at once to lessen their opportunities for criticism, and dilute the
quality of such criticism as they do venture upon. The Roman—it has been
observed, and truly observed, a thousand times—is a man of letters
almost always by accident, and on the way to being something else. When
he is not, he is generally of the second class. Virgil, Horace, and
Cicero perhaps are the chief exceptions, and the two first at any rate,
if not the third, were among the most artificial, if also of the most
artful, imitators of the Greeks. To Catullus, his exquisite and hardly
surpassed poetical faculty was evidently little more than a toy or a
pastime—helpful to express his moods of love or of laughter, and that
was all. So the magnificent singing robes of Lucretius cover a man who
has hardly a thought of being a poet, who aims mainly at being a
philosopher; and the scarcely inferior Muse of Juvenal positively turns
her back on her sisters, and busies herself with a sardonic “criticism
of life,” in which indignant disdain is oddly blended with a strange
interest in all trifles, and all serious things, that are _not_
literary. The men with whom literature is, if not exactly a passion, a
really serious interest, are, on the other hand, “polyhistoric” persons
of talent, in strengths varying from Cicero himself to Pliny, or else
men like Martial, admirable practitioners, and something more, in a
limited and not very high kind.
Yet, again, though the Roman talent was extremely businesslike, it was
by no means subtle. It could, at any rate to some extent, borrow the
fanciful Greek refinements; but it found a necessity of changing them
into hard and fast rules.
To all this we must add another thing of the first importance. Great as
were the accidental advantages of oratory in Greece, they were almost
greater at Rome. During every age of the Republic a good speaker had a
great weight in his favour; but in its last age, unless the luck was
strangely against him, honours and wealth were to be had by him simply
for the asking. Under the Empire his position as to the honours of the
state was a little more precarious, and his talents (if he was a very
honest man and not a very discreet one) were not unlikely to bring him
into trouble. But if he were not too scrupulous—as in the case of Eprius
Marcellus, of that Regulus whom Pliny evidently admired almost as much
as he loathed him, of Fabricius Veiento, and others—these talents could
be dishonestly made subservient to fortune. Even in the worst times of
the worst emperors their exercise in the law courts was fairly safe, and
extremely profitable; while the rage for declamations also gave the art
of speaking a factitious but very great popularity.
Hence there was no fear, or hope, of Oratory being brought to its proper
place among the departments of literature. On the contrary, the
practical prosaic character of the people tended to exalt it higher than
ever over such kickshaws as poetry. Probably nine out of ten Romans
would have agreed with Aper in the _Dialogus_.
All this was not particularly favourable to any practice of criticism,
and particularly unfavourable to a fresher and wider interpretation of
it. Yet, as we have seen, there was something of a set towards literary
criticism of a kind in Rome. There, fashion was at once very powerful
and very conservative: and the fashion of literary conversations,
especially after dinner, set by the Scipios and others when they came
into contact on their foreign campaigns with lettered Greeks, seems
never to have died out till the very incoming of the Dark Ages, if then.
It may have been—it was—more philological, antiquarian, “folklorish,”
and what not, than strictly literary, but it was sometimes this. The
other fashion of recitation and declamation, closely connected with
this, provided also material for it. Sometimes, no doubt, these literary
conversations were a terrible bore, as the satirists not obscurely tell
us, and as Pliny, in a letter[450] full of good sense and pleasantness,
points out to a friend of his who had been bored at another kind of
dinner, where the fun was provided by _scurræ_, _moriones_, and other
professional persons not to be mentioned in English.
Footnote 450:
Ep., ix. 17.
From all this we find, and are not surprised to find, that literary
critical talk, and literary critical writing, in Rome, turned much more
upon oratory than upon any other department, and that, when they did
turn on others, these were often merely or mainly regarded as
storehouses of quotation and patterns of imitation for the orator. There
was, indeed, one additional reason for this which has not yet been
mentioned, but which was not unnaturally among the most powerful of all.
Oratory was about the only division of literature in which even a very
patriotic Roman could, with any show of reason, consider his countrymen
the equals of the Greeks. Here the flattering unction was often laid;
and though as regards Cicero and Demosthenes, the inevitably selected
champions, we may hardly think the match an equal one, it must be
remembered that the extraordinary, and not quite comprehensible, loss of
nearly all other Roman orators puts Latin at a very great disadvantage.
We have Æschines, Lysias, Isæus, something, if not much, of Hyperides, a
good deal of Isocrates, on the literary side of oratory. But we have
nothing by which fairly to judge Hortensius or Catulus, Calvus or Pollio
or Messala. What is certain is that men of cool judgment, who did not
venture to set up even Virgil against Homer, and who practically let all
Roman minor poetry go by the board, did think they could make a fight
for Rome in symbouleutic and dikanic, if not in epideictic, oratory.
It follows from all these things that, strong as is the oratorical
preoccupation in Greek, it is stronger still in Roman Rhetoric and
criticism. Even the men who take the widest view of literature, and are
most familiar with it—Cicero, Pliny, nay, Quintilian himself—fall, as
has been said, unconsciously, or in the way of bland assumption as of a
matter not worth arguing about, into the habit of regarding it either
primarily as an exercising-ground, a magazine, a source of supply and
training for the orator, or as a means of sport and pastime to him in
the intervals of his more serious business. The utterly preposterous
notion (as it seems to us) of trying a poet like Virgil by the rules of
the rhetorician, classifying his speeches, pointing out his deft use of
“means of persuasion,” laying stress on the proprieties and felicities
of his use of language according to the rhetorical laws, taking examples
of Figures from him and the like, could arise from nothing but this
preliminary assumption or confusion, and could only be excused by it. It
is in fact all-pervading—forget or lose sight of it, and there is hardly
a Roman utterance about literature which will not be either quite
unmeaning, or very seriously misleading.
The consequence is that very seldom do we get literary criticism of
anything like the best kind—of any kind that deserves the name in
meaning at once full and strict—from a Roman. There is no Latin
Longinus—Quintilian himself is but at best a rather less technical
Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and it is even very uncertain whether he
does not owe a good deal directly to Dionysius himself. At any rate,
much as we owe him, we owe it rather to his ineradicable and inevitable
good sense, his thorough grasp of the educational values of things, and
his unfeigned love of literature, than to any full conception on his
part of the art of criticism as an art of appreciation—as a reasoned
valuing and analysing of the sources of literary charm.
Another consequence (of the illustrative kind chiefly) is that the spell
of the Figures is even more heavy on the Roman than on the Greek. That
horrified cry[451] of the unlucky Albucius, _schemata tollis ex rerum
natura_, is as much the note of the average Roman critic as the
quotation given above from Simylus[452] is above the note both of Roman
and even of Greek as a rule. It could hardly out of the head of a critic
of this stamp, that if you took the proper number of scruples of
hyperbole, so many drams of antiphrasis, and so on, you would make a
fine sentence—that so many sentences thus formed and arranged, with
proper regard to _inventio_, _narratio_, and the rest, would make a fine
chapter, so many chapters a fine book. The whole process, once more, is
topsy-turvy, and can come to no good end.
Footnote 451:
_V. supra_, p. 238.
Footnote 452:
_V. supra_, p. 25.
In Poetic of the limited kind we have, of course, from Rome one
document, the historical importance of which it is impossible to
exaggerate. But the intrinsic importance, even of this, is singularly
out of proportion to its reputation and its influence. As has been
explained in detail above, it may be unjust to regard the _Epistola ad
Pisones_ as a designed and complete tract _De Arte Poetica_. But make as
much allowance as we may and can for scheme and purpose, the intrinsic
quality of such criticism as it does give will remain clear and
unaltered. Neither of the real nature, requirements, capabilities of any
one literary form, nor of the character of any one source of literary
beauty, does Horace show himself in the very least degree conscious. His
precepts are now precepts of excellent commonsense, not less—perhaps
rather more—applicable to life than to literature: now purely arbitrary
rules derived from the practice—sometimes the quite accidental
practice—of great preceding writers.
Yet, all the same, Horace unconsciously and almost indirectly does take
up a very decided critical side, and expresses, with the neatness and in
the rememberable fashion to be expected from so consummate a master, one
of the two great critical creeds. Nor is there any doubt that this
creed, so far as literary criticism appealed to the Roman mind at all,
was that of by far the larger number of persons. This is—not necessarily
in a _ne varietur_ shape, but put very clearly in a certain form—the
creed of what is known as “Classicism,” the creed which recommends,
first of all, as the probable, if not the certain, road to literary
success, adherence to the approved traditions, the elaboration of types
and generalisations rather than indulgence in the eccentric and efforts
to create the individual, the preference of the regular to the vague,
&c., &c.
This, it may be repeated without much rashness, was even more the
critical orthodoxy of Rome than it was the critical orthodoxy of Greece.
We see it in the stock preference of the Attic to the Asiatic style in
oratory; it simply defrays the whole of the just-mentioned criticism of
Horace; it animates the campaign of the satirists against archaic and
euphuist phraseology; it is clearly the proper thing to think in the
literary miscellanies of Gellius, and even of Macrobius. The precepts of
the formal treatises, so far as they touch on style at all, never fail
to express this general tendency; and the even more deliberate and
canonical “correctness” of the modern Latin races and literatures, if
not directly and unavoidably inherited, is a very legitimate attempt to
recover and improve the lost heritage of their ancestor.
Nor will any other conclusion, I think, be drawn from the study of those
grammarians in the strict sense, of whom little or nothing has been said
in the main body of this Book, for the simple reason that there was
little or nothing to say. From Varro to Festus the symptoms which we
have noted elsewhere recur with unmistakable fidelity. The etymology and
signification of words; the explanation of customs, rites, myths; the
arrangements of accidence and syntax—all these things awake evident
interest, and receive careful and often most intelligent pains. These
grammarians (and, of course, still more professedly metrical writers
like Terentianus Maurus) are diligent on metre, and even behind metre,
on that most difficult of subjects, in all times and languages, the
metrical quality and quantity as distinguished from the metrical
arrangement of words. But where all these things begin to group and
crystallise themselves into higher criticism of literary form and charm,
there our authors, I think it will be found with hardly an exception,
stop dead. I shall be surprised (to stick to the example formerly given)
to have pointed out to me a single passage in which the _poetical_
quality of the Ennian, the Lucretian, and the Virgilian hexameter is
discussed.
At the same time, it would be uncritical not to perceive, and
unhistorical not to note, the existence in the history of Latin
literature of a current running strongly in the opposite direction,
making itself distinctly felt at more than one period, and, finally, in
creative literature at least, going near to triumph. We have seen, both
directly and indirectly, that in the first century of our era there
_was_ a very strong set towards archaism and euphuism, that it had the
patronage of Seneca the father, certainly, if not also that of his more
famous and more influential son; that it was not by any means wholly
disapproved by Pliny; and that though what we may call literary
orthodoxy was against it, a very large bulk (perhaps the great majority)
of the prose declamations and the verse exercises of the time must have
exhibited its influence. What is more, it is certain that in more than
one of the Roman colonial or provincial districts, which furnished
fresher and more vigorous blood than the Eternal City herself, or her
Italian precinct, could now supply, this tendency received very strong
accessions from various local peculiarities. It seems to have been least
prevalent in Gaul, though by no means unknown there; the Senecas, and
Quintilian himself, show at what an early date Spanish blood or birth
inclined those who had it to what was long afterwards to take names from
Guevara and Gongora. But the great home of Roman Euphuism was Africa. To
say nothing of ecclesiastical writers like Tertullian (who might be
supposed to have their style affected by Eastern influences), Apuleius
earlier, and Martianus later, are more than sufficient, and luckily
pretty fully extant, witnesses to the fact.
Yet this tendency is not represented in criticism at all. Apuleius, who
was a very pretty pleader as well as an accomplished Euphuist in
original composition, might well have left us a parallel to De Quincey’s
own vindications of the ornate style, if he had chosen; but it did not
apparently occur to him though the _Florida_ would have given a quite
convenient and proper home to such a dissertation.[453] _Con amore_ as
Martianus describes (in the passage above translated) the gorgeousness
of Rhetoric, it is strictly in reference to her _oratorical_ practice.
