_Sciens_ being used for _scitus_ and _pugnæ_ for _pugnandi_, and each

use of one word for another being reckoned as one figure.

Footnote 400:

Deliberate repetition.

Footnote 401:

Antithetic distinction.

Footnote 402:

Concession in order to strengthen argument.

Footnote 403:

Pretended reticence, implying what is meant.

The connection, however, with strictly literary criticism becomes closer

still in the following (fourth) chapter of the Ninth [Sidenote:

_Composition._] Book, which, together with the surveys of literature in

the Tenth and Twelfth, is _the_ “place” of Quintilian for our subject.

For it deals directly with Composition, in the higher sense of attention

to style, and before very long we see that what is immediately uppermost

in Quintilian’s mind at the moment is the order of the words, and the

consequent rhythmical effect. He spends, after a fashion pardonable to

the professional declaimer and teacher of rhetoric, some time on general

remarks, rebutting the silly talk, common then as now, about the

superiority of natural to artificial eloquence, the frippery of style,

and the like. And then he mounts the battle-horse of all true critics,

the argument from alteration of arrangement of words, adding, truly

enough, that the more beautiful the sentence which is thus distorted,

the worse will the distortion seem. He turns to an interesting and quite

relevant historical digression on the lateness of deliberate style, and

on its differences, narrowing these for the present to two, “loose” and

“firm,” by which it would appear that he does not mean the usual

contrast of “loose” and “periodic,” but merely that between irregular

conversational style and set speech. Then, noting the technical

divisions of phrases, clauses, and sentences, he considers the order of

words, and (being a Latin) of course urges the conclusion of the

sentence with a verb, where possible, and perstringes certain sentences

of Mæcenas, a notedly “precious” writer, in which we can only dimly

perceive the offence.

Remarks on emphasis, hiatus, cacophonous conjunction of consonants,

jingle, plethora of monosyllables, and the like, [Sidenote: _Prose

rhythm._] follow, and then the great and difficult subject of rhythm is

tackled directly. Distinguishing it from metre, correctly if not quite

sufficiently, by the necessity that the latter should show a certain

order, he proceeds to deal with the proper rhythm of prose in the most

difficult, but not least important, passage of his book, rightly

insisting in sum on the presence of _numbers_, which are not to be

monotonous. Some of his minor directions are, indeed, dark to us,

especially his objection, not merely in prose, but even in verse, to

polysyllables at the end. And though we are in full light again when he

denounces complete verses in prose (the chief formal fault of Mr

Ruskin), he, here also, goes too far for us. The most delicate English

ear would not object to the equivalent of Sallust’s “Falso queritur de

natura sua,”[404] to the commencement of a hexameter in the

_Timæus_,[405] or to the muffled Galliambic of Thucydides.[406]

Footnote 404:

Said to be an iambic decasyllable—hobbling enough!

Footnote 405:

Εἷς δύο τρεῖσ· ὁ δὲ δὴ τέταρτος ἡμῶν ὧ φίλε. The first words to δὴ

make the beginning of a hexameter or a penthemimer elegiac, the whole,

omitting Εἷς, a very “lolloping” iambic trimeter, while ὁ to ἡμῶν is

an Anacreontic. Plato would certainly have retorted that where so many

metres are possible no one can arise distinctly, and therefore

disagreeably, to the ear.

Footnote 406:

ὑπὲρ ἥμισυ Κᾶρες ἐφάνησαν. Spalding, I think, detected Galliambic

cadence here, regarding the first foot as an anapæst and the rest as

two third pæons. You may also begin with a third pæon (ὑπὲρ ἥμι), as

do many of the lines of the _Atys_ itself. Therefore I call it

“muffled,” and have dwelt on the pæon, though the Galliambic is more

commonly thought of as Ionic _a minore_. Professor Hardie, however,

suggests to me that Quintilian was actually thinking of the Sotadean

metre of which he himself, lower in the chapter, quotes an example

beginning rather like this.

But this in the last case is, perhaps, due to the fact that the pæon is

hardly an English poetic foot at all, and in the first to the fact that

we have nothing corresponding to the strangely broken rhythm of the

Latin comic senarius and tetrameter. It is, however, in dealing with the

feet of prose that Quintilian, like Aristotle, gets most out of our

depth, and for the same reason, that we really do not know enough—if we

know anything—about the pronunciation, or intonation, of Greek and

Latin. Yet the general drift, if here and there we do not quite “feel

our feet,” is unmistakable and unmistakably correct, and the whole is an

excellent sample of a kind of criticism most necessary, much neglected

in modern times till very recently, and entirely independent of any mere

rhetorical technicality. And it is followed—at section 116 onward—by

some general remarks of capital importance, laying down among other

things that the chief touchstone of composition is the ear, and

admitting that in many cases, both of selection of single words and

_ordonnance_ of phrases, it is impossible to render an exact reason why

one thing is right and another wrong. It is so: and there’s an end on’t!

In the peroration of the Book, first the orator receives some special,

and then (at 138 onward) the author, in verse as well as in prose, some

general, cautions and admonitions as to musical effect.

But all this, good as it is, could be easily spared, if the choice lay

between it and the Tenth book. For here, and here only, do [Sidenote:

_Book X.: Survey of Classical Literature._] we get, from an eminent

critic of the first rank, a critical survey of the joint literatures of

Greece and Rome, during the main classical course of both. Interesting

as this would be from any one of tolerable ability, seeing that it is

precisely what we lack—doubly interesting as it is from a man of

Quintilian’s learning, long practice in teaching, and interest in the

subject—it becomes trebly so from certain characteristics of his which

have been more than once glanced at, and which make him an almost

perfect, certainly a typical, exponent in rational form of what may be

regarded as the standard orthodoxy—the _textus receptus_ of the critical

creed—of the ancients. Aristotle came too early to give this opinion

with full knowledge, and would, perhaps, always have been disinclined to

give it in the same way. Longinus, we feel, is an exception of genius.

But what Quintilian says the enormous majority of cultivated Greeks and

Romans (allowing in the former case for particularist and parochial

contempt of the latter) are likely to have thought. He prefaces the

survey by an interesting, and perhaps not really equivocal, explanation

of the reasons for its insertion. I say “perhaps not really equivocal,”

because Quintilian, a very genuine person, would not have hesitated to

give it the form of an apology if he had meant it apologetically. The

orator on his probation must, he says, study and imitate for himself all

the best authors, not merely the orators themselves, but, as no less an

authority than Theophrastus recommended, poets, and historians, and

philosophers. But this must be done with care and judgment; for the

methods of history are not the same as those of oratory, and it is no

use addressing one kind of juryman with the pregnant terseness of

Sallust, or another kind with the _lactea ubertas_ of Livy, while the

philosophers require the same caution, put in a different way. And some

remarks of his on at least the more celebrated authors will be expected

by his friends—to which friends we owe more thanks than is always the

case.

He “begins with Zeus,” that is to say, Homer, and delivers a very neat

set criticism on him from that oratorical point of view which was so

common in regard to both Homer and Virgil.

“For he, as,” in his own words, "the violence of rivers and the courses

of the springs take their beginning from the ocean, [Sidenote: _Greek:

Homer and other Epic poets._] has given an example and a starting-point

to all parts of eloquence. Him none has excelled, for great things in

sublimity as for small ones in propriety of speech. At once abundant and

compressed, agreeable and serious, wonderful now in volume, now in

terseness, is he; and not only in poetical, but also in oratorical,

virtue most eminent. For, not to say anything of his panegyrics, his

hortatives, his consolations, do not the Ninth Book, with the embassy

sent to Achilles, and the quarrel between the generals in the First, and

the sentences expressed in the Second, set forth every device of

advocacy and debate?" &c., &c.

Others he treats more briefly. Hesiod is in the middle style only, but

easy and sententious in that. Antimachus[407] (one of our losses) is

second to Homer, has force, energy, originality, but is deficient in

attractiveness and in _ordonnance_. Panyasis (another) excels Hesiod in

subject and Antimachus in treatment. Apollonius has an evenly sustained

mediocrity. Aratus is “equal to the work to which he thought himself

equal”—an ingeniously double-edged compliment. Theocritus (one must

quote the whole of this, and waive the discussion of it) “is admirable

in his peculiar style, but his rustic and pastoral muse shrinks not only

from appearing in the forum, but even from approaching the city.” And

then Pisander, Nicander, Euphorion, Tyrtæus, Callimachus, Philetas are

slid over rapidly, while, though Aristarchus had sanctioned three

_iambographi_, Simonides and Hipponax are passed in silence, Archilochus

only receiving very high praise for vigour and all similar qualities.

Footnote 407:

_V. supra_, pp. 20, 85. Perhaps no single “windfall of the Muses”

would be so great a gain to literary criticism, in respect of Greek,

as the recovery of a substantial portion of Antimachus.

So, too, of the nine canonical lyrists, Bacchylides, Ibycus, Anacreon,

Alcman, and even Sappho, are overlooked. Pindar [Sidenote: _The

Lyrists._] has a brilliant testimonial, to which, however, the authority

of Horace seems to be thought necessary as an indorsement. Stesichorus

is “equal to a great subject, strong, dignified, but exuberant.” Alcæus

is magnificent, but descends to sportive and amorous subjects (_ecce

idola scholæ!_); and Simonides, though of no very lofty genius, is

correct and pleasing.

The Old Comedy, with the usual three selected, but not characterised

separately, is better adapted for the orator’s use [Sidenote: _Drama._]

than anything save Homer: it is the cream of Attic; it is graceful,

elegant (and one may wonder for a moment, but it is a useful warning as

to the connotation of the word), “sublime.” The judgment of the three

tragedians is scarcely worthy of Quintilian. He speaks of Æschylus very

much as a Frenchman, not in the times of utter ignorance, used to speak

of Shakespeare. He is half silent, half enigmatic, on Sophocles; but he

gives Euripides obviously heartfelt praise, and thinks him the most

serviceable study of all for the orator. To which observations

Aristophanes would pretty certainly have retorted (clothing the retort

in language perhaps sadly lacking in decorum) that it was not very

wonderful that the sophist should be useful to the rhetorician.

Very high, too, is the praise of Menander. Indeed, as we have seen

before, Menander held a much higher position with the ancients than, if

we had more than fragments of him, he would, from those fragments, be

likely to hold with the moderns. He is praised (almost in the very

words) for his “criticism of life,”[408] and a tradition is mentioned

that he was an orator as well as a poet. But whether this be the case or

not, passages in his plays are cited as possessing all the charms of

eloquence, and he is especially extolled for that presentation of

character—_ethopœia_—which the ancients exacted from the orator even

more than from the poet. Philemon is the other late comic mentioned, and

though the taste of the age that preferred him is denounced as bad, he

is admitted as a fair second.

Footnote 408:

_Ita omnem vitæ imaginem expressit._

Herodotus and Thucydides are of course put in front of the historians,

and are contrasted fairly, though not with a great [Sidenote: _The

Historians._] deal of penetration. Theopompus, Philistus, Ephorus,

Clitarchus, and Timagenes are slightly mentioned: but Xenophon, somewhat

to our surprise, is put off to the philosophers. Yet this is of itself a

useful _datum_ for our inquiry, when we think how low _we_ should put

Xenophon’s contributions to philosophy (as distinguished of course from

philosophical biography), how much higher even the rather dry annals of

the _Hellenics_, how much higher still the agreeable miscellanies, and

the pleasant didactic romance of the _Cyropædia_, and how far highest of

all, the _Anabasis_, with its vivid realisation of action and scenery,

and the narrative power which gives a romantic interest to the rather

undeserved escape of a gang of mercenary filibusters.

Conscious, probably, that the comparison of them must be hackneyed,

Quintilian does not dwell long on the Greek orators, [Sidenote: _The

orators and philosophers._] even on that half of The Ten which he

selects, and of the later speakers mentions only Demetrius Phalereus. He

is much more enthusiastic about the philosophers, discerning

“agreeableness” of style[409] in Aristotle, a judgment in which few of

us who have groaned over the not indeed obscure, but hard and juiceless,

language of the _Ethics_ and the _Organon_, will quite acquiesce, while

we might think it rather kind even for that which clothes the more

popular matter of the _Politics_, _Poetics_, and _Rhetoric_. But it

would not be easy better to recognise the mastery of Plato, “whether in

acumen of argument, or in a certain divine and Homeric faculty of

style.” He rises far above mere prose, and seems instinct, not with

human reason, but with a sort of Delphic inspiration. Xenophon at last

receives due meed for his “unaffected delightfulness beyond the reach of

affectation,” and the “persuasive goddess that sits on his lips.”[410]

Perhaps Theophrastus may be a “little overparted” with “divine

brilliance,”[411] though of course the epithet is a mere translation of

the name Aristotle gave him.

Footnote 409:

_Eloquendi suavitas._ Cicero is equally complimentary, however, in

speaking of his _flumen aureum_: and the charitable have thought that

these qualities were discoverable in the lost _Dialogues_.

