SOURCE: "Sidney's Feigned Apology," in Renaissance Minds and Their Fictions: Cusanus, Sidney, Shakespeare, University of California Press, 1985, pp. 134-56.

Any attempt to discuss Sidney's theory of poetic fictions proves to be something of a paradox, since An Apology for Poetry opens with a warning not to take theories too seriously. There Sidney compares himself to his master in horsemanship, John Pietro Pugliano, who, not content to teach his young students the practical side of his profession, "sought to enrich [their] minds with the contemplations therein." So mighty does his art appear, thanks to the light of self-love, that "if I had not been a piece of a logician before I came to him, I think he would have persuaded me to have wished myself a horse" (p. 95).¹ Following his master, Sidney opens with a theoretical justification of his own vocation, poetry, but with such a precedent, the reader may wonder if Sidney will persuade him to wish himself a poem (which is, in fact, where Sidney's Astrophil ends up in Sonnet 45 of Astrophil and Stella).

The paradoxical opening of the Apology sets the tone for the rest of the work, which is filled with contradictions and shifts of emphasis. Its studied carelessness and playfulness are in marked contrast to the intense engagement of a Minturno or a Tasso, yet it is through these gestures that Sidney makes his most suggestive critical probings. What those probings reveal can be maddeningly elusive. Readers have often mistaken his intellectual affinities because of the oblique and self-conscious way in which he echoes traditional philosophical and critical attitudes, or have felt compelled to sketch in the lines of coherence they assume must underlie the argument. The result has been a series of alternative maps to Sidney's many fascinations: the nature of poetic invention and imitation, of moving through delight, of the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate fictions. These issues were indeed important to Sidney and became increasingly so over the short course of his poetic career. A closer look at his performances both here and in his other major works, however, reveals no single theoretical affinity or formulation, but rather an effort to come to terms with the deepest tensions of Renaissance poetics, as well as Sidney's kinship with the most penetrating and original thought of his time.

The Fore-Conceit

Sidney's purpose seems familiar enough: to justify poetic fictions against the charge that they are unreal and irresponsible fantasies. For the sake of clarity, I begin by dividing my examination into two parts, following the line drawn by Sidney's own argument:

Any understanding knoweth the skill of the artificer standeth in that Idea or fore-conceit of the work, and not in the work itself. And that the poet hath that Idea is manifest, by delivering them forth in such excellency as he hath imagined them. Which delivering forth also is not wholly imaginative, as we are wont to say by them that build castles in the air; but so far substantially it worketh, not only to make a Cyrus, which had been but a particular excellency as Nature might have done, but to bestow a Cyrus upon the world to make many Cyruses, if they will learn aright why and how that maker made him. (p. 101)

What is striking about this defense of poetic invention is that Sidney seeks to justify poetry by turning toward the two extremes it mediates, first to its source in the poet's "Idea" and then to the moral effect it has on the reader's world; it becomes a conduit of the ideal into the actual. To understand how Sidney puts his argument together, we must take a closer look at these two extremes and their relations.

First, what is the Idea, or "fore-conceit"? Modern critics often point to it as an example of Renaissance Neoplatonism and/or Augustinianism. Sidney's poet sets his mind on the Ideas beyond phenomenal appearance; the consequent poetic image "proliferates meanings which the discursive reason cannot hope to encompass."² The Apology does entertain echoes of Neoplatonism, or at least the claims Neoplatonism had made possible. After reviewing the arts of man and deciding that all follow the "works of nature" as their object, Sidney follows Landino and Scaliger in setting the poet apart as a free creator:

Only the poet, disdaining to be tied to any such subjection, lifted up with the vigour of his own invention, doth grow in effect into another nature, in making things either better than Nature bringeth forth, or, quite anew, forms such as never were in Nature, as the Heroes, Demigods, Cyclops, Chimeras, Furies, and such like: so as he goeth hand in hand with Nature, not enclosed within the narrow warrant of her gifts, but freely ranging only within the zodiac of his own wit.

Nature never set forth the earth in so rich tapestry as divers poets have done; neither with pleasant rivers, fruitful sweet-smelling flowers, nor whatsoever else may make the too much loved earth more lovely. Her world is brazen, the poets only deliver a golden, (p. 100)

The motive for connecting this golden world to Platonic Ideas, or to Augustinian illumination that grants "an apprehension of the reality of things," is succinctly stated by Panofsky in his discussion of the sixteenth-century revival of Neoplatonism:

The Idea was reinvested with its apriori and metaphysical character … the autocratic human mind, now conscious of its own spontaneity, believed that it could maintain this spontaneity in the face of sensory experience only by legitimizing the former sub specie divinitalis; the dignity of genius, now explicitly recognized and emphasized is justified by its origin in God.³

Italian critics, as we have seen, often turned to such justifications, and Sidney seems to need them as well. Like the Neoplatonists before him, he praises the poet as a creator "freely ranging only within the zodiac of his own wit," independent of nature and of any given subject matter. The poet does not derive "conceit out of a matter, but maketh matter for a conceit" (p. 120). In the Apology, however, Sidney tends to regard the protection the Platonic-Augustinian argument would afford as part of a voice that he self-consciously affects, and a voice he asks us to think about critically.

Sidney's discussion of poetic inspiration, for example, is deliberately tangled and ambivalent. He starts by examining the Roman term for poet, vates: he translates this "heavenly" title as "diviner, forseer, or prophet" and says that the Romans attributed the power of prophecy to Virgil. Sidney then gives us two contradictory reactions to this information. First he condemns the Romans for their "vain and godless superstition" (p. 98), and then he tells us they were "altogether not without ground." He softens his criticisms because "that same exquisite observing of number and measure in words, and that high flying liberty of conceit proper to the poet, did seem to have some divine force in it" (p. 99). The poet, then, is not really inspired; his heavenly and divine nature is at best metaphorical. It is an illusion, but an understandable one, basd on verbal artifice and the "high flying liberty of conceit." The irony is clear: inspiration is not the cause of the poet's conceit but the effect that the conceit has on the reader.⁴

Where Sidney does mention poets who were truly inspired by God (David, Solomon, et al.), he is careful to set them apart from "right poets," his subject.⁵ He makes so many motions in distinguishing these right poets from philosophical and historical poets (those who follow a "proposed subject" instead of their own "invention") that another distinction is easily missed.⁶ It can, however, be deduced easily enough, and it is equally important to his argument. Sidney is interested in a poetic grounded in the human mind, and inspiration would compromise its autonomy. As Sidney tells us later, Plato in his Ion "attributeth unto Poesy more than myself do, namely, to be a very inspiring of a divine force, far above man's wit" (p. 130).

