Another and a very important matter (which it is fairer and more

philosophical to call rather a defect of our understanding than a defect

of the matter presented to it) lies in that impossibility of attaining

the Greek standpoint as to certain rhythmical and verbal matters, which

has been more than once glanced at, and which is instanced in the case

of Longinus himself. Few among the wiser even of those who have paid

special attention to the subjects of Greek music and Greek pronunciation

would, I think, assert, that they thoroughly understand the passages

relating to prose rhythm, and the special suitableness of the cretic and

some of the pæons as the base-feet for it. And it is practically

admitted by most sober and well-instructed critics that both Aristotle

and Longinus make strictures upon things as “frigid” and in bad taste,

that they ostracise metaphors and ban conceits which to any modern

criticism (putting aside mere assentation) seem perfectly harmless, if

not positively admirable. The same thing occurs in English and French to

this day, although in this case all the difficulties which beset us in

relation to Greek disappear, except the radical difference of national

(not now even of temporal) ear and brain. A phrase of Bossuet, which

seems to French ears even of to-day the _ne plus ultra_ of majestic

melody, will strike very well-instructed Englishmen as a rhetorical

jingle and French critics of enthusiasm and enlightenment will see no

difference between the music of Moore and that of Shelley, or rather

prefer the former. In the other sphere, what is to an Englishman a piece

of dry humour will appear to a Frenchman a _saugrenu_ monstrosity; and a

Frenchman’s ideal of manly eloquence, dignified or passionate as the

case may be, will seem to an Englishman to show nothing but the maudlin

pathos of a drunkard, or the petulant braggadocio of a child. Yet here

there are innumerable side-lights, a long course of partially identical

history, literature, and religion, the experience of persons of both

nations who have lived in and with the other, to guide us. No wonder

that, when we have none of these things, we should be puzzled. Yet the

quarrel, such as it is, with the Greek critics, is not so much that

their estimates, low or high, differ from ours, as that they have given

us so few documents from their own side to help out the contrast. Even

one essay, on both the literatures, by a Greek to set over against the

invaluable survey by Quintilian would be not merely something for which

we could gladly exchange most of the Greek writers on Rhetoric, except

Aristotle, but something in consideration of which we would gladly read

all these writers, and make no complaint of them. As it is, we have to

go to Photius, a representative of a time and thought far more alien

from those of the Greeks proper than is Quintilian himself, for full

review of even Greek writers, and he also is silent about Latin.

But “something sealed the mouths of these Evangelists.” It is perhaps

not unphilosophical to think that this silence was the price the world

had to pay for the confident and magnificent advance which it made under

the guidance of the Greek genius. If that genius had been less

confident, if it had assumed less cavalierly that no other literature

could be worth taking into account, if it had hesitated and faltered

about systematising boldly whatever had been produced by itself, and

allowing everything else (if anything else existed) to go κατ’ οὖρον,

what we have would probably not have been vouchsafed to us. And in that

case we should, as probably, never have made up the loss. The estimable

but not wise persons who try to make out that the undoubtedly rich and

great languages and literatures of Modern Europe can supply substitutes

for those of Greece and Rome overlook, ignore, or perhaps are honestly

ignorant of, the fact that the very strong points of these modern

languages and literatures, their Romantic ebb and flow, their

uncertainty, their complaisance to the vagaries of the individual, their

lack of logical system and _ordonnance_, make it impossible that they

should ever give us the principles of fixity which we find in the

Classical tongues. Those of us who, far more by chance and good fortune

than by any deliberate and virtuous _proairesis_, happen to be

acquainted pretty equally with both Ancient and Modern Literature, know

that neither will do alone, but that for the education both of the world

at large and of any epoch of it, the Ancient is even more necessary than

the Modern.

Some idea of the positive extent of our debts to Greek is necessary to

this history, though a _résumé_ of them is no easy thing to give. In the

first place has to be reckoned the laying of the foundations of mere

grammar—the preliminary to every kind of _graphica lexis_. This must

have been done pretty early, and there is no language in the literary

record with which it could be done for the first time to so much

advantage as with Greek. Some languages, as Latin and its daughter

French, have a sort of peddling tendency to purely arbitrary rule, and

to enforced observance of it. Others, the chief example of which is

English, have had too haphazard a history, and are too much of ingrained

rebels to strict convention, to admit of elaborate grammar, despite the

athletic attempts which are sometimes made to discover it in them.

Between these two, Greek presents not so much the happy mean as the

consummate union of all the best qualities. It evidently possessed, from

the remotest time at which we have any traces of literature, an innate

sense of proportion and grammatical symmetry to guide it, first into

unconscious and then into conscious symmetry of accidence and syntax,

besides a native melody at once sweet, vigorous, and disciplined, which

made it the ideal raw material for prosody. On the other hand, the

intense philosophical spirit of the Greeks, and their love of liberty,

saved them from the hard and fast irrationality of the grammars of some

languages, and from the tendency, not merely to make arbitrary rules,

but to insist on their observance with absolute rigidity. The result was

a grammar which to this day is the pattern grammar of the world—as

flexible as it is symmetrical, as intelligently free as it is

philosophically policed,—an eternal harmony of idiom and rule.

We have glanced in the above paragraph at Prosody, but something more

must be said on this head, for the debt of literary criticism to Greek

in this respect is almost the mightiest item of the total account. The

mathematical element, which distinguishes this part of Grammar, enables

a people with a suitable language, and a sufficient stock of experiments

in it, to discover something much more like a universal calculus than is

possible in Accidence and Syntax; and the Greeks discovered this.

Prosody is a science which, in its pure, though of course not in its

applied, divisions, as regards strictly metrical writing, they

practically found out once for all.

There are systems of rhythm—early Latin probably, early Teutonic

certainly—to which this prosody does not apply, except partially, if it

applies at all. But all poetries that depend upon _metre_—that is to

say, on the arrangement of equivalenced syllabic values in certain

recurring orders—are governed by the laws which the Greeks discovered,

and which the Greeks exemplified. On this side, therefore (and it is a

most important side), the literary critic owes them everything. They

have furnished him with every tool that he requires for taking to pieces

the mechanism of the _Ancient Mariner_, as well as of the choruses, of

the _Agamemnon_, of the odes of Hugo as well as of those of Pindar, of

the _Nordsee_ of Heine as of the fragments of Sappho and Alcæus. And it

is not at all improbable that if we possessed more of their work on

prose rhythm, that subject also, and the kindred one of the so-called

accentual rhythms of Latin and early Teutonic verse, would be almost as

much facilitated.

When we pass beyond these elements and come to the general subject of

Rhetoric (which, it must be remembered, in at least some places is

recognised as covering the whole of _graphica lexis_) and Poetics, the

advances in both departments, but especially in the latter, are still

very great, if not so great proportionately. We have only one poetical

kind—that of Tragedy, as understood by the Greeks themselves, and

practised by the three great tragedians—which has been subjected to a

thorough critical examination in extant text. But then this examination

is so thorough that, in reference to the particular kind, hardly

anything has been added since. We have, in reference to the capital

example of another kind, Epic (again as understood by the Greeks), a

large variety of treatments, from Aristotle to Longinus, which, if they

do not give as firm and systematic a theory of this as of the former,

yet go far towards doing so. Of the remaining divisions of poetry we

learn, it must be confessed, less from the Greeks; and even in examples

we are, except in so far as the Ode and the Idyl are concerned, very

lamentably ill supplied. But in the one case, as in the other, the

fragments are precious. And it may in such a book as the present, be

pardonable once more to point to the feather in the cap of Criticism

furnished by the fact that, but for two critics, we should be destitute

of these two great lyrics of Sappho which, outside the contents of

drama, are the crown and flower of Greek lyrical poetry.

In prose the same complete examination was only given, and, in the

special conditions so often referred to, could only have been given, to

one, and that the least important of all the divisions of prose

literature—to Oratory. Oratory is, after all, the prose literature of

the savage. It is in no degree a contradiction to this that it should

have reached its highest pitches at periods which were not at all

savage—in the palmy days of Athens, in the agony of the Republic at

Rome, in the England of the eighteenth century—for it is scarcely

necessary to take into account the one period of modern times when

savagery ruled once more supreme, the French Revolution, though Oratory

certainly did then share the shameful throne. This confirms the doctrine

just laid down _simpliciter_, the others confirm it indirectly. In the

great age of Greece savagery was passing; but the efforts of

civilisation were directed to making perfect what the savage ages had

regarded as most important. The whole condition of Roman life tended to

support oratory. And in eighteenth-century England it so happened that

poetry was in abeyance; prose fiction was making its way half in the

dark; history was but just rising and philosophy, though still much

cultivated, had not got out of the strangling grasp of Locke. Even if

these propositions be disputable, the fact of the predominance of

oratory in Greece is not, nor is the thoroughness (surpassing even that

of the treatment of tragedy) which was accorded to its study.

Inadequate, however, as was the treatment of prose kinds in general by

the Greeks, even with such examples before them as Plato and Thucydides

and Herodotus, they _did_ treat them: and their treatment of the main

critical aspects of prose was, if not always well directed, even more

searching and thorough than their treatment of verse. They did not

neglect rhythm as it was neglected, with rare exceptions, by all modern

criticism till recently. They bestowed upon prose diction much of the

sometimes to us not fully intelligible, but constantly fruitful, care

which they had also bestowed on the diction of poetry. They hit at once

on the great fundamental principle—that while ordinary language breeds

clearness, language of an unfamiliar character (from whatever source

that unfamiliarity may be derived) breeds the power of _striking_—which

again not all modern critics, nor even the majority of modern critics,

seem to have been able to grasp. And then they hit upon the Figures.

A good deal of evil—too much some may think—has here been spoken of the

Figures: it will, at any rate, dispense us from saying any more in this

place, though the occasion for doing so may recur. But the good of them

as an exercise—as, in the language of their own curious technique, a

_progymnasma_—cannot be exaggerated. Short of the merest rote-work, the

consideration of them, the realisation of what they meant, the

investigations necessary to refer to one or the other head the phrases

of the great writers, were all of them critical processes, the defect

rather than the excess of which is to be reproached upon most modern

criticism. Exclaim as we may against the practice of ticketing a

peculiarity of style as if it were an atom, scientifically isolated,

foreordained from the creation of things, and merely gathered and

applied by the writer—yet it required at least some exercise of the pure

critical spirit to separate this atom, consider it, class it.

Figure-hunting and figure-shaping may have been aberrations of the

critical spirit, but they showed that spirit: they may have led too many

to acquiesce in mere terminology, but they showed the way to something

very different from any such acquiescence.

If, finally, we turn to the results of Greek criticism as applied to

Greek authors, we come to a region necessarily of doubt, if not exactly

of dread. The preoccupations of the writers in various directions, which

have already been mentioned, and the occasional difficulty of placing

ourselves at their point of view, make the necessary adjustments

difficult, but they do not make them hopeless.

In Homeric criticism, the oldest, the largest, and in some respects at

least the most interesting department of the whole subject, we find less

difference from somewhat similarly situated bodies of criticism in other

times than might be expected by some—as little as might be expected by

others. As with Shakespeare, as with Dante, as with Cervantes, as with

Molière, we find a vast body of unintelligent, if respectable, plodding,

and of futile, if occasionally ingenious, crotchet and hypothesis. As in

those cases, we find the phenomenon, curious if it were not so familiar,

of a sort of personal partisanship or antipathy—two things the most

unfavourable to criticism, yet the most frequently found in connection

with it.[275] What we do not find, in any satisfactory measure, is

literary criticism, pure and simple. The critics are constantly drawn

away to side questions, after a fashion which is only more excusable

than similar conduct in modern times because of the very different

relations in which Homer stood to the Greeks. We have talked (Heaven

knows!) nonsense enough about Shakespeare as it is. How much more should

we have talked if he had been at once the oldest and greatest of our men

of letters, the most ancient literary repository of our history, and a

kind of Scripture, a religious document, as well? To the Greek Homer was

all this, and more than all this. To the student of language he

presented the oldest literary exponent of it, to the lover of poetry the

admittedly sovereign poet. But neither could bring himself to regard him

merely in these lights. The Greeks cared less than the Romans, and very

much less than most modern nations, for personal genealogy; the personal

grudge and jealousy which is the ugliest feature of the Greek character,

but which is probably inseparable from small democratic societies, made

too strongly against this. Very rarely do we find in Greeks any of the

feeling which made Romans cherish the notion of being descended from the

fabulous companions of Æneas, and from the perhaps not fully historical

heroes of the monarchy and the early republic—which, to this day, makes

all, save foolish fanfarons of freedom from prejudice, rejoice in the

possession, or regret the absence, of a Crusading ancestor. On the other

hand, local patriotism and local pride were as notoriously strong in the

Greek breast; and to the latest periods we find, not merely Homer but

even Herodotus, treated exclusively as if they were stores of flattering

or unflattering particulars about the critic’s birthplace and its

history. Again, most Greeks were religious, if not quite in our way, and

almost all Greeks were interested in philosophy. With religious and even

with philosophical questions Homer had been for ages (even at the

beginning of the bulk of the literature that we have) so intimately

associated that few could disentangle themselves from the associations.