Footnote 410:

Eupolis on Pericles.

Footnote 411:

_Nitor divinus._

When the critic approaches his own countrymen his words have, perhaps,

an even greater interest. He begins of course [Sidenote:

_Latin—Virgil._] with Virgil, and, as in duty bound, ranks him next to

Homer, and nearer Homer than any one is near himself. Yet a suspicion

crosses one’s mind whether Quintilian was exactly enthusiastic about the

elegant Mantuan, for he talks about his being “obliged to take more

care,”[412] about his losing in the higher qualities, but finding

compensations, &c.

Footnote 412:

_Ei fuit magis laborandum._

So far so good. But what shall we say of this: “All others must follow

afar off. For Macer and Lucretius are indeed to [Sidenote: _Other epic

and didactic poets._] be read, but not for supplying phrase—that is to

say, the body of style. Each is elegant in his own subject, but the one

is tame and the other difficult.” Now, as to Macer we know little or

nothing; he seems to have been a sort of Roman Armstrong or Darwin, who

wrote about herbs, drugs, &c.[413] But Lucretius—a greater master of

phrase than Landor himself, nay, a greater, perhaps, than Milton—"not

good for supplying" it, and merely “difficult”? One wants, again, some

Aristophanic interjection. Varro is damned with faint praise as not

indeed despicable (_non spernendus quidem_), but _parum locuples_.

Ennius is spoken of as some of our own critics used to speak of

Chaucer—as a gigantic and aged oak, venerable but not beautiful. Ovid is

“wanton,” and too fond of his own conceits. Valerius Flaccus is a great

loss. Others—Severus, Bassus, Rabirius, Pedo[414]—names to us mostly,

though we have fragments of at least three, are dismissed, the two first

with high praise, the two last with the scarcely enthusiastic remark

that the orator may read them, if _he has time_. Lucan is ardent, eager,

and of noble sententiousness, but rather an orator than a poet. Domitian

would have been the greatest of poets, _if_ the gods had pleased. But,

unluckily, they did not please!

Footnote 413:

His fragments in Baehrens’s _Poetæ Minores_, vol. vi. pp. 344, 345,

run to seventeen, none exceeding two lines, and only two so long. The

most complete is this—

“Cygnus in auspiciis semper lætissimus ales:

Hunc optant nautæ, quia se non mergit in undis.”

This is certainly not much better than _humilis_, “tame” in phrase.

Footnote 414:

Of Cornelius Severus, a friend of Ovid, who wrote on the Sicilian war,

and of whom Quintilian thinks that, had he lived, he might have been

second to Virgil, we have some dozen odd lines, and a more solid

fragment of twenty-five, enshrining that plagiarism from Sextilius Ena

which has been noticed above (p. 235). It has some merit. For Saleius

Bassus see above (p. 281). The five scraps which we possess of

Rabirius warrant no judgment. But Seneca the Rhetorician in a context

noticed above (p. 234), has preserved a block of twenty-three lines of

Albinovanus Pedo on the voyage of Germanicus, which have a certain

declamatory vigour. See Baehrens, vi. 351-356. (Some elegies have also

been attributed to Pedo.)

In elegy Tibullus is Quintilian’s choice, but he admits that others

prefer Propertius. Ovid is more luxuriant than either; [Sidenote:

_Elegiac and miscellaneous._] Gallus harsher. Horace receives praise

thrice over as terse, pure and just in satire, bitter in iambics

(lampoons), and almost the only Roman deserving to be read[415] in

lyric—where he sometimes soars. He is full of pleasant grace, and is

agreeably audacious. After this, or rather before it, it is not

surprising that Catullus is only mentioned for “bitter” iambics. As

older satirists (“Satire is _ours_!” says Quintilian with a pleasant

patriotic exaltation), Lucilius and Varro have praise.

The remarks on Tragedy we are unfortunately unable to check; but it is

interesting that Quintilian apparently thought [Sidenote: _Drama._]

Latin better off here than in Comedy, which we certainly should not have

expected. He quotes the traditional praise of the language of Plautus

without expressing any opinion on it, but in a fashion pretty clearly

intimating that he was unable to agree.[416] “The ancients extol

Cæcilius,”—another phrase which can only be pointed in one way; and

Terence, though extremely elegant in his kind, scarcely attains to a

faint image of Greek. It seems, however, as if he would have thought

better of Afranius had it not been for that foulness of subject which,

from the frequency of mention of it in connection with the author, seems

to have turned the by no means squeamish stomach even of less moral

Romans.

Footnote 415:

_At Lyricorum idem Horatius fere solus legi dignus._

Footnote 416:

_In comœdia maxime claudicamus: licet Varro, Musas (Ælii Stilonis

sententia), Plautino dicat sermone locuturas fuisse, si Latine loqui

vellent._

He is much more patriotic in regard to History—in fact, his patriotism

rather outruns his discretion. One may have the [Sidenote: _History._]

highest admiration of Sallust’s masterly sweep (“immortal velocity”

Quintilian himself calls it), of his pregnant thought and vivid

representation, yet hesitate to match the two miniatures or Kit-cats of

the _Jugurtha_ and the _Catiline_ against the mighty grasp and volume,

alike in whole and in detail, of the _Peloponnesian War_. It must,

however, be remembered that Sallust wrote a larger _History_ in four

books, which is lost except in fragments. Livy with Herodotus, though

Quintilian thinks the latter ought not to feel indignant at the match,

is only not so _impar congressus_, because there is here no unequality

in scale and range. But, once more, the expression of opinion is a

valuable one, and we must come back to it. Of Servilius Nonianus and

Aufidius Bassus we know nothing; but the section ends with a high and

most interesting panegyric on a certain unnamed living historian, whom

we must all hope, though some would identify him with Pliny, to be

Tacitus. If _he_ had been equalled with even the greatest of the Greeks,

Thucydides might have made room for him with hardly condescending

good-humour.

Having thus put himself in the mood of “our country right or wrong” by

this time, Quintilian is emboldened to match [Sidenote:

_Oratory—Cicero._] Cicero against any Greek orator, though he proceeds

to explain that this is not meant to depress Demosthenes. Thus minded,

he certainly does not go to work “with a dead hand,” as the French say,

and endows his favourite not merely with the energy of Demosthenes, but

with the flow of Plato and the sweetness of Isocrates. (One may invoke

the aid of Echo—courteous nymph—and assent at least to Isocrates.) And

then he passes to other Latin orators, praising Pollio for pains, and

Messala for an aristocratic elegance. Cæsar (it is noticeable that he

says nothing of the _Commentaries_) has qualities in his speeches which

might have made him a rival to Cicero, especially the elegance of his

diction. Cælius for wit; Calvus for severe correctness; others for other

things, receive homage.

In Latin philosophy he again, with some rashness, advances Cicero as a

rival to Plato, and ends with a curious and interesting [Sidenote:

_Philosophy—Cicero and Seneca._] passage on Seneca, whom he had been

supposed to condemn and even hate, whose vitiated taste he still

reprehends, but to whose real merits he now makes handsome concessions.

This is quite one of Quintilian’s best “diploma-pieces” as a literary

critic, in the division of decided but not illiberal censure, qualified

by just and not grudging allowance for merits. It is a pity that it is

too long to quote.

With the rest of the book, interesting as it is and germane to our

subject, we must deal more succinctly. It first handles [Sidenote:

_Minor counsel of the Tenth Book._] Imitation of the styles just run

through, and contains some of the best advice available anywhere on that

head. The danger of imitating one style is especially dwelt upon, and

Quintilian draws nearer to Greece or England than to Rome, in the simple

observation that he has known Ciceronians think themselves quite

accomplished when they ended a sentence with _esse videatur_. _Habemus

criticum!_ Another most excellent chapter is devoted to Writing—that is

to say, to “exercises in composition,” which, under the dispensation of

Rhetoric, were much in use. We know that Cicero wrote theses at the

moment, and on the subject, of his sorest trouble. Quintilian’s advice

here again is excellent; and if it were worse, it would be saved by the

delightful story he tells of Julius Florus, a Gaulish provincial (for

literary talent was beginning to be centrifugal), who, to his nephew and

Quintilian’s friend Julius Secundus, when he was troubled about his

style, observed, “Do you want to write better than you can?” Nor should

the subsequent observations on rough copies be passed over. The rough

copy is the superstition of those who wish to write better than they

can. In some respects, and especially for the urbane, intimate,

un-Philistine common-sense of it, this is one of Quintilian’s best

chapters. He follows it up by a short one on Correction, wisely

observing that we may indulge in that too much; by another on

Translation, dedication-writing, and so forth; by yet another on

premeditation, and by a last on speaking extempore, which he says

(irrefutably from his oratorical point of view, and perhaps not much

less so from the point of general literature) is all but a _sine qua

non_. In these later chapters he is, as we may say, pursuing the art of

the critic the reverse way—that is to say, he is counselling the author

how to anticipate the critic. But it ought to be needless to add that

they are not the less important as chapters of a manual of criticism

itself.

The Eleventh book is wholly professional, dealing with the manner and

general conduct appropriate to the orator, the [Sidenote: _Books XI.,

XII.: The styles of oratory._] cultivation of the memory, delivery,

gesture, and so forth. It therefore yields us nothing, while the

beginning of the Twelfth, with its respectable paradox that a good

orator must be a good man, may not look more promising, nor the

subsequent demonstration that he ought to be acquainted with the civil

law, and with examples and precedents, that he must have firmness and

presence of mind, years of discretion, and also reasonable fees and

retainers, that he must study his brief, not lay himself out too much

for mere applause, and while preparing carefully, be ready with

impromptus and extempore speech when necessary. But when we are

beginning to get a little weary of this good-man-of-the-Stoics, called

to the bar, an abrupt turn to the style of oratory refreshes us. The

sketch of literature in the Tenth Book had been made, it is to be

remembered, from a somewhat different point of view; it had been

occupied with the authors whom an orator should read, and the qualities

which were to be discovered in them. Here the standpoint changes, and

the literary quality of what the orator himself is to produce is the

question. After a distinctly interesting parallel from painting and

sculpture, to illustrate differences of style, Quintilian takes up these

differences, in some cases repeating the descriptions of Book X., in

reference to Latin orators, and especially renewing his eulogy of Cicero

as excellent in every oratorical quality. This, however, he admits, was

by no means the universal opinion, either of Cicero’s contemporaries or

of succeeding critics. And he hits a distinct blot in too much literary

criticism by pointing out that while these earlier critics usually

censured the great Arpinate as too flowery, too Asiatic, too fond of

jests, his, Quintilian’s, [Sidenote: “_Atticism._”] own contemporaries

were apt to speak of him as dry and wanting in succulence. Next he turns

to the three famous divisions of oratorical style—Attic, Asiatic, and

Rhodian: the first chastened, energetic, correct; the second redundant

and flowery; the third a mixture of the other two. And then, with his

usual unpretending shrewdness, he proceeds to point out that although

there certainly _is_ an Attic style, and this style is far the best, yet

that there are many, nay, infinite varieties and subdivisions of it—that

Lysias is not in the least like Andocides, Isocrates different from

either, Hyperides apart from all three. And so, with perfect good sense,

he objects to the limitation of the “odour of thyme,” the Attic charm,

to those who “flow as a slender stream making its way through

pebbles”—that is to say, to those who write in a studiously correct and

elegant style, with no magniloquence or turbid rush.

More interesting still, because it is the first and by far the best

thing of the kind that we have, is the passage which follows on the

oratorical—we may excusably read the [Sidenote: _Literary quality of

Greek and Latin._] “literary”—qualities of the Latin language as

compared with the Greek. There are, it is true, phonetic difficulties

here, and probably no wise man will pretend to understand Quintilian’s

praise of the “sweetness” of the Greek _phi_, as compared with the harsh

repulsiveness of the Latin _f_ and _v_. No one but a student of

phonetics themselves (that is to say, of a science as arbitrary as the

most technical part of the Hermogenean rhetoric) can perceive any

difference between _phi_ and _f_, or the repulsiveness of the latter and

of _v_, or the extra harshness of _fr_ as in _frangit_. _Fr_, to a

modern English ear, gives a very harmonious sound indeed. He

incidentally, however, as far as _v_ is concerned, gives us a “light” by

saying that the sound of the digamma was preserved in _Servus_ and

_Cervus_, so that the Romans adopted the Wellerian form in these words;

and has a specially interesting observation (because it applies equally

to Anglo-Saxon) on the ugliness of terminations in _m_, “like the lowing

of an ox,” as opposed to the clear ringing Greek _n_. The intonation of

Latin he also thinks inferior to Greek, and still more the vocabulary.

But _sursum corda_! after all:—

“Wherefore, if any demand from Latins the grace of Attic speech, let him

give us the same sweetness of utterance, and an equal abundance of

words. If this be denied, we must match our meaning to the words we

have, nor mix a too great subtlety of matter with words too strong, not

to say too stout, for it, lest the combination lose either excellence.

