Chapter 1 (1)

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

THE CONDITIONS OF LATIN CRITICISM—CICERO—HIS ATTITUDE TO LUCRETIUS—HIS
RHETORICAL WORKS—HIS CRITICAL VOCABULARY—HORACE—THE ‘AD
PISONES’—ITS DESULTORINESS—AND ARBITRARY CONVENTIONALITY—ITS
COMPENSATIONS—BRILLIANCY—TYPICAL SPIRIT—AND PRACTICAL VALUE—THE
‘SATIRES’ AND ‘EPISTLES’—"DECLAMATIONS"—THEIR SUBJECTS: EPIDEICTIC
AND FORENSIC—THEIR INFLUENCE ON STYLE—SENECA THE ELDER—THE
“SUASORIES”—THE ‘CONTROVERSIES’: THEIR INTRODUCTIONS—VARRO.

[Sidenote: _The conditions of Latin criticism._]

Those who direct their literary ideas by considerations of what they think likely to happen, or of what they think ought to have happened, would probably expect—neither without some reason nor without a certain amount of confirmation from experience—a considerable development of literary criticism under the Latin dispensation.[276] In the first place, the Romans had what the Greeks at first lacked, and afterwards too often disdained, that opportunity of Comparison, which, as has been said so often, is the very life and soul and breath of the higher and better critical exercise. In the second place, the whole literature of their classical period was itself a kind of critical imitation—sometimes pretty slavish, sometimes freer—of Greek: and it was practically impossible for a Roman to write without the exercise, independent or second-hand, of processes of study and thought which were critical or nothing. Against this must be set the facts—first, that the Latin literary genius was somewhat timid, that it felt itself rebuked by the majesty of Greece; and secondly, that the tendency of the race was not, till it was much mixed with others, very decidedly literary. Few Romans dared to approach the masterpieces of Greek literary art in a thoroughly critical spirit, and fewer had the sense of literature which might have enabled them to do so usefully. Further, their own period of consummate production was distinctly short, and not excessively fruitful, while those authors of their own to whom they devoted most attention stimulated only certain kinds of criticism. Virgil and Cicero are very great writers, doubtless, but everybody does not feel much enthusiasm for the first, and some people do not feel much enthusiasm for the second. The curious perfection of Horace is, after all, as limited as it is curious—there are no vistas in it; and the same may be said of the easy flow of Livy, the artificial, and, for its range, intense idiosyncrasy of Sallust, and the artful fancy of Ovid. These six writers seem to have always attracted the lion’s share of Roman admiration, though at one time there might be a taste for the tricks, precious or slightly obscure, of Seneca in prose and Persius in verse, at another for other things. For their two most poetical poets, Lucretius and Catullus, the Romans never seem to have felt any deep or widespread admiration; their proseman of greatest genius, Tacitus, came too late, and was too unpopular in his sentiments, to attract much. Even so late as the latter days of Quintilian, when the Silver Age itself was drawing to a close, we find that it was customary to devote chief attention to Greek, and that it was thought necessary to argue for Latin as for a novice, who, if well trained and encouraged, might become a pretty fighter in time. As for Cicero’s time, there is no reason to suppose him an exception: yet we know how, when not in full public dress, he takes refuge in Greek at every moment, and sometimes seems almost inclined to echo a phrase of Ascham’s in the dawn of modern English letters, and say it would be “more easier” for him to write in Greek, as it was for the author of the _Toxophilus_ to have written in Latin.

Footnote 276:

I am not aware of any work, corresponding to Egger’s, in reference to
Latin Criticism. But in English there is an Essay of the first
excellence on the subject by the late Mr Henry Nettleship (reprinted
at vol. ii. p. 44 of his _Lectures and Essays_, Oxford, 1895). In my
case old personal obligations were not needed to deepen the admiration
which every one, who would even like to be a scholar, must feel for Mr
Nettleship’s work. I am here, however, to demur to his opening
division of criticism into “criticism of philosophy, which
investigates the principles of beauty,” and “isolated and spontaneous
judgments, never rising beyond personal impression.” It is one main
purpose of this book to show that a third course is possible and
desirable, by way of the wide and systematic comparison of the
manifestations of literary beauty in the accomplished work of letters.

It is, however, from Cicero that Roman literary criticism, properly so called, begins,[277] and he, with Horace, almost exhausts [Sidenote: _Cicero._] our supply of it from the days before the Empire. Yet he prepares us for the disappointments which meet us in Latin criticism even more than in Greek. That Cicero’s interest in literature was great no one would dream of denying. His letters swarm with quotations and literary allusion; he is constantly arranging for new bookcases and new books; he no sooner has enforced (he never had much voluntary) leisure than he sets to work to write, to translate, to compose, to discuss. But the general inconveniences just noted, and some others of a particular nature, prevent him from being of much importance as a critic. He thought himself (as Quintilian later thought him) a philosopher, and he devoted much time to composing agreeable but extremely diluted copies of the Platonic dialogues. He was an orator not merely by profession but by taste, and he has left us (even excluding the pretty certainly spurious _Ad Herennium_) a very respectable bulk of Rhetorical work. But, as we shall presently see more in detail, most of this belongs altogether to the non-literary side of Rhetoric. Still, in default of some regular treatise (which was hardly to be expected), it is to his abundant, varied, and interesting correspondence that we should look for material, and we find very little of it. Here is a joke on the habit of Aristarchus (and indeed of other critics), the habit of marking as spurious anything they do not like: there an equally jocular introduction of rhetorical technicalities; elsewhere a rather curious but more linguistic than literary disquisition on the way in which innocent words and phrases acquire, half by accident, awkward double meanings, or slip into the single bad meaning only. There is a passage of some interest in a letter to Atticus about Cicero’s lost Greek history of his consulship, where he describes himself as having used up all Isocrates' perfume-shop, and the cabinets of his disciples, and even Aristotelian pigments.[278]