If we refuse to remember that the questions discussed resemble rather

the questions of Original Sin, or of Innate Ideas, than those of Classic

and Romantic, it may astonish us that age after age should busy itself

unweariedly with the discussion of Homer’s moral or immoral purpose in

depicting the scenes between Helen, Paris, and Aphrodite, between Zeus

and Hera with the cestus, instead of dilating upon the character-force

of the first scene and the voluptuous beauty of the second. But if we

realise the motives which actuated them, we shall be less surprised to

find so little literary criticism of Homer.

Footnote 275:

Probably the very temperament, which spurs the critic on to his

business, afflicts him with this thorn in the flesh. I should not be

surprised if examples of it were found in the present volume. But it

has been kept down as far as possible.

We have far more in regard to the Tragedians, and for obvious reasons:

indeed we have more strictly literary criticism in regard to the drama

than to any other division of Greek literary art. The estimates of the

Three in general seem to have been not very different from what we

should expect, but still somewhat different. The magnificence of

Æschylus struck the scrupulous Greek taste as too often approaching

bombast, and we look with surprised disappointment for so much as a

single appreciation of his unequalled choruses (that of Dion, noted

above, is slight and little to the point). With the Greek public

generally Euripides seems, on the whole, and putting different times

together, to have been the favourite of the three, and if the critics

were less favourable to him, it was rather for extra-literary than for

literary reasons. Public and critics together seem to have felt for

Sophocles that special esteem, as distinguished, perhaps, from actual

enthusiasm, which has descended to us moderns as a sort of venerable

convention—to be acquiesced in even when we do not actively share it,

and to be transformed occasionally into vehement championship. Only from

Longinus do we learn that Sophocles was considered to be far from

impeccable, but to atone for his faults by his beauties: and Longinus

himself, unfortunately, does not tell us what the faults were.

The Orators have naturally been discussed with greater minuteness than

any other group, nor have the results of the discussion been much

interfered with by modern study. The pre-eminence of Demosthenes was as

much “matter of breviary” with Dionysius as with Longinus, with Longinus

as with Hermogenes: and if Aristotle says little about his mighty

contemporary, we know what the great ox was that trod on his tongue.

Necessarily the criticism bears largely—indeed almost entirely—on the

oratorical effect; but this effect, narrowly studied as it was, in the

hopes of, at any rate to some extent, reproducing it, was analysed into

parts which had not a little to do with literature. And, except in

Longinus himself (some of whose best remarks are on the orators), there

is no chapter of Greek literary criticism richer than the commentaries

of Dionysius on these orators generally.

In the same way, Plato seems to have early won, and easily kept, his

proper place at the head of philosophers who are men of letters, while

the more mannered graces of Isocrates seem, at least generally, to have

been put in their proper position. That so obvious, and at the same time

so complicated and tempting, a contrast as that of the historical

manners of Thucydides and Herodotus should escape quickwitted students

was of course impossible; but here those drawbacks, to which reference

has been made above, are specially apparent. The animus of Dionysius

against the one is as patent, though not quite so stupid, as that of

Plutarch or the pseudo-Plutarch against the other; and on the whole the

ancient critics seem to have stuck, with surprising want of energy and

acuteness, in the commonplace contrast of the instructive and the

amusing, instead of going on to the far more interesting contrast of

strict literary manner which the two authors offer.

Of the other kinds we have much more scattered and less satisfactory

observations. The Greeks were clearly not happy with their Comedy; they

were half ashamed of Aristophanes, who might suffice for the glory of a

whole literature; and they seem to have too often ranked the ingenious

and fertile, but distinctly thin and “pretty,” talent of Menander above

his. The same curious kind of mistaken belittling would appear to have

hung upon Lyric. Both upon these and several other kinds, from Dithyramb

to Mimiambics, they remind us of the apologetic remarks of our own

eighteenth-century censors on the work of their own time, which, from

the point of view of universal literature, will last longest and rank

highest—fiction, essay, and the like. In fact, this mistaken calculus of

appraisement of kinds is one of the main notes of the whole subject.

The punishment, as usual, has been adjusted to the crime; and the merit,

as usual also, has met with its reward from the secure judgment of the

world. The more a man knows Greek literature the more deeply will he be

impressed with the inestimable services which, in criticism as

elsewhere, the Greeks rendered to humanity. But the more he knows other

literatures, besides Greek, the more will he be convinced of the

necessity of enlarging, extending, and at the same time correcting, the

Greek point of critical view.

BOOK II

LATIN CRITICISM

----------

“_At demonstrare virtutes, vel si quando ita incidat vitia,

id ... maxime proprium est._”—QUINTILIAN.

CHAPTER 1.

BEFORE QUINTILIAN—CICERO, HORACE, SENECA THE ELDER, VARRO.

THE CONDITIONS OF LATIN CRITICISM—CICERO—HIS ATTITUDE TO LUCRETIUS—HIS

RHETORICAL WORKS—HIS CRITICAL VOCABULARY—HORACE—THE ‘AD

PISONES’—ITS DESULTORINESS—AND ARBITRARY CONVENTIONALITY—ITS

COMPENSATIONS—BRILLIANCY—TYPICAL SPIRIT—AND PRACTICAL VALUE—THE

‘SATIRES’ AND ‘EPISTLES’—"DECLAMATIONS"—THEIR SUBJECTS: EPIDEICTIC

AND FORENSIC—THEIR INFLUENCE ON STYLE—SENECA THE ELDER—THE

“SUASORIES”—THE ‘CONTROVERSIES’: THEIR INTRODUCTIONS—VARRO.

[Sidenote: _The conditions of Latin criticism._]

Those who direct their literary ideas by considerations of what they

think likely to happen, or of what they think ought to have happened,

would probably expect—neither without some reason nor without a certain

amount of confirmation from experience—a considerable development of

literary criticism under the Latin dispensation.[276] In the first

place, the Romans had what the Greeks at first lacked, and afterwards

too often disdained, that opportunity of Comparison, which, as has been

said so often, is the very life and soul and breath of the higher and

better critical exercise. In the second place, the whole literature of

their classical period was itself a kind of critical imitation—sometimes

pretty slavish, sometimes freer—of Greek: and it was practically

impossible for a Roman to write without the exercise, independent or

second-hand, of processes of study and thought which were critical or

nothing. Against this must be set the facts—first, that the Latin

literary genius was somewhat timid, that it felt itself rebuked by the

majesty of Greece; and secondly, that the tendency of the race was not,

till it was much mixed with others, very decidedly literary. Few Romans

dared to approach the masterpieces of Greek literary art in a thoroughly

critical spirit, and fewer had the sense of literature which might have

enabled them to do so usefully. Further, their own period of consummate

production was distinctly short, and not excessively fruitful, while

those authors of their own to whom they devoted most attention

stimulated only certain kinds of criticism. Virgil and Cicero are very

great writers, doubtless, but everybody does not feel much enthusiasm

for the first, and some people do not feel much enthusiasm for the

second. The curious perfection of Horace is, after all, as limited as it

is curious—there are no vistas in it; and the same may be said of the

easy flow of Livy, the artificial, and, for its range, intense

idiosyncrasy of Sallust, and the artful fancy of Ovid. These six writers

seem to have always attracted the lion’s share of Roman admiration,

though at one time there might be a taste for the tricks, precious or

slightly obscure, of Seneca in prose and Persius in verse, at another

for other things. For their two most poetical poets, Lucretius and

Catullus, the Romans never seem to have felt any deep or widespread

admiration; their proseman of greatest genius, Tacitus, came too late,

and was too unpopular in his sentiments, to attract much. Even so late

as the latter days of Quintilian, when the Silver Age itself was drawing

to a close, we find that it was customary to devote chief attention to

Greek, and that it was thought necessary to argue for Latin as for a

novice, who, if well trained and encouraged, might become a pretty

fighter in time. As for Cicero’s time, there is no reason to suppose him

an exception: yet we know how, when not in full public dress, he takes

refuge in Greek at every moment, and sometimes seems almost inclined to

echo a phrase of Ascham’s in the dawn of modern English letters, and say

it would be “more easier” for him to write in Greek, as it was for the

author of the _Toxophilus_ to have written in Latin.

Footnote 276:

I am not aware of any work, corresponding to Egger’s, in reference to

Latin Criticism. But in English there is an Essay of the first

excellence on the subject by the late Mr Henry Nettleship (reprinted

at vol. ii. p. 44 of his _Lectures and Essays_, Oxford, 1895). In my

case old personal obligations were not needed to deepen the admiration

which every one, who would even like to be a scholar, must feel for Mr

Nettleship’s work. I am here, however, to demur to his opening

division of criticism into “criticism of philosophy, which

investigates the principles of beauty,” and “isolated and spontaneous

judgments, never rising beyond personal impression.” It is one main

purpose of this book to show that a third course is possible and

desirable, by way of the wide and systematic comparison of the

manifestations of literary beauty in the accomplished work of letters.

It is, however, from Cicero that Roman literary criticism, properly so

called, begins,[277] and he, with Horace, almost exhausts [Sidenote:

_Cicero._] our supply of it from the days before the Empire. Yet he

prepares us for the disappointments which meet us in Latin criticism

even more than in Greek. That Cicero’s interest in literature was great

no one would dream of denying. His letters swarm with quotations and

literary allusion; he is constantly arranging for new bookcases and new

books; he no sooner has enforced (he never had much voluntary) leisure

than he sets to work to write, to translate, to compose, to discuss. But

the general inconveniences just noted, and some others of a particular

nature, prevent him from being of much importance as a critic. He

thought himself (as Quintilian later thought him) a philosopher, and he

devoted much time to composing agreeable but extremely diluted copies of

the Platonic dialogues. He was an orator not merely by profession but by

taste, and he has left us (even excluding the pretty certainly spurious

_Ad Herennium_) a very respectable bulk of Rhetorical work. But, as we

shall presently see more in detail, most of this belongs altogether to

the non-literary side of Rhetoric. Still, in default of some regular

treatise (which was hardly to be expected), it is to his abundant,

varied, and interesting correspondence that we should look for material,

and we find very little of it. Here is a joke on the habit of

Aristarchus (and indeed of other critics), the habit of marking as

spurious anything they do not like: there an equally jocular

introduction of rhetorical technicalities; elsewhere a rather curious

but more linguistic than literary disquisition on the way in which

innocent words and phrases acquire, half by accident, awkward double

meanings, or slip into the single bad meaning only. There is a passage

of some interest in a letter to Atticus about Cicero’s lost Greek

history of his consulship, where he describes himself as having used up

all Isocrates' perfume-shop, and the cabinets of his disciples, and even

Aristotelian pigments.[278]

Footnote 277:

The actual primacy is assigned to a verse canon of the Ten Latin Comic

Poets by a certain Volcatius Sedigitus, who may be close to 100 B.C.

This “stupid production,” as Mr Nettleship unkindly but most justly

calls it, may be found in his Essay (so often quoted) in Aulus

Gellius, xv. 24, or in Baehrens' _Poetæ Latini Minores_, vi. 279. The

six-fingered one puts Cæcilius first, Plautus second, Terence sixth,

Ennius tenth, _antiquitatis causa_. He had, of course, borrowed the

“canon” system from the Alexandrians, among whose most dubious

services to criticism the arrangement of such things must be placed.

There are touches of literary and critical reference in Ennius, in the

Prologues of Terence, &c., but nothing that need delay us.

Footnote 278:

_Ad Att._, ii. 1: _Meus autem liber totum Isocratis_ μυροθήκιον,

_atque omnes ejus discipulorum arculas, ac nonnihil etiam Aristotelia

pigmenta consumpsit_.

But the most direct and famous piece of pure literary criticism in the

letters is an unlucky one. Cicero of course came [Sidenote: _His

attitude to Lucretius._] before—or rather himself led—the most brilliant

age of Latin, and could not have so much as seen the work of Virgil, of

Horace, much less of Ovid, and others. But he could and he did know

Lucretius, whose work an absurd tradition has it that he even revised.

And what does he say of this mighty poet, who unites the poignancy of

Catullus to the sustained grasp of Virgil, and adds a sublimity unknown

to both? The manuscripts are said to read: _Lucretii poemata, ut

scribis, ita sunt: multis luminibus ingenii multæ tamen artis_.[279] The

earlier editors most naturally considered this sentence nonsense. No

doubt the opposition of _ingenium_ and _ars_ is a common thing, almost a

commonplace, in Latin. But would any one, unless he had a thesis to

prove, dream of regarding _tamen_ as admissible here? of translating it

as if it were _necnon_? There is, of course, a certain paradoxical sense

in which, at the end of the nineteenth century, a brisk young critic

might say of Mr X., “He has plenty of brains, _and yet_ he really knows

how to write.” But this is not in the least Roman; and it is Ciceronian

rather less than it is Roman generally. Some, recognising that there

must have been a _non_ somewhere, put it before _multæ_, and suppose

that Cicero, as if he had been accustomed to Virgilian smoothness,

thought Lucretius rough. But this, from his own verses, is very

unlikely. The natural emendation is to put the _non_ (as till recently

it used always to be supplied) before _multis_, which emendation, and

which alone, makes the sentence run as, without prejudice on the score

of the special meaning, we should expect it to run: “The poems of

Lucretius are, as you say, not very full of brilliancy in genius, but

show plenty of art.”

Footnote 279:

_Ep. Ad Quint._, _Frat._, ii. 11 (9 in some edd.)

Supposing this to be so, some have tried to make out that Cicero’s

well-known dislike of the Epicurean tenets accounts for the unfavourable

criticism. So much the worse for him as a literary critic if it was so.

A man who cannot taste Shelley because Shelley attacks Christianity, or

laugh at the _Twopenny Postbag_ because Moore was a Whig, may be, and

very likely is, an honour to his species as a man, but the less said

about him as a critic of literature the better. But there is no real

probability of such a plea having any foundation. We shall see what

Quintilian says about Lucretius later: we know that very few other Latin

writers say anything about him at all. Cicero, who would fain have been

a poet, and who sometimes could hammer out a tolerable hexameter,[280]

could not as a mere craftsman, as a mere student of Rhetoric, fail to

appreciate something of the “art” of Lucretius. The stately volume of

those magnificent hexameters—the _ne plus ultra_ of their kind in more

ways than one or two—could not but appeal to him as a mere connoisseur

of Latin rhythm, which (put him high or low in general literature) he

most certainly was. The difference in comparison with Ennius, as a

matter of art, was for such a man as Cicero simply unmistakable.

Footnote 280:

It has been urged upon me that my judgment of Cicero’s verse is rather

harsh, and that he at any rate made some progress towards the

Lucretian hexameter before Lucretius. It may be so; tolerably careful

and tolerably wide students of literature know that these things are

always “in the air,” and that, sometimes if not always, you find them

in the poetaster before you find them in the poet. But after reading

all Cicero’s extant verse two or three times over, seeking diligently

for mitigations of judgment, I am still afraid that “Cousin Cicero,

you will never be a poet,” would have been, and justly, the verdict of

Lucretius, had they stood to one another in the relations in which

Swift and Dryden stood.

But the qualities of the Lucretian “genius,” as distinguished from the

Lucretian art, were not suited to attract Cicero—were, we may say,

without fear of injustice, suited to attract very few Romans of the true

type.[281] That type was, as far as the defects went, distinctly

“barbarian,” in the sense in which Mr Matthew Arnold (very unjustly)

applied the word to the English aristocracy—full of vigour, instinct

with the faculty of ruling, magnanimous after a fashion, but

impenetrable to ideas, only formally religious, shutting off its keen

perception of a certain justice with huge blinkers, and, above all,

curiously insensible to the vague, the mystical, the sense of wonder.

Now, Lucretius, though he had chosen for himself a creed approaching

mere materialism, had treated it in a fashion constantly and unabashedly

ideal. It does not need the “flaming bastions of the world” or the sense

of the _néant_, splendidly as he can describe both, to awake the

poetical faculty in him. He can make poetry out of the _exiguum

clinamen_, and out of things less promising if even more abstract still.

With him it is always “the riding that does it”; the subject hardly

matters at all. Lucretius, in short, was one of the great poets—sheerly

and merely as poets—of the world. The didactics in which our

eighteenth-century versemen so dismally failed offer no more

difficulties to him than a love-poem or a flowery description. He will

do you a science, or an atomic system, as another might do an Odyssey or

a story of Lancelot. Now this was what the ancients, with all their

acuteness and originality, could seldom understand or like; and what

Cicero (a man of genius in some ways, but something of a Philistine and

nothing of a poet) could like least of all those who can in any way be

compared with him. Many of the beauties of the Lucretian imagination

would be no doubt simply lost on him; and others he would consider

wasted on the wrong subjects, if not positively applied in the wrong

manner. Let us, however, for fairness' sake, accept the MS. reading,

allow that _tamen_ may be the same or nearly the same as _necnon_, and

further allow that as Marcus is only echoing words of Quintus which we

do not possess, equity would in any case require that we should lay no

very great stress on his own. There will still remain the objection that

a poem of this character and importance, brought directly under his

notice, and already as is clear within his knowledge, does not tempt him

to do anything more than echo his correspondent’s words in a

cut-and-dried formula which would be applicable to any tolerably good

composition in verse, and which does not touch nor approach the

idiosyncrasy of the poem itself. We cannot therefore very greatly regret

that we have so little pure literary criticism from him. But still we

must, for the sake of completeness, give some account of his Rhetorical

works, which, in a manner, play the same complementary part to the _Ars

Poetica_ of Horace that the twin treatises of the Stagirite play to each

other.

Footnote 281:

It is one of Ovid’s titles (_v. infra_) to credit as a critic that he

did see the value of Lucretius, and expressed it in the well-known

couplet (_Amor._, i. 15. 25)—

“_Carmina sublimis tunc sunt peritura Lucreti,

Exitio terras quum dabit una dies._”

Virgil’s still better known quit-rent for his borrowings (_Georg._,

ii. 490) is a mere praise of the Lucretian _free-thought_, with no

reference to poetry. But the praise (no mean one) of having

appreciated Lucretius better than any other Roman is due to Statius

(_v. infra_, pp. 268-270).

There is, however, no small difference between the values of the

Rhetorical works themselves. The _Ad Herennium_, even if [Sidenote: _His

Rhetorical works._] it were as certainly Cicero’s as it is almost

certainly not his, would require very small attention, for it is a

strict _Techne_ or Art of Rhetoric, of the kind which we have thoroughly

examined in the First Book, rigidly limited to Oratory, and containing

nothing that may not be found in a dozen or a hundred other places. The

_De Inventione_—more probably, if still not certainly, Cicero’s—is

equally technical, and has hardly anything of interest for us except a

quotation from Curio, which gives the lie direct to the “saw” of our

“dead shepherd,”[282] _Nemo potest uno aspectu neque præteriens in

amorem incidere_. It is to Cicero’s credit that he cites this as a

rhetorical assumption, as saying that what happens rarely does not

happen at all. The _De Oratore_ looks more promising, especially as

there are references, in its very _exordia_, to the study of letters and

its difficulty. There is a passage of some interest in Book II., cap.

12, 13, on the connection of oratory and history, with a short review of

the Greek historians; and another of somewhat wider reference in cap. 7

of Book III., besides, it may be, others still here and there,

especially that which begins about the 37th chapter of the third book.

The _Brutus_ is the best of all, with its survey of the Latin orators

and its account of the author’s literary education. The _Orator_ deals

still more closely with oratorical style, as does the little tract, _De

Optimo Genere Oratorum_. The _Partitiones_ and the _Topica_ are again

mainly, if not even merely, technical.

Footnote 282:

_As You Like It_, iii. 5. 82.

It will be seen from this, not only that there is little purely literary

criticism in Cicero, but that it is rather unjust to expect any from

him. It was not his business; he had hardly any examples of it before

him (and Cicero, like most other Latins, was a man who could do little

without a pattern); the mere subject-matter (at least as far as Latin

was concerned) was far from very abundant or specially interesting.

Moreover, he was constantly occupied on other things. We know, from

passages cited above, and others, that he had the purely grammatical and

lexicographical interest which was so strong in the Romans; he must have

had real feeling for poetry, or he would not be so constantly quoting

it, nor would he have made his unequal attempts at writing it; he would

fain, in the same way, have been a historian. But these were mere

pastimes; and both from that vanity which was his master passion, and

from an honest conviction which, as we have seen, was widely spread in

antiquity, he seems to have thought Oratory the roof and crown of things

literary, the queen of literary kinds, to which all others were

ancillary, pedagogic, mere exercising-grounds and sources of convenient

ornament. No one so thinking could make any great proficiency in

literary criticism, and Cicero did not make any such.

This estimate of Cicero may seem audaciously unfair, if not grossly

incompetent, to those who accept the more usual one. So far as much, if

not all, very high authority goes, I must acknowledge, though I do not

recant, my heresy. Mr Nettleship, for instance, while acknowledging that

Cicero “threw his whole strength into the criticism of oratorical

prose,” still speaks of his work, especially of the _Brutus_, with

something like enthusiasm, claims “genius” and “fulness of light” for

him, and even makes what is to me, I confess, the astonishing remark

that he “follows in the same track as the Greek critics in all

probability had done before him, as undoubtedly Dionysius _and the

author of the_ Περὶ Ὕψους did after him.” I should have myself thought

that if there were two critics who might be pedantically symbolised as A

and not-A, they were Cicero and Longinus. But to give the other side, in

the case of so important a client with such an admirable advocate, I may

say that Mr Nettleship, while admitting Cicero’s tendency to the wooden

placing and comparison borrowed from the Greeks, and naturally made more

wooden by the Latins, and granting his inadequacy as to History (which

he, like so many others whom we have seen and shall see, regards as a

mere _ancilla_ of Oratory), claims for him the origination of the

principle that the general as well as the connoisseurs must stamp the

value of a work (_Brutus_, 183), approves his distaste (_De Oratore_,

iii. 96) for “precious” style, and gives a most interesting _cento_ from

the _Brutus_ (93, 125, 139, 143, 148, 201, 261, 274, 301). In these

characterisations of the great orators he finds qualities of the highest

kind, completing the panegyric by saying, “His usual prolixity is thrown

aside, and he returns to obey the true laws of expression. As a critic

he can write with all Tacitus' terseness and without any of Tacitus'

affectation.” I quote, though—and indeed because—I cannot agree.

One point of great interest, however, in which there may be general

agreement as to Cicero’s achievement, Mr Nettleship [Sidenote: _His

Critical Vocabulary._] did not treat in his Essay, though a passage

therein leads straight to it. This passage gives a very useful list[283]

(elsewhere referred to) of some of the technical terms of criticism

which appear to have accumulated in Greek literature during the

post-Aristotelian period. Some of these are either used in their

ordinary sense, or in senses easily and closely tropical; others are

more far-fetched, and, as has also been noted elsewhere, remind one of

the technicalities of wine-tasting (especially in French), or of

pictorial art. Some are very hard to render exactly in other languages.

Footnote 283:

τραχύς, αὐστηρός, αὐθαδής, αὐχμηρός, εὐπινής, στρυφνός, συνεσπασμένος,

ἀντίτυπος, ἀρχαϊκός, πυκνός, δεινός, &c. Mr Nettleship gives in all

thirty-three, to which, I daresay, one could add as many more from the

later rhetoricians, Longinus, and others down to Photius.

It has always been noticed that Cicero—a master of language, and though

far from the pedantic prejudice which then tabooed Greek words in Latin,

just as it now taboos French words in English, always anxious to enrich

his own tongue when he could—has shown special ingenuity in translating,

paraphrasing, and adding to this rhetorical and critical dictionary. It

is not, however, very many years since the interesting labour of a

French scholar[284] made it possible, without very considerable trouble

on one’s own part, to get the results of this process ready for study.

With the Ciceronian terms of mere forensic Rhetoric (though all students

of the Greek and Latin Rhetoricians will agree with M. Causeret that

these terms have been, with a very mischievous result, transferred to

other branches) we need not busy ourselves. It is under the usual head

of “Elocution” that we shall find most to interest us. The abundance of

the Ciceronian vocabulary every one will recognise; it is less certain

whether we are to admire its precision. But it is at least an innocent,

and may sometimes be a profitable, pleasure to classify the usages of

_inusitatum_ and _insolens_, to separate the _nuances_ of _obsoletum_,

_priscum_, and _vetustum_, of _grandia_ and _gravia_, of _majestas_ and

_splendor_. The Latin rather than the Teutonic languages admit the

distinctions of _juncta_, _cohærentia_, _apta_, and _coagmentata_, if

distinction there be; but it would be of real value to ascertain whether

there was any between _modus_ and _numerus_. Sometimes at least it seems

as if it might coincide with that between “rhythm” and “metre”: while

often _numerus_ itself seems to be “rhythm.”

Footnote 284:

_Etude sur la Langue de la Rhétorique et de la Critique Littéraire

dans Cicéron._ Par C. Causeret. Paris, 1886.

By no means uninteresting, again, are the numerous metaphorical

expressions from actual physiology—_lacerti_, _sanguis_, _nervi_,

_succus_, _exsanguis_, _enervatus_—which we find applied to style, and

the still more numerous but vaguer terms, most of them with modern

equivalents, which express its qualities by comparison with moral ones.

It is impossible not to see what an influence the use of such terms by

such an author must have had, and we shall find evidences much later (in

Pliny, for instance) that the language of literary criticism at Rome

yielded in nothing to that beautiful dialect which enables our own

censors to speak of a novel as “assertive and challenging,” of the

“swiftness and fusion” of its style. But whether the influence was as

beneficial as it was great is perhaps rather a different question.[285]

Footnote 285:

It has not seemed necessary to go through the literary passages of the

_Orations_, though some, the _Pro Archia_ especially, are not

infertile in them. “What _counsel_ says is not evidence,” whatever

else it is.

The contrast between the limited and partial relevance of Aristotle’s

_Rhetoric_ to literary criticism, and the complete if [Sidenote:

_Horace._] still limited relevance of his _Poetics_, is repeated far

more pointedly in that between the Rhetorical works of Cicero and the

so-called _Ars Poetica_ of Horace. It is, in fact—though the most ardent

admirers of the Venusian would fain defend it from being intentionally

and originally an Art of Poetry at all—the most complete, nay, the only

complete, example of literary criticism that we have from any

Roman.[286] As in other similar cases, before saying much about it in

the way of secondary comment, it will be well to give a fairly full

analysis of it, which can be the better done because of its extreme

shortness. The famous tags with which it abounds, to an extent almost

unmatched, may be sometimes, but need not be always, given in full.

Footnote 286:

Here, however, as elsewhere, the fatally parasitic character of the

whole literature comes in. There is little doubt (see Nettleship, _op.

cit._) that the piece was very closely modelled upon the work of a

certain Neoptolemus of Parium, an Alexandrian critic, whose date is

not known.

In form it is merely an _Epistola ad Pisones_, and plunges at [Sidenote:

_The_ Ad Pisones.] once into its subject, without any attempt at

preliminary argument or flourish.

The representations of art, like the presentations of nature, must be

characterised by appropriateness of parts; you must not simply join

anything to anything else. Perhaps, says an objector; but surely

painters and poets enjoy liberty of fancy. Certainly; but still some

propriety must be observed. Even ornament must be adjusted to the

subject; and even when correctness itself is specially attempted,

defects wait on the attempt—obscurity on brevity, bombast on flights,

tameness on simplicity. Take care that your subject suits both your

style and your powers.

Then, as to vocabulary? There is no reason why old words should not be

resuscitated and new ones coined, provided that both things are done

“with brains” and discretion. Usage is the arbiter, and what usage will

not admit must be content to perish. As for metre, the kinds appropriate

to the various subjects have been long ago settled, though by whom is

not always known—hexameters for Epic by Homer, elegiacs for less

important matter by somebody or other, iambics for satire by

Archilochus, and so on with tragedy, comedy, lyric, and the rest. It is

not wise to alter this established order.

In the same way, the established styles and characters must be

maintained: a tragic hero must not speak like a comic one, or _vice

versâ_; and you must not attempt new lights on the character of accepted

heroes and heroines like Achilles and Odysseus and Medea. At the same

time, you need not cling to the stock subjects, and if you take quite

novel ones you may handle your character as you like, provided it keep

uniformity throughout. But you may be wiser if you stick to the

old.[287] If you do, do not begin too magniloquently; bustle your reader

well along in the action; and drop the ungrateful parts of the story.

As before for traditional characters, so for the stock parts. Generalise

and conventionalise wisely; let your boys be childish; your youths fond

of sport, reckless, and fickle; your men of full age, business-like and

prudent; your old men praisers of the past, sluggish, grudging, and so

forth. In short—Keep to the Type.

Footnote 287:

Here comes in one of the most famous and often-quoted of the

“tags”—_difficile est proprie communia dicere_, a sentence which,

hackneyed as it is, is not altogether easy to translate fully even by

itself, and becomes in the context less easy still.

In play-writing be careful how you utilise the double opportunity of

representation and narrative. Do not let ugly things appear on the

actual stage. Stick to your five acts; do not be prodigal of your _deus

ex machina_; do not introduce a fourth personage. Keep your chorus to

its business—moral sentiment, religious tone, and so forth. This caution

introduces a long digression on the incursion of elaborate music into

the stage, and on the combination (while keeping them _unmixed_) of

Satiric Drama and Tragedy.

Then, with the almost shorthand abruptness of transition which

characterises the poem, we pass to an incidental consideration of

metres. An iambic is a long syllable put after a short one, and you

arrange them in batches of six with, in certain places only, spondees

for a change. Do not take too many licences: stick to the Greek. If your

ancestors were fools enough to admire Plautus you need not. They say

Thespis invented drama, or at least tragedy. Æschylus improved it and

made it magniloquent. Then came the Old Comedy—rather too licentious, so

that it had to pull in its sails and drop its chorus. We have tried all

sorts, not without success, but the labour of the file is absolutely

necessary. The idea of poetic madness and excess is all nonsense. If I

cannot write great poetry I can teach others how to write it. Be careful

of your subject, and do not attend to tuneful trifles.

You must either instruct or delight, or both; you must not write

romantic and prodigious extravagances. Mix pleasure with profit and you

are safe. You need not be absolutely faultless, but avoid faults as much

as you can. Be careful to suit the style to the subject as much as

possible, and do not “pad.” Mediocre poetry is intolerable.

Finally, do not be in a hurry to publish; invite friendly criticism; do

not force yourself; destroy a good deal. For _nescit vox missa reverti_.

The influence of poets is mythically signified by the stories of

Orpheus, who moved beasts, and Amphion, who built Thebes by song. Homer

came next, and was famous. Tyrtæus roused men to war. Many kinds of

poetry have been discovered since, and they all need hard work to

cultivate them with success. Some remarks on recitation follow, and then

the lines on which friendly criticism should proceed are drawn, and the

piece ends rather ambiguously with a reference to the fate of

Empedocles.

Now, in criticising this criticism we must of course take into

consideration the plea that Horace may not have meant to give [Sidenote:

_Its desultoriness_] a regular treatise even on Dramatic Poetry, but

merely to throw out a few observations for the benefit of a friend. It

is still more obvious that we must not saddle him with all the rubbish

of corollary and comment with which he has been loaded (sometimes

without his having in the least deserved or provoked it) by the

“Classical” critics of the 16th-18th centuries. Yet not merely equitable

but generous allowances of this kind will still leave the piece open to

pretty severe comment. In the first place, its desultoriness is

excessive, even extravagant. Much licence in this respect no doubt must

be allowed to the “mixer of the useful and the pleasant” by means of

verse-didactics. But no possible licence will cover Horace’s method, or

absence of method. He begins with a sufficiently lively diatribe against

inconsistency of design and want of harmony of parts, then slides to

methods of composition, thence to vocabulary, thence to the technical

divisions of prosody, thence to stock characters and the selection of

subject, gives cautions as to the minor and more arbitrary proprieties

of the stage, indulges in a little bit of literary history, returns to

metres, insists on the importance of self- and other criticism. Then he

shifts artfully to the contrast between Greek emulation and Roman

shopkeeping covetousness, extols Orpheus and Amphion, Homer and Tyrtæus,

excuses faults if they are not too many, but will not tolerate mere even

mediocrity, cautions against flattering hearers, and ends with a

description, half sarcastic, half rallying the sarcasm, of bad poets. If

it were not for its vividness and its constellation of glittering

phrases, nobody could see in such a thing aught but a mere congeries of

desultory observations.

Still more indisputable is the singular spirit of routine—of

red-tape—which pervades the piece. Aristotle (whom Horace follows

without direct acknowledgment, and by no means slavishly, but still on

the whole) had been sufficiently positive, and not seldom a little

arbitrary; but he had carefully abstained [Sidenote: _and arbitrary

conventionality._] from mere red-tape. Horace, in his prescription of

the five acts, and his proscription of the fourth actor, measures that

tape off in a fashion which implies one of two things, both of them

bad—either implicit belief in purely arbitrary rules, or indifference to

the mischief that such rules may do. Elsewhere, though his good sense

sometimes interferes to advantage, he is, though less meticulously, as

slavishly conventional. You must use the consecrated metres, and no

others, for the various subjects; you must keep to the accepted

lineaments of well-known characters, and you must model your new ones

strictly on types. Decency, propriety, convention—to these things you

must look throughout. If you are really a great poet you may be allowed

a “fault” or two, as a great beauty is allowed a mole, but still it is a

“fault.” And so this kind of pottering and peddling censorship goes on

through the whole. We are at such an antithesis or antipodes to the Περὶ

Ὕψους, that one sometimes feels inclined to give the _Ars Poetica_ a

third title and call it Περὶ μεσότητος, or _De Mediocritate_, so

directly does it tend to produce the quality which, in one of its own

happier moments, it denounces.

All this, I say, is undeniable, or, if it be denied, the denial is of no

consequence. But the compensatory merits are very considerable.

[Sidenote: _Its compensations: Brilliancy._] In the first place, it is

no small thing to have got once more to purely, or almost purely,

literary criticism, to have done with the sense that literature as such

is only the second thought, the _parergon_, at best the mere means, not

the end, to the critic. In the second place, it is a greater thing still

to have our literary criticism, now that we have got it, done by such a

man as Horace, one in whom the generation of the critic has not waited

for the corruption of the poet,[288] and who has the peculiar gift of

crisp rememberable felicitous phrase. The few hundred lines of the

little piece are positively “made of quotations.” Every man of letters,

at least, ought to have learnt it by heart in the original during his

youth. Yet even to those who have not been thus favoured, but who have

some tincture of Humanity, mere scraps and tags of it must often recall

the actual context, or at least the sense. The first five-and-twenty

lines contain, in the way of such “lights” of phrase, at least seven:—

“Desinat in piscem mulier formosa superne.

Risum teneatis, amici.

Velut ægri somnia....

Pictoribus atque poetis

Quidlibet audendi semper fuit æqua potestas ...

Petimusque damusque vicissim.

Purpureus ... pannus ...

Currente rota cur urceus exit?”

And the proportion is well maintained throughout.

Footnote 288:

I had hoped that no reader would want explanation of this, but it has

been hinted to me that some may. For them only, I note that the

saying, the thought of which has found various and frequent

expression, is slightly altered in form from Dryden, and is one of his

happiest scholasticisms. It glances, utilising the old philosophical

opposition-connection of γένεσις and φθορά, at the theory, put later

by another person of genius more bluntly, that critics are those who

“have failed in literature and art.”

But the greatest value of the piece, beyond all doubt, is the clear and

distinct idea which it gives of one, and that [Sidenote: _Typical

spirit_] the principal, side of the critical conception of literature in

Roman times certainly, in all times more or less. Just as, and in the

same manner as, we said that Longinus plays the exception among the

critics of antiquity, so does Horace represent the rule. There is indeed

something in other critics of antiquity of the spirit which makes

Longinus pre-eminent, but it is not prominent in them. There is in the

better of them, especially in Aristotle, much that is not in Horace; but

what they have in common with him is the differentia of them all.

Of this latter spirit those worse points which we have noted in the

piece are the caricature or corruption, the others are the rational

embodiment and expression. “Observe order; do not grovel or soar too

high; stick to the usage of reasonable and well-bred persons; be

neither stupid nor shocking; above all, be like the best of your

predecessors, stick to the norm of the class, do not attempt a perhaps

impossible and certainly dangerous individuality.” In short the false

_mimesis_—imitation of previous art—is mixing herself up more and more

with the true _mimesis_, representation of nature. If it is not

exactly true that, as a modern prose Horace has it, _Tout est dit_, at

any rate the forms in which everything ought to be said have long been

found out. You cannot improve on them: try to make the best use of

them that you can.

It is needless to say with what hardly matched and certainly unsurpassed

shrewdness and neatness Horace has—not merely in the tags, the phrases,

the purple patches themselves [Sidenote: _and practical value._] noted

above, but throughout—set forth, enforced, decorated his views. Except

in a few extremest moods, when the whole world of literature seems to be

at once painted red and strangled with the tape that paints it, he is

never absurd; he is never even negligible. The most “dishevelled”

Romantic may neglect him, but the neglect will always be at his own

peril—he must be a Shakespeare, or at least a Marlowe, a Shelley, or at

least a Beddoes, if he flies in the face of the Horatian precepts. These

precepts even, in the opening, in the “mediocrity” remark, in the

peroration and elsewhere, contain not a little antidote for their own

bane. “Not worth writing” would be the Horatian verdict on many a

“Classical” poem which the judge might acknowledge to be quite

unobjectionably written; while on the other hand the evils of

extravagance, of disproportion, of tedious and silly crotchet and

caprice, at which he drives full from first to last, are real evils, and

by no means to be minimised. It is not rash to say—though perhaps one

must have read more literatures, and passed through more phases of

literary judgment than one, before saying it with conviction—that there

is no school or period of literary practice in which the precepts of

Horace, when rightly taken, have lost, or are ever likely to lose,

critical validity. To say this is to say a very great deal. But it is

not inconsistent with—and it makes especially necessary—the further

observation that the critical attitude of Horace is a wofully incomplete

one. In the first place, he has left us no really “grasping” judgment of

a single writer he has mentioned. He had not much room, but nobody could

put a paragraph in a line better than he could, when he understood and

cared for the matter. Horace on Orpheus and Amphion, on Homer, nay, on

Æschylus and Plautus, is _banal_—badly _banal_, one may add. But let us

grant that the knack of luminous summarising of the individual was not,

and could not be, yet born, was not even with Longinus, was not even

fifteen hundred years after Horace. His shortcomings do not cease here.