The less the mere language helps us, the more we must reinforce

ourselves by invention of matter. Let us extract sublime and varied

meanings. Let us stir all the passions, and illuminate our addresses

with gleaming metaphor. We cannot be so graceful; let us be more

vigorous. We are conquered in subtlety; let us prevail in weight. _They_

are surer of propriety, let _us_ overcome by numbers. The genius of the

Greeks, even in their lesser men, has its own ports; let us spread more

ample sail and fill it with a mightier breeze. Nor let us always seek

the deep; we must sometimes follow the windings of the shore. _They_ may

slip over any shallows; let _me_ find a deeper sea in which my bark may

not sink.”

A very little farther[417] and we find Wordsworth’s paradox in the

Preface to the _Lyrical Ballads_—that there is no natural eloquence but

in the speech of ordinary folk—anticipated, stated, and very happily and

thoroughly answered, though in reference to prose, not verse; and after

this, some interesting further observations on _sententiæ_—deliberate

and ostentatious sententiousnesses.

Footnote 417:

XII. x. 40.

Later still he returns upon himself, and adopts a fresh threefold

division into ἰσχνὸν or plain; ἁδρὸν or grand; and ἀνθηρὸν or florid,

examples of each of which, with oratorical adaptations, he proceeds to

give, perorating on plain and florid style, in a manner not unworthy of

his precepts. He concludes with a sort of postscript on the necessity of

the orator’s withdrawing before his natural force is abated, and thus

leads, by a not ungraceful parable, to his own _Finis_.

It may be hoped that the above analysis, however jejune and imperfect,

of this remarkable book will at least serve as a basis for some

intelligible, if brief, remarks on its position [Sidenote: _Quintilian’s

critical ethos._] and value in the history of literary criticism. Its

_status_ as a document of this is, like that of all other ancient

documents without exception (even the Περὶ Ὕψους cannot rank as

completely exceptional), an indirect one, one of but partial relevance

to the gospel of criticism. The Law of Rhetoric was but a schoolmaster,

teaching, like all good schoolmasters, many things which had no absolute

bearing on the future life of its pupils. And it is all the more curious

that Quintilian should nevertheless give us so much that is of direct

importance, because he is not merely a literary critic at intervals, but

almost a literary critic _malgré lui_. Except in the case of Cicero,

where his professional feeling comes in, he displays no very great

enthusiasm for literature. He is never tempted, as not merely Longinus,

but even Dionysius, is, to take a particular author, book, piece, and

thoroughly analyse him and it, to grasp it, turn it lovingly inside out,

hold it up to the admiration of others, deck it with the ornament, and

adore it with the incense, of his own. His interest, though liberal, is

just a trifle utilitarian. He holds, like Scott’s counsellor, that “a

lawyer without history or literature is a mere mechanic,” and he studies

both accordingly; but his study is mainly a means to an end. He may not

be exactly insensible to the pure beauty of literature in and by itself;

but it may be suspected that, if he spoke of it freely, he would speak

in much the same tone that he uses in an odd passage[418] about working

in the country, where he thinks the beauty of tree and flower, the song

of birds, the sound of streams, likely to distract rather than to

inspire. The prose of the Roman nature, its businesslike character, its

matter-of-factness, all betray themselves a little in him.

Footnote 418:

X. iii. 22-24. It is natural to compare this with the remarks of Aper

and Maternus in the _Dialogus_.

It is therefore not wonderful that he embodies for us, in a vary

edifying fashion, that distrust of the Romantic which appears so often,

if not so constantly, in the post-Homeric classical ages, up to his own

time, though soon after it was to break down in writers like Apuleius.

We saw that if he did not absolutely dislike or despise, he ignored the

romantic element in Xenophon, that the “seizing” situation of the Ten

Thousand, leaderless though victorious, a handful isolated in the heart

of a hostile country, the moving accidents of their journey across the

mountain walls and through the warlike clans of Kurdistan, and all the

rest, till the sight of the sea, and the rush to the hill-brow to behold

it, and the shout of welcome—even though the incident be as rhetorical a

thing as history and literature contain—pass entirely unnoticed by him.

His astonishing dismissals of Lucretius (though he may have been

prejudiced by Cicero[419] there) as merely “difficult,” of Catullus as

merely “bitter,” group themselves with this very well. The grim force of

the Lucretian despair, which would so fain persuade itself to be

scientific acquiescence in contemplation from the temples of the wise,

the throb of the Catullian passion, are not his business. Indeed, what

_contio_, what _judices_, would pay any attention to the drift of the

atoms in the void? what respectable paterfamilias but must highly

deprecate verses, not merely immoral but extravagant, to Ipsithilla and

Lesbia, attempts to reproduce, in sober Latin, the Greek ravings of a

Sappho or about an Attis? Apollonius Rhodius, too, who to us seems a

Romantic before Romanticism, touches no chord in Quintilian’s breast.

And we may be tolerably certain that the chords which were not

responsive in the breast of Quintilian were at least equally mute in

other breasts of his time.

Footnote 419:

This remark is, of course, made subject to the uncertainties referred

to above (p. 214 _sq._).

But these shortcomings are not only inevitable, they are, for the

purpose of the historian, almost welcome. We may protest as lovers, but

we register and interpret as students. Moreover, Quintilian, like all

the greater men in all periods, and some even of the smaller in some,

supplies us with a great deal of matter for registration and

interpretation, without any protest at all. In the first place, we see

in him the gradual deflection or development (whichever word may be

preferred) of Rhetoric into pure Literary Criticism, assisted by the

practical disappearance of symbouleutic oratory, by the degradation of

epideictic, and by the practical Roman contempt for mere technicalities,

unless, as in the case of law, they are intimately and almost

inextricably connected with some practical end. It would be possible, as

we have seen, by a process of mere “lifting out,” with hardly any

important garbling of phrase, to extract from the _Institutions_ a

“Treatise on Composition and Critical Reading” which would be of no mean

bulk, of no narrow range, and would contain a very large proportion of

strictly relevant and valuable detail. And this treatise would be

illuminated—for practically the only time, in the range of ancient

literature on the subject, to any considerable extent—by that

searchlight of criticism, the comparative method; while it would also

display, throughout, the other illuminative powers of wide reading,

sound judgment, and an excellent and by no means merely pedestrian

common-sense.

We may regret, indeed, as we have regretted already, that these good

gifts were not turned to the business of direct literary examination of

particular books and authors, after the fashion of Dionysius; but it is

quite evident why they were not. And their actual use has resulted in

passage on passage, in chapter on chapter, of the most precious

material. Quintilian can only be despised by those who consider

themselves defrauded if critics do not attempt the _meteorosophia_ of

the highest æsthetic generalisations. It is, on the other hand, certain

that these airy flights, in this particular matter, have too often had

the ultimate Icarian fate, and have not often met even with the

temporary Icarian success. The “high priori way” has never led to any

permanent conquest in literary criticism; and it is never likely to do

so, because of the blessed infinity and incalculableness of human

genius. It has constantly led that genius into deserts and _impasses_.

Even things that look like generalisations firmly based on actual

experience have to be cautiously guarded, and put forth merely as

working hypotheses. You make, with the almost superhuman compound of

learning and reason belonging to an Aristotle, a general theory of

Poetry, and a special one of Tragedy, which require, and command, almost

universal agreement. In a few hundred years there drops in a graceless

sort of prose tale-tellers, who by establishing, slowly and uncertainly

at first, but after a couple of thousand years unmistakably, the kind of

prose fiction, sap the very foundations of your theory of poetry. Later

still arises a more graceless sort of strolling actors, ne’er-do-weel

university men in England, cavaliers or shavelings in Spain, who in the

same way bring it about that your theory of tragedy has to acknowledge

itself to be only a theory of one kind of tragedy.

The other way is the way of safety; and if it be objected that it is the

way of plodders only, one could undertake to make a very striking

company of plodders from Longinus to Mr Arnold, who, sometimes not quite

wittingly or willingly, have done all their best work in it. It would be

but re-summarising our summary to point out once more, in any fulness,

what work Quintilian has done. He has given us a history in little of

the choicest Greek and Latin literature; he has drawn and placed for us

the contrasted styles, not merely of oratorical, but of all prose

composition; he has handled the literary side of grammar with singular

fairness and sense; and has dealt more satisfactorily—to us at

least—than any other ancient writer with the all-important and most

difficult question of euphony in written speech. No one among ancient

writers has treated the important but delusive subject of the Figures

with more sense and skill; no one has contrived to get, out of some of

the merest technicalities of the Rhetoric of the Schools, such a solid

extract of critical power. The technical observations in Book X., which

for want of space we passed over rapidly, form the most invaluable

_Introduction to Composition_ to be found in any language; they put our

modern books of the kind to shame, at once by the practical character of

their suggestions, and by their freedom from mere mechanical

arbitrariness of prescription on points where idiom, good usage, and

individual ability are really the only arbiters. And lastly, on the

all-important and ever-recurring battle of the styles, Plain and Ornate,

Attic and Asiatic, or whatever antithesis be preferred, it would be

almost impossible to find a more intelligent pronouncement than

Quintilian’s.

He can therefore afford to smile at those who say that he _chancelle sur

le terrain des principes_,[420] and to reply that _terrain_ is exactly

the word which does not apply to the principles with which he is

reproached for not dealing. The only reproach to which he _is_ perhaps

open is one which all antiquity, from Aristotle to Longinus, and

including both these great men, shares with him. This is the reproach of

never completely clearing up the mind about Rhetoric, and of perpetually

confusing it with the Art of Prose Literature, or else leaving prose

literature without any “art” at all. We have seen, long ago, how this

confusion arose, and how it was maintained by conditions which, though

working more feebly in Quintilian’s days, were still working. The matter

came to a head (though, oddly enough, the person chiefly concerned seems

not quite to have understood it) when Lucian formally renounced Rhetoric

and took to essay-writing in dialogue, when Apuleius in the _Golden Ass_

mingled declamation, dialogue, philosophy, and romance in one _olla

podrida_, with a daring sauce of new prose style to make it go down. But

the barbarians were then at the gates; and the real recognition and

reconstruction was not to take place for ages later, if it has

completely taken place even yet.

Footnote 420:

Théry, _op. cit._, i. 207. I venture to think that Mr Nettleship also

is not quite just to Quintilian.

CHAPTER IV.

LATER WRITERS.

AULUS GELLIUS: THE ‘NOCTES ATTICÆ’—MACROBIUS: THE ‘SATURNALIA’—SERVIUS

ON VIRGIL—OTHER COMMENTATORS—AUSONIUS—THE ‘ANTHOLOGIA LATINA’—THE

LATIN RHETORICIANS—RUTILIUS LUPUS, ETC.—CURIUS FORTUNATIANUS, HIS

CATECHISM—MARIUS VICTORINUS ON CICERO—OTHERS—MARTIANUS CAPELLA.

The period from Nero to Hadrian is not merely the central and most

important period of Latin criticism, but it contains a proportion

altogether disproportionate of the bulk as of the value of Latin

contributions to the subject. We must, however, complete our view of

that subject, before summing up its general characteristics, with

another chapter surveying the yield of the second, third, and

fourth—perhaps, in view of the uncertainty of date of Martianus, we

should add the fifth—centuries. The crop, if not very abundant, or of

the very greatest value, is neither very scanty nor very uninteresting.

It shall consist, in the specimens of it which we can afford to examine,

first of the two famous and by no means unamusing miscellanists, the

authors of the _Noctes Atticæ_ and the _Saturnalia_; then, by an easy

transition, of the commentators and scholiasts represented by their

prior Servius, himself an interlocutor in the Macrobian symposium; in

the third place, of a poetical contingent, much less important indeed

than that furnished by the satirists from Horace to Martial, but not

quite insignificant; and lastly, of the technical rhetoricians, ending

with one of their latest representatives, but perhaps the most

interesting of all, Martianus Capella. The chapter will thus, at least,

not lack variety.