Footnote 277:

The actual primacy is assigned to a verse canon of the Ten Latin Comic
Poets by a certain Volcatius Sedigitus, who may be close to 100 B.C.
This “stupid production,” as Mr Nettleship unkindly but most justly
calls it, may be found in his Essay (so often quoted) in Aulus
Gellius, xv. 24, or in Baehrens' _Poetæ Latini Minores_, vi. 279. The
six-fingered one puts Cæcilius first, Plautus second, Terence sixth,
Ennius tenth, _antiquitatis causa_. He had, of course, borrowed the
“canon” system from the Alexandrians, among whose most dubious
services to criticism the arrangement of such things must be placed.
There are touches of literary and critical reference in Ennius, in the
Prologues of Terence, &c., but nothing that need delay us.

Footnote 278:

_Ad Att._, ii. 1: _Meus autem liber totum Isocratis_ μυροθήκιον,
_atque omnes ejus discipulorum arculas, ac nonnihil etiam Aristotelia
pigmenta consumpsit_.

But the most direct and famous piece of pure literary criticism in the letters is an unlucky one. Cicero of course came [Sidenote: _His attitude to Lucretius._] before—or rather himself led—the most brilliant age of Latin, and could not have so much as seen the work of Virgil, of Horace, much less of Ovid, and others. But he could and he did know Lucretius, whose work an absurd tradition has it that he even revised. And what does he say of this mighty poet, who unites the poignancy of Catullus to the sustained grasp of Virgil, and adds a sublimity unknown to both? The manuscripts are said to read: _Lucretii poemata, ut scribis, ita sunt: multis luminibus ingenii multæ tamen artis_.[279] The earlier editors most naturally considered this sentence nonsense. No doubt the opposition of _ingenium_ and _ars_ is a common thing, almost a commonplace, in Latin. But would any one, unless he had a thesis to prove, dream of regarding _tamen_ as admissible here? of translating it as if it were _necnon_? There is, of course, a certain paradoxical sense in which, at the end of the nineteenth century, a brisk young critic might say of Mr X., “He has plenty of brains, _and yet_ he really knows how to write.” But this is not in the least Roman; and it is Ciceronian rather less than it is Roman generally. Some, recognising that there must have been a _non_ somewhere, put it before _multæ_, and suppose that Cicero, as if he had been accustomed to Virgilian smoothness, thought Lucretius rough. But this, from his own verses, is very unlikely. The natural emendation is to put the _non_ (as till recently it used always to be supplied) before _multis_, which emendation, and which alone, makes the sentence run as, without prejudice on the score of the special meaning, we should expect it to run: “The poems of Lucretius are, as you say, not very full of brilliancy in genius, but show plenty of art.”

Footnote 279:

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

Supposing this to be so, some have tried to make out that Cicero’s well-known dislike of the Epicurean tenets accounts for the unfavourable criticism. So much the worse for him as a literary critic if it was so. A man who cannot taste Shelley because Shelley attacks Christianity, or laugh at the _Twopenny Postbag_ because Moore was a Whig, may be, and very likely is, an honour to his species as a man, but the less said about him as a critic of literature the better. But there is no real probability of such a plea having any foundation. We shall see what Quintilian says about Lucretius later: we know that very few other Latin writers say anything about him at all. Cicero, who would fain have been a poet, and who sometimes could hammer out a tolerable hexameter,[280] could not as a mere craftsman, as a mere student of Rhetoric, fail to appreciate something of the “art” of Lucretius. The stately volume of those magnificent hexameters—the _ne plus ultra_ of their kind in more ways than one or two—could not but appeal to him as a mere connoisseur of Latin rhythm, which (put him high or low in general literature) he most certainly was. The difference in comparison with Ennius, as a matter of art, was for such a man as Cicero simply unmistakable.

Footnote 280:

It has been urged upon me that my judgment of Cicero’s verse is rather
harsh, and that he at any rate made some progress towards the
Lucretian hexameter before Lucretius. It may be so; tolerably careful
and tolerably wide students of literature know that these things are
always “in the air,” and that, sometimes if not always, you find them
in the poetaster before you find them in the poet. But after reading
all Cicero’s extant verse two or three times over, seeking diligently
for mitigations of judgment, I am still afraid that “Cousin Cicero,
you will never be a poet,” would have been, and justly, the verdict of
Lucretius, had they stood to one another in the relations in which
Swift and Dryden stood.

