With its compliment to Cæsius Bassus and his _marem strepitum fidis

Latinæ_.

The far bulkier work of Juvenal—work also of far higher genius in parts,

but more unequal and uncertain—contains less [Sidenote: _Juvenal._] that

concerns our subject. It is impossible to mistake in Persius, young as

he died, and scanty as are his remains, a very direct interest in

literary form, such as did not always or often accompany Stoic

philosophy. Juvenal, with a less definite philosophical creed, and

perhaps a rather lower moral standard, had a higher “Pisgah-sight” and a

stronger grasp of life as a whole. However long Persius had lived, it is

improbable that he would ever have given us anything equal to the

magnificent Tenth Satire. But Juvenal, much more of a pessimist than

Persius, was less capable of enthusiasm. His general critical standpoint

does not seem to have been very different from that of his predecessor,

or indeed (allowing for the vastly greater difference of temperament)

from that which we shall find in Martial. But to Juvenal literature as

literature had no special pre-eminence among the contents of his famous

_farrago_. It would even appear that, although practising it greatly

himself, he had a rather special contempt for it.[320] The well-known

opening of the First Satire[321] agrees with Persius and with Martial in

its scorn of artificial Greek epics, of sham heroic subjects and forms

generally. But there pierces through it something of a special contempt

for “Grub Street”—for the unlucky “Codrus”—who reappears, not always to

be abused, but always to be dismissed with a sort of kick of contempt.

There is something more than the stock superciliousness of the satirist

in the thousand times quoted

“Stulta est clementia, cum tot ubique

Vatibus occurras, perituræ parcere chartæ.”

Footnote 320:

It has been held that Juvenal shows his “freedman” extraction by aping

and overdoing patrician prejudice in this and other matters. But I had

rather not think this.

Footnote 321:

_Semper ego auditor tantum_, &c.

The same tone is maintained throughout, and when poetry and literature

appear (which is not extremely often), poets and men of letters are

treated as practitioners of a rather troublesome, nearly superfluous,

and slightly disreputable, profession, not as bad or good artists as the

case may be. The stage-fright of the rhetorician who is going to make a

speech at Lyons (the gird at the provincial is obvious), the book-chest

of Codrus, with the mice gnawing the divine poems, the Greek mania which

alternates with others in wives, and the learned lady who talks for

hours on the comparative merits of Homer and Virgil, are introduced with

the poet’s usual spirit and vigour, but very distinctly _not_ from the

literary point of view. They are ludicrous things and persons, good

satiric matter: but the book-chest is in the same class with the _lectus

Procula minor_, the fancy for Greek with the fancy for gladiators, the

critical lady with her sister who enamels her face. It is by no means

un-noteworthy that, in the Tenth itself, the vanity of literary study

and success—an admirably suggestive subject—is hardly touched at all;

that the careers of Demosthenes and Cicero are held up as a moral

because of their political ill-success, and the sanguinary fate of

each—which might have happened to the most illiterate of men. But this

is most noticeable of all in the Seventh, which may be said to have a

definitely literary frame and scheme, or which at least certainly would

have had these in the hands of a man really inclined to literary

criticism. It opens with a characteristic picture of what the Americans

would call a “slump” in poetry—the most celebrated bards giving up the

profession in sheer despair, becoming bath-keepers, or stokers, or

auctioneers’ criers, selling their tragedies at rummage sales, or at the

very best getting empty praise and no pudding from their stingy though

wealthy patrons. Then Juvenal becomes a little graver, and contrasts the

victim of _cacoethes scribendi_ with the really exceptional poet (whom

he cannot point out, and only imagines), who will put forth no

hack-work, and writes not even for fame, but to please himself and the

Muses. Such a poet must be in independent circumstances—if Virgil had

had no boy to wait on him, and no tolerable lodging, all the snakes

would have dropped from the hair of his Erinyes, says he in one of his

most characteristic Juvenalisms. Lucan happened to be well off: but

Statius, for all the popularity of his _Thebais_, would have gone

dinnerless if he had not sold his _Agave_ to the actor Paris (apparently

to pass off as his own).[322] Nor is the historian’s labour more

profitable. Indeed it is less so, for it consumes more paper, more time,

and more oil for the lamp, as Juvenal points out in what some modern

reviewers would call “his flippant manner.” Even the much-praised trade

of the orator brings in wretched fees as a rule—a ham, a jar of

sardines, a bunch of onions, half-a-dozen of common wine. If you wish to

soar higher in the matter of receipts, you must spend greatly, have

handsome horses, furniture, rings. Merely teaching to declaim may be

rather more profitable, but think of the intolerable boredom of the

business! the same patter of stock declamations and exercises, the

unreality and folly of it all! True, there are exceptions—and here comes

a curious passage, half satirical, half complimentary, on Quintilian

himself, but treating him not in the least from the literary standpoint.

And so to the end.

Footnote 322:

I think _intactam_ insinuates this. But it may only mean that the play

was produced “for the first time on any stage,” though this seems

feebler. Some would have it that Paris, as being a pantomime, was to

travesty the thing.

This abstract, though brief, should be sufficient to establish our

point—that Juvenal, while he rarely cared to touch strictly literary

subjects, hardly ever treated them in a strictly literary manner. He

shared the opinion of the best Roman literary judges at all times—and

especially in his own times, when the popular current was setting in the

opposite direction—that literary style ought to be plain, nervous,

manly; and he could express this with even better right than Persius,

inasmuch as his own, though extremely allusive and of the most original

character, is quite clear from involution or conceit. But he did not

care in the least to investigate literary processes: nor did he trouble

himself very much to contrast styles and differentiate their values. One

may even, without any rashness of guess, be certain that he would have

regarded criticism of form with nearly as much disfavour in a man as he

expressly does in a woman. In fact, he would have considered it the

occupation of a fribble.

When we pass to the graceful graceless crowd of motes, or rather midges

(for they have a very distinct bite), which composes [Sidenote:

_Martial._] the works of Martial, we find, as has been said, very much

the same general attitude towards styles in literature. But the

expression is differentiated, not merely by the existence in the writer

of a different moral complexion, but by the necessary conditions of his

form. _They_ could discuss; _he_ can only glance. Further, the avowed

purpose of amusement, of composing the verses of a very peculiar

society, which animates the epigrams practically throughout, affects the

result very considerably. Their author resembles both Persius and

Juvenal in paying very elaborate attention to the outside of things, to

the accidents of the literary business. We hear in him continually the

echo of the _sophos_, the “bravo!” which the reciter and the rhetorician

sought for, and which they sometimes, if not often, procured by the

agency of a regular _claque_. We learn (not in the least to our

surprise) that then, as now, there existed the kind literary friend who

was quite eager to receive presentation copies, but who was by no means

ready to go to the publishers and exchange even an extremely moderate

number of his own denarii for a nice clean book, on polished vellum and

neatly rubricated.[323] There were also then, as now, readers or

reviewers who would take copyists’ (_lege_ “printers’”) errors very

seriously, and upbraid the poet for them[324]—which he did not bear

patiently.

Footnote 323:

i. 117.

Footnote 324:

ii. 8.

Here we have the certainly pointed, if not very polite, excuse for not

submitting to the same tax of presentation copies, that he fears his

friend may reply with a present of _his_ works:[325] elsewhere (in those

triumphs of ingenious trifling the _apophoreta_, or gift-tickets) the

neat suggestion, with a blank album, that a poet can offer no more

acceptable present than paper _not_ written upon.[326] In one place

there is, to carry off a piece of sheer begging, an irresistibly comic

anecdote of a “curious impertinent,” who after asking whether the poet

is not the Martial whom everybody not a fool admires, and receiving a

confession of the soft impeachment, abruptly demands why such a poet has

such a shocking bad great-coat, and receives the meek reply, _quia sum

malus poeta_.[327] But these, and a good many others, which an easy

reading, and a not very troublesome classification, of the _Epigrams_

will enable any one to produce, are examples parallel rather to our

citations from Juvenal than to the capital one from Persius. That is to

say, they are examples rather of the selection of a particular subject,

as one of a hundred suitable to the special mode of treatment, than of

the assertion or the display of any particular interest in that subject,

or any special theories upon it. So, too, in some cases of more special

reference, Martial’s habits of flattery, and the unblushing way in which

(not for the first or the last time) men of letters in his generation

were wont to fish for presents, make it not always quite easy to know

how much seriousness to attach to his expressions of opinion on

particular writers. Did he, for instance, really think Silius Italicus

such a great poet?[328] One cannot say: it is certain that Silius was

rich, and a person who seems to have been able to keep his head above

water, and on his shoulders, during all the stormy changes of his

lifetime. And if such a man wrote poetry, if he was not his enemy—still

more if, as was the case here, he was his friend—we know but too well

that Marcus Valerius Martialis was never likely to _publish_ any

unflattering opinion of it.

Footnote 325:

vii. 3.

Footnote 326:

xiv. 10.

Footnote 327:

vi. 82.

But, in a very large number of cases, there was no possibility of

hoodwinking, nor any object in attempting the operation. In [Sidenote:

_The style of the Epigrams._] the very numerous references to his own

books, Martial shows us that he wrote, not at haphazard but with the

keenest critical knowledge of the requirements of the form. That he

recognises, in more places than one,[329] Catullus as his own master,

model, and superior, is itself a critical document and testimonial of

the first value. For it is notorious that the Romans, as a rule, by no

means rated the great poet of Verona at his due; and though the sneer of

Horace[330] may have been dictated by a sufficiently ignoble but very

intelligible jealousy, the slight and passing note of Quintilian[331]

admits of no such explanation. But it was the Catullus of the epigrams

that Martial endeavoured to rival. In doing so he shows that he had a

very definite, and a very just, notion of the versification and diction

necessary to his purpose. His praise of the _Romana simplicitas_ shown

in the style of the lampoon of Augustus on Fulvia, in respect to which

one can only refer modern readers to the original,[332] is capable of

being mistaken for a mere laudation of coarse language—for an

anticipation of that curious fallacy which has more than once made men

regret the withdrawal of the licence to “talk greasily.” But this is

unfair both to the poet and to the Emperor. Martial certainly does talk

greasily with a vengeance; but the last line of this Imperial

fescenninity depends for its point by no means merely on the obscene,

and is an excellent example of clear-cut, straight-hitting phrase.

Footnote 328:

iv. 14; vii. 63.

Footnote 329:

_E.g._, x. 78.

Footnote 330:

_V. supra_, p. 229.

Footnote 331:

_V. infra_, p. 311.

Footnote 332:

xi. 20.

This phrase Martial himself almost always achieved, though in a few

cases his points are still dark to us, and though he had not the

slightest objection to using Greek words, vulgar words, and so forth

when it suited his purpose. The misty magniloquence which attracted so

many men of his time had no charms for him. When he rises, as he

sometimes does, from sheer naughtiness or playful trifling to pathos, to

seriousness, to graceful description of landscape—in the well-known

Pætus and Arria piece, in the epitaphs on Erotion, and the still finer

one on Paris, in his country poems and elsewhere—he is purely Attic. No

style can have a simpler and a less affectedly simple grace. And that he

did this deliberately—that it was his theory as well as his practice—we

may see very well from a sort of cento of passages bearing on the

subject. He differs not merely from Catullus but from Prior (who is

perhaps his nearest analogue in almost all ways) by having obviously no

velleities towards the grand style. We can imagine Prior writing, and

writing quite as well, the piece which tells how pretty Phyllis, when

her lover was racking his brains for some elegant present to reward her

kindness past, exerted fresh coaxing before asking him for—a jar of

wine,[333] or describing the singular history of Galla on the stock- and

share-lists of Love.[334] But we cannot imagine Martial writing _Alma_

or _Solomon_. And all his critical observations, direct or indirect,

testify to a conception of literature perfectly clear and not really

deserving the term narrow, if only because the poet quite frankly limits

it to the kind in which he wishes to, and knows that he can, excel, the

kind indicated in his own famous quatrain:—

“Ille ego sum nulli nugarum laude secundus

Quem non ignoras, sed puto lector amas:

Majores majora sonent, mihi parva locuto

Sufficit in vestras sæpe redire manus.”

Let us see what morsels of criticism such handling furnishes.

Footnote 333:

xii. 65.

Footnote 334:

x. 75.