It would be difficult to have a better example of the indisposition of

the Latin mind towards literary criticism proper, [Sidenote: _Aulus

Gellius: the_ Noctes Atticæ.] than that which is afforded by the famous

_Noctes Atticæ_ of Aulus Gellius.[421] We know nothing of this good

person except that he was probably of more or less pure Roman descent,

that he probably lived for the most part of his life at Rome and at

Athens in the early second century, that he was a friend of Herodes

Atticus, probably knew Plutarch, and was extremely intimate with, and a

great admirer of, the rhetorician Favorinus. The well-known miscellany

which he has left us, and which, in purporting to give the results of

study or conversation in an Attic country-house, has been for seventeen

hundred years so fruitful in imitations—mother, indeed, of a family

sometimes a great deal fairer than herself—is an amusing book and a

valuable, because it preserves for us a great number of quotations from

lost authors or books, because its farrago of matter is good pastime,

and not least because of a certain Pepysian or Boswellian quality in its

author. But though, amid its jumble of things ethical, physical,

logical, legal, and, above all, philological, perhaps the larger part is

occupied with literature or at least with books, it is quite astonishing

how small is the proportion that can be called literary criticism, and

how rudimentary and infantine even that small proportion is. Gellius had

nearly all the qualities and acquirements of the dictionary-maker; he

was interested in etymology, was a most exact and careful purist in the

definition and usage of words, and evidently prided himself on his

collections of illustrative phrases and passages.[422] But almost

invariably it must be said of him that _hæret in litera_, or, if he

escapes that adhesion, that he gives himself over to the substance and

meaning, not to the literary form and art, of what he quotes and

studies. In all the nineteen or twenty books of his work there are

probably not nineteen or twenty pages of real literary criticism; and

where he does give us any it is of the “strawiest” character. Take, for

instance, his comparison (ii. 23) of the Greek and Latin comic writers,

and especially of some passages of Cæcilius with their originals in

Menander. In preferring the Greek he is, of course, quite right; but it

is noteworthy that he can hardly render any specific reason for his

preference. He says, vaguely if truly, that the Latins seem low and

sordid beside the wit and brilliancy of the Greeks, that Cæcilius

appears stupid and frigid by Menander. But as to detail he prudently

adds, _nihil dicam ego quantum differat_; and, less prudently

transgressing this rule later, confines himself wholly to the matter,

accusing the Roman of leaving out a _simplex et verum et delectabile_

remark of the Greek. And if he comes a little nearer in praising (or

making his favourite Favorinus praise) the _flavum marmor_ of Ennius, it

is still pretty clear that he does this merely or mainly from the side

of the dictionary-maker, pleased at getting a light on the exact meaning

of _flavus_. Although to our ears his preference (vi. 20) of “Ora” to

“Nola” (in the passage which Virgil is said to have altered from a

rather petty spite to the Nolans), “because it makes a sweet hiatus”

with _Vesevo_ at the end of the preceding line, may seem all wrong, the

principle is æsthetic if the application is not. But, as a rule, we

shall find that his critical opinions, where they are not concerned with

purely verbal matters, are always decided by moral, philosophical, or in

some other way extra-literary considerations. Even in an extremely

interesting passage towards the end (xix. 9) where he makes _Græci

plusculi_ attack the Spanish-Latin rhetor Antonius Julianus[423] on the

score of the inferiority of Roman to Greek erotic poets, and gives the

passages with which Julianus retorted, the chief interest for us is that

even the Greeks except Catullus to some extent, and Calvus, from their

censure. For there is little or nothing but logomachy to be got out of

the condemnation of Hortensius as _invenustus_ and Cinna as _illepidus_.

Footnote 421:

Ed. Hertz, 2 vols., Leipsic, 1886.

Footnote 422:

Cf. the amusing chapter (vi. 17) in which he tells with innocent pride

how he overwhelmed _quempiam græculum_ with apt citations on the word

_obnoxius_. Gellius is not the only critic who has allowed parallel

passages to choke his critical faculties, or has endeavoured to make

up by the former for the absence of the latter.

Footnote 423:

This Antonius Julianus, from another notice (xx. 9), seems to have

been a person of slightly florid but by no means bad taste. For

Gellius tells us that he used to say his ears were delighted and

caressed by the coined words in the first mimiambic of C. Matius,[a]

such as _Columbulatim_, which is certainly not a little charming and

very Caroline. After all, the famous advice to regard and avoid an

unusual word, _tanquam scopulum_ (which, by the way, Gellius gives

us), is fatal to poetry.

Footnote a:

The fragments of this author may be found either in the sixth volume

of Baehrens’s _Poetæ Latini Minores_, or in the appendix to Otto

Crusius’s edition of Herondas (Leipsic, 1898). He has another word

which Herrick might have Englished, _albicascit_.

This same imputation of logomachy is hard to clear from the dispute in

x. 3, whether, though Caius Gracchus is undoubtedly _fortis et

vehemens_, it is or is not intolerable that he should be deemed

_severior_, _amplior_, _acrior_, than Cicero. If Gellius had kept to the

same words, and had said _fortior_ and _vehementior_, the observation

just made might seem unkind; but as it is, one seems to be dropping into

the well-known jargon of our own times, and of all times, to be hearing

one reviewer asserting that Johnson is “alert” and another replying that

Thompson is “nimble,” or opposing the “poignancy” of Smith to the

“swiftness” of Brown. But the attention to words certainly comes in

better when the critic objects to the use, in an otherwise _non sane

incommode_ adapted version from Euripides by Ennius, of _ignobiles_ and

_opulenti_ for ἀδοξοῦντες and δοκοῦντες. XII. 2, however, is a good

_locus_ for us in more ways than one. It opens with a sketch of the

difference of opinion about Seneca in the age succeeding his own, a

difference of which Quintilian had, a little earlier, given us an

inkling. “Some,” says Gellius, “think of him as of a most unprofitable

writer, one not worth reading, because they hold his style vulgar and

hackneyed, his matter and opinions distinguished either by inept and

empty haste (_impetu_) or by frivolous and Old-Bailey (_causidicali_)

wire-drawing, his erudition vernacular and plebeian, and possessing

nothing either of the dignity or the grace of the classics. Others,

while not denying that he has little grace of phrase, maintain that his

matter lacks neither information nor teaching power, and that he has no

unhappy gravity and severity in castigating vice.” He himself will give

no general censure, but consider Seneca’s opinion of Cicero and Ennius

and Virgil. This “consideration,” according to his wont, is rather a

string of quotations with objurgatory epithets than a regular criticism.

One may not agree with Seneca or one may (there are certainly some who

would indorse his confession and avoidance of Cicero’s faults in the

words _non ejus sed temporis vitium_). But the words which Gellius

himself uses—_insulsissime, homo nugator, inepti et insubidi[424]

hominis joca_—surely require some little argument to justify them, and

this argument is what Gellius never gives. We may thank him, however,

for the criticism as well as for the anecdote preserved (xiii. 2) in the

story of the meeting of the tragic poets Pacuvius and Accius at

Tarentum, in the extreme old age of the former. Pacuvius had asked his

young guest and craftsfellow to read his tragedy of _Atreus_, and, after

the reading, praised it as sonorous and grand, but perhaps a little

harsh and austere. “It is so,” said the junior, “but I am not very

sorry, for I hope to improve. It is the same in wits as in fruits: the

hard and harsh mellow and sweeten, but those that are at first flabby,

and soft, and moist, do not ripen but rot. I thought it best to have

something in my genius for time and age to mitigate.” A sound principle,

though not quite a universal one, as one may see in studying a certain

life-work which ranges from “Claribel” to “Crossing the Bar.”

Footnote 424:

A Gellian synonym or variant for _ineptus_, not found in Augustan

Latin.

He is in his more meticulous moods when (xiii. 18) he accuses Plato of

misquotation and Euripides of plagiarism; but a couple of chapters later

a set discourse on euphony, starting from a saying of Valerius Probus,

seems to promise well. Some one had asked Probus whether it was better

to use the terminations _em_ or _im_, _es_ or _is_, for the accusative,

where both occur. _Aurem tuam interroga_, said Probus, which is no doubt

the conclusion of the whole matter. But his questioner, either foolish

or dogged, asked how he was to do this, and Probus replied, “As Virgil

did when he wrote _Urbisne invisere Cæsar_ but _Urbes habitant magnas_.”

Nor are we sorry to hear that when the questioner still bored on, saying

that he could not understand why one should be better in one place and

another in another, Probus retorted, “_You_ need not trouble yourself;

it will do _you_ no harm whatever you use.” _Prope inclementer_, says

Gellius (“Served him right,” most of us will say). But he goes on to

accumulate some other instances of this application of the rule of

euphony, and perhaps here draws as near to true criticism as he ever

does. Nor is he wrong, though he may be fanciful, in deciding in regard

to certain almost literal Virgilian imitations of Homer, that the Greek

is _simplicior et sincerior_, Virgil νεωτερικώτερος _et quodam quasi

ferrumine immisso fucatior_.[425]

He may strain the word again too much, when he bestows a page on the

difference of _multis hominibus_ and _multis mortalibus_ (xii. 28), but

he recovers esteem when in xiv. 6 we find him rejecting, not without

contumely, contributions to his _Noctes_ on the questions “Who was the

first grammarian?” and “Why Telemachus did not nudge his bedfellow

Pisistratus but kicked him?” &c., &c. _Properans reddidi_, says he, with

the shudder one can fancy, though, to tell the truth, he does himself

“something grow to” this kind of disease.

Footnote 425:

“Hobbledehoyish, and got up with inserted expletives.” _Ferrumen_, a

post-classical word, is almost exactly the French _cheville_.

We may close this anthology of the Gellian criticisms with some account

of one of the most elaborate—a discourse of Favorinus on Pindar and

Virgil.[426] After quoting the Roman poet’s traditional saying about

himself—that he brought forth his verses as a bear does her cubs,

licking them slowly and busily into shape—he points out that the facts

exactly bear out the description, and that certain verses, not having

undergone the process of licking, are very inferior to the others. Among

these unlicked cubs, it seems, Favorinus would place the Etna passage.

Even Pindar himself, whom Virgil followed, is, the critic thinks, _ipso

insolentior tumidiorque_ in the place; but Virgil’s verse is such that

Favorinus calls it “begun, not made.” And, the two passages having been

cited in full, he indulges in the following drastic verbal censure: “At

the very beginning, Pindar, paying more attention to the truth, said

what was the fact, and a matter of ocular demonstration, that Etna

smoked by day and flamed by night. But Virgil, laboriously seeking

noisy-sounding words, confuses the two. The Greek says plainly that

fountains of fire are belched forth, and rivers of smoke flow, and

yellow, curling volumes of flame are borne down to the shores of the sea

like fiery snakes; but this fellow of ours, choosing to interpret ῥόον

καπνοῦ αἴθωνα by _atram nubem turbine piceo et favilla fumantem_, makes

a crass and clumsy mixture, and translates the κρουνοὺς of flames, both

harshly and inexactly, into ‘globes.’ Again, when he talks of ‘licking

the stars,’ he makes an idle and empty exaggeration. Nay, the phrase,

‘emitting a black cloud of smoke full of pitchy whirlwinds and glowing

ashes,’ is bad style and almost nonsense.[427] For glowing things, quoth

he, neither smoke nor are black; unless by an improper vulgarism he

applies _candente_, not to glowing but to merely ‘hot’ ash. But when he

talks of ‘rocks and cliffs being belched and flung up,’ adding

immediately that they are ‘melted, and groan, and are flung in handfuls

into the air,’ neither did Pindar write this, nor would anybody else

think of saying it, and the thing is the most monstrous of all

monstrosities.”

Footnote 426:

xvii. 10.

Footnote 427:

_Inenarrabile et propemodum insensibile._

The classical hatred of bombast and the classical propensity to “stick

at the word” in criticism are both very well illustrated here; but we

should hardly guess, from the sample, that there existed in classical

times much power of grasping the literary and poetical merit of a

passage as a whole. Virgil, if he had cared to defend himself, would, no

doubt, have called attention to the Pindaric words, τέρας and θαῦμα, as

justifying even “monstrosity” in his own expanded description, and have

urged that this description was at least partly intended to indicate the

terror and confusion of mind caused by so portentous a phenomenon.

But this absence of the synoptic grasp of æsthetic means, as applied to

produce literary effect, is precisely what we notice most in the ancient

criticism which has come down to us. And it may be added that it is also

precisely what we should expect to follow from the limitations of the

ancient Rhetoric. Grammar provided rules for the arrangement of words,

and lexicography provided lists of them, with their authority and their

use carefully ticketed; so here criticism was at home. Rhetoric provided

lists of Figures with which a man could compare the passage before him.

But there was no training in the process of simply “submitting to” this

passage, interrogating oneself whether it exercised a charm or not, and

then interrogating oneself further whether that charm was genuine, and

what was its cause. After all, Gellius has, as we have seen, sometimes

come near to the discovery of the true method, and that he loved

literature there can be no doubt.[428]

Footnote 428:

It may perhaps seem to those who know him well that he might have been

allowed more space here; and certainly he gives plentiful material.

But the individual importance of his items hardly requires more than

representative treatment.

Nor, much later, shall we find things different with that favourite of

the Middle Ages and of Dr Johnson’s youth, [Sidenote: _Macrobius: The_

Saturnalia.] Macrobius,[429] who, about the beginning of the fifth

century, undertook a pendant to the work of Gellius. It is not

surprising that the author, _qui ot nom Macrobes_,[430] should have been

a favourite (for his commentary on the _Somnium Scipionis_ principally,

no doubt) with the period between Darkness and Renaissance. He has

precisely the “fine confused feeding” in the way of matter and manner

that these ages loved; and they would not be likely to quarrel with him

for his lack of the criticism which, as we shall see, they themselves

hardly, in more than a single instance, relished or understood. But he

certainly illustrates, even in a greater degree than Gellius, the small

propulsion of the Romans and their vassals towards the proper subjects

of this book. Once more we find that etymology, mythology, grammar, the

_farrago_ of the antiquary as distinguished from that of the literary

enthusiast, of the philologist as opposed to the critic, receive ample

attention. And, once more, what we are specially in quest of remains

practically, if not entirely, unhandled.