Sidney's use of metaphysics can be deceptive. Though he uses its terms to praise the poet's creativity, he then dismisses them before they can compromise the mind's autonomy. The same pattern recurs immediately after the vates discussion, when Sidney turns to the word poet: "It cometh of this word poiein, which is 'to make.'" Sidney's use of Greek etymology, like Landino's, serves as an occasion to honor the poet, and Sidney follows with the previously quoted celebration of poetry's golden world and the poet's creation of a new nature. Sidney then defends his claims:

Neither let it be deemed too saucy a comparison to balance the highest point of man's wit with the efficacy of Nature; but rather give right honour to the heavenly Maker of that maker, who having made man to His own likeness, set him beyond and over all the works of that second nature: which in nothing he showeth so much as in Poetry, when with the force of a divine breath he bringeth things forth far surpassing her doings, with no small argument to the incredulous of that first accursed fall of Adam: since our erected wit maketh us know what perfection is, and yet our infected will keepeth us from reaching unto it. (p. 101)

Man's position is a gift of God, and he is fitted into a hierarchical series of makers, beginning with God, who surpasses him, and concluding with nature, which he surpasses. But if the gift explains man's capacity, it does not control his use of it, nor bind it to the fixed order of things. After his ironic reading of the superstitious vates argument, Sidney invokes the poet's "divine breath" with a self-conscious sense of its status as metaphor, referring to man's own efforts as he brings forth his own creations, echoing only obliquely Scaliger's claim that man "transforms himself into a second deity."⁷

Nor is there a clear graduation from the mind's operations to a transcendental source. Sidney's "highest point of man's wit" is not a mystical apex mentis directly sparked by the divine. It is the faculty that creates fictions, the faculty that creates another nature and so reveals our divinity to ourselves. In order to demonstrate "erected wit," we must be "lifted up with the vigour of [our] own invention" (p. 100). We know our Ideas, not by tracing them back to an eternal Logos, but by making them "manifest, by delivering them forth in such excellency as [we have] imagined them" (p. 101).

Furthermore, the above quotation on the hierarchy of makers is a defense of one possible metaphor—an attempt to show that it is not "too saucy." After his magnificent praise of the erected wit, Sidney tells us that "these arguments will by few be understood, and by fewer granted. Thus much (I hope) will be given me, that the Greeks with some probability of reason gave him the name above all names of learning" (p. 101). He pulls us up with a reminder that the passage is something of an indulgence, a voice he has assumed in order to sound out certain attractive, if abstruse, arguments. He is not concerned with proving their validity, and he neither affirms nor denies them to those who will not grant them. He is satisfied, rather, with showing that the Greek name displays "some probability of reason." Indeed, the argument for the poet as maker is not so much a justification of the wit as a demonstration of it. It is a bold "comparison," which, according to Aristotle and Renaissance rhetoricians, is a prime way of exhibiting wit.⁸

Sidney's discussion of the fore-conceit, or Idea, then, may remind us of Neoplatonic art theory, but its orientation is closer to Cusanus's art of conjecture. The mind's highest capacity, like Cusanus's intellectus, may suggest an intuitive leap to a higher unity, but it always return us to the mind's active fashioning. The metaphysical terms of the Apology, like the elaborate schemata of De coniecturis, must be pictured as lying within, rather than outside of, the sphere of human making.

Many Cyruses

If the poet is "lifted up with the vigour of his own invention," so, too, is the reader. Poetry, as its humanist defenders often tell us, is the best teacher, the "first light-giver to ignorance," and the first study to show us the "pleasure in the exercises of the mind" (pp. 96, 98). The separation of the Idea from a fixed ontology, moreover, makes poetry a special kind of exercise. In a fascinating article, A. E. Malloch argues that, for Sidney, it is only in poetry that reason finds an object properly proportioned to its capacities. But Malloch sees this in a Thomist light: the fallen world is deficient, whereas poetry's golden world reveals a "fullness of being" that fully actualizes the act of cognition.⁹ I would argue, on the contrary, that the poetic object is best proportioned to our reason because that object is a projection of our reason. Jacopo Mazzoni made this very argument in Italy only a few years after the Apology was written. The object of poetic imitation is one that is consciously framed to fit the poet's intellectual needs.¹⁰

The more autonomous the poet's Idea becomes, however, the more insistent the need to attach it to something outside itself. And if a metaphysical foundation is problematic, then a practical and ethical application becomes all-important. The function of poetry is to reform the will, as well as to perfect the wit, since "no learning is so good as that which teacheth and moveth to virtue" (p. 123). Using a suggestive pun, Sidney writes: "The poet … doth draw the mind more effectually than any other art doth" (p. 115). The poet both depicts the mind and leads it to action. And this brings us to the second part of Sidney's theory, that poetry is justified not only by the brilliance of the Idea but by the way it works in the world, bestowing a "Cyrus upon the world to make many Cyruses."

Sidney echoes the rhetorical interpretation of poetry, and following Minturno's transference of Cicero's "teach, delight, and move" from the orator to the poet, he writes that poets "imitate both to delight and teach: and delight to move men to take that goodness in hand" (p. 103). Poetry's rhetorical address to the reader, however, is shaped by Sidney's radical conception of the poet's Idea, and the result is a discussion of didacticism that brings to the surface the intrinsic difficulties of such justifications.