The prose preface and the opening epigrams of the first book contain

humorous statements of his own fame, excuses (not quite valid) for his

licence of speech, and jocose exaggerations of the critical temper of

the times; but there is not much doctrine in them. There is more in ii.

77, where, not in the best temper [Sidenote: _Précis of their critical

contents._] (for Martial, like some other persons, though he loved to

criticise, was not excessively fond of being criticised), he points out

to a certain Cusconius what the French wit afterwards borrowed from him

in the phrase “ce n’est pas long, mais il y a des longueurs.” Verses, he

says, like his own, though there may be many of them, are not long

because they can spare nothing, because there is nothing otiose in them.

Cusconius, on the other hand, can write distichs which are long. There

is a not uninteresting glance at the fashionable literary subjects and

kinds—History of the times of Claudius, criticism of the myths about

Nero (these could be safely done under the Flavian emperors), fables in

the style of Phædrus, tender elegiacs and stern hexameters, Sophoclean

tragedy or Attic salt—in iii. 20. Another French jest—one of the very

best of Piron on La Chaussée—is anticipated with variation in the 25th

of the same book, by the suggestion to a friend whose baths have been

overheated, that he should ask Sabinæus the rhetor to bathe. _He_ can

reduce the temperature of the Thermæ of Nero themselves. IV. 49 gives us

another critical laudation of the epigram. Flaccus is quite wrong to

think it child’s play. The poet is much more guilty of that who busies

himself with Tereus and Thyestes and Dædalus and Polyphemus. There is no

mere bombast in _his_ book: _his_ Muse is not frounced with senseless

tragic train.[335] “But,” says Flaccus, “the others are the things that

people praise.” “Perhaps,” says Martial, “they praise _them_: but they

read _me_,” with of course the implied and very sound criticism that it

is not so easy to write what shall be easy to read. V. 10 ends with a

jest, the poet saying that if his fame is to come after his death he

hopes it will come late. But it treats rather seriously the other “touch

of nature” (opposite to that of which Shakespeare speaks and

complementary to it), that in literature, and at times [not always, O

Martial!] men do _not_ “praise new-born gauds.” They read Ennius in the

lifetime of Virgil, laughed at Homer [the evidence for this?] in his own

days, preferred Philemon to Menander, and left Ovid to the appreciation

of Corinna.[336] But he shows his less critical mood in setting this

down to envy rather than to the undoubted fact that, in at least many

cases, poets anticipate, if they do not exactly create, the taste for

them—that, as it has been said, a poet’s chief admirers are born at

about the time when he writes. The necessity of some “bite”[337] in

epigrams, vii. 25, is counsel at least as much of common-sense as of

literature. In the 85th of the same, the poet objects to Sabellus that

he can write a few quatrains rather well, but not a book—by which he

probably glances at the necessity, in a book, of varying and sorting the

kinds, as well as of providing a mere quantity of monotonous stuff. And

in the 90th again of the same book he is still more explicitly

argumentative. A certain Matho, it seems, went about saying that

Martial’s books were unequal. If this be so, retorts our bard, it is

because Calvinus (? or Cluvienus, as in Juvenal) and Umber write “equal”

verses, and a bad book is always an “equal” one.

Footnote 335:

_Insano syrmate tumet._

Footnote 336:

Another and severer side of the same epigram is that, viii. 69, to

Vacerra, who only praises dead poets. To die in order to please

Vacerra, says the bard, is not quite _tanti_.

Footnote 337:

_Sapit quæ novit pungere._

Now, what exactly did he mean by “equal”? When we say that a book is

unequal, we generally mean that it has faults as well as beauties, that

it is not equally good, and in this sense Martial would merely be

vindicating himself from the charge of a tame faultlessness, from that

_æqualis mediocritas_ which Quintilian smites in passing. But, if we

take it in conjunction with the Sabellus epigram just quoted, I think it

will not be unfair to allow to _æqualis_ also its other sense of

“unvarying,” “monotonous,” and give the prominence to this in the

equivalence with _malus_ of the last line.[338] Martial specially and

critically prided himself on the variety of his books, on their

containing something for every taste, and something (almost) about every

subject. And the book, he says therefore, that has not this quality is a

bad book. The same doctrine pierces through the laudation of the prose

preface of the Eighth to Domitian, and points the hope that the

celestial _verecundia_ of the “bald Nero” will not be offended by the

naughtier epigrams.

Footnote 338:

There is yet another sense of _æqualis_, “like something else,” which

might be brought in.

The third of this eighth book contains an interesting dialogue between

the Poet and his Muse. Were it not, says he, better to stop? Are not six

or seven books enough and too much? Their fame is far and widely spread,

and when the monuments of the great are dust they will be, and strangers

will take them to their own country. It is never quite easy to know

whether Martial is laughing in his sleeve or not in these boastings. But

the ninth of the sisters, her hair and garments dripping with perfume

(probably Thalia, certainly not one of the _Musæ severiores_), upbraids

him with ingratitude and folly. Why drop these pleasantries? What better

pastime will he find? Will he change his sock for the buskin, or arrange

hexameters to tell of wars, that pedants may spout him, and that good

boys and fair girls may loathe his name? Let the grave and precise write

such things by their midnight lamp. But for him, let an elegant saltness

dash his Roman books, let real living people recognise and read their

own actions and characters; and if the oat be thin, remember that it

conquers the trumpets of many. The Epigram here, it will be seen,

arrogates to itself something like the place of the full Satire.

This, one of the best and most spirited of Martial’s literary

pronouncements, is followed up in a lower key by the 56th epigram of the

same book, addressed to that Flaccus who is elsewhere the recipient of

the poet’s literary confidences. It contains the famous line—

“Sint[339] Mæcenates, non deerunt, Flacce, Marones”—

and elaborates the doctrine that the patron makes the poet, comfort, if

not luxury, the poetry, in an ingenious but impudent manner, carrying

off the impudence, however, by the close. What, he supposes Flaccus to

say, will you be a Virgil if I give you what Mæcenas gave him? Well, no,

perhaps: but I may be a Marsus—a poet who wrote many things, but chiefly

in the occasional kind, whom Martial greatly admired, and whose epilogue

on Tibullus—

“Te quoque Virgilio comitem non æqua Tibulle”—

with two or three other fragments, we possess.[340] And the same

doctrine, that love and luxury are needful to the bard, reappears in 73.

Footnote 339:

Some MSS. and edd. read _sunt_: but _sint_ is so clearly required that

this seems mere perversity.

Footnote 340:

Baehrens, _Poet. Lat. Min._, vi. 346-348.

Martial does not often come down to the minutiæ of criticism, but he

sometimes does, and once in a very noteworthy passage, ix. 11. Here, in

some of his most gracefully fluttering verses, he celebrates the charm

of the name[341] Eiarinos or Earinos, notes that unless he takes the

epic licence of the first form it will not come into verse, and then

adds—

“Dicunt Eiarinon tamen poetæ,

Sed Græci, quibus est nihil negatum

Et quos Ἄρες ἄρες decet sonare:

Nobis non licet esse tam disertis,

Qui Musas colimus severiores.”

Footnote 341:

_Nomen cum violis rosisque natum._ Wherefore Ben Jonson took it for

the heroine of this most beautiful thing, _The Sad Shepherd_.

There are two things noticeable here—first, Martial’s truly poetical

sensitiveness to the beauty of a name, for certainly there is none

prettier than Earine (let him keep the masculine to himself!) which also

appears elsewhere; and secondly his equally poetical yearning for that

licence of “common” quantification, which has made Greek and English the

two great poetical languages of the world.[342] If he would have

developed these views a little oftener, and at a little greater length,

we really could have spared a considerable number of epigrams imputing

unmentionable offences to the persons he did not like. It was his cue,

however, to profess (though half his charm comes from his sense of them)

disdain for such niceties, as in the 81st epigram of the same book,

which is one of his neatest turns. Readers, he says, and hearers like

his books, but a certain poet denies that they are correctly finished

(_exactos_). It does not trouble him much, for he would rather that the

courses of the feast he offers pleased the guests than that they pleased

the cooks. In this, light as it is, there lurks the germ of a weighty

criticism, and one which would, had it been worked out, have carried

Martial far from the ordinary critical standpoint of his time. That, in

homely phrase analogous to his own, the proof of the pudding is in the

eating—that the production of the poetical satisfaction afterwards, not

the satisfaction of the examiners beforehand as to the observation of

the rules, is the thing—that Martial doubtless saw, and that he, by

implication, says. But he does not say it quite openly, and it might

have shocked Quintilian (though it would not have shocked Longinus) if

he had.

Footnote 342:

My friend Professor Hardie rather demurs to the idea of “common”

syllables being commoner in Greek than in Latin, save possibly in

proper names. But I had certainly thought they were, and, even if we

allow for some poetic and humorous exaggeration in _nihil negatum_, it

seems to show that Martial thought so too.

The Tenth book is particularly rich in literary epigrams. It opens with

a batch of them,—one of his pleasant excuses for yet another

reappearance (the pieces are so short that if you don’t like the book

you can lay it down as finished at any moment), an honest indication of

the fact that some of the epigrams are only new editions, so to speak,

of old ones, smoothed with a recent file, one of the not disagreeably

boasting reminders that letters outlive brass and marble (a boast

justified in his own case, but not so, alas! in those of Marsus and

others whom he admitted as his masters), a strongly worded protest

against some clandestine poet who has been forging bad epigrams in his

name, a repetition of the old contemptuous pooh-poohing of stock Greek

subjects, and the old exhortation to study the life. The 19th, in a

pleasant _envoy_ of the book to Pliny, bids the Muse who carries it

observe her time, and not disturb the grave man at his graver hours. The

21st is an expostulation with a certain Sextus, who seems to have prided

himself on the eccentric vocabulary of his poems. What is the use of

writing so that Modestus and Claranus themselves (known men of learning)

can scarcely understand you, and so that your books demand not an

ordinary reader but the Delphic Apollo? You would prefer to Virgil

Cinna—Helvius Cinna, whose fancy for out-of-the-way words we can see,

even in the petty wreckage of his work that time has fated to us.[343]

Perhaps, Martial admits, such poems may be praised; but he would rather

have grammarians like his work, and not be necessary to its liking.[344]

The 35th is a specially graceful compliment to the poetess Sulpicia, who

wrote her love poems (apparently rather warm ones[345]) to her husband

only, and with whom, says Martial, for schoolmate or schoolmistress,

Sappho herself would have been _doctior et pudica_—a right happy

blending of comparative and positive. 70 is a quaint apology, not for

writing so much but for writing so little, the satire of which is so

ingeniously airy that it is possible to interpret its irony in more ways

than one. Potitus calls him lazy because he does not bring out more than

one book a-year. What time has a man to write poetry? Calls and

congratulations (which, somehow, he does not find returned), attendances

at religious and official functions, listening the whole day long to

other poets, to advocates, to declaimers, to very grammarians, the bath,

the _sportula_—why, the whole day slips away sometimes without one’s

being able to settle to work at all!

The 78th, addressed to Macer, contains the graceful request—

“Nec multos mihi præferas poetas,

Uno sed tibi sim minor Catullo”—

which shows Martial’s faithfulness to his exquisite master.

Footnote 343:

Cf. the technical words _carchesia_, _anquina_ in the fragment of his

_Propempticon Pollionis_, Baehrens, _Poetæ Latini Minores_, vi. 323.

Footnote 344:

_Grammaticis placeant, et sine grammaticis._

Footnote 345:

_V._ the only remaining fragment in Baehrens, _Poet. Lat. Min._, vi.

370. The satirical piece, usually printed with Juvenal and assigned to

a Sulpicia, _may_ be hers: but at any rate Martial was not thinking of

anything of the kind. He varies his own conceit in vii. 69 on a

certain Theophila.

The Eleventh and Twelfth, the last of the epigrams proper (for the

_Xenia_ and _Apophoreta_[346] have been dealt with so far as the little

that they have concerns us, and the _Liber de Specta culis_ is out of

the question), are also fruitful. The common habit of addressing the

book itself at its beginning frequently has a literary turn given to it

by Martial, and as in the Tenth so in the Eleventh, not one but a batch

appears as overture, chiefly dedicatory; while another batch farther on

is opened by the promise, certainly not falsified, that the book is

going to be the naughtiest of all. The 90th, however, is important for

us, though by no means immaculate, because the sudden fling of a handful

of mud, in which Martial too often delights, is led up to by satire on

that same preference for uncouth and archaic language, which, as we have

seen, so often defrays the satiric criticism of the time. Chrestillus,

the victim, it seems, approves no smooth verses; they must roll over

rocks and jolt on half-made roads to please him. A verse like

“Luceili columella heic situ’ Metrophanes”

is better to him than all Homer, and he worships _terrai frugiferai_ and

all the jargon of Attius and Pacuvius.