Here as elsewhere, except in a few passages of the graver philosophy of

life, there is no “soul” in him. He has no enthusiasm, no passion. It is

perhaps improper to bring together Horace and Mr Browning, but I never

read the _Epistola ad Pisones_ without thinking of certain lines of the

latter:—

“The fool! would he try a flight further and say,

He never saw, never, before to-day,

What was able to take his breath away—

A face to lose youth for, to occupy age

With the dream of, meet death with—why, I'll not engage

But that, half in a rapture and half in a rage,

I should toss him the thing’s self, ‘’Tis only a duplicate,

A thing of no value—take it, I supplicate.’”

Longinus, one feels, would have been in some danger of losing his

literary loves on this principle; the modern critic can “say ditto to Mr

Browning” over a thousand passages. But Horace was quite safe. He never

felt this enthusiasm for author, or book, or page; and so he never

tried, as others in their despairing way do, to render a reason for it.

To those who consider criticism as a whole and historically, the

enormous influence which the _Ars Poetica_ has exercised [Sidenote:

_The_ Satires _and_ Epistles.] must always give it the prerogative place

among its author’s critical work. But it is needless to say that he has

other claims to appear here. And the pieces which give him these claims

have by some been considered more important, as they certainly are more

original. It is unnecessary to pick out _Pindarum quisquis_ and the

other literary references in the Odes, universally known, admirably

expressed, but as criticism hardly more than a refashioning of _publica

materies_. The Fourth and Sixth _Satires_ of the First book, which are

probably a good deal earlier than the adaptation from Neoptolemus, and

the two _Epistles_ of the Second book, which may be taken as later, are

serious documents. The Satires perhaps give a better opinion of Horace’s

talent than of his taste and temper. His critics had praised Lucilius

against him; and without denying his predecessor all merit, he makes,

though less generously, the sort of comment which even Dryden made on

the rough versification and lack of art of the giant race before the

flood. This (i. 4) naturally brought fresh attacks on him, and in i. 10

he returns to the subject, lashes the _fautores ineptos Lucili_,

indulges in the too famous sneer at Catullus and Calvus, and with a

touch of something which is perhaps not quite alien from snobbishness,

boasts his intimacy and agreement not merely with Varius, Virgil,

Pollio, Messala, among men of letters, but with Mæcenas and Octavius.

His general position here is easy enough to perceive, and there are of

course defences for it. Among all our thousand fragments of

Lucilius,[289] but two or three at most are long enough to give us any

idea of his faculty of sustained composition. And fine as is the

fragment to Albinus—with its Elizabethan reiteration of _virtus_ at the

beginning of the lines, its straight-hitting sense, and the positive

nobility of its ethic—numerous as are the instances in the smaller

scraps of _Romana simplicitas_ and picturesque phrase, there is no doubt

that the whole is rough and unfinished, not with the roughness of one

who uses a rudimentary art, but of one who has not mastered—perhaps, as

Horace insinuates, has not taken the trouble to master—one ready to his

hand. But there is something of the Frenchman’s “_We_ are all princes or

poets” about the tone of Horace himself. He is, _mutatis mutandis_, too

much in the mood of a _parvenu_ who has just been admitted to an

exclusive club, and thinks very meanly of poor wretches who are not

entitled to use the club-paper.

Footnote 289:

_Poet. Lat. Min._ (Baehrens), vi. 139-266. Our greatest English

Latinists recently have been singularly unkind to this poet. Munro

made what I can only call a violent attack on him: and Mr Nettleship,

while allowing him “extraordinary vigour” and “the ring of Caius

Gracchus” (see his Essay on the Satires (second series), where Munro’s

diatribe is quoted), practically indorses this. Against such judges I

should not have a word to say on the linguistic side: but I claim full

_parrhesia_ on the literary. The Virtue passage (which Munro specially

refuses to except) is as rough as, say, Marston; but it has a far

sincerer, loftier, and more truly poetical tone than anything of the

kind in Horace, and than most things in Juvenal. And everywhere I see

quality, passion, _phrase_. Here, at least, I can agree with Cicero

(_De Orat._, ii. 6 and elsewhere), though _perurbanus_ is not exactly

the epithet that I should, from his extant writings, myself select for

Lucilius.

On the other hand, Mr Nettleship is surely justified in calling the

Epistles of the second book “the best of Horace’s critical utterances,”

though perhaps they are not the most important. Indeed, their eulogist

hastens to add that “it is the incomparable manner of the writer, the

ease and sureness of his tread,” which really interests the reader. It

is so; but there is more in criticism than manner, and you must be right

as well as felicitous. Horace is not exactly wrong, but he is

limited—the Chrysostom of Correctness has acquired better breeding than

he showed in the Satires, but he has not enlarged his view. The

_horridus Saturnius_ still strikes its own horror into him: he still

girds at the ancients; and though in the epistle to Julius Florus there

is some pleasant self-raillery, as well as an admirable picture of the

legitimate poet, yet there is perhaps no piece of Horace which brings

more clearly home to us the fact that he was after all, as he has been

called, far more a critic of life than of literature, and much more

seriously interested in the former than in the latter. So much the

better for him perhaps; so much the better for all the ancients who more

or less agreed with him. But that is a matter of argument: the fact

remains.[290]

Footnote 290:

Mr Nettleship justly and, considering his enthusiasm for Horace

generously contrasts the “comprehensive sympathy” of Ovid (_Am._, i.

15-19, _Trist._, ii. 423) with the lack of the same quality in the

Venusian.

The third representative selected for Roman criticism of the latest

Republic and earliest empire, the elder Seneca—"Seneca Rhetor"—is again

of a different class and at a different standpoint, though he is very

much nearer to Cicero than to Horace.

The declamations of antiquity had an influence on its prose style—and

consequently an effect on its critical opinions of [Sidenote:

“_Declamations._”] style both in verse and prose—which it is almost

impossible to exaggerate. The practice of them began in boyhood; it

formed almost the greater part of the higher education; and it appears

to have been continued in later life not merely by going to the Schools

to hear novices, but in actual practice, half exercise, half amusement,

by orators and statesmen of the most established fame. It was a sort of

mental fencing-school or gymnasium, to which those who wished to keep

their powers in training resorted, even to the close of life. We know

that Cicero composed, if he did not actually deliver, declamations up to

the very end of his career; and, in a very different department of

letters, we know from Seneca himself that Ovid, though not a constant,

was a by no means infrequent, attendant of the schools, and either

acquired or exercised his well-known fancy for turns and plays of words

in prose as well as in verse.

In theory, and no doubt to some extent in practice also, these _meletæ_,

or declamations, were permissible and desirable in [Sidenote: _Their

subjects: epideictic_] all the branches of Rhetoric. But the examples

which have come down to us, and the references that we possess to

others, show us that, as, indeed, we should expect, Epideictic and

Dicanic provided the chief subjects. The declamations of the former kind

were those at which the satirists chiefly laughed—Hannibal crossing the

Alps, Leonidas at Thermopylæ, Whether Cicero could decently have avoided

death by making a bargain with Antony, and the like. To this kind of

subject there could evidently be no limit, and it might sometimes pass,

as in the Orations (which are after all only declamations) of Dion

Chrysostom we know that it at least once did pass, into a regular

literary Essay. But it seems more generally to have affected the

fanciful-historic.

The purely forensic declamation had some differences. As its object was

not merely or mainly, like that of the other, to [Sidenote: _and

forensic._] display cleverness, but to assist the acquisition and

display of ability as a counsel, it fell into certain rather narrow and

not very numerous grooves. Certain “hard cases,” paradoxes of the law,

seem from very early times to have been excogitated by the ingenuity of

the rhetoricians, and the game was to treat these—on one side or the

other, or both—with as much force, but above all with as much apparent

novelty, as the speaker’s wits could manage. A very favourite one was

based on the venerable practice of allowing the victim of a rape the

choice of death for her violator or requiring him to marry her, with the

_aporia_, “Suppose a man is guilty of two such crimes, and one girl

demands death, the other marriage, what is to be done?” Or “Suppose a

girl, situated like Marina in _Pericles_, but slaying her Lysimachus,

not converting him. Released from her bondage, she presents herself as

candidate for a priestess-ship. Is she eligible or not?”[291] The

extremity of perverse fancy in this direction is perhaps reached by a

pair of the declamations attributed to Quintilian,[292] in which the

lover of a courtesan brings an action against her for administering a

counter-philtre, so that he may love her no longer, and she may accept a

wealthier suitor. But there is no limit to the almost diseased

imagination of these Cases. A city[293] is afflicted by famine, and a

commissioner is sent to buy up grain, with orders to return by a certain

day. He executes his commission successfully and quickly, but being

driven into port in a third country by bad weather, sells the grain at a

high price, buys twice as much elsewhere, and returns by the appointed

time. But, meanwhile, the famine has grown so severe that the people

have been driven to cannibalism, which his return direct with his first

bargain would have prevented. Is he guilty or not guilty?

Footnote 291:

Seneca, _Contr._, i. 2.

Footnote 292:

xiv. and xv. _Ed. cit. inf._ (p. 279 _note_), pp. 154-169.

Footnote 293:

Ibid., xii. The so-called _Pasti Cadaveribus_. _Ed. cit. inf._, p.

126.

A very little consideration will show that both these classes of

composition must have had great, permanent, and not altogether

[Sidenote: _Their influence on style._] good effects on style. Both

dealt with hackneyed subjects, and in both success was most likely to be

achieved by “peppering higher,” in various ways. The epideictic subjects

suggested various forms of bombast, conceit, trick, from the use of

poetical, archaic, or otherwise unfamiliar diction to the device of the

mouther of whom Seneca tells us,[294] and who, declaiming on Greeks and

Persians, stood a-tiptoe and cried, “I rejoice! I rejoice!” and only

after a due pause explained the cause of his rejoicing. The forensic

subjects tempted the racking of the brain for some new quibble, some

fresh refinement or hair-splitting. Especially was this the case in the

subdivision of what were called the _colores_—ingenious excuses for the

parties, whence comes the special sense of our word colourable, and

whereof Seneca makes a special heading, usually at the end of his

articles. No pitch of mental wiredrawing, no extravagance of play on

word or phrase, was too great for some declaimers, of whom a certain

Murredius is Seneca’s favourite Helot. In fact, in both classes,

epideictic and forensic, one can see that a plain, forcible, manly style

could only be commended by a combination of very unusual genius on the

part of the speaker, and still more unusual taste and receptivity on the

part of the audience. Their _sophos_, their _euge_, their _belle_,[295]

were much more likely to be evoked by ingenious and far-fetched conceit

than by solid reasoning and Attic style, which latter, indeed, on such

trite subjects were nearly impossible.

Footnote 294:

_Suas._, ii. 17. _His_ name, too, was Seneca; and the text is

curiously worded.

For illustration of what has been said, the hodge-podge of Seneca is

more valuable than the finished declamations of the Pseudo-Quintilian.

These latter,[296] despite the absurdity, or at any rate the

non-naturalness, of their subject, are sometimes rather accomplished

pieces of writing in a very artificial style. The speech, _Pro Juvene

contra Meretricem_, referred to above, is, in its whimsical way, a

decidedly remarkable example of decadent prose. The crime of making some

one cease to love is odd in itself; the complaint that you have been

injured by being made to cease to love odder still. Besides, if you

complain of this as an injury, do you not still love, and have you not,

therefore, nothing to complain of? The topsyturvyfication is, it will be

seen, complete. And the declaimer, whoever he was, treats his subject

_con amore_. The tricks of his thought are infinite, and well suited

with the artifices of his speech. In particular, every paragraph leads

up to, and winds up with, a sort of variation on one general theme or

_Leitmotiv_.

Footnote 295:

Of these equivalents of “Hear! hear!” or “Bravo!” the second is good

adopted Latin of all times. The first, well known from Martial, is

post-Augustan; the third (which Cicero did not much like) seems to

have been both lukewarm and affected.

Footnote 296:

_V. inf._, p. 279 _sq._

“To be compelled to hate is the one incurable form of disease.”

“There is some solace in being miserable in love. 'Tis a more cruel

destiny to hate a harlot.”

“He who cannot leave off hating a harlot is still her lover.”

“The victim of a counter-philtre may hate one: he can love none.”

Thinker and writer, it will be seen, are a sort of pair of bounding

brothers: they stand on their heads, fling circles, intertwine limbs,

take every non-natural posture, to the utmost possibility of

intellectual acrobatics.