Sidney approaches this discussion by pretending to moderate a dispute between the educative claims of philosophy and history, only to carry the prize away for poetry. A philosopher claims that by teaching what virtue is, his discipline makes clear "how it extendeth itself out of the limits of a man's own little world to the government of families, and maintaining of public societies" (p. 105). Sidney objects that the philosopher never extends himself. He is trapped within the closed world of his fellow philosophers: "The philosopher teacheth, but he teacheth obscurely, so as the learned only can understand him; that is to say, he teacheth them that are already taught" (p. 109). Sidney later parodies the circularity of such discourse: "Nay truly, learned men have learnedly thought that where once reason hath so much overmastered passion as that the mind hath a free desire to do well, the inward light each mind hath in itself is as good as a philosopher's book; seeing in nature we know it is well to do well" (p. 113). The learned learnedly discuss how it is well to do well, but their terms only point to themselves: "Happy is that man who may understand him, and more happy that can apply what he doth understand" (p. 107). The same charge reappears indirectly, if a bit more cruelly, during a later discussion of love: "Some of my masters the philosophers spent a good deal of their lamp-oil in setting forth the excellency of it" (p. 125). Lamp oil, Sidney suggests, is all a philosopher usually "spends" in love. The philosopher fails in teaching and seduction because his definitions "lie dark before the imaginative and judging power, if they be not illuminated or figured forth by the speaking picture of poesy" (p. 107).

If philosophy gives us reason devoid of external application, history poses an opposite extreme, for it is circumscribed by the world of experience, one devoid of any perceivable rationality. The historian is "bound to tell things as things were" and "cannot be liberal … of a perfect pattern" (p. 110):

The historian, being captived to the truth of a foolish world, is many times a terror from welldoing, and an encouragement to unbridled wickedness.

For see we not valiant Miltiades rot in his fetters? the just Phocion and the accomplished Socrates put to death like traitors? the cruel Severus live prosperously? (pp. 111-12)

Not only is the historian's world one of moral chaos, but history, in recording it, lacks logical coherence. His example "draweth no necessary consequence," and so he follows the logic of "because it rained yesterday, therefore it should rain to-day" (pp. 107, 110). The historian cannot understand the nature of examples and how the mind uses them,

but if he know an example only informs a conjectured likelihood, and so go by reason, the poet doth so far exceed him as he is to frame his example to the which is most reasonable … where the historian in his bare was … must tell events whereof he can yield no cause; or, if he do, it must be poetical, (p. 110)

The poet knows that the mind must work through conjectures, that examples can lead only to "a conjectured likelihood." Thus the poet is freed from imitating things as they have been, the "bare was," and may concentrate, instead, on the modes of understanding themselves, the lines of connection or consequence the mind attempts to draw in making sense out of the world. His examples are framed according "to that which is most reasonable," rather than any external res. It is of small importance that the historian can boast that he brings us "images of true matters, such as indeed were done, and not such as fantastically or falsely may be suggested to have been done" (p. 109), for he knows better "how this world goeth than how his own wit runneth" (p. 105). The poet, by contrast, having no law but wit, can frame examples into purified types of moral ideals: "If the poet do his part aright, he will show you in Tantalus, Atreus, and such like, nothing that is not to be shunned; in Cyrus, Aeneas, Ulysses, each thing to be followed" (p. 110).

The argument, as Sidney notes, is based on Aristotle: poetry is more philosophical than history because it deals "with Katholou … the universal consideration" (p. 109). Italian critics often fortified Aristotle's universal by associating it with Platonic exemplars, and it is sometimes suggested that Sidney follows their lead. The golden reshaping of the world, like the "Idea" argument, does echo Neoplatonic claims. Ficino writes, for example: "What, then, does the intellect seek if not to transform all things into itself by depicting all things in the intellect according to the nature of the intellect? … the universe, in a certain manner, should become intellect"¹¹ But again, Sidney both appeals to meta physical claims and refuses their protection. After his ridiculing of philosophers, we cannot leap so adroitly to fixed and timeless exemplars. Nor did Aristotle, as Sidney's cagey circularity suggests: Aristotle's "reason … is most full of reason." A closer philosophical analogue to Sidney's "universal consideration" is the Cusan conjecture. The latter, as we have seen, is the mind's response to the unknowable, whether the hidden God or a world without apprehensible quiddities and fixed points; the mind turns to its purest forms of thought, usually mathematics, and projects them outward in a display of its own fecundity. Sidney's "highest point of man's wit" may not produce mathematical forms, but its poetic fictions fulfill a parallel function: the poet's wit is lifted up with the vigor of its own invention.¹² The poet faces a brazen world of moral disorder, which snares the historian in its senselessness, but delivers back a golden world, another nature structured by his mind.

Sidney's justification for such invention is not ontological authority but didactic efficacy. If we look back to the Idea/Cyrus passage, we can see how insistently Sidney attempts to join his golden world and didacticism in a bond of dialectical necessity. The poet's fiction, his delivering of the Idea, is "not wholly imaginative, as we are wont to say by them that build castles in the air; but so far substantially it worketh, not only to make a Cyrus, which had been but a particular excellency as Nature might have done, but to bestow a Cyrus upon the world, to make many Cyruses" (p. 101). Moreover, the poet's effect on the world is as important to the poet as it is to the world he affects. It is the only way he can grant substance to his creations, the only way he can be sure they are not a sign of his estrangement. Like Danielle Barbara and others, Sidney cautions that eloquent fantasies must be carefully directed to prevent the teacher of the many from becoming the frenzied and solitary builder of "castles in the air."¹³

At crucial junctures in the Apology, where Sidney would have found a metaphysical argument most useful, we find, instead, claims for didactic efficacy. Forrest Robinson, in keeping with his argument that the poet has access to absolute patterns, suggests that the fore-conceit is a preverbal mental diagram, which, because of its participation in absolute truth, serves as a universal frame to insure a uniform response in all readers.¹⁴ But when Sidney comes to discuss how this frame works, he tells us simply that when readers of poesy are "looking for fiction, they shall use the narration but as an imaginative ground-plot of a profitable invention" (p. 124). Sidney does not claim that there is any true or universal Idea embodied by, or hidden in, the ground-plot. "Invention" carries its full ambiguity here,¹⁵ and we cannot tell whether the reader comes upon a preestablished meaning or fashions his own, any more than we can be certain that one man's conjectures in Cusanus's universe are the same as another's. All we know is that the "invention" ought to be "profitable." We are not guaranteed a fixed unity between speaker and hearer; the most interpretation can aim for is some ethical utility.

