Chapter II: The Contemporaries of Quintilian (1)

PETRONIUS—SENECA THE YOUNGER—THE SATIRISTS—PERSIUS—THE PROLOGUE AND
FIRST SATIRE—EXAMINATION OF THIS—JUVENAL—MARTIAL—THE STYLE OF THE
EPIGRAMS—PRÉCIS OF THEIR CRITICAL CONTENTS—STATIUS—PLINY THE
YOUNGER—CRITICISM IN THE ‘LETTERS’—THE ‘DIALOGUS DE CLARIS
ORATORIBUS’—MR NETTLESHIP’S ESTIMATE OF IT—THE GENERAL LITERARY
TASTE OF THE SILVER AGE—“FAULTLESSNESS”—ORNATE OR PLAIN STYLE.

From the later years of Augustus, and the earlier of his immediate successors, we have no criticism of importance [Sidenote: _Petronius._] except Seneca’s. But the Neronian time has left us interesting approaches to the subject in the works of Petronius and Seneca the younger, as well as in the poet Persius; while, somewhat later, the satires of Juvenal and the epigrams of Martial are, the former not destitute, the latter full, of literary allusion and opinion. These, with a certain contribution from Pliny’s _Letters_ and the _Dialogus de Claris Oratoribus_ (usually included among the works of Tacitus, but not resembling him in style, and sometimes attributed to Quintilian), must be successively dealt with. Quintilian himself is of too great importance not to deserve a separate chapter.

We can understand, as well from the character usually given of the _Arbiter elegantiarum_ as from the style of his curiously dismembered and rather disreputable written work,[303] that questions of literary criticism must have been of the first interest to him. If we had the entire _Satires_ (supposing that they ever were more entire than _Tristram Shandy_ or the _Moyen de Parvenir_), there can be very little doubt that this element would show itself in very large proportion. There must have been suppers less brutally vulgar and Philistine than that of Trimalchio; and literary discussion was as indispensable at a Roman supper of the better class as broiled bones at an English one—while suppers lasted. Even the Circes, if not the Quartillas, of the time were very frequently “blue” in the intervals of more exciting amusements, and Agamemnon, Eumolpus,[304] and others must have frequently spoken in character. As it is, the opening of the fragment as we have it, and a passage farther on, deal directly with the subject.

Footnote 303:

I use the smaller edition of Bücheler, Berlin, 1862.

Footnote 304:

There is a theory that the verses put in the mouth of Eumolpus are
parodies of Lucan and Seneca.

The opening passage is occupied with that denunciation of bombastic and “precious” language which seems to have been the favourite occupation of the critics of the time. The attack is at first directed against the practice of declamation, which almost inevitably tempted boys and youthful writers to bombast, but it so quickly glides into a general literary censure that it is worth giving in full.

“I believe that the reason why schoolboys and students become such fools is, that they never see or hear of anything to which we are accustomed in the actual world. They are occupied by pirates standing on the beach with chains in their hands, by tyrants ordaining that sons shall cut their fathers’ heads off, by oracles against a pestilence to the effect that three or more virgins are to be sacrificed, by little bundles of words smeared with honey, and everything, as it were, powdered with poppy-seed and sesamum. For people bred in this fashion sense is as impossible as a pleasant odour for those who live in the kitchen.[305] If you will excuse my saying so, you rhetoricians were the first to ruin literature. By exciting ridicule of [_or_ playing tricks with] your light and empty phrases,[306] you weakened and prostrated the whole body of oratory. Youth had not yet been enslaved to declamations when Sophocles and Euripides devised the words in which they were to speak. The private schoolmaster[307] had not spoilt good wits when Pindar and the Nine Lyrists feared to sing in Homeric verse. And not to allege poets only, I certainly find it nowhere said that Plato and Demosthenes betook themselves to this kind of eloquence. Oratory full grown, and, if I may say so, in her maidenhood, is not spotted and swelling [like a toad], but shoots up in natural beauty.

Footnote 305:

Or “good taste is as impossible as good smell to those,” &c. I have
not hit on any satisfactory English equivalents for _sapere_ (with its
double sense) and _bene olere_. What is meant, of course, is that the
power of distinguishing is lost in the vicious atmosphere.

Footnote 306:

_Ludibria quædam excitando._

Footnote 307:

_Umbraticus doctor_, which Ben Jonson Englishes directly as
“umbratical doctors” in the _Discoveries_, and De Quincey rather
hardily converts to a compliment in his _Essay on Rhetoric_.

“Of late this windy and extravagant loquacity has shifted from Asia to Athens, and has breathed upon the aspiring minds of youth like a pestilential star, and forthwith true eloquence, its rule corrupted, has been arrested, and put to silence. Tell me, who has since equalled the fame of Thucydides, of Hyperides? Not so much as a lyric of wholesome complexion has appeared, and everything, as if poisoned with the same food, has been unable to last to a natural grey old age. Even painting has made no better end, since the audacity of the Egyptians has cut so great an art down to shorthand.”

The rhetorician Agamemnon defends scholastic procedure by the old plan of throwing the blame on parents and the like; but the story quickly turns to one of its more than “picaresque” episodes, and the subject drops.

The other passage[308] begins with equal abruptness, and serves as preface only to a very much longer poetical recitation by Eumolpus, who speaks it. It is chiefly noteworthy for containing the phrase _Curiosa felicitas_, applied to Horace, which perhaps itself gives us as good a notion of Petronius’ critical faculty as anything could. But it conveys some sound doctrine. Verse itself seems easy; any boy thinks he can write it as soon as he has learnt the rules, and retired orators (a hit, I suppose, at Cicero) compose it as a relaxation, as if it were easier than their speeches. But it is no such light matter. You must take choice words [we are almost at Dante’s “sifted” words], words far from the use of the vulgar crowd,[309] and at the same time you must be careful that individual phrases are not too fine for the rest. Nor must you treat your subject—civil war, for instance—in the mere tone of a chronicler, but the “free spirit must be forced through[310] difficulties, and the ministry of the gods, and a fabulous torment of sentences, so that it may rather appear the vaticination of a frenzied mind than a trustworthy and scrupulous document under attestation.” Now this advice, though much in it is sound, takes distinctly the other side to that which Encolpius had urged in the overture.

Footnote 308:

§ 118. Ed. cit., p. 71.

Footnote 309:

_Refugiendum est ab omni verborum ut ita dicam vilitate, et sumendæ
voces a plebe summotæ._

Footnote 310:

_Præcipitandus est liber spiritus._ A characteristic Petronian phrase
which will serve (and has in part been used) as text for very
different sermons. Part of what follows is no doubt intentionally
obscure. The _ambages deorumque ministeria_ refer, of course, to the
stock revolutions and interventions of Epic as of Tragedy. But
_fabulosum sententiarum tormentum_ is not such plain sailing. I
_think_ it means (with an intentional side-glance at the fabled
torments which the heroes of Epic see in Hades) the process of racking
the brain for story-ornament and sententious conceit of phrase.

On the whole, we must regret very keenly that we have not more of the Arbiter’s remarks on the subject. It is improbable that anything like a coherent theory of criticism on the great scale would have emerged, and very likely that (as in the two extant examples just quoted) we should rather have had ingenious centos of opposing views. But all would have been originally and brightly put, and it is by no means impossible that what we now chiefly desiderate—_aperçus_ of particular authors, books, or passages, done with grasp and insight—would have been forthcoming. As it is, we have but what we have.

Nero’s other victim, the curious compound between Polonius and Mr Pecksniff (with, it must be owned, some merits which [Sidenote: _Seneca the Younger._] belonged to neither), whose name was L. Annæus Seneca, has left us a great deal more work than Petronius, and was certainly a man of letters. He was even a considerable man of letters, and if he wrote the _Tragedies_, a very considerable man of letters indeed.[311] He had, moreover, though scarcely a good, a distinct and by no means commonplace style, and while Quintilian attacks him _nominatim_ in a passage which will occupy us later, it is by no means improbable that Petronius (who must have known him well, and was probably bored by him) had Seneca himself in his mind when he talked of the _ventosa et enormis loquacitas_.

Footnote 311:

_Works_, 3 vols., ed. Haase, Leipsic, 1886-87. This does not contain
the _Tragedies_, as to which, however, I have never wished to go
beyond a nearly forty years’ possession, the pretty little “Regent’s
Classics” edition of 1823. But I have never, as a critic, been able to
believe that Seneca wrote them.

Seneca, however, was by profession a Stoic, and these classical Pharisees, though their sect was not exactly unliterary, pushed to an extreme the partly superfine, partly puritanic, contempt with which, as we have seen, the philosophy of antiquity generally chose to regard the minutiæ of literary criticism and literary craft. The “wise man of the Stoics” might be a perfect man of letters, as he was a perfect everything else; but it was entirely beneath him to take seriously such things as metre, or style, or the pleasure of literary art. In the Tenth Dialogue, _de Brevitate Vitæ_,[312] after the philosopher has been talking in his high-sniffing way of collecting brasses, singing, giving long and _recherché_ dinners (but not, so far as I remember, of putting out money at usury), he begins a new chapter with things to be treated more contemptuously still.

Footnote 312:

Ed. cit., i. 209. If Seneca be suspected of possible insincerity,
Marcus Aurelius cannot be. Yet the estimable Emperor, who had earlier
(i. 7), in the true Pharisaic spirit, congratulated himself on
abstaining from “rhetoric and poetry,” concludes his reference to the
drama (xi. 6) (a reference interesting as including one of the
explanations of κάθαρσις), by asking, “To what end does the whole plan
of poetry and drama look?” As for Epictetus, _v. supra_, p. 62.

“’Twould be long,” he says, “to track them all out—those whose life draughts, or ball-playing, or the practice of carefully cooking their flesh in the sun, has caused to waste away. They are not exactly lazy people, since their pleasures give them a great deal of trouble. For nobody can doubt that they make much ado about nothing, who are detained by the study of useless letters—there is a considerable company of them among us Romans. It has been a mania of the Greeks to inquire how many rowers Ulysses had, whether the _Iliad_ was written earlier than the _Odyssey_, further, whether the two are by the same author, and other matters of the same stamp, which, if you keep to yourself, they will not help your silent conscience, while, if you talk about them, you will seem not more learned but only more of a bore.”

The rest of the chapter draws up a long list of similar enormities of curiosity—historical and literary. “Who had the first naval triumph?” &c. Seneca even ironically supplies questions of the kind, and information about them, to those who like such things. Elsewhere in the 88th (the third of the thirteenth book)[313] of those not disagreeable epistles which he composed for the edification of a man of straw called Lucilius, and for the display of his own ability, he supposes the definite question to be put to him, “What do you think of liberal studies?” and he goes off at score in the true style of the Stoic pulpit. He respects none, counts none as good. They are all very well as exercises, as preparations; you may stick to them as long as you can do nothing better. They are called “liberal,” as worthy of a free man: but there is only one study worthy of a freeman (does one not hear the very drone of the ancestor of Mr Chadband?), and that is the study of WISDOM. All else is petty and puerile: it has nothing to do with making a GOOD man. Will the grammarian, who, if he does not stick to mere philology, goes to history or, at farthest, to poetry, be a road-maker for us to VIRTUE, my brethren? Will syntax and prosody banish fear, quench cupidity, bridle lust? And so forth. He makes, indeed, not bad fun of the attempts to make out Homer now a Stoic, now an Epicurean, now a Peripatetic. But he soon relapses into the “chaff and draff” of the conventional moralists at all times. What are the tempests that impelled Ulysses to the storms of the mind? What does it matter whether Penelope was chaste? Teach me what Chastity _is_. _Et patati et patata._ From a man in this frame of mind comes no good critical thing; though we certainly should like to have heard from the Tragedian, whoever he was, what put into his head the idea of that remarkable compromise between Classic and Romantic Tragedy which gave us the Latin _Hippolytus_ and the _Octavia_.

Footnote 313:

Ed. cit., iii. 246 _sq._

The three satiric poets give us both directly and indirectly a great deal of matter; in fact, they may almost be said to provide the illustrative commentary to their contemporary and friend[314] Quintilian’s precepts. It is possible that [Sidenote: _The satirists._] the example of Horace may have had something to do with this; but such an example need not have been required. As we know, not merely from themselves, the first century at Rome, if not one of the very greatest times of literary production, was one of very great and very widespread literary interest. As Persius tells us—

“Ecce inter pocula quærunt
Romulidæ saturi, quid dia poemata narrent;”

while Seneca’s remarks, take them with what grains of salt we will, are sound corroborative evidence. Further, it appears on all hands, not merely that there was a distinct fashion of literature, but that this fashion had its own distinct characteristics, that it was one of the times of ornate as opposed to plain style in verse and prose alike, a time of “preciousness,” of “raising the language to a higher power,” a time when men openly called Cicero a commonplace and obvious writer, and, if they did not fail to pay a kind of conventional reverence to Virgil, wrote in a way as far as possible from being Virgilian. This always gives plenty of handles to the poetical satirist, and, as we shall see, all the three availed themselves of these handles to the full.

Footnote 314:

In two cases at least. And Quintilian might have known Persius, as he
was in Rome before 59 A.D., while Persius did not die till 62.

The scanty and notable work of Persius—work which, in the junction of these two qualities, has hardly a parallel in literary [Sidenote: _Persius._] history, except that of Collins in English—is soaked in criticism of literature as well as of life. The poet’s turbid rush of thought and style, forcing its way through self-created obstacles but still forcing it, thick with suspended matter, but all the richer therefor, allows him not merely to deal directly with this subject, but in dealing with others to make constant allusion and by-blow. The famous [Sidenote: _The Prologue and First Satire._] scazontic prologue, with its affected language, satirising affectation, and its conceits, giving an object-lesson of conceited style, is all literary except the moral, _quoad_ “Master Gaster, first Master of Arts,” as Rabelais refashioned it fifteen hundred years later. The “horsy fountain” and the sleep on “two-headed” Parnassus, the relinquishment of the Muses to those whom such ladies concern, and the final fling about the crow-poets and poetess-magpies, may be gibes at dabblers in literature: but they show that the giber is steeped in literature himself, and has taken a critical as well as a delighted bath therein. And the first satire (the longest but one) is wholly and directly devoted to the subject. With the old device of a cool objecting friend, Persius takes occasion, while declaring (also an old trick) his own honest desire to keep to better matters, to draw a lively picture of the professional poet, or declamation-writer, scribbling in his locked study, arraying himself in his best clothes, and even with such jewelry as he can muster, carefully gargling his throat, and then tickling the ears of his audience, and comforting himself, when anybody objects the worthlessness of such applause, by the plea—

“At pulchrum digito monstrari et dicier ‘Hic est!’”[315]

A still livelier picture follows of the symposium referred to in the lines above quoted as to _Romulidæ saturi_; of the literary dandy in hyacinthine garment mincing and twanging through his nose some morbid stuff (_rancidulum quiddam_) about Phyllis and Hypsipyle, and being cheered in a fashion fit to make the poet’s ashes happy, his slab lie lighter on his tomb, and violets spring therefrom.

Footnote 315:

Not a few other phrases, such as—

“Cum carmina lumbum
Intrant, et tremulo scalpuntur ubi intima versu”—

show what a formidable, and what an accurate and capable, reviewer, of
the slashing order, Persius would have made.

Then he draws in his horns a little. Verse, of course, is not necessarily bad because it is popular only. But _Euge!_ and _Belle!_ are not the be-all and end-all of literature. What wretched stuff has not received them? How often have they not been consideration for a good dinner, and a cloak just a little torn! And what is even genuine popular judgment worth? Why do not poets adopt honest Roman subjects, instead of chattering about unreal Hellenics? And why do they affect such antiquated and unnatural style? What is the good of borrowing such stuff as

“Ærumnis cor luctificabile fulta,”

of ranging everything _in doctis figuris_, and of writing passages, such as two famous ones which he quotes, and which are traditionally asserted to be the work of Nero himself. He exhausts his images of scorn on these unlucky lines, and holds up _Arma virum_ against them as an example of natural knotty strength against effeminate drivel. And to a fresh protest of his friends about the danger of this kind of criticism, he replies by an ironical consent to declare it all very good, and a _coda_ of regret for the time when Lucilius used what freedom of speech he chose, when Horace laughed at everybody without giving offence, more seriously declaring that, whether he can publish or not, he will _write_ as the giants of the Old Comedy wrote.

In this lively crabbed production there are two distinct strains or bents to note. All the best critics have for some time admitted that in professed satire generally, and in Roman satire more than in any other, there is, if not a touch of cant, at any rate a distinct convention of moral indignation—a sort of stock-part of bluff, honestly old-fashioned, censuring of modern corruption—which the satirist takes up as a matter of business. Even Martial, upon whom, Heaven knows! it sits oddly enough, though his consummate dexterity carries it off not ill, affects this now and then; it sometimes suggests itself even through the gloomy intensity of Juvenal; and though such a line as Persius’ famous

“Virtutem videant intabescantque relicta”

carries us far out of the dissenting-pulpiteer region where Seneca too often gesticulates, there is in this First Satire, at any rate, some suspicion of forced wrath, of the righteous overmuch.

But the other strand in the twist, the other glance of the view, is in a very different state. There is nothing unreal, to all appearance, in the poet’s condemnation of the preciousness [Sidenote: _Examination of this._] and conceit of poetic and prose style in his day. That his own is very far from simple or Attic does not matter; the satire had a prescriptive right to be crabbed, archaic, irregular, bizarre. Whether political dislike of the tyrant did not sharpen literary objection to the poetaster (if the lines really are Nero’s) may be a debatable question for those who care to debate it; but, in any case, the objection was there, and seems to have been quite genuine. Now, as has been often pointed out, these definite passages, definitely objected to or praised, are precisely what we want most, and have least of, in ancient criticism. A short examination of them, therefore, will serve our turn very well.

The first passage appears to be cited chiefly as an objectionable example of archaism. We shall see that Quintilian (perhaps in obedience to this very passage, for he knew his Persius, and admired him) repeats the objection to the word _ærumna_[316]—to us a word not in the least objectionable, but the contrary. And if it be said that foreigners, and especially foreigners who acknowledge themselves entirely uncertain about the probable pronunciation of Latin, have no business to give an opinion about the euphony of words, the retort is obvious and pretty triumphant. To _some_ Romans, at any rate, if not to Persius and Quintilian, the word must have sounded agreeable, or as poets they would not have used, and as hearers or readers would not have applauded, it. The conceit of “cor _fulta_ ærumnis”—with heart stretched on pillows of woes—was no doubt another crime, and it is not improbable that _luctificabile_ was a third. The Romans had a rather pedantic horror of long words, which is again formulated by Quintilian, just as it is implied and exemplified here.

Footnote 316:

It has been questioned whether Persius did object to _ærumna_, or to
any of these words, _as words_. I should say that the coincidence in
Quintilian settles the first point: even if the context did not, to my
thinking, settle it, with the others. But he _may_ have been thinking
merely or mainly of the confusion of tragic and epic style.

Of the same type and colour is the objection to _rasa antitheta_ and _doctæ figuræ_ which follows, as well as that to the vowel harmony, the soft cadence, the mouth-watering[317] tenderness of the Neronian fragments. We may, without rashness, point to the soft sound of “Berecynthius Attin,” the alliteration of “_di_rimebat” and “_Del_phin” with the internal half-rhyme of “_cær_uleum” and “_Ner_ea,” the leonine effect of “long_o_” and “Apennin_o_” and the two tetrasyllables, with the sudden pull up of the spondaic ending, as what irritated Persius. This same accompaniment of sound, and cunning contrast or echo of vowels, recurs in the second and more coherent extract: “_Tor_va, _cor_nua”; “Mimal_lon_eis _bom_bis,” “_rap_tum _cap_ut”; “vitul_o_ superb_o_”; “_lyn_cem co_rym_bis”; the long words “reparabilis” and “Mimalloneis,” with the foreign effect of the latter and others. These, no doubt, were the things which annoyed our poet here.

Footnote 317:

_Tenerum et laxa cervice legendum ... delumbe ... natat in labris ...
in udo est._

A little reflection will make this annoyance exceedingly interesting. Not merely is the general effect of these lines very similar to that of hundreds and thousands of lines, in the earlier English Romantic school from Marlowe to Chamberlayne, in the later from Keats to Mr Swinburne; but the indignation of Persius is exactly similar, if not to the almost incredulous and disgusted disdain with which the critics and poets of the “school of good sense” looked back on the vagaries of their predecessors, to the alarmed and furious attempt made by critics of the present century to extinguish contemporaries who indulged in such things. Persius on Nero, if Nero it was, no doubt gave hints to, and, with hardly less doubt, was himself quite in sympathy with, the _Quarterly_ Reviewers of Keats and Tennyson. There is the same protest against the effeminate, the luscious, the unrestrained, the same indignant demand for manliness, order, sanity.

But we may go even further. These same processes, which we have ventured to point out as certainly illustrated by the gibbeted verses, and as probably accounting for the wrath of their executioner, are the very processes by which all our great nineteenth-century poets in English have produced their characteristic effects—alliteration, internal rhyme or assonance, complete or muffled, and, above all, the modulation of vowel and consonant so as to produce a sort of song without music, accompanying the actual words. And it may be noted that while some of our modern critics have objected to these things in themselves, many more, oddly enough, object to the process of pointing them out, and seem to think that there is something almost indecent in it.

It would be unreasonable to expect that in the narrow compass of some six hundred lines this passage—_locus uberrimus fructuosissimusque_, to borrow the Ciceronian superlatives—should repeat itself. But the literary interest of Persius, as regards criticism, is by no means exhausted. The next three satires are indeed wholly occupied by the exposition of that practical, honest, upright, rather hard, rather limited morality which it is the pride of Rome to have carried as far as mere morality of the sort can travel. But the beginnings of the fifth[318] and sixth[319] have a literary and critical turn in them, and though the course of the satire is afterwards deflected, these beginnings show the same man, the same tastes, the same standards that we have seen in the first. Don’t potter over fantastic subjects and sham Greek epics, but attack something Roman and serious. Whatever you write, write it in a manly fashion, with no æsthetic trifling. That is the critical gospel of Persius, and he sets it forth with a vigour which we shall seldom find equalled, and with (in the instance we have dwelt upon) a most fortunate fertility of illustration.

Footnote 318:

_Vatibus hic mos est_, κ.τ.λ.

Footnote 319:

With its compliment to Cæsius Bassus and his _marem strepitum fidis
Latinæ_.

The far bulkier work of Juvenal—work also of far higher genius in parts, but more unequal and uncertain—contains less [Sidenote: _Juvenal._] that concerns our subject. It is impossible to mistake in Persius, young as he died, and scanty as are his remains, a very direct interest in literary form, such as did not always or often accompany Stoic philosophy. Juvenal, with a less definite philosophical creed, and perhaps a rather lower moral standard, had a higher “Pisgah-sight” and a stronger grasp of life as a whole. However long Persius had lived, it is improbable that he would ever have given us anything equal to the magnificent Tenth Satire. But Juvenal, much more of a pessimist than Persius, was less capable of enthusiasm. His general critical standpoint does not seem to have been very different from that of his predecessor, or indeed (allowing for the vastly greater difference of temperament) from that which we shall find in Martial. But to Juvenal literature as literature had no special pre-eminence among the contents of his famous _farrago_. It would even appear that, although practising it greatly himself, he had a rather special contempt for it.[320] The well-known opening of the First Satire[321] agrees with Persius and with Martial in its scorn of artificial Greek epics, of sham heroic subjects and forms generally. But there pierces through it something of a special contempt for “Grub Street”—for the unlucky “Codrus”—who reappears, not always to be abused, but always to be dismissed with a sort of kick of contempt. There is something more than the stock superciliousness of the satirist in the thousand times quoted

“Stulta est clementia, cum tot ubique
Vatibus occurras, perituræ parcere chartæ.”

Footnote 320:

It has been held that Juvenal shows his “freedman” extraction by aping
and overdoing patrician prejudice in this and other matters. But I had
rather not think this.

Footnote 321:

_Semper ego auditor tantum_, &c.

The same tone is maintained throughout, and when poetry and literature appear (which is not extremely often), poets and men of letters are treated as practitioners of a rather troublesome, nearly superfluous, and slightly disreputable, profession, not as bad or good artists as the case may be. The stage-fright of the rhetorician who is going to make a speech at Lyons (the gird at the provincial is obvious), the book-chest of Codrus, with the mice gnawing the divine poems, the Greek mania which alternates with others in wives, and the learned lady who talks for hours on the comparative merits of Homer and Virgil, are introduced with the poet’s usual spirit and vigour, but very distinctly _not_ from the literary point of view. They are ludicrous things and persons, good satiric matter: but the book-chest is in the same class with the _lectus Procula minor_, the fancy for Greek with the fancy for gladiators, the critical lady with her sister who enamels her face. It is by no means un-noteworthy that, in the Tenth itself, the vanity of literary study and success—an admirably suggestive subject—is hardly touched at all; that the careers of Demosthenes and Cicero are held up as a moral because of their political ill-success, and the sanguinary fate of each—which might have happened to the most illiterate of men. But this is most noticeable of all in the Seventh, which may be said to have a definitely literary frame and scheme, or which at least certainly would have had these in the hands of a man really inclined to literary criticism. It opens with a characteristic picture of what the Americans would call a “slump” in poetry—the most celebrated bards giving up the profession in sheer despair, becoming bath-keepers, or stokers, or auctioneers’ criers, selling their tragedies at rummage sales, or at the very best getting empty praise and no pudding from their stingy though wealthy patrons. Then Juvenal becomes a little graver, and contrasts the victim of _cacoethes scribendi_ with the really exceptional poet (whom he cannot point out, and only imagines), who will put forth no hack-work, and writes not even for fame, but to please himself and the Muses. Such a poet must be in independent circumstances—if Virgil had had no boy to wait on him, and no tolerable lodging, all the snakes would have dropped from the hair of his Erinyes, says he in one of his most characteristic Juvenalisms. Lucan happened to be well off: but Statius, for all the popularity of his _Thebais_, would have gone dinnerless if he had not sold his _Agave_ to the actor Paris (apparently to pass off as his own).[322] Nor is the historian’s labour more profitable. Indeed it is less so, for it consumes more paper, more time, and more oil for the lamp, as Juvenal points out in what some modern reviewers would call “his flippant manner.” Even the much-praised trade of the orator brings in wretched fees as a rule—a ham, a jar of sardines, a bunch of onions, half-a-dozen of common wine. If you wish to soar higher in the matter of receipts, you must spend greatly, have handsome horses, furniture, rings. Merely teaching to declaim may be rather more profitable, but think of the intolerable boredom of the business! the same patter of stock declamations and exercises, the unreality and folly of it all! True, there are exceptions—and here comes a curious passage, half satirical, half complimentary, on Quintilian himself, but treating him not in the least from the literary standpoint. And so to the end.

Footnote 322:

I think _intactam_ insinuates this. But it may only mean that the play
was produced “for the first time on any stage,” though this seems
feebler. Some would have it that Paris, as being a pantomime, was to
travesty the thing.

This abstract, though brief, should be sufficient to establish our point—that Juvenal, while he rarely cared to touch strictly literary subjects, hardly ever treated them in a strictly literary manner. He shared the opinion of the best Roman literary judges at all times—and especially in his own times, when the popular current was setting in the opposite direction—that literary style ought to be plain, nervous, manly; and he could express this with even better right than Persius, inasmuch as his own, though extremely allusive and of the most original character, is quite clear from involution or conceit. But he did not care in the least to investigate literary processes: nor did he trouble himself very much to contrast styles and differentiate their values. One may even, without any rashness of guess, be certain that he would have regarded criticism of form with nearly as much disfavour in a man as he expressly does in a woman. In fact, he would have considered it the occupation of a fribble.

When we pass to the graceful graceless crowd of motes, or rather midges (for they have a very distinct bite), which composes [Sidenote: _Martial._] the works of Martial, we find, as has been said, very much the same general attitude towards styles in literature. But the expression is differentiated, not merely by the existence in the writer of a different moral complexion, but by the necessary conditions of his form. _They_ could discuss; _he_ can only glance. Further, the avowed purpose of amusement, of composing the verses of a very peculiar society, which animates the epigrams practically throughout, affects the result very considerably. Their author resembles both Persius and Juvenal in paying very elaborate attention to the outside of things, to the accidents of the literary business. We hear in him continually the echo of the _sophos_, the “bravo!” which the reciter and the rhetorician sought for, and which they sometimes, if not often, procured by the agency of a regular _claque_. We learn (not in the least to our surprise) that then, as now, there existed the kind literary friend who was quite eager to receive presentation copies, but who was by no means ready to go to the publishers and exchange even an extremely moderate number of his own denarii for a nice clean book, on polished vellum and neatly rubricated.[323] There were also then, as now, readers or reviewers who would take copyists’ (_lege_ “printers’”) errors very seriously, and upbraid the poet for them[324]—which he did not bear patiently.

Footnote 323:

i. 117.

Footnote 324:

ii. 8.

Here we have the certainly pointed, if not very polite, excuse for not submitting to the same tax of presentation copies, that he fears his friend may reply with a present of _his_ works:[325] elsewhere (in those triumphs of ingenious trifling the _apophoreta_, or gift-tickets) the neat suggestion, with a blank album, that a poet can offer no more acceptable present than paper _not_ written upon.[326] In one place there is, to carry off a piece of sheer begging, an irresistibly comic anecdote of a “curious impertinent,” who after asking whether the poet is not the Martial whom everybody not a fool admires, and receiving a confession of the soft impeachment, abruptly demands why such a poet has such a shocking bad great-coat, and receives the meek reply, _quia sum malus poeta_.[327] But these, and a good many others, which an easy reading, and a not very troublesome classification, of the _Epigrams_ will enable any one to produce, are examples parallel rather to our citations from Juvenal than to the capital one from Persius. That is to say, they are examples rather of the selection of a particular subject, as one of a hundred suitable to the special mode of treatment, than of the assertion or the display of any particular interest in that subject, or any special theories upon it. So, too, in some cases of more special reference, Martial’s habits of flattery, and the unblushing way in which (not for the first or the last time) men of letters in his generation were wont to fish for presents, make it not always quite easy to know how much seriousness to attach to his expressions of opinion on particular writers. Did he, for instance, really think Silius Italicus such a great poet?[328] One cannot say: it is certain that Silius was rich, and a person who seems to have been able to keep his head above water, and on his shoulders, during all the stormy changes of his lifetime. And if such a man wrote poetry, if he was not his enemy—still more if, as was the case here, he was his friend—we know but too well that Marcus Valerius Martialis was never likely to _publish_ any unflattering opinion of it.

Footnote 325:

vii. 3.

Footnote 326:

xiv. 10.

Footnote 327:

vi. 82.

But, in a very large number of cases, there was no possibility of hoodwinking, nor any object in attempting the operation. In [Sidenote: _The style of the Epigrams._] the very numerous references to his own books, Martial shows us that he wrote, not at haphazard but with the keenest critical knowledge of the requirements of the form. That he recognises, in more places than one,[329] Catullus as his own master, model, and superior, is itself a critical document and testimonial of the first value. For it is notorious that the Romans, as a rule, by no means rated the great poet of Verona at his due; and though the sneer of Horace[330] may have been dictated by a sufficiently ignoble but very intelligible jealousy, the slight and passing note of Quintilian[331] admits of no such explanation. But it was the Catullus of the epigrams that Martial endeavoured to rival. In doing so he shows that he had a very definite, and a very just, notion of the versification and diction necessary to his purpose. His praise of the _Romana simplicitas_ shown in the style of the lampoon of Augustus on Fulvia, in respect to which one can only refer modern readers to the original,[332] is capable of being mistaken for a mere laudation of coarse language—for an anticipation of that curious fallacy which has more than once made men regret the withdrawal of the licence to “talk greasily.” But this is unfair both to the poet and to the Emperor. Martial certainly does talk greasily with a vengeance; but the last line of this Imperial fescenninity depends for its point by no means merely on the obscene, and is an excellent example of clear-cut, straight-hitting phrase.

Footnote 328:

iv. 14; vii. 63.

Footnote 329:

_E.g._, x. 78.

Footnote 330:

_V. supra_, p. 229.

Footnote 331:

_V. infra_, p. 311.

Footnote 332:

xi. 20.

This phrase Martial himself almost always achieved, though in a few cases his points are still dark to us, and though he had not the slightest objection to using Greek words, vulgar words, and so forth when it suited his purpose. The misty magniloquence which attracted so many men of his time had no charms for him. When he rises, as he sometimes does, from sheer naughtiness or playful trifling to pathos, to seriousness, to graceful description of landscape—in the well-known Pætus and Arria piece, in the epitaphs on Erotion, and the still finer one on Paris, in his country poems and elsewhere—he is purely Attic. No style can have a simpler and a less affectedly simple grace. And that he did this deliberately—that it was his theory as well as his practice—we may see very well from a sort of cento of passages bearing on the subject. He differs not merely from Catullus but from Prior (who is perhaps his nearest analogue in almost all ways) by having obviously no velleities towards the grand style. We can imagine Prior writing, and writing quite as well, the piece which tells how pretty Phyllis, when her lover was racking his brains for some elegant present to reward her kindness past, exerted fresh coaxing before asking him for—a jar of wine,[333] or describing the singular history of Galla on the stock- and share-lists of Love.[334] But we cannot imagine Martial writing _Alma_ or _Solomon_. And all his critical observations, direct or indirect, testify to a conception of literature perfectly clear and not really deserving the term narrow, if only because the poet quite frankly limits it to the kind in which he wishes to, and knows that he can, excel, the kind indicated in his own famous quatrain:—

“Ille ego sum nulli nugarum laude secundus
Quem non ignoras, sed puto lector amas:
Majores majora sonent, mihi parva locuto
Sufficit in vestras sæpe redire manus.”

Let us see what morsels of criticism such handling furnishes.

Footnote 333:

xii. 65.

Footnote 334:

x. 75.

The prose preface and the opening epigrams of the first book contain humorous statements of his own fame, excuses (not quite valid) for his licence of speech, and jocose exaggerations of the critical temper of the times; but there is not much doctrine in them. There is more in ii. 77, where, not in the best temper [Sidenote: _Précis of their critical contents._] (for Martial, like some other persons, though he loved to criticise, was not excessively fond of being criticised), he points out to a certain Cusconius what the French wit afterwards borrowed from him in the phrase “ce n’est pas long, mais il y a des longueurs.” Verses, he says, like his own, though there may be many of them, are not long because they can spare nothing, because there is nothing otiose in them. Cusconius, on the other hand, can write distichs which are long. There is a not uninteresting glance at the fashionable literary subjects and kinds—History of the times of Claudius, criticism of the myths about Nero (these could be safely done under the Flavian emperors), fables in the style of Phædrus, tender elegiacs and stern hexameters, Sophoclean tragedy or Attic salt—in iii. 20. Another French jest—one of the very best of Piron on La Chaussée—is anticipated with variation in the 25th of the same book, by the suggestion to a friend whose baths have been overheated, that he should ask Sabinæus the rhetor to bathe. _He_ can reduce the temperature of the Thermæ of Nero themselves. IV. 49 gives us another critical laudation of the epigram. Flaccus is quite wrong to think it child’s play. The poet is much more guilty of that who busies himself with Tereus and Thyestes and Dædalus and Polyphemus. There is no mere bombast in _his_ book: _his_ Muse is not frounced with senseless tragic train.[335] “But,” says Flaccus, “the others are the things that people praise.” “Perhaps,” says Martial, “they praise _them_: but they read _me_,” with of course the implied and very sound criticism that it is not so easy to write what shall be easy to read. V. 10 ends with a jest, the poet saying that if his fame is to come after his death he hopes it will come late. But it treats rather seriously the other “touch of nature” (opposite to that of which Shakespeare speaks and complementary to it), that in literature, and at times [not always, O Martial!] men do _not_ “praise new-born gauds.” They read Ennius in the lifetime of Virgil, laughed at Homer [the evidence for this?] in his own days, preferred Philemon to Menander, and left Ovid to the appreciation of Corinna.[336] But he shows his less critical mood in setting this down to envy rather than to the undoubted fact that, in at least many cases, poets anticipate, if they do not exactly create, the taste for them—that, as it has been said, a poet’s chief admirers are born at about the time when he writes. The necessity of some “bite”[337] in epigrams, vii. 25, is counsel at least as much of common-sense as of literature. In the 85th of the same, the poet objects to Sabellus that he can write a few quatrains rather well, but not a book—by which he probably glances at the necessity, in a book, of varying and sorting the kinds, as well as of providing a mere quantity of monotonous stuff. And in the 90th again of the same book he is still more explicitly argumentative. A certain Matho, it seems, went about saying that Martial’s books were unequal. If this be so, retorts our bard, it is because Calvinus (? or Cluvienus, as in Juvenal) and Umber write “equal” verses, and a bad book is always an “equal” one.

Footnote 335:

_Insano syrmate tumet._

Footnote 336:

Another and severer side of the same epigram is that, viii. 69, to
Vacerra, who only praises dead poets. To die in order to please
Vacerra, says the bard, is not quite _tanti_.

Footnote 337:

_Sapit quæ novit pungere._

Now, what exactly did he mean by “equal”? When we say that a book is unequal, we generally mean that it has faults as well as beauties, that it is not equally good, and in this sense Martial would merely be vindicating himself from the charge of a tame faultlessness, from that _æqualis mediocritas_ which Quintilian smites in passing. But, if we take it in conjunction with the Sabellus epigram just quoted, I think it will not be unfair to allow to _æqualis_ also its other sense of “unvarying,” “monotonous,” and give the prominence to this in the equivalence with _malus_ of the last line.[338] Martial specially and critically prided himself on the variety of his books, on their containing something for every taste, and something (almost) about every subject. And the book, he says therefore, that has not this quality is a bad book. The same doctrine pierces through the laudation of the prose preface of the Eighth to Domitian, and points the hope that the celestial _verecundia_ of the “bald Nero” will not be offended by the naughtier epigrams.

Footnote 338:

There is yet another sense of _æqualis_, “like something else,” which
might be brought in.

The third of this eighth book contains an interesting dialogue between the Poet and his Muse. Were it not, says he, better to stop? Are not six or seven books enough and too much? Their fame is far and widely spread, and when the monuments of the great are dust they will be, and strangers will take them to their own country. It is never quite easy to know whether Martial is laughing in his sleeve or not in these boastings. But the ninth of the sisters, her hair and garments dripping with perfume (probably Thalia, certainly not one of the _Musæ severiores_), upbraids him with ingratitude and folly. Why drop these pleasantries? What better pastime will he find? Will he change his sock for the buskin, or arrange hexameters to tell of wars, that pedants may spout him, and that good boys and fair girls may loathe his name? Let the grave and precise write such things by their midnight lamp. But for him, let an elegant saltness dash his Roman books, let real living people recognise and read their own actions and characters; and if the oat be thin, remember that it conquers the trumpets of many. The Epigram here, it will be seen, arrogates to itself something like the place of the full Satire.

This, one of the best and most spirited of Martial’s literary pronouncements, is followed up in a lower key by the 56th epigram of the same book, addressed to that Flaccus who is elsewhere the recipient of the poet’s literary confidences. It contains the famous line—

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

and elaborates the doctrine that the patron makes the poet, comfort, if not luxury, the poetry, in an ingenious but impudent manner, carrying off the impudence, however, by the close. What, he supposes Flaccus to say, will you be a Virgil if I give you what Mæcenas gave him? Well, no, perhaps: but I may be a Marsus—a poet who wrote many things, but chiefly in the occasional kind, whom Martial greatly admired, and whose epilogue on Tibullus—

“Te quoque Virgilio comitem non æqua Tibulle”—

with two or three other fragments, we possess.[340] And the same doctrine, that love and luxury are needful to the bard, reappears in 73.

Footnote 339:

Some MSS. and edd. read _sunt_: but _sint_ is so clearly required that
this seems mere perversity.

Footnote 340:

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

Martial does not often come down to the minutiæ of criticism, but he sometimes does, and once in a very noteworthy passage, ix. 11. Here, in some of his most gracefully fluttering verses, he celebrates the charm of the name[341] Eiarinos or Earinos, notes that unless he takes the epic licence of the first form it will not come into verse, and then adds—

“Dicunt Eiarinon tamen poetæ,
Sed Græci, quibus est nihil negatum
Et quos Ἄρες ἄρες decet sonare:
Nobis non licet esse tam disertis,
Qui Musas colimus severiores.”

Footnote 341:

_Nomen cum violis rosisque natum._ Wherefore Ben Jonson took it for
the heroine of this most beautiful thing, _The Sad Shepherd_.

There are two things noticeable here—first, Martial’s truly poetical sensitiveness to the beauty of a name, for certainly there is none prettier than Earine (let him keep the masculine to himself!) which also appears elsewhere; and secondly his equally poetical yearning for that licence of “common” quantification, which has made Greek and English the two great poetical languages of the world.[342] If he would have developed these views a little oftener, and at a little greater length, we really could have spared a considerable number of epigrams imputing unmentionable offences to the persons he did not like. It was his cue, however, to profess (though half his charm comes from his sense of them) disdain for such niceties, as in the 81st epigram of the same book, which is one of his neatest turns. Readers, he says, and hearers like his books, but a certain poet denies that they are correctly finished (_exactos_). It does not trouble him much, for he would rather that the courses of the feast he offers pleased the guests than that they pleased the cooks. In this, light as it is, there lurks the germ of a weighty criticism, and one which would, had it been worked out, have carried Martial far from the ordinary critical standpoint of his time. That, in homely phrase analogous to his own, the proof of the pudding is in the eating—that the production of the poetical satisfaction afterwards, not the satisfaction of the examiners beforehand as to the observation of the rules, is the thing—that Martial doubtless saw, and that he, by implication, says. But he does not say it quite openly, and it might have shocked Quintilian (though it would not have shocked Longinus) if he had.

Footnote 342:

My friend Professor Hardie rather demurs to the idea of “common”
syllables being commoner in Greek than in Latin, save possibly in
proper names. But I had certainly thought they were, and, even if we
allow for some poetic and humorous exaggeration in _nihil negatum_, it
seems to show that Martial thought so too.

The Tenth book is particularly rich in literary epigrams. It opens with a batch of them,—one of his pleasant excuses for yet another reappearance (the pieces are so short that if you don’t like the book you can lay it down as finished at any moment), an honest indication of the fact that some of the epigrams are only new editions, so to speak, of old ones, smoothed with a recent file, one of the not disagreeably boasting reminders that letters outlive brass and marble (a boast justified in his own case, but not so, alas! in those of Marsus and others whom he admitted as his masters), a strongly worded protest against some clandestine poet who has been forging bad epigrams in his name, a repetition of the old contemptuous pooh-poohing of stock Greek subjects, and the old exhortation to study the life. The 19th, in a pleasant _envoy_ of the book to Pliny, bids the Muse who carries it observe her time, and not disturb the grave man at his graver hours. The 21st is an expostulation with a certain Sextus, who seems to have prided himself on the eccentric vocabulary of his poems. What is the use of writing so that Modestus and Claranus themselves (known men of learning) can scarcely understand you, and so that your books demand not an ordinary reader but the Delphic Apollo? You would prefer to Virgil Cinna—Helvius Cinna, whose fancy for out-of-the-way words we can see, even in the petty wreckage of his work that time has fated to us.[343] Perhaps, Martial admits, such poems may be praised; but he would rather have grammarians like his work, and not be necessary to its liking.[344] The 35th is a specially graceful compliment to the poetess Sulpicia, who wrote her love poems (apparently rather warm ones[345]) to her husband only, and with whom, says Martial, for schoolmate or schoolmistress, Sappho herself would have been _doctior et pudica_—a right happy blending of comparative and positive. 70 is a quaint apology, not for writing so much but for writing so little, the satire of which is so ingeniously airy that it is possible to interpret its irony in more ways than one. Potitus calls him lazy because he does not bring out more than one book a-year. What time has a man to write poetry? Calls and congratulations (which, somehow, he does not find returned), attendances at religious and official functions, listening the whole day long to other poets, to advocates, to declaimers, to very grammarians, the bath, the _sportula_—why, the whole day slips away sometimes without one’s being able to settle to work at all!

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

“Nec multos mihi præferas poetas,
Uno sed tibi sim minor Catullo”—

which shows Martial’s faithfulness to his exquisite master.