand and the familiar, and the relation of the ancient rivalry between them to the theory of modern AntiCiceronianism. This, however, is the proper approach to our subject. For in the controversies of the Anti-Ciceronians "Attic style" means to all intents and purposes the genus humile or subtile, "Asiatic" describes the florid, oratorical style of Cicero's early orations or any style ancient or modern distinguished by the same copious periodic form and the Gorgianic figures that attend upon it. 'Attic' is always associated with philosophy and the ars bene vivendi, ‘Asiatic' with the cultus of conventional oratory. This is not the usual modern method of relating the two terms. Probably the fault now most commonly associated with Asianism is one to which the Anti-Ciceronians of the seventeenth century were themselves peculiarly liable when they used the characteristic forms of their art for oratorical purposes. We think of the tumor, the exaggerated emphasis, the monstrous abuse of metaphor in the preaching of the first half of the century in all the European countries; or of qualities dangerously related to these in the non-oratorical prose writings of Donne, Gracian, Malvezzi, and other masters of the 'conceit'; or even of tendencies of the same kind that we may observe in writers so normal as Lipsius,

See a passage near the beginning of the first dialogue, and a more interesting one near the end of the second, in which Fénelon seems to apprehend not only the connection between Bossuet and Isocrates, but the Isocratean character of medieval Latin preaching-style.

"See the passages of La Recherche de la Véritié cited on a later page (p. 127, n. 64).

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Bacon, Balzac, and Browne. There is a kind of Asianism, in short, that arises from a constant effort to speak with point and significance, as well as from an excessive use of the ornate figures of sound, from too much love of expressiveness as well as from the cult of form; and inasmuch as this vice was more familiar to the reformers at the end of the century than the other, and was the one that was in immediate need of correction at that time, it has taken its place in our traditions as typical Asianism. But the Anti-Ciceronians were not aware that they were falling into error through an excess of their own qualities; they called themselves "Attic" because they avoided certain traits of style which they disliked, and did not observe that they sometimes ceased to be Attic through avoiding and disliking them too much. It is true therefore that their use of the terms was a one-sided and inadequate interpretation of their meaning in ancient criticism.2 But on the other hand, it is fair to remark that so is the present use, and indeed that the seventeenth century was far more nearly in accord with the ancient ideas of the character of Attic prose than we are. Through the influence of eighteenth-century tastes we have come to associate it with the laws, of taste and good form imposed by a slightly frivolous, or at least not very intellectual, social custom; and have lost sight of the facty that it had its original in philosophy rather than in the manners of "the world," and preserved its philosophical associations in antiquity through all its transmutations. This fact the AntiCiceronians of the seventeenth century never forgot. It was the basis of their distinction between Attic and Asian prose.

23

The evidence on this point is clear and decisive, and begins with the earliest phases of the sixteenth-century Ciceronian controversy. Erasmus, however, is the only witness that we shall need to cite from the first period. Throughout the Ciceronianus 'Attic' denotes opposition to the copiousness of Cicero, and fondness for a scientific

"In antiquity, however, there was much the same variation of usage as that described in the text. The opponents of Cicero always tended to identify Asianism with the oratorical cultus, just as the modern AntiCiceronians did; but of course the prevalent doctrine was that there are two ways of becoming Asian: aut nimio cultu aut nimio tumore; either by studying too zealously the orationis cultus (as Bembo, Lyly, and many -sixteenth-century writers did) or by exaggerating the sententiarum ve nustas (as Montaigne, Lipsius, Browne did in the seventeenth century). See Hendrickson, XXVI, p. 287, where the appropriate passages from Diomedes, Cicero, and St. Augustine are cited.

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or philosophical brevity, marked by the same tendency toward ingenuity and point which accompanied the genus humile in ancient times. Speaking of the humanist Lazare de Baïf, one of the interlocutors says: "He prefers to be pointed [argutus], it seems, Attic rather than Ciceronian.” 24 William Grocyn "was always inclined to the epistolary pointedness, loving laconism and appropriateness of style; " in this genre certainly one would call him nothing but Attic; indeed he aimed at nothing else, and when he read any writings of Cicero would say that he could not endure his fulness of expression."" Linacre, again, surpasses an Attic in the repression of his feelings.. ; he has studied to be unlike Cicero." 27 Scaliger, answering Erasmus, bullies and berates <him for calling Cicero "redundant and Asiatic." 28 Improperly of course; for Erasmus is using these opprobrious words only in echoing Cicero's own criticism of his earlier orations, and is careful to point out the variety of styles in his works. Still Cicero is prevailingly a copious and ornate orator. Controversy is never nice and discriminating; and Cicero continues Asian' to the end of Anti-Ciceronian history. Lipsius, for example, writes in 1586; "I love Cicero; I even used to imitate him; but I have become man, and my tastes have changed. Asiatic feasts have ceased to please me; I prefer the Attic."