A similar development appears in the icastic/fantastic opposition, so important for Renaissance criticism. As William Rossky has shown, the fear of imaginative distortion was a powerful theme in Renaissance England, and English texts are filled with admonitions to control the imagination.¹⁶ In George Puttenham's Arte of English Poesie (1589), a sophisticated understanding of the contingency of cultural norms is chastened by the demand that the mind be fitted to objective truth. Puttenham warns against the "evill and vicious disposition of the braine," which can distort the judgment with "busie and disordered phantasies." Our concepts can become like "false glasses and shew thinges otherwise than they be in deede." Despite his earlier echoes of Sidney that the poet "contrives out of his owne braine" without "any foreine copie or example," Puttenham insists that the orderly imagination must represent things "according to their very truth. If otherwise, then doth it breede Chimeres and monsters in mans imaginations and not only in his imaginations but also in his ordinarie actions and life which ensues." The useful life must be "illuminated with the brightest irradiations of knowledge and of the veritie and due proportion of things."¹⁷

Sidney, by contrast, avoids such Augustinian metaphysics. More decisively committed to poetic feigning he welcomes the mind's ability to create such new forms "as never were in Nature, as the Heroes, Demigods, Cyclops, Chimeras, Furies" (p. 100). For him, the icastic/fantastic dichotomy is not an issue of metaphysics but of ethics: "For I will not deny but that man's wit may make Poesy, which should be eikastike, which some learned have defined, 'figuring forth good things,' to be phantastike, which doth contrariwise infect the fancy with unworthy objects" (p. 125). There is no question here of approximating an image to an external model, of a faithful likeness being opposed to a mere semblance. For Sidney, as for Mazzoni (who places the fantastic over the icastic), this approximation has become too restrictive. But instead of reversing the distinction, Sidney redefines it: "good" and "unworthy" are purely ethical. Thomas Wright was to warn his English audience in 1605 that the distorted imagination "putteth greene spectacles before the eyes of the witte, to make it see nothing but greene."¹⁸ But for Sidney, as for Cusanus, one can never take away the spectacles. All cognition implies some filtering or refraction; we can only hope to control the lenses we use.

But what is the basis of this control? Sidney admits that man's wit can produce irresponsible poetry, and hopes by this admission to answer those who see poetry as a corrupting influence: we should "not say that Poetry abuseth man's wit, but that man's wit abuseth Poetry" (p. 125). Shifting the blame closes one problem, but it opens a larger one. For poetry depends on the wit, it is born in the fore-conceit, and the poet follows no law but wit. Without a direct argument of inspiration or illumination, how can we be sure the light-giving poet himself has the proper light? What is the foundation for his claims? Some critics, borrowing from the rhetorical tradition, argue that the good poet must also be a good man, but this only begs the question.

Sidney's double justification—through the fore-conceit and through didacticism—proves to be doubly problematic. Both are traditionally founded on metaphysics, but Sidney wants to justify poetry without recourse to such support. The poetic "Idea" points to perfection by pointing back to itself; like Cusanus's conjectures, it justifies itself by repeating the act of creation. The other side of the argument, the attempt to translate poetic effects into moral ones, is pursued with perhaps even greater urgency. Sidney would very much like to present poetry as an instrument of the moral, active life, but the very process of making the argument exposes its gaps; indeed, it appears to face a dilemma similar to that of the Idea. Wimsatt alerts us to the problem:

Sidney, like most of those who have maintained that poetry is (and ought to be) moral, has not been able to resolve an ambiguity of the word ought as used in the formula. Is this a poetic "ought," or is it in fact only a moral "ought"? In the second sense, "ought to be moral" is a tautology—since moral is what all our works ought to be.¹⁹

The easiest way out for Sidney would have been to repeat Boccaccio's claims for the unity of poetry and theology, or to claim some metaphysical universal at work, as did many who propped up their interpretation of Aristotle's "ought" as a moral term. As Sidney's argument stands, it verges on telling us that poetry ought to be what it ought to be, and like the moral philosophers he parodies, Sidney finds his terms pointing back to themselves.

The Poet Nothing Affirms

One of the reasons there is such difficulty on both sides of the justification is the paradoxical nature of the poetic fictions that lie between them. Unlike some rhetorical critics who argue that the poet derives true conclusions from false elements, Sidney tells us that the poet

nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth. For, as I take it, to lie is to affirm that to be true which is false; so as the other artists, and especially the historian, affirming many things can, in the cloudy knowledge of mankind, hardly escape from many lies. But the poet (as I said before) never affirmeth. The poet never maketh any circles about your imagination to conjure you to believe for true what he writes, (pp. 123-24)

Insisting on the fictional nature of poetry, Sidney argues that its essential feature is the poet's "feigning," "not rhyming and versing" (p. 103).²⁰ Poetry inhabits a special realm of discourse, one that, like Mazzoni's idols, eludes the strict laws of verification. While Sidney's claim is not unique in the Renaissance, the route by which he arrives at his claim, and the consequences he draws from it, have an important effect on the way we read the Apology as a whole and lead us to a more general sense of what all discourse implies for Sidney.

As he explores conventional categories and their limits, Sidney's procedure again resembles that of Cusanus, who is forever testing the coincidence of opposites by attempting to reconcile curvature and straightness, potentiality and actuality. Cusanus also submits personifications of competing cultural ideals—the philosopher and the humanist orator—to the scrutiny of the conjecturing idiota, a craftsman who creates forms that never were in nature. Sidney does not deal with the same kinds of puzzles, but his poetic fictions are likewise the result of a coincidence of opposites. The poet fuses the two extremes of the philosopher and the historian as he "coupleth the general notion with the particular example." Poetry is clearly not an Aristotelian mean between them, as some Italian theorists reckoned it on a scale of abstractions.²¹ Sidney includes both extremes within the synthesis, which gives rise to a distinct mode of discourse, one that he claims surpasses the limits of its rivals. It is, in a sense, more abstract than metaphysics, because it is completely free from nature, unlike the "metaphysic, though it be in the second and abstract notions, and therefore be counted supernatural, yet doth he indeed build upon the depth of Nature" (p. 100). At the same time, it is more concrete than history, since its speaking pictures and shining images are able to instruct and move men immediately.

Neither Sidney nor Cusanus argues for the final sufficiency of conjecture or fiction, but both suggest that all human attempts to make sense out of the world must deal with the conditions of human apprehension. Cusanus tells us in De docta ignorantia that previous philosophers erred in their understanding of the nature of things because of their adherence to the illusion that their systems precisely represented some fixed structure. The doctrine of learned ignorance does not free men from the dilemma of representation but brings them to recognize its inevitability, allowing them to manipulate it consciously. The conjectural art, then, becomes a way of rejecting the constraints of both affirmative and negative ways. Sidney continually suggests such paradoxes; indeed, having released the "right poet" from the burden of affirming, he drives the paradox even further than does Cusanus. Poetry is only a special instance of the fictionality that pervades all discourse. The most casual observation shows that other disciplines use fictions to enhance their effectiveness: lawyers use such fictitious names as "John a Stile" and "John a Noakes" in their cases for the sake of making "their picture the more lively," and chess players call a piece of wood a bishop. So, too, historians, despite their claims of truthfulness, still give "many particularities of battles, which no man could affirm" and invent "long orations," which historical figures never pronounced (p. 97).

In a profounder sense, any attempt at rational communication leads to fiction making. Our only choice is whether or not to acknowledge the pretense. So the historian is described as "loaden with old mouse-eaten records, authorising himself (for the most part) upon other histories, whose greatest authorities are built upon the notable foundation of hearsay." Any art that purports to rest on the foundation of external verities finds that its support quickly disintegrates. Even those who go beyond books to nature find themselves in this vertiginous plight: "There is no art delivered to mankind that hath not the works of Nature for his principal object, without which they could not consist, and on which they so depend, as they become actors and players, as it were, of what Nature will have set forth" (pp. 99-100). They pretend to "follow nature" but find themselves on a stage, their words turned into players' lines, their deeds transformed into mere theatrics.

A.C. Hamilton has argued that Sidney's paradox is borrowed from Agrippa's skeptical attack on the vanity of human studies.²² However much we attribute to Agrippa's influence, whether on the basis of his mocking tone or of his argument that nothing can be affirmed, it is clear that Sidney carries the skeptical argument to its conclusion, that our only access to reality is through fiction and conjecture. As Montaigne writes: "Have I not seen this divine saying in Plato, that Nature is nothing but an aenigmaticall poesie? As a man might say, an overshadowed and darke picture, inter-shining with an infinit varietie of false lights, to exercise our conjecture … philosophy is nothing else but a sophisticated poesie."²³ Sidney would object, however, that the only real "poesie" is poetic making itself. It is the greatest of the arts because it is the only one to realize that it is not anchored to a fixed and objective truth. Like Cusanus, Sidney does not let this realization force him back to a passive fideism: the poet recognizes the necessity of conjecture and so boldly sets about inventing his own.

This claim inevitably doubles back to affect the status of the Apology. If the only choice is between those who naively entertain fictions and those who act their own, then Sidney, as the speaker of the Apology, makes it clear that he thinks of himself as one of the latter.

At the beginning of the Apology, Sidney tells us that he is following the example of John Pietro Pugliano, the master horseman and self-promoter, and that in order to defend his own craft, poetry, he needs "to bring some more available proofs." He is alluding to Aristotle's definition of rhetoric as the "faculty of observing in any given case, the available means of persuasion," and so is signaling us that he is about to adopt the role of rhetorician. Kenneth Myrick's book on Sidney helps us to see how self-conscious an actor Sidney is, as he closely models his work after the "judicial oration in behalf of an accused client." Furthermore, Sidney seems to remind us continually of the role he is playing. As Myrick demonstrates, Sidney not only follows the seven-part form of an oration as he found it described by Thomas Wilson but does so in elaborate detail, following the recommended subject matter and style for each section and even marking the transitions between them with conspicuous phrases.²⁴

This is a fitting role for Sidney, considering the highly rhetorical role he imagines for poetry. But the paradox thickens when we realize that Sidney is playing not only the rhetorician but the poet as well. He tells us at the start that he has slipped into the title of poet, and he often demonstrates the appropriateness of that title in the Apology. After describing poetry as "feigning notable images of virtues, vices, or what else," Sidney proceeds to feign notable images of the poet's competitors, including the moral philosophers, whom he envisions approaching him "with a sullen gravity," and the historian, staggering under a load of mouse-eaten records. Before they have a chance to speak, Sidney gives us a notable image of them as hypocrites and buffoons and, in the process, characterizes himself as one who acts out his own theories.

Sidney leads us to recognize his arguments for his craft as examples of his craft by showing us that they are in the same realm of discourse, the realm of feigned images and self-conscious conjectures. I have already mentioned the discussion of the poet as maker as a kind of conjecture. Later, during a crucial argument with those who claim that fictions are mere day-dreams or toys, Sidney counters, "If to a slight conjecture a conjecture may be opposed, truly it may seem, that as by him [Homer] their learned men took almost their first light of knowledge, so their active men received their first motions of courage" (p. 127).

There are, of course, advantages to adopting this role. Sidney can demonstrate the persuasive force of poetry even as he describes it. And by treating his arguments as conjectures, he can arrange a variety of them without strict regard for consistency. He presents us with "something for everyone," aiming different claims at different readers, hoping that all will find something to serve as "an imaginative ground-plot of a profitable invention." We often find, in fact, running counter to what I have described as the central theory, the testing of more conservative possibilities, aimed at those who may be unhappy with the more daring claims for the poet's creativity. We can see this, for example, in the notion of poetic "fitness."²⁵

Early in the Apology, when praising the poet's creativity, Sidney argues for the peculiar "reverse adequation" found in critics such as Mazzoni. The mind does not fit its concepts to externals but, rather, invents forms to fit its own faculties. Poets are like painters, who, "having no law but wit, bestow that in colours upon you which is fittest for the eye to see" (p. 102). If verse is used in poetry, so much the better, because of the "fitness it hath for memory" (p. 122). But later, when discussing stage productions, Sidney moves far away from the freedom of Mazzoni's idols and closer to the unimaginative literalness of Castelvetro. Unity of place is essential because no audience could believe a rapid change of location. Playwrights are attacked for being too "liberal" with time as well. There must be a correspondence between the imitation and the action imitated. The play should be "fitted to the time it set forth" (p. 134).

These reversals are not restricted to specific questions of dramaturgy. At one moment the poets are free of the works of nature, not enclosed by its "narrow warrant"; at another, they must rely on the "force truth hath in nature," and their proper effects are endangered if the matter is "disproportioned to ourselves and nature" (p. 136). We may even suspect that Sidney is allowing himself to act out his own ambivalence about the poet's "high flying liberty of conceit." Late in the Apology, Sidney tells us that "the highest-flying wit [must] have a Daedalus to guide him," and that this Daedalus has three wings, "Art, Imitation, and Exercise": "Exercise indeed we do, but that very fore-backwardly: for where we should exercise to know, we exercise as having known; and so is our brain delivered of much matter which never was begotten by knowledge" (p. 133). Sidney more strictly regulates the poet with a firmer objective orientation. The next sentence, in fact, complains, "For there being two principal parts—matter to be expressed by words and words to express the matter—in neither we use Art or Imitation rightly" (p. 133). Sidney does not openly contradict his earlier idealistic claim that the poet "bringeth his own stuff, and doth not learn a conceit out of a matter, but maketh matter for a conceit" (p. 120), but he is clearly suggesting a safer res/verba distinction, as used by the Horatian critics to direct poetry outward.²⁶

Sidney can take these liberties because of the manifestly conjectural nature of the Apology.²⁷ But his retreat to more conservative themes does not solve his dilemmas; rather, their conjectural status serves only to remind us of those dilemmas. The claim that poetry neither affirms nor denies may not be unique in the Renaissance, but the suggestion that one's own defense of poetry follows the same pattern forces into question the very possibility of making such a defense.

Sidney's theory requires that he take an affirmative stand somewhere, that he find some first premise from which to deduce his conclusions. Sidney himself makes this need explicit by reducing his argument to a syllogism:

If it be, as I affirm, that no learning is so good as that which teacheth and moveth to virtue, and that none can both teach and move thereto so much as Poetry, then is the conclusion manifest that ink and paper cannot be to a more profitable purpose employed, (p. 123)

Sidney makes this statement just after he has given a lesson in logic to the poet-haters, laughing at their argument that "doth (as they say) but petere principium" (p. 123). But immediately after his own argument, he undermines the clause on which the entire syllogism rests, "I affirm." For it is here that he chooses to place the already-quoted passage on how the poet "never affirmeth," unlike the others who, "affirming many things, can, in the cloudy knowledge of mankind, hardly escape from many lies" (p. 124). Even as he points out the logical mistakes of his opponents, Sidney seems to be deliberately committing his own, making any first premise impossible and so exposing himself to an inevitable infinite regress. To put the matter more simply, if the best the mind can accomplish is conjecture, then its justification is also a conjecture.

Sidney reminds us of this problem in the peroratio, or conclusion:

I conjure you all that have had the evil luck to read this ink-wasting toy of mine, … to believe, with Aristotle, that they were the ancient treasurers of the Grecians' divinity; to believe, with Bembus, that they were first bringers-in of all civility; to believe, with Scaliger, that no philosopher's precepts can sooner make you an honest man than the reading of Virgil; to believe, with Clauserus, the translator of Cornutus, that it pleased the heavenly Deity, by Hesiod and Homer, under the veil of fables, to give us all knowledge, Logic, Rhetoric, Philosophy natural and moral, and quid non?; to believe, with me, that there are many mysteries contained in Poetry, which of purpose were written darkly, lest by profane wits it should be abused; to believe, with Landino, that they are so beloved of the gods that whatsoever they write proceeds of divine fury; lastly, to believe themselves, when they tell you they will make you immortal by their verses, (pp. 141-42)

The facetious tone is unmistakable from opening self-deprecation to insistence that we believe the love poet's favorite seduction line. But we also find a summary listing of nearly all the arguments made in the Apology, now paraded without distinction. We are conjured to believe arguments that Sidney has made essential—namely, for poetry as a civilizing force and for its didactic efficacy—as well as those he has rejected, such as Landino's claims for poetry as an emanation of divine fury, and those he has deliberately minimized or ignored, such as the view of poetry as a veil of allegory or as a mystery for the initiated. All are brought out like actors at the end of a play, taking their bows.

Sidney cannot expect that his readers will believe so many conflicting points of view, and the lack of distinction among them hurts their credibility. Even his insistence that we do believe them, when he "conjure[s us] … to believe," is a selfparody, teasing us with verbal echoes of a previous denial: "The poet never maketh any circles about your imagination, to conjure you to believe for true what he writes."

Myrick, who gives an excellent survey of Sidney's rhetorical strategies, argues that this kind of playfulness adds to the Apology's persuasiveness. It is a sign of Sidney's sprezzatura, a "courtly grace which conceals a sober purpose."²⁸ Sidney does praise the courtier who finds a style "fittest to nature" and who "doth according to art, though not by art," and contrasts him to the pedant who uses "art to show art, and not to hide art" (p. 139). But Sidney is not that courtier. Little is hidden by the style of the Apology. His adopted role is announced as an adopted role, and nearly all his persuasive tricks and witty anecdotes are relished as persuasive tricks and demonstrations of wit. We rarely lose sight of the self-conscious fashioning of the Apology and cannot forget that Sidney is, in Myrick's terms, a "literary craftsman" constructing a "literary artifact."

It would be tempting to conclude that the Apology acts out its own argument, that the work itself moves us through images and fictions while praising the power of poetry to move us through images and fictions. But if this were so, there would be no real argument to act out, only a fiction that neither affirms nor denies, taking as its subject still other fictions. The Apology requires another Apology to justify it, and so on without end. What the Apology does act out are the tensions characteristic of the most adventurous Renaissance thought, whether they appear in the texts of an Elizabethan courtier, an Italian critic, or a German philosopher.

Sidney's friend Hubert Languet had little patience with such protracted ambiguities, and Sidney enjoyed teasing him about it. In his correspondence with the older humanist, Sidney praises the joys of mental exercise: "I am never less a prey to melancholy than when I am earnestly applying the feeble powers of my mind to some high and difficult object."²⁹ Languet approves of his enthusiasm, but warns him not to spend too much time on studies that do not lead directly to a life of action. He recommends Cicero's letters "not only for the beauty of the Latin but also for the very important matter they contain."³⁰ But he is guarded about those who practice a double-translation method, turning Latin into a modern language and then closing the book to translate it back again. This exercise in style is considered useful by some, but it smacks too much of what Languet later calls "literary leisure." Sidney responds:

I intend to follow your advice about composition, thus: I shall first take one of Cicero's letters and turn it into French; then from French into English, and so once more by a sort of perpetual motion … it shall come round into Latin again. Perhaps, too, I shall improve myself in Italian by the same exercise.³¹

Like Languet, Sidney wants to direct his learning outward, to energize the will through the wit. As a prospective man of action, Sidney endorses the teleology of mental effort: "It is not gnosis but praxis must be the fruit." That such a transition can be made is confidently, even aggressively, proclaimed in the Apology. But for Sidney, there always seems to be another game to be played by the wit, yet another circuit to be made by its self-circling energies, before it can make that transition.³²

Notes

¹ All quotations are from An Apology for Poetry, ed. and introd. Geoffrey Shepherd (1956; reprint, London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1973). Page numbers are cited in text.

² Walter Davis, Idea and Act in Elizabethan Fiction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), p. 37. For Sidney as a Renaissance Neoplatonist, see in addition to Davis (chapter 2): F. Michael Krouse, "Plato and Sidney's Defense of Poesie," Comparative Literature 6 (1954): 138-47; John P. Mclntyre, S.J., "Sidney's 'Golden World,'" Comparative Literature 14 (1962): 356-65; and William Wimsatt and Cleanth Brooks, Literary Criticism: A Short History (New York: Knopf, 1957), p. 174. For a view of Sidney in dialogue with the original Plato, see Irene Samuel, "The Influence of Plato on Sidney's Defense of Poesie," Modern Language Quarterly 1 (1940): 383-91. Besides the obvious metaphorical difference, Augustinian illumination is different from Platonic inspiration; the former deals with the general nature of cognition, the latter with a special poetic gift. But both fulfill similar functions in Renaissance poetics. The argument for Sidney's Augustinianism usually relies on the evidence of Mornay and Hoskins's hierarchy of inner "words," leading to the divine Logos. See Apology, ed. Shepherd, pp. 59, 157-58 n.; An Apology for Poetry, ed. and introd. Forrest G. Robinson (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970), p. 17, n. 63; and Forrest G. Robinson, The Shape of Things Known: Sidney's Apology in Its Philosophical Tradition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972), chapter 3.

³ Erwin Panofsky, Idea: A Concept in Art Theory, trans. Joseph Peake (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), pp. 91-92.

⁴ The disenchantment with, or distancing from, arguments for poetic inspiration in the later Renaissance has often been noted. See, for example, Baxter Hathaway on Fracastoro, The Age of Criticism: The Late Renaissance in Italy (1962; reprint, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1972), pp. 405-6; Robert Durling, The Figure of the Poet in Renaissance Epic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965), pp. 199-200, where Tasso's yearning for inspiration and his view of poetry as "rationalistic, autonomous techné" are found to be in conflict; and Richard Willis's effort to rationalize inspiration: poets behave "as if … roused by the divine breath, they seem to be transported," cited and discussed in J. V. H. Atkins, English Literary Criticism:. The Renascence (1947; reprint, New York: Barnes and Noble, 1968), pp. 109-10.

⁵ See A. C. Hamilton, "Sidney's Idea of the 'Right Poet,'" Comparative Literature 9 (Winter 1957): 51-59.

⁶ This silence is part of Sidney's rhetorical strategy. He wants us to be able to say, as does John Buxton, that "Sidney describes the poet as a combination of vates, divinely inspired seer, and poet, or maker" (Sir Philip Sidney and the English Renaissance [London: Macmillan, 1954]. p. 4). But Sidney is careful to leave us enough evidence to deduce a more precise set of theoretical distinctions.

⁷ A useful survey of attitudes toward the poet as "maker" appears in S. K. Heninger, Touches of Sweet Harmony (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1974), pp. 287-324. Sidney echoes the further analogy of human creativity to the divine, but he is oblique about the matter, compared not only to Cusanus, Ficino, and Scaliger, but also to other English apologists of the verbal arts, who, despite their caution, still invoke the analogy more directly. Thomas Wilson calls the eloquent man "halfe a GOD," in the preface to The Arte of Rhetorique (1553), ed. G. H. Mair from the 1560 edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909); Thomas Lodge alludes with favor to the ancient praise of Homer as Humanus deus in his Defence of Poetry (1579), in Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. G. Gregory Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1904), 1:64. Sidney's indirectness cannot be accounted for in terms of religious scruples without also explaining why the pious Wilson did not share the same reluctance when he went halfway to asserting an equivalence. I suspect that Sidney is intrigued by the trope's claims for creativity, but views its ontological complacency with suspicion. Compare also George Puttenham's opening chapter, where after comparing God to a poet, he turns the analogy around, but only with a metaphorical dodge and a lower-case plural: "Poets thus to be conceived … be (by maner of speech) as creating gods" (The Arte of English Poesie, ed. Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker [1936; reprint, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970], p. 4).

⁸ William G. Crane, Wit and Rhetoric in the Renaissance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1937), p. 14. There are, to be sure, religious themes sounded in the passage, from the exhortation to give "right honour to the heavenly Maker" to the mention of "that first accursed fall of Adam." But these references are keyed to rhetorical ends; the emphasis in the Apology is on man as the maker of images, not man as the image made. Acknowledgment of the Fall and the infected will does not draw the discussion into the orbit of theology—although diverging claims have been made for it as an indication of Sidney's Calvinism, Thomism, or semi-Pelagianism—so much as it advertises the way poetry can grant an argumentative edge over the "incredulous." If poetic fictions now seem, oddly enough, to assume the function of Anselm's "necessary reasons" in disputing with hypothetical unbelievers, that impression is only momentary. For we soon discover that the passage on the hierarchy of makers, despite multiple echoes of Genesis, is not an explication of faith; still less is it an objective account of the vertical structure of being.