Footnote 346:

It ought, however, perhaps to be added that these include a

considerable batch of inscription-distichs for presents of books from

Homer and Virgil downwards. Most of these are decorative but

conventional: that on Lucan (194), “There are those who say that I am

not a poet; but my bookseller thinks me one,” is keen with a double

edge.

The prose preface of the Twelfth book starts with an excuse for a three

years’ silence (it would appear that for a considerable time Martial had

produced a book yearly), due to the poet’s return to Spain. He had been,

as the epigram above quoted pleads, too busy or too lazy to write in

town; in the country he found himself deprived of the material for

writing. The stimulating, teasing occupations of Rome had given place to

mere clownish vacancy. However, to please Priscus, he has busied himself

again, and he only hopes that his friend will not find his work “not

merely Spanish of the Roman Pale, but Spanish pure and simple.”[347] In

the third epigram there is a half-rueful recommendation (which Thackeray

would have translated impeccably) to his book to revisit the dear old

places, ending with a distich revindicating, in no wise foolishly, the

crown of style—

“Quid titulum poscis? Versus duo tresve legantur,

Clamabunt omnes te, liber, esse meum.”

He was right. Nobody but Martial could have written Martial except

Catullus himself in his less noble moods; and the boast is in itself a

criticism and a just one. Yet Martial had his dignity, and an odd

epigram, the 61st of this book, disclaims the mere coarse language in

which he seems to us too often to have indulged. And the tale of

literary epigrams ceases (I apologise for omissions in the bright and

shifting bevy) with another odd piece, which may be either gross

flattery, irony of a rather sanguinary kind, or mere playfulness, and in

which he remonstrates with his friend Tucca for touching and executing,

so as to make competition impossible, every kind of poetry. Epic,

tragedy, lyric, satire, epigram itself—Martial has tried them all and

dropped them, because he feels himself beaten by Tucca. This is not

fair; let Tucca leave him at least one kind, the kind that he doesn’t

care for. It is not fanciful, surely, to find a critique of poetical

polypragmatism here also.

Footnote 347:

_Non Hispaniensem sed Hispanum._

It may well seem to some that too much space has been accorded to

Martial; but it has been allotted on the principle which, be it mistaken

or not, is the principle that underlies this book. We have, in this

good-for-nothing trifler, a very considerable number of pronouncements

on critical points, or points connected with criticism, and, what is

more, we have in him a writer who has a very clear notion of literary

criticism in and for his own work. A great poet Martial is not: he has

no fine madness, or only the remotest touches of it. He does not look

back to the way in which Lucretius had infused that quality into the

language; I do not think, speaking under correction, that he ever so

much as names him. He does not anticipate (and if he had anticipated, he

would not, I think, have welcomed with any pleasure) the tide which,

welling in upon the severer Muses of classical Latin style, gave them

once more the Siren quality in the Low Latin of the Middle Ages.

Farther, he can hardly be said to have any “wood-notes wild”; even his

country descriptions, charming as they are, are distinctly artificial.

Much as he adores Catullus, it is not for the flashes of pure poetry

which we see in that poet. But, on the other hand, Martial sees, not

merely with instinctive but with critical certainty, that gift of

precision, clearness, felicity, _venustas_, which the Greek-Latin blend

of the Golden and Silver Ages had. He practises and he preaches the

cultivation of this. He preaches it at no tedious length: his chosen

form as well as his common-sense would have prevented that. But he

directly extols the cultivation of style—of that quality which will make

any decent judge identify a poet when he has heard three lines of his

poem. And he practises what he preaches. Even what the grave and precise

(quite truly one must confess) call his moral degradation saves him from

confusing the moral with the literary quality of literature—the noble

error of most ancient criticism. He has, as scarcely any other ancient

writer has, formulated the great critical question, “L’ouvrage est-il

bon ou est-il mauvais?” And if he had chosen to write a _De Arte

Poetica_, I am bound, shocking as the confession may seem, to say that I

think it would have been superior to that of Horace, while he has

provided no unimportant _progymnasmata_ towards one as it is.

From “the mixed and subtle Martial,” as Gavin Douglas excellently

[Sidenote: _Statius._] calls him, we may pass to the poet, perhaps the

rival, whom he never mentions[348]—the author of that only adequate

Roman description of Lucretius which has been referred to above.[349]

The precise sources of the popularity of Statius in the Middle Ages have

never yet, I think, been thoroughly investigated. It is, however, not

difficult to discern them afar off, and to include among them a certain

touch of that uncritical quality which, as we shall see, was one of the

main notes of the Middle Ages themselves. Yet the author of the words

_furor arduus Lucreti_[350] must have been able at least to appreciate.

And the poem which contains that phrase, as well as the prose prefaces

of the _Sylvæ_ where it occurs, will yield something more bearing on our

subject. The first of these prefaces is a curious if not particularly

felicitous plea for the legitimacy—indeed, for the necessity—of a poet’s

indulging in lighter work in the intervals of _Thebaids_ and

_Achilleids_. This is something like the view of Pliny: the poet must be

a Jack-of-all-poetical-trades. Martial knew better. But it is a

noteworthy thing (and Martial himself would have been pungent on it)

that Statius cannot make his trifles brief. Domitian’s horse has nearly

three hundred lines. I do not think that there is a single poem in the

five books of the _Sylvæ_ which falls short of several scores, whatever

its metre. In the preface of the second he apologises to his friend

Melior for some of the pieces, as _libellos quasi epigrammatic loco

scriptos_, and here again Martial might have had something to say about

epigrams seventy-seven lines long. That Statius had not cleared up his

own mind about criticism appears from the touching and attractive,

though not quite consummate, _Ad Claudiam Uxorem_, where the poet,

beaten in the public competitions where he had long triumphed, proposes

that Naples, and his wife’s caresses, shall console him for the loss of

tasteless and thankless Rome. But the _Genethliacon Lucani_, a

commemorative birth-day poem on Lucan (which would have been a little

more effective if we could forget that this tribute to the victim of

Nero was written by a flatterer of Domitian), contains the central

utterance of Statius about other poets. It is, as nearly everything of

Statius has been said to be, too long and too much improvised, though

also, like most things, if not everything, of his, it contains fine

touches, especially that of Lucan in the shades:—

“Seu magna sacer et superbus umbra

Nescis Tartaron, et procul nocentum

Audis verbera, pallidumque visa

Matris lampade respicis Neronem.”

But its interest for us, besides the Lucretian description, which is

itself not improved by _docti_, consists in the long eulogy of Lucan

himself, and the repeated, and therefore not probably conventional,

advice to him not to be afraid of Virgil—

“Bætin Mantua provocare noli;”

and after some time—

“Quin majus loquor; ipsa te Latinis

Æneis venerabitur canentem.”

It would be clear from this, if we did not know it from the evidence of

his original work, that Statius was not on the side of the satirists,

that he had no objection to the Spanish _ampulla_.

Footnote 348:

No one of his contemporaries, except Juvenal (_v. supra_, p. 255),

ever does mention Statius. It is indeed usually said that no classical

author does so, with the same exception.

Footnote 349:

P. 216.

Footnote 350:

_Et docti furor arduus Lucreti._ _Genethliacon Lucani, Sylv._, ii. 7.

76.

The, in all ways very delightful, Epistles[351] of the younger Pliny are

not least delightful in the line of literary criticism. [Sidenote:

_Pliny the Younger: Criticism on the Letters._] Pliny was a confirmed

man of letters. In no member of the most interesting group of late

Flavian and early Antonine writers do we see more clearly the “bookish”

tone which so largely pervaded Roman society. He even, on the celebrated

occasion[352] when he tells Tacitus with modest pride that he had bagged

three wild boars, _et quidem pulcherrimos_, admits that he sat at the

nets with a pencil and a notebook, thus anticipating the action of

Kingsley’s Lancelot Smith when he took St Francis de Sales to a meet. He

takes an intelligent pride in his uncle’s literary work, and if he is a

little wrong in doubting Martial’s power of “lasting” in the letter

which he writes after his death,[353] let us remember that Martial had

paid him a very pretty compliment (which he quotes and which we have

quoted[354]), and that it would not have done to be too certain of the

fact of this coming to Prince Posterity. The very first letter[355]

admits a particular critical care in composition, and the second gives

further particulars thereof. He had never taken such care as with the

book that he sends to Arrian. He had tried to follow Demosthenes and

Calvus, but few, _quos æquus amavit_ (this allusiveness would have been

reprehended by some of our modern critics), can really catch up such

masters. The matter was good, and he had sometimes ventured to extract

special ornaments from the “perfume-bottles”[356] of Cicero. But Arrian

must give him a careful revision, for the booksellers tell him that the

thing is already popular. He has many of the technical phrases which

half attract and half repel modern readers, because they are so

difficult to adjust. There is something like a miniature review in his

description of the works of Pompeius Saturninus to Erucius in i. 16.

This Pompey has something so _varium_, so _flexibile_, so _multiplex_,

that he holds Pliny’s entire attention. He had heard him pleading both

with and without preparation, _acriter et ardenter, nec minus polite et

ornate_. There were in these speeches _acutæ, crebræque sententiæ_, a

grave and decorous construction, sonorous and archaic terms (Martial and

Persius would have shaken heads). “All these things,” he says, “please

strangely when they are rolled forth in a rushing flood, and they please

even if they are read over again. You will think as I do when you have

his orations in your hands, orations comparable to those of any of the

ancients whom he rivals. Yet he is still more satisfactory in History,

whether you take his brevity, or his light, or his sweetness, or his

splendour, or his sublimity. In popular addresses he is the same as in

Oratory, though more compressed and circumscript, and wound together.

His verses are as good as Catullus or Calvus, and full of elegance,

sweetness, bitterness, love! and his Letters (which he calls his wife’s)

are like Plautus or Terence without the metre.” Truly an Admirable

Crichton of a Pompeius Saturninus! and great pity it is that he has not

come down to us, this “Cambridge the everything”[357]—of _circa_ 100

A.D.

Footnote 351:

It did not seem necessary to specify editions of Persius, Juvenal, and

Martial. For Pliny I use that of Keil, Leipsic, 1886.

Footnote 352:

I. vi. Ed. cit., p. 5.

Footnote 353:

III. 21, p. 65.

Footnote 354:

_V. supra_, p. 264.

Footnote 355:

_Hortatus es ut epistolas si quas paulo accuratius scripsissem

colligerem ... Collegi._

Footnote 356:

ληκύθους. The word, whether from the use of its diminutive in the

_Frogs_ or not, seems to have become a stock metaphor for rhetorical

tropes. It has even been compared to _ampulla_, though I fancy it was

not quite so uncomplimentary, and meant “prettiness,” “conceit,”

rather than “bombast.” Both, however, illustrate the view, put

frequently in Book I. and here, as to the ancient conception of style.

Footnote 357:

If the reader is in ignorance of this worthy, he can cure his disease

by any one of three pleasant medicines—Boswell, Horace Walpole, and Mr

Austin Dobson’s _Eighteenth Century Vignettes_.

But the most famous of Pliny’s letters in connection with this subject

is the twentieth of the first book,[358] to Tacitus, in which he deals

with a set question of literary criticism. “A certain learned and

skilful man” maintains that in oratory brevity is everything. In certain

cases, Pliny admits, but only in certain cases. The adversary objects

Lysias among the Greeks, the Gracchi and Cato among the Romans. Pliny

retorts with Demosthenes, Æschines, Hyperides, Pollio, Cæsar, Cælius,

Cicero. Indeed he does not fear to lay it down as a general principle,

“the bigger the better.”[359] The adversary says that the orators spoke

less than they published. Pliny dissents. And then he discusses the

matter generally—from the point of view of oratory in the main, but

partly also from that of literature. And his general view, like that of

his generation (I hardly know whether to include his master Quintilian

or not), may be taken as put in the phrase, _Non enim amputata oratio et

abscissa, sed lata et magnifica et excelsa tonat, fulgurat, omnia

denique perturbat ac miscet_.[360]

Footnote 358:

P. 16.

Footnote 359:

_Ut aliæ bonæ res, ita bonus liber melior est quisque, quo major._

Footnote 360:

This letter contains an interesting _mot_ of Aquilius Regulus, the

brilliant and questionable orator-informer, of whom Pliny frequently

speaks with a sort of mixture of admiration and dislike, reminding one

of the way in which men used to speak of Lord Chancellor Westbury.