If the satires of the later Cæsars’ time take the other side, and so do
give us some criticism on that, it is pretty certainly because all the
greatest satirists, from Aristophanes downwards, have always been
Tories, and have selected the absurdities of innovation more gladly than
those of tradition for their target. Nay, it is a question whether
Petronius, in one direction, and Persius in another, do not, so far as
their own compositions are concerned, somewhat incur the blame of which
they are so lavish, though Martial and Juvenal certainly do not. On all
sides the conviction comes in that for strictly literary criticism the
time was not ripe, or that the country, the nation, was indisposed and
unprepared for it.
Footnote 453:
The fact that the subject not seldom seems to be coming (_e.g._, at i.
9 and iv. 20) in this curious patchwork, and does not come, is not
without significance.
In no point, perhaps, is this so noteworthy and so surprising as in
regard to what we may call the literary criticism of metre. For this
Latin offered, at both ends of the history of Latin proper, temptations
and opportunities which, so far as we know, were unknown to the Greeks.
At the one end there were the remains, scanty, but significant even now,
then probably abundant, of “Saturnian” prosody. Of this, of course,
Roman writers, technical and other, do take notice: they even, with the
antiquarian and mythological patriotism so common at Rome, take a fairly
lively interest in it. But of the remarkable _literary_ difference
between it and the accepted literary metres—a point almost exactly on a
par with that of the difference between our ballad metre and the
accepted literary poetic forms of the eighteenth century—they do not, so
far as I remember, seem to have taken any notice at all. There must have
been—in fact we know perfectly well that there were—Roman literary
antiquaries as diligent, as enthusiastic, and, no doubt, at least as
intelligent as any of our own, from Percy and Hurd to Tyrwhitt and
Ritson. There is no reason in the nature of things (indeed, Varro is a
very fair analogue to the historian of English poetry) why there should
not have been Romans of the calibre at least of Warton, if not even of
Gray. But hardly a vestige of the combined antiquarian, philological,
and literary interest, which animates all these men of ours, appears in
the extant fragments of any Roman writer.
The facts at the other end point to the same conclusion. From no Roman
critic, so far as I know, have we any notice whatsoever of that
insurrection or resurrection (whichever word may be preferred) of
accentual against quantitative rhythm which is one of the most
interesting, and certainly one of the most mysterious, phenomena of the
literary history of the world. Grant that early in the third century (if
that be the right date) no cultivated student was likely to pay much
attention to the barbarous rhythms of a Commodian,[454] to be prepared
even to consider
“Audite quoniam propheta de illo prædixit”
as a hexameter. But a hundred and fifty years later things were
different. Before Macrobius wrote, before Servius commented, the verse
of Prudentius had been given to the world. Now, the mere classical
scholar has no doubt been usually unkind to Prudentius,[455] but few
people who have read him without a fixed idea that anybody who writes in
Latin is bound to confirm to the prosody of the Augustan age, can have
read him without frequent satisfaction. At any rate, he is a literary
_person_; and his personality is emphasised by the fact that at one time
he tries to write, and not infrequently succeeds in writing, very fair
orthodox hexameters and trimeters; at others (and in the best work of
the _Cathemerinon_ and _Peristephanon_) his verse, whether answering to
the test of the finger or not in metre, is clearly accentual in rhythm,
and seems to be yearning for rhyme to complete and dress it. Now, if
literary criticism in the full sense had been common, such a phenomenon
must have attracted attention. The orthodox critics would have attacked
it as furiously as the orthodox critics in England attacked Coleridge’s
system of metrical equivalence, or the orthodox critics in France
attacked Victor Hugo’s _enjambements_. The unorthodox critics, the
revolutionary and romantic party, would, as in each case, have welcomed
it with pæans. But, so far as we know, not the slightest notice was
taken of Prudentius by the literary wits of the _Saturnalia_, or by any
one else.
Footnote 454:
The edition of the _Instructiones_ and the _Carmen Apologeticum_ which
I use is the most accessible, and I think the most recent, that of E.
Ludwig (two parts, Leipsic, 1877-78). But I must own that a certain
compunction invades me at finding any fault with the shortcomings of
ancient critics, when I find in this edition, at the end of the
nineteenth century, great care about the text, but not a single word
about the date, the person, or the circumstances of Commodianus, and
an utter ignoring of the literary position and interest of the matter
edited. Commodian’s form may be barbarous, and his matter may be
respectably ordinary; but he is, at any rate, on a not yet disturbed
hypothesis, the ancestor—or the earliest example—of the prosody of
every modern language which combines (as some at least of us hold that
all modern languages do) quantitative scansion with a partly or wholly
non-quantitative syllabic value. And one might at least have expected
a few facts, if not a little discussion, to butter the bread of the
bare text in such a case. But the fetish of the letter has been too
much for this editor also.
Footnote 455:
I use the Delphin edition, but I believe the standards are those of
Obbarius (Tubingen, 1845) or Dressel (Leipsic, 1860). A good deal of
work which has not yet come in my way seems to have been recently
spent on this most interesting writer, resulting in such things as the
first part of a _Lexicon Prudentianum_ (Bermann, Upsala, 1891), a book
on illustrated MSS. of him (Stettener, Berlin, 1895), while in England
Mr Bridges has translated some of his charming hymns.
In part, no doubt, this silence may be set down to accidental and
extra-literary causes. The very growth of provincial literatures would
at once have rendered the productions of these literatures less likely
to reach Rome, and have disinclined the literary critics of the capital
to listen to provincial productions. Even the debate of Christian and
Pagan,[456] as it became more and more of a conflict between triumphant
youth and declining eld, less and less of the resurrection of a
desperate and despised minority against established order, may have had
something to do with the matter. But, however this may be, the facts are
the facts.
We shall do well to accept them as they are, and to recognise that Latin
had the criticism which it deserved, the criticism which was made
necessary by the conditions of its own classical literature, and,
lastly, the criticism which was really most useful both for itself and
for its posterity—that is to say, in greater or less degree, not merely
the so-called Romance tongues, but all the literary languages of modern
Europe. The first two points must be tolerably clear to any tolerable
Latinist, but they may be freshly put. A literature like classical
Latin, which is from first to last _in statu pupillari_, which, with
whatever strength, deftness, elegance, even originality at times,
follows in the footsteps of another literature, must for the very life
of it have a critical creed of order, discipline, moderation. Otherwise
it runs the risk of being a mere hybrid, even a mere monstrosity.
Footnote 456:
Symmachus, the great defender of Virgil in the _Saturnalia_, was an
obstinate and audacious champion of Paganism against Christianity: and
Prudentius wrote directly against him.
Still more certainly, nothing could have been better for the future of
the world than the exact legacy which Latin left, not merely in its
great examples of literature, but in the forms of the scholastic Grammar
and Rhetoric, to that millennium of reconstruction and recreation which
is called the Middle Age. For that wonderful period—which even yet has
never been put in its right place in the history of the world—a higher
lesson would have been thrown away, or positively injurious. No
instruction in Romanticism was wanted by the ages of Romance: for full
literary knowledge of the ancient literatures they were in no wise
suited or prepared. Their business was, after a long period of mere
foundation-work in the elaboration of the modern speeches, to get
together the materials of the modern literatures, and to build up the
structure of these as well as they could. So strongly did they feel the
_nisus_ towards this, that they even travestied into their own likeness
such of the old literature as remained.
But still Grammar and Rhetoric abode—to be a perpetual grounding and
tutelage, a “fool-guard” and guide-post in these ages of exploration and
childhood. That the Rhetoric was meagre and arbitrary, that a great deal
of it had nothing to do with literature at all, but was a sort of
fossilised skeleton of a bygone philosophy, or else a mere business
training, mattered nothing. The Trivium and Quadrivium, the legacies of
the classics, especially of Latin, gave in every one of their divisions,
and not least in Rhetoric, precisely the formal stays, the fixed norms
and forms of method, which were required in the general welter.
Had the appreciative criticism of Latin been stronger and wider, had it
left any tradition in its own last age, and so been able to throw that
tradition as a bridge over the dark time to come, it would have been no
advantage, but a loss and a mischief. Not only would it have been waste
of time for the Middle Ages to appreciate Greek and Latin literature
critically, if they could have done so, but it would have hampered them
in the doing of their own great day’s, or rather night’s, work—their
work of assimilation, of recuperation, and, not least, of dream.
BOOK III
MEDIÆVAL CRITICISM
----------
“_Sola vocabula nobilissima in cribro tuo residere curabis._”
—DANTE.
CHAPTER I.
BEFORE DANTE.
CHARACTERISTICS OF MEDIÆVAL LITERATURE—ITS ATTITUDE TO
CRITICISM—IMPORTANCE OF PROSODY—THE EARLY FORMAL RHETORICS:
BEDE—ISIDORE—ALCUIN (?)—ANOTHER TRACK OF INQUIRY—ST AUGUSTINE A
PROFESSOR OF RHETORIC—HIS ATTITUDE TO LITERATURE BEFORE AND AFTER
HIS CONVERSION—ANALYSIS OF THE ‘CONFESSIONS’ FROM THIS POINT OF
VIEW—A CONCLUSION FROM THIS TO THE GENERAL PATRISTIC VIEW OF
LITERATURE—SIDONIUS APOLLINARIS—HIS ELABORATE EPITHET-COMPARISON
AND MINUTE CRITICISMS OF STYLE AND METRE—A DELIBERATE
CRITIQUE—CASSIODORUS—BOETHIUS—CRITICAL ATTITUDE OF THE FIFTH
CENTURY—THE SIXTH: FULGENTIUS—THE FULGENTII AND THEIR BOOKS—THE
‘SUPER THEBAIDEN’ AND ‘EXPOSITIO VIRGILIANA’—VENANTIUS
FORTUNATUS—ISIDORE OF SEVILLE AGAIN—BEDE AGAIN—HIS ‘ARS
METRICA’—THE CENTRAL MIDDLE AGES TO BE MORE RAPIDLY PASSED
OVER—PROVENÇAL AND LATIN TREATISES—THE ‘DE DICTAMINE
RHYTHMICO’—JOHN OF GARLANDIA—THE ‘LABYRINTHUS’—CRITICAL REVIEW OF
POETS CONTAINED IN IT—MINOR RHYTHMICAL TRACTATES—GEOFFREY DE
VINSAUF: HIS ‘NOVA POETRIA.’
It may seem a platitude, but it really has much more of the altitudinous
than of the platitudinous about it, to say that, before entering on the
consideration of mediæval criticism,[457] it is above all things
necessary to clear the mind of cant about mediæval literature. For in no
division of this work is such a caution a more appropriate writing on
the door. On the classical [Sidenote: _Characteristics of mediæval
literature._] and on the modern sections it would be a gratuitous
impertinence. In both or them, as here, there is the distinction between
linguistic and literary criticism, and the further distinction between
literary criticism of different kinds. But in both there are, as there
always have been in relation to the classics, and as there sometimes
have been in relation to modern literature, a very large number of
persons who are aware of the _crevasses_, and who can cross them.
Footnote 457:
As at the beginning of Bk. ii. I had less obligation to acknowledge
than at that of Bk. i., so here also the diminution continues. On the
general subject it approaches zero. Théry himself is more sketchy than
himself here; and has practically nothing in detail to say of any one
save Raymond Lully, who does not supply _us_ with anything, though he
brought Rhetoric, like other sciences, into his philosophic scheme.
Even in regard to individuals, it is only on Dante that I know of much
precedent treatment, and for that _v. infra_.
In mediæval literature such persons are, and for the strongest reasons,
much more to seek. Until recently—it is the greatest “refusal” and the
greatest misfortune in the literary history of the world—mediæval
literature, which some, at least, believe to hold the keys of both
ancient and modern, was utterly neglected and contemned. Then, for a
time, it was praised without full knowledge, or by divination only. It
is now possible to know much if not most of it; but few are they who are
content to know it as literature. Not only has it had to go through, all
at once, the usual diseases to which literary childhood is obnoxious,
the petty grammarianisms which Latin and Greek got over in their own
time, the squabbles as to interpretation from which the Renaissance, to
a great extent, delivered us in their case, and the criticastry of the
seventeenth-eighteenth centuries, but new ailments, diphtherias and
influenzas of its own, have arisen in “phonology,” and Heaven knows what
else. Even this does not exhaust the list of ills that wait upon its
most unhappy state. It has been thought necessary, for political and
ecclesiastical reasons, to praise the Middle Ages a little unwisely for
a time, and then (more recently) to abuse them with an unwisdom so much
greater, that one feels inclined to relapse upon the mood of the real Mr
Kenelm Digby of _The Broad Stone of Honour_, and the imaginary Mr
Chainmail of _Crotchet Castle_. Abused and extolled as “Ages of Faith,”
they were really ages of a mixture of logical argument and playful
half-scepticism. Regarded with scorn as “Ages of Ignorance,” they knew
what they did know thoroughly, which is more than can be said of some
others. Commiserated as Ages of Misery, they were probably the happiest
times of the world, putting Arcadia and Fairyland out of sight.