But the qualities of the Lucretian “genius,” as distinguished from the Lucretian art, were not suited to attract Cicero—were, we may say, without fear of injustice, suited to attract very few Romans of the true type.[281] That type was, as far as the defects went, distinctly “barbarian,” in the sense in which Mr Matthew Arnold (very unjustly) applied the word to the English aristocracy—full of vigour, instinct with the faculty of ruling, magnanimous after a fashion, but impenetrable to ideas, only formally religious, shutting off its keen perception of a certain justice with huge blinkers, and, above all, curiously insensible to the vague, the mystical, the sense of wonder. Now, Lucretius, though he had chosen for himself a creed approaching mere materialism, had treated it in a fashion constantly and unabashedly ideal. It does not need the “flaming bastions of the world” or the sense of the _néant_, splendidly as he can describe both, to awake the poetical faculty in him. He can make poetry out of the _exiguum clinamen_, and out of things less promising if even more abstract still. With him it is always “the riding that does it”; the subject hardly matters at all. Lucretius, in short, was one of the great poets—sheerly and merely as poets—of the world. The didactics in which our eighteenth-century versemen so dismally failed offer no more difficulties to him than a love-poem or a flowery description. He will do you a science, or an atomic system, as another might do an Odyssey or a story of Lancelot. Now this was what the ancients, with all their acuteness and originality, could seldom understand or like; and what Cicero (a man of genius in some ways, but something of a Philistine and nothing of a poet) could like least of all those who can in any way be compared with him. Many of the beauties of the Lucretian imagination would be no doubt simply lost on him; and others he would consider wasted on the wrong subjects, if not positively applied in the wrong manner. Let us, however, for fairness' sake, accept the MS. reading, allow that _tamen_ may be the same or nearly the same as _necnon_, and further allow that as Marcus is only echoing words of Quintus which we do not possess, equity would in any case require that we should lay no very great stress on his own. There will still remain the objection that a poem of this character and importance, brought directly under his notice, and already as is clear within his knowledge, does not tempt him to do anything more than echo his correspondent’s words in a cut-and-dried formula which would be applicable to any tolerably good composition in verse, and which does not touch nor approach the idiosyncrasy of the poem itself. We cannot therefore very greatly regret that we have so little pure literary criticism from him. But still we must, for the sake of completeness, give some account of his Rhetorical works, which, in a manner, play the same complementary part to the _Ars Poetica_ of Horace that the twin treatises of the Stagirite play to each other.

Footnote 281:

It is one of Ovid’s titles (_v. infra_) to credit as a critic that he
did see the value of Lucretius, and expressed it in the well-known
couplet (_Amor._, i. 15. 25)—

“_Carmina sublimis tunc sunt peritura Lucreti,
Exitio terras quum dabit una dies._”

Virgil’s still better known quit-rent for his borrowings (_Georg._,
ii. 490) is a mere praise of the Lucretian _free-thought_, with no
reference to poetry. But the praise (no mean one) of having
appreciated Lucretius better than any other Roman is due to Statius
(_v. infra_, pp. 268-270).

There is, however, no small difference between the values of the Rhetorical works themselves. The _Ad Herennium_, even if [Sidenote: _His Rhetorical works._] it were as certainly Cicero’s as it is almost certainly not his, would require very small attention, for it is a strict _Techne_ or Art of Rhetoric, of the kind which we have thoroughly examined in the First Book, rigidly limited to Oratory, and containing nothing that may not be found in a dozen or a hundred other places. The _De Inventione_—more probably, if still not certainly, Cicero’s—is equally technical, and has hardly anything of interest for us except a quotation from Curio, which gives the lie direct to the “saw” of our “dead shepherd,”[282] _Nemo potest uno aspectu neque præteriens in amorem incidere_. It is to Cicero’s credit that he cites this as a rhetorical assumption, as saying that what happens rarely does not happen at all. The _De Oratore_ looks more promising, especially as there are references, in its very _exordia_, to the study of letters and its difficulty. There is a passage of some interest in Book II., cap. 12, 13, on the connection of oratory and history, with a short review of the Greek historians; and another of somewhat wider reference in cap. 7 of Book III., besides, it may be, others still here and there, especially that which begins about the 37th chapter of the third book. The _Brutus_ is the best of all, with its survey of the Latin orators and its account of the author’s literary education. The _Orator_ deals still more closely with oratorical style, as does the little tract, _De Optimo Genere Oratorum_. The _Partitiones_ and the _Topica_ are again mainly, if not even merely, technical.

Footnote 282:

_As You Like It_, iii. 5. 82.

It will be seen from this, not only that there is little purely literary criticism in Cicero, but that it is rather unjust to expect any from him. It was not his business; he had hardly any examples of it before him (and Cicero, like most other Latins, was a man who could do little without a pattern); the mere subject-matter (at least as far as Latin was concerned) was far from very abundant or specially interesting. Moreover, he was constantly occupied on other things. We know, from passages cited above, and others, that he had the purely grammatical and lexicographical interest which was so strong in the Romans; he must have had real feeling for poetry, or he would not be so constantly quoting it, nor would he have made his unequal attempts at writing it; he would fain, in the same way, have been a historian. But these were mere pastimes; and both from that vanity which was his master passion, and from an honest conviction which, as we have seen, was widely spread in antiquity, he seems to have thought Oratory the roof and crown of things literary, the queen of literary kinds, to which all others were ancillary, pedagogic, mere exercising-grounds and sources of convenient ornament. No one so thinking could make any great proficiency in literary criticism, and Cicero did not make any such.

This estimate of Cicero may seem audaciously unfair, if not grossly incompetent, to those who accept the more usual one. So far as much, if not all, very high authority goes, I must acknowledge, though I do not recant, my heresy. Mr Nettleship, for instance, while acknowledging that Cicero “threw his whole strength into the criticism of oratorical prose,” still speaks of his work, especially of the _Brutus_, with something like enthusiasm, claims “genius” and “fulness of light” for him, and even makes what is to me, I confess, the astonishing remark that he “follows in the same track as the Greek critics in all probability had done before him, as undoubtedly Dionysius _and the author of the_ Περὶ Ὕψους did after him.” I should have myself thought that if there were two critics who might be pedantically symbolised as A and not-A, they were Cicero and Longinus. But to give the other side, in the case of so important a client with such an admirable advocate, I may say that Mr Nettleship, while admitting Cicero’s tendency to the wooden placing and comparison borrowed from the Greeks, and naturally made more wooden by the Latins, and granting his inadequacy as to History (which he, like so many others whom we have seen and shall see, regards as a mere _ancilla_ of Oratory), claims for him the origination of the principle that the general as well as the connoisseurs must stamp the value of a work (_Brutus_, 183), approves his distaste (_De Oratore_, iii. 96) for “precious” style, and gives a most interesting _cento_ from the _Brutus_ (93, 125, 139, 143, 148, 201, 261, 274, 301). In these characterisations of the great orators he finds qualities of the highest kind, completing the panegyric by saying, “His usual prolixity is thrown aside, and he returns to obey the true laws of expression. As a critic he can write with all Tacitus' terseness and without any of Tacitus' affectation.” I quote, though—and indeed because—I cannot agree.