Footnote 429:

Ed. Eyssenhardt, Leipsic, 1883.

Footnote 430:

_Roman de la Rose_, l. 7.

There are few more striking _loci_ in connection with this subject than

the end of the first book of the _Saturnalia_. The guests have been

talking mythology and etymology for some stricken hours, till at last a

break occurs. Vettius Prætextatus, the host, has just ended a long

mythological dissertation, to the admiration of everybody, when

Euangelus (the irreverent humourist of the party) breaks in, with some

amusement at the practice of citing Virgil as an authority. He supposes

that the notion of making Latin poets into philosophers is an imitation

of the Greeks, and hints that the process is dangerous, since even Tully

himself, who was as formal a professor of philosophising as of oratory,

so often as he talks of the nature of the gods, or of fate, or of

divination, injures the glory which he has got together through his

eloquence, by his desultory handling of things. Symmachus, the

scholar-statesman, rebukes this blasphemer gravely, observing that, as

for Cicero, he is _conviciis impenetrabilis_, and may be left aside for

the moment, but that he fears Euangelus has learnt his Virgil only as

boys do, and thinks him only good for boys, with nothing higher in him.

Euangelus is by no means abashed, and takes the offensive. It was all

very well, he says, for us as boys to take Virgil at our master’s

valuation, but did not he himself pronounce himself far from faultless,

inasmuch as he wished them to burn the _Æneid_? No doubt he was afraid,

not merely of ethical blame for such scenes as the request of Venus to

her lawful husband in favour of her illegitimate son, but of critical

blame for his now Greek, now barbarous, diction, and for the awkward

_ordonnance_ of his work. To this, _cum omnes exhorruissent_, Symmachus,

still calm and sententious, makes answer by putting Virgil beside

Cicero, and saying of his glory, that as it can grow by no one’s praise,

so it is diminished by no one’s abuse. Any grammarian, he continues, can

refute these calumnies; and it would be a shame to ask Servius (the

famous Virgilian scholiast, who is present) to take the trouble. But he

should like to know whether, as Euangelus is dissatisfied with Virgil’s

Poetic, he likes his Rhetoric better. “Oh!” says Euangelus, “you have

made him a philosopher, and now you are going to make him an orator, are

you?”

A conversation of this kind gives us no bad reason to expect something

like literary criticism proper, something such as Coleridge has given us

in the _Biographia Literaria_ in reference to Wordsworth. But Symmachus

for the time contents himself with undertaking to defend the Mantuan’s

rhetoric, while the others overwhelm the impenitent Euangelus with a

string of affirmations as to the poet’s proficiency in politics, law,

augury, astrological and other philosophy, fidelity to the traditions of

the Latin language, &c. But the justifications of these praises are

deferred by the announcement of dinner, and for a time the conversation

turns to lighter subjects—the famous string of stories for which

Macrobius is most commonly quoted, including scandal about Princess

Julia. Only in the third book, and then, it would seem, after a lacuna,

is the detailed criticism of Virgil resumed.

There is no occasion to find fault with the quantity of it, for it

fills, with a digression or two of the lighter kind, such as that on the

dessert when it appears, four whole books, and some two hundred and

forty pages in Eyssenhardt’s text. But the quality is, at any rate from

our point of view, not quite so satisfactory. Much simply consists in

citation of passages illustrating different “Figures.” A very large

part, probably the largest, is mere and sheer quotation from Virgil

himself, from Homer, and from other poets, Latin and Greek, with whom he

is compared. And the comparison is carried on almost, if not quite

entirely, on that most unsatisfying parallel-passage system which, in

its abuse, has ever since been the delight of the pedantic

criticaster—and the abomination of the true critic.

Of course the parallel passage, rightly handled, is invaluable—is

practically indispensable to true literary criticism. The “Truth”

passages of the _Areopagitica_ and Halifax’s _Character of a Trimmer_,

the “Death” passages of Raleigh, Marston, and Lee, the different

harmonies which the motive “Ask me no more” has suggested to Carew and

Tennyson, the accounts of the passing of Arthur or the parting of

Lancelot and Guinevere in Malory, and in his probable verse original,

are the constant, the inexhaustible, texts and exercises of the critical

faculty. But I do not think it unfair to Macrobius to say that hardly in

a single occasion does he make any such use of his parallels. And in

literary criticism, properly so called, such parallels as

οὐδέ τις ἄλλη

φαίνετο γαιάων ἀλλ’ οὐρανὸς ἠδε θάλασσα,

and

“Nec jam amplius ulla

apparet tellus, cælum undique et undique pontus,”

are all but valueless. They merely show what might be demonstrated once

for all in a page—what does not need demonstrating to any intelligent

person who has read fifty lines of the two poets—that Virgil was an

excellent translator, and was, rather more frequently than becomes a

great poet, content simply to translate.

The rest of the matter lies, for the most part if not wholly, as much as

this or more in the uttermost precincts of literary criticism proper.

The illustrations of Virgil’s attention to that religious ritual and

liturgical language which was so important at Rome are very curious,

very interesting, very valuable but they scarcely touch the fringe of

literature: a Roman Blackmore could be as prolific of them as the Roman

Dryden.

The contents of Book IV. may, perhaps, be urged against me; and I shall

confess that they come nearer to a certain conception of literary

criticism. But I should reply that this conception itself is an argument

on the side I am taking. One of the gaps, common at the opening of the

books of the _Saturnalia_, plunges us into the midst of a demonstration

of Virgil’s pathos, that word being sometimes used in the Greek plural

_pathe_, and referring to the Rhetorical “passions” appealed to. We

find, however, almost directly, that the citations are only applied to

illustrate and enforce Virgil’s technical command of rhetoric, as

Symmachus had foreshadowed. The parts are accordingly dealt out in the

orthodox way between accuser and defendant, and the passages quoted are

distributed once more under figures—Irony, Hyperbole, and the rest.

This, of course, is literary criticism after a fashion, though a fashion

which Quintilian had already treated with some disdain (abandoning it

almost entirely in the best parts of his own critical work), and which

Longinus, though he too was not quite bold enough to discard it

entirely, avoids, either cunningly or instinctively, in all his best

passages. Macrobius and his distinguished company seem to wish for

nothing better, and after they have complacently ticked off the sorts

and sources of the pathos—time, place, circumstance, age, mood, manner,

and so forth—they decide triumphantly, at the beginning of the Fifth

Book, that Virgil must be held no less of an orator than of a poet.

Indeed, Eusebius, who has conducted the rhetorical inquiry, draws a neat

parallel between Virgil and Cicero himself. The eloquence, he says, of

the Mantuan is multiplex and multiform, and comprehends every kind of

speech. In your Cicero [Eusebius of course is a Greek] there is one

tenor of eloquence, the abundant, and torrential, and copious. For the

nature of orators is not uniform, but one flows and overflows, another

affects a brief and concise manner. The thin and dry and sober speaker

loves, as it were, a parsimony of words, his rival revels in full and

florid and amply illustrated rhetoric. Virgil is the only man who, while

others are so dissimilar, blends his own eloquence of every kind. And he

subsequently distributes these kinds more specially to Cicero, Sallust,

Fronto, and the younger Pliny. The passage which follows, for three or

four pages, till the scoffer Euangelus brings on the Homeric parallels

by asking whether they think a Venetian farmer’s boy is likely to have

known Greek literature, is one of the most literary in the book. But it

is (as a devil’s advocate must point out) curious and a little

unfortunate that once more we find the subject drawn, as it were,

irresistibly to the oratorical side. In no other branch of literature,

it seems, could a Roman or a late Greek (which Macrobius probably was)

taste the _minutiæ_ of difference, the savours and qualities which

concern criticism proper. Elsewhere he “stuck in letters,” or in

Figures, or in the merest schematic construction of prosody, or in the

matter, as opposed to the form and spirit, of the literature.

Another piece of criticism, proper if not consummate, will be found in

the seventeenth chapter of the Fifth Book, in the shape of a fresh

comparison, to be itself compared with that cited above from Gellius,

between Pindar’s Ætna, in the First Pythian and Virgil’s in the third

_Æneid_. It is an even weaker piece. For the critic, a Greek, cavils at

Virgil quite in the Rymer-and-Dennis style, not merely because he speaks

of an _atram nubem_ as _fumantem candente favilla_, but (exactly as if

he were an eighteenth-century French critic speaking of Shakespeare)

because the poet actually indulges in such shocking words as _eructans_.

The Sixth Book deals with Virgil’s borrowing of diction and phrase from

the older Latin poets, and has, of course, great linguistic, and a

certain portion of literary, interest. But it is again remarkable how

little this latter is improved or worked out. As in the Homeric case,

the literary interest of the fact that Virgil was content simply to

“lift” Ennian phrases, like _stellis fulgentibus_ or _tollitur in cælum

clamor_, is limited to the demonstration that Virgil “stole his brooms

ready made,” as the Berkshire broom-squire did. And no attempt is made

(as might easily have been done, and in fairness to Virgil should have

been done) to show the taste with which the poet selected beautiful

words and happy phrases. Servius, later in the book, has some not

uninteresting verbal criticism, but attempts nothing more. In fact, in

all this bulk of work there is not as much literary criticism in the

proper sense as Longinus has often given us in a paragraph, and hardly

an attempt at even that general characterisation which we find sometimes

in Gellius and still more in Quintilian. The place and power of Virgil

remain untouched, or are referred to only in the vaguest

conventionalisms.

[Sidenote: _Servius on Virgil._]

One of the contributors, as has been said, to the Macrobian symposium is

no less a person than Maurus (or Marius) Servius Honoratus, the greatest

commentator on the greatest Latin poet in general repute, and obviously,

from the figure he makes in the _Saturnalia_, a man held in very high

esteem for erudition and ability. We have his commentary,[431] together

with those of other ancient commentators of less repute. They are

extremely voluminous;[432] they are, and always have been, justly

respected for their value in the interpretation of the poet. Servius had

before him, and undoubtedly used, a very large bulk of precedent

annotation, and represents, almost fully, the “Variorum” editor of

modern times. We might therefore expect to find in him, if not something

like the proceedings and results of Mr Furness in his _Shakespeare_, at

any rate something like those of the Johnson-Malone time. Let us see

what we actually do find. He gives us, at the very first, a definition

of the duties of a critical editor, in which, on the face of it, there

is very little to blame. The life of the poet; the titles of his work;

the quality of the poem; the intention of the writer; the number of the

books, the order of them, the explanation of them. Looking at this

off-hand, one may wonder a little at the elevation to co-ordinate

honours of the number and order of the books, and of course perceive

that _qualitas carminis_, the critical point, is susceptible of rather

widely differing interpretations as a promise. In the vague modern sense

of “quality”—a sense, too, not absolutely unknown in ancient times—it

covers by itself almost all that the most accomplished and wide-ranging

criticism—the criticism of Coleridge or of Arnold, of Hazlitt or of

Sainte-Beuve—can extend unto. In the narrow technical sense of the Greek

ποιότης, it comes to very little more than the mere technical

classification of the piece as epic or what not, and offers us food as

little sappy with critical juice as the most arid distinctions of

Rhetoric.

Footnote 431:

Ed. Lion, 2 vols., Göttingen, 1826.

Footnote 432:

The edition just quoted contains, without its indices, all but 1000

pages of very close and small print.

But we have barely turned a page when the sense in which Servius

understands the comparative extent of the duties he has so lucidly

mapped out breaks upon us. The “life,” brief and business-like, leaves

no special room for complaint except to anecdote-mongers. But all the

rest, except the “explanation,” is huddled up in less than a page, and

in forms as succinct as the answers to a catechism. Title? “Æneis,”

derived from Æneas, cf. Juvenal’s “Theseis.” Quality? Quite clear: the

metre is heroic, the action “mixed” (_i.e._, the poet sometimes speaks

himself, sometimes introduces others speaking). It is also Heroic,

because it contains a mixture of divine and human things, of truth and

fiction. For Æneas really did come to Italy, but clearly the poet made

it up[433] when he represented Venus speaking to Jupiter, or the mission

of Mercury. The style is grandiloquent—that is to say, the phrase is

lofty and the sentiments noble. Besides, are there not three kinds of

speaking, the low, the middle, the grand? This is the grand style.

Virgil intended first to imitate Homer, then to magnify the ancestry of

Augustus (proofs of this latter given). Here there is no dispute about

the number of the author’s books, though in other cases (such as that of

Plautus) there is. And there is not much doubt about the order, though a

mere crotcheteer might put them in the order 2, 3, 1, in his ignorance

that the art of the poet consists in beginning at the middle and

anticipating the future (see Horace). This shows that Virgil was a

skilful bard. That is all. _Sola superest explanatio quæ in sequenti

expositione probabitur._

Footnote 433:

_Constat esse compositum._

_Sola superest explanatio!_ All, except the mere verbal part, is swept

aside, as settled and done for, in these thirty or forty lines. Of the

_quality_, in the fuller and higher sense, of the Virgilian art nothing;

nothing of its comparative value even with that of Homer himself, still

less of other Greeks, or with that of Ennius, of Lucretius, of Statius,

of the scores of Roman epic or “heroic” poets whom and whose books

Servius had before him, while their names only are before us. Nothing of

his way of managing his metre, his diction, his prosopopœia, his

scenery, his dialogue. And in the settlement of the questions that are

attacked, the most schoolboy-like abstinence from anything but reference

to stock authorities, stock classifications. Nothing, for instance, one

would think, would be easier and more attractive, for a man who thinks

that Virgil’s is the grand style, than to prove it to be so, nothing

more curious and fascinating than to reply to the objections of those

who think it is not, if there be such heretics (and, as we know from the

Euangelus of the _Saturnalia_, there were such, even in those days). But

no glimpse or glimmer of any such thing enters the mind of our

scholiast. There are, everybody allows, three styles: Low, Middle, and

Grand. Nobody calls Virgil low; you surely would not call him middle;

therefore he must be grand. Q.E.D.; and demonstrated it is most

mathematically. Then what kind of poem is it? You run your finger down

the official list of kinds and find “Heroic; written in hexameters and

dealing with mixed kinds.” Virgil is in hexameters, but _is_ he mixed?

Let us run the careful finger down yet another table, “Mixed: that which

is partly divine and partly human, partly false, partly true.” Let us

see whether this will apply to Virgil. It does. Then Virgil is Heroic.

Next, about order and so forth. Ought not Books II. and III., which tell

the voyage of Æneas up to the events recorded in the opening of Book I.,

to come before it? This gives a moment’s pause, but let us look at our

Horace—_Ut jam nunc dicat_, and so forth. Once more, we need not trouble

ourselves: the order is all right.

To some readers this account may savour of flippancy; and to them it is

impossible to offer any excuse. To others, who may not be likely to take

the trouble to read Servius for themselves, it will be enough to say

that practically nothing is put in his mouth which he does not say, that

his method is hardly caricatured even in form. It is one of the best

illustrations we have, or could reasonably expect to have, of the whole

system of ancient criticism, save in its very greatest examples, and to

some extent even in these. You construct, or accept from tradition as

already constructed, a vast classification of terms and kinds,

hierarchically arranged; and when a subject presents itself you simply

refer it to the classification. Practically no intellectual labour is

required, and still less—a mere minus quantity indeed—of cultivation of

the æsthetic sentiment. The necessary cards, with the necessary

descriptions on them, are in cell B or A, compartment _x_ or _y_, case 3

or 5, room I. or VI. You take them out and you tie them on, and there’s

an end of the matter. Nay, some fifteen hundred years after Servius,

there are other authorities who conduct criticism—and are indignant when

it is not conducted—in the very self-same way.

But, it may be said, _superest explanatio_; the explanation does remain,

and there may be much in that. In point of bulk there is very much; in

point of value there is a great deal; but in point of strict criticism

there is simply nothing, though the same reference to card, and cell,

and compartment, and case abounds, as thus:—

_Arma virumque._ _Arma_ means “war”: it is the trope called Metonymy. So

_toga_, for “peace,” see Cic. As for _Arma virumque_, it is another

figure—that by which we change the order: some call it Hyperbaton. The

whole phrase is a professive poetic beginning; _Musa_, &c., an

invocative, and _urbs antiqua_ a narrative. As for _virum_, he does not

mention the name, but indicates the person circumstantially. And now, as

Thackeray says somewhere, “we know all about it, and can proceed” to

write the exordium of an Æneid.

Far, very far, be it from me to speak with any ignorant or vulgar

contempt of Servius. His erudition is very great; his verbal expositions

are almost always very sound and grammatical; but for him we should lack

a whole world of traditional information, without which the meaning of

Virgil would either be entirely dark to us, or attainable only by the

rashest of guesswork. And it must be admitted that according to the

“figure” system of criticising he is, as the Roman orators say,

_accuratissimus_. When Virgil, as he so often does, borrows a phrase

from Ennius with a slight alteration, Servius points out that it is an

_acyrologia_, and no doubt feels much comforted by the fact. Something

else is an _amblysia_ (a “blunting,” lessening, _litotes_). There are

derivations, anticipating the modern philologist, of the most scientific

kind, as that of _consilia_ for _considia_, because people’s minds

become quieter when they sit down. There is, indeed, a very great deal

of miscellaneous information of all kinds.

But of criticism nothing, or less than nothing. Occasionally, at the

beginning of the books, it does seem to occur to the excellent

commentator that something more may be expected of him. Especially, and

indeed most naturally, is this the case with the Fourth. He tells us,

quite properly, that Apollonius had written an _Argonautica_, and that

the whole book is borrowed from it.[434] It is; a fact of which those

persons who (having better knowledge than Dante had) still take Virgil

for a supreme poet might perhaps take more notice than they have usually

taken. But to Servius, and persons of Servius’ way of thinking, there

would not have been much in this. He goes on. It is almost entirely in

affection, though it has pathos in the end, where the departure of Æneas

begets sorrow. It consists entirely in counsels and subtleties. The

style is very nearly comic—which is not surprising, considering that it

treats of love. But there is a proper junction with the former book,

which is a proof of art, as we have often said. An abrupt transition is

a bad transition, though some people foolishly say that this junction is

not well managed, &c., &c.

Footnote 434:

The enthusiastic Maronite usually

One may be, I hope without affectation, a little aghast at this. urges

that not the whole is conveyed, and that Virgil combines his

conveyances. Let it be so.

Grant that Virgil shows his want of originality by his relying on

Apollonius. Grant that in the delineation of Dido’s tragic “All for Love

and the World well Lost” for such a tame scoundrel as Æneas, he has none

of the lightning strokes of Lucretius or Catullus. Yet most of us think

that the Fourth book is a great thing, some that it is a much greater

thing than the _Æneid_ of which it forms part. Servius might think, was

entitled to think, and has the consent of many respectable moderns in

thinking, differently. But it does not appear that he thought about it

at all. He found in his books a distinction between “affection” and

“pathos,” and applied it. He had learnt from the same books that Love

was an inferior subject, Comedy an inferior style, and the former a

proper theme of the latter. So the Fourth book, with its steady rise

towards the hopeless, the hapless, the inevitable end, is _pæne

comicus_. Certainly the criticism is, from our point of view.

But the very value of Servius, as of so many other writers, is precisely

this, that he is _not_ writing from our point of view, that he is

writing from a point of view entirely different. When he annotates _Est

in secessu_ “_Topothesia_ est—_i.e._, fictus secundum poeticam licentiam

locus.... Nam _topographia_ est rei veræ descriptio,” it may be

difficult to repress a smile. So also when he points out, in respect to

one of Anna’s speeches to Dido, not that it is touching, or eloquent, or

indicative of a wonderful knowledge of the human heart, and an equally

wonderful grasp of pathetic expression, but that it is regular

Rhetoric—_suasione omni parte plena; nam purgat objecta, et ostendit

utilitatem, et a timore persuadet_. But, after all, he is only playing

his own game, not ours. It is impossible, or at any rate very difficult,

to be sure whether it is in innocent unconsciousness or dry humour that

he quotes, without comment, the objection to the phrase _nepos Veneris_

that it is unbecoming to represent Venus as a grandmother. Again, in one

of his short prefaces to the Seventh book—at the point when, to modern

readers, the interest of the _Æneid_ is all but over, and the romantic

wanderings of Æneas, the passion of the Fourth book, the majesty and

magnificence of the Sixth, are exchanged for the kite-and-crow battles

of Trojans and Rutulians, the doll-like figure of Lavinia, and the

unjust fate of the hero Turnus at the hands of a divinely helped

invader—he tells us that the earlier books have been like the _Odyssey_

(as indeed they are), not because of the romantic interest, which of

course he did not see, but as being _graviores varietate personarum et

allocutionum_, while the last books are like the _Iliad_, as being

_negotiis validiores_!

So, again, the relatively long preface to the _Bucolics_ tells us that

the word comes from the Greek for oxen, which are the principal rustical

animals; that these poems were invented in the time of Xerxes, when the

Laconians (one does not quite see why, as Xerxes never landed in the

Peloponnese) were kept to their walls or the mountains; that the

_qualitas_ is a _humilis character_, thus, with the _medius_ of the

_Georgics_, vindicating all the three styles for Virgil. For we must not

require lofty speaking from humble rustics. He then gives us a curious

specimen of the critical punctiliousness in matters of mint, anise, and

cumin which accompanied blindness to weightier things. In bucolic verse

there ought, it seems, to be a pause at the fourth foot; and if that

foot is a dactyl so much the better; and it is better also that the

first foot should be a dactyl and included in the word, and so forth.

For a final specimen he tells us, in the corresponding introduction to

the _Georgics_ themselves, that as Virgil had followed Homer, and had

not come near him in the _Æneid_, as he had followed Theocritus and run

a good second in the _Eclogues_, so he followed Hesiod, and “simply left

him” (_penitus reliquit_) in the _Georgics_. It required enormous skill

to do what he has done. (So far so good, but before very long we come

again to the parting of the ways.) The book is didactic, and therefore

it should be written to somebody, for teaching presupposes two

personages—the teacher and the taught. Again, one does not know whether

to smile or not, to take the matter gravely and urge that any _lector

benevolus_ will occupy quite sufficiently the _personam discipuli_, or

to pass the matter, _olli subridens_, and reflecting that our legs also

are not unexposed to the arrows.

It can scarcely be necessary to take special examples from the minor

commentators on Virgil or on other Latin poets: for their

characteristics are, so far as I know, exactly uniform with [Sidenote:

_Other commentators._] those of Servius and with those of the Greek

scholiasts. In explanation of words and things diligent to admiration,

and extremely serviceable, if not always (according to modern standards,

which are very likely temporary) scientific. In matters of prosody

excellently minute and regular, though occasionally a little arbitrary.

Not very seldom careful, to an almost touching extent, of referring

phrases to the accepted categories of Figure, and applying the stock

Rhetorical divisions and classifications. But not merely in the higher,

but even in the middle regions of criticism proper, so meagre that they

may almost be called entirely to seek. Quite rudimentary in Comparison;

in indicating character, content to accept stock divisions, and not even

attempting individual _signalement_. Abstaining with such uniformity

that one can easily perceive the entire absence of any demand for it,

from, any attempt to deal with the literary beauty of phrase or of

passage, to bring out its effect on the reader, to estimate it as a work

of art, like a picture or a statue. And now and then, as we have seen,

not merely not applying the right, but applying totally wrong, tests to

literature and especially to poetry, demanding from this latter

compliance with the arbitrary requirements of traditional Rhetoric, and

praising it for such compliance. Are they to be blamed for all this?

Certainly not; no one is to be blamed for not doing what he never

intended to do and what nobody wanted him to do, for doing what was his

commission and his business. But they are to be cited, and examined, and

recorded as witnesses to prove that, for the most part at any rate,

criticism, in the best and highest sense, was what no critic thought of

giving, and no reader thought of demanding, under the Latin

dispensation.

It may not be uninteresting to accompany (as we did in the case of

Greek) this view of the later criticism, more or less formal, with some

account of the poets where they touch the subject. These touches are not

frequent or important, but we find some in Ausonius for the end of the

fourth century, and in the curious collection bearing (with what

imparity of suggested contrast!) the title of the Latin Anthology, and

supposed to have been put together at Carthage, at the end of the fifth,

or a little later.

The unequal and decadent, but sometimes fascinating, author[435] of the

_Mosella_ and the _Cupido cruci affixus_, of the two charming epigrams

to wife and mistress—

“Uxor vivamus,”

and

“Deformem quidam te dicunt, Crispa”—

has, in his epigrams themselves, followed Martial in directions where he

is a less blameless guide than in his literary criticism. [Sidenote:

_Ausonius._] But he has not followed him here; and though much of the

collection is simply a translation of the Greek Anthology, I do not

remember any literary following thereof. But the curious verse

celebration of what we may call the University of Bordeaux, with its

“commemoration,” in separate pieces of varying length and metre, of a

couple of dozen of Professors; the Fourth Idyll, to his namesake and

grandson on his studies; and the Epistles, especially those to Paullus

the Rhetor and to Tetradius, all have more or less to do with the

subject.

Footnote 435:

Ausonius received little attention from scholars till very recently;

and I know him only, as I have long known him, in the Delphin edition

and the _Corpus Poetarum_. There are now, however, I believe, editions

by Peiper, Leipsic, 1886, and Schenkl, Berlin, 1883, besides

monographs.

We find, and are not surprised to find, that of the Professors at

Bordeaux the majority are Professors of Rhetoric. Compliment has

naturally rather the better of criticism in the addresses to them, but

certain things emerge. Tib. Victor Minervius is “another Quintilian,”

especially for fluency and for the _Demosthenicum_ (I suppose δεινότης);

but it is a little suspicious that the fullest praise is given to his

_memory_. Latinus Alcimus Alethius seems to have been himself a careful

critic, and appears to have written specially on Sallust and on the

Emperor Julian—perhaps the books are somewhere? Attius Patera was “a

descendant of the Druids,” and we should have been glad to know whether

he displayed that “Celtic spirit” in literature of which we have heard

more than enough in these days. But Ausonius is vague as the Celtic

vague itself. Attius Tiro Delphinius was a poet as well as an orator.

Others—the dead Luciolus, Alethius Minervius the Younger, the Grammarian

Lentulus, “_cognomine Lascivus_” (quite innocent, Ausonius tells us),

his brother Jucundus, are more generally commended. Pieces, two grouped

and some single, to the Greek and the Latin grammarians of Bordeaux—show

that the languages, as well as the literatures, received plentiful

attention. The compliment to Exuperius of Toulouse goes closer, and is

decidedly double-edged.[436] Erudition is specially attributed to

Staphylius, who knew not only Livy and Herodotus, but “all that is

stored in the thousand volumes of Varro” (_sexcentis_, of course). It is

observable that the grammarians[437] appear to have chiefly lectured on

poetry, the Rhetors on prose, and the whole, with touches numerous, if

not very definite, suggests to us a study liberal enough, but perhaps

not very wide, rather undiscriminating. The Idyll to his nephew enters

naturally into a few more particulars. A generous but general incitement

to the study of the tongues is followed by detail. The, as it seems to

us, very odd conjunction of Homer and Menander is an additional

testimony to the popularity of the great New Comic. It can hardly be

accidental, for it is separated by some lines from any other mention. In

fact, Ausonius is not prodigal of names, only those of Horace, Virgil,

and Terence being mentioned for Latin poetry, and the work, though not

the name, of Sallust, with some other histories of the last Republican

period. Lastly, the Epistles, besides supplying fresh instances of

Ausonius’ _rococo_ fancy for the cento—even the Macaronic cento—supply a

perhaps humorous prose criticism in form of his own work, which is worth

subjoining.[438]

Footnote 436:

He has praised him (Prof. xvii.) his stately walk, his _verba

ingentia_, his handsome dress, and adds—

“Copia cui fandi longe pulcherrima: _quam si

Auditu tenus acciperes deflata placeret.

Discussam scires solidi nihil edere sensus_.”

Footnote 437:

It may be barely necessary to append the caution that _grammaticus_ is

a good deal more than “grammarian” in the most limited sense,

including “philologist,” “critic,” &c. Some preferred _literatus_, as

the Latin word.

Footnote 438:

_In verbis rudem; in eloquendo hiulcum; a propositis discrepantem; in

versibus concinnationis expertum, in cavillando natura invenustum nec

arte conditum; diluti salis et fellis ignavi; nec de mimo planipedem

nec de comœdis histrionem._.

The _Anthologia Latina_,[439] which a certain noble youth of the name of

Octavian composed at the bidding of some Vandal [Sidenote: _The_

Anthologia Latina.] chieftain, perhaps as late as 532, at the extreme

verge of the twilight of the West, is not entirely deserving of the

transferred sense attached to its patron’s nationality. It has preserved

one or two pretty things for us, and more curious ones. And, in our

particular relation, it shows that literary society and occupation had

by no means gone wholly out of fashion. Both with individuals and

coteries Virgil was a perversely favourite subject; and the deplorable

persons who called themselves the Twelve Wise Men wrote distichs, and

pentastichs, and polystichs, _à dormir debout_, on the contents of the

books of the _Æneid_ and other subjects. The epigrams attributed to

Seneca are probably, whether they belong to any of the known Senecas or

not, of an older and better time; and the pair (Nos. 27 and 28) on the

theme of _Ære perennius_, though the sentiment is of course a

commonplace, have a grip and ring of style which, at any rate after the

flaccid barbarisms of the sixth century, shows well. But for the

literary taste of this time itself, the works of a certain Luxorius (a

contemporary it would seem, and, from the word _spectabilis_, probably

of official rank) are most valuable. They are of some bulk, consisting

of not much less than a hundred pieces, filling some forty pages in

Baehrens’s edition. The body of the work, according to the usual _prava

docilitas_ of the epigrammatist, consists of things licentious or

trivial enough; but Luxorius had read his Martial in this respect more

closely than Ausonius, that he begins with three or four pieces of a

critical or semi-critical kind. He is thoroughly convinced of the danger

of writing after the ancients; but, as he says with some force to the

Reader, “If you think them of better quality, why don’t you read them

and not me?” He consoles his book, should it meet with contempt at Rome

and Carthage, with the observation that things must be content with

their proper places; and in a fourth piece pleads that if his epigrams

are short, why, the reading will be the sooner finished. The tone, with

a good deal less disguised conceit, is very much that of a literary

_abbé_ or President of the eighteenth century—a kind of person with

whose general tastes, literary and other, Luxorius would probably have

sympathised well enough.

Footnote 439:

_Poetæ Latini Minores_, ed. Baehrens, vol. iv. Sidonius Apollinaris,

who comes between Ausonius and the Anthology, and has much concern for

us, is deliberately postponed to the next Book.

We may now complete our survey of the actual documents by dealing with

such remnants as we have of the technical [Sidenote: _The Latin

Rhetoricians._] treatises on Rhetoric in Latin. These are neither

numerous nor bulky, nor, with one exception at the very end of the

classical, and gate of the mediæval, period (to which latter some of

them even belong), of much interest or importance. The fact may seem a

little surprising, in face of the immense interest in the practice of

the subject, which not merely Seneca, and Quintilian, and Pliny, but all

others, show. But the surprise will vanish at a little consideration.

Before the Romans attempted it, the technical part of Rhetoric had been

reduced, as we saw, to a settled scheme of extreme intricacy by the

Greeks, and these claimed to be as much the masters of the subject as

Jews were of Medicine in the Middle Ages. Probably every Roman, though

he might attend his own countrymen’s declamations, learnt the art of

Rhetoric from a Greek professor at one time or another, and was familiar

with the Greek _technæ_. It was only after the separation of the

Empires, and not even immediately then, that Greek ceased to be the

language of education. Moreover, the Romans, though of orderly and

business-like habits of thought, had neither the liking nor the language

suited for the intenser and minuter technicalities of the Art.

It may be almost sufficient justification of the last paragraph to

mention that the whole body of Latin Rhetoricians, as given in the

standard edition of Capperonnier,[440] fills but a volume of some 400

not very large quarto pages; and that this is made up by the insertion

not merely of the Rhetorical part of Martianus Capella, but of such

purely mediæval or “Dark Age” work as that of Bede, Isidore, and

possibly Alcuin. These latter will find better place in the next Book.

Martianus shall be noticed by himself presently; we may meanwhile run

over the rest.

Footnote 440:

_Rhetores Latini_ (Argentorati, 1756). It is, however, worth while to

substitute, or add, the newer edition of Halm (2 vols., Leipsic,

1863), which gives not only critical apparatus and very useful

indices, but some more texts from MSS. Ernesti’s _Lexicon Technologiæ

Latinorum Rhetoricæ_ (Lips., 1795) is only less necessary than its

Greek companion, inasmuch as Latin-English lexicographers have been

less neglectful of rhetorical vocabulary than Greek-English—but still

necessary.

The first in order, and perhaps the oldest, is the Treatise on the

Figures of P. Rutilius Lupus, a rhetorician often quoted [Sidenote:

_Rutilius Lupus, &c._] by Quintilian. It is in the dictionary form, but

not alphabetically arranged. The definitions are technical, meagre, and

chiefly limited to that jejune splitting of kinds which has been noticed

under the head of Greek. The illustrative quotations, which are numerous

and not useless, are wholly from Greek authors, many of them indicating

by their time that the Gorgias, whose four books Quintilian tells us

that Rutilius abstracted into one, was not the sophist of Leontini, but

a later Athenian rhetorician. Except for the close connection

which—until quite recently if not still—has existed between the Figures

and criticism, this has little interest for us.

The next treatise, that of Aquila Romanus, is in the same way only a

Latin accommodation of the work of Alexander (_v. supra_, p. 102). It is

of the same class, a non-alphabetical dictionary in miniature, and

devoted to the same subject. Of the same class again, exactly, is the

tractate of Julius Rufinianus, who, since he keeps, as Rutilius and

Aquila had not done, the Greek words _schema_ for _figura_, and _lexis_

for _elocutio_, was probably a closer adapter, paraphrast, or translator

of his original even than they. He has added a short parallel treatment

of the other division of _schemata_, the intellectual or dianoetic.

Curius or Chirius Fortunatianus (a writer at any rate senior to

Cassiodorus, who epitomised him) was more ambitious, [Sidenote: _Curius

Fortunatianus: his Catechism._] and instead of confining himself to the

Figures, composed a regular art of the Rhetoric of the Schools in three

books. It supplies an interesting and early example of the catechetical

form which was so popular during the middle ages, which continued to

flourish till within the memory of the present generation, and the

disuse of which has certainly been accompanied by a loss in exactness of

actual knowledge, compensated, or not, by a gain in the philosophical

character of such as is acquired.

“Q. What is Rhetoric? A. The science of speaking well. Q. What is an

orator? A. A good man skilled in speaking. Q. What is the duty of an

orator? A. To speak well in civil cases. Q. What is his end? A. To

persuade so far as the condition of things and persons allows.”

And so forth—the writer proceeding by the simple method of throwing into

catechism-form the same kind of dictionary matter which we have just

noticed, sometimes with very odd effect, as in _Quæ est anæschyntos?_—a

question which, if Mrs. Quickly had heard it and had understood Greek,

would doubtless have made her adjust to the occasion her objection to

“Jenny’s case.” The thing, though curious, drags Rhetoric farther out of

its proper course than ever, and one perhaps at no time feels more

inclined to join in the contempt of scholastic methods, mistaken as one

knows it to be, than when reading such questions as—_Assumpta qualitas

facit statum?_ and the rest of this liturgy of abracadabra in

catechetical form. In no rhetorical treatise, indeed, is the question of

style so unceremoniously ignored. A long handling of the _staseis_ is

followed by shorter ones of other technical divisions, “Elocution”

receiving the most perfunctory treatment possible (though with a certain

practicality). How are you to acquire diction? By reading, speaking,

hearing others speak, and inventing new words (which must not be done

too often). Put your long words last; but begin a sentence if you can

with a long syllable, and do not keep too many short ones, or too many

monosyllables, together; avoid archaisms; and attend to such minute, but

in at least some cases arbitrary, rules as the following[441]:—

“Let your construction be more frequently round than flat; let it not

gape with too frequent collision of vowels, especially long ones; nor be

rough with the conflict of two consonants; let not many monosyllables be

joined together; let there be no great stretch of short syllables nor

many long ones; let not the first syllable of a word be the same as the

last of the word before, nor let the two together make any awkward

compound; let not the oration be deformed by many thin[442] words or

vast syllables; and let not many genitive plurals come together.”[443]

Footnote 441:

_Op. cit._, p. 93.

Footnote 442:

_Exilibus._

Footnote 443:

To avoid the _um-um_ sound, the “lowing” to which Quintilian objects,

and which is undoubtedly one of the great defects of Latin as of

Anglo-Saxon.

Cautions, it will be observed, sometimes judicious, sometimes

capricious, but never reasoned.

The commentary of Marius Victorinus on Cicero’s _Rhetoric_ is the

longest of all these treatises. It contains a great deal of [Sidenote:

_Marius Victorinus on Cicero._] matter, and there is no discoverable

reason why it should not have contained a great deal more. For the very

first note on Cicero’s words, “I have thought to myself of this often

and very much,” is as follows: “If there be only one of these, it does

not indicate a sufficiently lengthy cogitation. For we may frequently

think of a thing, but immediately desist from the thinking. We may also

think long upon a thing, but do it only on a single day. He therefore

has properly joined the two, and said: ‘_Often_ and much have I thought

to myself on this.’ And because a thing ought not to be published unless

it be certain and the result of deliberation, he rightly says: ‘I

thought of this _to myself_.’”

All this is exceedingly true; but it is also exceedingly trivial. And

the second is like unto it. _Bonine an mali plus attulerit hominibus et

civitatibus sc. eloquentia_: “The cause of his deliberation is not

whether eloquence be good or bad, but whether it have more of good or of

bad in it. The order of the words, however, is not unimportant, for he

might have said, ‘of bad or of good.’ But Cicero stuck to the nature of

eloquence, which, when it first began, did good to men, for it brought

them together. But later, when it was depraved by the ingenuity of bad

men, it hurt the republic very much. So he arranged the words in the

proper order in saying _Bonine_, &c. The republic consists of two parts,

private and public—that is to say, of men and states. We may notice this

also in the Verrines, how Cicero always defends either men or cities.”

A man who is content to write like this need never stop while paper,

pen, and ink hold out, or till the kindness of nature, or the impatience

of men, puts an end to his life. Sometimes the comment is not quite so

nugatory, especially when Victorinus illustrates the differences between

Cicero and Hermagoras. But he seldom even approaches literary criticism.

The rest, save one, may be almost silence. The ambitiously entitled

_Institutiones Oratoriæ_ of Sulpicius Victor is incomplete. [Sidenote:

_Others._] What we have of it follows the usual order of “states”

narration, &c., with some, but only a few, peculiarities. Most of the

other articles are both meagre and late. Emporius deals with

_ethopœia_, the Commonplace, and one or two other matters. There is a

Latin version of the _Progymnasmata_ of Hermogenes. The probably

spurious _Principia Rhetorices_, attributed to St Augustine, are at

least commended by his name, yet hardly by anything else; and the same

may be said in lesser degree of the _Compendium_ of Cassiodorus.[444]

The verses of Rufinus, on the rhythms suitable to oratory, have more

interest. And so we may come to Martianus.

Footnote 444:

We shall return to these in the next Book.

Inferior as Latin criticism, on the Rhetorical side, is in comparison

with Greek, it is not fanciful to say that it ends with a better note,

though a quaint and fantastic one. The later stages in Greek, as we have

seen, were mere arid technicalities or idle epideictic—ghosts of things

no longer alive, and never perhaps alive with the best kind of life.

What followed in the Byzantine age had at best the character of literary

research. Such a book as that of Photius, invaluable as it is to us, has

no life-promise in it, either as regards its own generation or for the

future.

On the contrary, there is much of both, as we look back on it, in the

eccentric treatise on the _Marriage of Philology and [Sidenote:

_Martianus Capella._] Mercury_, by Martianus Capella.[445] Of the author

and date of the book we know, with accuracy, hardly anything at all. His

full name appears to have been Martianus Minneius Felix Capella, and he

is described as a Carthaginian. His date is much contested, as well as

his religion, his occupations, and other things which no mortal need

trouble himself about; while this date, which _is_ of some importance,

cannot be adjusted very exactly. There is, however, not very much

dispute that it must have been somewhere in the fifth century. “Before

439” is all that his latest editor, Eyssenhardt, will say.

Footnote 445:

Ed. Eyssenhardt. Leipsic, 1866.

What is certain is that the treatise is written in a very late and not a

little barbarous Latin style, and that it was popular in the Middle

Ages, with that peculiar popularity which seems to have settled itself

upon Boethius, Orosius, and other writers of the last age before

chaos—the age to which those who kept up education in chaos itself would

be most likely to look back, as connecting them with the greater past

yet not too far off.

Further, while we find in Martianus a firm outline of the exact scheme

of Humaner Letters which prevailed from 500 to 1500, we find in his

frame and setting, slightly preposterous and more than slightly

fantastic as it is, just that touch of romance—of youth, with its

promise as well as its foolishness—which is wanting in Byzantine work,

and which has Future in it. On both these characteristics of the whole

book we must say something, before coming to its rhetorical part.

The title of the book (to observe Servian formality) has been already

given. Its form is that of the Varronian _satura_, or mingle-mangle of

prose and verse; and it is divided into nine books. The first two of

these serve as an introduction, containing a wonderful rigmarole, in

more wonderful jargon,[446] about things in general, divine and human,

the old mythology and physics, with abstract philosophical

personifications, _Sophia_, _Phronesis_, and so forth, coming in. At

last it settles down to the real plan of the treatise, which is that the

Seven Liberal Arts, as adopted (very mainly from this book) by the

Middle Ages, being estated as bridesmaids (or something like it) to

Philology, each Art has a book to herself, and, in the flowery fantastic

fashion of the Introduction, gives a summary of her teaching to the

assembled gods. This summary is of the most precise and business-like

character, despite its “trimmings,” so that Grammar is not ashamed to

inform the gods that “Ulcus makes ulc_e_ris, but pecus pec_o_ris,” and

Logic rattles off things like _Primæ formæ primus modus est in quo

conficitur ex duobus universalibus_, and so forth, after a fashion which

suggests that the marriage itself might have been celebrated by Dean

Aldrich with great propriety. The beginnings and ends of the books are

generally decorated with verse, and with fancy _prosopopœiæ_ of

different kinds: but the stuff of the text is exactly what it was

intended to be—solid schoolbook matter.

Footnote 446:

There is, however, a certain barbaric charm—of the nose-ring and

feather belt and head-dress kind—about this furthest development of

the “African style” which Apuleius had started. The gay bombastic

ornament of Anglo-Saxon prose-writing, both in Latin and vernacular,

has sometimes been credited to Martianus.

The book devoted to Rhetoric is the fifth, being preceded by those of

Grammar and Logic, in the usual and indeed natural order of the

Trivium:—

“_Gram._ loquitur, _Dia._ vera docet, _Rhet._ verba colorat,”

though Martianus does not arrange the Quadrivium exactly according to

the second line of the mnemonic—

“_Mus._ canit, _Ar._ numerat, _Geo._ ponderat, _Ast._ colit Astra,”

his order being Geometry, or rather Geography, Arithmetic, Astronomy,

Music.

The book on Rhetoric opens literally with a flourish of trumpets,—

“Interea sonuere tubæ,”—

which, as some sixteen rather bombastic hexameters full of _gradus_-tags

inform us, quite alarms the gods, major and minor. In the midst of it

there steps forth “a stately woman of lofty stature, and confidence

greater than common, but radiantly handsome, helmed and crowned,

weaponed both for defence and with flashing arms wherewith she could

smite her enemies with a thundering coruscation. Under her armpits, and

thrown over her shoulder in Latian fashion, was a vest, exhibiting

embroidery of all possible _figures_ in varied hue, while her breast was

baldricked with gems of the most exquisite colour. As she walked her

arms clashed, so that you would have thought the broken levin to

rattle—with explosive handclaps, like the collision of clouds, so that

you might even believe her capable of wielding the thunderbolts of Jove.

For she it is who, like a mighty queen of all things, can direct them

whither she will and call them back whence she chooses, and unbend men

to tears or incite them to rage, and sway the minds of civic crowds as

of warring armies. She brought beneath her sway the senate, the rostra,

the courts at Rome,” &c., &c., the innocent and transparent allegory of

the earlier part changing into a half-historical, half-philosophical

account of the functions of Rhetoric generally. She is followed by a

great crowd of men, some Greek, some Roman, among whom (it is worth

mentioning, as a proof of the taste of the age) Æschines, Isocrates, and

Lysias are specially mentioned for the one tongue, and, with some

uncertain names, Pliny and Fronto in the other. Cicero is later put, by

Rhetoric herself, as beyond competition in either. She displays her

declamatory skill in a formal exordium, and then plunges into the usual

matter of Rhetorical treatises. The treatment is technical, but by no

means ill-arranged, clear enough even in the bewildering labyrinths of

the _status_, not excessive in the Figures, and altogether one of the

best of the Latin _Rhetorics_. When she finishes, Mercury beckons to her

to join the group of those who had played their part, and to salute the

bride. So she walks with much confidence up to Philology, gives her “a

sounding kiss—for she can do nothing silently even if she would—on the

top of her head,”[447] and joins the society of her sisters.

Footnote 447:

Martianus is curious in philematology. In the second book of the

Introduction, when the Muses have described themselves in elaborate

verse, one of the Graces kisses Philology “on that part of the

forehead where a smooth middle space intervenes between the pubescence

of the eye-brows.”

Recurring to the speech of one of these sisters, Grammar, and combining

it with this, we shall have no ill notion of the helps to literary

criticism with which the next thousand years of the world’s history were

provided in the west of Europe. They were rudimentary enough, and those

who were furnished with them had in most cases no thought—indeed for

long centuries hardly any opportunity—of using them for any critical

purpose. But they lay ready for the hand of others, and at the

Renaissance, as well as in one brilliant and some minor instances

earlier, they were turned with only a little delay to their proper

purpose.

Grammar, with the quaintness that suffuses the whole book, says, “My

parts are four—_litteræ_, _litteratura_, _litteratus_, _litterate_.

‘Letters’ are what I teach; ‘Literature’ am I who teach them; ‘the man

of letters’ is he whom I shall have taught; ‘_literate_’ the manner in

which my pupil shall skilfully handle things.” But the expectation thus

raised is a little falsified, for “letters” are taken at their own foot,

though Pallas pulls up Grammar and maintains that she has omitted the

“historic part,” which does not mean our historic in the very least, any

more than _litteratura_ means our Literature.

There is, however, both in these places and throughout the book, a great

deal of “fine confused feeding,” both on matters really literary and on

those more or less subsidiary to literature, from Phonetics upwards. The

citations, though not extremely frequent or copious, show pretty wide

reading, especially in Latin. In the book on Rhetoric we find very

particular and minute attention paid to these considerations of euphony

to which attention has already been drawn, Martianus (who, whether we

allow him poetry or not, was evidently a very careful and deft

versifier[448]) applying his practice in the other harmony with his

usual quaint conceit here. Nowhere, perhaps, do we better perceive,

though nowhere may we find it more difficult exactly to follow, the

niceties of the ancient ear, than in the caution that while it is well

to end a clause with a molossus (three longs), if the final word is a

trisyllable you must be careful to put a trochee before it, and by no

means a spondee or pyrrhic. Thus “Littus ejectis,” with which Tully

finishes a clause, is all right, but “rupes ejectis” would be _pessima

clausula_, and “apex ejectis” (where _apex_ is described as a pyrrhic,

according to its natural quantity in the oblique cases) almost worse.

Footnote 448:

His Anacreontics in particular are sometimes by no means inelegant.

His use of metrical terms is, however, sometimes odd, and tells tales

of the inroads and havoc of the accent. Thus below he speaks of a

molossus with a short first syllable!

Further than this, however, Low Latin was not encouraged by its tutor

Martianus to advance. Nor is it surprising that with such teaching we

find no such advance in the first lisping of the modern literatures

themselves, till the strangely articulate speech of their greatest

critic, as he was their greatest creator—Dante the Wingbearer.

INTERCHAPTER II.

In considering and summing up the contribution of ancient Latin

literature to the history and achievements of Criticism, we may

conveniently adopt a threefold division and arrangement, so as to see,

first, what was the general character of Latin criticism as contrasted

with Greek, and with that comparative study of literature which has only

recently become possible; secondly, its actual and positive achievement;

thirdly, the state in which it left the chances of the future.

The first point under the first head is obvious at once, and has been

repeatedly glanced at and referred to already. The Romans had what the

Greeks had not and could not have—the advantage of literary comparison

in two tongues. This—it may be said a thousand times over, and not be

said too often—is an advantage so enormous that nothing else is required

to show the wonderful faculty of the nation which could effect so much

without it. Without comparison, not merely is the diagnosis of qualities

mostly guesswork, but even the discovery of them becomes extremely

difficult. With comparison, the qualities almost “leap to the eyes,” and

the difference of their results goes far to help in the differentiation

of their natures.

At the same time, this advantage, huge as it still was, was conditioned

and hampered by the fact that Latin, as a language, was an extremely

close connection of Greek, and, as a literature, was daughter and pupil

in one. It would be stepping out of the safe and solid, if not often

trodden, path which has been prescribed for this book, to inquire

whether, if more scope had been given to the Italian and less to the

Italiote[449] element, this need have been the case; it is sufficient

for our strictly historical inquiry that it was the case as a matter of

fact. With rare exceptions, of which the Satire itself is a doubtful

chief, with few and more doubtful followers, the Romans invented no form

of literature whatsoever. Nor did they, as more literary races have so

often done, re-create and make their own the forms that they borrowed.

The earlier lost Roman tragedy was, it is clear, simply _calqué_ upon

Greek, as was the Roman comedy (though the mother-wit of Plautus, one of

the most original of Latin writers not of the decadence, gives it an

original air) absolutely _calqué_ upon the later forms of the Attic. The

Epic was even more slavishly imitative—those who rate Virgil highest

must admit that, delicately as he walks, and elegant as is his footgear,

he simply steps in the footprints, now of Homer, now of Apollonius, now,

in all probability, of writers who happen to be lost. The Latin Lyric

poets dare invent no fresh scheme; the historians, even those of genius,

have the fear, or at any rate the following, of the Greeks always before

them. And so they deprive themselves, from the critical point of view,

of the very advantage with which they start—they lose their chance of

finding out the real forms of literature, transcending those of any

particular tongue, by assimilating the forms of their own as exactly as

possible to another’s.

Footnote 449:

Of course I do not mean to imply that the Italiote cities were the

direct source of the Greek element in classical Latin literature.