Patronised as Ages of mere preparation, they accomplished things that we
have toiled after in vain for some five hundred years. They have in the
rarest cases been really understood, even historically. And the
understanding which has, in these rare cases, reached their history, has
almost always merely scrabbled on the doors of their literature. There
are exceptions, of course, some of whom have taught me all I know, and
whom I honour only short of the great originals. But they are still
exceptions.
Lest any one should accuse me of passing from criticism into
dithyrambic, let me acknowledge at once that whatsoever the [Sidenote:
_Its attitude to criticism._] Middle Ages were or were not, they were
certainly not Ages of Criticism. They could not—it has already been
hinted—have been anything of the kind; it would have ruined their
business and choked their vocation if they had attempted to be so. One
mighty figure does indeed show himself in their midst, to pass on the
torch from Aristotle and Longinus, through unknowing ages, to Coleridge
and Sainte-Beuve. But their very essence was opposed to criticism in any
prevalence. The incorrigible and triumphant (though or because wholly
unconscious) originality which, in practice, created the Romance,
revolutionised the Drama, altered History, devised a fresh Lyric, would
have been constrained and paralysed in the face of theory. At no time
can we be so thankful for the shortcomings of the School Rhetoric which,
if it had been better, might have done frightful harm. Had the Italian
critics, with their warpings of Plato and of Aristotle, appeared in the
thirteenth century instead of the sixteenth, it might have been all over
with us. For the thirteenth century was docile: the sixteenth,
fortunately, was not.
In one particular, however, the comparatively scanty criticism of the
thousand years from the sack of Rome by Alaric to the [Sidenote:
_Importance of prosody._] fall of Constantinople before Mahomet,
acquires a new significance. We have hitherto said little about the
formal criticism of prosody, and for good reasons. The Greek, and in a
less degree the Latin, writers on Metric, are interesting, but their
interest is hardly literary at all, though it has so much to do with
literature. Before we have any finished classical literature from them,
Greek had by its own _euphuia_ acquired, and Latin had forced on itself
by a stern process of gymnastic, systems of prosody which, though in the
former case at least easy as nature, were in both cases simply a branch
of mathematics. The decay of Greek, the bursting by the strong Italian
wine of the earthen or leathern vessel of artificial prosody which had
so long contained it, and the rise of the new vernaculars, introduced a
perfectly different situation; and the criticism, the tentative
unscientific rule-of-thumb criticism, of prosody assumed an importance,
at about the beginning of the fifth century of our era, which it has not
lost on the eve of the twentieth. But these general questions will be
further treated at the close of this Book (see Interchapter iii.) We
must now turn to the details of the actual history.
The standard collection[458] of Latin Rhetorics contains four of very
early date, speaking from our present point of view. The [Sidenote: _The
early formal Rhetorics—Bede._] oldest, and, if it were genuine, the most
interesting, of all in point of authorship, that attributed to S.
Augustine, we shall—for reasons—take last. The others, still of great
interest in this respect, are by, or attributed to, the three greatest
men of “regular” letters in the whole period (500-1000), except Scotus
Erigena—to wit, Bede, Isidore of Seville, and Alcuin.
Footnote 458:
Ed. Capperonnier, pp. 318-328; pp. 375-409. Ed. Halm, i. 137-151; ii.
505-550, 607-618. The _Rhetoric_ (forming part of his _Institutiones_)
of Cassiodorus is also in both collections. It has been glanced at,
_supra_ (pp. 346, 349), and will be noticed again, _infra_ (p. 390).
Bede, who has also left us work of interest on metre,[459] has included
in his works a tractate on the Tropes and Figures of the Holy Scriptures
which gives us, at least, a glimmer in darkness. His argument is
characteristic of his time; but nobody except a churl, and an ignorant
and foolish churl, will smile at it. The Figures are the most important
things in style; the Scriptures are the most important of books;
therefore there must be as good Figures in the Scriptures as in any
other book, and better. He uses, to prove his point, seventeen figures
with examples. In what follows, the chief point of interest is that he
first quotes classical examples (chiefly from Virgil) and then
Scriptural analogues. But he does not by any means confine himself to
the chosen seventeen.
Footnote 459:
_V. infra_, p. 403.
The critical importance of this, for its time especially, can be shown
with little labour. The great danger, the great curse, so to say, of
uncritical reading, is the taking of things as a matter of course, and
the neglect to analyse and ascertain the exact causes and sources of
literary excellence. Now, in itself, the comparison of the Bible and the
classics, from the hard-and-fast point of view of a scholastic
classification of Figures, is a very small matter—and not perhaps even a
very good matter. But when these two so different things are compared,
from any point of view no matter what, the curiosity is aroused; the
mind begins to consider what it really _does_ think fine in this and
that; and in happy circumstances and cases a real—in any perhaps some
approach to a real—appreciation of the goodness of literature will
result. Bede did not intend this—he might have left no pepper to any one
who suggested it to him, as a consequence of his work. But such a
consequence at least might follow.
The references of that great authority of the early Middle Ages, Isidore
of Seville, to Rhetoric are not copious, and are [Sidenote: _Isodore._]
chiefly made up of the already consecrated tags, while the subject is
somewhat mixed with Logic. The orator is the _vir bonus dicendi
peritus_; the parts of Rhetoric are as usual, its kinds likewise. The
forensic side is almost exclusively prominent, and style has hardly any
attention at all.[460]
Footnote 460:
But see below (p. 400) for other contributions of Isidore to our
subject.
Very much more curious is the dialogue with Charlemagne, attributed to
Alcuin or Albinus. The emperor-king, in a [Sidenote: _Alcuin (?)._]
rather precious but not inelegant style, beseeches instruction on the
point; and his teacher, with grandiosity suitable (at least on the
estimate of Martianus) to the subject, protests that the spark of his
little intellect can add nothing to the flame-vomiting light of the
emperor’s genius,[461] but will obey his commands, _juxta auctoritatem
veterum_. In fact, he follows the usual lines, with occasional
indulgence in the curiously, and rather barbarically, but sometimes not
unpleasantly, ornate style which seems to have pleased the youthful
nations of modern Europe. The hard cases of the old Declamations make a
considerable appearance—in fact, very much more of the dialogue (which
is neither very long nor very short) is devoted to this side of the
matter than is the case with Bede and Isidore; and there is even a
slight glance into the subject of Fallacies. The passage on Elocution
may be scrutinised, not perhaps with very great results, but with some
interest and profit, not merely because it directly concerns us, but
also because one may at least hope to have the _auctoritas veterum_
qualified by a little personal and temporal colour. From attention to
style comes _venustas_ to the cause, and _dignitas_ to the orator. It
must be _facunda et aperta_—that is to say, grammatically correct and
clearly arranged. The best authors must be read, and their example
followed. In choosing single words (here the characteristic
above-mentioned may be thought to appear, while the sentiment, and even
the phrase, though of course not new, leads us interestingly on to the
great work of Dante) we ought to choose _electa et illustria_. Metaphor
(_translatio_) brings ornament; as the first object of clothing is to
keep the cold out, and then we make it ornamental, so, &c. In fact,
metaphor is now quite common—the very vulgar speak of the vines
“gemming,” the harvest being “luxuriant,” the crops “waving”: for what
can hardly be described by a “proper” word is illustrated by a metaphor.
Metaphors make things clearer, as “the sea _shivers_”; and sometimes
save a periphrasis, as “the dart _flies_ from the hand.” But you must be
careful only to use honest metaphors; and here the old illustrations
recur. Special figures are slightly touched, though Metonymy and
Synecdoche occur. The remarks on Composition are very meagre, chiefly
deprecating hiatus, the juxtaposition of similar syllables, &c. It is
not unnoteworthy that much more time is spent on actual delivery, that
no illustrations from the poets appear, and that the piece finishes with
remarks on religious and moral virtue, of great excellence in
themselves, but having very little to do with Rhetoric, save indirectly
in the epideictic kind.
Footnote 461:
_Licet flammivomo tuæ sapientiæ lumini scintilla ingenioli mei nil
addere possit._ This was the kind of style wherewith the Dark Ages
liked to lighten their darkness.
But it is unnecessary to hunt further through the formal Rhetorics which
appeared during the Dark and earlier [Sidenote: _Another track of
inquiry._] Middle Ages, though it may be proper to return to the subject
in the chapter dealing with Criticism after Dante. Conservative in all
their ways, though with a conservatism compatible with limitless
expatiation and rehandling, these Ages were nowhere more conservative
than in regard to Rhetoric; and Martianus by himself almost represents
their manual thereof. The influence of the _Marriage of Philology_,
which is prominent at the middle in the _Contention of Phyllis and
Flora_,[462] appears again at the very close, when Hawes “rang to
even-song,” and it will dispense all but specialists from investigation
under this head. We have seen how small is its contribution to
criticism. We must therefore look elsewhere, and, throwing back a little
to St Augustine, himself a Professor of Rhetoric, may endeavour to trace
and pick up, often in bypaths, such windfalls of expression about
literature as may enable us to compose something like a history, if not
of definite and expressed Criticism, at any rate of Literary Taste,
century by century, from the fourth to the thirteenth, through a chain
of now almost wholly Christian writers.
Footnote 462:
This very agreeable Latin verse debate on the merits of knights and
clerks as lovers, which had so long a popularity that it was
paraphrased by Chapman on the eve of the seventeenth century, dates
originally, it would seem, from the twelfth. It may be found in
Wright’s _Poems of Walter Mapes_, p. 258 (London, 1841), or in
_Carmina Burana_, p. 155 (3rd ed., Breslau, 1894).
It is probable, if not certain, that the _Principia Rhetorices_, which
has been already referred to, and which we have [Sidenote: _St Augustine
a Professor of Rhetoric._] under the name of Aurelius Augustinus, was
never written or delivered by the chief of the Latin Fathers, at Tagaste
or at Carthage, at Milan or at Rome. The loss to him is certainly not
great. The treatise, which is short (some ten quarto pages in
Capperonnier), is based upon, and apparently to a large extent quoted or
stolen from, Hermagoras, Cicero’s Rhodian master. It busies itself first
with the nature of Rhetoric, and the calumnies brought against it, and
proceeds to the examination of technicalities, not dictionary-fashion,
as had lately become usual, but continuously. Perhaps the sole argument
(a worthless one enough, for there were probably ten thousand professors
of Rhetoric doing the same thing in his time) for the Saint’s authorship
is, that no book could better answer to his own bitter description of
his worldly profession as “selling words to boys.”
But he _was_ a Professor of Rhetoric, and therefore, in a way, of
literature; and the decisive, because in most cases unintentional,
evidence of the _Confessions_[463] touches [Sidenote: _His attitude to
literature before and after his conversion._] our subject closely and
frequently. We can not only see what was Augustine’s attitude to
literature even before his conversion, but from his attitude to it after
that event we can, without rashness or unfairness, discern the causes
which make one huge and important division of late ancient and early
mediæval literature—the works of the Fathers of the Church—almost a
blank for our special purpose.
Footnote 463:
The editions of the _Confessions_, Latin and English, are so numerous
that I refer to none in particular, but quote book and chapter
throughout.
That Augustine as a little boy (_Conf._, I. 13) hated Greek and loved
Latin, especially the Latin poets,[464] has nothing in [Sidenote:
_Analysis of the_ Confessions _from this point of view_.] it more
marvellous than that any healthy English boy should hate Latin and love
(it is to be hoped that he still does love) _Robinson Crusoe_, and
_Gulliver_, and the _Morte d’Arthur_, and the _Faerie Queene_. And there
is, no doubt, some allowance to be made for that “megalomania” of
repentance which besets the strongly religious, in his regrets for the
tears he shed over dead Dido, neglectful of his own death in life as far
as the soul was concerned.[465] But his attitude to literature, as
expressed in this chapter and onwards, is suggestive not merely of
religiosity, but of a certain antiquarian priggishness. Will not even
the “sellers of grammar” confess that nobody knows when Æneas came to
Carthage, while the more learned know that he never did? Which is the
more useful, reading and writing _per se_, or the figments of poetry?