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Attic,' however, by this time was beginning to be more fully defined, and all its ancient associations re-awakened in defense of it. Erik van der Putten (or Puteanus), evidently a follower of Lipsius, publishes a rhetoric of Laconism,' in which he marshals an array of "brief" ancient writers, Thucydides, Cato, Tacitus, especially, who are properly called Attics, he says, because they are so reticent, so incisive, so significant. But this term is inadequate to express their true glory; they may better, he thinks, be

"Opera Omnia, Leyden 1703-1710, vol. 1, col. 1012A.

* Proprietatem sermonis: on the technical meaning of this term in the theory of the genus humile see below, pp. 114-117.

"Col. 1012 E.

"Ib., ib. In Column 989 F, paraphrasing Horace's description of the brief style that tends to obscurity, he calls it Atticism, though Horace has nothing to suggest this.

Pro M. T. Cicerone, Paris 1531, section 68 and elsewhere. "Epp. Misc., 11, 10.

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called the Spartans. Later Balzac in the Preface to his Socrate Chretien (1652), makes the same distinction. "Que si nostre zele ne peut s'arrester dans nostre coeur: Qu'il en sorte a la bonne heure! Mais qu'il se retranche dans le stile de Lacedemone: Pour le moins dans l'Atticisme: Au pis aller, quil ne deborde pas par ces Harangues Asiatiques, ou il faut prendre trois fois haleine pour arriver a la fin d'une periode." Further on he is more exact, and speaks of the "Attiques de Rome, qui contrefaisoient Brutus, et n'imitèrent pas Ciceron," meaning Seneca and his school.

Great progress in critical discrimination and historical knowledge has evidently been made since the sixteenth century. This progress continues in a later generation; and the clearest witness of all is Père Bonhours. He has the prose ofthe century in perspective: its faults and dangers are vividly before his mind, and he sees that they are immediately connected with the imitation of the ancient models of the acute and subtle genus humile, Tacitus, Lucan, Seneca: yet, he says, I am still an Attic in my tastes; and what he means by that is exactly shown in a passage from an earlier work," every sentence of which is important for our purpose. He is speaking of the French language, and says that what he admires most in it is "that it is clear without being too diffuse (étendue). (There is perhaps nothing that is less to my taste than the Asiatic style.) It takes pleasure in conveying a great deal of meaning in a few words. Brevity is pleasing to it, and it is for this reason that it cannot endure periods that are too long, epithets that are not necessary, pure synonyms that add nothing to the meaning, and serve only to fill out the cadence (nombre). . . . The first care of our language is to content the mind (esprit) and not to tickle the ear. It has more regard to good sense than to beautiful cadence. I tell you once again, nothing is more natural to it than a reason

"De Laconismo, Louvain 1609. Van der Putten was Lipsius' successor in the chair of rhetoric at Louvain, and was one of those disciples of his who caused his contemporaries to speak of him in the terms that Quintilian used of Seneca, as "the man upon whose faults a sect was founded.” Ideas adapt themselves to the size of the minds they find a lodging in, and it is not Lipsius' fault altogether that concettismo of one kind or another makes its appearance so soon in the style of his followers. Van der Putten thinks (p. 78-9) that there is too much copia in Demosthenes and the other Attic orators!

* Entretiens d'Ariste et d'Eugène, 1671.

able brevity." The form of the opposition between Attic' and 'Asian' in the seventeenth-century mind is more exactly expressed in the various phrases and turns of this passage than in any other that we shall be likely to find.

IV

The aim of the literary historian is the utmost simplification that is consistent with the actual variety of the facts he deals with; and in the preceding pages we have been trying to make our generalization broad enough to include all the significant facts of seventeenth-century prose-style. But on the other hand, the uniformity of any large set of phenomena is only interesting in relation with their diversity. The genus humile had a history in antiquity running through seven or eight centuries, and during that period developed various phases of theory and various forms of style, most of which were known to the leaders of Anti-Ciceronianism and played their different parts in the drama of rhetorical controversy in the seventeenth century. To distinguish these phases, and the character and extent of the influence that each of them had in the period we are studying, is no less important than to observe the general tendency that is common to them all; and this will be the purpose of all the rest of our discussion.

The earlier Greek phases of this history-the only ones that we have considered up to this point-were of minor importance in determining the actual forms that prose-style took in the seventeenth century; and if we only wanted to know what models it could imitate we might confine our attention to the Stoic school of rhetoric that triumphed over Ciceronian oratory in the first century of the Roman Empire. But, on the other hand, the critics whose business it was to defend and explain it were well acquainted with its purer sources in the classical period of Greek culture; and they very often, one might say usually, defended or concealed their real use of the inferior "Atticism" of Seneca and Tacitus by claiming the sanction of greater names than these. Unless we can interpret the disingenuousness of men laboring under the imputation of literary heresy we shall constantly be puzzled in reading their manifestoes. Three names associated with three phases of the history of genus humile in the classical Greek period occur with some frequency in their writings, those of Plato

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