The fashion of treating Latin literature as of all importance to English
is passing away in the better understanding of things. It is true that
the knowledge of Latin has been always more widely spread than the
knowledge of Greek, and that our speech is more deeply tinged with
Latinity. Yet Greek literature is the source and origin of almost all
that is best in Latin, and its influence to-day is far more vital. Let
it be added that, while in point of matter and thought Latin borrowed
unsparingly from Greek, in point of style its principles were less sound
or consistent.
Nevertheless, Latin literature is of immense importance. We may think of
the prodigious historical significance of the pagan Roman Empire, and
then of the prodigious spiritual significance of the Christian Roman
Church. We may think of the impress that has been left on all Western
Europe by these, and remember that the language of each is Latin. The
necessity of not neglecting the mere language is obvious. But we are here
concerned with Latin literature, of which the language is but the vehicle.
* * * * *
Where does Latin literature begin and end?
Writing in Latin has not ended yet. But we shall for the present confine
ourselves to the Latin works of pagan Rome, in the days when Rome can
fairly be called a nation of tolerably homogeneous life and pursuits.
Though the writings of Tertullian, Lactantius, Jerome and Augustine, in
the third and fourth centuries, are undeniably Latin, and literature
also, we can on this principle draw a tolerably clear line against them.
Similarly the later poets, such as Ausonius, Claudian, and Boethius, lie
outside the scope of the present chapter.
From the third century B.C. onwards, the Latin-speaking Romans, beginning
as a mere clan in central Italy, spread their empire gradually over the
peninsula, over France, Spain and Portugal, over Great Britain to the
Grampians, across the Rhine, along the Danube, over modern Turkey and
Greece, over Asia Minor and Syria to the river Euphrates, over most
of Arabia, Egypt, and all the southern coast of the Mediterranean. In
Spain and Portugal, in France, and in Roumania they planted colonies and
settlements, till the languages of those countries actually became Latin;
dialects, no doubt, but Latin. Over all this empire Latin literature
spread with the spreading of control and settlement, and in the first
century of our era it was as natural for a Latin writer to hail from
Spain as from Rome. Persons no less than Seneca, Lucan, Quintilian, and
Martial are Spaniards from towns later known as Cordova, Calahorra and
Bambola. Subsequently Africa (Tunis) and Gaul have their distinguished
representatives.
Considerations like these should make it clear how vast an influence
Latin literature must have wielded both directly and indirectly. The
modern languages of France, Spain, Portugal, Roumania, and Italy are
various continuations of the Latin; and France, Spain, Portugal, and
Italy, despite all historical changes, have been neither able nor
desirous to shake off the guidance and impulses of Latin literature. This
is one reason why it is the French and Italians who find their chief
study in Virgil and Horace, Cicero and Seneca, whereas the Teutons,
exerting a greater freedom of choice, more distinctly recognize the
superiority of Homer and Sappho, Demosthenes and Aeschylus.
Needless to say that the people which could build and govern such an
empire and hold it so long together must have been a people of strong
innate quality. It need be no surprise that it was hardly an imaginative
or artistic quality. It is, indeed, scarcely open to dispute that the old
Roman and his kindred Italian tribes were marked by a comparative lack of
fine imagination. Not only in war and politics, in legal and political
institutions, but in intellectual culture they were a most practical and
literal-minded race.
We are apt, in looking at the modern Frenchman or Italian, to commit
two large errors. Because they frequently appear excitable in temper
and demonstrative in gesture, we incline to put them down not only as
passionate, but as profound in sentiment, feeling, and imagination. Yet,
in point of fact, still waters run deep, here as elsewhere. The second
error is greater still. We judge the old Latin stock from the so-called
“Neo-Latin” peoples, or those who speak the neo-Latin tongues. Yet in
many cases the “Neo-Latins” have but a comparatively small infusion of
Roman blood still running in their veins. In some cases their forbears
must have had none at all.
We can only judge the old Latin race, as especially embodied in the
Roman, from its literature, its history and its institutions. From these
we gather that it was a stock excellent for great ideals in the way
of conquering and administering, a people of admirable commanders and
engineers and jurists, a practical people, but a people not distinguished
by brilliance of fancy, great delicacy of taste, notable depth of
imagination or poignancy of feeling. Roman literature, left to itself,
would, we may believe, have proved a very solid and rather heavy thing.
The Latin language is like the Roman people. It is a language of great
logical method and strict system of structure. As languages go, it
is unusually free from idioms in the proper sense of the word. It is
distinctly a solid and stately, but distinctly not a flexible, speech.
And yet, despite the innate character of the Latin stock, and the
unyielding nature of the language, Latin literature is not so eminently
practical and massive as we might expect.
For this there are two reasons. The one is that a large number of
the chief writers of Latin literature are not themselves of unmixed
Latin birth; they possess Celtic blood, or Greek blood, or some other
non-Roman strain. Virgil came from Mantua, Catullus from Verona, Horace
from Venusia, and other writers from other northern, southern, or even
Spanish towns. The second reason is that, before Roman literature had
properly earned the name, it had come into contact with the fully
developed art of Greece, both Attic and Alexandrian, and forthwith
became a literature of imitation. Feeling its limitations, the Latin
genius submitted its own tendencies to the correction of a people whom
it instinctively recognized as superior in this domain. But here an
important qualification must be made. It cannot be too much insisted
upon that Latin literature hardly rose at all till Greek literature was
far decayed. Unhappily, when the Roman writers set about imitating their
masters, they exploited, it is true, the matter or substance of anything
Greek, and of any period, but the style and form which they affected were
rather those of the later and inferior Greeks of Alexandria, not those of
the perfect earlier masters of Attica and Ionia. It is in any case easier
to imitate what is affected or “loud” or artificial than what is simply
and naturally strong and beautiful.
Latin literature, in the sense in which we are to treat it, may be
divided into three main periods. The first is that of immature art,
of vigorous but ill-disciplined imitation of Greek models, of growing
mastery over language. It is a period of preparation, the “iron age,”
corresponding roughly to the period of English literature before the
Revival of Learning. The date of this epoch is from 250 to 80 B.C., and
it embraces the best days of the republic. During all this time the
literature, rough and poor as it was, was sincere enough. It was meant
for the people and for a purpose. For us, however, it contains little of
any consequence besides the comedies of Plautus and Terence.
The second period is that of highest excellence in prose and poetry,
the age of Cicero, Lucretius, Catullus, Sallust, Caesar, Livy, Virgil,
Horace, and Ovid. This is the “golden age,” and may be dated from 80
B.C. to A.D. 14, a period during which the republic was passing into an
empire, and when great men played their parts in great historical dramas;
men like Sulla and Pompey, Julius Caesar, Antony, and Augustus. The
latter half of this period, which extends from 30 B.C. to A.D. 14, and
includes the names of Livy, Virgil, Horace, and Ovid, coincides with the
rule of Augustus, and is therefore called the “Augustan” age. In other
words, the Augustan age is the second half of the “golden” age. It is
from 80 B.C. to A.D. 14 that Latin literature and the Latin language are
at their highest degree of perfection. But, unhappily, at least during
the second half, it is also a time when writers and readers are coming
more and more to form a special literary class, which stands far aloof
from the great public and its urgent or spontaneous interests.
The third period, the “silver age,” is that of the despotic and often
tyrant emperors, when freedom of speech no longer existed, when the
autocrat, a servile aristocracy, and a vicious populace occupied the
capital. At this date literature is but a forced product without real
motive or inspiration. It is characterized by declamation and rhetoric,
by smart epigram, by cynicism and satire, by clever expression. Such is
the period of Seneca, Lucan, Martial, Tacitus, Pliny, Juvenal. It may be
put down roughly as extending from A.D. 14 to the year 150.