The Seneca book,[297] much more fragmentary, is also of its nature

richer. It consists of one book of “Suasories” (examples [Sidenote:

_Seneca the Elder._] of the symbouleutic or epideictic kind), and ten

(by no means completely extant) of “Controversies” (Forensic subjects),

the latter sometimes including introductions of interest to the writer’s

three sons—Novatus, afterwards Gallio, Seneca the Philosopher, and Mela,

father of the poet Lucan—and usually concluding with a kind of _résumé_

(called Excerpta) of their contents. The substance is made up of short

extracts from the most celebrated declaimers of Rome, and a few Greeks,

on the various subjects.

Footnote 297:

I use the text of Kiessling. Leipsic, 1872.

They give us a really invaluable abundance, in all kinds, of rhetorical

_loci communes_, tags, _pointes_, with which, from early [Sidenote: _The

Suasories._] and late practice, the mind of every educated man at Rome

was simply saturated, and which could hardly fail to colour his style,

either directly in the way of imitation, or indirectly in that of

repulsion, and preference of extreme severity.

For instance, the first _Suasoria_ deals with the question, “Shall

Alexander cross the Ocean?” though the exact statement of question is

lost altogether, with the beginning of the piece itself. It seems to

have opened with a sort of abstract of general commonplaces, and then

come the quotations. Argentarius [perhaps Marcus the epigrammatist]

addresses the conqueror: “Halt! the world that is thine calls thee back;

we have conquered as far as it was lawful for us. There is nothing I can

seek at the risk of Alexander.” Oscus said: “It is time for Alexander to

leave off where the sun and the earth leave off likewise,” and

endeavoured to describe the sea, “immense and untried by human

experience, the bond of all the world and the keeper of its lands, the

vastness unruffled by any oar, the shores, now harried by the raging

tide, now deserted by its ebb, the horrid darkness brooding on the

waves, and the eternal night oppressing what nature has withdrawn from

human eyes.” And so many. Then there is a section (headed _Divisio_), on

the particular kind of suasion to be used in such speeches, the devices

which it is safe and proper for orators to address to kings, with

gradations as before. It will readily be perceived from this example

what sort of dealing is here on the other stock subjects—the

deliberation of the three hundred at Thermopylæ, whether they shall go

or not; of Agamemnon, whether he shall sacrifice Iphigenia; of

Alexander, whether he shall enter Babylon; of the Athenians, whether on

Xerxes’ threat of a second invasion they shall remove the Persian war

trophies; of Cicero, whether he shall ask mercy of Antony, or burn his

Philippics. The quotations are sometimes verse as well as prose, and

give us specimens of poets otherwise lost, with an occasional literary

anecdote of interest, such as the offence which Asinius Pollio[298] took

at the praise given to Cicero in the recitation by a certain poet of

Corduba, Sextilius Ena—

“Deflendus Cicero est Latiæque silentia linguæ,”

which Cornelius Severus borrowed, and improved into—

“Conticuit Latiæ tristis facundia linguæ.”

This anecdote is interesting in many ways,—first for the protest of

Pollio, almost equally piquant whether it proceeded from critical

severity, from personal jealousy, or from political feeling; and

secondly, for the evidence it gives of the straining for point and

rhetorical “hit,” in verse and prose alike.

Footnote 298:

See _Suas._, vi. Pollio, a great friend of Antony, was both an orator

of high reputation and a very severe critic. It was he, it should be

remembered, who found “Patavinity” in Livy; though it has been

ingeniously suggested that this was only an _excessive_ propriety of

speech, such as enabled the old woman to detect Theophrastus as not an

Athenian.

The Preface of the First Book of the _Controversies_—addressed to the

three sons—gives a rather interesting view of the scheme [Sidenote:

_The_ Controversies: _their Introductions_.] of these curious

compositions, which seems to have been that Seneca the father should

brush up his memory of the golden or nearly golden age of Latin Rhetoric

which immediately followed Cicero, and illustrate it from more strictly

literary sources. A good deal in the piece (as is usual in the better

class of rhetorical writing) bears directly on our subject. The old

rhetorician commends his sons for extending their view beyond their own

age, for wanting to know what Roman eloquence there was to set against

“insolent Greece”[299]—in short, for endeavouring to take that

comparative view of at least one division of literature the want of

which (as we have so fully set forth) was the crying sin and yet the

inevitable weakness of Greek criticism. He has the usual complaint of

luxury withdrawing men from literature, which was doubtless as true, and

as little peculiar, then as at all other times. He lets us know that

there were none (or no good) _commentarii_ of the best declaimers, that

he himself had heard them all except Cicero, whom, as far as chronology

went, he might have heard,[300] but for the confusions of the state: he

points out that the regular declamation was a rather late growth, and

extols the character of Porcius Latro, one of its oldest practitioners.

The Introduction to the Second Book is much shorter, and principally

celebrates the ability of Arellius Fuscus. The Third (for the text of

which we only have the Excerpts, not the full articles) has an important

preface, which starts from the fact or assertion that Cassius Severus, a

great orator on serious occasions, was not a good declaimer, though he

had good bodily advantages, a voice at once powerful and sweet, a

delivery with all the merits and none of the drawbacks of the stage, and

an extraordinary faculty of improvisation. It seems that Seneca once

asked him why these faculties failed him in set _agonismata_, and his

answer (whether to the point or not) is of the very first interest, as

illustrating that difficult point of the ancient conjunction of oratory

and literature, and also as a counterblast to the Plinian idea (_v.

infra_) of the poly-historic _littérateur_. “What great wit,” said he,

“has ever been good at more than one thing [whereby, let it be observed,

he separates declamation from oratory]? Did not Cicero’s eloquence fail

him in verse? Virgil’s genius in prose? We read the orations of Sallust

simply as a compliment to the historian: and the oration of that most

eloquent man Plato, which is written for Socrates, is worthy neither of

counsel nor of client.”

Footnote 299:

_Insolenti Græciæ_ (_op. cit._, p. 59). I hope it may be hardly

necessary to quote certain lines, “To the memory of my beloved Master,

William Shakespeare, and what he hath left us.” It is already known to

students of Ben Jonson that Ben was soaked in Latin, especially of the

silver age: and Professor Schelling of Philadelphia has done good work

by indicating sources in his edition of the _Discoveries_. But the

vein is not exhausted. Seneca and Quintilian were to Ben almost more

than Browne and Fuller were to Lamb.

Footnote 300:

Seneca was born about 60 B.C., and was thus eighteen at Cicero’s

death.

All these things invite comment—the last most of all. I put aside, as

entirely irrelevant, certain modern dubitations as to the genuineness of

the Platonic _Apology_. They rest upon no warranty of scripture, and

opinion is simply opinion, to be received politely, and to be “laid on

the table.” But it is worth dwelling on the point that the _Apology_ as

we have it, though to all competent judges of literature one of the

capital works of antiquity, arch-worthy of Plato, more than arch-worthy

of Socrates, might very well seem to a Roman lawyer unworthy of both,

and might possibly have so seemed to Aristotle himself. For of all

recorded _plaidoyers_ it is perhaps, in the temper of the jury and the

circumstances of the case, the least likely to secure an acquittal, and

the most likely to render condemnation inevitable. The other remarks do

not matter so much; but it is of weight that a man should seriously put

the difference between Declamation and practical Oratory on the same

footing as the difference between poetry and prose. It shows how

ill-adjusted, as yet, the grasp of literary criticism was, and also how

necessary it is to keep an eye on everything that is said about

Rhetoric, if we are really to master what was thought about Criticism.

The introduction to the Fourth Book, again one of Excerpts only, gives

the information that Asinius Pollio (whose works, if we had them, would

probably be of the greatest possible value to _us_) disliked declaiming

in public, but was, on the rare occasions when he could be heard thus

exercising himself, more florid than in his actual orations. We can well

believe it, and it shows that Pollio had the root of the matter in him.

In the same way a man with critical sense will allow himself, in a rough

draft, flowers which he cuts out in the most ruthless manner before he

prints.

The Fifth and Sixth books, which are in the same fragmentary

condition, have no introductions at all; but the seventh is in better

case. Like the others, it is mainly devoted to the characteristics of

a single orator—in this case Silius Albucius. Some of the things said

about him touch us nearly, as, for instance, Pollio’s—the severe

Pollio’s—description of his _sentences_ (axioms, maxims, apophthegms)

as “white”—that is to say, simple, clear, with nothing obscure or

unexpected,—but “vocal” and “splendid.” It was impossible, continues

Seneca, to complain of the poverty of the Latin tongue when you heard

him: he was never in the very least in pain for a word. Yet, on the

other hand, he was not equal. His language was at one moment

magnificent, at another he would mention the most sordid

things—"vinegar, and pennyroyal, and lanterns, and pumice, and

sponges." He thought “nothing must _not_ be named in a declamation

[and the reason is valuable or invaluable] because he feared to smack

of the Schools.” And yet further we get the important _obiter dictum_:

“Familiar phrase is, among oratorical virtues, a thing which rarely

succeeds.” And then there is a very luminous and jocund anecdote of

the real trouble into which the devotion to Figures might even then

bring men. Albucius had rhetorically proposed to administer certain

oaths. His opponent, L. Arruntius, very coolly rose and said, “We

accept the condition: he shall swear.” Albucius protested that this

would do away with Figures altogether. Quoth Arruntius (very

sensibly), “Let them go—we can do without them”: and the _centumviri_

allowed the catch. The unlucky orator was so annoyed that he renounced

actual pleading from that day, because of the insult done to his

beloved Figures.

The Eighth Book is again without its preface; but though there is a very

large lacuna in ix., we have part of the introduction. It yields little.

The last is in better case, but still not very fertile, though we have

another instance of the mania for Figures. It is said of the

above-quoted Oscus: “Dum nihil non schemate dicere cupit, oratio ejus

non figurata erat sed prava.” Certainly there are no few examples of

this “pravity” in the declamations themselves, which it would be

interesting, but in our space impossible, to examine, as we have

examined the prefaces.[301]

Footnote 301:

It has always to be remembered that they are not integral and

complete, but centos of quoted flights, conceits, &c., on the stock

hard cases.

They, however, also contain examples of that severity of taste which has

always distinguished Latin criticism, and of which Pollio is the great

example. Messala, as we learn, was _Latini utique sermonis observator

diligentissimus_, and he said of Latro (whom Seneca’s later taste

admired) “_sua_ lingua disertus est”—"He is an eloquent man in his own

lingo." Seneca himself, however, is by no means tolerant of excessive

conceit, and rebukes the class of “sentence” which, he tells us, some

charged upon Publilius as inventor. The examples given are in the case

of a disinherited son found with poison, which he spills on discovery in

the interior of his father’s house: and the sentences are, “He washed

out his disinheriting with poison, and what he spilt was my death,” both

being supposed to be spoken by the father. And in another stock case—the

curious one which has more than one historical analogue, where the

Prætor Flamininus was accused of having had a condemned man’s throat cut

at dinner, to amuse a courtesan who said she had never seen a man

die—the unlucky Murredius is said to have arranged a _tetracolon_—a

four-membered antithesis: “The courts are made subservient to the

bed-chamber; the prætor to a harlot; the prison to the banquet; day to

night”; as to which last Seneca justly asks, “What sense has it?”

On the whole, this very valuable and interesting book, which has been

spoken of with surprisingly uncritical contempt by some, and to which I

should like to devote much greater space, forms, with Pliny’s _Letters_

and Quintilian, the great trinity of documents for appreciating directly

the state of Latin opinion as to literature, and its causes, in the

first century after Christ, while with Cicero and Horace it forms a

similar trinity for that in the last century before Christ. And it is

needless to say that these two periods were, early _avant-coureurs_ and

belated decadents excepted, the flourishing time of classical Latin

literature. Of this state and these causes we shall speak generally

later.

One writer of famous memory who belongs to this period—who [Sidenote:

_Varro._] indeed was older even than Cicero—has been hitherto

unmentioned, because, as a matter of fact, we have practically no

literary criticism remaining from him, and that is Varro. I should

myself have been disposed to relegate the author of the _De Re Rustica_

and the _De Lingua Latina_ to the place of his brother (or grandson)

grammarians; but this might seem unceremonious in face of the importance

of the critical position which Professor Nettleship assigned to him. It

is, perhaps, also a convenient place to notice the exact character of

that importance. As in so many other cases, if we went by titles only,

and by guesswork from them, Varro must certainly have a high rank. “On

Poets,” “On Poems,” “On Characters” (in the technical Greek sense of

literary _differentia_?), “On Scenic Action,” “Plautine Questions,”

might seem at first sight likely to be, if we had them, a very El Dorado

of Latin criticism. But the few surviving fragments are a little

discouraging. That Varro would be fertile in grammatical, mythological,

social explanation, we may be quite certain. But the fragments seldom go

much farther. The report, quoted by Quintilian, of Ælius Stilo’s saying

that if the Muses wrote Latin they would write in the language of

Plautus, is one of those rather irritating critical catchwords which

carry with them the minimum of critical illumination. It is, in fact,

only an _ad captandum_ fashion of saying that the speaker liked Plautus,

or wanted to pay him a compliment at the moment. Most of the others seem

(as indeed Mr Nettleship saw) to be merely examples, either of the

habits of “placing” authors in this or that rank, of comparing them with

this or that other, from which criticism has suffered many things and

gained few, or else of the not much less barren classification of kinds.

It is on the first point that I wish to make a slight digression. It is

evident from the epithets that he uses in regard to them, such as

“stupid,” “trifling,” “vicious,” that these processes of placing and of

comparison were not to Mr Nettleship’s taste. I shall myself admit that

the addiction of Greek, and still more of Latin, criticism to them seems

to me to be among the very greatest weaknesses of both. But I must add a

distinction which is constantly forgotten, and which I am not sure that

Mr Nettleship himself had in mind. The “placing” of A, B, C, and D in

order of merit is “stupid” and “trifling” enough; the still further

awarding of seventh place to A for Somethingity, and of third to B for

Somethingelseness, is more stupid and more trivial still. Nor is that

comparative criticism, the _locus classicus_ of which is perhaps M.

Taine’s ejaculation, “J’aime mieux Alfred de Musset,” as a criticism on

Tennyson, any better; in fact, as being not merely sterile and jejune,

but illogical and actively misleading, it is considerably worse. But

there _is_ a placing and there _is_ a comparison, which are two very

different things—which are, in fact, the two highways of all real

literary criticism. The placing is that which sets a man, not in the

first division of the first class, or the second of the third, but in

his relations to time and country, to language and manner, to

predecessors and successors—to the whole literary map in larger or

smaller circumference. The comparison is that which does not work out a

performer’s rank, but disengages his qualities. These are the methods to

which all the great critics have perforce resorted, and which have made

them great. That there is less of them than there should be in ancient

criticism may be true enough; that the want of them (with perhaps a

little want also of sympathy with the highest poetry) is what prevents

Aristotle from being the greatest critic of all time, is true enough;

that the presence of them in Longinus is one of the main secrets of his

unmatched quality, is true enough. But they are very different things

from the enumeration of Volcatius Sedigitus, and from the _in argumentis

Cæcilius in ethesin Terentius in sermonibus Plautus_ of Varro.[302]

Footnote 302:

Varro was happier in the phrase _filo et facetia sermonis_ applied to

Plautus: and he seems to have been genuinely devoted to the dramatist

whose canon he constituted, _v._ _Noctes Atticæ_, III. iii.

CHAPTER II.

THE CONTEMPORARIES OF QUINTILIAN.

PETRONIUS—SENECA THE YOUNGER—THE SATIRISTS—PERSIUS—THE PROLOGUE AND

FIRST SATIRE—EXAMINATION OF THIS—JUVENAL—MARTIAL—THE STYLE OF THE

EPIGRAMS—PRÉCIS OF THEIR CRITICAL CONTENTS—STATIUS—PLINY THE

YOUNGER—CRITICISM IN THE ‘LETTERS’—THE ‘DIALOGUS DE CLARIS

ORATORIBUS’—MR NETTLESHIP’S ESTIMATE OF IT—THE GENERAL LITERARY

TASTE OF THE SILVER AGE—“FAULTLESSNESS”—ORNATE OR PLAIN STYLE.

From the later years of Augustus, and the earlier of his immediate

successors, we have no criticism of importance [Sidenote: _Petronius._]

except Seneca’s. But the Neronian time has left us interesting

approaches to the subject in the works of Petronius and Seneca the

younger, as well as in the poet Persius; while, somewhat later, the

satires of Juvenal and the epigrams of Martial are, the former not

destitute, the latter full, of literary allusion and opinion. These,

with a certain contribution from Pliny’s _Letters_ and the _Dialogus de

Claris Oratoribus_ (usually included among the works of Tacitus, but not

resembling him in style, and sometimes attributed to Quintilian), must

be successively dealt with. Quintilian himself is of too great

importance not to deserve a separate chapter.

We can understand, as well from the character usually given of the

_Arbiter elegantiarum_ as from the style of his curiously dismembered

and rather disreputable written work,[303] that questions of literary

criticism must have been of the first interest to him. If we had the

entire _Satires_ (supposing that they ever were more entire than

_Tristram Shandy_ or the _Moyen de Parvenir_), there can be very little

doubt that this element would show itself in very large proportion.

There must have been suppers less brutally vulgar and Philistine than

that of Trimalchio; and literary discussion was as indispensable at a

Roman supper of the better class as broiled bones at an English

one—while suppers lasted. Even the Circes, if not the Quartillas, of the

time were very frequently “blue” in the intervals of more exciting

amusements, and Agamemnon, Eumolpus,[304] and others must have

frequently spoken in character. As it is, the opening of the fragment as

we have it, and a passage farther on, deal directly with the subject.

Footnote 303:

I use the smaller edition of Bücheler, Berlin, 1862.

Footnote 304:

There is a theory that the verses put in the mouth of Eumolpus are

parodies of Lucan and Seneca.

The opening passage is occupied with that denunciation of bombastic and

“precious” language which seems to have been the favourite occupation of

the critics of the time. The attack is at first directed against the

practice of declamation, which almost inevitably tempted boys and

youthful writers to bombast, but it so quickly glides into a general

literary censure that it is worth giving in full.

“I believe that the reason why schoolboys and students become such fools

is, that they never see or hear of anything to which we are accustomed

in the actual world. They are occupied by pirates standing on the beach

with chains in their hands, by tyrants ordaining that sons shall cut

their fathers’ heads off, by oracles against a pestilence to the effect

that three or more virgins are to be sacrificed, by little bundles of

words smeared with honey, and everything, as it were, powdered with

poppy-seed and sesamum. For people bred in this fashion sense is as

impossible as a pleasant odour for those who live in the kitchen.[305]

If you will excuse my saying so, you rhetoricians were the first to ruin

literature. By exciting ridicule of [_or_ playing tricks with] your

light and empty phrases,[306] you weakened and prostrated the whole body

of oratory. Youth had not yet been enslaved to declamations when

Sophocles and Euripides devised the words in which they were to speak.

The private schoolmaster[307] had not spoilt good wits when Pindar and

the Nine Lyrists feared to sing in Homeric verse. And not to allege

poets only, I certainly find it nowhere said that Plato and Demosthenes

betook themselves to this kind of eloquence. Oratory full grown, and, if

I may say so, in her maidenhood, is not spotted and swelling [like a

toad], but shoots up in natural beauty.

Footnote 305:

Or “good taste is as impossible as good smell to those,” &c. I have

not hit on any satisfactory English equivalents for _sapere_ (with its

double sense) and _bene olere_. What is meant, of course, is that the

power of distinguishing is lost in the vicious atmosphere.

Footnote 306:

_Ludibria quædam excitando._

Footnote 307:

_Umbraticus doctor_, which Ben Jonson Englishes directly as

“umbratical doctors” in the _Discoveries_, and De Quincey rather

hardily converts to a compliment in his _Essay on Rhetoric_.

“Of late this windy and extravagant loquacity has shifted from Asia to

Athens, and has breathed upon the aspiring minds of youth like a

pestilential star, and forthwith true eloquence, its rule corrupted, has

been arrested, and put to silence. Tell me, who has since equalled the

fame of Thucydides, of Hyperides? Not so much as a lyric of wholesome

complexion has appeared, and everything, as if poisoned with the same

food, has been unable to last to a natural grey old age. Even painting

has made no better end, since the audacity of the Egyptians has cut so

great an art down to shorthand.”

The rhetorician Agamemnon defends scholastic procedure by the old plan

of throwing the blame on parents and the like; but the story quickly

turns to one of its more than “picaresque” episodes, and the subject

drops.

The other passage[308] begins with equal abruptness, and serves as

preface only to a very much longer poetical recitation by Eumolpus, who

speaks it. It is chiefly noteworthy for containing the phrase _Curiosa

felicitas_, applied to Horace, which perhaps itself gives us as good a

notion of Petronius’ critical faculty as anything could. But it conveys

some sound doctrine. Verse itself seems easy; any boy thinks he can

write it as soon as he has learnt the rules, and retired orators (a hit,

I suppose, at Cicero) compose it as a relaxation, as if it were easier

than their speeches. But it is no such light matter. You must take

choice words [we are almost at Dante’s “sifted” words], words far from

the use of the vulgar crowd,[309] and at the same time you must be

careful that individual phrases are not too fine for the rest. Nor must

you treat your subject—civil war, for instance—in the mere tone of a

chronicler, but the “free spirit must be forced through[310]

difficulties, and the ministry of the gods, and a fabulous torment of

sentences, so that it may rather appear the vaticination of a frenzied

mind than a trustworthy and scrupulous document under attestation.” Now

this advice, though much in it is sound, takes distinctly the other side

to that which Encolpius had urged in the overture.

Footnote 308:

§ 118. Ed. cit., p. 71.

Footnote 309:

_Refugiendum est ab omni verborum ut ita dicam vilitate, et sumendæ

voces a plebe summotæ._

Footnote 310:

_Præcipitandus est liber spiritus._ A characteristic Petronian phrase

which will serve (and has in part been used) as text for very

different sermons. Part of what follows is no doubt intentionally

obscure. The _ambages deorumque ministeria_ refer, of course, to the

stock revolutions and interventions of Epic as of Tragedy. But

_fabulosum sententiarum tormentum_ is not such plain sailing. I

_think_ it means (with an intentional side-glance at the fabled

torments which the heroes of Epic see in Hades) the process of racking

the brain for story-ornament and sententious conceit of phrase.

On the whole, we must regret very keenly that we have not more of the

Arbiter’s remarks on the subject. It is improbable that anything like a

coherent theory of criticism on the great scale would have emerged, and

very likely that (as in the two extant examples just quoted) we should

rather have had ingenious centos of opposing views. But all would have

been originally and brightly put, and it is by no means impossible that

what we now chiefly desiderate—_aperçus_ of particular authors, books,

or passages, done with grasp and insight—would have been forthcoming. As

it is, we have but what we have.

Nero’s other victim, the curious compound between Polonius and Mr

Pecksniff (with, it must be owned, some merits which [Sidenote: _Seneca

the Younger._] belonged to neither), whose name was L. Annæus Seneca,

has left us a great deal more work than Petronius, and was certainly a

man of letters. He was even a considerable man of letters, and if he

wrote the _Tragedies_, a very considerable man of letters indeed.[311]

He had, moreover, though scarcely a good, a distinct and by no means

commonplace style, and while Quintilian attacks him _nominatim_ in a

passage which will occupy us later, it is by no means improbable that

Petronius (who must have known him well, and was probably bored by him)

had Seneca himself in his mind when he talked of the _ventosa et enormis

loquacitas_.

Footnote 311:

_Works_, 3 vols., ed. Haase, Leipsic, 1886-87. This does not contain

the _Tragedies_, as to which, however, I have never wished to go

beyond a nearly forty years’ possession, the pretty little “Regent’s

Classics” edition of 1823. But I have never, as a critic, been able to

believe that Seneca wrote them.

Seneca, however, was by profession a Stoic, and these classical

Pharisees, though their sect was not exactly unliterary, pushed to an

extreme the partly superfine, partly puritanic, contempt with which, as

we have seen, the philosophy of antiquity generally chose to regard the

minutiæ of literary criticism and literary craft. The “wise man of the

Stoics” might be a perfect man of letters, as he was a perfect

everything else; but it was entirely beneath him to take seriously such

things as metre, or style, or the pleasure of literary art. In the Tenth

Dialogue, _de Brevitate Vitæ_,[312] after the philosopher has been

talking in his high-sniffing way of collecting brasses, singing, giving

long and _recherché_ dinners (but not, so far as I remember, of putting

out money at usury), he begins a new chapter with things to be treated

more contemptuously still.

Footnote 312:

Ed. cit., i. 209. If Seneca be suspected of possible insincerity,

Marcus Aurelius cannot be. Yet the estimable Emperor, who had earlier

(i. 7), in the true Pharisaic spirit, congratulated himself on

abstaining from “rhetoric and poetry,” concludes his reference to the

drama (xi. 6) (a reference interesting as including one of the

explanations of κάθαρσις), by asking, “To what end does the whole plan

of poetry and drama look?” As for Epictetus, _v. supra_, p. 62.

“’Twould be long,” he says, “to track them all out—those whose life

draughts, or ball-playing, or the practice of carefully cooking their

flesh in the sun, has caused to waste away. They are not exactly lazy

people, since their pleasures give them a great deal of trouble. For

nobody can doubt that they make much ado about nothing, who are detained

by the study of useless letters—there is a considerable company of them

among us Romans. It has been a mania of the Greeks to inquire how many

rowers Ulysses had, whether the _Iliad_ was written earlier than the

_Odyssey_, further, whether the two are by the same author, and other

matters of the same stamp, which, if you keep to yourself, they will not

help your silent conscience, while, if you talk about them, you will

seem not more learned but only more of a bore.”

