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HUGH MACLACHLAN 'In the Person of Prince Arthur': Spenserian Magnificence and the Ciceronian Tradition In the Letter to Ralegh Spenser announces that 'in the person of Prince Arthur I sette forth magnificence in particular, which vertue ... (according to Aristotle and the rest) ... is the perfection of all the rest, and conteineth in it them all.'l Few critics, however, have accepted the poet's statement that magnificence is the virtue which perfects all the other virtues without some form of emendation or qualification. It has been suggested that John Dryden began this tradition by observing in his 'Essay on Satire' that it is 'magnanimity, which is the character of Prince Arthur.'2 His statement, however, was probably not intended as a correction of Spenser, for in his Dedication to the Translation of Juvenal he remarks that 'magnanimity (magnificence) ... is the true character of Prince Arthur:' casually equating the two moral virtues. For Dryden, apparently, these virtues are synonyms or, if this perhaps overstates the case, at least so closely connected that they are to a great extent interchangeable . Moder,:, critics, however, have been quick to point out that in Aristotle 's Nicamachean Ethics magnanimity is the 'crown' or perfection of all the rest of the virtues while magnificence is a severely limited virtue concerned primarily with the proper display of wealth in the pursuit of glory. And so, they suggest, Spenser was wrong in attributing his definition of magnificence to Aristotle and that he meant to say magnanimity.4 On the other hand, there have been in recent years several critics who, in an attempt to argue that Spenser made no mistake, 'solved' the problem of his apparent confusion by suggesting that it was not confusion at all but rather conflation - that Spenser's contemporaries used these terms interchangeably.' Other critics with the same intention have looked not· to the Aristotelian tradition but to the Stoic tradition of the cardinal virtues to reveal (they believe) this same effect at work. And finally, in an article which has generally been accepted as authoritative, Michael F. Moloney has attempted to show that.the source of Spenser's concept of magnificence as the perfection of all the other virtues lies in Aquinas's Summa thealagiae. 6 The purpose of this article is twofold: first, to suggest that only in a most qualified way can Aquinas be read as anything like Spenser's 'source' - that in fact the very sections of the Summa used by Moloney to UTQ, Vol/lme XLVI, Number 2 , Wint er 1976/7 126 HUGH MACLACHLAN justify his conclusion that Aquinian magnificence 'subsumes' magnanintity are the very ones which would negate it - and second, to attempt (in a condensed fashion) to trace the evolution of a tradition of magnificence readily available to a writer in the sixteenth century, a tradition in which magnificence and magnanimity were closely connected but not indeed interchangeable, but in which magnificence was clearly and repeatedly defined as the 'perfection of all the rest' of the moral virtues. Aquinas begins his definition of magnificence in the Summa by asking what it is that makes magnificence a special or unique virtue. Surely if the definition is only that its function is to execute a great deed, all virtues can do the same in themselves. Therefore magnificence would only denote 'a perfect condition of any virtue.'7 Moreover, magnanimity is concerned with great deeds also; and because of this there would seem to be no difference between magnanintity and magnificence. However, Aquinas suggests, an important distinction within the virtue of magnificence can be made, for facere can be understood in two senses: The task of magnificence, as is clear from the term, is to perform (Jacere)some great work. Now {aeere can be understood in two ways, that is in the strict and in the commonly accepted senses. Strictly speaking, it means producing something in an external material, like building a houseor something similar. But it is used generally to describe any action, whether it passes into an external object (for example, burning or cutting) or remains in the agent itself (like understanding or willing). So if magnificence is understood in the strict meaning of the creation of...

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