Homer, though full of “sweetly idle fiction,” was bitter to him, because
he was difficult. And then he returns to the other line, wherein, it
must be confessed, he had strong pagan as well as Christian support.
Footnote 464:
For poor little Roman boys had no _prose_ Defoes or Marryats.
Footnote 465:
Virgil was of course popular everywhere. But, as we have seen, he was
specially popular in Roman Africa, because of the local patriotism
(the strongest sentiment of ancient times) which laid hold of the
story of the hapless Queen of Carthage. I have sometimes thought that
much of the origin of Romance may be traced to this. For Africa, till
the Mahometan Deluge, was the most literary quarter of the late Roman
world.
Do not the poets assign vices to the gods, or rather give the divine
title to wicked men? (cap. 16.) Does not Terence actually make one of
his characters shelter his own sin under Jove’s example? How absurd it
was, if not worse, to have to learn by heart the wrath of Juno at her
ill-success in thwarting Æneas! Nay, he proceeds to further altitudes.
Grammar is more carefully observed than the Law of God. Rhetoric helps
you to do harm to human beings. His own father spent more money than he
could afford on sending him to Madaura and Carthage for education, but
was wholly indifferent to his spiritual welfare (Book II. cap. iii.) His
success in the Rhetoric school (III. 2) filled him with wicked pride. He
even liked stage plays; was so wretchedly mad as to grieve at their
falsehoods and shadows, and so wicked as to sympathise with the
imaginary but immoral enjoyments of lovers. He read Cicero’s
_Hortensius_ with admiration, but for its wisdom, not its form. His own
professorship of Rhetoric was a “covetous selling of tricks to conquer,”
though he himself would not fee a wizard to gain a dramatic prize. He
wrote a treatise, _De Apto et Proprio_, which we (like him) have not,
but which was evidently, if criticism at all, criticism in the abstract.
Although he refers often (_e.g._, V. 7) to his lectures on literature,
he gives us hardly a notion of his literary preferences, estimates,
views; and his Manichæan difficulties, his agonies about the origin of
evil, seem to have drawn him further and further from anything but a
mere professional connection with the subject. In his high eulogium of
Victorinus (VIII. 2) it can hardly be said that he says a word about his
literature. In all his allusions to his Chair he constantly refers to
the oratorical, or rather the debating and advocating, not the literary
side. And what to me seems the most conclusive and remarkable point of
all, the long discourse of sinful, or at least worldly, pleasures with
which Book Ten closes, contains not a reference to the pleasures of
literature, which, as we know from the beginning, he did think ungodly.
They have apparently not importance enough to be taken into
consideration, not merely in connection with the pleasures of sense
(where there might be a reason for their omission), but along with
curiosity, love of praise, fear of blame, vainglory, self-conceit, and
other purely intellectual temptations. The boy had been charmed by
Virgil and Terence—wicked charms he acknowledges—but the man, though he
certainly does not mean to deny their wickedness, has simply put them
away as childish things.
I have thought it well to be somewhat particular in regard to this
appearance of what we may call the Puritan attitude to [Sidenote: _A
conclusion from this to the general patristic view of literature._]
literature, in its earliest and perhaps almost its greatest exponent. It
is of course not entirely new—nothing indeed is ever that; and it is not
merely foreshadowed, but to a certain extent fathered, by the Platonic
views of poetry, and the Academic and Pyrrhonist views of literature
generally. But these older things here acquire an entirely new character
and importance—a character and an importance which can hardly be said to
be merely matters of history yet. Moreover, as I have hinted above, the
attitude is that—varied only by the personal factor—of all the Fathers,
more or less, until, and for some time after, the complete downfall of
Paganism, and of the great majority of ecclesiastical writers for a
thousand years later still.
Its justifications, or at least its excuses, have been often put, and
must in great measure be allowed. Not merely had it, as has been said, a
most respectable pedigree in purely Pagan philosophy, but, as a fighting
creed, it was almost indispensable to the Church Militant. Literature,
and Heathen religion, and the Seven Deadly Sins, were, it might even
seem, inextricably connected. If you wrote an epic you had to begin with
Jove or some other false god; if you wrote a parcel of epigrams it was
practically _de rigueur_ to accuse somebody of unnatural vices, or
affect a partiality for them yourself. But even if things had been
better—if there had been no danger of relapses in faith, and none of the
worst kind in practice—it was inevitable that the poor Fine Arts should
seem vain and trifling exercises to that intense “otherworldliness”
which had come (as no doubt it will at some time or other have to come
again) as an alternative to secular absorption in things secular. To
Augustine, as to monk and homilist long afterwards, not merely was the
theology of literature false, and its morals detestable, but it
was—merely as occupation—frivolous and puerile, a thing unworthy not
only of a Christian but even of a reasonable being. We shall have to
count with so much of this in the present book (and not there only) that
it seemed worth while to take note of it at the outset. It probably did
no great harm, for, as has been repeated more than once, what was wanted
was a new development of literature, as fresh and as spontaneous as
possible: and this might have been more hindered than helped by too
great a devotion to the old. Meanwhile the Seven Liberal Arts were not
much interfered with, either by the Seven Deadly Sins or by their
opponent Virtues, and the mere necessities of preaching and
homily-writing, of controversy with heretics, and of historical
summaries, obliged to practise in the more scholastic branches of
literature itself. As for the less scholastic, they came soon enough,
and more than well enough, as the rains of heaven descended and the wind
of the Spirit blew—the Northern wind.
In such a state of mind literary criticism, though the fact is not even
yet universally recognised, is practically impossible. It is the
furthest stage, and to some extent the converse, of the famous
fallacy—stated once by a critic[466] of great though one-sided ability,
and probably accepted, tacitly or implicitly, by the majority of critics
still—that a man “must take pleasure in the thing represented before he
can take pleasure in the representation.” Here the assumption is that,
if you take pleasure in the representation, you take pleasure in the
thing represented. And there is more also. Not only are the subjects of
literature in part men or devils masquerading as gods, in part men
committing more or less shameful acts; but, even when they are in
themselves unobjectionable, they are idle fiction, there is no truth or
usefulness in them. Men with immortal souls to be saved or lost should
at the worst be horrified at touching such pitch, at the best be ashamed
of burdening themselves with such trumpery. Great as is St Augustine’s
genius for producing literature, one doubts whether he had much taste
for estimating it. The story of the famous pears, which he stole, comes
in rather fatally pat. He stole them, he says, not because he wanted
them or liked them, but because it was naughty to do it. This, though no
uncommon mood, is the worst possible for the critic. It leads him, in
the same way, to praise a book or an author, not because he really likes
them, but because they are naughty—the reverse of the other fallacy and
its punishment.
Footnote 466:
Peacock, in _Gryll Grange_. The utterance is of course dramatic, not
direct, but the character in whose mouth it is put obviously expresses
the author’s sentiments.
Taking this fact into consideration, and adding to it the facts already
glanced at,—the sickness incidental to the moulting of language, the
want of helpfulness in such ancient critics as were likely to fall in
the writer’s way, the increasing scarcity, for hundreds of years, of
books, and other things of the same kind,—it will be seen to have been
not nearly but wholly impossible that the Dark and the Early Middle Ages
could produce much criticism—or any, strictly speaking. The importance
of what they did produce, with the much greater importance of the wholly
new material they offered (to be long slighted by the critical world),
will be considered at length in the Interchapter succeeding this Book.
In the course of the Book itself we shall have to consider a few
rhetorical and art-poetical treatises, entirely in Latin, between the
sixth century and the thirteenth, the solitary document of the _De
vulgari Eloquio_ at the central point of the history, and perhaps some
more _Rhetorics_ and _Poetics_, now dealing in increasing measure for
moderns with the modern tongues, between 1300 and 1500. But we shall
derive most of our material, and almost all the more interesting part of
it, from incidental expressions on literary matters in books not
professedly rhetorical or critical. And, taking century by century and
beginning with the Fifth, we are lucky in finding at once, in the latter
part of this, an interesting and half-famous writer who stands at the
gate of the Dark Ages, but is something of a Janus, avowedly looking
back on classical times, and, Christian as he is, admiring classical
writers.
The literary references in the works of Sidonius Apollinaris[467] are
pretty numerous, and no small proportion of them possesses [Sidenote:
_Sidonius Apollinaris._] direct or indirect critical bearing. On the
rather numerous occasions when the good count-bishop puts a little thing
of his, in easy or flebile verse, into his letters, he by no means
seldom prefaces or follows it with a little modest depreciation; he has
not a few references to books and reading, and now and then he
criticises in form. We could therefore hardly have a fairer chance of
knowing what, at the very eleventh hour and fiftieth minute of the
classical period, was the general state of literary taste in the West.
That Sidonius was a very well-read man, not merely for his time, and
that he had access not merely to most of the things that we have but to
many that we have not, is sufficiently established by this evidence. And
that he did not merely read but marked—that he endeavoured to shape a
style for himself from his reading—is equally certain. Nor would it be
any argument against his critical competence that this style is, if not
exactly harsh, or even very barbarous, marked by the affectation and
involution which seem to beset alike periods of immaturity and periods
of decadence, and which were specially likely to affect a period of both
at once.
Footnote 467:
Ed. Paulus Mohr, Leipsic, 1895.
But it is not easy to rank him very high. His critical utterances have a
besetting tendency to run off into those epithet-tickets which have been
referred to more than once, and which were the curse of the routine
criticism of antiquity. Still, he is very interesting both for his
position and for his intrinsic characteristics: and a selection from the
passages bearing on the subject which I have noted in my reading may, as
in former cases, be of service.
The very dedication of the Epistles to Constantius shows him to us as
modestly endeavouring to follow, if without presumptuous footsteps, “the
roundness of Symmachus, the discipline and maturity of Pliny,” for he
will not say a word of Cicero, referring only to an odd criticism of
that master[468] by Julius Titianus, and to an expression of the school
of Fronto, “the ape of the orators,” applied to Titianus himself. The
description[469] of the villa at Nîmes which, from Gibbon’s[470]
introduction of it, is perhaps better known than anything else of
Sidonius, includes that of a library containing religious works arranged
in cases among the armchairs of the ladies, and a collection of profane
authors near the men’s seats. Thus not merely Augustine, Prudentius, and
the Latin translation of Origen by Rufinus, but Varro and Horace,
received attention; while the excellence of Rufinus’ work is brought out
by a critical allusion to the translations by Apuleius of the _Phædo_,
and by Cicero of the _De Corona_.
Footnote 468:
_Quem in stilo epistulari nec Julius Titianus sub nominibus illustrium
feminarum dignum similitudine expressit._ Ep. i. 1, p. 1, ed. cit.
Footnote 469:
Ep. ii. 9, p. 42.
Footnote 470:
In a note to his account (ch. xxxvi.) of the Emperor Avitus, the
father-in-law of our poet and epistoler.
The metrical questions which were becoming of such immense critical
importance, in consequence of the impingence of vernacular accent and
rhythm on Latin, are frequently touched upon by Sidonius, not, of
course, with a full (that was impossible), but with a fair, sense of
their magnitude. He thinks, justly enough (Ep. ii. 10),[471] that
“unless a remnant, at any rate,[472] vindicates the purity of the Latin
tongue from the rust of barbarism, we shall soon have to bewail it as
utterly abolished and made away with.” And then he justifies himself for
writing a “tumultuous poem” on the church of “Pope”[473] Patiens at
Lyons in hendecasyllabics (which he seems oddly to call “trochaic
triplets” here, as looking at the end only), because he wished not to
vie with the hexameters of the eminent poets Constantius and Secundinus.
Footnote 471:
P. 44 _sq._
Footnote 472:
_Vel paucissimi._
Footnote 473:
Sidonius of course uses _papa_ for “bishop” generally.
There is a glance in iii. 3,[474] which may excite indignation in the
apostles of the “Celtic Renascence,” at the nobility of [Sidenote: _His
elaborate epithet-comparison_] his correspondent “dropping its Celtic
slough” and “imbuing itself, now with the style of oratory, now with
Camenal measures.” This was his brother-in-law Ecdicius, son of the
Emperor Avitus. The epithets come now in single spies, now in
battalions. In a very interesting letter (iv. 3), addressed _Claudiano
suo_ (not, of course, the poet, who was dead before Sidonius was born),
he says that if the “prerogative of antiquity” does not overwhelm him he
will refuse, as equals, the gravity of Fronto and the thunder of the
Apuleian weight; nay, both the Varros, both the Plinys. Then, after an
equally hyperbolical praise in detail, he addresses Claudian’s work as
“O book, multifariously pollent! O language, not of a thin, but of a
subtle mind! which neither bombasts itself out with hyperbolical
effusion, nor is thinned to tameness by _tapeinosis_!” And later:—
Footnote 474:
P. 55.
“Finally, no one in my time has had such a faculty of expressing what he
wished to express. When he[475] launches out against his adversary he
claims, of right, the _symbola_ of the characters and studies of either
tongue. He feels like Pythagoras, he divides like Socrates, he
explains[476] like Plato, he is pregnant like Aristotle; he coaxes like
Æschines, and like Demosthenes is wroth; he has the Hortensian bloom of
spring, and the fruitful summer[477] of Cethegus; he is a Curio in
encouragement, and a Fabius in delay; a Crassus in simulation, and in
dissimulation a Cæsar. He ‘suades’ like Cato, _dis_suades like Appius,
_per_suades like Tully. Yea, if we are to bring the holy fathers into
comparison, he is instructive like Jerome, destructive like Lactantius,
constructive like Augustine; he soars like Hilary, and abases himself
like John; reproves like Basil, consoles like Gregory; has the fluency
of Orosius, and the compression of Rufinus; can relate like Eusebius,
implore like Eucherius; challenges like Paulinus, and like Ambrose
perseveres.”
Footnote 475:
“He” appears to be better than “it,” as partly a personification of
the book, partly a polite _deflection_ of the flattery from the
author.
Footnote 476:
Or perhaps “expatiates” is better for “_explicat_” as a contrast to
_implicat_ for Aristotle.
Footnote 477:
_Vernat ... æstivat_, a favourite antithesis of conceit with Sidonius.
An alternative equivalent for it would be, of course, the _freshness_
of spring and the _glow_ of summer. Nor does this exhaust the
suggested pairs.
As for hymns "your commatic is copious,[478] sweet, lofty, and overtops
all lyrical dithyrambs in poetical pleasantness and historical
[Sidenote: _and minute criticisms of style and metre._] truth. And you
have this special peculiarity, that while keeping the feet or your
metres, the syllables of your feet, and the natures of your syllables,
you can, in a scanty verse, include rich words within its limits, and
the shortness of a restricted poem does not banish the length of a fully
equipped prose phrase: so easily do you manage, with tiny trochees and
tinier pyrrhics, to surpass, not merely the ternaries of the molossus
and the anapæst, but even the fourfold combination of the epitrite and
the pæon."
Footnote 478:
_Commaticus._ This word, originally employed of the alternate
_threnos_ of personage and chorus in Tragedy, passed, in rhetorical
use, to the signification of “short-cut” clauses of prose, and later
received a special application to poems (especially hymns) in very
short lines.
In this extravagant, but really interesting and important, passage, we
may probably see the critical taste of the meeting of the fifth and
sixth centuries—of the late classical and the Dark ages, at its best and
most characteristic. Although the mere taste has lost the power of
distinction, it retains distinguishing formulas. It has learnt, only too
much by heart, certain stock ticket-epithets for distinguished writers,
and it applies them fearlessly and, as far as rote goes, well. Secondly,
we see that a not unimportant habit of comparison had grown up between
the old Pagan and the new Christian literature. Thirdly, that Sidonius
was well aware that all poets of his time by no means kept “the feet of
their metres, and the syllables of their feet, and the natures of their
syllables.” And fourthly, that a lively sense of metrical _quality_—of
the effects that a poet can get out of metre—existed in him.
Fortunately, this sense survived and flourished: and it had almost
everything to do with the formation of the prosody of the new languages.
The promise of the twelfth epistle of the same book,[479] which opens
with a picture of the poet-bishop’s son reading Terence (the _Hecyra_),
while his father expounded the parallel passages in Menander’s Ἐπιτρέπων
is not maintained. But the words, _Gaius Tacitus unus ex majoribus
tuis_, opening another letter[480] to a certain Polemius, bring us once
more close to literary matters, though only to hear that (in a
characteristically Sidonian calculus) Polemius might vanquish, not only
Tacitus in oratory but Ausonius (another, and perhaps more authentic,
ancestor) in verse. If we had a few more details, the letter to Syagrius
(v. 5) on his acquired skill in German speech[481] would be priceless;
as it is, it is rather tantalising. But yet another list[482] of
flattering comparative tickets is valuable because it refers in the main
to lost authors. The diction of Sapaudus is _tam clara tam spectabilis_,
that “the division of Palæmon,[483] the gravity of Gallio, the
copiousness of Delphidius, the discipline of Agroecius, the strength of
Alcimus and the tenderness of Adelphius, the rigour of Magnus and the
sweetness of Victorius, are not only not superior but scarcely equal.”
And then, with a sort of apology for this hyperbolical catalogue, he
cites the “acrimony” of Quintilian and the “pomp” of Palladius as
perhaps comparable. The sixth and seventh books are, the first wholly,
the second mainly, occupied with letters to bishops, of whose interest
in literature Sidonius might not be sure, or to whom he might not care
to parade his own. But the eighth[484] opens with one of those
references to the nasty critics, the envious rivals and derogators, who
play the part of Demades to Demosthenes and Antony to Cicero, and of
whose likes we have perhaps heard from writers later than the Bishop of
Clermont. Their “malice is clear while their diction is obscure,” a
play, of course, on the double meanings of _clarus_ as “clear” and
“illustrious,” and of “obscure” as still observed. And the third letter
of the same has reference to an accompanying translation of the _Life of
Apollonius_, not straight from Philostratus, but as Taxius Victorianus
did it from a recension by one Nicomachus—which the author depreciates
as, by reason of haste, a confused and headlong and “Opic” translation,
thrown out in a rough-and-ready draft.
Footnote 479:
P. 87.
Footnote 480:
P. 89.
Footnote 481:
_Immane narratu est quantum stupeam sermonis te Germanici notitiam
tanta facilitate rapuisse_, pp. 108, 109.
Footnote 482:
Ep. x. p. 114.
Footnote 483:
No doubt Q. Remmius Palæmon, a very famous, very arrogant, and very
immoral grammarian and schoolmaster, who flourished from Tiberius to
Claudius, taught Quintilian, and is mentioned by Juvenal (vi. 451,
vii. 215-219).
Footnote 484:
P. 172.
The eleventh[485] contains a much longer critical passage, of something
the same character as that quoted and analysed [Sidenote: _A deliberate
critique._] above. The death of a certain Lampridius gives Sidonius an
opportunity of copying one of the little things above noted, which had
been composed in the lifetime of its subject, instead of an elegy, and
of praising the Ciceronian, Virgilian, Horatian, and other
accomplishments of that subject as usual. A prose eulogy follows—a
passage among the best of its author’s for the real feeling and force of
its descant on the _necessitas abjecta nascendi, vivendi misera, dura
moriendi_, in which we hear approaching the true Mediæval tone. The
praise is by no means unmixed as far as character goes; it only
approaches panegyric when it comes to the literary part. In orations, it
seems, the defunct was “keen, round, well composed and well struck
off,”[486] in poems “tender, good at various metres, and a cunning
craftsman.” His verses were “very exact but singularly varied both in
foot and measure,” his hendecasyllables were “smooth and knotless,” his
hexameters “detonating[487] and cothurned (fitted for the buskin)”; his
elegiacs “now echoing, now recurrent, now joined at end and beginning by
anadiplosis” (the “turn of words” in which the decadence bettered Ovid).
In his “ethica dictio” (probably equal to “ethopoeia”) he did not use
words as they came, but selected “grand, beautiful, carefully polished”
ones.[488] In controversy he was strong and nervous, in satire
careful[489] and biting, in tragic passions fierce or plaintive, in
comic urbane and multiform, in his fescennines showing the bloom of
spring (we know this Euphuism) in his words, the warmth of summer in his
wishes; watchful, economical, and “carminabund”[490] in bucolics, and in
Georgics so rustical as to have nothing clownish about him. His epigrams
aimed not at abundance but point; they were not shorter than a distich
or longer than a quatrain; they were not seldom peppered, often honeyed,
always salt. He followed Horace in swift iambics, weighty choriambics,
supple Alcaics, inspired Sapphics. In short, into whatever form of
expression his mind carried him, he was subtle, apt, instructed, most
eloquent, a swan like to soar, with wings only inferior to those of
Horace himself and Pindar. And envious fate has left us not a note of
this swan’s song![491]
Footnote 485:
P. 188 _sq_.
Footnote 486:
_Acer, rotundus, compositus, excussus._ I am never quite certain
whether these Sidonian collocations (see above, p. 385 _note_) ought
not to be taken in pairs as antithetic double epithets, “round in the
keenness, and well struck off in its composition.”
Footnote 487:
_Crepantes._
Footnote 488:
Here does Sidonius (though all unknowing, in the one case certainly,
in the other all but certainly) repeat Longinus and anticipate Dante—a
cry of the child in the night.
Footnote 489:
_Sollicitus_, perhaps “actively harassing” his enemy.
Footnote 490:
This is a word so delightful in itself that I have no heart to attempt
translation. “Carolling,” I suppose, would come nearest.
Footnote 491:
The passage contains many curious details about this not wholly
Admirable Crichton, who was at last strangled by his slaves. The
description of the dead body and its silent testimony to the
crime—_protinus argumento fuere livida cutis, oculi protuberantes, et
in obruto vultu non minora iræ vestigia quam doloris_—is vivid, and
does not compare too badly even with the great picture of
Glouceester’s corpse in _Henry VI._
We may close the account of the Sidonian criticism in prose with a mere
reference to the curious list of symbolic gestures and features of the
philosophers in ix. 9. His poems need not detain us; but reference
should also be made to the verse enclosure in Epist. ix. 13, containing
glosses on different metres[492] and poetic forms; to the exposition of
“recurrent” verses in the succeeding letter, as well as, in the
_Carmina_, to the long list, with critical remarks, of authors in ix.;
to the very interesting, and to this day sound, justification of the
introduction of exotic words and neologisms when necessary, in the prose
preface to xiv.; and to a crowd of literary references in xxiii.
Footnote 492:
P. 223.
I have been somewhat copious in dwelling on the bishop-count-poet,
because he is infinitely the most valuable document [Sidenote:
_Cassiodorus._] that we have as to the highwater-mark of the state of
critical knowledge and opinion with which the Dark or Earlier Middle
Ages started.[493] We have in the last book examined the chief text-book
of formal grammar and Rhetoric, that of Martianus, with which they were
already provided, and we need only glance at two other standards of
theirs, Boethius and Cassiodorus, who come close in time to Sidonius,
and probably to Martianus likewise. Cassiodorus wrote, like Capella, on
the Liberal arts, though in a manner at once informal and less
fantastic, and his influence in encouraging the frequenters of the
mediæval _scriptorium_ to copy ancient manuscripts deserves eternal
gratitude. But I have not yet discovered in him much material for our
special inquiry.
Footnote 493:
Indeed, such a passage as the elaborate criticism of the literary work
of Lampridius, however exaggerated and out of focus, is of quite
priceless value to us. It is the kind of thing of which we have only
too little from classical antiquity, and if it were not for the
Halicarnassian and Longinus, should have quite wofully little. It is
the kind of thing of which we have as nearly as possible nothing from
the Middle Ages, and hardly anything, of equal directness to the
individual, from the Renaissance; while, though it has been plentiful
enough for the last two hundred and fifty years, and especially for
the last hundred, the very abundance of it diminishes the individual
significance of the expressions.
Nor is the great name of Boethius here as great as elsewhere. He wrote,
indeed, on rhetorical _loci_, and the author of the [Sidenote:
_Boethius._] metres in the _Consolatio_[494] deserves no mean place in
creative literature. But if he had taken any really keen critical
interest in books, for their form as distinguished from their matter, it
must have appeared in the _Consolatio_ itself. On the contrary, as
everybody knows who has ever looked at the book, it begins with
Philosophy packing the Muses off as “strumpets and mermaidens” in a tone
half-suggestive of Plato a little the worse for Augustine. And though
the “suasion of sweetness rhetorien” is afterwards patronisingly spoken
of (Book II., Prose i.), and Homer with the honey-mouth, Lucan, and
others are quoted, yet Rhetoric is expressly warned that “she goeth the
right way only when she forsaketh not _my_ statutes.” Moreover, the
beautiful metre _Vela Neritii ducis_ is a merely moral, and almost
merely allegorical, playing on the story of Circe.
Footnote 494:
I use the agreeable Variorum edition, Leyden, 1671. No apology, I
think, is needed in this instance for not making my own translations,
but partly conveying Chaucer’s.
We can, however, see from the comparison some useful things. The stock
of actual erudition possessed by at any rate some persons was
considerable; but the number of these persons was not very large, and
both the [Sidenote: _Critical attitude of the fifth century._] “remnant”
itself[495] and its accomplishments were likely to decline and dwindle.
The new vernaculars were already assuming importance; men were
likely[496] to be chosen for positions of ecclesiastical eminence
(almost the only ones in which study of literature was becoming
possible), because of their bilingual skill, or to be driven by such
positions to study of the vernacular. And this bilingualism was likely
not merely to barbarise even their Latin style, but to draw them away
from the study of classical Latin, and still more Greek. In regard to
the latter, we see further, from two passages of Sidonius quoted above,
that persons of very considerable education were apt to use translations
of the Greek fathers, as well as of Pagan writings, in preference to the
original. Yet again we see that even the most accomplished scholars of
the time (and Sidonius himself may certainly claim that distinction)
were, on the one hand, more and more acquiescing in what, to borrow
Covenanting phraseology, we may call the “benumbing, deadening, and
soul-destroying” list of ticket-epithets: and, on the other, were
gradually losing a sense of the relative proportions of things—of the
literary ratio of patristic to classical literature, and of the
productions of their own day to those of the great masters, whether
classical or patristic. And thirdly, we see that even so careful a
metrical student as the Bishop of Clermont was succumbing to the charm
of “recurrent” verses, acrostics, telestics, and all the rest of it.
Footnote 495:
_V. supra_, p. 384, and note.
Footnote 496:
As in the well-known cases, somewhat later, of St Faron and of
Mummolenus.
On the other hand, this process of “losing grip” is very far from the
state in which we find it by the time that we are in full Middle Age:
and, for good as well as for evil, the glorious hotch-potch of that
period is still distant. Virgil is not yet an enchanter or anything like
it: he and his works are perfectly well placed in their proper literary
and historical connections. If, on the side of form, there is perhaps
already a rather perilous tendency to see no very great difference
between Orosius and Livy, there is none to put Dares (who probably did
not exist) on a level as an authority with Homer, or above him, in point
of matter. And while the fables about Alexander probably _did_ exist,
men of education did not think of mixing them up with the facts.
The most favourable sign of all, however, is that metrical solicitude
which has been already more than once referred to. The anxiety which
Sidonius shows to suit his metres to his subject would do credit to a
much better poet in a much more “enlightened” age; and it is surely not
fantastic to see in his constant reference to success or failure in
adjusting “syllables to feet, and feet to measures,” that the difference
of the classical prosody from the newer, half-accentual quantification
even in Latin, and from the vernacular rhythms sounding all over Europe,
was forcing itself, consciously or unconsciously, on his mind. And it
cannot be repeated too often that to construct and perfect new
prosodies, in Latin and in the vernaculars alike, was perhaps the
greatest critical-practical problem that the Middle Age had before it.
The sixth century has even fewer lights among its gathering gloom; in
the beginning and at the end of the seventh a kind of rally of torches
is made by Isidore and Bede. [Sidenote: _The sixth—Fulgentius._] There
are, however, two authors at least in the sixth who are full of
significance, even if that significance be too much of a negative kind.
These are the African grammarian Fulgentius, with his _Expositio
Virgiliana_, probably in the earlier half, and the poet-priest Venantius
Fortunatus, certainly in the later.
Fulgentius[497] holds something like a position in the history of
Allegory, being not infrequently breveted with the rank of go-between,
or the place of fresh starting-point, between the last development of
the purely classical allegory in Claudian, and the thick-coming
allegoric fancies of the early Christian homilists and commentators,
which were to thicken ever and spread till the full blossoming of
Allegory in the _Romance of the Rose_, and its busy decadence
thenceforward. Unluckily, Allegory was, as we have seen, no novelty in
criticism; but rather a congenital or endemic disease—and Fulgentius
only marks a fresh and furious outburst of it. Virgil, a favourite
everywhere in the late Roman world, was, it has been said, an especial
favourite in Africa: and Fulgentius would appear to have given the
reins, not exactly to the steed, but to the ass, of his fancy, in
reference to the Mantuan.
Footnote 497:
Fabius Planciades Fulgentius (to describe whom in appropriate epithet
would require the pen and ink of Ritson, though his recent editor says
that the _injucundum opus_, as Reifferscheid had called it, had become
to him _jucundissimum_ in performance) used to be buried in the
_Mythographi Latini_. The benevolence of Herr Teubner has however made
him accessible separately, or rather with a dim little brace of
satellite Fulgentii (ed. Helm, Leipsic, 1898).
The writings of the Fulgentian clan (none of which, fortunately, is
long) consist of (1) three books of _Mitologiæ_ (_Mythologiæ_), of (2)
the _Expositio Virgilianæ Continentiæ [Sidenote: _The Fulgentii and
their books._] secundum Philosophos Morales_ which is our principal
text, and of (3) a shorter _Expositio Sermonum Antiquorum_, attributed
to Fabius Planciades Fulgentius, who was probably of African birth, and
probably lived in the early sixth century; of (4) a tractate, _De
Ætatibus Mundi et Hominis_, attributed to Fabius Claudius Gordianus
Fulgentius; and (5) of a note on the _Thebaid_ of Statius, attributed to
Fulgentius, Saint and Bishop. The personalities of these persons are to
the last degree unknown; and it is very uncertain whether they were in
reality one or two or three. The books we may best cite as 1, 2, 3, 4,
5.
4 is far better written and more sensible than the others; but it has
nothing to do with our subject. 3 is a short list (sixteen pages and
sixty-two articles) of notes on out-of-the-way words (_abstrusi
sermones_), where it is curious to find among really unusual
locutions—_friguttire_, _suggrundaria_, _tittivilitium_, and the
like—such to us everyday ones as _problema_ and _auctio_. 2 and 5
concern our business, equally in substance, unequally in importance and
extent, and to understand them both, it is desirable to read 1 at least
cursorily, although it, like them, is a tissue of appallingly barbarous
Latin—enshrining allegorical interpretations as ridiculous as the most
absurd in the _Gesta Romanorum_,[498] and derivations which in their
sheer serious insanity surpass the most promising efforts of the clever
and sportive schoolboy in the same kind. As no one, I think, who reads
this book will regard me as a detractor of the Dark and Middle Ages, I
may speak here without fear and without favour.
Footnote 498:
Some of the morals of the _Gesta_ are of course not in the least
ridiculous: but others “bear the bell” in that respect.
Having surveyed Mythology from the point of view of the most grovelling
allegory, etymologically assisted by such fancies as that Teiresias
(T_e_resias in his spelling) is derived [Sidenote: _The_ Super Thebaiden
_and_ Expositio Virgiliana.] from _theros_ and _æon_, meaning “eternal
summer,” and that Ulixes _Græce_ (it will go near to be thought shortly
that Fulgentius knew less Greek than Shakespeare) is “quasi-_olon xenos_
id est omnium peregrinus,” Fulgentius seems to have turned to
literature. If he also wrote the note on the _Thebaid_ attributed to the
Sainted Bishop (and it is very much in the same style), he confined
himself to a brief argument of the story, with a few etymologies, such
as “_Creon quasi cremens omnia_,” and a short preface. In this he tells
us that he “can never without grand ammiration[499] retract the
ininvestigable prudence of the poets, and the immarcescible vein of
their genius”: and having thus prepared rejoicing for the heart of the
Limousin scholar nine hundred years ahead, he sets the fashion to Lyly
by observing “Diligit puer nucem ad ludum integram: sapiens autem et
adultus frangit ad gustum.” But this, though not insignificant, is a
slight thing.
Footnote 499:
The forms _ammiratio_, _nimfa_, &c. are interesting as showing Latin
in its transformation to Romance.
The _Expositio Virgiliana_ or _Virgiliana Continentia_ (this word being
late Latin for “contents”) is itself not long: it fills, with _apparatus
criticus_, some five-and-twenty pages. If it were not written in a most
detestable style, combining the presence of more than the affectation
and barbarism of Martianus with a complete absence of his quaintness and
full-blooded savour, it would be rather agreeable to read: even as it
is, it is full of interest. We catch Virgil in mid-flight through the
void, from that position of universal exponent of sober literary art
which we have seen him occupy with Macrobius, to his rank as beneficent
enchanter a few centuries later. The Bucolics and Georgics are full of
such _Phisica secreta_, such _misticæ rationes_, that they are actually
dangerous to touch. He has passed over the _interna viscera nullius pæne
artis_ in these books. In the first Eclogue he has physically summed up
the three lives (active, contemplative, and enjoying); in the fourth, he
is a prophet; in the fifth, a priest; in the sixth, partly a musician,
partly a physiologist; in the seventh, _botanicen dinamin tetigit_, he
has touched the power of botany;[500] in the eighth he has pointed out
magic and the apotelesmatic of the musician; combining this with
_euphemesis_,[501] in the ninth.
Footnote 500:
It is very agreeable to see how the poor copyist of one MS., utterly
nonplussed by the learning of Fulgentius, has excogitated the blessed
words “totakicendi namin.”
Footnote 501:
This, disentangled from various _voces nihili_ in the MS., is probably
used in one of the senses which εὐφημία more properly bears in
classical Greek, “liturgical writing,” “prayer and praise.”
In the first Georgic he is throughout an astrologer and then a
“eufemetic”; in the second, a physiologist and medical man; in the
third, wholly an aruspex; and in the fourth, is to the fullest musical.
But Fulgentius will not meddle further with the details of these books;
and, after a breathless and intricate prologue, attacks the _Æneid_ in a
manner easily to be conjectured from what has been said. Every word,
every syllable almost, of the first line, is tortured to yield an
allegory; the account being thrown into the form, first of a dialogue
between poet and interpreter, and then of a long speech from the former.
Achates is “Græce quasi _aconetos_ id est tristitiæ consuetudo.” Iopas
is “quasi _siopas_ id est taciturnitas puerilis.” The progress of the
story is the growth of human life. The wanderings of the first three
books are the tales that amuse youth; the fourth shows how love
distracts early manhood; the fifth displays it turning to generous
exercises; the sixth is deep study of nature and things; the rest active
life. And if anybody wishes to know why Turnus’ charioteer was called
Metiscus, “Metiscos enim Græce est ebriosus.”
It cannot be necessary to say much of this, which speaks for itself; it
is, as we said at first, the _intellectus_ (or rather the want of
intellect) _sibi permissus_ and expatiating unchecked. _Qui l’aime le
suive!_
Venantius Honorius Clementianus Fortunatus[502] (for a plethora of names
was as characteristic of the Latin as of other decadences) is a much
more interesting figure, and his [Sidenote: _Venantius Fortunatus._]
critical importance, if less direct, is not really inferior. He goes in
the general literary memory with Sidonius, as the twin-light of not yet
wholly barbaric Gaul; and he had probably more original poetic gift than
his predecessor. At least, I can find nowhere in Sidonius anything
approaching the throb and thrill of his two great and universally known
hymns, _Pange Lingua_ and _Vexilla Regis_—the earliest, perhaps, to
attain that ineffable word-music of hymn-Latin, which is entirely
independent of mere tune, mere setting, and which is not only equal to,
but independent of, the choicest sound-music of either ancient or modern
verse. He was also a livelier writer; and though he has made even
further progress in the direction of affectation and bombast, these
things rather add a piquancy, if not to his painful official praises of
Queen Brunehault, at any rate to his expression of his half-pious,
half-human affection for Radegund the Queen and Agnes the Abbess, his
account of the sad results when the hospitable Mummolenus[503] would
make him eat too many peaches, and his admirable description of his sail
on the Moselle.
Footnote 502:
Ed. in two parts—the prose by F. Leo and the verse by B. Krusch—among
the _Monumenta Germaniæ Historica_ (Berlin, 1881-85).
Footnote 503:
Not the Bishop afterwards famous as first known to preach in French.
Moreover, he was certainly accomplished in all the learning of his time.
He could even write very fair, if not delightful, sapphics. And he is
not to be treated with the scornful contempt which some have heaped upon
him, merely because he composed (with an amount of labour which makes
one’s brain and eyes ache to think of) acrostics and cross-poems of
various degrees of artificiality. He has one marvellous structure of the
latter kind,[504] in which not only do the frame-letters of the scheme
make sense, but correspondences, interwoven in the text trace out, also
in sense, a sort of cross _patée_, as thus:—
[Illustration]
Here the dots represent (though they are fewer) letters doing double
duty, as part of sentences straight across, and in the lines of the
figure itself. “The grace and liberty of the composition,” as some one
says, may indeed be lost in such intricacies, yet are they not in
themselves unliterary as a pastime.
Footnote 504:
Part i. p. 30. Another design of only minor intricacy, but not fully
filled in, appears a little later.
It must, however, be most frankly confessed that the literary
expressions and references which we find in Fortunatus are (in the sense
in which the word has so often to be used in this part of our work)
“tell-tales.”
The Preface of his Poems,[505] addressed to Pope Gregory, opens with a
somewhat emphatic and inflated laudation of the great men of letters of
old, who were, we learn, "provident in invention, serious in partition,
balanced in distribution, pleasant with the heel of epilogues, fluent
with the fount of bile, beautiful with succise terseness, adorned from
head to foot [literally "alike crowned and buskined"] with tropes,
paradigms, periods, epicheiremes," which gives us a pretty clear idea of
what seemed to Fortunatus to be literature. It contains also some
touches of the “Italic”[506] writer’s contempt of those who “make no
distinction between the shriek of the goose and the song of the swan,”
who love “the harp buzzing barbarous _leods_.” But far fewer direct
references to literature occur in these poems than in those of Sidonius.
In II. ix.,[507] to the Parisian clergy who bade him resume his
long-abandoned lyre, he takes it up purely as the hymn-writer, not the
man of letters. There is more of the attitude of the latter in the prose
epistle (III. iv.)[508] to Bishop Felix, but it does not come to very
much. In the tenth of the same book,[509] the same bishop (who had, it
seems, turned a river from its course) receives a complimentary
reference to Homer, but none to Herodotus. Yet another bishop (of the
undeniably Frankish name of Bertechramnus) is complimented, in the
eighteenth, on his epigrams.[510] But Fortunatus, after much applause,
does not fear (let us hope that the Frank was more placable than his
brother prelate of Granada later) to add—
“Sed tamen in vestro quædam sermone notavi
Carmine de veteri furta novella loqui,
Ex quibus in paucis superedita syllaba fregit
Et pede læsa suo musica clauda gemit.”
Let us congratulate Venantius on not yielding to the heresy of the
“extra-metrical syllable,” which has deceived some of the very elect in
more illuminated days. Some slight glimmers are given by the
flattery,[511] more elaborate than anything yet noticed, of still
another bishop, Martin of Gallicia: and in V. iii.[512] we get a
ticket-list of the same kind (though shorter and slighter) as those of
which Sidonius is so prodigal. In this, after Athanasius has been
designated _fortis_, Hilary _clarus_, Martin _dives_, and Ambrose
_gravis_, he adds the distich—
“Gregorius _radiat_, sacer Augustinus _inundat_,
Basilius _rutilat_, Cæsariusque _micat_.”
Footnote 505:
Part i. p. 1.
Footnote 506:
Fortunatus seems to have been carefully styled Presbyter _Italicus_.
Cf. “Romanos” below. He was born at, or near, Treviso.
Footnote 507:
P. 37.
Footnote 508:
P. 52.
Footnote 509:
P. 62.
Footnote 510:
P. 72.
Footnote 511:
In the prose overture of Bk. V., p. 101 _sq._
Footnote 512:
Ll. 37-40 (p. 107).
The epistle to Syagrius of Autun (V. vi.)[513], which introduces another
elaborate cross-poem, contains a vindication of it, by a twist of the
Horatian tag to the effect that as painting and poetics are so like, why
should you not combine them in such a fashion? After which the
intricacies of the poem itself are carefully explained. The reference to
“us Romans” in the poem to Sigebert (V. ii. 98)[514] (where he
compliments the king on his skill, Sicambrian as he is, in the Latin
tongue) suggests that the writer would have been scantly grateful for
the inclusion of his work among “Monumenta _Germaniæ_.”
Footnote 513:
P. 112.
Footnote 514:
P. 133.
The genuine prose works of Fortunatus, consisting only of a few Saints’
Lives, do not promise much; but there is at least one remarkable passage
in them. It is the opening of the Life of Saint Marcellus[515] in which
his customary deprecation takes this form. “Illustrious orators of the
most eloquent genius, whose speeches are distinguished by varied
flowers, and shadowed by the vernal tendrils of eloquence, are wont
deliberately to seek common causes and sterile matter, that they may
show themselves as possessing an inexhaustible flow of speech on the
smallest subjects, and as able to inundate the dryest themes with their
internal founts of rhetoric. Men not so clever cannot even treat great
subjects,” &c.
Footnote 515:
Part ii. p. 49.
And this, falling in with the other glimpses we have obtained, gives no
misty view of the critical standpoint of this agreeable writer. The
literary _nisus_, the literary tone, are fairly well maintained; there
is no glaring lack of positive knowledge; and neither style nor sense
shows anything like the degradation of Fulgentius. But Fortunatus, far
more than Sidonius, is, in the good old phrase, “to seek” in the general
field of matters literary, and especially in its critical quarters.
Glitter and clatter, tinsel and crackers, are in prose, if not in verse
(he is far more sober there), too much his ideals. The curse of the
ancient formal Rhetoric has so far outlasted its blessings, that the
expression of opinion last quoted would suit, and almost exaggerate, the
position of the worst of the old declamation-makers. As to prosody, he
has to some extent, if not wholly, “kept the bird in his bosom,” and his
affection for subtleties in arrangement is, as has been said, not so
wholly to his discredit as Mr Addison and Mr Pope thought. But it is
rather a dangerous support; and he has very few others.
As Fulgentius and Venantius have stood for the sixth, so Isidore and
Bede[516] may stand for the seventh century, while Bede’s flourishing
time stretches into the eighth.
Footnote 516:
Aldhelm, between the two, wrote on metre, and is a considerable and
characteristic writer for his time, but needs no detailed treatment
here.
Isidore’s treatment of Grammar[517] is much fuller than his handling of
her showier sister Rhetoric.[518] It fills the whole of [Sidenote:
_Isidore of Seville again_.] the First Book of the curious Encyclopædia
called the _Origines_, and is much more liberally arranged than the
usual grammatical treatise, including a great deal of applied matter of
various kinds, visibly filching Tropes and Figures from Rhetoric
herself, and, besides dealing with Prosody, even devoting sections to
the Fable and to History under more than one head. There is much
interesting (if not for us strictly relevant) matter in the earlier
chapters, where we read that _literæ_ are _quasi legiteræ_, and that
Greek and Latin appear to have arisen out of Hebrew. The _vitia_, from
barbarism and solœcism downwards, are pure Rhetoric, containing, as
they do, things like _tapeinosis_ and amphibology, with which Grammar,
as such, has certainly nothing to do; and they are near the rhetorical
side of Criticism herself. The Metaplasms which follow, as purely
verbal, may be claimed by the elder sister, but the _schemata_ and the
_tropi_ are unquestioned usurpations. And thereafter, with Chapter
Thirty-Seven _De Prosa_, we are almost on our own ground.
Footnote 517:
The _Origines_ or _Etymologiæ_, as a whole, form vol. iii. of
Lindemann’s _Corpus Grammaticorum_ (Leipsic, 1833), but this can
usually be obtained separate, and is worth having. It, of course,
repeats the _Rhetoric_, which is merely one section of it.
Footnote 518:
See above, p. 374 _sq._
Isidore, if not (save in his title) very original, is judicious in his
selections from the public stock, and puts them together in a much more
useful fashion than some authors of “composition-books” a good deal his
juniors. Prose is “a straightforward form of speech freed from metre.”
Metres (he has given “feet” a good deal earlier) are the fixed
arrangements of feet which constitute verse. Their names are classified
and accounted for, as are, subsequently, the chief forms of poetry in
which they appear. The origination of these is claimed for various
sacred persons—of the Hymn for David, “who was long before Ennius,” of
the Epithalamium for Solomon. Not a few of the definitions, though
desultory and oddly selected, are noteworthy, and the considerable space
given to that of the Cento is characteristic of the age.
Fable, as has been said, has a section to itself, an honour which is
prophetic of—and considering Isidore’s influence may, to some extent,
have caused—the great attention paid in the Middle Ages to that kind.
The History sections, though four in number, are much shorter—indeed,
scarcely so long together as the single one allotted to Fable, which
fact also is true, as the needle is, to the pole of the time. It is much
better, Isidore thinks, that a man should only write of what he has
actually seen. But History is not useless reading. Strictly, it is of
our own time; “Annals” of the past; while Ephemeris is a diurnal and
Kalendarium a monthly history. Finally the book ends with a contrast of
_historia_, _argumentum_, and _fabula_. The first is of true things
really done; the second of things which, though they have not been done,
might be; the third of things which neither have been done nor can be,
because they are contrary to nature. Here _argumentum_ clearly looks
towards oratory: with regard to the difference between _historia_ and
_fabula_, it must be admitted that the ages which followed very
scrupulously forgot their teacher’s warning.
But even this does not exhaust our indebtedness to a very agreeable
work, full of good sense and sound learning. The Sixth Book, which
begins with an account of the Old and New Testament, diverges to the
consideration of books generally. A note on famous libraries leads
Isidore to record the chief authorities on Biblical Exegesis, from whom
he passes to Latin libraries, to others (those of the Martyr Pamphilus
and of Jerome), and thence to authors. Much writing attracts him first:
and Varro, the Greek Chalcenterus, Origen, and St Augustine are picked
out, the not entirely single-edged compliment being paid to the last,
that not only could nobody write his books by working day and night, but
nobody could read them completely by a similar expenditure of time and
labour. An odd division of works follows, into _excerpta_ or _scholia_,
“homilies,” and “tomes” or books,[519] or volumes: and this is followed
by a string of remarks, as before rather desultory, on different kinds
of books and writings, commentaries, prefaces, and what not. Then
Isidore passes to the material side, and discusses waxen and wooden
tablets, parchment, paper, with something about _format_. The staff and
the plant of libraries follow; and then, returning from things profane
to things divine, the book finishes with an account of the Calendar and
the Offices of the Church.
Footnote 519:
Perhaps this is not so odd as it looks. _Excerpta_ or _scholia_ are,
_individually_, scraps; “homilies,” or essays, are only parts of a
book: _tomi_ are books substantive.
Those to whose taste and intellect this kind of thing appears despicable
must, of course, be permitted to despise it. Others will prefer to
recognise, with interest and sympathy, the combination of an extremely
strong desire for knowledge, and the possession of no small quantity
thereof, not merely with great disadvantages of resource and supply, but
with a most curious and (if it were not so healthy and so promising)
pathetic inability to distinguish, to know exactly where to plant the
grip, what to discard, what simply to neglect. And they, once more, will
see in this whole attitude, in this childhood crying for the light,
something more encouraging than the complacent illumination of certain
other ages, with which, perhaps, they may be more fully acquainted.
Bede,[520] a century later than Isidore, presents a changed but not a
lesser interest. It is utterly improbable that the Bishop [Sidenote:
_Bede again._] of Seville found himself in face of any vernacular
writing that could be called in the least literary—if any vernacular
except Latin and Old Basque can be supposed to have existed in Spain at
all. Bede’s circumstances were quite different. The most famous passage
in his writings—the story of Cædmon—is sufficient to tell us, even if we
did not know it from other testimony, and from his extant death-bed
verses, that he was well acquainted with vernacular poetry.
Footnote 520:
Bede’s treatises on Metric and Orthography, besides being accessible
in the various collected editions of his works, are to be found in
vol. vii. part ii. of Keil’s _Grammatici Latini_ (Leipsic, 1878).
But he seems to have thought it either unnecessary or undesirable to
give any critical attention to it. His _Ars Metrica_[521], like his
_Orthography_[522] and his _Rhetoric_,[523] concerns [Sidenote: _His_
Ars Metrica.] itself strictly with Latin. That this was on the whole
better for the time, and so indirectly for us, who are the offspring of
that time; that it was better for the vernaculars to be left to grow and
seed themselves, and be transformed naturally without any attempt to
train and so to cramp them; that it was, on the other hand, all
important that the hand of discipline should be kept on the only
“regular” writing, that of Latin—we may not only admit with frankness,
but most eagerly and spontaneously advance and maintain. But the carnal
man cannot help sighing for a tractate—a tractatule even of the
tiniest—on English verse, from the Venerable One. There are, however, in
the _Ars Metrica_ one large and several small crumbs of comfort. It is a
pity that the learned and accurate Keil should have spoken so
scornfully[524] of the undoubted truth that, while Bede supplements the
precepts of the old grammarians in no whit, his whole usefulness lies in
regard to the examination of more recent poets, and, as he calls them,
“modern versifiers”; and should, a little further, have still more
scornfully declined[525] to trouble himself with verifying unnamed
references to such persons as Prudentius, Sedulius, Venantius
Fortunatus, and others. To despise any age of literature is not
literary: and to ignore it (as the motto which I have ventured to borrow
from the excellent Leyser hath it in other words) is not safe. I think
we may ask Herr Keil this question, “Is it not exactly of the _moderni
versificatores_ that Bede can speak to us with advantage?” Do we, except
by a supererogation of curiosity, want remarks from him on Virgil and
Ovid?
Footnote 521:
Ed. cit. (with Introd.), pp. 219-260.
Footnote 522:
Ibid., pp. 261-294.
Footnote 523:
See p. 374.
Footnote 524:
Ed. cit., p. 221.
Footnote 525:
_Ut longum et molestum erat, ita in hoc genere scriptorum parum utile
esse videbatur._
Bede (who addresses the tract to the same Cuthbert whom we have to thank
for the charming account of his death) begins with the letter, goes on
to the syllable, and then has a chapter of peculiar interest on _common_
syllables—those stumbling-blocks to so many modern students of English
prosody. The quantity of syllables in various positions is then dealt
with successively, and next the metres, cæsura, elision, &c. One may
note as specially interesting the section _Quæ sit optima Carminis
forma_ (p. 243), both as showing long before, in reference to the
hexameter, the same “striving after the best” which appears in Dante’s
extrication of the _canzone_ and the hendecasyllable from meaner forms
and lines, and as indicating something like a sense of that
“verse-paragraph” which was to be the method of Shakespeare and of
Milton. In dealing with these things he sometimes quotes, and still more
frequently relies upon, Mallius Theodorus. But the passage which, if it
existed alone, would make the book valuable (though in that case, as no
doubt in many others, we should be prone to think that we had lost
something more precious than it actually is), comes under the head _De
Rhythmo_. After saying that the “Common books of a hundred metres”[526]
will give many of these which he has omitted, he goes on thus: “But
rhythm seems to be like metres, in that it is a modulated arrangement of
words, governed not by metrical rule, but _by the number of syllables_,
according to the judgment of the ear. And there can be rhythm without
metre, though there can be no metre without rhythm: or, as it may be
more clearly defined, metre is rhythm with modulation, rhythm modulation
without proportion. But for the most part you will find, by a certain
chance, proportion likewise in rhythm: not that any artificial
discipline is used, but from the conduct of the sound and the modulation
itself; and such as the poets of the people naturally produce in a
rustic, learned poets in a learned manner.”[527] And then he quotes, as
examples of iambic and trochaic rhythms respectively, the well-known
hymns, _Rex æterne Domine_ and _Apparebit repentina_.
Footnote 526:
_Libris centimetrorum simplicibus examinata._ “Centimeter” is “the
poet who employs a hundred metres,” or the critic who discusses them.
Sidonius (Carm. ix. 264), in a passage referred to above (p. 389),
applies it to Terentianus Maurus, who certainly deserves it both in
theory and practice (_v._ his book, ed. Lachmann, Berlin, 1836).
Footnote 527:
_Vulgares poetæ._
Now this, which, though partly a result of, is quite different from, the
classical opposition of rhythm and metre, is a thing of the first
importance, and could not have been said by any one who had neglected
the _moderni versificatores_: while it would perhaps not have been said
so clearly and well by any one who had not known, and paid some
attention to, the rising vernaculars. Even if, as Keil thinks, Bede
followed such writers as Victorinus and Audax, he confirmed and
strengthened this following by his study of recent verse.
I do not perceive any great crux in this passage: but Guest[528] was
puzzled by the phrase _numero syllabarum_, which he seems to have taken
as meaning that rhythm was more, not less, strict than metre in syllabic
regularity. I am not sure that the words bear this interpretation: but,
even if they did, we must remember that the rhythms _of which Bede was
speaking_ are very strict syllabically, and admit little or no
equivalence. The more prudish hymn-writers even dislike elision, and
give every syllable its value.
Footnote 528:
_History of English Rhythms_, Bk. iii. chap. vi. (p. 472, ed. Skeat).
He also speaks of “discrepancies” in the different copies: but Keil’s
_apparatus_ gives no important variants in the MSS.
It is not from caprice or idleness that the somewhat minute examination
thus given to the opening centuries of the Dark [Sidenote: _The Central
Middle Ages to be more rapidly passed over._] or early Middle Ages will
now be exchanged for a more rapid flight over the central portion of the
same division of history. There are two very good reasons for this
course. The first is, that there is a very great absence, probably of
all material, certainly of material that is accessible. The second is,
that even if such material existed and could be got at, it would
probably be of little if of any service. When conditions of rhythmical
composition in Latin were once settled, that composition was pursued
with delightful results,[529] but with half traditional, half
instinctive, absence of critical inquiry as to form. It was impossible
that any such inquiry should take place, in the case of the vernaculars,
until they had reached a state of actual creative development, which
none of them enjoyed till the twelfth century, and hardly any of them
till the thirteenth. As for appreciation, other than traditional, of
authors classical, patristic, or contemporary, this was rendered a rare
thing by that very mental constitution of the Middle Ages which has
already been often referred to, and which will be more fully discussed
in the Interchapter following this book. This constitution, rich in many
priceless qualities, almost entirely lacked self-detachment on the one
hand, and egotistic introspection on the other. It can very seldom have
occurred to any Mediæval to isolate himself from the usual estimate of
writers—to separate his opinion of their formal excellence from the
interest, or the use, of their contents. And even if it had so occurred
to any one, he would probably not have thought that opinion worth
communicating. From which things, much more than from the assumed
shallowness or puerility, a thousand years saw an almost astoundingly
small change in regard to the matters with which we deal. Boethius and
Martianus are text-books to the early sixteenth century as to the early
sixth: the satirical lampoons of the religious wars in France burlesque
the form, and use the language, of the hymns of Venantius
Fortunatus:[530] Hawes and Douglas look at literature and science with
the eyes of Isidore, if not even of Cassiodorus. Whether this
conservatism did not invite, disastrously, the reaction of the
Renaissance-criticism, we shall have to consider later; it is certain
that it limits, very notably, the material of the present book, and
especially of this portion of the present chapter. On two very
remarkable books of the earliest thirteenth century, the _Labyrinthus_
attributed to Eberhard, and the _Nova Poetria_ of Geoffrey de Vinsauf,
we may dwell with the utmost advantage. Otherwise a few notes, chiefly
on the formal _Arts Poetic_ of the mid-Middle Age, are not only all that
need, but almost all that can, be given before we turn to the great
mediæval document of our subject, the _De Vulgari Eloquio_ of Dante.
Footnote 529:
For the understanding reader there is perhaps no subdivision of
literature more constantly delectable and refreshing than the Latin
hymns of the sixth-thirteenth centuries on the one hand, and on the
other the lighter work contained in such collections as the _Carmina
Burana_, Edélestand du Méril’s _three_ issues of _Poésies Populaires
Latines_, Wright’s _Poems of Walter Mapes_, _&c._
Footnote 530:
Cf. the ferocious, but vigorous, lampoon on Catherine of Montpensier
and Jacques Clément, entitled _Prosa Cleri Parisiensis ad ducem de
Mena_ (_Anciennes Poésies Françaises_, vol. ii. _Bibl. Elzévirienne_:
Paris, 1855).
In the vernacular languages it is hardly necessary to do more than refer
to the instructions for accomplishing the intricacies [Sidenote:
_Provençal and Latin treatises._] of Provençal verse found in that
tongue;[531] the Latin rhythmics are rather more interesting. Until
quite recently, access to them, save in the case of those students who
unite palæographical accomplishment with leisure and means to travel all
over Europe, was almost confined to two precious collections, the
_Reliquiæ Antiquæ_ of Wright and Halliwell, and the plump and pleasing
volume of Polycarp Leyser, which, among its varied treasures, gives the
entire _Labyrinthus_ of Eberhard, the most important of them all. Now,
however, the really admirable industry of Signor Giovanni Mari has
collected, not merely the metrical part of the _Labyrinthus_, and the
work (also rather famous) of John de Garlandia, but no less than six
others, all of the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries.[532] It is indeed
not impossible that the first of these, the _De Rhythmico Dictamine_,
may in its original have been as old as the twelfth, to which the
_Labyrinthus_ itself used also to be assigned.
Footnote 531:
_V._ Bartsch, _Grundriss zur Gesch. der Prov. Lit._, p. 65 _sq._, on
Faidit’s _Donat_, Ramon Vidal’s _Rasos de Trobar_, &c.
Footnote 532:
_Reliquiæ Antiquæ_, by T. Wright & J. O. Halliwell, 2 vols., London,
1845.
P. Leyser, _Historia Poetarum et Poematum Medii Ævi_, Halle, 1721.
G. Mari, _I Trattate Medievali di Ritmica Latina_, Milan, 1899.
The _Dictamen_,[533] the MSS. of which are found all over Europe, is
very short. It lays down firmly the principle, which was [Sidenote:
_The_ De Dictamine Rhythmico.] later to differentiate Romance from
Teutonic, especially English, prosody, that _rhythmus est consonans
paritas syllabarum sub certo numere comprehensarum_; it sets the limits
of the line at a minimum of four syllables and a maximum of fourteen; it
designs rhyme throughout as _consonance_; it gives examples from
well-known hymns, from the poems attributed to Mapes and some not
elsewhere known; and it supplies minute distinctions of kind as
“transformed,” “equicomous,” “orbiculate,” “serpentine” rhythms. The
tractatule is strictly limited to rhythm proper: classical metres do not
appear in it. A rehandling by a certain “Master Sion” differs in its
examples, and is rather more minute in its subdivisions: and there is
yet a third version or pair of versions showing the authority and
general influence of the treatise, while the _Regulæ de Rhythmis_ hardly
differ essentially, and lead to the same conclusion.
Footnote 533:
First given in _Reliquiæ Antiquæ_, i. 30-32. The others (except the
_Labyrinthus_) are in Mari only.
The _Ars Rhythmica_ of John de Garlandia is a much more elaborate
composition, which originally followed upon similar [Sidenote: _John of
Garlandia._] treatments of “prose” and “metre.” It is remarkable on the
one hand for giving, not mere verses, but whole poems as examples, and
on the other for varying the same theme in different rhythmical
dispositions. The terms of ancient metric are also borrowed rather more
freely than in the _Dictamen_; and great attention is paid to
“rhetorical colours” of verse—homœoteleuton and the like. It is much
longer than any form of the _Dictamen_, and has a supplement dealing
with the strictly metrical forms usual in hymns. This does not exhibit
the learned John Garland (he may have been an Englishman) as an expert
in literary history, since he writes: “Saphicum, a Sapho _muliere
quadam_ quæ fuit inventrix hujus metri: adonicum ab Adone inventore.”
But in his liberal contribution of probably original examples he
includes an _Oda de Archidiacono_, which might have been useful in a
famous investigation. In fact, probably a major part of the treatise
consists of not very excellent verse.