One point of great interest, however, in which there may be general agreement as to Cicero’s achievement, Mr Nettleship [Sidenote: _His Critical Vocabulary._] did not treat in his Essay, though a passage therein leads straight to it. This passage gives a very useful list[283] (elsewhere referred to) of some of the technical terms of criticism which appear to have accumulated in Greek literature during the post-Aristotelian period. Some of these are either used in their ordinary sense, or in senses easily and closely tropical; others are more far-fetched, and, as has also been noted elsewhere, remind one of the technicalities of wine-tasting (especially in French), or of pictorial art. Some are very hard to render exactly in other languages.

Footnote 283:

τραχύς, αὐστηρός, αὐθαδής, αὐχμηρός, εὐπινής, στρυφνός, συνεσπασμένος,
ἀντίτυπος, ἀρχαϊκός, πυκνός, δεινός, &c. Mr Nettleship gives in all
thirty-three, to which, I daresay, one could add as many more from the
later rhetoricians, Longinus, and others down to Photius.

It has always been noticed that Cicero—a master of language, and though far from the pedantic prejudice which then tabooed Greek words in Latin, just as it now taboos French words in English, always anxious to enrich his own tongue when he could—has shown special ingenuity in translating, paraphrasing, and adding to this rhetorical and critical dictionary. It is not, however, very many years since the interesting labour of a French scholar[284] made it possible, without very considerable trouble on one’s own part, to get the results of this process ready for study. With the Ciceronian terms of mere forensic Rhetoric (though all students of the Greek and Latin Rhetoricians will agree with M. Causeret that these terms have been, with a very mischievous result, transferred to other branches) we need not busy ourselves. It is under the usual head of “Elocution” that we shall find most to interest us. The abundance of the Ciceronian vocabulary every one will recognise; it is less certain whether we are to admire its precision. But it is at least an innocent, and may sometimes be a profitable, pleasure to classify the usages of _inusitatum_ and _insolens_, to separate the _nuances_ of _obsoletum_, _priscum_, and _vetustum_, of _grandia_ and _gravia_, of _majestas_ and _splendor_. The Latin rather than the Teutonic languages admit the distinctions of _juncta_, _cohærentia_, _apta_, and _coagmentata_, if distinction there be; but it would be of real value to ascertain whether there was any between _modus_ and _numerus_. Sometimes at least it seems as if it might coincide with that between “rhythm” and “metre”: while often _numerus_ itself seems to be “rhythm.”

Footnote 284:

_Etude sur la Langue de la Rhétorique et de la Critique Littéraire
dans Cicéron._ Par C. Causeret. Paris, 1886.

By no means uninteresting, again, are the numerous metaphorical expressions from actual physiology—_lacerti_, _sanguis_, _nervi_, _succus_, _exsanguis_, _enervatus_—which we find applied to style, and the still more numerous but vaguer terms, most of them with modern equivalents, which express its qualities by comparison with moral ones.

It is impossible not to see what an influence the use of such terms by such an author must have had, and we shall find evidences much later (in Pliny, for instance) that the language of literary criticism at Rome yielded in nothing to that beautiful dialect which enables our own censors to speak of a novel as “assertive and challenging,” of the “swiftness and fusion” of its style. But whether the influence was as beneficial as it was great is perhaps rather a different question.[285]

Footnote 285:

It has not seemed necessary to go through the literary passages of the
_Orations_, though some, the _Pro Archia_ especially, are not
infertile in them. “What _counsel_ says is not evidence,” whatever
else it is.

The contrast between the limited and partial relevance of Aristotle’s _Rhetoric_ to literary criticism, and the complete if [Sidenote: _Horace._] still limited relevance of his _Poetics_, is repeated far more pointedly in that between the Rhetorical works of Cicero and the so-called _Ars Poetica_ of Horace. It is, in fact—though the most ardent admirers of the Venusian would fain defend it from being intentionally and originally an Art of Poetry at all—the most complete, nay, the only complete, example of literary criticism that we have from any Roman.[286] As in other similar cases, before saying much about it in the way of secondary comment, it will be well to give a fairly full analysis of it, which can be the better done because of its extreme shortness. The famous tags with which it abounds, to an extent almost unmatched, may be sometimes, but need not be always, given in full.

Footnote 286:

Here, however, as elsewhere, the fatally parasitic character of the
whole literature comes in. There is little doubt (see Nettleship, _op.
cit._) that the piece was very closely modelled upon the work of a
certain Neoptolemus of Parium, an Alexandrian critic, whose date is
not known.

In form it is merely an _Epistola ad Pisones_, and plunges at [Sidenote: _The_ Ad Pisones.] once into its subject, without any attempt at preliminary argument or flourish.

The representations of art, like the presentations of nature, must be characterised by appropriateness of parts; you must not simply join anything to anything else. Perhaps, says an objector; but surely painters and poets enjoy liberty of fancy. Certainly; but still some propriety must be observed. Even ornament must be adjusted to the subject; and even when correctness itself is specially attempted, defects wait on the attempt—obscurity on brevity, bombast on flights, tameness on simplicity. Take care that your subject suits both your style and your powers.

Then, as to vocabulary? There is no reason why old words should not be resuscitated and new ones coined, provided that both things are done “with brains” and discretion. Usage is the arbiter, and what usage will not admit must be content to perish. As for metre, the kinds appropriate to the various subjects have been long ago settled, though by whom is not always known—hexameters for Epic by Homer, elegiacs for less important matter by somebody or other, iambics for satire by Archilochus, and so on with tragedy, comedy, lyric, and the rest. It is not wise to alter this established order.

In the same way, the established styles and characters must be maintained: a tragic hero must not speak like a comic one, or _vice versâ_; and you must not attempt new lights on the character of accepted heroes and heroines like Achilles and Odysseus and Medea. At the same time, you need not cling to the stock subjects, and if you take quite novel ones you may handle your character as you like, provided it keep uniformity throughout. But you may be wiser if you stick to the old.[287] If you do, do not begin too magniloquently; bustle your reader well along in the action; and drop the ungrateful parts of the story.

As before for traditional characters, so for the stock parts. Generalise and conventionalise wisely; let your boys be childish; your youths fond of sport, reckless, and fickle; your men of full age, business-like and prudent; your old men praisers of the past, sluggish, grudging, and so forth. In short—Keep to the Type.

Footnote 287:

Here comes in one of the most famous and often-quoted of the
“tags”—_difficile est proprie communia dicere_, a sentence which,
hackneyed as it is, is not altogether easy to translate fully even by
itself, and becomes in the context less easy still.

In play-writing be careful how you utilise the double opportunity of representation and narrative. Do not let ugly things appear on the actual stage. Stick to your five acts; do not be prodigal of your _deus ex machina_; do not introduce a fourth personage. Keep your chorus to its business—moral sentiment, religious tone, and so forth. This caution introduces a long digression on the incursion of elaborate music into the stage, and on the combination (while keeping them _unmixed_) of Satiric Drama and Tragedy.

Then, with the almost shorthand abruptness of transition which characterises the poem, we pass to an incidental consideration of metres. An iambic is a long syllable put after a short one, and you arrange them in batches of six with, in certain places only, spondees for a change. Do not take too many licences: stick to the Greek. If your ancestors were fools enough to admire Plautus you need not. They say Thespis invented drama, or at least tragedy. Æschylus improved it and made it magniloquent. Then came the Old Comedy—rather too licentious, so that it had to pull in its sails and drop its chorus. We have tried all sorts, not without success, but the labour of the file is absolutely necessary. The idea of poetic madness and excess is all nonsense. If I cannot write great poetry I can teach others how to write it. Be careful of your subject, and do not attend to tuneful trifles.

You must either instruct or delight, or both; you must not write romantic and prodigious extravagances. Mix pleasure with profit and you are safe. You need not be absolutely faultless, but avoid faults as much as you can. Be careful to suit the style to the subject as much as possible, and do not “pad.” Mediocre poetry is intolerable.

Finally, do not be in a hurry to publish; invite friendly criticism; do not force yourself; destroy a good deal. For _nescit vox missa reverti_.

The influence of poets is mythically signified by the stories of Orpheus, who moved beasts, and Amphion, who built Thebes by song. Homer came next, and was famous. Tyrtæus roused men to war. Many kinds of poetry have been discovered since, and they all need hard work to cultivate them with success. Some remarks on recitation follow, and then the lines on which friendly criticism should proceed are drawn, and the piece ends rather ambiguously with a reference to the fate of Empedocles.

Now, in criticising this criticism we must of course take into consideration the plea that Horace may not have meant to give [Sidenote: _Its desultoriness_] a regular treatise even on Dramatic Poetry, but merely to throw out a few observations for the benefit of a friend. It is still more obvious that we must not saddle him with all the rubbish of corollary and comment with which he has been loaded (sometimes without his having in the least deserved or provoked it) by the “Classical” critics of the 16th-18th centuries. Yet not merely equitable but generous allowances of this kind will still leave the piece open to pretty severe comment. In the first place, its desultoriness is excessive, even extravagant. Much licence in this respect no doubt must be allowed to the “mixer of the useful and the pleasant” by means of verse-didactics. But no possible licence will cover Horace’s method, or absence of method. He begins with a sufficiently lively diatribe against inconsistency of design and want of harmony of parts, then slides to methods of composition, thence to vocabulary, thence to the technical divisions of prosody, thence to stock characters and the selection of subject, gives cautions as to the minor and more arbitrary proprieties of the stage, indulges in a little bit of literary history, returns to metres, insists on the importance of self- and other criticism. Then he shifts artfully to the contrast between Greek emulation and Roman shopkeeping covetousness, extols Orpheus and Amphion, Homer and Tyrtæus, excuses faults if they are not too many, but will not tolerate mere even mediocrity, cautions against flattering hearers, and ends with a description, half sarcastic, half rallying the sarcasm, of bad poets. If it were not for its vividness and its constellation of glittering phrases, nobody could see in such a thing aught but a mere congeries of desultory observations.

Still more indisputable is the singular spirit of routine—of red-tape—which pervades the piece. Aristotle (whom Horace follows without direct acknowledgment, and by no means slavishly, but still on the whole) had been sufficiently positive, and not seldom a little arbitrary; but he had carefully abstained [Sidenote: _and arbitrary conventionality._] from mere red-tape. Horace, in his prescription of the five acts, and his proscription of the fourth actor, measures that tape off in a fashion which implies one of two things, both of them bad—either implicit belief in purely arbitrary rules, or indifference to the mischief that such rules may do. Elsewhere, though his good sense sometimes interferes to advantage, he is, though less meticulously, as slavishly conventional. You must use the consecrated metres, and no others, for the various subjects; you must keep to the accepted lineaments of well-known characters, and you must model your new ones strictly on types. Decency, propriety, convention—to these things you must look throughout. If you are really a great poet you may be allowed a “fault” or two, as a great beauty is allowed a mole, but still it is a “fault.” And so this kind of pottering and peddling censorship goes on through the whole. We are at such an antithesis or antipodes to the Περὶ Ὕψους, that one sometimes feels inclined to give the _Ars Poetica_ a third title and call it Περὶ μεσότητος, or _De Mediocritate_, so directly does it tend to produce the quality which, in one of its own happier moments, it denounces.

All this, I say, is undeniable, or, if it be denied, the denial is of no consequence. But the compensatory merits are very considerable. [Sidenote: _Its compensations: Brilliancy._] In the first place, it is no small thing to have got once more to purely, or almost purely, literary criticism, to have done with the sense that literature as such is only the second thought, the _parergon_, at best the mere means, not the end, to the critic. In the second place, it is a greater thing still to have our literary criticism, now that we have got it, done by such a man as Horace, one in whom the generation of the critic has not waited for the corruption of the poet,[288] and who has the peculiar gift of crisp rememberable felicitous phrase. The few hundred lines of the little piece are positively “made of quotations.” Every man of letters, at least, ought to have learnt it by heart in the original during his youth. Yet even to those who have not been thus favoured, but who have some tincture of Humanity, mere scraps and tags of it must often recall the actual context, or at least the sense. The first five-and-twenty lines contain, in the way of such “lights” of phrase, at least seven:—

“Desinat in piscem mulier formosa superne.
Risum teneatis, amici.
Velut ægri somnia....
Pictoribus atque poetis
Quidlibet audendi semper fuit æqua potestas ...
Petimusque damusque vicissim.
Purpureus ... pannus ...
Currente rota cur urceus exit?”

And the proportion is well maintained throughout.

Footnote 288:

I had hoped that no reader would want explanation of this, but it has
been hinted to me that some may. For them only, I note that the
saying, the thought of which has found various and frequent
expression, is slightly altered in form from Dryden, and is one of his
happiest scholasticisms. It glances, utilising the old philosophical
opposition-connection of γένεσις and φθορά, at the theory, put later
by another person of genius more bluntly, that critics are those who
“have failed in literature and art.”

But the greatest value of the piece, beyond all doubt, is the clear and distinct idea which it gives of one, and that [Sidenote: _Typical spirit_] the principal, side of the critical conception of literature in Roman times certainly, in all times more or less. Just as, and in the same manner as, we said that Longinus plays the exception among the critics of antiquity, so does Horace represent the rule. There is indeed something in other critics of antiquity of the spirit which makes Longinus pre-eminent, but it is not prominent in them. There is in the better of them, especially in Aristotle, much that is not in Horace; but what they have in common with him is the differentia of them all.

Of this latter spirit those worse points which we have noted in the piece are the caricature or corruption, the others are the rational embodiment and expression. “Observe order; do not grovel or soar too high; stick to the usage of reasonable and well-bred persons; be neither stupid nor shocking; above all, be like the best of your predecessors, stick to the norm of the class, do not attempt a perhaps impossible and certainly dangerous individuality.” In short the false _mimesis_—imitation of previous art—is mixing herself up more and more with the true _mimesis_, representation of nature. If it is not exactly true that, as a modern prose Horace has it, _Tout est dit_, at any rate the forms in which everything ought to be said have long been found out. You cannot improve on them: try to make the best use of them that you can.

It is needless to say with what hardly matched and certainly unsurpassed shrewdness and neatness Horace has—not merely in the tags, the phrases, the purple patches themselves [Sidenote: _and practical value._] noted above, but throughout—set forth, enforced, decorated his views. Except in a few extremest moods, when the whole world of literature seems to be at once painted red and strangled with the tape that paints it, he is never absurd; he is never even negligible. The most “dishevelled” Romantic may neglect him, but the neglect will always be at his own peril—he must be a Shakespeare, or at least a Marlowe, a Shelley, or at least a Beddoes, if he flies in the face of the Horatian precepts. These precepts even, in the opening, in the “mediocrity” remark, in the peroration and elsewhere, contain not a little antidote for their own bane. “Not worth writing” would be the Horatian verdict on many a “Classical” poem which the judge might acknowledge to be quite unobjectionably written; while on the other hand the evils of extravagance, of disproportion, of tedious and silly crotchet and caprice, at which he drives full from first to last, are real evils, and by no means to be minimised. It is not rash to say—though perhaps one must have read more literatures, and passed through more phases of literary judgment than one, before saying it with conviction—that there is no school or period of literary practice in which the precepts of Horace, when rightly taken, have lost, or are ever likely to lose, critical validity. To say this is to say a very great deal. But it is not inconsistent with—and it makes especially necessary—the further observation that the critical attitude of Horace is a wofully incomplete one. In the first place, he has left us no really “grasping” judgment of a single writer he has mentioned. He had not much room, but nobody could put a paragraph in a line better than he could, when he understood and cared for the matter. Horace on Orpheus and Amphion, on Homer, nay, on Æschylus and Plautus, is _banal_—badly _banal_, one may add. But let us grant that the knack of luminous summarising of the individual was not, and could not be, yet born, was not even with Longinus, was not even fifteen hundred years after Horace. His shortcomings do not cease here. Here as elsewhere, except in a few passages of the graver philosophy of life, there is no “soul” in him. He has no enthusiasm, no passion. It is perhaps improper to bring together Horace and Mr Browning, but I never read the _Epistola ad Pisones_ without thinking of certain lines of the latter:—

“The fool! would he try a flight further and say,
He never saw, never, before to-day,
What was able to take his breath away—
A face to lose youth for, to occupy age
With the dream of, meet death with—why, I'll not engage
But that, half in a rapture and half in a rage,
I should toss him the thing’s self, ‘’Tis only a duplicate,
A thing of no value—take it, I supplicate.’”

Longinus, one feels, would have been in some danger of losing his literary loves on this principle; the modern critic can “say ditto to Mr Browning” over a thousand passages. But Horace was quite safe. He never felt this enthusiasm for author, or book, or page; and so he never tried, as others in their despairing way do, to render a reason for it.

To those who consider criticism as a whole and historically, the enormous influence which the _Ars Poetica_ has exercised [Sidenote: _The_ Satires _and_ Epistles.] must always give it the prerogative place among its author’s critical work. But it is needless to say that he has other claims to appear here. And the pieces which give him these claims have by some been considered more important, as they certainly are more original. It is unnecessary to pick out _Pindarum quisquis_ and the other literary references in the Odes, universally known, admirably expressed, but as criticism hardly more than a refashioning of _publica materies_. The Fourth and Sixth _Satires_ of the First book, which are probably a good deal earlier than the adaptation from Neoptolemus, and the two _Epistles_ of the Second book, which may be taken as later, are serious documents. The Satires perhaps give a better opinion of Horace’s talent than of his taste and temper. His critics had praised Lucilius against him; and without denying his predecessor all merit, he makes, though less generously, the sort of comment which even Dryden made on the rough versification and lack of art of the giant race before the flood. This (i. 4) naturally brought fresh attacks on him, and in i. 10 he returns to the subject, lashes the _fautores ineptos Lucili_, indulges in the too famous sneer at Catullus and Calvus, and with a touch of something which is perhaps not quite alien from snobbishness, boasts his intimacy and agreement not merely with Varius, Virgil, Pollio, Messala, among men of letters, but with Mæcenas and Octavius.

His general position here is easy enough to perceive, and there are of course defences for it. Among all our thousand fragments of Lucilius,[289] but two or three at most are long enough to give us any idea of his faculty of sustained composition. And fine as is the fragment to Albinus—with its Elizabethan reiteration of _virtus_ at the beginning of the lines, its straight-hitting sense, and the positive nobility of its ethic—numerous as are the instances in the smaller scraps of _Romana simplicitas_ and picturesque phrase, there is no doubt that the whole is rough and unfinished, not with the roughness of one who uses a rudimentary art, but of one who has not mastered—perhaps, as Horace insinuates, has not taken the trouble to master—one ready to his hand. But there is something of the Frenchman’s “_We_ are all princes or poets” about the tone of Horace himself. He is, _mutatis mutandis_, too much in the mood of a _parvenu_ who has just been admitted to an exclusive club, and thinks very meanly of poor wretches who are not entitled to use the club-paper.

Footnote 289:

_Poet. Lat. Min._ (Baehrens), vi. 139-266. Our greatest English
Latinists recently have been singularly unkind to this poet. Munro
made what I can only call a violent attack on him: and Mr Nettleship,
while allowing him “extraordinary vigour” and “the ring of Caius
Gracchus” (see his Essay on the Satires (second series), where Munro’s
diatribe is quoted), practically indorses this. Against such judges I
should not have a word to say on the linguistic side: but I claim full
_parrhesia_ on the literary. The Virtue passage (which Munro specially
refuses to except) is as rough as, say, Marston; but it has a far
sincerer, loftier, and more truly poetical tone than anything of the
kind in Horace, and than most things in Juvenal. And everywhere I see
quality, passion, _phrase_. Here, at least, I can agree with Cicero
(_De Orat._, ii. 6 and elsewhere), though _perurbanus_ is not exactly
the epithet that I should, from his extant writings, myself select for
Lucilius.

On the other hand, Mr Nettleship is surely justified in calling the Epistles of the second book “the best of Horace’s critical utterances,” though perhaps they are not the most important. Indeed, their eulogist hastens to add that “it is the incomparable manner of the writer, the ease and sureness of his tread,” which really interests the reader. It is so; but there is more in criticism than manner, and you must be right as well as felicitous. Horace is not exactly wrong, but he is limited—the Chrysostom of Correctness has acquired better breeding than he showed in the Satires, but he has not enlarged his view. The _horridus Saturnius_ still strikes its own horror into him: he still girds at the ancients; and though in the epistle to Julius Florus there is some pleasant self-raillery, as well as an admirable picture of the legitimate poet, yet there is perhaps no piece of Horace which brings more clearly home to us the fact that he was after all, as he has been called, far more a critic of life than of literature, and much more seriously interested in the former than in the latter. So much the better for him perhaps; so much the better for all the ancients who more or less agreed with him. But that is a matter of argument: the fact remains.[290]

Footnote 290:

Mr Nettleship justly and, considering his enthusiasm for Horace
generously contrasts the “comprehensive sympathy” of Ovid (_Am._, i.
15-19, _Trist._, ii. 423) with the lack of the same quality in the
Venusian.

The third representative selected for Roman criticism of the latest Republic and earliest empire, the elder Seneca—"Seneca Rhetor"—is again of a different class and at a different standpoint, though he is very much nearer to Cicero than to Horace.

The declamations of antiquity had an influence on its prose style—and consequently an effect on its critical opinions of [Sidenote: “_Declamations._”] style both in verse and prose—which it is almost impossible to exaggerate. The practice of them began in boyhood; it formed almost the greater part of the higher education; and it appears to have been continued in later life not merely by going to the Schools to hear novices, but in actual practice, half exercise, half amusement, by orators and statesmen of the most established fame. It was a sort of mental fencing-school or gymnasium, to which those who wished to keep their powers in training resorted, even to the close of life. We know that Cicero composed, if he did not actually deliver, declamations up to the very end of his career; and, in a very different department of letters, we know from Seneca himself that Ovid, though not a constant, was a by no means infrequent, attendant of the schools, and either acquired or exercised his well-known fancy for turns and plays of words in prose as well as in verse.

In theory, and no doubt to some extent in practice also, these _meletæ_, or declamations, were permissible and desirable in [Sidenote: _Their subjects: epideictic_] all the branches of Rhetoric. But the examples which have come down to us, and the references that we possess to others, show us that, as, indeed, we should expect, Epideictic and Dicanic provided the chief subjects. The declamations of the former kind were those at which the satirists chiefly laughed—Hannibal crossing the Alps, Leonidas at Thermopylæ, Whether Cicero could decently have avoided death by making a bargain with Antony, and the like. To this kind of subject there could evidently be no limit, and it might sometimes pass, as in the Orations (which are after all only declamations) of Dion Chrysostom we know that it at least once did pass, into a regular literary Essay. But it seems more generally to have affected the fanciful-historic.

The purely forensic declamation had some differences. As its object was not merely or mainly, like that of the other, to [Sidenote: _and forensic._] display cleverness, but to assist the acquisition and display of ability as a counsel, it fell into certain rather narrow and not very numerous grooves. Certain “hard cases,” paradoxes of the law, seem from very early times to have been excogitated by the ingenuity of the rhetoricians, and the game was to treat these—on one side or the other, or both—with as much force, but above all with as much apparent novelty, as the speaker’s wits could manage. A very favourite one was based on the venerable practice of allowing the victim of a rape the choice of death for her violator or requiring him to marry her, with the _aporia_, “Suppose a man is guilty of two such crimes, and one girl demands death, the other marriage, what is to be done?” Or “Suppose a girl, situated like Marina in _Pericles_, but slaying her Lysimachus, not converting him. Released from her bondage, she presents herself as candidate for a priestess-ship. Is she eligible or not?”[291] The extremity of perverse fancy in this direction is perhaps reached by a pair of the declamations attributed to Quintilian,[292] in which the lover of a courtesan brings an action against her for administering a counter-philtre, so that he may love her no longer, and she may accept a wealthier suitor. But there is no limit to the almost diseased imagination of these Cases. A city[293] is afflicted by famine, and a commissioner is sent to buy up grain, with orders to return by a certain day. He executes his commission successfully and quickly, but being driven into port in a third country by bad weather, sells the grain at a high price, buys twice as much elsewhere, and returns by the appointed time. But, meanwhile, the famine has grown so severe that the people have been driven to cannibalism, which his return direct with his first bargain would have prevented. Is he guilty or not guilty?

Footnote 291:

Seneca, _Contr._, i. 2.

Footnote 292:

xiv. and xv. _Ed. cit. inf._ (p. 279 _note_), pp. 154-169.

Footnote 293:

Ibid., xii. The so-called _Pasti Cadaveribus_. _Ed. cit. inf._, p.
126.

A very little consideration will show that both these classes of composition must have had great, permanent, and not altogether [Sidenote: _Their influence on style._] good effects on style. Both dealt with hackneyed subjects, and in both success was most likely to be achieved by “peppering higher,” in various ways. The epideictic subjects suggested various forms of bombast, conceit, trick, from the use of poetical, archaic, or otherwise unfamiliar diction to the device of the mouther of whom Seneca tells us,[294] and who, declaiming on Greeks and Persians, stood a-tiptoe and cried, “I rejoice! I rejoice!” and only after a due pause explained the cause of his rejoicing. The forensic subjects tempted the racking of the brain for some new quibble, some fresh refinement or hair-splitting. Especially was this the case in the subdivision of what were called the _colores_—ingenious excuses for the parties, whence comes the special sense of our word colourable, and whereof Seneca makes a special heading, usually at the end of his articles. No pitch of mental wiredrawing, no extravagance of play on word or phrase, was too great for some declaimers, of whom a certain Murredius is Seneca’s favourite Helot. In fact, in both classes, epideictic and forensic, one can see that a plain, forcible, manly style could only be commended by a combination of very unusual genius on the part of the speaker, and still more unusual taste and receptivity on the part of the audience. Their _sophos_, their _euge_, their _belle_,[295] were much more likely to be evoked by ingenious and far-fetched conceit than by solid reasoning and Attic style, which latter, indeed, on such trite subjects were nearly impossible.

Footnote 294:

_Suas._, ii. 17. _His_ name, too, was Seneca; and the text is
curiously worded.

For illustration of what has been said, the hodge-podge of Seneca is more valuable than the finished declamations of the Pseudo-Quintilian. These latter,[296] despite the absurdity, or at any rate the non-naturalness, of their subject, are sometimes rather accomplished pieces of writing in a very artificial style. The speech, _Pro Juvene contra Meretricem_, referred to above, is, in its whimsical way, a decidedly remarkable example of decadent prose. The crime of making some one cease to love is odd in itself; the complaint that you have been injured by being made to cease to love odder still. Besides, if you complain of this as an injury, do you not still love, and have you not, therefore, nothing to complain of? The topsyturvyfication is, it will be seen, complete. And the declaimer, whoever he was, treats his subject _con amore_. The tricks of his thought are infinite, and well suited with the artifices of his speech. In particular, every paragraph leads up to, and winds up with, a sort of variation on one general theme or _Leitmotiv_.

Footnote 295:

Of these equivalents of “Hear! hear!” or “Bravo!” the second is good
adopted Latin of all times. The first, well known from Martial, is
post-Augustan; the third (which Cicero did not much like) seems to
have been both lukewarm and affected.

Footnote 296:

_V. inf._, p. 279 _sq._

“To be compelled to hate is the one incurable form of disease.”