“You,” said Regulus to him, “hunt out everything in your brief. I see

the throat at once, and go for it”—_ego jugulum statim video, hunc

premo_. There is some point in Pliny’s retort that people who do this

not infrequently hit knee or ankle instead.

The third letter of the second book is a set panegyric of Isæus,[361]

which would be of more interest if criticisms of orators were not so

common; the fifth of the third is the notice of the life, literary and

other, of Pliny the Elder. The obituary criticism of Martial, to which

reference has been made, occurs in the 21st of this third book, and is a

little patronising. But the contemner of brevity, even if he were a

private friend and a flattered one, and if he had (as most Romans would

have had) no objection to Martial’s freedom of subject and language,

could hardly be expected to do full justice to the epigrammatist.

Footnote 361:

_Not_ the great Attic; but an Assyrian rhetor of Pliny’s own time,

supposed to be also referred to by Juvenal in the well-known phrase,

_Isæo torrentior_ (iii. 74).

We are less able to judge the literary part of the flattering epistle

(iv. 3) to Antoninus, afterwards Emperor, which is so much in the

extravagant style of Roman compliment that, in the absence of the work

referred to, it gives us no critical information whatever. The literary

characteristic of the future Pius appeared to Pliny to be the mixture of

the severe with the agreeable—of the grave with the gay, which made his

style extraordinary sweet, as the eighteenth century would have said.

The usual honey and its maker-bees put in the usual appearance to

express Pliny’s sensations when he reads his correspondent’s Greek

epigrams and iambics. He thinks of Callimachus or Herodes (doubtless our

just recovered Herondas). Only neither has done anything so humane, so

venust, so sweet, so loving, so keen, so correct. How could a Roman

write such Greek? It is more Attic than Athens, and Pliny grudges such a

writer to the Greeks, though there is no doubt that if Antoninus would

only write in his mother tongue he would do better still.

IV. 14, enclosing some hendecasyllabics which have not come down (from

other specimens they are a tolerable loss), contains some interesting

and curious remarks on the always burning and never yet settled question

of morality in literature. Pliny adopts to the full, as a matter of

principle, the doctrine which his friend Martial had both practised and

preached, that naughty things, and even the naughtiest words, may figure

in poetry,—that, as Pliny himself puts it, with the still higher

authority of Catullus—

“Nam castum esse decet pium poetam

Ipsum—versiculos nihil necesse est.”

Only he himself declines to use the naughty words,[362] not out of

prudery, but out of timidity. He follows this up with the sounder

doctrine that everything must be judged in its own kind.

Footnote 362:

_Verba nuda._

Another short letter to Antoninus (iv. 18) not merely repeats the praise

of his Greek epigrams, but informs us that Pliny himself has put some of

these in Latin. A longer one, which follows, to Calpurnia Hispulla,

contains an elaborate eulogy of the lady’s niece, Pliny’s second wife,

who shows her good taste and virtue by learning her husband’s books by

heart, instructing herself in literature generally for love of him, and

singing his verses. And later, with something of the same innocence or

lack of humour which was a Roman—in fact, has generally been a

Latin—characteristic, he tells us that he has been for three days

listening _cum summa voluptate_ to a certain Sentius Augurinus, reciting

his poems or poemkins (_poematia_). Sentius, it seems, performed many

things with lightness, many with sublimity, many with beauty, many with

tenderness, many with sweetness, many _with bile_. It is not quite clear

under which head comes the specimen he produces, which is a rather

feeble compliment to Pliny himself. “Vides,” says Pliny, after quoting

it, “quam acuta omnia, quam apta, quam expressa.” Besides, he is the

friend of Spurinna and Antoninus. What an _emendatus adolescens_!

V. 8[363] is a not uninteresting paper on History. Tutinius Capito

wishes him, as he tells us others had done, to write this. Pliny is not

ill-disposed to do so, not because he thinks he shall do it very well,

but (the sentiment is a fine one, though a little bombastically

expressed) because “it seems to him one of the best of actions to rescue

from perishing that which ought to be eternal.”[364] His idea of

history, however, is not very lofty. Oratory and Poetry, he says, must

have style; History pleases howsoever it be written, because of the

natural curiosity of man—a doctrine which, in slightly changed matter,

has been joyfully accepted by the usual novelist. Besides, his uncle had

been a diligent historian. Then why does he delay? Because he wants to

execute a careful recension of his speeches in important cases, and he

hardly feels equal to both tasks, while, though there is much in common

between Oratory and History, they are also different. The contrast is

curious, and shows the overweening position which Oratory had with the

ancients. To History, says Pliny, things humble and sordid, or at least

mediocre, belong: to Oratory, all that is exquisite, splendid, and

lofty.[365] The bare bones, muscles, and nerves suit history: Oratory

must have the swelling bulk of flesh and the waving plumes of hair.

History pleases by rough, bitter energy:[366] Oratory by long-drawn

sweetness. Diction, style, construction—all are different. After which

he gives a somewhat unexpected turn to the famous Thucydidean saying, by

admitting that history is the _ktema_, and the _agonisma_ oratory. And,

therefore, he thinks that he had better not attempt at once two things

so different. A letter to Suetonius about the books of both (v. 10),

another to Spurinna (v. 17) about a recitation by Calpurnius Piso, a

third (vi. 15) on a thin jest by Javolenus Priscus at another recitation

by a descendant of Propertius (who began “Prisce jubes,” and was

interrupted by Javolenus, _Ego vero non jubeo_), may be glanced at

rather than discussed.

Footnote 363:

There is another interesting critical remark at the end of the famous

description of the villa (v.6): “I think it the first duty of a writer

to _read his own title_, and constantly ask himself what he sat down

to write, and to be sure that if he sticks to his subject he will

never be too long, but will be hopelessly so if he drags other matters

in.”

Footnote 364:

_Non pati occidere, quibus æternitas debeatur._

Footnote 365:

This, of course, is the old invidious distinction between tragedy and

comedy revived in other material. Cf. the curious passage in Tacitus

(_Ann._, xiii. 31) in which he, for his part, glances disdainfully at

those who think “beams and foundation-stones” (Nero’s amphitheatre)

worth mentioning. such things should be kept for journals (_diurnis

urbis actis_): it is for the dignity of the Roman people that only

illustrious matters should find place in Annals. The two thoughts are

characteristic of the two men.

Footnote 366:

_Vi, amaritudine, instantia._

Perhaps there is no better document of Pliny’s literary criticism, both

in its strength and in its weakness, than vi. 17. He writes in a state

of _indignatiuncula_ (let us translate “mild wrath”), which he can only

relieve by working it off in a letter to his friend Restitutus. He has

been at one of the eternal recitations, where the book recited was not

so usual; indeed, it was _absolutissimus_—quite “A per se,” as our

ancestors would have said. But one or two of the audience (clever[367]

fellows, as they and a few others thought) listened to it as if they

were deaf mutes. They did not open their lips: they did not clap: they

did not even rise from their seats save when they were tired of sitting.

What is the good of such gravity, such wisdom, nay, such laziness,

arrogance, _sinisterity_ (a good word!), or, to cut things short,

madness, which leads men to spend a whole day [the terrors of recitation

were obviously not exaggerated by the satirists] in offending and making

an enemy of a man whom you have visited as a friend? Are you clever? Do

not show envy: the envier is the lesser. Nay, whether you can yourself

do as well, or less well, all the same praise him, whether he be

inferior or superior or equal. Your superior, because, if he is not

praiseworthy, still less are you; your equal or inferior, because the

better he is, in that case, the better you are. Pliny, for his part, is

wont to venerate and admire anybody who does anything in literature. It

is a difficult thing, sir, an arduous, a fastidious, and it has a knack

of bringing scorn on those who scorn it.[368] Restitutus will surely

agree: he is the most amiable and considerate of judges. We may mark

this passage as, of many interesting ones, that which gives us Pliny’s

measure as a literary critic best.

Footnote 367:

_Diserti_, used here, as _disertior_ is lower, with the slightly

invidious sense which often attaches to the word, just as it does to

the English equivalent here used for it.

Footnote 368:

_Est enim res difficilis, ardua, fastidiosa, et quæ eos, a quibus

contemnitur, invicem contemnat._

But the list of his noteworthy “places” is by no means closed. VI. 21

gives us his standpoint in another famous quarrel—that of Ancients and

Moderns. He admires the former, but by no means so as to despise the

latter. He does not hold with the doctrine of the senescence of nature.

He recently heard Vergilius Romanus recite a comedy in the Old Comedy

kind, which was as good as it could be. The same man has written

mimiambics with perfect grace, comedies in another kind as good as

Menander’s; he has force, grandeur, subtlety, bitterness, sweetness,

neatness, he glorifies virtue, attacks vice, invents his

personages,[369] and uses real ones, with equal appropriateness. And (as

by this time we begin to expect in such cases) “In writing about _me_ he

has only gone wrong by excessive kindness; and, after all, poets may

feign.” One sees that the excellent Pliny’s geese were swans in every

quill.

Footnote 369:

So I translate _nominibus_.

VII. 4 deals at some length with his own poems, and gives some

hexameters about Tiro and Cicero, which are in style quite worthy of the

subject. There are some elegiacs (rather better) in vii. 8, which is an

elaborate recommendation of literary study—the turning of Greek into

Latin, and _vice versa_, the refashioning and rearrangement of work

already done, the alternation of oratorical practice with history,

letter-writing, and verse of the lighter kind, which receives an

elaborate and not unhappy encomium. As for reading, read all the best

models in all the styles in which you write. VII. 17 is on recitation;

20 of the same book is one of several interesting, though slightly

amusing, letters to Tacitus, in which Pliny implies it to be his own

opinion, and quotes it as that of others, that he and Tacitus were the

two greatest literary men of Rome, and that it was quite wonderful that

they were such friends. What Tacitus thought of the conjunction we do

not know; he was probably too well bred a man to put his thought in

words, though a Tacitean expression of it would indeed be a treasure. In

vii. 25 we meet another “swan,” Terentius Junior, who writes things

_quam tersa omnia! quam Latina! quam Græca!_ Later, in the 30th, a

friend having compared his work, in vindication of Helvidius Priscus, to

that of Demosthenes against Midias, he confesses that he had had the

piece in view, though he thinks it would have been _improbum et pæne

furiosum_ to have imagined rivalry possible. In viii. 4 he encourages

the friend to write an epic poem in Greek on the Dacian war, thereby

incurring a considerable responsibility. The descendant of Propertius,

on whom Javolenus Priscus made that surpassing joke, recurs in ix. 22

with fresh praise; and the last literary letter of importance (the 26th

of the same) is on what may be called the grand style in oratory.

Here, as elsewhere, there may no doubt be room for difference of opinion

as to the space and importance allowed to our witnesses. From the point

of view of this book, however, Pliny’s testimony is of the utmost

importance. We may regret—I certainly do—that an equal abundance of

documents of the same character has not come to us from some one of

greater literary competence—from Aristotle, or even from Dionysius, from

Longinus, or even from Quintilian. But this is distinctly a case where

the better is enemy to the good. For the purpose of ascertaining what

was the actual state of critical opinion and literary taste at a given

time, it is of more value to possess such a collection as this of

Pliny’s than to have fifty _Arts of Poetry_.

Let us “write off” liberally at the outset for the drawbacks of the

document. Pliny’s Letters, pleasant as they are, are not free from a

suspicion, and, considering some statements of their own, something more

than a suspicion, of being not entirely spontaneous: they were, at any

rate in some cases, evidently written for publication. The author

himself, though a man of excellent learning, of the completest

cultivation of his day, of wide and ardent literary interests, and of no

little common-sense, was, as some of his quoted judgments will have

shown, not quite sufficiently possessed of the finest or most

discriminating literary judgment. Moreover, he had a somewhat omnivorous

and disproportionate opinion of the value of literary work, merely as

such, even merely as something that looked such—compilation,

translation, copying verse and prose, what not. Further, in these

characteristics he to a great extent reflected those of his time—a time

of great and active attention to literature, but rather one of talent

than of genius, a period of decadence in many respects, and hardly of

resurrection in any, and lastly, a period of doubtful literary taste,

inclining, when it was sincere, to the florid and Asiatic, when it

affected superiority, to a forced Pseudo-Atticism and concinnity.

Yet it will readily be perceived that none of these allowances is

damning to the individual, while most of them even increase his value as

a representative of the period itself. That he was, and was regarded by

the time itself as, one of the most eminent of contemporary men of

letters, cannot reasonably be doubted, though he certainly yokes himself

rather unequally with Tacitus. And he is none the worse witness that,

though a generous admirer of antiquity, he avowedly was by no means so

out of conceit with his own time as men of letters often are. That this

age was no decrepit one need hardly be said—with Persius “dead ere his

prime,” and Martial, Juvenal, Quintilian, Tacitus, Statius, and Pliny

himself, in full flourishing, with Marcus Aurelius and Arrian coming,

with Lucian and Apuleius not far off—to mention no others—it had

something considerable to show and say for itself. If we can obtain

anything like a clear view of its opinions on literary criticism (to

which it was naturally inclined, as being itself not of the very first,

and having pasts of the very first behind it), we shall not do ill. And

Pliny gives us help of a very special kind, and in very abundant degree,

for the attainment of such a view, which we may proceed to take, after

noticing briefly the only other documents of the time which require

notice for our purpose.

These are the Apocrypha[370] of Quintilian, which are, for more reasons

than one, best regarded apart from the _Institutes_. There are, in the

first place, the _Declamations_, already referred to[371]—nineteen

complete, with sketches, fragments, and skeletons of a much larger

number, which even thus falls short of the huge total of nearly four

hundred assigned to him after a fashion. If the whole were written on

the scale of the score that we possess, they would fill some four

thousand closely printed pages. Interesting, in a fashion, they are; as

pointed out above, they supply, with the works of the elder Seneca, our

only considerable bodies in Latin of that work of the schools which for

centuries occupied the growing intellects of the two great ancient

literary nations, and which supplied the never-blunted point of the

satirist’s

“Ut pueris placeas et declamatio fias.”

Footnote 370:

The _Declamations_ were last edited, I think, by Ritter in the Teubner

Library. That invaluable collection puts (as indeed is usual) the

_Dialogus_ with the other minor works of Tacitus, ed. Halm. It may

also be found, with the same company, in the new Oxford _Bibliotheca

Classicorum_, ed. Furneaux. I use a pretty and convenient joint

edition of the nineteen complete Declamations and the Dialogue, which

appeared at Oxford, without editor’s name, in 1692.

Footnote 371:

_V. supra_, p. 230 _sq._

Seneca has been treated already in his proper place. The

Pseudo-Quintilian (for there is hardly a page of the _Declamations_

which does not fly in the face of the _Institutes_) gives us speeches,

adjusted to the strict canons of _status_ and the rest, written in the

well-known style of the Ciceronian superlative (one wonders that, simply

to save breath and time, the bar of Rome did not agree that any one who

said _-issimus_ should be sconced an amphora, or, if that seem

excessive, at least a _congius_), extremely ingenious now and then, but

of the most fantastic and arbitrary quality. The chief interest of them,

at least from our point of view, is, that in the mere reading one

understands how impossible it was that attention to such things should

consist with attention to true literary criticism.

The _Dialogus de Claris Oratoribus_, traditionally ascribed to Tacitus,

though some will have it to be nothing less than the [Sidenote: _The_

Dialogus de Claris Oratoribus.] otherwise lost _De Causis corruptæ

Eloquentiæ_ which Quintilian, as we know from himself, certainly wrote,

is a much more meritorious performance. The style is very unlike[372]

that of the surely unmistakable author of the _Germania_ and the

_Annals_, the method does not seem, to me at least, after a good deal of

study of Quintilian, to be his. But it is very likely about their date,

and by no contemptible author. The opening certainly chimes in not ill

with the title of Quintilian’s missing treatise. A certain Justus

Falinus had asked why, after the magnificent crops of oratory which

former ages had yielded, the very name of _orator_ had almost died out,

and had been supplanted by “counsel”[373] and “advocate” and “patron.”

The author replies, with a due Ciceronianism, that he had better rub up

his memory of a remarkable conversation on the subject heard in his

youth. Curiatius Maternus, both poet and orator, had recited a tragedy

on Cato which excited the town nearly as much as another piece of the

same name sixteen hundred years later; and Marcus Aper, a man of Gaulish

origin, consular rank, and great fame, and Julius Secundus, met (with

the writer) at Maternus’ house to talk over it. The first of these

rather despised literature, relying on mother-wit; the second was said

to be indebted more to art than to nature: but both were among the

leading counsel of their day. Secundus gently suggests that Cato is a

dangerous subject, and Maternus says that he has another tragedy in hand

(_Thyestes_) with which to follow it. Then Aper opens fire upon him:

first, for deserting oratory and the bar for idle play-writing;

secondly, for choosing foolish fancy subjects like Thyestes. Maternus

appeals to Secundus. He is accustomed to Aper’s denunciations of poetry.

Will not Secundus act as judge? Secundus says that he is not quite

impartial because of his friendship for Saleius Bassus (a contemporary

epic poet of whom we hear in Quintilian as a particular friend of his).

Oh, says Aper, let Bassus and others, who cannot compass oratory,

cultivate poetry if they like. Here is Maternus who can: so he is

wasting his time. And he embarks on a warm and by no means ineloquent

eulogy of eloquence from its practical side, urging not merely its great

political importance but other points. Eloquence opens positions of

opulence and power, makes you valuable to your friends and the State, is

a safeguard to yourself, gives fame, wealth, dignity. As for poetry, it

brings none of these things. It is of no use, and the pleasure it gives

is short, idle, and unprofitable. What is the good of it? Who thinks

much even of Bassus himself? And if he or his friends are in any

difficulty, to whom will they go? Why, to an orator. The poet spends an

infinity of labour on his poem, compasses heaven and earth to whip an

audience together, and gets nothing from it. Certainly Vespasian did

give Bassus five hundred sestertia, and very noble it was of him; but

this was mere alms. An orator _earns_ his money. Besides, your poets

have to skulk in the country, and even if they stay in town, who cares

about them, or goes to see them? Of course, as before said, if a man

cannot be an orator, why, let him be a poet. But eloquence is as great a

thing from the merely literary point of view, and far more useful.

Footnote 372:

I say this in some fear and trembling, with such an authority as the

late Mr Nettleship against me. But I have been accustomed for a good

many years to compare styles in more languages than one or two, and I

think these most unlike. Even the argument that a man may suit his

style to his work is not conclusive, for here it is the _general_

unlikeness of tone and flavour, which cannot be wholly disguised, that

decides me.

Footnote 373:

_Causidici._

Maternus takes this diatribe quite coolly, and replies readily enough.

He has had some little experience, he says, and some little fame in both

oratory and poetry: he does not care for the publicity (so precious to

Aper) which the former brings, and, holding the contrary opinion to his

friend’s, he thinks the country life far higher and better than that of

the town. The great poets of old, if you reckon mere fame, are at least

the equals of the orators, and (here we come to another point of contact

with Quintilian) there are more nowadays who run down Cicero than

Virgil. The unquiet and anxious life of the orator has no charms for

him. He wants neither more money nor more power: and he would have

himself figured on his tomb, not serious and frowning, but merry and

crowned. At the peroration of Maternus comes in Vipsanius[374] Messalla,

who, being informed by Secundus of the nature of the dispute, expresses

his approval of it, but hints a strong preference for the _older_

orators. Aper catches this up rather hotly, after his manner: and after

a little general conversation puts the obvious _aporia_, Who _are_ the

old orators? running over the history of Roman oratory, with some not

uninteresting criticisms, and a strong contention in favour of his own

contemporaries. Maternus and Messalla take up the same matter from other

sides, and the dialogue ends.

Footnote 374:

Or Vipstanus, as they read now.

This piece at first promises considerably, and it cannot be said to

perform badly in any place; but its conclusion and middle part are of

less importance to us than seemed likely at the beginning. The

panegyrics of Oratory and Poetry respectively, in which Aper and

Maternus indulge, might well have led to a fuller and more searching

analysis of the respective literary merits of the two—instead of which

we have from Aper only a rather Philistine exaltation of the superior

use and profit of oratory, from Maternus a generous, but slightly vague

and rhetorical, exaltation of the qualities of poetry and the delights

of the poet. From the entrance of Messalla the piece becomes little more

than a contribution to the everlasting ancient-and-modern quarrel on the

one hand, and to the history of Roman oratory on the other. Yet in Aper,

at least, we have a vigorous projection of the positive Roman spirit,

combined with a fancy for pregnant and precious style; in Maternus, an

indication of that mainly dilettante and bookish temper which the

satirists blame in their literary, and especially their poetical,

contemporaries; and in Messalla (who is taken by the partisans of the

Tacitean authorship to represent Tacitus himself), an instance of that

looking back to better times which is, at any rate sometimes, if not

invariably, a token of literary decadence.

Here again, as in the case of Cicero, it is necessary to break the rule

of not entering upon controversy, lest by silence one [Sidenote: _Mr

Nettleship’s estimate of it._] incur the blame of neglecting more than

competent authority. As in that other case, Mr Nettleship’s estimate of

the critical value of the _Dialogus_ (which he unhesitatingly attributes

to Tacitus) is higher, though not so much higher, than mine. He ranks it

with, but above, the _Brutus_, as “the two great documents of Latin

criticism”: I should put both as such (though Cicero and Tacitus were

both of them far cleverer than Quintilian) below the _Institutes_, and

also below other things.

The reason of the difference somewhat consoles me for the fact. Mr

Nettleship was evidently bitten with that noble error, the belief that

criticism of literature must be criticism of something that is _not_

literature. Tacitus seems to him to ask “under what social conditions

great writing and great speaking arise,”—a most interesting question,

but an excursus from criticism proper. “He sees clearly, and this is the

important point which characterises the treatise, that literature must

be taken and judged as the expression of national life, not as a matter

of form and of scholastic teaching.”

For “scholastic teaching” so be it: that also is extraneous to the

central matter. But on the other point one must throw away the scabbard.

Never will literature be judged adequately—seldom will it be, even

within limits, judged accurately—as “an expression of national life.”

From this and kindred fallacies come, and always have come, a brood of

monsters, the folly, almost as great as its opposite, that “a poet must

be a good man,” the folly that you can judge literature by remembering

that there is much water-meadow in England[375]—hundreds of others. That

literature is an expression of national life nobody need deny—that

national life can never be estimated without an estimate of literature

is, if anything, still more true. But literature is first of all

literature, and it must be judged, like all other things, by the laws of

its essence, and not by the laws of even its inseparable accidents.

Footnote 375:

Those who have an accurate memory of M. Taine’s _English Literature_

and of his _English Notes_ will not object to this apparent

impossibility.

How different was Mr Nettleship’s point of view may be judged from the

mere fact that he actually passes over the first fifteen chapters, which

to me seem to contain most of the literary criticism of the piece. Nor

can I (though he himself fully admits the oratorical preoccupation both

here and still more in Cicero) help thinking that the substitution of

the English “style” for “eloquentia” and “oratio” amounts to a certain

begging of the question. Much that is true of the orator is no doubt

also true of the writer, but not all: and the connection with life, with

public national life, on which such stress is here laid, undoubtedly

applies to oratory, whether of the pulpit, the senate-house, or the bar,

far more than it applies to books. The most _literary_ side of oratory

(I am not ashamed to make the concession) is the lowest—that of pure

epideictic. But then, that is because oratory is, after all, only

applied, not pure literature.

We see, then, from this interesting piece, almost as much as from the

poets and Pliny, that the age was, so to say, poly-historic [Sidenote:

_The general literary taste of the Silver Age._] rather than original,

and that, while it was no stranger to the very sound opinion that the

goodness of a thing must be measured in its own kind, it still had not

cleared up its mind about the relative value of different kinds.

Although oratory had, with the rarest exceptions, become the mere art of

the advocate, or the mere business of the travelling or resident

rhetorician, it still had a most disproportionate position. Although the

satirist laughed at the custom of writing artificial Greek epics and

tragedies, it is clear that these still held the highest place in the

general opinion. The bilingual practice, not merely in these but in

other kinds, of itself inferred a certain lack of “race,” vernacularity,

genuineness, in either literature. Some kinds of letters were still

hardly known; Pliny’s own indulgent reference to _fabellæ_ is all the

more interesting that we are not so very far from the _Lucius_ and the

_Golden Ass_. In almost all departments odd conventions and assumptions

prevailed, such as the necessity of loose subjects, and even of coarse

language, in _vers de société_. And it was probably the working of this,

and of the strict ideas as to certain forms and their laws, that caused

the jack-of-all-trade tendency to which we have more than once referred.

If the rules are pretty clearly laid down, and if you are a man of

reasonable learning and intelligence, attention to such rules will

secure success. There is no reason why as Pliny himself seems to have

thought in his own case and the cases of many of his friends, you should

not be at once an orator and a historian, an epic poet and a comic, a

dramatist and an epigram-writer. And the age still believed devoutly in

the rules, though free-lances like Martial might kick at them in verse,

and though Quintilian, with his unfailing good sense, might hint that

there were far too many Figures, and that the subdivisions of Greek

rhetoric were in many cases idle.

In nothing, perhaps, is this tendency of ancient criticism better shown

than in its attitude to the question of Faultlessness. [Sidenote:

“_Faultlessness._”] Of course, on this question there were two parties,

with many subdivisions in each. There were the extreme classics of that

classic time, the wooden persons of whom Martial tells us, for whom it

was enough if a thing was not “correct,” to whom a fault was a

fault—indelible, incompensable, to be judged off-hand and Draconically.

And at the other side there were the sensible persons, like Quintilian,

like Pliny, like Martial himself (not to mention Longinus, whom some

would have to be their contemporary), who contended that faults might be

made up by beauties, who sneered at _mere_ “faultlessness.” But no one,

not Longinus himself, seems to have taken up the position which the

boldest and most consistent (it would be question-begging to say the

best) modern critics take, that the whole calculus is wrong—that this

notion of “faults” made up by “beauties,” of a balance-sheet, debtor and

creditor, with the result struck one way or the other, is wholly a

misconception. Two, I suppose, of the most representative passages in

English poetry touching this subject are Lear’s apostrophe to the

elements, and Milton’s episode of Sin and Death. The extreme stop-watch

and foot-rule critics of the first century, like those of the

eighteenth, and, perhaps, some (though they are not a prevailing party)

even at the present day would call these undoubted faults, both of them

sinning against the law or conception of measure in language, and the

second offending still more gravely against that or those of decency,

propriety, the becoming, in imagery, subject, language. The defenders,

or those who might have been the defenders, of Shakespeare and Milton,

from the other point of view, would admit in varying degrees that the

things were faulty; but would urge the pathos of the first, the gloomy

magnificence of the second, the force and power and grandeur of both, as

_redeeming_ them—in a degree and to an extent again varying with the

individual critic.

Now, a thoroughgoing “Romantic” and comparative critic of the modern

type, while he would, of course, scout the first party, would be loath

to adopt either the method or the exact conclusions of the second. “Let

us clear our minds of cant,” he would say. “These things are not

‘faults’ at all. They do not leave the court pardoned on consideration

of the previous or subsequent good behaviour of the culprit, but simply

because there is no stain on his or their character. There is no need to

plead extenuating circumstances: we stand for acquittal _sans phrase_.

These things might be faults elsewhere, in other poems: they are not so

here. They are the absolutely right things in the right place, producing

the right effect, driven home by the right power to the right mark.

Shakespeare and Milton _have_ faults—the somewhat excessive tendency of

the first to play on words out of season as well as in, and the

deplorable propensity of the second to joke when joking was absolutely

impossible to him. But these are not of the character of the Longinian

or Quintilianian ‘fault’ at all. They do not endear the poets; they make

them less good; we wish they _were_ faultless in this sense. Your

‘faultlessness’ simply means that the man has that most hopeless of all

faults—mediocrity: and your ‘fault’ is simply derived from the existence

in your mind of a more or less complicated set of rules which have no

real existence. Nay,” he might proceed, “the extremest classical men are

sounder in a way than you are. They are right in thinking that a fault

_is_ a fault, and can never be ‘redeemed,’ much less purged, by a

beauty. They are only wrong in not knowing what beauties or what faults

really are.”

Now, I do not say whether the criticism of antiquity was right or wrong

in not taking this view. But I think there is absolutely no evidence

that it was ever taken at this time.

In some other agreements and differences we find ourselves more at home.

The everlasting questions of archaic or modern [Sidenote: _Ornate or

plain style._] language, of conceited or direct thought, of ornate or

plain style, occupied the critics of the end of the first and the

beginning of the second century, just as they have occupied those of

more recent pasts, are occupying those of the present, and will occupy

those of the future. As has been indicated in detail, there was not here

quite the critical unanimity which some periods have shown on these and

similar questions. Among the general there was something like an

agreement; it seems undeniable that the popular taste of Roman audiences

at recitations ran towards elaborate and slightly archaic phraseology,

to Greek literary subjects, and (both in verse-epics and tragedies and

in prose declamations) to topsy-turvy conceit. This was evidently

frequent in verse, though time has carried away most traces of it; and

in prose it is not entirely alien from the magnificent phrase-making of

Tacitus, it shows itself amply in the rhetoric of Seneca the son, as in

the earlier rhetorical examples of Seneca the father, is almost openly

defended by Pliny, and seems to receive a certain amount of “colour” (as

the rhetoricians themselves would have said) even from some passages of

Quintilian. It is very noteworthy that all these prose-writers incline

more or less to the artificial side, while the verse-satirists argue and

sally for terseness, elegance, concinnity. And the cause may not

improbably be sought in those very declamations of which mention has

been so often made. We have no enormous stock of them, which is not to

be regretted; but in the surviving examples we have material which is

welcome in its way, and which amply proves what has been said.[376]

Footnote 376:

I am not sure that I should have given any place here to Cornelius

Fronto, if his ticket of admission had not been (rather

contumeliously) countersigned by Mr Nettleship. The low opinion which

Marcus Aurelius seems to have had of literature may possibly have been

in part excused by his preceptor’s utterances on the subject. He

appears to have been an eminent representative of the “labelling”

school of critics. Lucilius is “gracile” (this is not quite Horace’s

view), Albucius and Pacuvius mediocre, Accius unequal, Ennius

multiform. Sallust writes history _structe_, Pictor _incondite_,

Claudius _lepide_, Antias _invenuste_, Sisenna _longinque_, Cato

_verbis multijugis_, Cœlius _singulis_. One cannot help “nodding

approval and saying, ‘This is very satisfactory to know,’” as Lady Kew

did when she was informed that “Alfred was a trump, and Ethel a brick,

and Barnes a snob.” But if Mr Nettleship thought that æsthetic, as

opposed to philosophical, criticism could not get beyond this system

of tickets-of-leave, he was surely mistaken.

CHAPTER III.

QUINTILIAN.

THE ‘INSTITUTES’—PREFACE—BOOK I.: ELEMENTARY EDUCATION AND

GRAMMAR—BOOKS II.-VII. ONLY RELEVANT NOW AND THEN—HOW TO LECTURE

ON AN AUTHOR—WIT—BOOK VIII.: STYLE; PERSPICUITY; ELEGANCE—BOOKS

VIII., IX.: TROPES AND FIGURES—COMPOSITION—PROSE RHYTHM—BOOK X.:

SURVEY OF CLASSICAL LITERATURE—GREEK: HOMER AND OTHER EPIC

POETS—THE LYRISTS—DRAMA—THE HISTORIANS—THE ORATORS AND

PHILOSOPHERS—LATIN: VIRGIL—OTHER EPIC AND DIDACTIC POETS—ELEGIAC

AND MISCELLANEOUS—DRAMA—HISTORY—ORATORY: CICERO—PHILOSOPHY: CICERO

AND SENECA—MINOR COUNSEL OF THE TENTH BOOK—BOOKS XI. AND XII.—THE

STYLES OF ORATORY—"ATTICISM"—LITERARY QUALITY OF GREEK AND

LATIN—QUINTILIAN’S CRITICAL “ETHOS.”

In passing, say, from Cicero, the chief prose Latin critic of

præ-Augustan times, to Quintilian, the chief of post-Augustan, and

[Sidenote: _The_ Institutes.] indeed of Latin critics of all dates, we

come to a man of much less genius no doubt, and, in particular, of far

less creative literary power, but still to one who, for our special

purpose, has some very considerable advantages. It is not merely that

the Spanish-Roman is a professional critic, as well as a

rhetorician—that he is as much _the_ professional critic of Latin as

Dionysius of Halicarnassus (whom he much resembles, and to whom, as has

been said, he possibly owes not a little) is of Greek. He has over the

greater writer (whom he admires so generously) the further advantage of

complete freedom from that touch of dilettantism (one is sometimes

almost tempted to use a harsher word and call it quackery) which besets

Cicero whenever he is not actually pleading or debating, and which is

not invariably lost even then. Further, Quintilian is the only critic of

antiquity (for even Longinus, as we saw, merely glances at the subject)

who seriously takes the two languages, seriously compares them, and, by

the help of the comparison, acquires a view-point over literature as

such—not merely as Greek or Latin literature—which was shut to all his

predecessors and most of his followers. If the _Rhetoric_ and the

_Poetics_ of Aristotle form the great book of critical method for

ancient times, if the Περὶ Ὕψους is the great book of their critical

inspiration; the _Institutes of Oratory_ contain the fullest, the most

intelligent, the most satisfactory applications of criticism to

literature, as it presented itself to an intelligent and thoroughly

educated person, whose eyes were sharpened by long expert use, at the

end of the first century, when, except for a few belated authors, mostly

of curiosities, the list of the great writers of antiquity was all but

closed. The book[377] is extremely well written; it is, with a few

_cruces_, remarkably clear, and its range and thoroughness leave

practically nothing to desire.

Footnote 377:

Whether its correct title be _Institutiones Oratoriæ_, or _De

Institutione Oratoria_, and whether this be better translated

_Principles of Oratory_, or _Of the Education of an Orator_, are

questions not very important _to us_. The sense of “Institutes” may be

illustrated by the old division of academical chairs in, for instance,

Medicine into “Institutes” (_i.e._, “Theory”) and “Practice.” But

Quintilian includes a good deal of the practical side. All the

editions of Quintilian are either antiquated by, or more or less based

upon, that of Spalding and Zumpt, with Lexicon, &c., by Bonnell,

Leipsic, 1798-1834. I find the little Tauchnitz print of the text

(ibid., 1829) very useful. The Bohn translation, by the ill-starred J.

S. Watson, though not impeccable, will serve English readers well

enough.

This wide range of it (which, according to different, but, in each case,

defensible interpretations of its title, busies itself with the whole

education of an orator, or with the whole theory and practice of

oratory) naturally makes it include much which does not fall strictly

within our subject. But nearly the whole of three books, the eighth,

ninth, and tenth, and a large and important section of the twelfth, are

devoted directly to that subject; while there are references to it

almost throughout. We shall therefore, as we did in the case of

Aristotle and Longinus, give a kind of running abstract of the whole,

dwelling very briefly on the irrelevant, somewhat more fully on the

partly relevant, fully on the rest, and returning to the consideration

of special points later.

In a sort of Advertisement, to and for the use of his publisher Trypho,

and in a prefatory dedication to his friend Marcellus [Sidenote:

_Preface._] Victorius, Quintilian gives some information about the

origin and object of the work. From this we learn, among other things,

that part-cause at least of its actual appearance was the fact, not

unknown in more modern times, of unauthorised publication of his

lectures by note-taking pupils.

The first book is devoted to the subject of the education of boys from

the earliest age, a subject on which Quintilian speaks [Sidenote: _Book

I. Elementary Education_] with much knowledge and good sense, as well as

kindliness. But from this he soon passes to Grammar, and his importance

for us begins. For his treatment of the subject is quite in the larger

and humaner sense, insisting from the first on critical reading, though

he seems, as indeed we should expect, to regard the “desperate hook” of

the extremer kind of verbal critic with little favour. It is noteworthy

that he alleges music to be necessary, because the grammarian has to

speak of metre and rhythm. And passing rapidly from considerations of

orthography, right pronunciation, and audience, he arrives at the

all-important subject of “correctness,” and of its attainment,

negatively by the avoidance of barbarisms and solecisms, positively by

the selection of the best words in the best arrangement. Observations of

special importance in this context may be cited: That the word in itself

(_i.e._, out of connection) has no merit except its inherent euphony;

that (a most pregnant remark) it is often difficult to distinguish

Faults from Figures of speech; and some exceedingly [Sidenote: _and

Grammar._] interesting, but also more than ordinarily difficult, remarks

on tone and accent-variation. In all these grammatical notes, which are

pretty full and numerous, and often very curious—showing that, as he

himself says pleasantly, though he is not writing a treatise on Grammar,

yet as it lay in his way he did not like not to be polite to it—there is

a pervading quality of not at all Philistine common-sense which shows

the best side of the Roman temperament. Although Quintilian acknowledges

the convenience of Greek for terminology, and makes fairly free use of

the terms, it is quite evident that he has (long before he formulates it

later) a profound and very wholesome distrust of the Greek rhetorical

practice of splitting a thing up, naming the splinters, and then passing

on, as if a real, solid, and final examination had been attained. And

the same quality appears eminently in the summing up of his discourse on

words, “Custom in speaking I shall call the agreement of the educated,

as custom in living is the agreement of the good.”

Remarks on orthography follow, and some on reading, valuable, though not

so valuable, as those on the same [Sidenote: _Books II.-VII. only

relevant now and then._] subject which come later. And then he passes to

certain of the _progymnasmata_ of the Greek rhetoricians, fables, uses,

sentences, and “ethologies,” which, though they have puzzled some, are

clearly the same as the _ethopœiæ_ of Hermogenes and his

fellows.[378] All these are, in fact, exercises in composition. The rest

of the book is occupied with the discussion of other subjects of the

school curriculum, subsidiary to rhetoric. The second book continues the

subject of Composition, but with more special reference to Oratory

proper—a tendency which naturally increases; and for some five or six

books the technicalities of the rhetoric-school and the courts have the

better of literature. There are, however, two exceptions, which require

notice—the first a remarkable passage[379] on reading or lecturing on

authors.

Footnote 378:

For these technical terms _v. ante_, bk. i. chap. iv., or the Index.

Footnote 379:

II. v. 5-9.

“But”—he has just ruled out the explanation of the mere meaning of

uncommon words as below the duties of a Professor of Rhetoric—"to point

out the merits, and if it so happen, the faults, is the properest of all

things for the profession and for the promise by which he holds himself

out as a master of eloquence...." (He should make the students read in

turn, and then), "after setting forth the case on which the oration was

composed (for thus it will be more clearly understood), he should leave

nothing unnoticed which may be noteworthy in the invention or the

elocution, pointing out the manner of conciliating the jury in the

proem, the clearness, conciseness, persuasive force of the narration,

the occasional design and hidden artifice (for that alone is true art

here, which can only be understood by an artist), what foresight there

is in division, what subtle and thronging[380] argumentation, the

strength of the inspiration, the attraction of the winning passages, the

roughness[381] of the objurgation, and the humour of the jokes; how,

finally, the man [Sidenote: _How to lecture on an author._] shows

mastery of feeling, makes his way into the very heart, and adjusts the

minds of the jury to his own contention. Then, as for style, we must

point out what words are proper, ornate, sublime, where the

amplification is to be praised, what excellence there is in the contrary

direction,[382] what is ingeniously transferred; what the figurativeness

of the words is, how smooth and squared, yet manly, the composition."

And then he proceeds to recommend the occasional selection of passages

which are not to be praised—the exhibition, in short, of a rhetorical

helotry.

Footnote 380:

_Crebra_, as it were “attacking on all sides,” “redoubling blows.”

Footnote 381:

_Asperitas_, which some would rather translate “trenchancy.” But there

was an idea in ancient times (not quite unknown in modern) that in

hostile argument politeness (“treating your adversary with respect,”

as Johnson said) was out of place.

Footnote 382:

_Quæ virtus ei contraria_, that is to say, I suppose, brevity and

pregnancy. “Transferred” just below, in the sense of _translatio_,

“metaphor,” “what ingenuity of metaphor.”

No reader, I hope, will need to have it pointed out to him, at any great

length, how exactly this corresponds to the practice of the critical

lecturer or reviewer, as it ought to be, in regard to all kinds of

literature, and not oratory merely. Such a lecturer, or such a reviewer,

can do no better than grave these words of Quintilian on his mind, and

follow their directions as best he can, whensoever an author is to be

expounded on the platform or reviewed in the column. It scarcely

requires more than the easiest and most obvious substitutions and

amplifications to make the passage a manual in miniature of all

criticism, be it of prose or poetry.

The other passage is the very curious and interesting section in the

third chapter of the Sixth book, on Wit.[383] As is well known, this is

one of the points on which ancient (especially Latin) and modern taste

are most out of harmony. Except [Sidenote: _Wit._] Aristophanes at one

end, with his alternations of outrageous farce and keen poetry, and

Lucian at the other, with the innocent-seeming flow of his white-hot

irony, there are perhaps not even any Greek authors whose command of our

risibility is absolutely sure; and the average Greek joke, as reported

by the anecdote-mongers, is to us but a vapid thing. In Latin it is even

worse. Plautus pretty generally, but in a limited way; Catullus, when he

exchanges passion for humour; sometimes Horace, for a pleasant Augustan

“wit of the town”; Martial for a too often naughty _persiflage_,—these

we have little doubt about. But Terence, even if we shut our eyes to his

borrowed capital, is but comedy-and-water; Cicero jokes without indeed

much difficulty on his part, but with surprisingly little effect on

ours; and the _average_ Latin jest is far worse than the average Greek.

Of course this is all natural enough; the jest always, save in certain

transcendences, lies more in the ear of the hearer than the charm or

quality of any other kind of literature. But it is all the more

interesting and valuable to have a set discussion on the comic by a man

of immense reading, excellent taste, and great acuteness. Besides,

Quintilian’s Spanish blood or birth may very likely have given him a

somewhat wider and more flexible appreciation of humour than the “firm

Roman” wit itself allowed, or at least encouraged.

Footnote 383:

_Virtus quæ risum judicis movet_, VI. iii.

After mentioning, as a generally accepted thing, the deficiency of the

comic element in Demosthenes, and the superabundant quantity and

inferior quality of it in Cicero (it must be remembered that Quintilian

had the Tullian _Three Books of Jests_, which time has mercifully hidden

from us), he passes to the general question, and accepts the almost

universal classical opinion that laughter has always something low about

it.[384] In this, we know, Plato and Aristotle both agreed; it was a

sort of postulate of all Greek philosophy, and though almost certainly

false, was excused, partly by the extreme licence of the Comic Muse in

ancient times, and partly by the rarity of humour in the best sense, and

the almost non-existence of Romantic Comedy. He observes, however,

acutely enough, on the insufficiency of the general explanations of the

origin of laughter (an insufficiency which has certainly not been filled

up to the present day), and shows that urbane shrewdness, which is one

of his best points, by questioning whether deliberate cultivation of

jesting as an art is an altogether satisfactory thing. But it is in his

subsequent remarks on the kind of jesting admissible in oratory (we

might here at least substitute, with hardly any wrong, “in literature”)

that his chief merit lies. On the dangerous business of verbal

distinction between _venustum_, _salsum_, _facetum_ he is luminous and

useful; while his remarks, in two different places, on _urbanitas_ are

not far from a _locus classicus_, and those[385] on the special treatise

of Domitius Marsus on that topic have the best qualities of a

review—that is to say, of the kind of review that one sees too seldom.

Footnote 384:

_Hoc semper humile._

It is not, however, till the eighth book is reached (for the seventh,

except in some remarks on arrangement, is almost [Sidenote: _Book VIII.:

Style._] purely legal) that we find Quintilian, for a considerable time,

at close quarters with our special subject. After summarising with

remarkable clearness (so that there is nowhere any better conspectus, in

little, of the matter) the earlier and technically rhetorical part of

the _Institutes_, he comes to the third part, which he calls

“elocution.”[386] This is no other than the _lexis_, which Aristotle

treats not indeed perfunctorily (it was not in Aristotle to be guilty of

that crime), but with a sort of apologetic impatience, as one turning

back to the Court of the Gentiles after visiting the Holy of Holies. The

point of view, with some four hundred years of great work, not merely in

oratory, but in general literature, behind the critic, and with the new

requirement of comparison between Greek and Latin brought in, has

changed remarkably. Instead of a popular and slightly vulgar appendix,

it is (Quintilian tells us that all orators agreed with him) the most

difficult part of the subject. At the same time, he has not attained to

the almost perfect _parrhesia_ of Longinus; he dares not tell us (though

we can see that he was sometimes half minded to do so) that “beautiful

words are the light of thought.” He has the stereotyped caution—very

wholesome in its way—to those who neglect things and attend to words.

But he will not allow words to be neglected in their turn, and as a

matter of fact perhaps the greater, certainly the most interesting and

original, part of the five books which follow is occupied with what,

disguise itself as it may under the term of “elocution,” is really

“style.” Not, be it added, the mere fritter and foppery which sometimes

receives that name, but literary manner and art in the great and wide

sense—the proper subject, that is to say, of literary criticism.

Footnote 385:

§§ 101-112.

Footnote 386:

Some moderns (notably Campbell in his _Philosophy of Rhetoric_) have

followed Quintilian in this use of the word for “style.” But the

accepted sense in English is too well settled for this to be

permissible.

After this proem, Quintilian begins regularly on the subject—φράσις in

Greek, _elocutio_ in Latin—referring to his remarks [Sidenote:

_Perspicuity._] in the first book (_vide supra_) on the avoidance of

Barbarism and Solecism, and glancing at Livy’s Patavinity, and at the

alleged over-Atticism of Theophrastus. He has, however, a good deal more

to say on the actual lexicon; and in the course of it sharply

perstringes that sort of affected periphrasis which the eighteenth

century (though it thought it knew its Quintilian) so dearly loved. “The

Iberian shrub” for “broom,” the “fishes solidified by brine” which he

laughs at, are Thomson in his worst mood, Armstrong, Mason, even

Wordsworth at times, to the very life, and Delille to more than the

life—of which there is not much in that famous Abbé. The necessity of

making the epithet fit the noun is excellently inculcated; the use of

archaic technical terms not excessively denounced. But I grieve that

Quintilian joins the herd in condemning Parenthesis, a heavenly maid

whom there have been many and great ones, from Herodotus to De Quincey,

to love, but whom few have dared to praise as she deserves. It is true

that she speaks chiefly to the sapient; and the insipient accordingly do

not love her.

Passing from perspicuity to “elegance,” as our own eighteenth-century

rhetoricians would have said, Quintilian is equally admirable; but, as

before, a certain amount of “hedging” is perceptible in him. True

beauty, he thinks, is never separable [Sidenote: _Elegance._] from

utility. It is a noble sentiment, and to a very large extent a true one;

but it may be questioned whether the greatest part of its truth is not

esoteric—whether it does not arise from the suppressed rider, “because

true beauty, in merely being beautiful, _is_ of the highest utility.”

He himself, however, perhaps did not care to penetrate so far with his

analysis; at any rate he does not, and so he rather beats about the

bush. Grace of style will captivate; all the great men, Aristotle no

less than Cicero, say that we ought to excite admiration. Only we must

be “manly, sir, manly”; our embellishment must not be effeminate—it must

be in good taste. The three kinds of oratory, too, will admit of

different degrees—even different kinds of embellishment. Epideictic

almost demands ostentation of ornament; debating sometimes permits it;

it must be far more cautiously used in forensic speech. Even words must

be most cautiously chosen—harshness, a touch of the ludicrous, and other

effects, unless they are deliberately invited, must be carefully

shunned. The archaic (from this point of view there is no real

contradiction with the former, _v. supra_) will add picturesqueness, but

we must walk warily with it, we must not say _antigerio_ for _valde_.

Here, perhaps, one may presume to differ with Quintilian, who extends

his condemnation to the beautiful word _ærumna_. He may have been led to

dislike it by that sensitiveness of his ear to the grunt of the “um,”

which we shall notice later, but which ought here to have been appeased

by the musical syllables on either side.

Proceeding from individual words to connected speech, he has some

capital cautions on unlucky conjunctions of words, suggesting double

meaning—with, however, the still wiser reflection that if you are always

looking out for this, you had better hold your tongue altogether. A

handful of the rhetorical tickets—_tapeinosis_,[387] _meiosis_,[388]

Homœology, Macrology, pleonasm, _cacozelon_,[389] and so forth—is

taken up, and they are shaken out and shown to be at least susceptible

of useful application, while in the passages that follow (the conclusion

of the third chapter) some celebrated _loci_[390] are severally

examined, with an admirable combination of verbal acuteness and general

grasp. The shorter fourth chapter deals in the same way with the

favourite figure of Amplification and its opposite Diminution, as

exemplified in chosen illustrations. Then he turns (and we must remember

that the turn is not arbitrary nor desultory, but follows the divisions

of the older Rhetoric) to those sentences or _gnomæ_, as the Greeks

termed them, which had such an effect on ancient audiences, and which,

_mutatis mutandis_, are not without effect on modern readers. We have

seen very recently how the mere trick of what may be called

“topsy-turvyfying” accepted maxims has, not once or twice, but again and

again, managed to secure an audience.

Footnote 387:

The use of undignified expression, as “a _wart_ of stone” on a

mountain.

Footnote 388:

Not in its usual equivalence with _litotes_, but in the sense of

cursory and elliptic reference.

Footnote 389:

Affected excess in _any_ direction, whether ornate or plain.

Footnote 390:

Chiefly from Virgil and Cicero.

This section ends with a passage of such weight and importance as

general criticism that we must give it nearly _in extenso_:—

“But there will be no end to it if I follow out individual forms of

corrupt taste. It is better to turn to what is more necessary. There are

two opposite opinions on this subject; some hardly pay attention to

anything but ‘sentences’—some utterly condemn them; and with neither do

I entirely agree. If sentences are too crowded they get in each other’s

way, just as, with all crops and trees, nothing can grow to a proper

size if it lacks room. Nor does anything stand out in a picture where

there is no shading; so that artists, when they deal with many things in

one canvas, leave spaces between them lest shade and object fall

together. Moreover, this same profusion cuts the style too short; for

each sentence stands by itself,[391] and there is, as it were, a fresh

beginning after it. Whence the composition becomes too disjointed,

consisting not of integral members, but of separate scraps, inasmuch as

these things, each rounded and cut off from the rest, refuse

conjunction.[392] Besides, the colour of the speech becomes, as it were,

spotty with blotches, bright indeed, but too many and too different. For

though a selvage and fringes of purple, in their proper place, light up

the gown, a garment speckled with patches of colour is certainly

unbecoming. Wherefore, though these sentences may seem to flash and to

strike in some sense, yet they are lights which may be likened, not to

flame but to sparks amid smoke: they are not even seen when the whole

speech is luminous, as the stars themselves cease to be visible in

sunshine. And, rising only with fitful and feeble effort, they are but

unequal, and, as it were, broken, so as to attain neither the admiration

due to things eminent nor the grace of a close uniformity” (VIII. v.

25-29).

Footnote 391:

_Subsistit_: or perhaps “comes to a halt,” “stops dead.”

Footnote 392:

_Insistere invicem nequeant_: or perhaps “are unable to lean upon each

other,” “to come close to each other,” “to stand in each other’s

shoes.”

The end of the Eighth book, and the beginning of the Ninth, deal with

the subject—the all too famous and long-studied [Sidenote: _Books VIII.,

IX.: Tropes and Figures._] subject—of Tropes and Figures, which

Quintilian distinguishes from one another a little artificially, and

with a kind of confession that the distinction is sometimes

correspondent to no real difference. It is not till rather late in his

handling (IX. i. 22) that he makes that scornful reference to the Greek

abundance in this kind which has been itself more than once referred to

here. He is bound to say that figures are by no means so numerous as

some would make them out. Nor have the names, which the Greeks can botch

up at any occasion, the least influence with him.[393] And he is

particularly earnest in condemning the practice of allotting a Figure to

every affection of the mind—a practice certainly absurd enough, though

no very unnatural consequence of the constitution of “figures” as real

things.[394]

Footnote 393:

_Neque enim me movent nomina illa, quæ fingere utique Græcis

promptissimum est._

Footnote 394:

And, it may be added, pretty closely connected with the mania for

insisting that literary criticism shall perpetually mix itself up with

ethics and psychology.

He himself, however, is by no means stingy of accepted Tropes and

Figures, though he treats them, with his usual common-sense, as names,

not things. The first place, in his discussion and enumeration of the

matter, is occupied as usual by Metaphor, a mode of speech so prevailing

in both senses that, here at least, no objection can be made to its

constitution into a quasi-entity. He calls it “the most frequent and by

far the most beautiful,” points out, of course, that it is only Simile

in another and shorter form, and illustrates its kinds by examples in

the best critical style. He specifies these kinds; but once more _not_

to distinguish for the mere sake o£ distinguishing. In fact, here as

elsewhere, we may notice that Quintilian, half unconsciously, stops

short at the points where Rhetoric parts company with literary

criticism, and becomes mere pseudo-science. From Metaphor he goes,

treating them in the same way, as with all the tropes and figures that

he mentions, to Synecdoche, Metonymy, Hypallage; and has some good

remarks on the fine but real distinctions between the indulgences in

these flights and sleights which are, and those which are not,

permissible to the orator, whom he practically identifies with the

prose-writer by contrasting him with the poet. Antonomasia, which is of

the same family, follows, and then a rather disappointing treatment of

Onomatopœia. One sees here the Roman, and the late Roman, but also

the yearner after better things, in the observation that “this, which

the Greeks thought one of the greatest excellences, is scarcely allowed

_us_.” “We do not dare to form a new word,” he says, and tells us that

even the formation of such words, on strict analogy of others, was

scarcely ventured on,[395] and that the inability to compound, which has

so notoriously manifested itself later in her greatest daughter, was

beginning to appear in Latin. In short, Latin had reached a stationary

state—the state of the nation _qui cesse de prendre_, if not quite of

that _qui commence à rendre_. It had to become the picturesque and

delightful, if perhaps too much crossed and blended, Low Latin of the

Dark and Middle Ages before it could recover itself.

Footnote 395:

This famous horror of the _insolens_, the _inusitatum verbum_, is the

very dominant note of all Latin criticism, and will recur constantly.

Catachresis, Metalepsis, the ornamental and “perpetual” epithet follow;

and then we come to the fruitful subject of Allegory.

Quintilian is perhaps not exactly the writer from whom we should expect

a thoroughly satisfactory treatment of this great subject—a subject

which, far more than metaphor, escapes the state of a mere rhetorical

ticket, and challenges that of a real literary quality or kind. Although

it is unjust to represent him as merely conversant in details and afraid

to rise, a certain timidity serves as the Nemesis of his common-sense.

Besides, his materials were not favourable: the great allegorical style

of Plato had long passed, not to be revived; the magnificent exuberance

of mediæval fancy in this kind was far in the future; the exercises

which Quintilian had before him were either mere phrases in the poets,

tedious didactic things in the philosophers, or such easy examples as

Horace’s “O navis,” which he quotes. We have therefore no such handling

of the matter as we might have had from Longinus. And when we are told

that the most ornamental kind of writing by far is that in which the

three figures—simile, metaphor, and allegory—are mixed, we seem to see

the worst side of Rhetoric as we seldom do in Quintilian. Once more

there arises the picture of a dismal sort of library-laboratory, with

bottles and drawers full of ready cold-drawn or ready short-cut

figures—of the literary dispenser, with his apron on and his balance

adjusted, taking a handful of this, two ounces of that, three drachms of

the other, and compounding a draught or a pill to be exhibited in the

forum, or the lecture-room, or the courts of justice, as the case may

be. But he recovers himself soon, if only by the dry fashion in which he

observes that, if anybody does not know it, the Greeks call certain

kinds of allegory sarcasm, asteism, antiphrasis, and parœmia, to

which it may be well to add mycterism,[396] a kind of derision which is

dissembled, but not altogether concealed—as very neatly by M. Fabius

Quintilianus in the passage before us.

Footnote 396:

_I.e._, suppressed sneering.

Periphrasis, Hyperbaton, Hyperbole close the chapter, and the book, and

Quintilian shines on the latter, while at the end he refers to his lost

dialogue _On the Causes of the Corruption of Eloquence_, one of the

things of its kind which we must regret most.

The Ninth book opens with the distinction between Trope and Figure,[397]

and with some general remarks on the latter word which illustrate rather

amusingly the Delilah-effect of it on those who use it. We should not

have been sorry to have had that treatise of Apollodorus which

Quintilian seems only to have known through Cæcilius (the writer on the

Sublime), and in which the author by no means frivolously argued that,

in the common sense of Figure, everything is a figure, and the

enumeration of figures is impossible and useless. We should have thanked

Time for sparing that other of the Homeromastix, in which Zoilus, with

better sense apparently than when he talked of matters too high for him,

limited the word Figure to a phrase, in which the apparent or first

meaning is different from the second or real. And Quintilian himself,

when he comes to the distinction between Figures of Thought and Figures

of Speech, illustrates (whether purposely or not it is difficult to say)

the purely childish side of the matter, by remarking that in one of the

Verrines, _jamjam_ and _liberum_ are figures of speech. For, as the

commentators have gravely worked it out, _jamjam_ is a Palillogia or

repetition, and _liberum_, contracted from _libeirum_, is an instance of

Syncope. Verily, one exclaims, there is much to be said for Apollodorus!

And when he further observes that the greatest power of Figures is to

render oratory attractive, one feels inclined to say, “The figure is

nothing, and the power of making figures is less; but there _are_

attractive qualities in oratory, and you may ticket them as figures,

within moderation, as you like.”

Footnote 397:

_Trope_ = an expression altered from its natural and obvious _sense_.

_Figure_ = an expression differing in _form_ from the ordinary mode.

But it would be a delusion to suppose Quintilian himself deluded.

Immediately after the passage just quoted comes his Declaration of

Independence in regard to the Greek nomenclature, a fresh observation in

the same key “to exhibit anger or grief, or any other passion in

literature, is not of itself to be figurative, though one may use

figures in the expression,” and—after two quotations from Cicero, in

which crowds of figures are introduced and named—a distinct, though

gentle, hint that, much as he admires Cicero, he thinks him too prodigal

here.

Two long chapters, the second and third of the Ninth Book, contain

Quintilian’s own survey of figures as distinguished from tropes, and as

divided into figures of thought and speech respectively. He opens the

first division with Interrogation—the rhetorical interrogation, of

course; he goes on to Anticipation (_prolepsis_ in a sense different

from the usual one); Feigned Doubt, Communication,[398] Feigned Passion,

Prosopopeia, Apostrophe, Hypotyposis, and then regains more open and

higher ground for a time with the great figure of Irony, of which,

however, he makes relatively as little as of Allegory. Aposiopesis,

Ethopœia, and Emphasis follow, with something to which he gives no

definite name, but which approaches Parable. After this he becomes

rather technically forensic, and winds up with a shower of names of the

verbal hair-splitting kind.

Footnote 398:

In the technical sense of “taking the audience into confidence,” of

asking the jury what _they_ would do in such a case, &c.

Verbal figures—"Figures of Speech" proper—begin, after some general

remarks, by examples which seem to bring us back to the old conclusion

that “everything is a figure,” and which are sometimes barely

intelligible, as where _Sthenelus sciens pugnæ_, which seems to us a

most ordinary expression, is said to show two figures combined.[399] The

Figures themselves, where named distinctly, range from such familiar

things as Parenthesis and Climax to more technical ones in Epanodos[400]

and Paradiastole.[401] Others, familiar and less familiar, follow, but

at last Quintilian grows impatient, and after plumply denying that

Paromologia[402] and Parasiopesis[403] are figures at all, declares

roundly that he shall pay no attention to authors who have made no end

of mere term-seeking, and have classed arguments among Figures. And he

winds up the whole with a weighty caution against abusing even those

Figures which he has admitted. Of such abuse, almost all times, whether

they have been devoted to nominated Figures or not, leave more than

sufficient record: but it can never have been more tempting or more

frequent than when the process of peppering style with the contents of a

certified chemist’s shop of Figures was almost prescribed by the

orthodox curriculum of literary education.

Footnote 399: