Chapter II: The Contemporaries of Quintilian (2)

Footnote 343:

Cf. the technical words _carchesia_, _anquina_ in the fragment of his
_Propempticon Pollionis_, Baehrens, _Poetæ Latini Minores_, vi. 323.

Footnote 344:

_Grammaticis placeant, et sine grammaticis._

Footnote 345:

_V._ the only remaining fragment in Baehrens, _Poet. Lat. Min._, vi.
370. The satirical piece, usually printed with Juvenal and assigned to
a Sulpicia, _may_ be hers: but at any rate Martial was not thinking of
anything of the kind. He varies his own conceit in vii. 69 on a
certain Theophila.

The Eleventh and Twelfth, the last of the epigrams proper (for the _Xenia_ and _Apophoreta_[346] have been dealt with so far as the little that they have concerns us, and the _Liber de Specta culis_ is out of the question), are also fruitful. The common habit of addressing the book itself at its beginning frequently has a literary turn given to it by Martial, and as in the Tenth so in the Eleventh, not one but a batch appears as overture, chiefly dedicatory; while another batch farther on is opened by the promise, certainly not falsified, that the book is going to be the naughtiest of all. The 90th, however, is important for us, though by no means immaculate, because the sudden fling of a handful of mud, in which Martial too often delights, is led up to by satire on that same preference for uncouth and archaic language, which, as we have seen, so often defrays the satiric criticism of the time. Chrestillus, the victim, it seems, approves no smooth verses; they must roll over rocks and jolt on half-made roads to please him. A verse like

“Luceili columella heic situ’ Metrophanes”

is better to him than all Homer, and he worships _terrai frugiferai_ and all the jargon of Attius and Pacuvius.

Footnote 346:

It ought, however, perhaps to be added that these include a
considerable batch of inscription-distichs for presents of books from
Homer and Virgil downwards. Most of these are decorative but
conventional: that on Lucan (194), “There are those who say that I am
not a poet; but my bookseller thinks me one,” is keen with a double
edge.

The prose preface of the Twelfth book starts with an excuse for a three years’ silence (it would appear that for a considerable time Martial had produced a book yearly), due to the poet’s return to Spain. He had been, as the epigram above quoted pleads, too busy or too lazy to write in town; in the country he found himself deprived of the material for writing. The stimulating, teasing occupations of Rome had given place to mere clownish vacancy. However, to please Priscus, he has busied himself again, and he only hopes that his friend will not find his work “not merely Spanish of the Roman Pale, but Spanish pure and simple.”[347] In the third epigram there is a half-rueful recommendation (which Thackeray would have translated impeccably) to his book to revisit the dear old places, ending with a distich revindicating, in no wise foolishly, the crown of style—

“Quid titulum poscis? Versus duo tresve legantur,
Clamabunt omnes te, liber, esse meum.”

He was right. Nobody but Martial could have written Martial except Catullus himself in his less noble moods; and the boast is in itself a criticism and a just one. Yet Martial had his dignity, and an odd epigram, the 61st of this book, disclaims the mere coarse language in which he seems to us too often to have indulged. And the tale of literary epigrams ceases (I apologise for omissions in the bright and shifting bevy) with another odd piece, which may be either gross flattery, irony of a rather sanguinary kind, or mere playfulness, and in which he remonstrates with his friend Tucca for touching and executing, so as to make competition impossible, every kind of poetry. Epic, tragedy, lyric, satire, epigram itself—Martial has tried them all and dropped them, because he feels himself beaten by Tucca. This is not fair; let Tucca leave him at least one kind, the kind that he doesn’t care for. It is not fanciful, surely, to find a critique of poetical polypragmatism here also.

Footnote 347:

_Non Hispaniensem sed Hispanum._

It may well seem to some that too much space has been accorded to Martial; but it has been allotted on the principle which, be it mistaken or not, is the principle that underlies this book. We have, in this good-for-nothing trifler, a very considerable number of pronouncements on critical points, or points connected with criticism, and, what is more, we have in him a writer who has a very clear notion of literary criticism in and for his own work. A great poet Martial is not: he has no fine madness, or only the remotest touches of it. He does not look back to the way in which Lucretius had infused that quality into the language; I do not think, speaking under correction, that he ever so much as names him. He does not anticipate (and if he had anticipated, he would not, I think, have welcomed with any pleasure) the tide which, welling in upon the severer Muses of classical Latin style, gave them once more the Siren quality in the Low Latin of the Middle Ages. Farther, he can hardly be said to have any “wood-notes wild”; even his country descriptions, charming as they are, are distinctly artificial. Much as he adores Catullus, it is not for the flashes of pure poetry which we see in that poet. But, on the other hand, Martial sees, not merely with instinctive but with critical certainty, that gift of precision, clearness, felicity, _venustas_, which the Greek-Latin blend of the Golden and Silver Ages had. He practises and he preaches the cultivation of this. He preaches it at no tedious length: his chosen form as well as his common-sense would have prevented that. But he directly extols the cultivation of style—of that quality which will make any decent judge identify a poet when he has heard three lines of his poem. And he practises what he preaches. Even what the grave and precise (quite truly one must confess) call his moral degradation saves him from confusing the moral with the literary quality of literature—the noble error of most ancient criticism. He has, as scarcely any other ancient writer has, formulated the great critical question, “L’ouvrage est-il bon ou est-il mauvais?” And if he had chosen to write a _De Arte Poetica_, I am bound, shocking as the confession may seem, to say that I think it would have been superior to that of Horace, while he has provided no unimportant _progymnasmata_ towards one as it is.

