POETIC IN ANCIENT DRAMA AND NARRATIVE
The classical practise of poetic in the two modes distinguished by
Aristotle, dramatic and narrative, has a twofold significance. It has
the claim of all great art for its own beauty; and it reveals certain
fundamentals of literary form and literary influence. Classical
influences on later art have been defined sometimes vaguely, sometimes
amiss, for lack of clear grasp of classical practise. Yet the vitality
of classical poetic art is hardly more proverbial than its definiteness.
Without circumscribing in formulas its creative variety, we can discern
quite clearly its artistic habits in these two enduring modes.
Into such a survey recent questions as to literary forms need not enter.
How far a literary form may be modified or extended without losing
its character, how suggestive a recognized form is to the composing
imagination, are questions important rather for those modern times in
which the artist is much concerned with individual self-expression than
for the centuries in which he was more the spokesman of a community.
Even if Brunetière’s transference of the word _genre_ from biology to
literature be only analogy, even if Croce’s denial that a literary form
is directive of the artist be justified, we must still use the terms
drama and epic. From Aristotle down, criticism has used them not only for
convenience, but because in fact there were two typical ways of extensive
imaginative composition in words, varying in detail but constant
essentially, and always sharply distinct. Whether these should rather be
called types or modes than forms is a question for later consideration.
For the purposes of the present review the terms drama and epic connote
only habits of composition universally recognized.
The two discussed by Aristotle as types are in fact seen as types to
persist. The habits of drama have remained typically distinct from those
of narrative, and have changed far less. To add Senecan tragedy to its
Greek prototype, and to mark the distinctive traits of Latin comedy,
will both fill out Aristotle’s summary and show in what forms classical
influences came first to modern drama. Narrative in the ancient world
developed along few lines. Its poetic art long remained epic. This art
was at once followed by Vergil and recreated. The _Æneid_ is the great
exemplar of all that is fruitful in literary influence. The Hellenistic
art that Vergil rejected was cultivated by Apuleius and ran to seed
in the Greek prose romances. Meantime it was practised with facile
brilliancy by the Latin poet whom the middle ages knew better even than
they knew Vergil—Ovid. Setting aside, then, all minor forms, and in
the two major forms all but what is typical, we may venture to survey
ancient poetic, first in Greek tragedy, with Senecan tragedy for contrast
and Latin comedy for supplement, then in Vergilian epic, with Ovidian
narrative for contrast and Apuleius for divergence.
I. DRAMA
A. GREEK TRAGEDY[1]
At first glance Greek tragedy strikes the modern student as finished.
Its historical period is definite. It grew; it matured; it died. Its
strictly dramatic influence appears to be sharply limited. Inoperative
as a mode of representation, indeed almost unknown, in the middle ages
and the early Renaissance, it seems at first to have been revived in
modern times only for archæological reproduction, as the models of
Greek architecture in museums. Even if such a view were just—and it is
not—Greek tragedy would compel attention by sheer artistic eminence.
It can no more be ignored than Gothic architecture. It is one of the
great artistic achievements of the human spirit. But no such artistic
achievement is ever finished in the sense of being relegated to a museum.
Its eminence constitutes a presumption of vitality. Gothic architecture,
though held in abeyance and even forgotten for centuries, is again
operative. It compels attention to-day not only in reproductions, but in
creation. Greek tragedy has profoundly influenced modern playwriting.
Its increasing reappearance to-day in revivals, and the distinction of
certain imitations such as _Samson Agonistes_, are less important than
its influence on modern dramaturgy, as in Racine and again in Ibsen and
finally in certain striking plays of our own time. This vitality implies
that the Greek experience, in especially happy conditions of stage and
audience, through a period of extraordinary artistic competition, was
fruitful not merely in skilful adaptation to those conditions, but in
dramatic principles.
(1). _Theater and Audience_
The emotions that are enhanced by representation before a crowd are
typically such as are best felt by the crowd together, such as are
communal.[2] Greek drama began, according to tradition, in the rites
celebrated by the whole village to honor Dionysus, the god of fertility
and enthusiasm. In the shouting, singing chorus there were at first no
actors in the modern sense; but that was because in a broader sense all
were actors. There was rude, impromptu mimic action. There was probably a
good deal of improvised verse by individuals, and probably a good deal of
recurring refrain by the whole crowd. Out of this communal impersonation
of the story of Dionysus grew very naturally individual impersonations
of the god and of his more prominent mythical attendants, the crowd
responding with impromptu variations of the familiar refrain. Every crowd
produces a leader. The leader of the Greek chorus became an actor in the
modern sense of taking, a fixed part. In time other fixed parts were
assigned to individuals, till the mimic action had a definite dialogue;
but the chorus persisted as representative of the whole community.
Then, as always, came the individual genius to discern the capacity of
what had grown up among the people, to reveal and enlarge that capacity,
and to fix a great form of art. The shaping of drama by Æschylus and its
development by Sophocles and by Euripides expressed, indeed, individual
genius; but no less they expressed the ideals of the Greek race and
remained answerable to the original popular impulse. The Greek audience
during the great period of drama felt not only that the chorus chanting
in the orchestra was its representative, but that it was itself as a
body assisting at a communal celebration. Always the enacting of legend
or history known to every spectator by heart, the drama was always
judged sternly not only by its poetic beauty, but by its faithfulness to
communal beliefs and feelings. Its success was measured by the feeling of
the community.
So the great open-air Greek theater was made for the community. It
superseded the unfurnished hillside as the community passed more and
more from participants to spectators; but it remained, to a degree
rarely realized in modern times, communal. For Greek tragedy, even at
its height, never lost its reminiscences of ritual. Every representation
being an act of religion, the theater crowd, united by a common rite, was
the more sensitive to common sympathies. That the theater is for the
crowd, not for the individual, has been realized by playwrights of every
age; but the first great age of drama opened this peculiar opportunity of
dramaturgy widest because its crowd was unified. The communal sense of
tradition was focused by religion.
(2). _Diction_
Remembrance of this fact has led many modern readers who have never seen
a Greek play to conceive Greek tragedy as formal and rigid. This is much
the same error as supposes Greek architecture and statuary to have been
white. It is an illusion of time. Greek buildings and statues became
white when no hands were left to restore their colors. Greek tragedies
became formal and rigid when they passed from the stage to the closet,
when they lost the rhythms of dance and of phrase. With every revival of
them upon the modern stage the illusion is dispelled. Indeed, it can be
broken by merely reading them aloud.
Nevertheless, though they show to an exceptional degree that larger
movement which Aristotle found to be a dramatic essential, they were
stately in gesture and in lines. Even without the associations of
religion, the very size of the theater would have precluded the facial
play that is a main reliance of modern acting, and induced in the
open air a delivery sometimes oratorical and always large. The tragic
mask and cothurnus were adaptations to a great open-air space. To the
same physical conditions were adapted the rendition and the lines
themselves.[3]
The diction of Greek tragedy, though varying widely of course from poet
to poet, has certain recognizable constants. It is generally sonorous,
sententious, and, to a degree never surpassed, direct. It realizes
fully the emotional appeal of rhythm; for though its dialogue has less
rhythmical variety than Shakspere’s, it rarely lapses into monotony,
and it is relieved by the abundant imagery and metrical variety of
the chorus. Greek tragic dialogue is typically austere. It rarely
amplifies, for it is poetry, not oratory;[4] but it makes every word
count dramatically. The ideal of economy is felt even in the diction.
Passages of narrative, such as those of messengers, are made dramatically
effective not only by situation, but by variations of tone and tempo.
Effects of style may seem to have preoccupied criticism too much
unless we remember that the Athenian audience was habitually sensitive
to rhythm, and that it was never distracted by novelty of story from
attention to the dramatist’s art. That the final touch of this art was
the rhythmical finishing of the lines there can be no doubt.
Nor is dramatic verse a mere traditional convention.[5] Obviously it
is appropriate to historical dignity; but beyond this we become aware,
even from reading, much more from hearing, that the verse subtly and
constantly enhances the emotion by enriching the connotation. It is not
merely rhythm added to force, though how much rhythm, even in prose, is
worth dramatically every good actor knows. It is not even poetry added
to drama. It is an element permeating and integral. Good dramatic verse,
to say nothing of the best, is not a lyrical addition, not a decoration,
but as truly a dramatic means as the other means of characterization.
That is why the tradition of every great stage, such as the Comédie
Française, lays distinct stress on rhythmical rendition; and that is why
the dramatic rhythms of Greek tragedy are still inspiring.
Nor is even this the final value of verse in Greek tragedy. Such verse
enhances the characterization not only in detail by widening the
opportunity of the actor to convey mood and emotion, but generally by
enhancing the poetry. The typical method of Greek tragic characterization
is to idealize. The mighty figures of the past, remote from the urgencies
of our confusing present, confirm our faith that man may dominate and
direct his world for good, or, when they too fail, reveal with larger
truth the tragic flaws of humanity and the hope of its regeneration.
Modern history plays, as well as ancient, are poetic in diction
ultimately because they are poetic in conception, as Greek drama was at
once tradition and poetry. The word audience, which in its etymological
suggestions has seemed inappropriate to a modern crowd gathered rather
for seeing than for hearing, is entirely appropriate to the Greek
theater. The visual values of representation were, indeed, realized
in gesture and pose, though less in scenery and spectacle; they were
realized as never, perhaps, since in group movements; but the auditory
values, the sounding line, the phrase harmony of the chant, always
enhanced representation by strong rhythmical suggestion. A Greek tragedy
was in a real sense, though its music was simply melodic, a symphony.
(3). _Chorus_
The symbol of the communal import of Greek tragedy and of its
characteristic form is the chorus. From being almost the whole the
chorus dwindled dramatically to a subordinate part. The inference,
however, that it was outgrown, that except for historical study it is
negligible, is unwarranted. Even Euripides used the chorus dramatically;
and Aristotle urges, not that it be abolished, but that it be made an
integral part, one of the actors. Nor were the practise and the theory
mere concession to Greek convention. The chorus was in fact dramatic.[6]
Too readily conceiving it in terms of our meager modern experience, as
in opera, critics often seem to have forgotten that the Greek chorus
furnished not primarily tableau or grouping or even pageantry in a wider
sense, but chanting and dancing. That dancing may be highly dramatic we
have but recently rediscovered. Aristotle[7] knew dance as compassing
the whole range of bodily expression. Far from being merely a lyric
interlude, the chorus offered distinct dramatic possibilities.
To begin with, the combination of choral dance and chanting has a direct
appeal to the simpler emotions that are communal; and in Greek drama it
enhances the idealizing of communal fears and beliefs and aspirations.
The idealism of Greek tragedy is conveyed largely by the chorus. Then the
chorus is used to enhance the emotion of a preceding scene by iterating
it sympathetically, or by recoiling in protest, or by reflecting on it
_sub specie æternitatis_. Thus are achieved the relief of variety and
also an intermediary effect, the effect of spectators of the action
itself interpreting to the spectators of the play. The variety brought
about by the choral throng was the more marked because the actors were
few. In the chorus were many opportunities for representation of the
human world about these isolated individuals, and for dramatic symbolism
through the group movements of the dance. The choral dance, always
symbolic, had been developed from simple, primitive forms to a fine art.
The preliminary to every dramatic production was the public granting of
a chorus; and the training of this chorus by the dramatist himself was a
main part of rehearsal. The chorus is associated in every one’s thought
of Greek tragedy inevitably and fitly. It is not merely an archaic
convention; it is not merely a lyric accessory to drama; it has dramatic
possibilities which may yet, if large open-air theaters win again a place
in communal life, be revived.
(4). _Themes and Personæ_
The rhythmical effects of diction and of choral dance are hardly more
characteristic of Greek tragedy than its unvarying use of legendary
themes and persons. Euripides is thought to have chafed within these
confines, to have been hampered by the conventional prescription of
old bottles for his new wine. In any age the playwright who insists
on ideas in advance of his crowd thereby sacrifices something of the
communal appeal. But even Euripides kept outwardly the unwritten law,
and Aristotle[8] accepted it as part of his theory. It is evident that
such themes and such persons were a tragic convention; but the convention
was still recognized in the middle ages;[9] it was accepted by the
Renaissance; it was formally adopted by the French seventeenth century;
and its being a convention does not prove it any the less dramatic.
Without disparaging the gain to modern tragedy from the widening of the
tragic field we may take account of the typical values of the field of
tradition.
The field of tradition is _ipso facto_ the field of communal memories and
aspirations and, even in modern times, of myth. Though the re-creation of
myth may be artificial and remote, that it need not be so, that it may on
the contrary originally express both the poet and the conceptions of his
audience, has been proved many times, and very convincingly in our own
time by William Vaughn Moody’s _Fire-bringer_. The fire of Prometheus is
there seen, even after Æschylus, even after Shelley, to be undying. The
modern science of anthropology, indeed, gives good ground for thinking
both that myth is constantly human and that by its very persistence, as
of a primitive trait, it opens opportunities for drama.
The modern study of folklore, by recovering some lost echoes in Greek
tragedy, has enhanced its significance. Folk superstitions, though they
retire from public gaze before more sophisticated conventions, are slow
to die. Those which have become mere curious lore are of course dead
dramatically; but those which express persistent human yearnings may
be all the more vital dramatically because they are primitive. Such,
for instance, is the folk-tale of the fairy mistress, the woman of
unearthly beauty who has the magic to enrich the man she loves with joy
and power. Widespread over western Europe in the middle ages, it has
roots in remote antiquity. Euripides made it, not as the medieval writers
the story of the delusion of the man, but the tragedy of the woman. In
varying forms it has recurred again and again. In Walter Map’s amazing
tale of Gerbert[10] it concludes upon penance and renunciation. In
Fouqué’s _Undine_ its native force is dissipated in sentiment. A dead
superstition, on the other hand, has no dramatic appeal. Though we admire
the steadfast piety that agonizes over the unburied body of a brother,
we can no longer appreciate the situation of Antigone as fully tragic;
for we have lost irrevocably the ancient superstition from which it
springs. But Medea with her power to bless and ban her lover, and with
her unearthly capacity for suffering, who will venture to say that she
is dead? That she is primitive gives her only the more power to walk the
stage to-morrow.
Mythical idealizing is readily symbolic. But in Greek tragedy direct
symbolism, except in the chorus, is not common. Rather than as
symbolical, the legendary figures appear as typical. It is as typical
that the “illustrious persons” are recommended by Aristotle and
represented by the dramatists that he expounds. Prometheus, Heracles,
Agamemnon, Medea, are chosen as eminent not in rank, as some French
dramatists are accused of thinking, but in typically human traits.
They show grandly and conspicuously what obscurely is suffered by us
all. “There you and I and all of us fell down.” They are race heroes;
we communally feel in them the race ghost. And the more mythical they
are, the more we can feel the struggle of all human kind. For the very
limitations on themes sets Greek tragedy in sharper relief against modern
as exhibiting the dramatic vitality of legend.
Personages so fixed do, indeed, tend to preclude both novelty and
subtlety of characterization. In this regard Euripides, especially in
his Medea, is sometimes exceptional. Generally the characterization of
Greek tragedy is broad and simple. The _personæ_ are taken full-blown,
at some revealing crisis. But modern experience with plays and with
novels confirms the impression that broad characterization is generally
more effective before an audience; subtle, minute, or cumulative, with
an individual reader. In this application, too, we may take Aristotle’s
saying that plot is more important in drama, character in epic. But
lest we separate character from plot unduly, we must remember that the
movement of Greek tragedy is not merely of events, but of human will.
Will is the exhibition of character in action. It is the mainspring of
every tragic crisis. At once the simplest and the strongest expression
of character, it animates Greek tragedy because it animates almost
all tragedy.[11] Æschylus in _Prometheus Bound_ promises the victory
of heroic fortitude. Sophocles in _King Œdipus_ conveys the agony of
assertive individuality at finding the struggle for self-fulfillment
vain, and brings even innocent willfulness to wreck. Euripides sees the
tragic conflict of the traditional bloodwite with reverence to a mother
as leading to madness. Within the compass of the few dramas left to
us from the Greek stage the tragedies of human will in a few typical
personages are seen to be as various as they are convincing. Even the
rich variety of the great Elizabethan period does not make them seem
meager.
Rather they exhibit the dramatic richness of the typical. By the
very fact of being embodied in flesh and blood any “illustrious
person” begins to be real. Even the allegorical figure of Everyman
in the mediæval morality—and the Greek _dramatis personæ_ were never
allegorical—has held modern audiences because each spectator recognized
himself with his secret foes and friends. That the persons of the Greek
stage were few and familiar, then, was not of itself a disadvantage. The
tragedies of a few famous families can strike pity and fear into all
families who know the bitterness of hate. Moreover, the restriction to
familiar themes, the exclusion of novelty from plot, focused attention
upon conception and movement. Playwright and audience alike looked for
originality not in subject, but in art. Comparison of play with play was
readier and more specific; and the competition of the stage was almost
purely artistic.
(5). _Plot_
Plot in Greek tragedy, the movement of the whole play, is discussed so
extensively by Aristotle that little need be added. For his preoccupation
with Sophocles hardly makes his exposition the less comprehensive. Later
criticism has generally accepted Sophocles as historically midway between
the occasional archaism of Æschylus and the occasional modernism of
Euripides, as typical of Greek dramatic habits, and as the greatest Greek
master of plot. Sophocles, as has been often pointed out, intensified
drama by making his unit not the trilogy, but the single play, by
developing a single theme with a clear conflict, and by making its
interaction self-sufficient through the use of a third actor. Euripides,
on the other hand, seems to care less for totality, though he achieves it
in some plays, notably in the _Medea_. His use of a separable prologue
instead of dramatic exposition within the play has been condemned as
impatient;[12] and the vividness of his lines, especially in description,
has been disparaged as distracting. In all this the art of Sophocles is
no more eminent than it is typical. He is the shining example of Greek
artistic economy.
This characteristic economy of Greek tragic art makes it permanently
inspiring to playwrights. Modern audiences, being less conscious of
art, may find the economy sometimes too close; but playwrights discern
in it both a triumph of technic and an example. For the revolt against
even the “unities” of the French classic stage spent its force long ago.
Meantime the war of the romanticists against the classicists should make
clear, what the greatest dramatists have always understood, that unity in
drama is valuable only as a means to coherence. Its only _raison d’être_
is to clear the way for steady movement and to lead that movement to a
convincing issue. Now in this compelling force of movement Greek drama,
especially in the hands of Sophocles, remains by common consent a model
of tragic art. That even audiences habituated to variety and tolerant
of looseness will still feel this force is suggested by revivals of
increasing frequency, by the eminence, even in a period of very different
dramatic habits, of such plays as _Othello_, and by the deliberate
preference of some recent dramatists[13] for the Greek model. But whether
single, steady movement through a limited time be a permanent dramatic
principle or not, at least it is characteristically Greek. What one
editor says of the _Antigone_ of Sophocles might be said of Greek tragedy
generally: “there is no halting in the march of the drama.”[14]
This effect is brought about technically by focusing on a single scene
and a continuous critical period.[15] The whole tragedy, as has been
quaintly said, is compressed within the fifth act; or, to speak in
still more modern terms, the Greeks composed their tragedies as long
one-act plays. Such a play differs from _Henry IV_ or _A Winter’s Tale_
essentially; it differs from _Othello_ only in removable accidents. The
characteristic is not brevity, nor even unity, but continuity. That the
habit of continuity was fostered by Greek stage conditions, the habit
of discontinuity by Elizabethan, there can be no doubt; but neither
can there be any doubt that the Greek stage conditions were modified
more than once by a dramatist, or that the Elizabethan stage conditions
did not determine the growth of Shakspere’s art. In both great ages
a dramatist took the stage as he found it, but built up his dramatic
technic as he chose. The continuity of Greek tragedy is not merely a fact
of archæology; it is an achievement of technic.
The limiting to a single place and time has been objected to as forcing
off-stage some events that the audience would like to see, and as
unnaturally crowding the action. In a word, the one-act form, for an
action of some magnitude, has been called artificial. Any form may seem
artificial if it is realized imperfectly; and the limits of this form
impose merely a higher degree of the difficulty inherent in any dramatic
form, the difficulty of focus. Even a five-act play imposes limits,
prescribes selection, by the very conditions of the stage itself. The
peculiar opportunity arising from the stage conditions of the Greek
theater was discerned to be emotional intensity. Intensity has even been
urged as the characteristic opportunity of all drama. Whether this be
granted or not, undoubtedly the Greeks conceived drama so, and developed
their technic accordingly. They worked for intensity. Though they were
not content with two actors, they were content with one stage set and
with one period of time. Not only so, but the difficulties of their
form stimulated their art. In these conditions playwrights heightened
intensity by a technic of progressive continuity.
So much for the idea behind the objections. The particular charges seem
hardly to hold. What is forced off the stage of Greek drama, or of any
drama? Surely nothing that the dramatist wishes to have on-stage, or his
art is imperfect. That the frequent murders are only heard, not seen, is
due not to any exigencies of form, but to social convention and to the
idea that dying is less tragic than death. For the rest, to put shifting
human life on a fixed stage, even with liberty to represent more than
one place and time, always involves foreshortening. Art cannot have the
diffuseness of life. It works by selection. The Greek tragic artists
chose to carry selection to the highest degree. That this event or that
of the tragic story is reported by a messenger, not enacted before
our eyes, is not a hindrance to the tragic march, not the makeshift
conceded to an intractable form. Let the speech of a Greek messenger be
read aloud, or better, let it be acted; and it will no longer be called
undramatic.[16] Add its dramatic value in context, its relation to the
scene that it enters; and no doubt will remain. The possibilities of
narrative on the stage, though they seem to have been forgotten by many
English playwrights, are clear. But the Greek dramatist did make a
virtue of necessity. He sometimes used a messenger, dramatically indeed,
but perforce. What we hear from a messenger we could not see without
change of scene. This was the dramatist’s sacrifice, not to formalism,
but to continuity. To that end he would have made even greater sacrifice.
The speeding of the action beyond the normal pace of life is not confined
to this form. It is a condition of all drama. Nor does Greek drama seem
either crowded or hurried. Though events may follow thick and fast, the
Greek movement is typically unhurried. It has steadiness from careful
preparation; it gains momentum as it advances; it culminates swiftly; it
diminishes to a slow and quiet close.
That tragedy should have a full close, carrying the action through to a
καταστροφή, or state of rest, must have been with the Greeks a principle;
for it was an almost invariable habit. Though the tragedies of other and
later nations do not always end so, they too have the full close often
enough to suggest that audiences generally desire it.[17] Whether or not
this is true of audiences, it seems true of playwrights in proportion as
they work, as the Greeks worked, for singleness. In Greek tragedy the end
crowns the work in the sense that the close completes the interpretation.
The close of the action is the issue of the characterization.
Characterization in Greek tragedy, more consistently than in any other,
is motivation. In some Greek plays it offers hardly anything else.
The characters are drawn for the play, not for themselves. The “part”
is subordinated to the theme. When we see that this is true even for
Medea, a “part” to be coveted by any modern actress, we realize that the
significance of the whole play was habitually in the Greek conception
the main object. This explains the full close as the goal of a steady
movement, and as the final stage of the idealization which habitually
shaped both characters and plot. And where a modern playwright has worked
with the same intention, we find again and again, as in _Othello_, the
same full close.
The ultimate technical question, then, is What is continuity worth?
Euripides composed sometimes as if it were worth less than salience. He
has even been called romantic; and the influence of Greek tragedy, since
it was overwhelmingly his among the Romans and in the middle ages, may
seem after all to be hardly the influence of Sophoclean movement. But
the great influence of Euripides is largely of his poetry apart from his
dramaturgy. It reigns through a time when tragedy was waning, and through
a later time when there was hardly any drama at all. He is still the most
interesting of Greek dramatists to read. On the other hand, those of his
plays which are now most effective as stage performances have the typical
Greek continuity; nor does he often depart from the type very far. That
the type has a controlling idea of continuity is evident. To the Greek
dramatists generally continuity seemed to be worth much technical labor
and even much sacrifice. The crown of their technical skill was to carry
the theme, to develop it, to fulfill it at the last.
Behind this technic is an ideal of singleness. The sacrifice to
continuity springs from that _ascesis_ which has been remarked in other
fields of Greek art. It has aroused—it will always arouse—the protest of
the romantics. An art of singleness, lucidity, cogency, seems to them, as
perhaps it seemed already to Euripides, too far removed from life. And
not the romanticists only, but after them the realists, have demanded a
drama more like life itself, freer, more various, less composed. Perhaps
there is no ultimate reconciliation, or perhaps the two conceptions are
complementary; but the Greek tragedians seem to answer from their plays:
art is not life; it is idealization.
B. SENECAN TRAGEDY[18]
How far the Latin tragedy of the actual stage followed the great Greeks
we can only speculate from a few fragments and from the references of
critics. That the lost _Medea_ of Ovid was Greek in more than name the
habit of composition seen in the _Heroides_ leaves much doubt. Certainly
the tragedies of Seneca, while they revive the great names of Agamemnon,
Hippolytus, and Medea, never enter the great art of Athens. Indeed,
their relevance at this juncture is for contrast. A Senecan prologue is
not only a separable prefix; it may be a summary of the whole plot, as
the prologue of Latin comedy. Separable the Senecan chorus is always in
providing lyric interludes. It would thereby interrupt the action if the
tragedy had the Greek onward course; but instead Seneca’s violent scenes
are themselves separable, and his dialogue is sometimes a collection
of speeches. Seneca wrote tragic scenes and spaced them with lyric
pauses;[19] he did not gather momentum for a total impression. He made
his _personæ_ utter their feelings; he did not make them interact. The
familiar names, the familiar stories, only heighten the contrast. Senecan
tragedy is like Greek tragedy only in non-essentials. The essentials of
Greek dramatic composition are not here.
What is here is not poetic, but rhetoric. That these pieces were written
for recitation, not for acting, the external evidence is strong, though
not conclusive,[20] but the internal evidence is abundant.[21] Most
significant is the feebleness of plot. More obvious is the rhetorical
method of characterization by typical traits,[22] the method of the
character sketches (ἠθοποιίαι) in schools for boys as it was expanded
in the schools for men under the masters of _declamatio_. A method
essentially oratorical, it developed under the _declamatores_ of
the Empire not creative conception, but inventive ingenuity and a
preoccupation rather with striking expression than with consistency. Most
obvious of all, written large on every page, is the swelling rhetoric of
the style. Not for nothing did this poet bear the name of Seneca.[23] To
deny that such writing has a certain force is to forget what it might
become in the mouth of a trained speaker and before an audience taught
to admire its distinctive effects; to forget also how eagerly Seneca was
appropriated fifteen centuries later; to forget finally that oratory
in the theater has not yet lost all its appeal. But while we grant to
rhetoric some share in the poetic art, we cannot put Senecan tragedy
beside the tragedy of Athens without seeing unmistakably that such art as
it has is not the distinctive art of drama.
C. LATIN COMEDY
The plays of Plautus and Terence keep the dramaturgy known as the New
Comedy,[24] the comedy of Menander. Its figures, alike in Greek and
in Latin, are types. Such individualizing as may be discerned, in
the _Menæchmi_ for instance, or the _Self-tormentor_, stands out as
exceptional. Comedy, perhaps, tends more than tragedy to the typical.
At any rate, Latin comedy has a set of _personæ_ quite fixed:[25] two
fathers, two sons in love and in debt, two daughters of romance or of
pleasure, and two slaves to stir the intrigue. There might be a matron, a
slave-trader, and a braggart soldier; and there would be pretty surely a
parasite.
Stock figures involve conventionality also in plot. One of them may have
a double,[26] and the plot may consist largely of mistaking one for the
other; or the long-lost daughter, as in the _declamationes_ and the
Greek romances, may have been kidnapped by pirates. Typical is the plot
of Terence’s _Phormio_:
One Chremes had a brother Demipho,
who wishing for some cause abroad to go,
had left his son young Antipho at home
at Athens, while it pleased him thus to roam.
This Chremes had a wife and daughter too
in Lemnos domiciled, that no one knew;
another one at Athens, and an heir
that desperately loved a harper fair.
From Lemnos came the mother with the maid
to Athens, and there died. The daughter paid
the last sad rites (now Chremes was away).
And so it came about that on that day
young Antipho the orphan child espied,
fell deep in love and took her for his bride.
(’twas through a parasite ’twas brought about).
The brothers coming home with rage broke out,
gave thirty minæ to the parasite
to take her off and marry her outright.
With this they buy the girl that Phædria prized;
the other keeps his bride now recognized.[27]
In essentials this is the plot of any Latin comedy. That the Greek
originals of the New Comedy were less crystallized is suggested by larger
fragments recovered recently; and that Menander was a creator of plots
may be inferred from the saying reported by Plutarch: “I have made my
comedy; for the plan is arranged, and I have only to write verses for
it.”[28] Even with so few situations as in Latin comedy there is room
for variety of handling. Early commentators distinguish the _modus
motorius_,[29] the kinetic mode, from the _statarius_, or static, and
find that Terence, except in the _Phormio_, tends to the latter. But even
the movement of Plautus is rather bustle and go than onward progress.
Dramatic movement will hardly be compelling where motivation is so much
from circumstances and so little from character. _Modus motorius_ seems
to imply rather liveliness than sequence. To the large, miscellaneous,
and turbulent Roman audience, it has been plausibly suggested, there
would have been little appeal in cogency of plot.
A certain dulness in the audience is suggested by the fact that Terence
was reproached for combining two Greek plots in one Latin play. He
protests, naturally, that this is his right; and the _Phormio_ shows his
ability to weave an intrigue clearly and attractively. The dramatic lack
mistakenly ascribed to his stories is rather of salience, especially of
visibly significant action before our eyes. That this can vivify even
conventional characters in a conventional plot is the chief dramatic
message of Plautus. He trusts the intelligence of his audience so little
as to make his prologue an oral program, a _catalogue raisonné_, explicit
to the last degree.[30] With Terence he resorts to the aside, the
soliloquy, and the convention of people on the stage together who do not
see each other—all these when they could be obviated by a little dramatic
ingenuity. Where Plautus spends his ingenuity is on lively realism of
detail, on abundance of stage “business.” He holds a scene, turning and
returning a situation, until he has used its whole value. Though this is
sometimes tiresome for reading, it shows good theatrical sense of the
actual audience. He may have learned it from acting. Nothing is more
instructive to playwrights than this filling of a simple outline. The
habit is almost the opposite of the compression of Greek tragedy, and the
New Comedy is doubtless inferior to tragedy in every point of plot; but
none the less it vindicates clearly the value and the Plautine method of
imaginative amplification.
FOOT-NOTES:
[1] All the larger histories of Greek literature appraise Greek tragedy,
trace its history, and cite monographs for special study. The study of
Greek tragedy as drama should begin with the plays themselves. These
should be read—and with happily increasing frequency they may even be
seen—before reading further about them; for they are now available not
only in many editions, but also in many translations. Translation, though
it must fall short or go wide of the original diction, conveys the
larger dramatic movement, the characteristic dramaturgy; and Sir Gilbert
Murray’s translation of Aristotle’s main example, _Œdipus Rex_, seeks
especially the dramatic values. Very instructive comparisons may be made
by reading all eight tragedies presenting the story of Orestes and his
house, the “Oresteia”: the _Agamemnon_, _Choephoræ_, and _Eumenides_ of
Æschylus, the only extant trilogy; the _Electra_ of Sophocles; and the
_Orestes_, _Electra_, _Iphigenia in Aulis_, and _Iphigenia in Tauris_
of Euripides. Beside the _Œdipus Rex_ of Sophocles most critics would
place his _Antigone_; and beside the _Medea_, the most popular play of
Euripides, his _Alcestis_ and his _Trojan Women_. But it is no great task
to read all extant Greek tragedies.
The general character of Greek dramaturgy and its historical place are
outlined at once concisely and suggestively by Brander Matthews in his
_Development of the Drama_ (New York, 1903), chapter ii, to which may
be added chapters iii, v, viii, ix, and xiii of his _Study of the Drama_
(New York, 1910). T. D. Goodell’s _Athenian Tragedy_ (New Haven, 1920) is
admirable. Gilbert Murray’s _Euripides and His Age_ (London and New York,
1913) discusses Greek dramaturgy generally in chapters iii, viii, and ix.
More inclusive works for English readers are A. E. Haigh’s _The Attic
Theatre_, 3d edition revised by A. W. Pickard-Cambridge (Oxford, 1907),
and R. C. Flickinger’s _The Greek Theatre and Its Drama_ (Chicago, 1918).
These few books are selected as specifically informing and suggestive
for dramaturgy. A longer selective list will be found in L. VanHook’s
_Greek Life and Thought_ (New York, 1923), pages 310-312. A comprehensive
bibliography, so many are the historical significances of Greek tragedy,
would fill a volume.
[2] This paragraph and the following are adapted from the author’s
_Writing and Speaking_, pages 412-415.
[3] “The words are so composed that their full effect can be appreciated
only through the clear and rhythmical enunciation of an actor who relies
mainly on his voice.” J. T. Sheppard, _The Œdipus Tyrannus of Sophocles_
translated and explained, Cambridge University Press, 1920, page ix.
[4] See pages 126, 127 above on the distinction made by pseudo-Longinus
(xi-xii) between poetry and oratory.
[5] Parts of this paragraph and the following are taken from the
author’s _A Note on the History Play_, in _Shakesperian Studies_,
Columbia University Press, 1916.
[6] This has nowhere been better expounded than in the ninth chapter
of Gilbert Murray’s _Euripides and His Age_, London and New York (Home
University Library), 1913.
[7] _Poetic_, 1447 a. See above, pages 140, 143.
[8] _Poetic_, 1453 a. See above, pages 135, 144, 155.
[9] For instance, Chaucer’s Monk says in his prologue:
Tragedie is to seyn a certeyn storie,
As olde bokes maken us memorie,
Of him that stood in greet prosperitee
And is yfallen out of heigh degree
Into miserie, and endeth wretchedly.
_Canterbury Tales_, B. 3163.
[10] _De Nugis Curialium_, IV. xi. Map’s collection contains several
other forms of the same story or of related stories.
[11] Brunetière’s point (_Annales du Théâtre_, 1893) is well interpreted
by Brander Matthews, _The Development of the Drama_, page 20, and again
in _A Study of the Drama_, chapter v.
[12] As to this see Gilbert Murray, _Euripides and His Age_, page 205.
[13] See above, page 163.
[14] E. S. Shuckburgh’s edition of the _Antigone_, Cambridge University
Press, 1908, page xvii.
[15] Not that there were never lapses of time or shifts of place (see
Matthews, _A Study of the Drama_, Chapter xiii, and Goodell, page 82),
but that Greek tragedies move habitually without time-break and in a
single stage-setting.
[16] Murray, _op. cit._, page 212.
[17] See above, pages 147, 149, 150, 161.
[18] The plays ascribed to L. Annæus Seneca (distinguished as “the
younger” or “the philosopher,” circ. 4 B.C.-65 A.D.) are _Œdipus_,
_Phœnissæ_, _Medea_, _Hercules Furens_, _Hippolytus_ (or _Phædra_),
_Hercules Œtæus_, _Thyestes_, _Troades_, _Agamemnon_. Their authorship is
discussed by E. C. Chickering in _An introduction to Octavia Prætexta_,
New York, 1910 (Columbia dissertation), which also contains a brief
account of Roman tragedy, reviews the question of the stage production
of Seneca, and discusses his rank as tragedian. Ella I. Harris’s _Two
tragedies of Seneca, Medea and the Daughters of Troy, rendered into
English verse_, Boston, 1898 (all ten, New York, 1904), summarizes
Senecan influence on English drama. See further J. W. Cunliffe’s _The
influence of Seneca on Elizabethan tragedy_, New York, 1893. All the
Senecan tragedies are included in _The tragedies of Seneca translated
into English verse, to which have been appended comparative analyses of
the corresponding Greek and Roman plays_ ... by F. J. Miller, introduced
by an essay on the influence of the tragedies of Seneca upon early
English drama by J. M. Manly, Chicago, 1907. Miller’s translation is
published also in the Loeb Classical Library.
[19] Chickering suggests (page 45) a resemblance to grand opera.
[20] It is reviewed by Chickering.
[21] “Ce sont des exercices de déclamation, des recueils factices de
morceaux de bravoure écrits pour la lecture.” G. Michaud, _Le génie
latin_, Paris, 1900, page 116.
[22] See above, pages 71-2 and foot-note 8. “Quant aux caractères c’est
du stoicisme découpé en personnages.” E. Nageotte, _Histoire de la
littérature latine_, page 469.
[23] Seneca “the elder,” or the rhetorician, in his collection of
_Controversiæ_, is the chief source of our knowledge of _declamatio_. See
Chapter IV. II.
[24] See Legrand, P. E., _Tableau de la comédie grecque pendant la
période dite nouvelle_—κωμῳδία νέα; translated as _The New Greek Comedy_
by James Loeb, with introduction by John Williams White, London and
New York, 1917. An earlier study quoted below is Lallier, R., _La
comédie nouvelle, introduction à l’étude du théâtre de Térence_ (leçon
d’ouverture), Toulouse, 1876.
Recent English translations of Plautus are: by Paul Nixon in the Loeb
Classical Library (2 volumes issued); by E. H. Sugden of _Amphitruo_,
_Asinaria_, _Aulularia_, _Bacchides_, _Captivi_, London, 1893; by H. O.
Sibley and F. Smalley of _Trinummus_, Syracuse, N. Y., 1895; by B. H.
Clark of _Menæchmi_, New York, 1915. W. H. D. Rouse has reprinted William
Warner’s Elizabethan translation of _Menæchmi_ with the Latin text for the
study of Shakspere’s _Comedy of Errors_, London, 1912.
A second edition of F. Leo’s _Plautinische Forschungen zur Kritik und
Geschichte der Komödie_ appeared in Berlin, 1912. More recent studies
are: Brasse, M., _Quatenus in fabulis Plautinis et loci et temporis
unitatibus species veritatis neglegatur_ ... Greifswald, 1914 (Breslau
thesis); Schild, Erich, _Die dramaturgische Rolle der Sklaven bei Plautus
und Terenz_, Basel (thesis), 1917; Blancké, W. W., _The dramatic values
in Plautus_, Geneva, N. Y., 1918 (Pennsylvania thesis); Cole, Mrs. H. E.,
_Deception in Plautus_, a study in the technique of Roman comedy, with
bibliography, Boston, 1920 (Bryn Mawr thesis).
A complete translation of Terence was privately printed for the Roman
Society, 1900, 2 volumes, with brief notes and partial bibliography.
The most useful available translation is that of the _Phormio_ by M. H.
Morgan, Cambridge, Mass., 1894, with the Latin text and reproductions of
the Vatican miniatures of costumes. This play has been translated also
by Clark, B. H., New York, 1915; _The Self-tormentor_, by Shuckburgh,
E. S., Cambridge, 1869, and by Ricord, F. W., New York, 1885. The Loeb
Classical Library publishes the translation of John Sargeaunt in 2
volumes. See also Michaut, G., _Sur les tréteaux latins (histoire de la
comédie romaine)_, Paris, 1912; Knapp, C., _References in Plautus and
Terence to plays, players and playwrights_, Classical Philology, xiv,
number 1 (Jan., 1919); and a charming popular study by Lemaître, J.,
“Térence et Molière,” in _Impressions de théâtre_, vi (1898) 15-27. The
better to define ancient conceptions of comedy, Lane Cooper reconstitutes
_An Aristotelian Theory of Comedy, with an adaptation of the Poetics and
a translation of the ‘Tractatus Coislinianus,’_ New York, 1922.
[25] See the quotation from Apuleius on page 228. The _Onomasticon_ of
Julius Pollux enumerates 44 masks sufficient for all the rôles and all
the situations of the New Comedy: 10 for old men, 10 for young men, 7
for slaves, 3 for old women, 14 for young women. There are even stock
names, e.g., Davos and Chremes. _Miles gloriosus_ was taken over by
Latin comedy and again by French seventeenth-century comedy, though in
fact neither society had this Athenian type. Over against him is the
parasite, often the mover of the intrigue. The slave and he are the most
active of the _personæ_. (This note is derived from Lallier.)
[26] The extreme case is the _Amphitruo_ of Plautus with its two
Amphitryos and two Sosias. In _Menæchmi_ the servants are doubled; in
_Bacchides_, the courtesans.
[27] Greenough’s translation of the argument, prefacing Morgan’s
translation of the play.
[28] Plutarch, _Mor._, De gloria Atheniensium, 347 F.
[29] Michaut (139) cites Evanthius _De Fabula_ IV. 4 and Donatus.
_Statarius_ seems to be used, in the prologue to the _Adelphi_ and in
a passage cited by Michaut from Cicero’s _Brutus_ xxx. 116, of acting.
Knapp cites the prologue to the _Self-tormentor_.
[30] “Qui sim, cur ad vos veniam paucis eloquar,” prol. to _Bacchides_;
and the play opens with both ladies together on the stage, so that there
can be no mistake. Terence, who devotes his prologue usually to rebuttal
of detraction, sometimes devotes his whole first act to exposition.
II. NARRATIVE
A. THE _ÆNEID_
(1). _Epic_
Epic is now often divided into “primitive,” “authentic,” or “popular”
epic, such as the _Iliad_, and “artistic,” or “literary” epic, such as
the _Æneid_. Of the former the great example is Homer. The _Iliad_ and
the _Odyssey_ remain, for us as for the ancients, supreme. Meantime the
western European nations emerging in the early middle age expressed
themselves in epics of original native force: the _Roland_, the
_Beowulf_, the _Nibelungenlied_, and some of the Norse sagas. To put
these beside Homer is to become aware of specific differences within a
general likeness. Homer is both more ample and more finished. Primitive
he certainly is not in any sense now recognized by anthropology.
Even the word popular has for us implications quite inapplicable to
the circulation of his day. The classification of certain epics as
primitive, authentic, or popular is based on the idea that these are
characteristically communal, expressing more the emotions of a whole
homogeneous community, less those of the individual poet. It has even
been held[1] that such epic began in aggregation of tribal lays, and that
even the form in which it has come down to us is less the creation of
any individual than the final artistic shaping of successive anonymous
versions. The theory of communal composition, in this literal and
extreme sense, has been sharply challenged. Without denying the use
of traditional material and form, one may remain convinced that the
_Iliad_ or the _Odyssey_ is the work of a single man, whom we may as
well continue to call Homer, and that he was not merely the mouthpiece
of a community, but a conscious and skilful artist. That his art was not
wasted on his community, that this community was far from primitive,
there is ample evidence in the remains of its other arts.
The same direction of study leads to a similar conclusion for the
later epics of this class. The more we know of the middle ages, the
less warrant we find for calling these epics primitive. True, they are
less finished than the _Iliad_; true, they show clearer traces of old
war-songs; but neither their art nor the society for which it was shaped
can accurately be called primitive. Alike the literary conventions of
the poems themselves and the social conventions of their times rule
such a characterization out. The “Gothic night” fancied by supercilious
eighteenth-century critics, the “dark ages” of imperfect historians, are
found to have had considerable illumination.
Nevertheless the twofold classification of epic, in spite of the
inaccuracy of its terms, has some significance. Earlier epic, what
we might call primary epic, is in fact more directly answerable to a
homogeneous community. Its unknown poets evidently felt themselves to be
spokesmen of communal emotions and achievements; and the world that they
saw they expressed with less intervention. As if they were transmitters
rather than creators, they expressed not themselves so much as their
people. This people, too, was in that stage of civilization in which
foray and warfare by small groups brought out individual heroes and kept
life precarious and simple. Booty and food, a fine sword and a fine web,
still had immediate appeal; and the physical sensations of battle-strain
and sweat, of ceaseless surf and darkening deep, were still common
experience. Thus primary epic, communal and objective, has the directness
of immediacy. Arising from those simpler emotions which we all feel
together, primitive perhaps in that sense, and expressing them in terms
of familiar physical sensations, it has its own inimitable flavor.
Later, or secondary, epic is not the transmission of legends still
active, but the re-creation of a past already remote. Still appealing
to a communal sense of the heroic, it adapts the old epic mode to an
audience more sophisticated not only in life, but in poetic art. The
poet is thus at once more imitative and more original. He binds himself
by traditions of subject-matter, of form, and of style; but within
this recognized mode he composes with more individual freedom and to a
more definite end. Relying less on scenes in a series, he selects and
manipulates toward more artistic sequence. Since his descriptions must be
less immediate, he develops the art of narrative. Endeavoring to remain
the spokesman of his people—for otherwise he must forfeit the communal
mainspring of epic—he interprets their past by his own message for their
future. Thus he may be all the more a poet, or maker. He cannot hope for
the fresh immediacy of primary epic; but in compensation he has greater
opportunity to move his people by his own vision. Milton’s conception,
vast as is its scope, is essentially the same. He interprets the Bible as
the epic of mankind in terms of a Puritan theocracy. Tasso re-creates a
departed chivalry to animate a vision of devotion and redemption. Vergil,
the great example of secondary epic, makes of the Trojan story, of Roman
legend, of myth and cult and drama and history, of all that enriched the
Roman past, a progressive vision of Roman destiny.
Primary epic and secondary epic, though thus distinguishable, are both
epic. They are complementary. They reveal different capacities of a
single artistic mode. Epic is constant. It was; it was again; it is; for
aught that we can see, it will be. Extended poetic narrative of great
deeds for communal inspiration, though it has never been common, has
never been extinct. Primary epic seems inevitable. The minstrel in the
hall of Hrothgar is poetically identical with the minstrel in the hall of
Alcinous.[2] Both hint to us of what epic was made, and how; both show
us its constancy. This primary form of epic can never, of course, recur.
It has been civilized away. But meantime it has established a poetic art
that is permanent. The word epic still connotes a distinct mode. To this
Vergil deliberately conformed, and Milton. Secondary epic is still epic.
What, then, are seen to be in ancient practise the essentials of
epic? First, its inspiration and its appeal are communal. By contrast
the modern novel, which is also extended narrative and also within
Aristotle’s definition of poetic, is seen to be individual; or, where in
exceptional cases it is broader and simpler,[3] is often distinguished
by criticism as having epic appeal. Then, epic is in style objective. It
narrates habitually without interposition, by images visual, auditory,
motor. Its scenery is merely the background of heroic activity. Its
speeches are in primary epic for characterization, not for plot. There
is no plot in the dramatic sense for the whole; and such as there is for
component parts is only to bring out persons. The object of epic being
persons, its commonest descriptive details are of personal activity:
attitude, movement, speech, gesture. The method is to suggest that heroic
life by its physical sensations, to make the characters, as Aristotle
says,[4] reveal themselves. Epic gives few reflections. It does not
comment even on Helen’s coming to the Scæan gates, or on Hector’s parting
from Andromache; it merely describes. This objectivity is a main means of
epic directness.
The characteristic form of epic[5] is for scope and variety. Drama is
intensive; epic is extensive. It has time to give us a sense of the
fulness of life; and its movement does not preclude excursions. We meet
many people and see them in various aspects. We can linger over a scene
for itself without being urged forward. Continuity may be but leisurely
succession from scene to scene. A scene may within itself have dramatic
progress; but the movement of the whole has not the dramatic causal
compulsion. Drama has its characteristic force through unity. Unity in
epic is neither compelling nor compulsory. In fact, to stretch the term
unity over epic tends to deprive it of all force. No epic poet has ever
composed more carefully than Vergil, or with keener awareness of the ways
of drama. The _Æneid_ was composed as a whole; its parts were carefully
adjusted to a plan, and its plan was controlled by a single idea. Epic
has never gone further toward unity; and Homer never dreamed of going so
far. But even such dramatization of epic as Vergil’s has time for the
funeral games, and does not sacrifice to the story of Rome the story
and the person of Dido. In poetic, unity means nothing unless it means
unity of form. This epic cannot have as a whole. Nor does any one regret
the lack, or think it a fault. The unity of drama is for intensity; the
object of epic is the realization not of a crisis, but of great persons
in a long and various course.
So the style of epic is typically sonorous and high. Height of style may
be attained by simplicity, and epic is simple often, but not always. To
speak of epic as characteristically simple is to belie much of Homer
and most of Vergil and Milton. Epic is not characteristically, nor even
usually, simple. It may be very elaborate. It begins by assuming a
language recognized as on a higher plane than that of ordinary speech.
The epithets of the _Iliad_ or the _Beowulf_ are a poetical convention;
and the style of epic proceeds always by conscious art. Here is the poet
who, daring to sing great deeds, means to sing them greatly. That the
effort may end in frigidity or bombast means only that there is bad epic
as well as good; it does not mean that epic should be simple. Epic poets
have never thought so. The poets of primary epic, no less than Vergil or
Milton, were occupied with style. For the term epic has always implied
greatness. It is a word of praise. It means a story of greatness told
greatly.
Homer was for the ancient Greek world, and Vergil became for the Roman
world, a Bible of style. Both were conned in school not only for
the examples of their great persons, but for the study of language.
That their connotation was immeasurably enriched, their “sublimity”
heightened, not only by rhythm, but by verse, no one will deny. It is
even possible to feel in Milton’s verse a beauty separable from that of
his ideas, and greater, lifting his narrow and political theology to
wider import. Aristotle[6] remarks upon the appropriateness to epic of
the Greek dactylic hexameter. Dionysius[7] even finds control of rhythms
to be Homer’s main poetic means. We are more inclined to admit this view
for Milton; but the ultimate truth is that we should not, except for
analysis, separate verse from the other elements of style. That every
great epic poet has been a masterly metrist means rather that for “the
height of this great argument” he felt the need of all that verse can add
of suggestiveness. Though prose epic, as Aristotle admits by implication,
is quite conceivable, it has to move on a lower plane. The Norse sagas
are more direct even than Homer, starker in narrative force as if
stripped for action, equally expressive of communal emotions, equally
vivid in characterization. They have all the epic means but one. That
single lack does not, indeed, relegate them to a different class; but it
shows by contrast that for its full realization epic demands verse.
(2). _The Conception and Scope of the Æneid_
The whole poetic art of ancient epic is exhibited in the _Æneid_. Setting
aside those interesting historical questions of epic origins, growth,
and transmission which in the study of Homer can hardly be ignored,
and on the other hand including the whole range of epic, secondary as
well as primary, we can learn best from the great poet who devoted his
mature years to conceiving, planning, and reshaping the epic of Rome.
The artistic scope of the _Æneid_, as well as its artistic eminence,
long secure beyond cavil, has been reaffirmed by recent criticism.
Sainte-Beuve calls Vergil “le poète de la Latinité tout entière.”[8]
Mackail, whose studies have been primarily Greek, exalts the _Æneid_
afresh.[9] Woodberry, whose criticism has been mainly of English
literature, says: “The distinctive feature of the ‘Æneid’ is the arc
of time it covers, the burden of time it supports,” and again, “The
‘Æneid’ is, I think, the greatest single book written by man because of
its inclusiveness of human life, of life long lived in the things of
life.”[10]
The idea of Roman destiny, animating the _Æneid_ throughout, is something
larger than the nationalism of other epics. It is imperialism, and of
a spirit generous enough to win the sympathy of Dante. It has not the
occasional character of such a nationalist story, for instance, as
Geoffrey of Monmouth’s _Historia Regum Britanniæ_. In a time of corrupt
politics it is above political opportunism. Its Rome is not merely the
throne of Augustus; it is the government of the world. Its Romanism
is less political than religious. “Pius Æneas” is more typical than
“much-enduring Odysseus” of the struggle of man for an abode of justice
and peace. This, more than the personal glory that humanism centuries
afterward read from the classics, is the conception of the _Æneid_. The
destiny of Rome reveals the hope of mankind; and the _Æneid_ has the
whole epic scope. Hardly less than Milton, Vergil justifies the ways of
God to man.
(3). _The Narrative Movement of the Æneid_[11]
That the _Æneid_ has a controlling idea implies that it is artistically
shaped to stricter continuity than appears in the Homeric model. The
_Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_ are everywhere freer. Homer writes a scene for
itself; Vergil also for its significance in a progress.[12] Salience
is sought by careful subordination. The Carthaginians, for instance,
are not elaborated as are the Italian tribes.[13] The slaughter of the
last night of Troy is confined to a few vivid scenes. Using Hellenistic
versions and evidently studious of their art, Vergil deliberately rejects
their decorative detail and sentimental dilation. He reduces the mating
of Æneas with Dido to a grave summary,[14] in order to give salience to
those other emotions which for the _Æneid_ as a whole were leading. Æneas
does, indeed, in the fourth book yield his position as protagonist to the
queen who among Vergil’s _personæ_ is the great individual; but even so
strong an impulse of creative inspiration does not drive the poet from
his main purpose. One of the few great love-stories, the fourth book is
still held, as it were by force, to the larger story of mission.
The same art deals with the gods. They were for Vergil necessary to epic;
they embodied at once the traditional sense of supernatural response in
natural forces and Vergil’s own sense of divine guidance. But they rarely
interpose, and never interrupt. They work through men; and the course
of events is always amply explained by human motive. The foundations of
Troy were shaken by divine wrath; but we see them dislocated by human
agency. The revengefulness of Juno, the protection of Venus, seem the
more plausible because they operate through the passion of Dido. The one
yields in the end, and the other prevails, because Æneas realizes his
mission. Olympus, now ordered within itself under a calm and absolute
ruler, expresses and animates, not interrupts, the progress of human
order. Thus Vergil’s gods are more than “epic machinery,” and more
than personification. The thoughts of men are not merely expressed
conventionally in archaic personal shapes; they are seen at once as
determining each decisive action and as inspired by divine purpose. For
not only has the _Æneid_ a more consistent theology than the _Iliad_; it
is also more religious.
The most frequent examples of Vergil’s subordination are in his fine
art of description. Picturesque with brilliant color, as well as with
the Homeric light and motion,[15] and as precise as they are vivid, his
descriptions are rarely separable. Not only are they contributory to the
action; they are also inwoven.[16] Vergil’s sensitiveness to the details
of nature transpires in a sentence, even in single words,[17] which
describe while they narrate. Here he discerned the artistic rightness by
which Homer describes every thing movable as in motion,[18] and applied
the principle with more careful attention to narrative continuity.
He dispenses with Homer’s superfluous mechanism of transition.[19]
Memorable as are the descriptions—and nothing in the _Æneid_ is better
remembered—very few can be detached from the context for separate
admiration.[20] The detailing of architecture and decoration, though
it unduly seized the fancy of the middle ages, is hardly an exception.
The Carthaginian pictures of Troy, the palace of Latinus, are there
not for scene-painting, but for historic suggestion. They serve the
story. Thus Vergil’s descriptive art is at once less ample than Homer’s
and more specifically subsidiary. The Hellenistic tableau—ἔκφρασις
is its ominous name—appears in the glittering conventional pauses of
Ovid. Vergil had put it aside. This is the more remarkable because the
ancients seem generally to have regarded certain scenes—battle, for
instance, conflagration, storm, thwarted love—as rather description
than narration.[21] Vergil, while he works even more than Homer to make
us realize a scene by sharing in it as actors,[22] works also to avoid
interruption of the story.
Similar is the constant care to avoid interruption of time or place.[23]
Vergil’s unremitting prevision and revision have obviated any time-lapse
that is insignificant for the action. The Homeric device of bringing in
antecedent action by retrospective narrative is used more artistically.
While it covers ground, extending the time-lapse beyond the stage, the
narrative of Æneas heightens the love of Dido before our eyes.
She loved me for the dangers I had passed;
And I loved her that she did pity them.
It is a larger achievement, one of the greatest,[24] to heighten epic
by suggesting vast reaches of time, from tribal wanderings through wars
of conquest to the reign of law. Here is the artistic significance of
the visit in Book VI to the world of the dead and the unborn, which,
as Mackail says, “slips in the keystone.” To compare the visit of
Odysseus to the shades is to see Vergil’s higher art of composition. But
the suggestion of the great loom of time (_tot volvere casus_) is not
confined to a single artistic device; it is pervasive from the opening
words through a hundred careful allusions; and it makes the _Æneid_ wider
than the _Iliad_ or the _Odyssey_ by making it constantly suggestive of
the whole struggle of history. It reveals more explicitly the struggles
of heroic men as the struggle of man.
Thus the oft-repeated objection that the _Æneid_ breaks into halves is
superficial. The break would not have been thought of if Vergil had
not been seen to be working for a continuity stricter than Homer’s.
Stated baldly by Tyrrell, the idea that the _Æneid_ is an _Odyssey_
plus an _Iliad_ presupposes a sort of imitation to which Vergil shows
himself everywhere superior. It would be as near the truth to reply
that the _Æneid_ is neither an _Odyssey_ nor an _Iliad_. But prototypes
aside, how and how far is the _Æneid_ held together? Surely by the most
careful articulation ever seen in epic, but surely not to the degree
of drama. Among the evidences of revision are indications that the
plan for the wanderings of Æneas was first achieved[25] when much of
the poem was already written. The adjustment of this part to the whole
course, a technic hardly explored by Homer, and the abbreviations of the
wanderings by careful selection, are of a piece with the consistent
connection by repetition of the theme, from the opening lines,
Trojæ qui primus ab oris
Italiam, fato profugus,
throughout the whole poem. True, the seventh book invokes Erato for
scenes of battle.
Maior rerum mihi nascitur ordo;
Maius opus moveo.
The following scenes are different, but not the theme. The art that
deliberately avoided Homer’s succession of battles by interposing such
scenes as Evander’s achieved more than variety. It suggests again
and again what the battles were for. The close upon the tragic death
of Turnus becomes more than the personal victory of the hero; it is
the triumph, over _violentia_, over such individual prowess as Homer
glorified, over personal ambition thwarting the state, of fortitude
bringing in religion and law.
But to ask therefore that the whole movement of the _Æneid_ should be
unified is at once to recognize Vergil’s art of continuity and to demand
for epic the strictness of drama. That Vergil understood drama, that his
art learned not only from Greek epic, but from Greek tragedy, was pointed
out by Nettleship and is important to remember. But he is too great a
master of his chosen form to sacrifice epic scope.
How, then, is the _Æneid_ dramatic? In the composition of the whole only
by such preparations and recurrences as add to the vividness of parts
suggestions of their bearing. Having planned a progress of events, not
merely a series, Vergil marks that progress by such articulation as
had been used to this extent only in drama. In the composition of the
parts singly his art is more dramatic. The _Æneid_ as a whole is not
dramatically unified, and could not be. What is unified is each book.[26]
For purposes of recitation, epic had to be composed, whether as a whole
or not, in distinct parts. Of this necessity Vergil made a virtue. He
advanced the narrative art of situation by applying some of the technic
of drama. This is conspicuous in his frequent use of peripety. Again,
the memorable and well remembered Laokoön scene is interposed between
the Sinon scenes. Each is made to heighten the other, and both to give
first suspense and then compelling motive to the bringing in of the
fatal horse. Again and again Vergil will be found thus to intensify his
narrative by the technic of drama. The most obvious instance is the
distinct group of scenes at Carthage. The entrance of Dido is in the
dramatic sense and by dramatic methods prepared. First, Æneas hears of
her from his goddess mother, and is kindled by her having achieved his
own epic mission—_dux femina facti_. Follows his view of the city, big
already in achievement, big also to every Roman listener with menace.
Then the decorative pictures at once review the tragedy of Troy and
reveal in this strong queen a propitious sympathy. Upon all this, as to
a waiting stage and a waiting audience, _enter Dido_.[27] Moreover in
the Dido scenes, instead of contenting himself with that mere strife
of emotions which was familiar in Hellenistic poetry[28] and became a
rhetorical commonplace with Ovid, Vergil advances and heightens the
leading emotion steadily, as in a play, up to its tragic close. The
close is the inevitable result of something more than thwarted passion
because Dido has been presented dramatically, without concession to the
Hellenistic narrative dilation, by what she said and did. Vergil’s Dido
is a creation every way beyond the Medea of Apollonius. She must be
placed beside the Medea of Euripides. In her consistent tragic nobility,
in the higher morality of her appeal, perhaps she must be placed above.
For the fourth book of the _Æneid_, as fully as the _Antigone_, is tragic
in its purgation of pity and fear.
Thus to apply drama to narrative without sacrificing the typical epic
opportunities of fulness and scope is among the greatest achievements
of poetic. It is an art so far beyond any other ancient narrative as to
remain solitary until Dante; and Dante’s guide was Vergil. It guided
also the creative hand of Milton. And not for epic only, but for all
imaginative story, the art of the _Æneid_ remains a test and a guide. In
this sense he who became for medieval Latinists _the_ poet, as Cicero was
_the_ orator, remains Master Vergil.
(4). _Characterization in the Æneid_
To turn from the narrative movement to the persons is to descend. At once
we feel that the achievement is less and that the method is less fruitful
for narrative art because it is less distinctively poetic. Vergil’s
narrative composition has universal validity; but his characterization,
for the most part, is only Latin. It had none the less influence on the
middle ages—perhaps all the more; but it had the less inspiration for
later creations.
To estimate Vergil’s characterization fairly, it is necessary first to
remove certain misconceptions. He has been reproached for leaving in our
minds few outstanding figures: Turnus, Evander, Mezentius, Pallas, Nisus
and Euryalus. Some of these, like the Camilla whom Dante remembers, are
only sketched; and most of them are secondary. Now though this is paucity
beside the populous pages of Homer, we must remember that Vergil’s whole
roster of heroes is smaller deliberately because, much more than Homer’s,
they are _dramatis personæ_. He makes the dramatic innovation of focusing
on a few and of subordinating the development even of these to the
development of the theme.
A more frequent objection is that throughout the latter part of the
poem the hero is no longer Æneas, but Turnus. This is to use the word
hero in a sense that Vergil would hardly have understood. Seeing Turnus
through centuries of romance, we are so occupied with his _bravoure_ as
readily to forget that Vergil’s Æneas is not meant to have the interest
or the significance of King Arthur. Nor, we should add, is he meant to
have the interest of Achilles. His individual prowess is only incidental
to his dominant fortitude. The achievement of personal glory is behind
him. “He has outlived his personal life.”[29] His work is to found the
Roman people. The characterization of Æneas, moreover, shows a certain
development.[30] He shows more growth than “much-enduring Odysseus.” The
battle frenzy of the return to the doomed city (_arma amens capio_), the
vacillation at Carthage, are put forever behind. He becomes progressively
more steadfast. Always _pius_, he enlarges his _pietas_ into calm
assurance of mission. As for the story, so for the characterization of
the hero, the sixth book is the critical stage of a progress.
The creative power of Vergil is amply vindicated by Dido. One may feel
that she is too vivid for her function, that she takes the stage, as
actors say, away from Æneas, that through her the nice planning of the
whole is quite warped. We shall doubtless never be able to judge this
as Romans. Perhaps even they were more absorbed than Vergil intended
in his tragic queen.[31] Perhaps Vergil himself was swerved by his own
creation. But all this only reinforces the testimony to a compelling
characterization. There may be difference of opinion as to Dido’s part in
the story; there can be none as to Dido herself.
But our estimates thus duly corrected, we cannot but feel that Dido
stands out among the figures of the _Æneid_ because she is exceptional.
We feel her to be drawn not only better, but often differently. And this
should lead to scrutiny of Vergil’s habitual method. To begin with, it
is everywhere apparent that he cares less than Homer for individuality.
A certain expansiveness in Homeric dialogue often keeps the story
waiting to give the individual his say. Vergil shifts the proportions.
He rejects long dialogues because he is more interested in narrative
economy than in personal expressiveness. Further, the speeches are often
more reasoned than Homer’s, more orderly, less like conversation and more
like oratory.[32] Sinon’s are very naturally elaborate pieces of special
pleading, and the rhetoric of Drances against Turnus is appropriate
in a deliberative assembly; but the making of successive points, and
the careful adaptation of style not only to the speaker, but to the
hearer, are habitual, as even in the speech of Allecto to Turnus. In
this reasoned order, rather than in any mere elaboration, Heinze finds
Vergil to be rhetorical. Instead of following the pace of emotional
utterance, abrupt and disjointed, he sometimes holds even violent emotion
to a steady course. By thus composing emotional expression he sometimes
sacrifices directness of characterization.[33]
Indeed, Vergil is generally less concerned than Homer with creating
individuals, and more concerned with showing his persons as types.
Whether the loss in individual distinctness is compensated by a gain
in common consent opens a long debate. Modern taste inclines rather
to Homer than to Vergil; but between stretch centuries of Latin
habit, and that habit, best exemplified in Vergil, is to characterize
typically. This method of idealization may in Vergil’s case have Stoic
preoccupations;[34] but more generally it is rhetorical. To characterize
by age, sex, race, occupation, etc., is a prescription of rhetoric[35]
fixed in recipes and school exercises. It was dilated into ingenious
fictions by the _declamatores_. Ovid’s characterization hardly rises
above the schools. Vergil was too great to move on that level; but even
he is preoccupied with that ideal and generally content with that method.
He carried the method as far, perhaps, as it will go. That except in
subordinate sketches he departed from it only in one surpassing instance
is doubtless the fundamental reason for our finding his characterization
inferior to his composition.
(5). _Epic Diction_
Generations have felt in the _Æneid_, first of all, high and constant
beauty. No other great poem has seemed more infallibly beautiful.
The beauty has sometimes, indeed, been acknowledged with a certain
disparagement, as if it implied the less strength; but so perverse an
antithesis cannot delay attention except to the fact that Vergil is
beautiful even to his detractors. The worst that has been said of his
style is that it is sometimes inappropriately elaborate.[36]
atque arida circum
Nutrimenta dedit, rapuitque in fomite flammam.
Tum Cererem corruptam undis Cerealiaque arma
Expediunt fessi rerum; frugesque receptas
Et torrere parant flammis et frangere saxo.
I. 175.
This, it must be admitted, seems comparatively remote and unreal beside
similar meals in Homer, and absolutely too high a style for camp cookery.
Nor is it safe to urge that Vergil is holding his style to the epic
level; for that plea opens the way to such mere etiquette as centuries
later quite deviated the discussion of epic from its main issues, and,
besides, Vergil himself does not thus describe Dares and Entellus. No,
the plea must be rather of confession and avoidance. Such passages
are not beautiful, and their style is not epic; but they are so few
that to call them characteristic is quite unfair. Nor are they to be
ascribed to preoccupation with rhetoric. Vergil is, indeed, sometimes
more oratorical[37] than we wish; but he is not, in our modern sense
rhetorical, and his rhetoric, no less than his poetic, must have found
such passages inferior. Rather we may think that these few “rubs and
botches in the work” were what led him to wish it burned; for after all
his revision he was acutely conscious that it was unfinished. Unfinished
in form it certainly is not. Unfinished in style it is here and there.
But what a sense of beauty had the artist who could not bear even so few
blemishes!
Not elaborateness, then, is characteristic of Vergil’s style, but
certainly elaboration. His tireless revision is testified by the
tradition that he composed first in prose, and that he spent on the
_Æneid_ ten years.[38] No style is more highly charged. It is made
to suggest at once vivid descriptive imagery and the sanctions of
history and religion. Not only the story, but the diction, is full of
Rome. His use of the language of Roman ritual[39] is characteristic of
an expression piously preservative of cult. “By instinct and temper
a ritualist,”[40] he is continually suggesting the significance of
traditional forms. The _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_ are in a special
dialect. The _Faery Queene_ has a language of its own. To achieve such
suggestions in the _Æneid_ with but the slightest resort to archaism
is in itself a great achievement of language; but it is only part of a
consistent allusiveness, an extraordinary connotation, ranging the whole
gamut from sharp physical sensations to spiritual significance. A style
eminently classic in precision and harmony is yet felt to be above all
rich. No other poet seems more nearly infallible with the right word; no
other so well to have charged classic restraint with romantic exuberance
by the energy of his expressiveness. The influence of Vergil, immediate,
wide, and long, is indubitably the influence of his style. Later ages,
unappreciative of the poetic art of his composition, felt the spell of
his imagery and rhythm almost as an incantation. “Virgil is that poet
whose verse has had most power in the world.”[41]
(6). _Originality in Imitation_
The notion that imitation must be subversive of originality betrays a
crude conception of both. Yet it lingers in such criticism as thinks the
_Æneid_ to be a Latin _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_. To measure it so is to miss
not only the art of a single great poem, but much of all poetic art. For
since all art works in forms received and recognized, less by invention
than by transformation, it is of cardinal significance to distinguish,
in a poem conspicuously imitative and conspicuously original, just what
artistic imitation is. Therefore what has been implied in the preceding
sections may here be drawn together in summary.
Imitation is always of movement or style; it has nothing to do with
material. To preface this should be superfluous; but many quests for
“sources” have left some confusion. Vergil took much of the Trojan story
from Homer. To be sure, he used other sources too. Nothing is more
remarkable in the _Æneid_ than the wealth and variety of its material.
Its sources are beyond the dreams of Homer. But even if Vergil’s material
were all Homeric, he would not on that account be the more imitative.
Ancient literature, and mediæval too, generally make freer with preceding
stories than modern. The material is not thought to be any one’s
property. In this respect Vergil is singularly independent. He uses more
sources; he is more selective; and what he adopts is often a composite.
He works in the modern way rather than in the ancient; but he is not on
that account either more or less imitative. Some of Shakspere’s plays
derive their plots from single sources; some are in plot composite; but
all are alike original. A modern French tragedy took the plot not only of
an ancient story, but of the best known of all ancient plays. It is none
the less original; and its imitation, as all artistic imitation, is of
the ancient technic.
Imitation in art, then, means following certain artistic ways. To begin
with, Vergil evidently set out to write an epic, and undoubtedly looked
to Homeric epic as a type. This is important not only in his case, but
throughout literary history. Though its importance may be exaggerated
in Brunetière’s _évolution des genres_, evidently epic meant something
controlling to Vergil because of Homer, and has meant something wider
ever since because of Vergil. To any poet, to Tasso and Milton as to
Vergil, epic necessarily implies a pattern. It directs and limits
_personæ_ and diction; but it does not hamper artistic progress, for it
does not limit interpretation. Vergil remade not only the epic material,
but the epic form, to a new end. His Sinon[42] is a typical instance of
artistic rehandling. Drawn doubtless from several ancient sources, he
has become through his new function and motivation creatively original.
Battles there must be in epic, even battles of the Homeric sort; but
Vergil does not rely on the general _mêlée_; he modifies it subtly in
the direction of the more organized Roman fighting, and he changes the
Homeric series into a progress. In short, even where he is perforce most
dependent on Homer, his imitation is never repetition. Imitation is
creative when it adapts the art of the past to the interpretation of the
present. The _Æneid_ is not a Latin _Iliad_; it is a Roman epic.
Vergil’s adaptation of the epic movement involves a departure from Homer
in the direction of drama.[43] How, and how far, imitation of drama can
serve extended narrative we learn fully from him because he imitates
selectively. He does not try to make his story a play, or merely a
series of plays; he finds how far epic can be conducted dramatically
without sacrificing its epic appeal. No less selectively he rejects the
Hellenistic technic of Apollonius.[44] Epic diction, he discerns, in
order to have the old communal appeal, must sound traditional; but echo
of Homeric style would make it sound merely conventional. He gives it
traditional connotation by means of his own. His diction, therefore, is
far less imitative than his composition. In fact, it is rarely imitative
at all. In the limits, no less than in the method, of his imitation his
art runs true. Through that obedience which great artists yield to the
art that they inherit he shows the way to imaginative freedom.
B. THE NARRATIVE POETRY OF OVID
Among the Latin poets Vergil has the siege perilous. He achieved that
high poetic emprise beside which others must seem less. In comparison no
one suffers more than Ovid.[45] Yet he who presented the gods without
seeing their divinity, and retold the myths instead of recreating them,
has literary qualities not only striking, but at once typical of his time
and very widely influential. Vergil has been revered; but Ovid has been
imitated and absorbed. Without attempting to measure his brilliancy, it
is necessary to distinguish the characteristic habits of a poetic whose
influence spread over western Europe.
That poetic is seen at once to be unfailingly expert in every artistic
detail. Its metrical facility, proverbial[46] from the first and
instructive of the verse of many centuries and many lands, is only
the most obvious skill of a man who loved style. Though he does not
make a habit of the elegiac tendency to rime, he plays variously upon
alliteration and other consonance;[47] and his use of refrain suggests
those stanza patterns set centuries later by French courtly makers in
rondel[48] and ballade.[49] For though he knows the subtlest spells of
sound, Ovid is never neglectful of such notes as must catch the ear. His
verse is more than popular; but it is popular, and many a Spaniard, Gaul,
and Briton has been grateful to feel its music running in his head.
Equally obvious is Ovid’s decorative description. Its bent is not
toward epic suggestion of character by attitude, gesture, and action,
but toward picturesqueness. Bright imagery garnishes the familiar.
Groves and streams and their tutelary nymphs, men, women, and gods,
are not individualized; they are merely realized. But what exuberance
of suggestion! To open dull eyes and spur jaded feelings, to vivify a
legendary scene, to dilate a conventional mood, to redecorate an old
landscape, Ovid had an inexhaustible fund.
For he elevated poetic convention to a fine art. A storm at sea[50] lacks
none of the properties; a fainting heroine or hero,[51] no appropriate
gesture. The pallor of love can move once more,[52] and the golden
age[53] make the over-civilized pensive. “Mortal art thou, or divine?”
was said by Odysseus to Nausikaa when gods walked with men; but Ovid had
the art to repeat it[54] when the gods were dead. Repeat? He himself
became the pattern of these things for centuries. Not only is he forever
the poet of “Gather ye roses while ye may,” but “Stay, dawn; why must
thou haste?”[55] echoed across Europe,[56] was heard in the cry of
Chaucer’s Troilus[57] and Shakspere’s Juliet,[58] and still reverberates.
The Alexandrian[59] dilation of such description[60] appears also in
the long-drawn emotions of soliloquy.[61] The fixing of this as a
literary type must have been promoted by the prevalence of the schools of
_declamatio_,[62] where Ovid had studied. Practised in elementary form
even by Roman schoolboys, developed by _declamatores_ in exhibitions of
virtuosity, the fiction of what so-and-so must have said on such-and-such
an occasion is still a rhetorical exercise. As an exercise it has some
value in promoting poetic appreciation; but it seems hardly the way
toward poetic creation. Ovid, at any rate, hardly creates persons. The
address of Sol, for instance, to Phaëthon,[63] is only a more extended
and more professional school theme; and the mixture of allegorical
personification with myth[64] shows him rather as a rhetorician[65] than
as a poet. That he is not a myth-maker, only a myth-teller, may be seen
by putting any of his demigods beside the Prometheus of Æschylus—or even
the Prometheus of Shelley. For re-creation Ovid lacked what the Great
Unknown[66] thought to be the primary source of expression, intellectual
vigor of conception. Thus his mythical persons, though always appropriate
and sometimes vivid, are not alive.
More has been claimed for his story-telling. Cruttwell[67] says of the
_Metamorphoses_: “The skill with which different legends are woven
into the fabric of the composition is as marvellous as the frivolous
dilettantism which could treat a long heroic poem in such a way.” The
skill of the weaving is indisputable; but is it more than an art of
transition? To call the _Metamorphoses_ a long heroic poem suggests
a cruel comparison with the _Æneid_, and partly begs the question.
What Ovid seems to have intended, and what he achieved, is a deftly
articulated collection. It is not a single poem in the sense of having
emotional progress or totality, nor is any other of Ovid’s collections.
His distinctively narrative art, therefore, is to be sought not in the
connection between stories, but in the composition of each one. It is
even probable that this art was the more popular because it offered, not
a long sustained narrative, but many separable short tales.
The “vivid inventiveness” and “unflagging animation” urged by Owen[68] as
characteristic of Ovidian narrative may be accepted without discussion,
and should not be undervalued. Inventiveness was overvalued, indeed,
in the melodramatic fictions of _declamatio_, and implies an art rather
facile than creative; but it is none the less sure of popularity. As
for animation, whatever else a story may be, it may not be dull. Here
Ovid often wins by his very levity. He makes no demands. No one can
be followed more easily; for he moves on the surface. Where he skates
on thin ice, he does so quite simply for excitement. There is none of
the modern pretense of exploration. His problems are purely artistic,
problems not of motive, but of interesting mood and attitude, of
appropriate and various utterance. His animation, partly rhythmical,
partly descriptive, is more largely unflagging expressiveness. Always
expressive, his people can always be understood without effort. He holds
attention without provoking thought.
The “rapid movement” claimed by Owen is often mere succinctness, rarely
the speed gained by modern narrative use of dramatic technic. For that
he usually has too much separable description, too much soliloquy, too
little motivation. He seeks intensity less often than expansiveness.
Nevertheless, though he pauses deliberately for description or _tirade_,
he does not lag. There is no clumsy prosing or deviation. He has the
art, more valued in ancient and medieval times than in modern, of lucid,
fluent narrative, the art of the tale. That he does not follow it oftener
is due to his readers’ fondness, and his own, for dilation. The onward
movement of poetic is thus sacrificed to rhetoric. The parts become more
important than the whole. For Ovid was a rhetorician, not only bred in
the schools, but habitually thinking of poetry less as composed movement
than as lucid and brilliant, as ample and harmonious style.
C. THE METAMORPHOSES OF APULEIUS
Sighting from the _Metamorphoses_ of Ovid through the _Metamorphoses_
of Apuleius,[69] one clearly discerns the coming of the Greek Romances.
So runs the Alexandrian narrative line from decorative description
and expansive emotion, through exciting incident and uncontrolled
variety,[70] to sheer violence. Ovid’s stories are sometimes like
dreams; the Greek Romances are nightmares. Apuleius, between the two,
already seeks the violent and the bizarre. His metamorphoses are no
longer mythical, nor in the least allegorical; they are mere sorcery.
The appetite of his time for horrors and other excitement had been both
fed and whetted by _declamatio_.[71] Ovid, too, knew _declamatio_; but
Apuleius, himself a rhetor, was less restrained by earlier literary
standards from giving rein to the sensational.
Though the bulk of his extant work is narrative, Apuleius devotes no
attention to onward narrative movement. Superficially continuous, his
_Metamorphoses_ are nevertheless often quite separable, as is evident
in the most famous of them, Cupid and Psyche. Such course of plot as
there is eddies in harangues, _tirades_ and decorative descriptions.
The abundant dialogue is uncontrolled by dramatic concision. Everywhere
Apuleius is orally expansive. A rhetor telling stories, he goes little
beyond the poetic of the platform: work for excitement, relying on lust
and witchcraft; expand what is showy, emphasizing each part without
regard to sequence; use dialogue for variety, letting _prosopopœia_
suffice for characterization; and if nevertheless the tale lags or
becomes confused, make a fresh start by bringing on brigands. This habit
of mind, and not the incidental satire, explains the narrative looseness.
Apuleius is no Rabelais; he is only a facile second-century rhetor
carrying the rhetorical fiction of his time to greater length. In style,
though habitually diffuse, he is sometimes charming and often lively; but
in composition he merely extends a meretricious convention.
During his lifetime Iamblichus wrote the _Babylonica_, or Rhodanes
and Sinonis (166-180); and, soon after, Chariton of Aphrodisias the
_Chæreas and Calirrhoe_ (before 200).[72] Thus was established the mode
followed later by Heliodorus and Achilles Tatius, the perverted narrative
known as the Greek Romances. Any one who has the patience for these
phantasmagoria of passion, horror, and adventure will see their likeness
to the _Metamorphoses_ of Apuleius, and will probably reproach him the
more for ignoring that onward causal movement without which the art of
narrative seems to lapse.
FOOT-NOTES:
[1] See F. B. Gummere’s _Beginnings of Poetry_. The controversy which was
spread by the Homeric studies of Wolf, has lately shifted to the popular
ballad. See G. L. Kittredge’s introduction to his one-volume selection of
the _English and Scottish Popular Ballads_ from the collection of Child,
Boston, 1904, and the recent studies of Professor Louise Pound. J. A.
Scott maintains _The Unity of Homer_ in his University of California
Lectures, 1921.
[2] C. S. Baldwin, _Introduction to English Medieval Literature_, New
York, 1914, pages 16-18.
[3] As I write, Knut Hamson’s _The Growth of the Soil_ has just been
called epic.
[4] _Poetic_, xxiv.
[5] Aristotle, _Poetic_, xxiv. See page 158 above.
[6] _Poetic_, xxiv.
[7] See above, page 106.
[8] Opening of the _Étude sur Virgile_.
[9] _Lectures on Poetry_, London, 1911.
[10] “Vergil,” in _Great Writers_, New York, 1912.
[11] W. Y. Sellar in _The Roman Poets of the Augustan Age, Virgil_,
Oxford (3d edition), 1908, analyzes under convenient headings Vergil’s
position in Latin literature. Henry Nettleship’s discussions in _Lectures
and Essays_, Oxford, 1875, 1885, have not been superseded, though they
have evidently been suggestive to more recent critics. Sainte-Beuve’s
_Étude sur Virgile_, Paris, n. d., and T. R. Glover’s _Virgil_, London,
1904 (4th edition, 1920), appeal more to the general reader. R. Y.
Tyrrell’s chapter in his _Latin Poetry_, Boston, 1895, is unsympathetic
with Vergil the artist. Most of the innumerable editions of the _Æneid_
have little to say of his poetic art. This is specifically the subject
of M. Marjorie Crump’s _The Growth of the Æneid_, Oxford, 1920, which,
though little developed, is a distinct contribution to technical study.
But _the_ book on Vergilian epic is the exhaustive work of Richard
Heinze, _Virgils epische Technik_, Leipzig, 1902 (2d edition. 1908, 3d
edition, 1915). References are to pages of the third edition.
[12] Heinze, 319, compares in this aspect the Homeric duel of Paris and
Menelaus with _Æneid_ xii. Typically, he points out, Vergil’s “Handlung
fortschreitet,” and the composition is “szenenhaft.”
[13] Paul LeJay, _L’Énéide_, Paris, 1919, page lix. Heinze, 381, shows
the minuteness of this care in cases where two scenes are chronologically
parallel. One of the two is always subordinated; and the first to be
presented is always carried to a state of rest before turning to the
second.
[14] Heinze, 361.
[15] The exactness, brilliancy, and range of Vergil’s color words are
studied by T. R. Price, _The Color-System of Vergil_, American Journal
of Philology, volume 4, number 13 (1882). See the more extensive work
of Hugo Blümner, _Die Farbenbezeichnungen bei den römischen Dichtern_,
Berliner Studien, volume 13 (1891).
[16] This is the technical secret of the distinction that Sainte-Beuve
expresses as “sobriété ... rien que le nécessaire,” _Étude sur Virgile_,
93.
[17] Glover, 16, repeats Henry’s praise of
Quale per incertam lunam sub luce maligna. VI. 270.
Surcharged precision intensifies
Lucet via longo
Ordine flammarum, et late discriminat agros. XI. 143.
But the same distinctness, at once precise and picturesque, may be found
almost anywhere in the _Æneid_; it is Vergil’s habit, and it is never
obtrusive.
[18] Lessing, _Laokoön_, especially chapters xvi and xvii.
[19] Heinze, 406.
[20] The famous description of the harbor under the cliffs (Est in
secessu longo locus. I. 159) is really less characteristic than
Adspirant auræ in noctem, nec candida cursus
Luna negat; splendet tremulo sub lumine pontus. VII. 8.
[21] Heinze, 396.
[22] Heinze, 374.
[23] Heinze cites the handling of Fama in IV, and of Allecto in VII.
[24] See above, page 199.
[25] Heinze, 94. Miss Crump analyzes the probable changes of revision.
Her theory that Book III survives from an earlier plan in which it stood
first, and that Vergil probably intended to revise it entirely, has
grave difficulties.
[26] Paul LeJay, _L’Énéide_, lxviii; Heinze, 263. For the detail of the
composition of single books and groups see also Heinze, 180, 448, 453.
For instances of peripety, see Heinze, 223, 323.
[27] Heinze, 120, is hardly extravagant in maintaining that this is
beyond any other ancient achievement of the kind.
[28] Heinze, 133.
[29] Woodberry, 132. See also J. R. Green, “Æneas, a Virgilian Study” in
_Stray Studies from England and Italy_, 227.
[30] Heinze, 271 seq.; W. Warde Fowler, _The Religious Experience of the
Roman People_, lecture xviii.
[31] Ovid (_Tristia_, II. 535) says that the fourth book was the most
popular.
[32] Sellar, 395. For careful discussion of this whole aspect of Vergil’s
diction, see Heinze, 410-427.
[33] That even Dido’s desperate plea, as well as the calm reply of Æneas,
proceeds from point to point, not all readers will agree with Heinze
(425-6, on _Æneid_ IV. 305). The variations of rhythm in this passage
would surely be used by a sympathetic reciter to suggest agitation.
But Vergil’s general neglect of the familiar means of asyndeton and
hyperbaton (see, for example, _De sublimitate_, xxi-xxii) to suggest
emotional disorder shows a characteristic distrust of incoherence.
[34] Heinze, 279.
[35] How freely Latin authors transferred it to poetic may be seen in
Horace’s _Ars Poetica_ (see below, Chapter viii). Compare Plutarch,
_Quomodo adolesc._, x, below, page 244.
[36] Sellar, 101, quotes Comparetti: “an elaboration of language which
disdains or is unable to say a plain thing in a plain way.”
[37] See above, page 210.
[38] “During all the years in which Virgil brooded over it and wrought
upon it, he kept his material ... in fusion, not crystallized and
hardened into final shape” (Mackail, 78); i.e., he continued to adjust.
[39] _Eximios tauros_, _farre pio_, etc., noted, among other critics,
by E. Nageotte, _Histoire de la littérature latine_, 334. Apropos of
Vergil’s incomparable command of the resources of his language, Nageotte
adds happily that a “tache de rouille antique a son effet prévu dans la
gamme des couleurs environnantes” (324).
[40] Woodberry, 125.
[41] Woodberry, 111.
[42] See above, page 206.
[43] See above, page 205.
[44] See above, page 203.
[45] Ovid has a large place in every comprehensive history of Latin
literature (e.g., in W. Y. Sellar’s volume on _Horace and the Elegiac
Poets_ in his _Roman Poets of the Augustan Age_, Oxford, 1892), and is
discussed at least briefly in the compends (e.g., C. T. Cruttwell’s
_History of Roman Literature_, American edition, New York, 1890).
The last edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica has an extensive
appreciation by S. G. Owen, whose critical edition of _Tristia_ provides
a bibliography of Ovidiana. Of English translations the most accessible
are those in the Loeb Classical Library: of _Heroides_ and _Amores_
by Grant Showerman, of _Metamorphoses_ by F. J. Miller, both with
introductions and bibliographical notes.
[46]
Sponte sua carmen numeros veniebat ad aptos,
Et quod tentabam dicere versus erat.
_Tristia_, IV. x. 25.
is almost as familiar as “lisped in numbers, for the numbers came.”
[47]
Morsque minus pœnæ quam mora mortis habet.
_Heroides_, x. 82.
[48]
Ilia, pone metus; tibi regia nostra patebit,
Teque colent amnes. Ilia, pone metus.
Tu centum plures inter dominabere nymphas;
Nam centum aut plures flumina nostra tenent.
_Amores_, iii. 6, 61.
Rime in Latin elegiac poetry is well summarized by K. P. Harrington in
his volume of edited selections, _The Roman Elegiac Poets_, New York,
1914, page 61.
[49] E.g., at the close of _Heroides_, ix, Impia quid dubitas Deianira
mori? in line 146 is repeated in lines 152, 158, 164, i.e., in every
sixth line.
[50] E.g., _Metam._ xi. 494.
[51] _Metam._ vii. 826.
[52] _Ars Amat._ i. 729.
[53] _Metam._ i. 89, _Amores_, iii. 8, 35.
[54] _Metam._ iv. 320.
[55] _Amores_, i. 13. 3.
[56] See, for example, Rudolph Schevill, _Ovid and the Renascence in
Spain_, University of California Publications in Modern Philology, vol.
4, number 1 (November, 1913), pages 24 and 95.
[57] _Troilus and Criseyde_, iii. 1415-1470.
[58] _Romeo and Juliet_, III. v.
[59] Owen in Encyclopedia Britannica speaks of Ovid as “the most
brilliant representative of Roman Alexandrinism.”
[60] A typical ἔκφρασις is “dira lues” in _Metam._ vii. 523.
[61] E.g., Byblis in _Metam._ ix. 474, Myrrha in _Metam._ x. 320.
[62] Discussed above in Chapter IV. II. Cruttwell says of the _Heroides_:
“They are erotic suasoriæ, based on the declamations of the schools.”
_History of Roman Literature_, 306; and Heinze, “die Gattung der
poetischen _declamatio_ inaugurierte.” _Virgils epische Technik_, 434.
Cf. Sellar, 331, 356; Carl Brück, _De Ovidio scholasticarum declamationum
imitatore_, Munich, 1909.
[63] _Metam._ ii. 33.
[64] Iris, Tisiphone, Luctus, Pavor, Terror. _Metam._ iv. 480. The method
seen more largely in Invidia (_Metam._ ii. 760), essentially a school
exercise, passed through the _Roman de la Rose_ into medieval habit.
[65] Heinze discusses more generally the rhetorical habit of Ovid in
_Virgils epische technik_, 434.
[66] See above, page 126.
[67] _History of Roman Literature_, 309.
[68] Encyclopedia Britannica.
[69] Apuleius, born about 125 A.D., and probably educated at Carthage,
where he passed much of his life, became a rhetor at Rome about 150, and
soon thereafter published the _Metamorphoses_. _Florida_ is the title
given to a collection of excerpts from what we should call his lectures
(see Chapter VIII, 230). Nettleship (in an essay on Nonius Marcellus,
_Lectures and Essays_, 282) calls him “a very striking representative
of his age.” Though his work is largely translation or compilation,
he has caught the fancy of several English _literati_, and was made
by Pater one of the _personæ_ in the twentieth chapter of _Marius the
Epicurean_. Adlington’s translation (1566) of the _Metamorphoses_ has
been reprinted with an introduction by Seccombe, and revised for the Loeb
Classical Library by Gaselee. The separable Cupid and Psyche chapters
(Books IV-VI), often translated, appear in the fifth chapter of Pater’s
_Marius_, and have been again translated by Purser (London, 1910), with
a suggestive introduction on Apuleius as a rhetor. Butler has translated
also the _Florida_.
[70] “L’art de composition faiblit, comme il arrive toujours quand la
sincérité du sentiment diminue; car c’est la préoccupation sincère
d’une idée dominante qui maintient d’un bout à l’autre l’unité de ton
et l’harmonie; quand le bel esprit l’emporte, il s’amuse aux détails,
il s’attache au ‘morceau,’ et n’a plus la force de lier l’ensemble.”
Croiset, _Histoire de la littérature grecque_, vol. V (_Période
Alexandrine_), page 158.
[71] See Chapter IV. II.
[72] These dates are taken from Wolff’s admirable summary of the Greek
Romances as an Alexandrian derivative in the opening chapter of his
_Greek Romances in Elizabethan Fiction_ (New York, 1912, Columbia
University Press).
CHAPTER VIII
RHETORIC IN ANCIENT CRITICISM OF POETIC
A. THE PERVASIVENESS OF RHETORIC
The Aristotelian distinction of poetic from rhetoric has been sometimes
blurred, sometimes ignored, by criticism. Such confusion as thus arises
became more common in ancient criticism with the waning of ancient art;
it was widespread in the middle age; it has reappeared many times since
the Renaissance.[1] For consistent development of poetic as a technic
distinct from rhetoric is beyond the occasion of most criticism, whether
ancient or modern. At an ebb tide of creation especially, the average
critic is likely to confine his observations to style; and there the two
technics have much common ground. Even in criticism of composition we
have seen often in our own time such familiar terms as unity, emphasis,
and coherence restricted to their rhetorical definitions, and yet imposed
in these senses on composition whose actual control was quite different.
The unity of the _Ancient Mariner_, for instance, has been interpreted as
the logical control of the proposition “He prayeth best who loveth best,”
though surely that composition was unified quite otherwise. Or the term
coherence is permitted to suggest that the progress of Burke’s speech
on _Conciliation_ from paragraph to paragraph is like the progress
of _Othello_ from scene to scene, though the two technics have little
resemblance. Such warping of poetic has sometimes been even urged by
ancient or modern schoolmasters and text-books. It has seemed thrifty
to make Molière, for instance, exhibit those principles of composition
which pupils must use in writing essays upon him. But even without
such pedagogical perversion it is easy to think of poetic in terms of
rhetoric; for rhetoric is in everybody’s head.
It was so much more a preoccupation of ancient thought that the
conception of poetic as a distinct movement seems to have become less
and less active. Though a few critics, even under the Empire, held the
Aristotelian distinction, generally ancient poetic was more and more
warped toward rhetoric. With rhetoric determining education, with even
Cicero and Tacitus discussing poetic as contributory, with the later
_declamatores_ habitually blending the two, with even poets yielding
to the common tendency, poetic could hardly be conceived often as a
distinct movement of composition. While Vergil’s art revealed a critical
conception unknown to Seneca and Lucan, Horace could repeat Aristotle
without following his distinctive idea. Cicero and Tacitus, best of Latin
critics, naturally contemplate in poetic rather its imagery than its
movement;[2] and Quintilian,[3] even more naturally, explores only its
treasures available for orators. That ancient criticism never lost the
Aristotelian distinction altogether appears in the anonymous and undated
_De sublimitate_[4] and in a few of the many words of Dio Chrysostom;[5]
but Plutarch’s poetic is indistinguishable from rhetoric.
B. CRITICISM FROM GRAMMARIANS
The overwhelming preponderance of rhetoric in ancient critical thought
followed naturally from the dominance of rhetoric in education.[6]
Formal schooling in poetic, what we now call primary instruction in
literature, began with _grammaticus_,[7] and he was committed in advance
to preparing his boys for their studies in rhetoric. With his task of
inculcating correctness in reading, speaking, and writing were associated
his lectures (_prælectiones_) on the poets. Though these may often, given
the highly selected group of students, have done much for appreciation
of literature, they can hardly have ranged far in poetic. _Grammaticus_
probably confined himself in most cases to what is known in French
schools as _explication des textes_. Within its limits this is admirable;
but given the age of the pupils and their specific object, it cannot
often have gone beyond words and sentences into the poetic composition of
the whole. Criticism _ad hoc_, the detailed study of a particular poem
passage by passage, is a method not only necessary for schooling, but
valuable more widely. By sheer prevalence it must always be influential;
illumination must in fact have come oftener from such interpretation
than from a systematic treatise on poetry. None the less it needs more
correction and extension from other forms of criticism than was usually
possible in the ancient world. By itself it tends toward a pedestrian
analysis of diction and toward emphasis on those aspects of poetic which
are available for rhetoric.
Criticism by labels, the classifying of authors by accepted adjectives,
is not, unfortunately, confined either to antiquity or to grammarians.
A certain amount of criticism, apparently, must always be devoted to
telling people what they ought to say. But the classifying habit seems
to have been especially prevalent in ancient criticism. At any rate, the
labels affixed by grammarians were widely repeated. Even so discerning a
critic as Quintilian thus makes his tenth book a convenient “survey.” The
satisfaction of an audience in neat and recognizable characterization is
given by Apuleius.
“Any speech composed by Avitus will be found everywhere
so consistently perfect that Cato would not miss in it
his dignity, nor Laelius his smoothness, nor Gracchus his
vehemence, nor Cæsar his warmth, nor Hortensius his clear plan,
nor Calvus his subtleties, nor Sallust his conciseness, nor
Cicero his richness.” Apuleius, _Apologia_.
Each orator has the right label, as in a cram-book; and the same
classifying neatness disposes of the poetic of Philemon.
“You who are sufficiently acquainted with his talent, hear
briefly of his end. Or will you hear somewhat also of his
talent? This Philemon was a poet, a writer of the Middle
Comedy. He wrote pieces for the stage in the time of Menander,
and in competition with him, perhaps not as an equal, but
certainly as a rival. In these contests, I am sorry to say,
he was often the winner. At any rate, you will find in him
much that is piquant, plots neatly woven, recognitions clearly
unfolded, characters adequate to the action, thoughts approved
by experience, humor not too low for comedy, seriousness not
involving tragedy. Seductions in his plays are rare; even
legitimate loves are treated as aberrations. None the less he
shows the perjured pimp, the passionate lover, the shrewd
slave, the deceiving mistress, the interfering wife, the
indulgent mother, the scolding uncle, the conniving crony, the
bellicose soldier, not to mention greedy parasites, stingy
fathers, and voluble harlots.” Apuleius, _Florida_, XVI.