The rest of the chapter draws up a long list of similar enormities of

curiosity—historical and literary. “Who had the first naval triumph?”

&c. Seneca even ironically supplies questions of the kind, and

information about them, to those who like such things. Elsewhere in the

88th (the third of the thirteenth book)[313] of those not disagreeable

epistles which he composed for the edification of a man of straw called

Lucilius, and for the display of his own ability, he supposes the

definite question to be put to him, “What do you think of liberal

studies?” and he goes off at score in the true style of the Stoic

pulpit. He respects none, counts none as good. They are all very well as

exercises, as preparations; you may stick to them as long as you can do

nothing better. They are called “liberal,” as worthy of a free man: but

there is only one study worthy of a freeman (does one not hear the very

drone of the ancestor of Mr Chadband?), and that is the study of WISDOM.

All else is petty and puerile: it has nothing to do with making a GOOD

man. Will the grammarian, who, if he does not stick to mere philology,

goes to history or, at farthest, to poetry, be a road-maker for us to

VIRTUE, my brethren? Will syntax and prosody banish fear, quench

cupidity, bridle lust? And so forth. He makes, indeed, not bad fun of

the attempts to make out Homer now a Stoic, now an Epicurean, now a

Peripatetic. But he soon relapses into the “chaff and draff” of the

conventional moralists at all times. What are the tempests that impelled

Ulysses to the storms of the mind? What does it matter whether Penelope

was chaste? Teach me what Chastity _is_. _Et patati et patata._ From a

man in this frame of mind comes no good critical thing; though we

certainly should like to have heard from the Tragedian, whoever he was,

what put into his head the idea of that remarkable compromise between

Classic and Romantic Tragedy which gave us the Latin _Hippolytus_ and

the _Octavia_.

Footnote 313:

Ed. cit., iii. 246 _sq._

The three satiric poets give us both directly and indirectly a great

deal of matter; in fact, they may almost be said to provide the

illustrative commentary to their contemporary and friend[314]

Quintilian’s precepts. It is possible that [Sidenote: _The satirists._]

the example of Horace may have had something to do with this; but such

an example need not have been required. As we know, not merely from

themselves, the first century at Rome, if not one of the very greatest

times of literary production, was one of very great and very widespread

literary interest. As Persius tells us—

“Ecce inter pocula quærunt

Romulidæ saturi, quid dia poemata narrent;”

while Seneca’s remarks, take them with what grains of salt we will, are

sound corroborative evidence. Further, it appears on all hands, not

merely that there was a distinct fashion of literature, but that this

fashion had its own distinct characteristics, that it was one of the

times of ornate as opposed to plain style in verse and prose alike, a

time of “preciousness,” of “raising the language to a higher power,” a

time when men openly called Cicero a commonplace and obvious writer,

and, if they did not fail to pay a kind of conventional reverence to

Virgil, wrote in a way as far as possible from being Virgilian. This

always gives plenty of handles to the poetical satirist, and, as we

shall see, all the three availed themselves of these handles to the

full.

Footnote 314:

In two cases at least. And Quintilian might have known Persius, as he

was in Rome before 59 A.D., while Persius did not die till 62.

The scanty and notable work of Persius—work which, in the junction of

these two qualities, has hardly a parallel in literary [Sidenote:

_Persius._] history, except that of Collins in English—is soaked in

criticism of literature as well as of life. The poet’s turbid rush of

thought and style, forcing its way through self-created obstacles but

still forcing it, thick with suspended matter, but all the richer

therefor, allows him not merely to deal directly with this subject, but

in dealing with others to make constant allusion and by-blow. The famous

[Sidenote: _The Prologue and First Satire._] scazontic prologue, with

its affected language, satirising affectation, and its conceits, giving

an object-lesson of conceited style, is all literary except the moral,

_quoad_ “Master Gaster, first Master of Arts,” as Rabelais refashioned

it fifteen hundred years later. The “horsy fountain” and the sleep on

“two-headed” Parnassus, the relinquishment of the Muses to those whom

such ladies concern, and the final fling about the crow-poets and

poetess-magpies, may be gibes at dabblers in literature: but they show

that the giber is steeped in literature himself, and has taken a

critical as well as a delighted bath therein. And the first satire (the

longest but one) is wholly and directly devoted to the subject. With the

old device of a cool objecting friend, Persius takes occasion, while

declaring (also an old trick) his own honest desire to keep to better

matters, to draw a lively picture of the professional poet, or

declamation-writer, scribbling in his locked study, arraying himself in

his best clothes, and even with such jewelry as he can muster, carefully

gargling his throat, and then tickling the ears of his audience, and

comforting himself, when anybody objects the worthlessness of such

applause, by the plea—

“At pulchrum digito monstrari et dicier ‘Hic est!’”[315]

A still livelier picture follows of the symposium referred to in the

lines above quoted as to _Romulidæ saturi_; of the literary dandy in

hyacinthine garment mincing and twanging through his nose some morbid

stuff (_rancidulum quiddam_) about Phyllis and Hypsipyle, and being

cheered in a fashion fit to make the poet’s ashes happy, his slab lie

lighter on his tomb, and violets spring therefrom.

Footnote 315:

Not a few other phrases, such as—

“Cum carmina lumbum

Intrant, et tremulo scalpuntur ubi intima versu”—

show what a formidable, and what an accurate and capable, reviewer, of

the slashing order, Persius would have made.

Then he draws in his horns a little. Verse, of course, is not

necessarily bad because it is popular only. But _Euge!_ and _Belle!_ are

not the be-all and end-all of literature. What wretched stuff has not

received them? How often have they not been consideration for a good

dinner, and a cloak just a little torn! And what is even genuine popular

judgment worth? Why do not poets adopt honest Roman subjects, instead of

chattering about unreal Hellenics? And why do they affect such

antiquated and unnatural style? What is the good of borrowing such stuff

as

“Ærumnis cor luctificabile fulta,”

of ranging everything _in doctis figuris_, and of writing passages, such

as two famous ones which he quotes, and which are traditionally asserted

to be the work of Nero himself. He exhausts his images of scorn on these

unlucky lines, and holds up _Arma virum_ against them as an example of

natural knotty strength against effeminate drivel. And to a fresh

protest of his friends about the danger of this kind of criticism, he

replies by an ironical consent to declare it all very good, and a _coda_

of regret for the time when Lucilius used what freedom of speech he

chose, when Horace laughed at everybody without giving offence, more

seriously declaring that, whether he can publish or not, he will _write_

as the giants of the Old Comedy wrote.

In this lively crabbed production there are two distinct strains or

bents to note. All the best critics have for some time admitted that in

professed satire generally, and in Roman satire more than in any other,

there is, if not a touch of cant, at any rate a distinct convention of

moral indignation—a sort of stock-part of bluff, honestly old-fashioned,

censuring of modern corruption—which the satirist takes up as a matter

of business. Even Martial, upon whom, Heaven knows! it sits oddly

enough, though his consummate dexterity carries it off not ill, affects

this now and then; it sometimes suggests itself even through the gloomy

intensity of Juvenal; and though such a line as Persius’ famous

“Virtutem videant intabescantque relicta”

carries us far out of the dissenting-pulpiteer region where Seneca too

often gesticulates, there is in this First Satire, at any rate, some

suspicion of forced wrath, of the righteous overmuch.

But the other strand in the twist, the other glance of the view, is in a

very different state. There is nothing unreal, to all appearance, in the

poet’s condemnation of the preciousness [Sidenote: _Examination of

this._] and conceit of poetic and prose style in his day. That his own

is very far from simple or Attic does not matter; the satire had a

prescriptive right to be crabbed, archaic, irregular, bizarre. Whether

political dislike of the tyrant did not sharpen literary objection to

the poetaster (if the lines really are Nero’s) may be a debatable

question for those who care to debate it; but, in any case, the

objection was there, and seems to have been quite genuine. Now, as has

been often pointed out, these definite passages, definitely objected to

or praised, are precisely what we want most, and have least of, in

ancient criticism. A short examination of them, therefore, will serve

our turn very well.

The first passage appears to be cited chiefly as an objectionable

example of archaism. We shall see that Quintilian (perhaps in obedience

to this very passage, for he knew his Persius, and admired him) repeats

the objection to the word _ærumna_[316]—to us a word not in the least

objectionable, but the contrary. And if it be said that foreigners, and

especially foreigners who acknowledge themselves entirely uncertain

about the probable pronunciation of Latin, have no business to give an

opinion about the euphony of words, the retort is obvious and pretty

triumphant. To _some_ Romans, at any rate, if not to Persius and

Quintilian, the word must have sounded agreeable, or as poets they would

not have used, and as hearers or readers would not have applauded, it.

The conceit of “cor _fulta_ ærumnis”—with heart stretched on pillows of

woes—was no doubt another crime, and it is not improbable that

_luctificabile_ was a third. The Romans had a rather pedantic horror of

long words, which is again formulated by Quintilian, just as it is

implied and exemplified here.

Footnote 316:

It has been questioned whether Persius did object to _ærumna_, or to

any of these words, _as words_. I should say that the coincidence in

Quintilian settles the first point: even if the context did not, to my

thinking, settle it, with the others. But he _may_ have been thinking

merely or mainly of the confusion of tragic and epic style.

Of the same type and colour is the objection to _rasa antitheta_ and

_doctæ figuræ_ which follows, as well as that to the vowel harmony, the

soft cadence, the mouth-watering[317] tenderness of the Neronian

fragments. We may, without rashness, point to the soft sound of

“Berecynthius Attin,” the alliteration of “_di_rimebat” and “_Del_phin”

with the internal half-rhyme of “_cær_uleum” and “_Ner_ea,” the leonine

effect of “long_o_” and “Apennin_o_” and the two tetrasyllables, with

the sudden pull up of the spondaic ending, as what irritated Persius.

This same accompaniment of sound, and cunning contrast or echo of

vowels, recurs in the second and more coherent extract: “_Tor_va,

_cor_nua”; “Mimal_lon_eis _bom_bis,” “_rap_tum _cap_ut”; “vitul_o_

superb_o_”; “_lyn_cem co_rym_bis”; the long words “reparabilis” and

“Mimalloneis,” with the foreign effect of the latter and others. These,

no doubt, were the things which annoyed our poet here.

Footnote 317:

_Tenerum et laxa cervice legendum ... delumbe ... natat in labris ...

in udo est._

A little reflection will make this annoyance exceedingly interesting.

Not merely is the general effect of these lines very similar to that of

hundreds and thousands of lines, in the earlier English Romantic school

from Marlowe to Chamberlayne, in the later from Keats to Mr Swinburne;

but the indignation of Persius is exactly similar, if not to the almost

incredulous and disgusted disdain with which the critics and poets of

the “school of good sense” looked back on the vagaries of their

predecessors, to the alarmed and furious attempt made by critics of the

present century to extinguish contemporaries who indulged in such

things. Persius on Nero, if Nero it was, no doubt gave hints to, and,

with hardly less doubt, was himself quite in sympathy with, the

_Quarterly_ Reviewers of Keats and Tennyson. There is the same protest

against the effeminate, the luscious, the unrestrained, the same

indignant demand for manliness, order, sanity.

But we may go even further. These same processes, which we have ventured

to point out as certainly illustrated by the gibbeted verses, and as

probably accounting for the wrath of their executioner, are the very

processes by which all our great nineteenth-century poets in English

have produced their characteristic effects—alliteration, internal rhyme

or assonance, complete or muffled, and, above all, the modulation of

vowel and consonant so as to produce a sort of song without music,

accompanying the actual words. And it may be noted that while some of

our modern critics have objected to these things in themselves, many

more, oddly enough, object to the process of pointing them out, and seem

to think that there is something almost indecent in it.

It would be unreasonable to expect that in the narrow compass of some

six hundred lines this passage—_locus uberrimus fructuosissimusque_, to

borrow the Ciceronian superlatives—should repeat itself. But the

literary interest of Persius, as regards criticism, is by no means

exhausted. The next three satires are indeed wholly occupied by the

exposition of that practical, honest, upright, rather hard, rather

limited morality which it is the pride of Rome to have carried as far as

mere morality of the sort can travel. But the beginnings of the

fifth[318] and sixth[319] have a literary and critical turn in them, and

though the course of the satire is afterwards deflected, these

beginnings show the same man, the same tastes, the same standards that

we have seen in the first. Don’t potter over fantastic subjects and sham

Greek epics, but attack something Roman and serious. Whatever you write,

write it in a manly fashion, with no æsthetic trifling. That is the

critical gospel of Persius, and he sets it forth with a vigour which we

shall seldom find equalled, and with (in the instance we have dwelt

upon) a most fortunate fertility of illustration.

Footnote 318:

_Vatibus hic mos est_, κ.τ.λ.

Footnote 319: