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Lipsius and the Art of Letter-Writing

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2019

E. Catherine Dunn
E. Catherine Dunn*
Affiliation:
The Catholic University of America
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Extract

“The whole history of the ‘epistle,’ as a literary genre, is full of interest and invites investigation.” — W. Rhys Roberts.

One of Professor Morris Croll's earliest essays on prose style was an article on Justus Lipsius, the sixteenth-century Belgian scholar and rhetorician whose name has become identified with the “anti-Ciceronian” school of prose. Croll later studied him as the leader of a triumvirate (Lipsius, Montaigne, and Bacon), and thus clarified somewhat the relationship of English prose style to continental experiments. The indebtedness of certain English writers, like John Hoskyns and Ben Jonson, to the epistolary theory of Lipsius is now well known, but the precise role played by his Epistolica institutio in literary history has never been clearly presented. Because Professor Croll's interests were centered in prose rhythm, he analyzed the Institutio only for the light it shed upon the development of “Attic” prose structure in the Renaissance.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in the Renaissance , Volume 3 , 1956 , pp. 145 - 156
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1956

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References

1 “Juste Lipse et le mouvement anticicéronien”, Revue du Seizième Siècle, ii (1914), 200-42; “Lipsius, Montaigne and Bacon”, Schelling Anniversary Papers (New York, 1923), pp. 117-50.

2 Maurice Castelain showed the Jonson-Lipsius relationship in his edition of the Discoveries (Paris, n.d.). See Hudson's, Hoyt H. edition of the Directions for Speech and Style by Hoskyns, John (Princeton, 1935)Google Scholar for the relationship of Jonson's work to Hoskyns’ and the scholarship on this problem.

3 I used the text of Tasso's Il segretario in Discorsi di Torquato Tasso (Pisa, 1823), Vol. i. To my knowledge, the Institutio of Lipsius has not been edited in modern times. Originally composed before June 1587, it was published from a student's copy of Lipsius’ lectures; it was printed in 1591, twice at Leyden and once at Frankfurt. See Bibliographie Lipsienne (Gand, 1886-88), II, 7 ff. and 215 ff. for many subsequent editions, both alone and in conjunction with other works of Lipsius, from 1592 to 1715.

4 “Die Composition und Litteraturgattung der Horazischen Epistula ad Pisones”, Hermes: Zeitschrift für Classische Philologie, XL (1905), 481-528.

5 Ibid., p. 516.

6 Ibid., pp. 519 ff. The Latin word juventus, as Harper's Latin Dictionary indicates, can mean the period from the twentieth to the fortieth year. The young person addressed in an institutio was not a child, and might even be already, to some degree, a professional man.

7 Ibid., pp. 508 ff.

8 Ibid., pp. 517-19.

9 Ibid., p. 525.

10 Ibid., p. 527.

11 Francois Ravlenghien, 1539-1597, member of the publishing concern of Christophe Plantin in Leyden.

12 Epistolica institutio in Opera omnia (Vesaliae, 1675), II, 1066. I have given my quotations from this edition, available at the Library of Congress, but I have also consulted the 1591 and 1601 editions of the Institutio at the Bodleian Library in Oxford.

13 Ibid., i, 15.

14 Ibid., p. 1075.

15 Ibid., p. 1074.

16 Norden, p. 508.

17 Ibid., pp. 509-10.

18 Lipsius, ii, passim.

19 “Muret and the History of Attic Prose”, PMLA, xxxix (1924), 301, n. 66: “In all of these the novelty of the letter as a literary genre is insisted on or implied. As an intimate or ‘moral’ form, like the essay, it was in fact new, and was associated in all minds with the ‘Attic’ tendency.”

20 Hansche, Maud, The Formative Period of English Familiar Letters (Philadelphia, 1902), p. 20 Google Scholar, writes of the Italian Renaissance achievements in the familiar letter; Burckhardt, Jakob, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (Phaidon Press edition, 1945), p. 138 Google Scholar, speaks of the fame of Politian and of Pietro Bembo as letter-writers.

21 For a discussion of the letter in antiquity see Klek, Josephus, Symbuleutici qui dicitur sermonis historia critica (Paderbornae, 1919)Google Scholar, passim.

22 The development of the ars dictaminis is a chapter not yet satisfactorily completed in the history of literature. See, however, Valois, Noel, De arte scribendi epistolas apud gallicos medii aevi scriptores rhetoresve (Paris, 1880)Google Scholar; Baldwin, C. S., Medieval Rhetoric and Poetic (New York, 1938).Google Scholar

23 Medieval Humanism in the Life and Writings of John of Salisbury (London, 1950), p. 88.

24 Hornbeak, Katherine, The Complete Letter-Writer in English, 1568-1800 (Northampton, Mass., 1934), pp. 21–22.Google Scholar See also Robertson, Jean K., The Art of Letter Writing: an Essay on the Handbooks Published in England during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (London, 1942), pp. 10 ff.Google Scholar, and Williamson, George, The Senecan Amble (Chicago, 1951), pp. 136 ft.Google Scholar

25 Lippus Brandolinus, e.g., grapples with the problem in his De ratione scribendi (Coloniae Agrippinae, 1573), sig. A5v-A6V. Georgius Macropedius comes closest to the theory of Lipsius, but does not analyze the problem involved (Methodus de conscribendis epistolis, London, 1580, sig. Aiiir and H5V). Fulwood, William, in the Enemie of Idlenesse (London, 1568)Google Scholar, defines the letter as “an Oration written” on sig. A7r. Cf. Day, Angell, The English Secretorie (London, 1586)Google Scholar, sig. B7r.

26 Erasmus, De conscribendis epistolis (Leyden, 1536), Ch. vii, sig. blv.

27 Lipsius, II, 1073.

28 Ibid.

29 Demetrius on Style, the Greek text of Demetrius De elocutione edited after the Paris manuscript with introduction, translation, facsimiles, etc., by W. Rhys Roberts (Cambridge, 1902).

30 Ibid., iv, 29.

31 LaDrière, J. Craig, “Horace and the Theory of Imitation”, American Journal of Philology, LX (1939), 289.Google Scholar

32 Demetrii el Libanii qui feruntur Tύπoι ὲπιστoλιxoí et Eπιστoγιμαιoι Xαραxτήρες, edidit Valentinus Weichert (Lipsiae, 1910), p. xii.

33 Whether the letter was supposed to imitate primarily natural dialogue or the literary genre of the dialogue is a question which will require a separate article. Lipsius’ historical position places him within possible debt to the Lucianic dialogue of late antiquity and to the Italian art of the dialogue highly developed in the Renaissance.

34 Demetrius, iv, 234.

35 Lipsius, II, 1079. Regarding this disagreement between Demetrius and Artemon, Torquato Tasso also made some comments and favored the position of Demetrius (Il segretario, pp. 123-4).

36 Aristotle had already made a similar distinction between spoken and written styles when he divided the prose of oratory into λέξις ἀγωvιστιxἠ and λέξις γραφxἠ. The former is the style of deliberative and forensic oratory, the manner of debate, either before a crowd or before a law court. The latter is the manner of epideictic oratory, suited for written composition. Demetrius used the Aristotelian distinction and applied it to the letter, assigning the written style to it and reserving the spoken form for the dialogue. (Aristotle, with an English translation: the “Art of Rhetoric”, by John Henry Freese, Loeb Classical Library, London, 1939, in, xii, 1-2.) It is worthy of note that Aristotle had used the addressee or audience as the determining element in the selection of oratorical manner. The type of listener controls the type of rhetoric used by the speaker (ibid., III, iii, 1). Epideictic oratory is suitable for written composition because the addressee is a kind of spectator of the orator's virtuosity in eulogy or condemnation; in the deliberative and forensic speeches an audience must be persuaded to judge the orator's admonitions or the guilt of a defendant. I think that Lipsius, even more clearly than Demetrius, analyzed the nature of the letter also in terms of its addressee, selecting the style of the dialogue because of the addressee's influence upon the letter-writer's speech.

37 Hirzel, Rudolf, Der Dialog (Leipzig, 1895), i, 306 Google Scholar, says: “Der Brief ist eine Art von Rede und unterscheidet sich von der eigentlichen Rede nur durch seinen geringeren Umfang.”

38 Ibid.

39 Goethe's phrase is, quoted from Dichtung und Wahrheit by Rhys Roberts in the Loeb Classical Library edition of Demetrius, p. 439.

40 Lipsius, II, 1079. The admiration for Plautine Latin was one of the most controversial aspects of Lipsius’ tempestuous career. He not only advocated this kind of Latin for letters but considered it appropriate for other types of prose as well. Lipsian prose was essentially a hybrid, formed by an eclectic imitation of several writers, beginning with Cicero and including both early and late Latin authors abhorred by the purist “Ciceronians”. ( Nisard, Charles, Le triumvirat littéraire au XVIe Siècle: Juste Lipse, Joseph Scaliger et Isaac Casaubon, Paris, 1852, p. 144.Google Scholar)

41 Demetrius, iv, 226. Roberts’ footnote concerning the apparent lacuna in the first sentence is: “Lacunam statuit Goellerus”. In the notes at the back of his book, p. 249, Roberts adds: “Some such words as αἷ τoṽ διαλóγov may have been lost”.

42 Lipsius, II, 1077 (italics not mine). On the art of the dialogue in antiquity and the Renaissance, see the article “Dialogo” in the Enciclopedia Italiana di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, xii, 735-37; and Giovannini, “Dialogue”, in Dictionary of World Literature (1st ed., New York, 1943), pp. 161-62.

43 Lipsius, II, 1077. This little passage on gracefulness apparently owes a debt to Cicero's De oratore, ii, liv, 216 and probably also to Demetrius, iii, 163. Tasso also advises raillery in letters (pp. 119-20).