From “the mixed and subtle Martial,” as Gavin Douglas excellently [Sidenote: _Statius._] calls him, we may pass to the poet, perhaps the rival, whom he never mentions[348]—the author of that only adequate Roman description of Lucretius which has been referred to above.[349] The precise sources of the popularity of Statius in the Middle Ages have never yet, I think, been thoroughly investigated. It is, however, not difficult to discern them afar off, and to include among them a certain touch of that uncritical quality which, as we shall see, was one of the main notes of the Middle Ages themselves. Yet the author of the words _furor arduus Lucreti_[350] must have been able at least to appreciate. And the poem which contains that phrase, as well as the prose prefaces of the _Sylvæ_ where it occurs, will yield something more bearing on our subject. The first of these prefaces is a curious if not particularly felicitous plea for the legitimacy—indeed, for the necessity—of a poet’s indulging in lighter work in the intervals of _Thebaids_ and _Achilleids_. This is something like the view of Pliny: the poet must be a Jack-of-all-poetical-trades. Martial knew better. But it is a noteworthy thing (and Martial himself would have been pungent on it) that Statius cannot make his trifles brief. Domitian’s horse has nearly three hundred lines. I do not think that there is a single poem in the five books of the _Sylvæ_ which falls short of several scores, whatever its metre. In the preface of the second he apologises to his friend Melior for some of the pieces, as _libellos quasi epigrammatic loco scriptos_, and here again Martial might have had something to say about epigrams seventy-seven lines long. That Statius had not cleared up his own mind about criticism appears from the touching and attractive, though not quite consummate, _Ad Claudiam Uxorem_, where the poet, beaten in the public competitions where he had long triumphed, proposes that Naples, and his wife’s caresses, shall console him for the loss of tasteless and thankless Rome. But the _Genethliacon Lucani_, a commemorative birth-day poem on Lucan (which would have been a little more effective if we could forget that this tribute to the victim of Nero was written by a flatterer of Domitian), contains the central utterance of Statius about other poets. It is, as nearly everything of Statius has been said to be, too long and too much improvised, though also, like most things, if not everything, of his, it contains fine touches, especially that of Lucan in the shades:—

“Seu magna sacer et superbus umbra
Nescis Tartaron, et procul nocentum
Audis verbera, pallidumque visa
Matris lampade respicis Neronem.”

But its interest for us, besides the Lucretian description, which is itself not improved by _docti_, consists in the long eulogy of Lucan himself, and the repeated, and therefore not probably conventional, advice to him not to be afraid of Virgil—

“Bætin Mantua provocare noli;”

and after some time—

“Quin majus loquor; ipsa te Latinis
Æneis venerabitur canentem.”

It would be clear from this, if we did not know it from the evidence of his original work, that Statius was not on the side of the satirists, that he had no objection to the Spanish _ampulla_.

Footnote 348:

No one of his contemporaries, except Juvenal (_v. supra_, p. 255),
ever does mention Statius. It is indeed usually said that no classical
author does so, with the same exception.

Footnote 349:

P. 216.

Footnote 350:

_Et docti furor arduus Lucreti._ _Genethliacon Lucani, Sylv._, ii. 7.
76.

The, in all ways very delightful, Epistles[351] of the younger Pliny are not least delightful in the line of literary criticism. [Sidenote: _Pliny the Younger: Criticism on the Letters._] Pliny was a confirmed man of letters. In no member of the most interesting group of late Flavian and early Antonine writers do we see more clearly the “bookish” tone which so largely pervaded Roman society. He even, on the celebrated occasion[352] when he tells Tacitus with modest pride that he had bagged three wild boars, _et quidem pulcherrimos_, admits that he sat at the nets with a pencil and a notebook, thus anticipating the action of Kingsley’s Lancelot Smith when he took St Francis de Sales to a meet. He takes an intelligent pride in his uncle’s literary work, and if he is a little wrong in doubting Martial’s power of “lasting” in the letter which he writes after his death,[353] let us remember that Martial had paid him a very pretty compliment (which he quotes and which we have quoted[354]), and that it would not have done to be too certain of the fact of this coming to Prince Posterity. The very first letter[355] admits a particular critical care in composition, and the second gives further particulars thereof. He had never taken such care as with the book that he sends to Arrian. He had tried to follow Demosthenes and Calvus, but few, _quos æquus amavit_ (this allusiveness would have been reprehended by some of our modern critics), can really catch up such masters. The matter was good, and he had sometimes ventured to extract special ornaments from the “perfume-bottles”[356] of Cicero. But Arrian must give him a careful revision, for the booksellers tell him that the thing is already popular. He has many of the technical phrases which half attract and half repel modern readers, because they are so difficult to adjust. There is something like a miniature review in his description of the works of Pompeius Saturninus to Erucius in i. 16. This Pompey has something so _varium_, so _flexibile_, so _multiplex_, that he holds Pliny’s entire attention. He had heard him pleading both with and without preparation, _acriter et ardenter, nec minus polite et ornate_. There were in these speeches _acutæ, crebræque sententiæ_, a grave and decorous construction, sonorous and archaic terms (Martial and Persius would have shaken heads). “All these things,” he says, “please strangely when they are rolled forth in a rushing flood, and they please even if they are read over again. You will think as I do when you have his orations in your hands, orations comparable to those of any of the ancients whom he rivals. Yet he is still more satisfactory in History, whether you take his brevity, or his light, or his sweetness, or his splendour, or his sublimity. In popular addresses he is the same as in Oratory, though more compressed and circumscript, and wound together. His verses are as good as Catullus or Calvus, and full of elegance, sweetness, bitterness, love! and his Letters (which he calls his wife’s) are like Plautus or Terence without the metre.” Truly an Admirable Crichton of a Pompeius Saturninus! and great pity it is that he has not come down to us, this “Cambridge the everything”[357]—of _circa_ 100 A.D.

Footnote 351:

It did not seem necessary to specify editions of Persius, Juvenal, and
Martial. For Pliny I use that of Keil, Leipsic, 1886.

Footnote 352:

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

Footnote 353:

III. 21, p. 65.

Footnote 354:

_V. supra_, p. 264.

Footnote 355:

_Hortatus es ut epistolas si quas paulo accuratius scripsissem
colligerem ... Collegi._

Footnote 356:

ληκύθους. The word, whether from the use of its diminutive in the
_Frogs_ or not, seems to have become a stock metaphor for rhetorical
tropes. It has even been compared to _ampulla_, though I fancy it was
not quite so uncomplimentary, and meant “prettiness,” “conceit,”
rather than “bombast.” Both, however, illustrate the view, put
frequently in Book I. and here, as to the ancient conception of style.

Footnote 357:

If the reader is in ignorance of this worthy, he can cure his disease
by any one of three pleasant medicines—Boswell, Horace Walpole, and Mr
Austin Dobson’s _Eighteenth Century Vignettes_.

But the most famous of Pliny’s letters in connection with this subject is the twentieth of the first book,[358] to Tacitus, in which he deals with a set question of literary criticism. “A certain learned and skilful man” maintains that in oratory brevity is everything. In certain cases, Pliny admits, but only in certain cases. The adversary objects Lysias among the Greeks, the Gracchi and Cato among the Romans. Pliny retorts with Demosthenes, Æschines, Hyperides, Pollio, Cæsar, Cælius, Cicero. Indeed he does not fear to lay it down as a general principle, “the bigger the better.”[359] The adversary says that the orators spoke less than they published. Pliny dissents. And then he discusses the matter generally—from the point of view of oratory in the main, but partly also from that of literature. And his general view, like that of his generation (I hardly know whether to include his master Quintilian or not), may be taken as put in the phrase, _Non enim amputata oratio et abscissa, sed lata et magnifica et excelsa tonat, fulgurat, omnia denique perturbat ac miscet_.[360]

Footnote 358:

P. 16.

Footnote 359:

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

Footnote 360:

This letter contains an interesting _mot_ of Aquilius Regulus, the
brilliant and questionable orator-informer, of whom Pliny frequently
speaks with a sort of mixture of admiration and dislike, reminding one
of the way in which men used to speak of Lord Chancellor Westbury.
“You,” said Regulus to him, “hunt out everything in your brief. I see
the throat at once, and go for it”—_ego jugulum statim video, hunc
premo_. There is some point in Pliny’s retort that people who do this
not infrequently hit knee or ankle instead.

The third letter of the second book is a set panegyric of Isæus,[361] which would be of more interest if criticisms of orators were not so common; the fifth of the third is the notice of the life, literary and other, of Pliny the Elder. The obituary criticism of Martial, to which reference has been made, occurs in the 21st of this third book, and is a little patronising. But the contemner of brevity, even if he were a private friend and a flattered one, and if he had (as most Romans would have had) no objection to Martial’s freedom of subject and language, could hardly be expected to do full justice to the epigrammatist.

Footnote 361:

_Not_ the great Attic; but an Assyrian rhetor of Pliny’s own time,
supposed to be also referred to by Juvenal in the well-known phrase,
_Isæo torrentior_ (iii. 74).

We are less able to judge the literary part of the flattering epistle (iv. 3) to Antoninus, afterwards Emperor, which is so much in the extravagant style of Roman compliment that, in the absence of the work referred to, it gives us no critical information whatever. The literary characteristic of the future Pius appeared to Pliny to be the mixture of the severe with the agreeable—of the grave with the gay, which made his style extraordinary sweet, as the eighteenth century would have said. The usual honey and its maker-bees put in the usual appearance to express Pliny’s sensations when he reads his correspondent’s Greek epigrams and iambics. He thinks of Callimachus or Herodes (doubtless our just recovered Herondas). Only neither has done anything so humane, so venust, so sweet, so loving, so keen, so correct. How could a Roman write such Greek? It is more Attic than Athens, and Pliny grudges such a writer to the Greeks, though there is no doubt that if Antoninus would only write in his mother tongue he would do better still.

IV. 14, enclosing some hendecasyllabics which have not come down (from other specimens they are a tolerable loss), contains some interesting and curious remarks on the always burning and never yet settled question of morality in literature. Pliny adopts to the full, as a matter of principle, the doctrine which his friend Martial had both practised and preached, that naughty things, and even the naughtiest words, may figure in poetry,—that, as Pliny himself puts it, with the still higher authority of Catullus—

“Nam castum esse decet pium poetam
Ipsum—versiculos nihil necesse est.”

Only he himself declines to use the naughty words,[362] not out of prudery, but out of timidity. He follows this up with the sounder doctrine that everything must be judged in its own kind.

Footnote 362:

_Verba nuda._

Another short letter to Antoninus (iv. 18) not merely repeats the praise of his Greek epigrams, but informs us that Pliny himself has put some of these in Latin. A longer one, which follows, to Calpurnia Hispulla, contains an elaborate eulogy of the lady’s niece, Pliny’s second wife, who shows her good taste and virtue by learning her husband’s books by heart, instructing herself in literature generally for love of him, and singing his verses. And later, with something of the same innocence or lack of humour which was a Roman—in fact, has generally been a Latin—characteristic, he tells us that he has been for three days listening _cum summa voluptate_ to a certain Sentius Augurinus, reciting his poems or poemkins (_poematia_). Sentius, it seems, performed many things with lightness, many with sublimity, many with beauty, many with tenderness, many with sweetness, many _with bile_. It is not quite clear under which head comes the specimen he produces, which is a rather feeble compliment to Pliny himself. “Vides,” says Pliny, after quoting it, “quam acuta omnia, quam apta, quam expressa.” Besides, he is the friend of Spurinna and Antoninus. What an _emendatus adolescens_!

V. 8[363] is a not uninteresting paper on History. Tutinius Capito wishes him, as he tells us others had done, to write this. Pliny is not ill-disposed to do so, not because he thinks he shall do it very well, but (the sentiment is a fine one, though a little bombastically expressed) because “it seems to him one of the best of actions to rescue from perishing that which ought to be eternal.”[364] His idea of history, however, is not very lofty. Oratory and Poetry, he says, must have style; History pleases howsoever it be written, because of the natural curiosity of man—a doctrine which, in slightly changed matter, has been joyfully accepted by the usual novelist. Besides, his uncle had been a diligent historian. Then why does he delay? Because he wants to execute a careful recension of his speeches in important cases, and he hardly feels equal to both tasks, while, though there is much in common between Oratory and History, they are also different. The contrast is curious, and shows the overweening position which Oratory had with the ancients. To History, says Pliny, things humble and sordid, or at least mediocre, belong: to Oratory, all that is exquisite, splendid, and lofty.[365] The bare bones, muscles, and nerves suit history: Oratory must have the swelling bulk of flesh and the waving plumes of hair. History pleases by rough, bitter energy:[366] Oratory by long-drawn sweetness. Diction, style, construction—all are different. After which he gives a somewhat unexpected turn to the famous Thucydidean saying, by admitting that history is the _ktema_, and the _agonisma_ oratory. And, therefore, he thinks that he had better not attempt at once two things so different. A letter to Suetonius about the books of both (v. 10), another to Spurinna (v. 17) about a recitation by Calpurnius Piso, a third (vi. 15) on a thin jest by Javolenus Priscus at another recitation by a descendant of Propertius (who began “Prisce jubes,” and was interrupted by Javolenus, _Ego vero non jubeo_), may be glanced at rather than discussed.

Footnote 363:

There is another interesting critical remark at the end of the famous
description of the villa (v.6): “I think it the first duty of a writer
to _read his own title_, and constantly ask himself what he sat down
to write, and to be sure that if he sticks to his subject he will
never be too long, but will be hopelessly so if he drags other matters
in.”

Footnote 364:

_Non pati occidere, quibus æternitas debeatur._

Footnote 365:

This, of course, is the old invidious distinction between tragedy and
comedy revived in other material. Cf. the curious passage in Tacitus
(_Ann._, xiii. 31) in which he, for his part, glances disdainfully at
those who think “beams and foundation-stones” (Nero’s amphitheatre)
worth mentioning. such things should be kept for journals (_diurnis
urbis actis_): it is for the dignity of the Roman people that only
illustrious matters should find place in Annals. The two thoughts are
characteristic of the two men.

Footnote 366:

_Vi, amaritudine, instantia._

Perhaps there is no better document of Pliny’s literary criticism, both in its strength and in its weakness, than vi. 17. He writes in a state of _indignatiuncula_ (let us translate “mild wrath”), which he can only relieve by working it off in a letter to his friend Restitutus. He has been at one of the eternal recitations, where the book recited was not so usual; indeed, it was _absolutissimus_—quite “A per se,” as our ancestors would have said. But one or two of the audience (clever[367] fellows, as they and a few others thought) listened to it as if they were deaf mutes. They did not open their lips: they did not clap: they did not even rise from their seats save when they were tired of sitting. What is the good of such gravity, such wisdom, nay, such laziness, arrogance, _sinisterity_ (a good word!), or, to cut things short, madness, which leads men to spend a whole day [the terrors of recitation were obviously not exaggerated by the satirists] in offending and making an enemy of a man whom you have visited as a friend? Are you clever? Do not show envy: the envier is the lesser. Nay, whether you can yourself do as well, or less well, all the same praise him, whether he be inferior or superior or equal. Your superior, because, if he is not praiseworthy, still less are you; your equal or inferior, because the better he is, in that case, the better you are. Pliny, for his part, is wont to venerate and admire anybody who does anything in literature. It is a difficult thing, sir, an arduous, a fastidious, and it has a knack of bringing scorn on those who scorn it.[368] Restitutus will surely agree: he is the most amiable and considerate of judges. We may mark this passage as, of many interesting ones, that which gives us Pliny’s measure as a literary critic best.

Footnote 367:

_Diserti_, used here, as _disertior_ is lower, with the slightly
invidious sense which often attaches to the word, just as it does to
the English equivalent here used for it.

Footnote 368:

_Est enim res difficilis, ardua, fastidiosa, et quæ eos, a quibus
contemnitur, invicem contemnat._

But the list of his noteworthy “places” is by no means closed. VI. 21 gives us his standpoint in another famous quarrel—that of Ancients and Moderns. He admires the former, but by no means so as to despise the latter. He does not hold with the doctrine of the senescence of nature. He recently heard Vergilius Romanus recite a comedy in the Old Comedy kind, which was as good as it could be. The same man has written mimiambics with perfect grace, comedies in another kind as good as Menander’s; he has force, grandeur, subtlety, bitterness, sweetness, neatness, he glorifies virtue, attacks vice, invents his personages,[369] and uses real ones, with equal appropriateness. And (as by this time we begin to expect in such cases) “In writing about _me_ he has only gone wrong by excessive kindness; and, after all, poets may feign.” One sees that the excellent Pliny’s geese were swans in every quill.

Footnote 369:

So I translate _nominibus_.

VII. 4 deals at some length with his own poems, and gives some hexameters about Tiro and Cicero, which are in style quite worthy of the subject. There are some elegiacs (rather better) in vii. 8, which is an elaborate recommendation of literary study—the turning of Greek into Latin, and _vice versa_, the refashioning and rearrangement of work already done, the alternation of oratorical practice with history, letter-writing, and verse of the lighter kind, which receives an elaborate and not unhappy encomium. As for reading, read all the best models in all the styles in which you write. VII. 17 is on recitation; 20 of the same book is one of several interesting, though slightly amusing, letters to Tacitus, in which Pliny implies it to be his own opinion, and quotes it as that of others, that he and Tacitus were the two greatest literary men of Rome, and that it was quite wonderful that they were such friends. What Tacitus thought of the conjunction we do not know; he was probably too well bred a man to put his thought in words, though a Tacitean expression of it would indeed be a treasure. In vii. 25 we meet another “swan,” Terentius Junior, who writes things _quam tersa omnia! quam Latina! quam Græca!_ Later, in the 30th, a friend having compared his work, in vindication of Helvidius Priscus, to that of Demosthenes against Midias, he confesses that he had had the piece in view, though he thinks it would have been _improbum et pæne furiosum_ to have imagined rivalry possible. In viii. 4 he encourages the friend to write an epic poem in Greek on the Dacian war, thereby incurring a considerable responsibility. The descendant of Propertius, on whom Javolenus Priscus made that surpassing joke, recurs in ix. 22 with fresh praise; and the last literary letter of importance (the 26th of the same) is on what may be called the grand style in oratory.

Here, as elsewhere, there may no doubt be room for difference of opinion as to the space and importance allowed to our witnesses. From the point of view of this book, however, Pliny’s testimony is of the utmost importance. We may regret—I certainly do—that an equal abundance of documents of the same character has not come to us from some one of greater literary competence—from Aristotle, or even from Dionysius, from Longinus, or even from Quintilian. But this is distinctly a case where the better is enemy to the good. For the purpose of ascertaining what was the actual state of critical opinion and literary taste at a given time, it is of more value to possess such a collection as this of Pliny’s than to have fifty _Arts of Poetry_.

Let us “write off” liberally at the outset for the drawbacks of the document. Pliny’s Letters, pleasant as they are, are not free from a suspicion, and, considering some statements of their own, something more than a suspicion, of being not entirely spontaneous: they were, at any rate in some cases, evidently written for publication. The author himself, though a man of excellent learning, of the completest cultivation of his day, of wide and ardent literary interests, and of no little common-sense, was, as some of his quoted judgments will have shown, not quite sufficiently possessed of the finest or most discriminating literary judgment. Moreover, he had a somewhat omnivorous and disproportionate opinion of the value of literary work, merely as such, even merely as something that looked such—compilation, translation, copying verse and prose, what not. Further, in these characteristics he to a great extent reflected those of his time—a time of great and active attention to literature, but rather one of talent than of genius, a period of decadence in many respects, and hardly of resurrection in any, and lastly, a period of doubtful literary taste, inclining, when it was sincere, to the florid and Asiatic, when it affected superiority, to a forced Pseudo-Atticism and concinnity.

Yet it will readily be perceived that none of these allowances is damning to the individual, while most of them even increase his value as a representative of the period itself. That he was, and was regarded by the time itself as, one of the most eminent of contemporary men of letters, cannot reasonably be doubted, though he certainly yokes himself rather unequally with Tacitus. And he is none the worse witness that, though a generous admirer of antiquity, he avowedly was by no means so out of conceit with his own time as men of letters often are. That this age was no decrepit one need hardly be said—with Persius “dead ere his prime,” and Martial, Juvenal, Quintilian, Tacitus, Statius, and Pliny himself, in full flourishing, with Marcus Aurelius and Arrian coming, with Lucian and Apuleius not far off—to mention no others—it had something considerable to show and say for itself. If we can obtain anything like a clear view of its opinions on literary criticism (to which it was naturally inclined, as being itself not of the very first, and having pasts of the very first behind it), we shall not do ill. And Pliny gives us help of a very special kind, and in very abundant degree, for the attainment of such a view, which we may proceed to take, after noticing briefly the only other documents of the time which require notice for our purpose.

These are the Apocrypha[370] of Quintilian, which are, for more reasons than one, best regarded apart from the _Institutes_. There are, in the first place, the _Declamations_, already referred to[371]—nineteen complete, with sketches, fragments, and skeletons of a much larger number, which even thus falls short of the huge total of nearly four hundred assigned to him after a fashion. If the whole were written on the scale of the score that we possess, they would fill some four thousand closely printed pages. Interesting, in a fashion, they are; as pointed out above, they supply, with the works of the elder Seneca, our only considerable bodies in Latin of that work of the schools which for centuries occupied the growing intellects of the two great ancient literary nations, and which supplied the never-blunted point of the satirist’s

“Ut pueris placeas et declamatio fias.”

Footnote 370:

The _Declamations_ were last edited, I think, by Ritter in the Teubner
Library. That invaluable collection puts (as indeed is usual) the
_Dialogus_ with the other minor works of Tacitus, ed. Halm. It may
also be found, with the same company, in the new Oxford _Bibliotheca
Classicorum_, ed. Furneaux. I use a pretty and convenient joint
edition of the nineteen complete Declamations and the Dialogue, which
appeared at Oxford, without editor’s name, in 1692.

Footnote 371:

_V. supra_, p. 230 _sq._

Seneca has been treated already in his proper place. The Pseudo-Quintilian (for there is hardly a page of the _Declamations_ which does not fly in the face of the _Institutes_) gives us speeches, adjusted to the strict canons of _status_ and the rest, written in the well-known style of the Ciceronian superlative (one wonders that, simply to save breath and time, the bar of Rome did not agree that any one who said _-issimus_ should be sconced an amphora, or, if that seem excessive, at least a _congius_), extremely ingenious now and then, but of the most fantastic and arbitrary quality. The chief interest of them, at least from our point of view, is, that in the mere reading one understands how impossible it was that attention to such things should consist with attention to true literary criticism.

The _Dialogus de Claris Oratoribus_, traditionally ascribed to Tacitus, though some will have it to be nothing less than the [Sidenote: _The_ Dialogus de Claris Oratoribus.] otherwise lost _De Causis corruptæ Eloquentiæ_ which Quintilian, as we know from himself, certainly wrote, is a much more meritorious performance. The style is very unlike[372] that of the surely unmistakable author of the _Germania_ and the _Annals_, the method does not seem, to me at least, after a good deal of study of Quintilian, to be his. But it is very likely about their date, and by no contemptible author. The opening certainly chimes in not ill with the title of Quintilian’s missing treatise. A certain Justus Falinus had asked why, after the magnificent crops of oratory which former ages had yielded, the very name of _orator_ had almost died out, and had been supplanted by “counsel”[373] and “advocate” and “patron.” The author replies, with a due Ciceronianism, that he had better rub up his memory of a remarkable conversation on the subject heard in his youth. Curiatius Maternus, both poet and orator, had recited a tragedy on Cato which excited the town nearly as much as another piece of the same name sixteen hundred years later; and Marcus Aper, a man of Gaulish origin, consular rank, and great fame, and Julius Secundus, met (with the writer) at Maternus’ house to talk over it. The first of these rather despised literature, relying on mother-wit; the second was said to be indebted more to art than to nature: but both were among the leading counsel of their day. Secundus gently suggests that Cato is a dangerous subject, and Maternus says that he has another tragedy in hand (_Thyestes_) with which to follow it. Then Aper opens fire upon him: first, for deserting oratory and the bar for idle play-writing; secondly, for choosing foolish fancy subjects like Thyestes. Maternus appeals to Secundus. He is accustomed to Aper’s denunciations of poetry. Will not Secundus act as judge? Secundus says that he is not quite impartial because of his friendship for Saleius Bassus (a contemporary epic poet of whom we hear in Quintilian as a particular friend of his). Oh, says Aper, let Bassus and others, who cannot compass oratory, cultivate poetry if they like. Here is Maternus who can: so he is wasting his time. And he embarks on a warm and by no means ineloquent eulogy of eloquence from its practical side, urging not merely its great political importance but other points. Eloquence opens positions of opulence and power, makes you valuable to your friends and the State, is a safeguard to yourself, gives fame, wealth, dignity. As for poetry, it brings none of these things. It is of no use, and the pleasure it gives is short, idle, and unprofitable. What is the good of it? Who thinks much even of Bassus himself? And if he or his friends are in any difficulty, to whom will they go? Why, to an orator. The poet spends an infinity of labour on his poem, compasses heaven and earth to whip an audience together, and gets nothing from it. Certainly Vespasian did give Bassus five hundred sestertia, and very noble it was of him; but this was mere alms. An orator _earns_ his money. Besides, your poets have to skulk in the country, and even if they stay in town, who cares about them, or goes to see them? Of course, as before said, if a man cannot be an orator, why, let him be a poet. But eloquence is as great a thing from the merely literary point of view, and far more useful.

Footnote 372:

I say this in some fear and trembling, with such an authority as the
late Mr Nettleship against me. But I have been accustomed for a good
many years to compare styles in more languages than one or two, and I
think these most unlike. Even the argument that a man may suit his
style to his work is not conclusive, for here it is the _general_
unlikeness of tone and flavour, which cannot be wholly disguised, that
decides me.

Footnote 373:

_Causidici._

Maternus takes this diatribe quite coolly, and replies readily enough. He has had some little experience, he says, and some little fame in both oratory and poetry: he does not care for the publicity (so precious to Aper) which the former brings, and, holding the contrary opinion to his friend’s, he thinks the country life far higher and better than that of the town. The great poets of old, if you reckon mere fame, are at least the equals of the orators, and (here we come to another point of contact with Quintilian) there are more nowadays who run down Cicero than Virgil. The unquiet and anxious life of the orator has no charms for him. He wants neither more money nor more power: and he would have himself figured on his tomb, not serious and frowning, but merry and crowned. At the peroration of Maternus comes in Vipsanius[374] Messalla, who, being informed by Secundus of the nature of the dispute, expresses his approval of it, but hints a strong preference for the _older_ orators. Aper catches this up rather hotly, after his manner: and after a little general conversation puts the obvious _aporia_, Who _are_ the old orators? running over the history of Roman oratory, with some not uninteresting criticisms, and a strong contention in favour of his own contemporaries. Maternus and Messalla take up the same matter from other sides, and the dialogue ends.

Footnote 374:

Or Vipstanus, as they read now.

This piece at first promises considerably, and it cannot be said to perform badly in any place; but its conclusion and middle part are of less importance to us than seemed likely at the beginning. The panegyrics of Oratory and Poetry respectively, in which Aper and Maternus indulge, might well have led to a fuller and more searching analysis of the respective literary merits of the two—instead of which we have from Aper only a rather Philistine exaltation of the superior use and profit of oratory, from Maternus a generous, but slightly vague and rhetorical, exaltation of the qualities of poetry and the delights of the poet. From the entrance of Messalla the piece becomes little more than a contribution to the everlasting ancient-and-modern quarrel on the one hand, and to the history of Roman oratory on the other. Yet in Aper, at least, we have a vigorous projection of the positive Roman spirit, combined with a fancy for pregnant and precious style; in Maternus, an indication of that mainly dilettante and bookish temper which the satirists blame in their literary, and especially their poetical, contemporaries; and in Messalla (who is taken by the partisans of the Tacitean authorship to represent Tacitus himself), an instance of that looking back to better times which is, at any rate sometimes, if not invariably, a token of literary decadence.

Here again, as in the case of Cicero, it is necessary to break the rule of not entering upon controversy, lest by silence one [Sidenote: _Mr Nettleship’s estimate of it._] incur the blame of neglecting more than competent authority. As in that other case, Mr Nettleship’s estimate of the critical value of the _Dialogus_ (which he unhesitatingly attributes to Tacitus) is higher, though not so much higher, than mine. He ranks it with, but above, the _Brutus_, as “the two great documents of Latin criticism”: I should put both as such (though Cicero and Tacitus were both of them far cleverer than Quintilian) below the _Institutes_, and also below other things.

The reason of the difference somewhat consoles me for the fact. Mr Nettleship was evidently bitten with that noble error, the belief that criticism of literature must be criticism of something that is _not_ literature. Tacitus seems to him to ask “under what social conditions great writing and great speaking arise,”—a most interesting question, but an excursus from criticism proper. “He sees clearly, and this is the important point which characterises the treatise, that literature must be taken and judged as the expression of national life, not as a matter of form and of scholastic teaching.”

For “scholastic teaching” so be it: that also is extraneous to the central matter. But on the other point one must throw away the scabbard. Never will literature be judged adequately—seldom will it be, even within limits, judged accurately—as “an expression of national life.” From this and kindred fallacies come, and always have come, a brood of monsters, the folly, almost as great as its opposite, that “a poet must be a good man,” the folly that you can judge literature by remembering that there is much water-meadow in England[375]—hundreds of others. That literature is an expression of national life nobody need deny—that national life can never be estimated without an estimate of literature is, if anything, still more true. But literature is first of all literature, and it must be judged, like all other things, by the laws of its essence, and not by the laws of even its inseparable accidents.

Footnote 375:

Those who have an accurate memory of M. Taine’s _English Literature_
and of his _English Notes_ will not object to this apparent
impossibility.

How different was Mr Nettleship’s point of view may be judged from the mere fact that he actually passes over the first fifteen chapters, which to me seem to contain most of the literary criticism of the piece. Nor can I (though he himself fully admits the oratorical preoccupation both here and still more in Cicero) help thinking that the substitution of the English “style” for “eloquentia” and “oratio” amounts to a certain begging of the question. Much that is true of the orator is no doubt also true of the writer, but not all: and the connection with life, with public national life, on which such stress is here laid, undoubtedly applies to oratory, whether of the pulpit, the senate-house, or the bar, far more than it applies to books. The most _literary_ side of oratory (I am not ashamed to make the concession) is the lowest—that of pure epideictic. But then, that is because oratory is, after all, only applied, not pure literature.

We see, then, from this interesting piece, almost as much as from the poets and Pliny, that the age was, so to say, poly-historic [Sidenote: _The general literary taste of the Silver Age._] rather than original, and that, while it was no stranger to the very sound opinion that the goodness of a thing must be measured in its own kind, it still had not cleared up its mind about the relative value of different kinds. Although oratory had, with the rarest exceptions, become the mere art of the advocate, or the mere business of the travelling or resident rhetorician, it still had a most disproportionate position. Although the satirist laughed at the custom of writing artificial Greek epics and tragedies, it is clear that these still held the highest place in the general opinion. The bilingual practice, not merely in these but in other kinds, of itself inferred a certain lack of “race,” vernacularity, genuineness, in either literature. Some kinds of letters were still hardly known; Pliny’s own indulgent reference to _fabellæ_ is all the more interesting that we are not so very far from the _Lucius_ and the _Golden Ass_. In almost all departments odd conventions and assumptions prevailed, such as the necessity of loose subjects, and even of coarse language, in _vers de société_. And it was probably the working of this, and of the strict ideas as to certain forms and their laws, that caused the jack-of-all-trade tendency to which we have more than once referred. If the rules are pretty clearly laid down, and if you are a man of reasonable learning and intelligence, attention to such rules will secure success. There is no reason why as Pliny himself seems to have thought in his own case and the cases of many of his friends, you should not be at once an orator and a historian, an epic poet and a comic, a dramatist and an epigram-writer. And the age still believed devoutly in the rules, though free-lances like Martial might kick at them in verse, and though Quintilian, with his unfailing good sense, might hint that there were far too many Figures, and that the subdivisions of Greek rhetoric were in many cases idle.

In nothing, perhaps, is this tendency of ancient criticism better shown than in its attitude to the question of Faultlessness. [Sidenote: “_Faultlessness._”] Of course, on this question there were two parties, with many subdivisions in each. There were the extreme classics of that classic time, the wooden persons of whom Martial tells us, for whom it was enough if a thing was not “correct,” to whom a fault was a fault—indelible, incompensable, to be judged off-hand and Draconically. And at the other side there were the sensible persons, like Quintilian, like Pliny, like Martial himself (not to mention Longinus, whom some would have to be their contemporary), who contended that faults might be made up by beauties, who sneered at _mere_ “faultlessness.” But no one, not Longinus himself, seems to have taken up the position which the boldest and most consistent (it would be question-begging to say the best) modern critics take, that the whole calculus is wrong—that this notion of “faults” made up by “beauties,” of a balance-sheet, debtor and creditor, with the result struck one way or the other, is wholly a misconception. Two, I suppose, of the most representative passages in English poetry touching this subject are Lear’s apostrophe to the elements, and Milton’s episode of Sin and Death. The extreme stop-watch and foot-rule critics of the first century, like those of the eighteenth, and, perhaps, some (though they are not a prevailing party) even at the present day would call these undoubted faults, both of them sinning against the law or conception of measure in language, and the second offending still more gravely against that or those of decency, propriety, the becoming, in imagery, subject, language. The defenders, or those who might have been the defenders, of Shakespeare and Milton, from the other point of view, would admit in varying degrees that the things were faulty; but would urge the pathos of the first, the gloomy magnificence of the second, the force and power and grandeur of both, as _redeeming_ them—in a degree and to an extent again varying with the individual critic.

Now, a thoroughgoing “Romantic” and comparative critic of the modern type, while he would, of course, scout the first party, would be loath to adopt either the method or the exact conclusions of the second. “Let us clear our minds of cant,” he would say. “These things are not ‘faults’ at all. They do not leave the court pardoned on consideration of the previous or subsequent good behaviour of the culprit, but simply because there is no stain on his or their character. There is no need to plead extenuating circumstances: we stand for acquittal _sans phrase_. These things might be faults elsewhere, in other poems: they are not so here. They are the absolutely right things in the right place, producing the right effect, driven home by the right power to the right mark. Shakespeare and Milton _have_ faults—the somewhat excessive tendency of the first to play on words out of season as well as in, and the deplorable propensity of the second to joke when joking was absolutely impossible to him. But these are not of the character of the Longinian or Quintilianian ‘fault’ at all. They do not endear the poets; they make them less good; we wish they _were_ faultless in this sense. Your ‘faultlessness’ simply means that the man has that most hopeless of all faults—mediocrity: and your ‘fault’ is simply derived from the existence in your mind of a more or less complicated set of rules which have no real existence. Nay,” he might proceed, “the extremest classical men are sounder in a way than you are. They are right in thinking that a fault _is_ a fault, and can never be ‘redeemed,’ much less purged, by a beauty. They are only wrong in not knowing what beauties or what faults really are.”

Now, I do not say whether the criticism of antiquity was right or wrong in not taking this view. But I think there is absolutely no evidence that it was ever taken at this time.

In some other agreements and differences we find ourselves more at home. The everlasting questions of archaic or modern [Sidenote: _Ornate or plain style._] language, of conceited or direct thought, of ornate or plain style, occupied the critics of the end of the first and the beginning of the second century, just as they have occupied those of more recent pasts, are occupying those of the present, and will occupy those of the future. As has been indicated in detail, there was not here quite the critical unanimity which some periods have shown on these and similar questions. Among the general there was something like an agreement; it seems undeniable that the popular taste of Roman audiences at recitations ran towards elaborate and slightly archaic phraseology, to Greek literary subjects, and (both in verse-epics and tragedies and in prose declamations) to topsy-turvy conceit. This was evidently frequent in verse, though time has carried away most traces of it; and in prose it is not entirely alien from the magnificent phrase-making of Tacitus, it shows itself amply in the rhetoric of Seneca the son, as in the earlier rhetorical examples of Seneca the father, is almost openly defended by Pliny, and seems to receive a certain amount of “colour” (as the rhetoricians themselves would have said) even from some passages of Quintilian. It is very noteworthy that all these prose-writers incline more or less to the artificial side, while the verse-satirists argue and sally for terseness, elegance, concinnity. And the cause may not improbably be sought in those very declamations of which mention has been so often made. We have no enormous stock of them, which is not to be regretted; but in the surviving examples we have material which is welcome in its way, and which amply proves what has been said.[376]

Footnote 376:

I am not sure that I should have given any place here to Cornelius
Fronto, if his ticket of admission had not been (rather
contumeliously) countersigned by Mr Nettleship. The low opinion which
Marcus Aurelius seems to have had of literature may possibly have been
in part excused by his preceptor’s utterances on the subject. He
appears to have been an eminent representative of the “labelling”
school of critics. Lucilius is “gracile” (this is not quite Horace’s
view), Albucius and Pacuvius mediocre, Accius unequal, Ennius
multiform. Sallust writes history _structe_, Pictor _incondite_,
Claudius _lepide_, Antias _invenuste_, Sisenna _longinque_, Cato
_verbis multijugis_, Cœlius _singulis_. One cannot help “nodding
approval and saying, ‘This is very satisfactory to know,’” as Lady Kew
did when she was informed that “Alfred was a trump, and Ethel a brick,
and Barnes a snob.” But if Mr Nettleship thought that æsthetic, as
opposed to philosophical, criticism could not get beyond this system
of tickets-of-leave, he was surely mistaken.