These three epochs are peculiarly well defined; they are universally
recognized, because so conspicuously recognizable.
* * * * *
The first real incentive to literature among the Romans sprang from the
contact into which they came with the Greeks of southern Italy and Sicily
when their conquests reached so far. This was in the third century B.C.
Until the Greek influence was strongly felt, we meet only with a series
of rude records, or of uncouth and clownish verses of a satirical or
farcical sort. From the rude records there began to develop themselves
histories and epics; from the farces and satirical verses were destined
to come the drama of tragedy and comedy and the literary satire; this,
however, did not occur till the communication with Greece was full and
close, and Greek material at hand to be utilized.
The first branch of Latin literature with which we need deal is the drama
of comedy and tragedy. Practically this limits itself to the popular
comedy of Plautus and Terence in the “iron” age, and the artificial and
rhetorical tragedy of Seneca in the “silver” period.
Titus Maccius Plautus, who flourished about the year 210 B.C., and
Publius Terentius, a generation later, are more nearly allied to each
other than are Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. It is only the special
student of literature who need be concerned to elaborate the full
distinction between them. Plautus has the more of broad and boisterous
fun and drollery, Terence has the subtler humour and the more artistic
style and architecture. But both alike borrow plots and even dialogue
wholesale from those Greek comedians of whom Menander is a type. They
both adapt Greek plays, just as English playwrights once adapted Molière,
and recently adapted Sardou. The Latin adaptations, however, were of
quite undisguised closeness, if not of positive servility. Whereas our
playwrights seek to make their adaptations entirely English, Plautus
and Terence did not seek to make theirs entirely Roman. It is true that
their plots were based on real life, but it was a Greek life and not
a Roman life. The scene was always in a Greek city. Imbecile fathers
duped by spendthrift sons, jealous husbands outwitted and stultified,
cunning and unscrupulous slaves playing the part of _dei ex machina_,
armies of cooks, confidantes and nondescripts—these things, which appear
monotonously, are not really Roman. Those who read the earlier plays
of Molière generally grow somewhat weary of the clever _valets_, the
Mascarilles, of the dupes, of the Sganarelles, and of the conventional
tricks upon parents and husbands. The truth is that Molière, at this
stage of his career, in imitating or adapting Plautus and Terence, was
almost as far from the real life of Paris in his own day as Plautus and
Terence were from the real life of Rome. _Les Fourberies de Scapin_ is as
distinct and as unconvincing an adaptation of the _Phormio_ of Terence as
Shakespeare’s early _Comedy of Errors_ is of Plautus’s _Menaechmi_.
Now it is a noteworthy fact, as illustrating how doubly exotic a thing
Latin literature was, that neither Plautus nor Terence was a true-born
Roman. Plautus was a countryman of Umbria, Terence was an African of
Carthage. Yet it was these two who remained the only considerable writers
of Latin comedy, and the whole of their work was adaptation, free
translation, or guileless plagiarism.
To our subject these writers are of no small account, in virtue of the
fact that they were the progenitors of Italian comedy, thence of Molière,
and, from Molière, of our own comic stage of the seventeenth, and the
earlier and greater part of the eighteenth, century, the ages of Congreve
and Farquhar, and of Fielding and Sheridan.
Tragedy, the other and nobler half of drama, took its rise in Latin
literature as early as the year 240 B.C.; but the obscure names of
Andronicus (who, as usual, was not a genuine Roman, but a Greek) and of
Naevius (who likewise was not a genuine Roman, but a Calabrian) need not
here detain us. The one considerable personage in the whole history of
the Latin tragic stage is Seneca, the Spanish-born Roman of the middle
of the first century A.D. Unfortunately, this one important figure is
also the incarnation of the defects of his epoch. He touches no real
chord in the public mind or heart; he borrows his subject-matter from the
Greeks—Greek gods, Greek heroes, Greek plots; there is nothing national,
local, nothing really natural or alive, about his work. The tragedies
are mainly excuses for putting fine declamatory speeches or brilliant
phrases into the mouths of the characters. They are, in short, exercises
in oratory, masquerading in dramatic form. In all probability they were
never intended for the stage. Those who know what Addison’s _Cato_
is like in its coldness and artificiality, those also who know French
literature and can remember the declamation in the least interesting of
the works of Corneille and Racine, can form a very fair notion of the
salient characteristics of the tragedy of Seneca. It was Seneca, the
easily accessible Latin model, whom the Italian and French tragedians
deliberately copied, and who in turn determined the style of Addison’s
_Cato_.
It is perhaps well to remark at this point how thoroughly unreal in every
domain of Latin literature is that part which deals with the gods. The
native Roman religion had no Olympus, no nymphs. It was a cold and formal
worship of gods either far removed or quite artificial abstractions.
To a Roman the Greek gods and heroes who fill Latin poetry are more or
less ornamental make-believe. They are introduced and regarded rather
as poetical properties, virtually meaning little more to the cultivated
Romans than the Roman gods, in their turn, mean to an English writer
of the eighteenth century, when he talks of Venus or Jove. Therefore,
whether it be tragedy or epic or lyric, a dispiriting artificiality
generally—although Virgil is an exception—drops upon Latin literature
immediately that we find ourselves among the gods and their doings. Yet
it cannot be too often repeated that the saving grace of literature is
sincerity. No immortal writing can base itself upon convention and a sham.
Perhaps one of the most deplorable legacies left to us by the influence
of Latin literature has been the introduction of Jupiter, Juno, Venus,
Cupid, Mars, Vulcan, the nymphs, the Graces and the rest into the
_répertoire_ of what is called poetic diction. As the eighteenth century,
more than any other, was dominated by the artificial principles of Roman
literature, both directly and through the French, so in that century
these names became a set of tinsel tokens to take the place and conceal
the lack of honest and genuine ideas and their natural expression.
* * * * *
Leaving Plautus and Terence, we turn to the golden age of Latin
literature, its most classical period. Most classical, because during
that period its works attain to the “class,” the class of the best
in their kind. It is between the year 80 B.C. and A.D. 14 that Latin
literature reaches this best, although the kind itself may be in
frankness considered not of the most sublime. In point of matter and
style Latin literature attains its acme during these last active days of
the republic and under the fostering, but at the same time cramping, care
of the first emperor, the great Augustus, and his favourite and minister,
the munificent Maecenas.
Before this golden period Latin work had been crude, rough, and
inharmonious. It is now perfectly polished and used for polished
purposes. On the other hand, after this period, in the silver age,
there is a loss of purpose, of healthy and genuine subject-matter, and
consequently an indulgence in strained cleverness, far-drawn epigram,
empty declamation. But during this period itself Latin in the hands of
Cicero, Lucretius, Caesar, Catullus, Virgil, Livy, Horace, and Ovid is
for the most part sober and restrained. It may not, in most of these
cases, delve very deep or soar very high, but at least it is both
admirable workmanship and marked by sober and practical sense. In the
poetry of the epic, the lyric, and the elegiac; in the prose of history,
oratory, and philosophy; in all but satire and epigram (which by their
nature flourish best in times of decadence), this golden period far
transcends the age which followed. It is not in this period that neatly
executed nothings, verbal conceits in the absence of true matter,
out-of-the-way learning and allusions, take the place of thinking.
It is true that during this Ciceronian and Augustan age the Roman
literary art was always conscious in its workmanship, always studied and
deliberate, always intentionally aiming at finish or style, at skill and
beauty and harmony of expression. It is true that it was seldom prompted
by instinct like the Greek. It is true that it was nearly all imitative,
unoriginal. But it is also true that it was sensible withal, free from
absolute rodomontade, bathos, or frivolity.
* * * * *
The department of poetry from which Latin literature derives most
nobility, if no other quality, is the epic. The two greatest epics of the
world are indisputably the _Iliad_ of Homer and the _Aeneid_ of Virgil.
The _Jerusalem Delivered_ of the Italian poet Tasso and the _Paradise
Lost_ of the English Milton rank next, but the distance between either
of these works and the Greek and Roman epics is scarcely to be bridged.
Probably an epic in the old-world sense is scarcely possible under our
modern social conditions and philosophic limitations.
The epic is the poem of a great action of a great hero. There may be many
episodes in the shape of other actions performed by other characters,
but, if the art is to be true, all must bear some appreciable relation
to, or centre upon, the said great action of the chief great figure.
Virgil’s _Aeneid_ is an epic left somewhat incomplete; its hero is
Aeneas, and the great action is the founding of the Roman race. In the
poem are described the wanderings of Aeneas from Troy, his adventures by
sea and land, his love of Dido and its calamitous ending, his landing
in Italy, his descent to the nether world and the sights he there
beholds, his wars and victories over the native Italian princes. But the
foundation of the Roman race is never reached, the work, which consists
already of some 10,000 lines, having been left unfinished.
The more serious purpose of this fine and noble work was to give to the
Romans a great national poem, and to supply them, now that they were
masters of the world, with an origin of which to be proud. In this aim
the poet completely succeeded, establishing himself at the same time as
the supreme national poet of the Empire. We may refrain from blaming
him if, meanwhile, he sought to offer poetical incense to the emperor
Augustus, by connecting him in direct descent with the Aeneas of heroic
exploits and half-divine birth. In such conscious purposes Virgil differs
entirely from Homer. Homer composed his verse to be heard or read by all
and sundry for its own sake, as a narrative full of life and interest and
verbal charm. His works have a nearer claim to be called effusions. But
Virgil necessarily writes without a simple strong conviction, with more
conscious toil of art, as a greatly gifted man of letters writing for men
of culture. Spontaneous he assuredly is not. Homer had described battles
and councils in the _Iliad_, and wanderings and marvels in the _Odyssey_.
Virgil borrows the battles or the wanderings, and weaves them with
wonderful art into one poem. He takes the similes and imagery of Homer
and other Greeks; he translates or paraphrases much of their diction;
he “finds his good things wherever he can” and works all into a mosaic,
which is exceedingly dexterous, vigorous and polished, but which cannot
be called original. The chief sphere of his originality is perhaps to be
found in the rhetorical strength and adroitness of many of the speeches
which he puts into the mouths of his characters.
Virgil is essentially a writer for the lover of verbal art. For those who
can read Latin with easy and scholarly apprehension he appears to combine
the splendid harmonies of Milton with the studied grace of Tennyson and
often the polished conciseness of Pope. It is impossible to translate
him so as to convey any adequate idea of these qualities, for it is
exactly these which are untranslatable. Matthew Arnold, in his _Essays in
Criticism_, speaks of individual lines which may serve as touchstones of
poetic virtue. In the mere matter of sound each great writer is apt to be
distinguishable by such isolated lines. Milton, for example, is only one
of many who have written in blank verse. Yet a fragment like
A dungeon horrible on all sides round
As one great furnace flamed
instantly reveals Milton. Virgil answers to the same test of
indescribable and incommunicable quality.
To the ignorant Middle Ages Virgil became a name to conjure with. He
grew, with little apparent reason except his general poetic fame, to be
regarded as the embodiment of all pagan wisdom, and it is for this reason
that Dante puts himself under the guidance of Virgil in his Hell and
Purgatory, though it is the Christian Beatrice, and not the pagan poet,
who accompanies him into Paradise. Dante’s _Inferno_ is the sixth book
of Virgil’s _Aeneid_ expanded and adapted to the strange blend of rapt
mysticism and crude realism which prevailed under mediaeval Catholicism.
It is from Virgil’s sixth book, combined with Dante, that Milton derives
the main hint and many of the particular suggestions for his Hell in
_Paradise Lost_. And it is, in short, to Virgil that all epics have
looked since his _Aeneid_ once appeared.
Virgil is not, indeed, the only epic poet of Rome, although immeasurably
the greatest. Lucan, in the silver age, composed an epic poem of the
“great action” of Julius Caesar in crushing Pompey. Like most of the
productions of that period of the second best, the _Pharsalia_ is full
of epigrammatic sayings, deliberate _tours de force_ and brilliant
rhetoric, together with much unreal sentiment, false taste, and grotesque
or repellent detail. According to Quintilian Lucan is “more fit to be
ranked amongst orators than poets.” Soon afterwards comes Statius with
his _Thebaid_, or epic of Thebes, a work of great pains and little life,
here and there beautified with those rather morbid colours which have
been known to suggest the dying dolphin, but incapable of sustaining any
natural interest. If he was called “Virgil’s ape,” the censure is hardly
too severe. To us, however, the poem is of some account as having formed
a portion of the staple reading in the days of Chaucer, who refers to
“Stace” with avowed admiration. The tale of _Palamon and Arcite_, which
Chaucer so admirably transformed from Boccaccio, owes its origin to this
somewhat insipid epic of the Roman. Meanwhile the world has been content
to forget the partial versions of Statius essayed by Pope or Gray.
In Lyric poetry, apart from the elegiac style, there are two names,
and two only, which stand out upon the chart of Roman history. One is
Catullus, the other Horace, and both are of the golden age, although of
different halves of that epoch. Catullus flourished under the republic
about 60 B.C., Horace under Augustus a generation later. It is curious
to observe how the verdict of taste is reversing the positions once held
in the general estimation by these two exquisite writers. Time was, and
not so long ago, when Horace was more read and quoted than any other poet
of antiquity. He was quoted at dinners, in literature, in parliament. It
was taken for granted that he represented the _ne plus ultra_ of lyric
quality. Catullus, it is true, was praised, but comparatively neglected
withal. But those who love literature as much for its substance as its
form, who seek for inward warmth and for stimulation of the pulses as
well as for pleasure of the palate, and who are attracted by the sterling
rather than by the elaborated—these set Catullus on a plane to which
Horace never reaches. Horace has been called “the poet of the man of the
world,” and the phrase, while fairly true, is manifestly not the highest
commendation. Those who read him without prepossession discover that
under all his gracefulness he is naturally unimaginative; that, feeling
little, he has little power over the heart; and, furthermore, that he
is prone to a peculiar inconsequence. Among his virtues is included the
characteristic Roman virtue of sound practical sense; but lyric poetry
is hardly to be satisfied with that merit. As a man of letters he takes
his rank from the perfection of his expression, from his consummate
skill of putting the fittest word in the fittest place with a singular
terseness and lucidity. To the ancient critic his work was marked by
a _curiosa felicitas_—a “painstaking happiness” of phrase. Meanwhile
Catullus possesses a far higher gift, the gift of experiencing a sincere
emotion and of communicating it by a rare directness and simplicity
of expression, almost after the manner of the Lesbian lyrists or of
Robert Burns. This is not to deny that Catullus was a conscious artist,
but perfect literature consists in this, that art expends itself on
expressing a feeling sincerely felt or a thought sincerely conceived.
Upon English literature the Latin lyrists, and more especially Horace,
have exercised a far-reaching influence, sometimes with the full
consciousness of the English poet, more often indirectly. The “Horatian
Ode”—that is to say, the ode in which there is but one comparative short
form of stanza repeated throughout—explains its own genesis by its name.
In other cases of English lyrics it is not easy, nor is it necessary,
to distinguish precisely between the debt due to the Latin writers and
that due to native-grown song and ballad. English lyrics of feeling would
necessarily have developed themselves in some shape without the aid of
foreign example, but in point of fact, the Elizabethans, and still more
the “cavalier” poets of the seventeenth century, were in the habit of
looking to Horace, and in a less degree to Catullus, for suggestions
of form and expression and occasionally of thought. For one external
indication of this attitude we may look to the practice of the school
of Herrick, Suckling, Lovelace, and Waller, who (following Elizabethan
sonneteers) habitually call their inspiring mistresses by the names of
“Lesbia,” “Delia,” “Chloe,” and the like, for no other reason than that
these are the non-committal names sanctioned by the usage of the Latin
lyrists.
Elegiac poetry, which, though properly a branch of lyric, has acquired
a form and character practically constituting it a class apart, was
cultivated and brought to perfection by a group of poets in the last
third of the last century before Christ. Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid
are the representatives in Latin of a form of art which had flourished
greatly in the lyric age of classical Greece, and had been revived with
much distinction, but with a new tone of sentiment, by Callimachus in
the age of Alexandria. In Latin Catullus had already taken Callimachus
for a model, and transplanted the elegy to Rome. But it was the group
above-named who in turns imparted to such compositions a specially Roman
character in respect of exacting rules of form. The elegy in early
Greece found various themes in martial and social exhortations, moral
sentiments, and advice, or in the expression of personal feelings in
different moods. If at Alexandria its matter consisted most frequently of
the thoughts and moods of the lover, the modification was due to altered
social conditions. It is hard to say what themes might not be treated in
the elegiac form, provided they were of moderate length and scope. The
Latin poets use the fullest liberty in this respect. Thus Ovid not only
writes his _Amores_ or love-poems in the usual sense, his _Tristia_ or
personal sorrows in banishment, and his _Letters of Heroines_, in which
the writers pour out their feelings to their absent or unfaithful lovers
or husbands, but he also puts together stories of Roman history into
a sort of calendar, which is accordingly named the _Fasti_. A modern
poem of reflection, an “occasional” poem, a sonnet, or even Milton’s
_Lycidas_, would alike be fitly converted into Latin elegiac verse.
Of the three elegists, Propertius, though remarkably unequal in quality,
and often rough and obscure (with an obscurity which suggests Browning),
in both expression and allusion, shows the most of native strength and
emotional sincerity. Tibullus is the lucid and graceful exponent of the
pensive commonplace. Ovid, the master of verbal polish and concision, is
to the elegy very much what Horace is to the ode. Facile and prolific, he
touches few subjects which he does not adorn. Unfortunately the subjects
which he touches are too often shallow and morally unworthy. His attitude
is that of a man not only without moral care, but without capacity for
any genuine ardour or emotion. He charms with his variety, and with his
grace and dexterity of treatment, but he strikes none of those full
or poignant chords which are wont to be stirred by elegies in Greek or
English literature.
* * * * *
Other forms of poetical composition among the Romans were the bucolic (or
pastoral eclogue), the philosophic, the didactic, the narrative, and the
poetry of fable.
Of bucolic or pastoral poetry, as written by the Greeks, something
has already been said, as also of the pedigree of this species before
its arrival in the literature of England. In Latin literature it is
represented almost solely by Virgil, his later imitator Calpurnius
being of little account either in himself or his effects. Virgil is
the first to introduce the species into Latin, and the line of descent
from Theocritus through Virgil to the Italians Sannazaro and Mantuan,
and thence to Spenser, is distinct and undisguised. In verse of a
certain subtle charm of movement, tinged occasionally with a deliberate
rusticity, and pervaded with a suggestion of pensive sympathy rare in
Latin writers, Virgil ostensibly tells in dramatic or semi-dramatic
form of the loves, labours, sorrows, and songs of shepherds, goatherds,
and other simple rural folk. Under this cover, however, he is often in
reality touching upon his own personal experiences and those of his
friends, or gently couching some poetical moral, or finding a safe vent
for the mild philosophizings of his meditative youth. Something of
the kind had already been done by the Greek imitators of Theocritus,
but Virgil goes much further than they. He has thus changed the whole
nature of the pastoral, and, artistically considered, for the worse.
The shepherds are no longer real and convincing, and the truth of
nature’s mirror is destroyed. Nevertheless, through a happy trick of
cadence, felicitous touches of natural description, and an indescribable
atmosphere of sympathy, the _Eclogues_ are wont to exert a charm which
defies criticism to do its worst.
Didactic poetry is met with in Virgil’s _Georgics_, or _Rules for
Husbandmen_. In four compositions he deals with corn-crops, fruit-trees,
cattle-breeding, and bee-keeping. The model was supplied, as usual, by
the Alexandrian Greeks, and for these the ancient inventor and the source
was Hesiod. There is no reason to doubt Virgil’s genuine interest in
these practical rustic themes. But, being essentially a poet and not a
farmer, he is not to be satisfied with versifying, however skilfully, a
list of useful precepts. If the work was, as Merivale considers it, the
“glorification of labour,” it served meanwhile as a frame for special
passages of great beauty upon topics more or less naturally associated
with the matter in hand. The poet on occasion finds it no long step to
take from the weather to eclipses, from eclipses to the death of Caesar,
and from Caesar to patriotic reflections. The digressions are not so far
afield, nor so numerous as in Cowper’s _Task_, but that work may perhaps
be cited in partial illustration.
Didactic in another kind is that short _Art of Poetry_, written in deft
verse by Horace, which was copied by Boileau in his _Art Poétique_,
and freely utilized by Pope in his _Essay on Criticism_. Its professed
aim is to inculcate certain principles of poetic composition, and, in
particular, the composition of drama. Inasmuch as Horace was drawing
upon Greek doctrines derived from Aristotle, but not always understood
by their somewhat superficial Roman poetizer; inasmuch also as poetic
drama had no real existence in the days of Horace, there was little
prospect that the _Art of Poetry_ would shed any new illumination upon
the world. To those who have read the seminal work of Aristotle, the
precepts of Horace inevitably appear rather trite and shallow. The
writer here, as elsewhere, is marked by shrewd and humorous good sense
and a gift of terse expression, and it must be admitted that these form
an excellent endowment for the middleman of intellectual traffic. The
essay would doubtless be read by his contemporaries with enjoyment, and
in many cases with edification. The misfortune is that, from the later
seventeenth century onwards, it was the superficial Horace rather than
the fundamental Aristotle who served as dictator of the laws of verse to
both England and France.
Philosophic verse, which is, of course, a species of the didactic,
finds its best representative, not merely for Latin literature, but
for the literature of the world, in Lucretius, who wrote during the
latter days of republican Rome. His poem _On the Nature of Things_ is an
exposition of the philosophy of Epicurus, as developed from the physical
speculations of Democritus. According to this philosophy the original
contents of the universe were minute atoms, the “seeds” or “elements”
of things, moving in a void. By their fortuitous collisions and various
combinations were formed all things as they are or have been. To this
extent had ancient speculation, combining bold imagination with close
reasoning, anticipated modern chemistry and astronomical hypothesis.
From crude and accidental beginnings, says Lucretius, there ensues a
“survival of the fittest,” and thus, though unaided by modern scientific
appliances, and imperfectly directed from the point of view of modern
scientific method, ancient speculation anticipates also the doctrines of
modern evolutionists. In the application of these results to the conduct
of life (which is the practical aim of philosophy) it is evident that
current theology must receive a severe blow. To Lucretius the chief
blessing derived from the true philosophy is that man is emancipated
from superstition, with all its terrors in life and death and all the
mischiefs it has worked. We may conjecture that the soul of the poet
himself, which was brooding and melancholy, would have been eminently
impressible by superstitious dread, if it had not been fortified by this
wisdom of “the master.” His fervent onslaught on _religio_ (in the Latin
sense) and its crushing effects can hardly be otherwise explained. He
does not—nor did Epicurus—absolutely deny the existence of gods; these
are logically as producible as other “things.” What he denies is their
interference with the processes of nature. All this and more he sets
forth in the six books of the _De Rerum Natura_.
In the use of verse as the vehicle of philosophic teaching, Lucretius
is but following the lead of the older Greeks, Empedocles, Xenophanes,
or Parmenides. The task is technically difficult, and in modern times
it would be purposeless. But for Lucretius we must not only grant the
utility of the method in awakening intellectual interest as widely as
possible among a community less prepared for philosophy than for poetry;
we are also compelled to recognize that his effort to make philosophy
talk in Latin verse was technically a triumph. Yet Lucretius is much more
than a translator of Greek philosophy into Latin hexameters. He is a
poet. Doubtless the passages in which he is setting forth bare statement
of theory, or bare argument, are of necessity as dull as many passages
of theologizing in Milton’s _Paradise Lost_ or _Paradise Regained_,
or as many passages in Wordsworth’s _Excursion_. But when the poetic
opportunity arrives, and when he is irresistibly borne away with such
reflections as those upon the life and death of man, he writes in lines
as splendid as those of Milton and Wordsworth at their best. Through
all the work there is a tone of the ardent missionary of intellectual
deliverance, blent with a certain melancholy which recalls Ecclesiastes.
Latin literature is not strong in great intellectual forces, but among
these Lucretius must hold a foremost place.
Narrative poetry, apart from epic, occupies no large space in the
literature of Latin. The _Metamorphoses_ of Ovid practically stand
alone. These, written in a lighter and more fluent hexameter than that
of Virgil’s _Aeneid_, are a series of stories dealing, as the title
shows, with the various transformations undergone by human beings in
mythology or legend. If there is anything in Latin answering to the
“romantic” elements in Ariosto or Spenser it is to be found here. The
author, knowing the stories to be fabulous, employs all his fancy
and inventiveness, his descriptive power and gift of language, in
embellishing them. Men and women are turned into beasts, birds, monsters,
trees, or stones with much poetic gusto of circumstance. The want of
real unity is no drawback to the work; the telling of the legends is
brilliant; the stories themselves are such as at all times appeal to the
lovers of the romantic and the marvellous, and particularly to the young.
From these causes it is not too much to say that the influence of the
_Metamorphoses_ has been immeasurable. The usual mediaeval, renaissance,
and modern _répertoires_ of mythological story have been almost entirely
derived from Ovid. To the better read contemporaries of Chaucer, as
of Shakespeare, Ovid supplied not only the matter, but the spirit of
such narrative. Such a familiar legend as that touching one of Philemon
and Baucis may be Greek in origin, but it is Ovid who has made it the
property of the later western world.
Not inappropriately may be introduced here the mention of a minor writer,
whose work, despite its slender substance and its narrow range of genius,
has been far-reaching in its legacy. This is Phaedrus, the versifier
of fables in the reign of Tiberius. With no special brilliancy or gift
of invention, but with a style of lucid simplicity which is excellent
for such narration, Phaedrus puts into verse the Greek fables—commonly
fathered all alike on “Aesop”—which he could find current in his day.
The collection is probably much the same as that of the Greek Demetrius
Phalereus (300 B.C.). From the point of view of both morals and language
the book served admirably for schoolboys, and it is at least one of the
main sources of the fables which found their way into England, first with
Alfred, and later, in more force, with Caxton’s “Aesop.”
In one branch of verse-writing, which must next be considered, the
Roman writers have every claim to the credit of originality. There has
always been, as there is at the present day, in the Italian mind a
pronounced strain of satire and irony, a tendency to lampoon and epigram,
a disposition to look on the seamy or ridiculous side of things. The
Aretino of later Italy is a true descendant of the Lucilius of ancient
Rome. The Romans themselves claimed as their very own the form of
composition known as _satura_. Satire, as a tone, may appear in Greek
writers of various kinds; it may even approach a special recognition
in certain portions of the Old Comedy of Athens; but there existed no
Greek example of a separate composition with the character implied in
“a satire.” The word itself, however, demands some examination. To us
it primarily implies fault-finding, general or particular, and such the
satire became, particularly in the hands of Juvenal. But originally
_satura_ meant a mixed dish, a medley of observations upon society and
men. These observations naturally took the form of describing habits and
revealing motives. It would follow that, according to the temperament
of the writer, the _satura_ might become either a moral essay or a
satire in the modern sense. Bitterness is not properly essential to such
compositions, and in the _Satires_ of Horace there is comparatively
little of that quality. His _Epistles_, which are practically only
_saturae_ under another name, are still more distinguished by geniality.
Nevertheless, just as “censure” began by meaning “judgement” and has
come to mean unfavourable judgement, so “satire” speedily limited
its implication even among the Romans. A hundred years before Horace
a certain Lucilius (of whom only fragments remain) had practised a
vigorous but rough invective in his _saturae_, but for us it is Horace
who represents the establishment of satire as a species of cultivated
writing. To him these compositions were _sermones_, or “talks,” and
they were permitted to serve as the vehicle for a frank egotism not
unlike that of the _Essais_ of Montaigne. They are “satirical” in that
they from time to time administer more or less caustic chastisement to
contemporary follies or vices. Three-quarters of a century later, in the
silver age, Persius put forth a small book of satires full of promise,
but also full of faults in the way of obscurities and artificialities of
style. Trained as a philosopher, he had studied mankind from books, and
particularly from Horace, rather than from experience, and, as he died at
twenty-eight, it may be presupposed that his insight is far from deep.
Fortunately he was withheld from the savage invective customary with
youth by his philosophic sincerity and the mildness of his nature. It is
early in the next century that satire, in the hands of Juvenal, becomes
the polished and trenchant weapon of offence now commonly understood by
the term. Juvenal became, and has remained, the very prince of those
who condense wit and sarcasm into pungent and rememberable lines of the
most consummate terseness. He possesses a singular power of presenting
moral vices and social foibles and follies in all their contemptibleness,
and there is ample reason to believe that, as he expressed it, it was
indignation which created his lines. It is Juvenal and Horace, though
chiefly the former, who have served as models for Dryden and Pope,
for Hall and Butler, and for Byron in his _English Bards and Scotch
Reviewers_. The less fierce and more descriptive part of Juvenal’s work
also found a notable imitation in Johnson, whose _London_ is copied from
one satire and his _Vanity of Human Wishes_ from another.
Often cognate to satire is epigram, as treated by Martial, a writer of
the generation preceding Juvenal. An epigram is, in fact, apt to be a
stinging satire in little. This is, however, a very distinct departure
from the nature and province of epigram as employed by the Greeks. Of
this something has already been said. It would, nevertheless, be a
mistake to suppose that the narrow sense now usually, if erroneously,
given to “epigram” was equally the sense in which it would have been
understood by the contemporaries of Martial. The “sting in the tail” is
by no means indispensable. That the wit and verbal dexterity of Martial
were so often applied to caustic purposes was no hindrance to the use of
the same qualities in epigrams of compliment, of fancy, of description,
and of mere humour. We cannot, it is true, assign to Martial a place
in “poetry” proper. A man without convictions or much refinement of
feeling, but well acquainted with his world, witty, and a manipulator
of phrase, he poured out more than a thousand of these little pieces,
many excellent, many execrable, many indifferent. But in this species of
literature—be it worth what it may—it is Martial who has determined the
form and matter of the epigram for modern Europe.
* * * * *
In prose, Roman literature is very copious, although not equally
rich in all domains. Its chief strength lies in history, after which
come philosophical works, oratory, and letter-writing. With Roman
jurisprudence and with grammatical (or philological) writing we are
not here concerned. The famous Cato, the Censor (184 B.C.), has left
us a treatise _On Agriculture_, consisting of practical maxims which
are scarcely literature; and a large number of didactic works (many of
which are not preserved, or only preserved in fragments) were produced
at different dates of the republic or the empire by men of distinction.
Thus Varro, a most erudite contemporary of Cicero, wrote voluminously
upon _Antiquities Human and Divine_, upon _The Latin Language_, and upon
_Agriculture_. Seneca the elder, in the reign of Tiberius, collected
educational examples of methods of rhetorical disputation. In the time of
Claudius medicine was treated by Celsus. Columella exhausted the subject
of agriculture. During the Flavian _régime_ Frontinus composed a treatise
on aqueducts and another upon military operations, and the laborious
Pliny the elder put together thirty-seven books on _Natural History_, a
vast cyclopaedia of mixed truth and untruth concerning all departments
of natural science, the arts connected therewith, and the fine arts to
boot. But, whatever merits and demerits of style these works display,
they hardly merit discussion in so general an outline of literary
history as this. It is impossible to say what information or ideas in
our modern possession might be traceable to writers like these, but
they can scarcely rank as appreciable “literary influences.” Doubtless
Pliny’s encyclopaedia is ultimately responsible for much of the confused
natural history of the middle ages, and not only Chaucer, but also the
sixteenth-century Euphuists, with their egregious similitudes, are almost
certainly in his debt. The affiliation of scientific knowledge and error,
however, lies beyond our scope.
In the field of history, Latin literature presents us with various
attitudes and styles. Historical writing in general may be of at least
three salient kinds. The first kind is imaginative, credulous, careless
of accuracy so long as the story is attractive, the narrative being, as
Quintilian would have it, “akin to poetry.” In the second kind, sheer
imagination may play no pronounced part, but there may be a rhetorical
tendency to embellish and expand, and to exaggerate the lights and
shades. The third kind is direct, simple, impartial, shrewdly critical.
In classical Roman history we have (besides the “Lives” of Nepos),
the works of Sallust, Caesar, Livy, Tacitus, and Suetonius. We cannot
take all these together and refer them to any one of the above-named
descriptions. So far as there is a characteristic common to any group of
them it is to be found in the fact that Sallust, Livy, and Tacitus all
show in various ways the customary Roman taste for rhetorical effect.
To this extent they are not greater sinners than Macaulay or Carlyle,
who, like them, fall into the second of the divisions described.
Meanwhile the _Commentaries_ (or “Notebooks”) of Caesar offer the best
example that Latin can supply of the third style. His plain narrative
in straightforward Latin is easily distinguished from the rich and
picturesque eloquence of Livy, the conscious stylism and laboured
point of Sallust, and the epigrammatic brilliance of Tacitus. Once
more Suetonius, a naturally inferior writer in a decadent age, is the
precursor, in his _Lives of the Twelve Caesars_, of that less ambitious
history which gossips and “deals in _ana_” concerning great personages
and their surroundings. Among all the Roman writers it is in vain that
we seek the historian who will, like Thucydides, describe the facts with
a lucid and serene impartiality, while clothing them with that style of
supreme art which makes them live before the reader.
These qualifications made, it still remains indisputable that Livy and
Tacitus are two of the very foremost historians in the literature of
the world. The unpretentious work of Caesar has its claim as well as
its intrinsic interest, but it cannot rank with these. Sallust, despite
undeniable merits, is placed in a minor rank by the triteness of his
ideas and the obviousness of his reflections. But Livy, in virtue of his
superb eloquence and unflagging descriptive power, and Tacitus, in virtue
of his shrewd insight and vivid presentation in a style inimitable for
its sparkling condensation—these will remain for ever admirable, as they
were, one or other, admired and followed by Gibbon, Macaulay, or Carlyle.
Of the vast work of Livy, written in the reign of Augustus, and entitled
_The History of Rome from its Foundation_, we possess but a portion,
although that portion is in itself of considerable dimensions. As Latin
prose, the style is magnificent in variety and colour. It may be called
Gibbon, without Gibbon’s sameness or too frequent ponderousness; Gibbon
warmed by patriotic ardour. That it sometimes suggests the poetical
is assuredly no drawback to what, after all, is a narrative intended
primarily to be read. As sober history it suffers from the shortcoming
that Livy hardly concerns himself with the verification and criticism of
authorities. He does not wholly emancipate himself from the first type of
historian. If Tacitus, a hundred years later, cannot be called credulous,
neither can he be called impartial. While we have no right to doubt his
moral earnestness, we have reasons for doubting his authority—or his
use of his authority—for the motives and conduct of the emperors who
reigned before his own time. As with Carlyle, and as with Macaulay, his
temperament and views led him to darken all the shades and whiten the
brightnesses. But, when we have admitted this, it is impossible to rise
from his _Annals_ or _Histories_ of imperial Rome without feeling that
men and women and events have been brought before the mind’s eye with
a wonderful vividness, nor without remembering many a phrase amazingly
packed with meaning. Whatever philosophic criticism may have to say of
Livy and Tacitus as history, they possess the essential literary merit,
that they captivate.
If in the region of philosophy we include, with works of morals and
politics, works on the principles and practice of rhetoric—a department
to which the Romans attached an unusual, but not unaccountable,
importance—we have to deal with three great names. These are Cicero,
Seneca, and Quintilian. The last-mentioned concerns himself with oratory,
the second with moral philosophy, while to Cicero nothing comes amiss.
Here, as generally elsewhere, the Latin genius makes little claim to
originality. When Cicero writes _On the Orator_ he is doubtless fully at
home with his subject; nevertheless he is practically converting into
Latin, with embellishments and enlargements, the system and terminology
of the Greeks. His moral treatises, which are excellent reading in their
kind, are but the expositions of an extremely clever man, who rightly
thought that he was rendering no small service to his own countrymen
by giving them in compact and intelligible form the substance of
Greek philosophy. With a view to imparting lightness to his themes,
and led by the example of Plato, he adopts the device of a pretended
conversation or disputation, but it can scarcely be said that he lends
much verisimilitude to the situation. The style everywhere is lofty, the
thinking is serious and helpful, if not profound or original, and it is
difficult to over-estimate the influence exercised by these books upon
the later thought of Rome, of the Middle Ages, or of the Renaissance.
Seneca the younger, writing under Claudius and Nero, is a philosopher
in the more strict sense of the term. Living in an age which demanded
striking phrase, point, and epigram, he is a master in that style. None
the less he was a deep and earnest thinker. Cicero, in dealing with
stoicism, is the highly intelligent amateur; Seneca is the expert, but
not a pedantic one. His _Moral Epistles_ and his dialogues are essays
touching upon matters of daily ethical concern, and both in their matter
and its presentation they deserve a much wider recognition than they
commonly receive. Some such recognition they did obtain at the Revival of
Learning, when Englishmen read the classics more for what they contained
than for the niceties of philology. It follows that the thoughts of
Seneca, acknowledged or not, have played no small part in modern
literature.
Quintilian, a salaried professor and practitioner of rhetoric under the
Flavian emperors, has left us an exhaustive treatise upon _The Training
of the Orator_, a training which begins at the cradle. The work sets
forth in all their completeness the principles of oratory, but it is
incidentally a discussion of education in a wider sense. The formation
of “a good man skilled in speaking” involves more than the cultivation
of language and the mastery of speech and delivery. It implies great
mental culture, and particularly culture derived from literature. To
subsequent ages Quintilian became an authoritative law-giver in the
domain of rhetoric, criticism, and language. Doubtless it would have
been intellectually better for the later European world to study its
philosophy and culture in the Greek originals, but, these being commonly
inaccessible, all gratitude is due to Cicero, Seneca, and Quintilian for
supplying so excellent a substitute in Latin.
Roman oratory, in the form of written speeches, is fortunately
represented for us by the greatest of Roman orators. It is a trite
observation that oratory can have no existence, except artificially,
under a despotism. Cicero, however, lived in the last days of the
republic, when speech was still free, burning questions numerous, and
the art of public speaking fully developed. Accordingly in his long list
of public speeches he has complete liberty to express himself with such
vigour, passion, pathos or humour as he chooses. The Roman ideal still
demanded from a great public character the quality of _gravitas_, a
moral impressiveness; that quality was in any case congenial to Cicero;
but, with that maintained, his scope was unrestricted. To the modern
reader the oratorical greatness of Cicero lies in the verbal eloquence
rather than in strenuous cogency of thought, or in those powerful flashes
which come from Demosthenes. He is an ingenious special pleader, a
tactful disposer of arguments; but, above all, he is a master of full,
rich, sonorous, impressive, and overwhelming language. As compared with
Demosthenes, he is at times somewhat too copious, and even too florid; he
is evidently speaking to a people less critical and less true in taste;
his humour is apt to be awkward; nevertheless the impression left upon
the reader is that of a man who employed superlative gifts, natural and
acquired, in an art of which he entertained a lofty conception. It is
not too much to say that the highest eloquence of Italy, France, and
England has at all times striven to be Ciceronian. Cicero was the model,
consciously or unconsciously, of Burke, Pitt, Fox, or Gladstone, just as
he was the model of great French preachers like Bossuet. It is perhaps
one mark of his inferiority to Demosthenes that he can be thus imitated.
Demosthenes himself is inimitable. In its later stages Roman oratory was
too much given to hunting the phrase, its decoration became vicious with
efforts of preciosity. But it cannot be said that these productions of
decadence have exercised any appreciable effect upon English speaking or
writing.
Just as in verse the Romans invented one form of literature, the satire,
so in prose they probably invented the epistle or letter. In Greek
literature letters are seldom found; those which are found are of dubious
authenticity, and in any case they are but essays in epistolary form. But
in Latin we meet with two great letter-writers, who, if they had written
nothing else, would have occupied the same positions in literature as
are occupied by Horace Walpole in England and by Madame de Sévigné in
France. The correspondence of Cicero was followed, a century and a half
later, by the correspondence of Pliny the younger, and both are full of
literary and also of historical interest. How far any of the letters
of Cicero were intended for publication is doubtful; very many of them
obviously were not. Those of Pliny, however, were carefully composed with
the distinct object of being given to the world. Apart from the different
characters and environment of the two men, there is consequently an
appreciable dissimilarity in the style. Except when he is writing
formal or courtesy letters to comparative strangers the correspondence
of Cicero carries with it a natural and unstudied air. He is vehement,
jocular, despondent, testy, as he thinks fit. He puns freely, breaks off
a sentence, quotes Greek, or uses colloquial terms. It would have been
well if critics of Cicero’s character had remembered to distinguish
private and not always serious correspondence from public behaviour. With
Pliny the case is otherwise. He was constitutionally a kindly man, with
a genuine love for letters; by training he was a staid man of affairs;
in circumstances he was rich, and his later years were leisured. But
he was withal a man who took himself with some excess of seriousness.
In any case he would not have forgotten what was orthodox for a Roman
gentleman; least of all was he likely to forget it in letters destined
for publication. His epistles are therefore always marked by a certain
reserve and a suggestion that they are intended to rank as literature.
Probably there would have been less unbending still, except for the
warrant of the letters of Cicero, who is plainly his model. Yet, in
spite of these drawbacks, they give an excellent picture of contemporary
Roman life, and afford an insight, otherwise unattainable, into current
Roman sentiment. For us it is important to note that the literary
letter-writing of France and England was, in the first instance, directly
suggested by these patterns of ancient Rome.
* * * * *
Despite the fact that there were three well marked periods in the
history of classical Latin literature, there are, nevertheless, certain
characteristics which appertain to that literature considered as a whole.
To say this is not to maintain that all Latin writers are monotonously
alike. Enough has been said already to demonstrate the contrary. It is
only meant that, taking writer after writer, and department of literature
after department, we can discover certain traits common to the majority
of them, and that these traits give a national character to the total
body of production. In the case of the Greeks the characteristic was the
clear-cut presentation of genuine thought or feeling at first-hand. In
the case of the Latins the case can hardly be stated so simply. Yet the
following observations may assist towards a fair generalization.
In the first place Latin literature is for the most part confessedly
imitative. It sets itself foreign models. Its standard of excellence
does not so much lie in the consciousness of having given a completely
truthful expression to a thought or emotion, as in the supposed success
with which a writer reproduces or transplants some Greek exemplar,
modifying it to what is believed to be unavoidably required by conditions
of the Roman tongue and Roman culture. It is in this spirit that the
comedians, the tragedians, the epic, lyric, and elegiac poets—Plautus,
Terence, Seneca, Virgil, Horace, Ovid—set about their work. It is
in this spirit that historians like Sallust, literary critics like
Horace, philosophic writers like Cicero, set about theirs. They are all
avowedly adapting Greek thoughts, Greek plots, Greek rhythms, and Greek
expressions, so far as the Latin can be made to admit them with elegance.
And in this secondary kind of work they were eminently successful. They
contrived somehow to make the Latin tongue do the work which they asked
of it. Horace and Virgil are consummate masters in this tasteful but
unoriginal labour. Thanks to them the forms and metres of Sappho and
Alcaeus, of Homer and Theocritus, were reproduced with only just so much
difference as the nature of the Latin tongue rendered unavoidable. The
result was verse of perfect polish and ease, and of splendid harmony.
But creators in any large sense they were not. They were magnificent
technical artists, of the kind who can reproduce an original picture as
a perfect etching with modifications, or who can carve and elaborate
artistic decorations if they are supplied with a portfolio of designs.
Possibly in this proceeding they worked some injustice to Latin
capabilities. It is conceivable that a number of Latin writers might have
left us work of much more essential strength if they had allowed their
own creative genius freer play. It was well that they should learn from
the Greeks, but not so well that they should mimic them. It is somewhat
as if the Germans, instead of writing from the full nature of a Goethe,
a Schiller, or their balladists, had followed the example of Frederick
the Great and put themselves into as complete a pupilage to the models
from France. There are instances in which the Latin genius did actually
follow its own course after gathering technical lessons from the Greeks,
and the result is then of such excellence that we cannot help feeling
some regret at the prevalence of deliberate imitation. The most truly
spontaneous, and therefore most creative, writers in Latin are Lucretius
the philosophic poet, Catullus the lyrist, Juvenal the satirist, the
letter-writers Cicero and Pliny, and the historians Caesar, Livy, and
Tacitus. Of these Lucretius, Catullus, and Caesar are frank and genuine
men with corresponding thoughts. They learn what Greece can teach in
the way of form, and then set themselves to deliver their own souls.
In letter-writing and in satire the native genius, strong in those
directions, broke out without assistance.
The first prevailing characteristic of Latin literature, then, is its
deliberate secondariness, which too often goes with lack of serious
purpose.
The second consists in a remarkable zest for polish of expression, a
studied elaboration of elegant diction and pointed phrase, which may
recall in some cases Pope, in others Tennyson. Something of this is
due to a necessarily disproportionate care for words in the absence of
substantial or novel matter; something is also due to the constitutional
Italian genius, which excels in cameo-cutting, whether in the literal
or the metaphorical sense. Doubtless the ideal literature combines the
exquisite expression with the original thought, but, if we must make some
surrender, we should naturally prefer to leave the brilliancy in the
thought. Latin writers, however, on the whole rather agreed with Boileau
and Pope, that the aim of literature was to utter “what oft was thought,
but ne’er so well expressed.” The result with them is that the most
famous of their poets are unsurpassable verbal artists, and that their
silver age writers are in particular exceedingly deft in the command of
terse and pointed phrase. But the result is also that their inferior
writers were apt to become mere tricksters and contortionists in words.
Nevertheless, it is one indefeasible ground of praise of the literature
of Rome that it did thus set itself and us a high ideal in the way of
melodious or compact and rememberable diction.
There is a third consideration. Greek literature reached its perfection
in the midst of free and stirring democratic activities; it was therefore
addressed to the mind and heart of the people at large. At Rome, on
the contrary, literature only reached its technical acme when freedom
was practically extinct. The work of Virgil, Horace, and Ovid, belongs
already to a period of despotism. It is addressed first to imperial
ears and then to those of an aristocracy more or less idle. It is in a
large measure written by a coterie for a coterie, or by a dependant for
patrons, its object being to entertain elegantly. For that reason it
avoids emotional depths and altitudes, and shuns intellectual audacities.
It seeks to say clever things, displaying culture and knowledge agreeable
to a society which plays with such matters. It adheres to a certain ideal
of “good form,” which, however, does not preclude plenty of such allusion
as will show wide reading and social experience. Ardours for the vital
interests of society, and the frankness of large natures communicating
with their fellow men, are necessarily taboo. Whether these existed
largely in Roman natures is, as has been said already, matter for doubt,
but almost certainly they existed beyond the extent to which expression
was countenanced. It is therefore with more justice than is commonly
perceived that the “Augustan” age of English literature has received that
name.
It seems not unjust to sum up Roman literature—allowing for the
exceptions already made—as a literature largely imitative and secondary,
highly polished and elegant in execution, but limited in its intellectual
and emotional range as in its originality.
* * * * *
The influence, direct and indirect, of Latin literature upon English is
perhaps best realized from the tabulations which appear in this volume.
Nevertheless it may be helpful to make sundry notes upon certain more
obvious debts taken in chronological order.
In and before the age of Chaucer the poems of Ovid upon love and its
cure were much drawn upon by writers of romances and allegories. They
were the direct inspiration of much of the troubadour poetry of Provence
and thence of the mediaeval lyric verse of Europe in general. Ovidian
borrowings are manifest in the _Romance of the Rose_. Chaucer himself was
a student of Ovid, Lucan, Virgil, “Stace,” and also Livy. From Ovid’s
_Metamorphoses_ and love-elegies in particular he took much matter. His
_Knight’s Tale_ is ultimately from the _Thebaid_ of Statius. The reading
of his contemporary Gower, and of his successor Lydgate, was even more
deep in the same authors. At the beginning of the sixteenth century Gawin
Douglas translated the _Aeneid_, and soon afterwards Wyatt and Surrey
show themselves steeped in Seneca and the epigrams of Martial; Surrey
also translated portions of the _Aeneid_. Before Marlowe and Shakespeare
the more scholarly pioneers of drama, such as Sackville, sought for
tragic models in Seneca and for comic models in Plautus. Elizabethan
readers ransacked all available Latin books. Spenser’s _Eclogues_ follow
Virgil’s, and his _Faerie Queene_ is full of borrowings from the _Aeneid_
and from Ovid’s _Metamorphoses_. The effect of Ovid on Shakespeare
himself is manifest in his _Venus and Adonis_. Bacon who, like all
the great prose-writers of his time, could use both English and Latin,
shows in especial the influence of Seneca. Ben Jonson, who translated
portions of Horace and Martial, is an imitator of Horace in the way of
poetical epistles and short lyrics, and of Martial in epigram. In the
school of the “Sons of Ben” and the “Cavalier poets,” we meet with very
distinct manifestations of the combined influence of the lyrists Horace
and Catullus and the epigrammatist Martial. We know these to have been
favourite poetic reading of the period. Simultaneously the general
style of prose-writing, whether as in Milton or as in Jeremy Taylor,
was imagined to be based upon the rounded periodic style of Cicero, and
the language itself is deliberately Latinized to a remarkable degree.
Milton, who wrote Latin poems as well as English, is greatly and openly
indebted in his epics to both the matter and the manner of Virgil. The
post-Restoration comedy derives itself through a French medium from
that of Plautus and Terence. At the same time the second-hand critical
principles of Rome begin to prevail in England. Roscommon translates the
_Ars Poetica_ of Horace; Dryden translates the _Aeneid_ and passages of
Ovid; he also writes powerful satire in direct imitation of Juvenal.
Addison produced his _Campaign_ under the influence of Lucan, and his
_Cato_ under the influence of Seneca. Pope begins with pastorals after
the manner of Virgil and Theocritus, composes _Imitations of Horace_,
and copies the _Ars Poetica_ and Epistles and Satires in his own
poetical essays on criticism and morals. His _Messiah_ is a recasting of
Virgil’s fourth Eclogue and his _Eloisa to Abelard_ is based on Ovid’s
_Heroides_. Samuel Johnson’s _London_ and _Vanity of Human Wishes_
are similar copies of Juvenal, while his prose seeks to model itself
upon the Ciceronian. The great preachers and orators of the eighteenth
century are Latinists in their rhetorical principles. During the same
age the didactic poems, such as Dyer’s _Fleece_ or Akenside’s _Pleasures
of the Imagination_, are the outcome of the study of Lucretius and the
_Georgics_ of Virgil. The letters of Pope or Walpole no less distinctly
take their hint from Cicero and Pliny.
It is unnecessary to elaborate further a bare catalogue of such
obligations. It is, perhaps, more useful to emphasize one consideration
which should bring home the vast, if undefinable, influence necessarily
exercised by Latin thoughts and Latin expression upon English writers.
Before the days of Alfred and the days of Chaucer the chief writers of
prose in England composed in some sort of Latin. They knew Latin, and
read such Latin books as they could get. From the Revival of Learning
Latin came more and more to be studied as modern languages are studied
now, for the sake of actual speech, correspondence, or controversy. The
pens of Englishmen like Sir Thomas More, Bacon, and Milton, were fluent
in Latin. Ben Jonson, Cowley, Addison, and Samuel Johnson were great
Latinists among a society in which Latin knowledge was general. Landor
and De Quincey were no less great. There are few writers in the English
language who have not received at least some tinge of Latin education.
Familiar as all these generations have been with Latin books, practised
in the imitation of Latin diction, filling the language with Latin
terms, it is quite impossible to determine how deeply we are steeped in
the influence which has passed through them. During the last century it
is true that education has not cultivated that fluency in spoken Latin
which marked the two or three centuries preceding. Latin is no longer
necessary as a medium for the interchange of thought, and the increasing
number of arts and sciences restricts the prominence of any one study.
On the other hand it is no less true that almost every considerable
writer and speaker of the century had received that more recent form of
Latin education which consists in an accurate and tasteful study of the
words, styles and thoughts of the best, or most classic, of the Roman
writers—Catullus, Lucretius, Cicero, Virgil, Horace, Livy, Ovid—rather
than Lucan or Statius. The influence of Roman literature during that
period has been more wholesome than during the later period of the
seventeenth and the greater part of the eighteenth century, an epoch in
which English writers delivered themselves over to almost as servile
a subjection to Latin (or rather Latin-French) patterns as the Romans
had once, with more reason, assumed towards the Greeks. That era, the
era of Dryden, Pope, Addison, Johnson, is in this sense the most Roman
period of our literary history. To it, unfortunately, we owe all that
personification of abstract qualities by the simple device of a capital
letter; all that use of “nymph” for “woman” and “fire” for “love”; all
that stereotyped phraseology, such as “reddening Phoebus lifts his golden
fire” for the “sun is rising,” from which we were delivered by Burns and
Wordsworth. To the Romans themselves these terms were artificial enough,
to the English they were doubly artificial.