⁹ A. E. Malloch, "'Architectonic' Knowledge and Sidney's Apologie," English Literary History 20 (1953): 181-85.

¹⁰ See discussion in chapter 4.

¹¹ Ficino, "Five Questions Concerning the Mind," in Renaissance Philosophy of Man, ed. Ernst Cassirer et al. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), pp. 201-2. For an argument that Sidney's notion of poetic feigning may have been influenced by Ficino, see Cornell March Dowlin, "Sidney's Two Definitions of Poetry," Modern Language Quarterly 3 (1942): 579.

¹² Sidney appears nonetheless to have been intrigued by geometry as a form of intellectual mastery and self-mastery. Languet admits its usefulness, but is concerned that it will exhaust Sidney's intellect and health. Sidney answers by including geometry as one of the "high and difficult objects" that free him from melancholy (The Correspondence of Sir Philip Sidney and Hubert Languet, ed. and trans. Steuart Pears [London: William Pickering, 1845], pp. 28-29). Alastair Fowler's numerological analyses of Sidney's poems are of some interest in this regard, although I do not share his sense of Sidney's Neoplatonic grounding; see Fowler's Triumphal Forms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 174-80, and Conceitful Thought (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1975), pp. 38-58.

¹³ Hathaway, Age of Criticism, p. 332.

¹⁴ Robinson, The Shape of Things Known, p. 118.

¹⁵ See Murray Wright Bundy. "'Invention' and 'Imagination' in the Renaissance," Journal of English and Germanic Philology 29 (1930): 535-45, and Baxter Hathaway, Marvels and Commonplaces : Renaissance Literary Criticism (New York: Random House, 1968), pp. 56, 121.

¹⁶ William Rossky, "Imagination in the English Renaissance: Psychology and Poetic," Studies in the Renaissance 5 (1958): 49-73.

¹⁷Arte of English Poesie, p. 19. Compare Puttenham's discussion of figurative speech as abuse and trespass: the "iudges Areopagites" forbade figurative speeches as "meere illusions to the minde" (p. 154). But see also the excellent discussion of Puttenham's pluralistic attitude toward rhetoric and illusionism in Lawrence Manley, Convention: 1500-1750 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980), pp. 176-88.

¹⁸ Quoted by Rossky, "Imagination in the English Renaissance," p. 56.

¹⁹ Wimsatt and Brooks, Literary Criticism, p. 171.

²⁰ For arguments that his radical insistence on the poet's free feigning sets Sidney apart from such Italian sources as Scaliger and Minturno, see Cornell March Dowlin, "Sidney and Other Men's Thought," Review of English Studies 20, no. 80 (1944): 257-71, and Hamilton, "Sidney's Idea of the 'Right Poet.'"

²¹ Bernard Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 1:31. By contrast, Jacob Bronowski has noted that in the Apology poetry appears to be straining in two directions at once, toward liberated ideality and a forced application to the concrete (The Poet's Defence [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1939], pp. 39-56).

²² A. C. Hamilton, "Sidney and Agrippa," Review of English Studies 7, no. 26 (1956): 151-57. Similar claims are made in Hamilton's book on Spenser, cited in note 2.

²³ Montaigne, Essays, trans. John Florio (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1938), 2: 244-45.

²⁴ Kenneth Myrick, Sir Philip Sidney as a Literary Craftsman (1935; reprint, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), pp. 53-55.

²⁵ There are several recent discussions of the disjunctions in Sidney's argument, sometimes refining the older question of the relative importance of Aristotelianism and Platonism for the Apology. See Michael Murrin, The Veil of Allegory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), pp. 184-89 for Sidney's witty and unclassifiable conflation of metaphysical and Neoclassical views, and O. B. Hardison, Jr., "The Two Voices of Sidney's Apology for Poetry," English Literary Renaissance 2 (Winter 1972): 83-99 for a possible shift in attitude by Sidney. "The Apology … was written in two phases…. Before a thorough revision was possible Sidney died (leaving the Apology) incompletely harmonized," Hardison writes (p. 98). For Sidney's eclecticism as a conscious rhetorical design, see Virginia Riley Hyman, "Sidney's Definition of Poetry," Studies in English Literature 10 (Winter 1970): 49-62, on Sidney as strategically selecting from his tradition; Catherine Barnes, "The Hidden Persuader: The Complex Speaking Voice of Sidney's Defence of Poetry," PMLA 96 (May 1971): 422-27, for the work's "'poetic' intricacy" (p. 426); and Margaret W. Ferguson, Trials of Desire: Renaissance Defenses of Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), chapter 4.

²⁶ See chapter 4, note 46, above. See also Philip's advice to his brother to avoid "Ciceronianisme the cheife abuse of Oxford, Quidum verba sectantur, res ipsas negligunt" (The Prose Works of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Albert Feuillerat [1912; reprint, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962], 3: 132).

²⁷ Compare Cusanus's liberties in De coniecturis, where he sketches out a schematic World Soul and hierarchical cosmos after questioning them in De docta ignorantia, discussed in chapter 2.

²⁸ Myrick, Sidney as Literary Craftsman, p. 298.

²⁹Correspondence of Sidney and Languet, ed. and trans. Pears, p. 29.

³⁰ Ibid., p. 20.

³¹ Ibid., p. 23.

³² Some of the discussion concerning this argument's first published version suggests the need for more specific clarification. I am not arguing that Sidney regards morality as ultimately divorced from ontology, or that he denies the final goodness of God's creation, but rather that he regards reliance upon such absolutes to justify human activities such as fiction making to be epistemologically untenable.

ABBREVIATIONS

Apology

Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry

AS

Sir Philip Sidney, Astrophil and Stella

De con.

Nicholas of Cusa, De coniecturis

DDI

Nicholas of Cusa, De docta ignorantia

GGN

Gammer Gurton's Needle

NA

Sir Philip Sidney, New Arcadia

OA

Sir Philip Sidney, Old Arcadia

PL

Patrologia latina, ed. J. P. Migne

Schmitt

Sancti Anselmi opera omnia, ed. F. S. Schmitt

ST

St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologica