Chapter III: Quintilian (1)

THE ‘INSTITUTES’—PREFACE—BOOK I.: ELEMENTARY EDUCATION AND
GRAMMAR—BOOKS II.-VII. ONLY RELEVANT NOW AND THEN—HOW TO LECTURE
ON AN AUTHOR—WIT—BOOK VIII.: STYLE; PERSPICUITY; ELEGANCE—BOOKS
VIII., IX.: TROPES AND FIGURES—COMPOSITION—PROSE RHYTHM—BOOK X.:
SURVEY OF CLASSICAL LITERATURE—GREEK: HOMER AND OTHER EPIC
POETS—THE LYRISTS—DRAMA—THE HISTORIANS—THE ORATORS AND
PHILOSOPHERS—LATIN: VIRGIL—OTHER EPIC AND DIDACTIC POETS—ELEGIAC
AND MISCELLANEOUS—DRAMA—HISTORY—ORATORY: CICERO—PHILOSOPHY: CICERO
AND SENECA—MINOR COUNSEL OF THE TENTH BOOK—BOOKS XI. AND XII.—THE
STYLES OF ORATORY—"ATTICISM"—LITERARY QUALITY OF GREEK AND
LATIN—QUINTILIAN’S CRITICAL “ETHOS.”

In passing, say, from Cicero, the chief prose Latin critic of præ-Augustan times, to Quintilian, the chief of post-Augustan, and [Sidenote: _The_ Institutes.] indeed of Latin critics of all dates, we come to a man of much less genius no doubt, and, in particular, of far less creative literary power, but still to one who, for our special purpose, has some very considerable advantages. It is not merely that the Spanish-Roman is a professional critic, as well as a rhetorician—that he is as much _the_ professional critic of Latin as Dionysius of Halicarnassus (whom he much resembles, and to whom, as has been said, he possibly owes not a little) is of Greek. He has over the greater writer (whom he admires so generously) the further advantage of complete freedom from that touch of dilettantism (one is sometimes almost tempted to use a harsher word and call it quackery) which besets Cicero whenever he is not actually pleading or debating, and which is not invariably lost even then. Further, Quintilian is the only critic of antiquity (for even Longinus, as we saw, merely glances at the subject) who seriously takes the two languages, seriously compares them, and, by the help of the comparison, acquires a view-point over literature as such—not merely as Greek or Latin literature—which was shut to all his predecessors and most of his followers. If the _Rhetoric_ and the _Poetics_ of Aristotle form the great book of critical method for ancient times, if the Περὶ Ὕψους is the great book of their critical inspiration; the _Institutes of Oratory_ contain the fullest, the most intelligent, the most satisfactory applications of criticism to literature, as it presented itself to an intelligent and thoroughly educated person, whose eyes were sharpened by long expert use, at the end of the first century, when, except for a few belated authors, mostly of curiosities, the list of the great writers of antiquity was all but closed. The book[377] is extremely well written; it is, with a few _cruces_, remarkably clear, and its range and thoroughness leave practically nothing to desire.

Footnote 377:

Whether its correct title be _Institutiones Oratoriæ_, or _De
Institutione Oratoria_, and whether this be better translated
_Principles of Oratory_, or _Of the Education of an Orator_, are
questions not very important _to us_. The sense of “Institutes” may be
illustrated by the old division of academical chairs in, for instance,
Medicine into “Institutes” (_i.e._, “Theory”) and “Practice.” But
Quintilian includes a good deal of the practical side. All the
editions of Quintilian are either antiquated by, or more or less based
upon, that of Spalding and Zumpt, with Lexicon, &c., by Bonnell,
Leipsic, 1798-1834. I find the little Tauchnitz print of the text
(ibid., 1829) very useful. The Bohn translation, by the ill-starred J.
S. Watson, though not impeccable, will serve English readers well
enough.

This wide range of it (which, according to different, but, in each case, defensible interpretations of its title, busies itself with the whole education of an orator, or with the whole theory and practice of oratory) naturally makes it include much which does not fall strictly within our subject. But nearly the whole of three books, the eighth, ninth, and tenth, and a large and important section of the twelfth, are devoted directly to that subject; while there are references to it almost throughout. We shall therefore, as we did in the case of Aristotle and Longinus, give a kind of running abstract of the whole, dwelling very briefly on the irrelevant, somewhat more fully on the partly relevant, fully on the rest, and returning to the consideration of special points later.

In a sort of Advertisement, to and for the use of his publisher Trypho, and in a prefatory dedication to his friend Marcellus [Sidenote: _Preface._] Victorius, Quintilian gives some information about the origin and object of the work. From this we learn, among other things, that part-cause at least of its actual appearance was the fact, not unknown in more modern times, of unauthorised publication of his lectures by note-taking pupils.

The first book is devoted to the subject of the education of boys from the earliest age, a subject on which Quintilian speaks [Sidenote: _Book I. Elementary Education_] with much knowledge and good sense, as well as kindliness. But from this he soon passes to Grammar, and his importance for us begins. For his treatment of the subject is quite in the larger and humaner sense, insisting from the first on critical reading, though he seems, as indeed we should expect, to regard the “desperate hook” of the extremer kind of verbal critic with little favour. It is noteworthy that he alleges music to be necessary, because the grammarian has to speak of metre and rhythm. And passing rapidly from considerations of orthography, right pronunciation, and audience, he arrives at the all-important subject of “correctness,” and of its attainment, negatively by the avoidance of barbarisms and solecisms, positively by the selection of the best words in the best arrangement. Observations of special importance in this context may be cited: That the word in itself (_i.e._, out of connection) has no merit except its inherent euphony; that (a most pregnant remark) it is often difficult to distinguish Faults from Figures of speech; and some exceedingly [Sidenote: _and Grammar._] interesting, but also more than ordinarily difficult, remarks on tone and accent-variation. In all these grammatical notes, which are pretty full and numerous, and often very curious—showing that, as he himself says pleasantly, though he is not writing a treatise on Grammar, yet as it lay in his way he did not like not to be polite to it—there is a pervading quality of not at all Philistine common-sense which shows the best side of the Roman temperament. Although Quintilian acknowledges the convenience of Greek for terminology, and makes fairly free use of the terms, it is quite evident that he has (long before he formulates it later) a profound and very wholesome distrust of the Greek rhetorical practice of splitting a thing up, naming the splinters, and then passing on, as if a real, solid, and final examination had been attained. And the same quality appears eminently in the summing up of his discourse on words, “Custom in speaking I shall call the agreement of the educated, as custom in living is the agreement of the good.”

Remarks on orthography follow, and some on reading, valuable, though not so valuable, as those on the same [Sidenote: _Books II.-VII. only relevant now and then._] subject which come later. And then he passes to certain of the _progymnasmata_ of the Greek rhetoricians, fables, uses, sentences, and “ethologies,” which, though they have puzzled some, are clearly the same as the _ethopœiæ_ of Hermogenes and his fellows.[378] All these are, in fact, exercises in composition. The rest of the book is occupied with the discussion of other subjects of the school curriculum, subsidiary to rhetoric. The second book continues the subject of Composition, but with more special reference to Oratory proper—a tendency which naturally increases; and for some five or six books the technicalities of the rhetoric-school and the courts have the better of literature. There are, however, two exceptions, which require notice—the first a remarkable passage[379] on reading or lecturing on authors.

Footnote 378:

For these technical terms _v. ante_, bk. i. chap. iv., or the Index.

Footnote 379:

II. v. 5-9.

“But”—he has just ruled out the explanation of the mere meaning of uncommon words as below the duties of a Professor of Rhetoric—"to point out the merits, and if it so happen, the faults, is the properest of all things for the profession and for the promise by which he holds himself out as a master of eloquence...." (He should make the students read in turn, and then), "after setting forth the case on which the oration was composed (for thus it will be more clearly understood), he should leave nothing unnoticed which may be noteworthy in the invention or the elocution, pointing out the manner of conciliating the jury in the proem, the clearness, conciseness, persuasive force of the narration, the occasional design and hidden artifice (for that alone is true art here, which can only be understood by an artist), what foresight there is in division, what subtle and thronging[380] argumentation, the strength of the inspiration, the attraction of the winning passages, the roughness[381] of the objurgation, and the humour of the jokes; how, finally, the man [Sidenote: _How to lecture on an author._] shows mastery of feeling, makes his way into the very heart, and adjusts the minds of the jury to his own contention. Then, as for style, we must point out what words are proper, ornate, sublime, where the amplification is to be praised, what excellence there is in the contrary direction,[382] what is ingeniously transferred; what the figurativeness of the words is, how smooth and squared, yet manly, the composition." And then he proceeds to recommend the occasional selection of passages which are not to be praised—the exhibition, in short, of a rhetorical helotry.

Footnote 380:

_Crebra_, as it were “attacking on all sides,” “redoubling blows.”

Footnote 381:

_Asperitas_, which some would rather translate “trenchancy.” But there
was an idea in ancient times (not quite unknown in modern) that in
hostile argument politeness (“treating your adversary with respect,”
as Johnson said) was out of place.

Footnote 382:

_Quæ virtus ei contraria_, that is to say, I suppose, brevity and
pregnancy. “Transferred” just below, in the sense of _translatio_,
“metaphor,” “what ingenuity of metaphor.”

No reader, I hope, will need to have it pointed out to him, at any great length, how exactly this corresponds to the practice of the critical lecturer or reviewer, as it ought to be, in regard to all kinds of literature, and not oratory merely. Such a lecturer, or such a reviewer, can do no better than grave these words of Quintilian on his mind, and follow their directions as best he can, whensoever an author is to be expounded on the platform or reviewed in the column. It scarcely requires more than the easiest and most obvious substitutions and amplifications to make the passage a manual in miniature of all criticism, be it of prose or poetry.

The other passage is the very curious and interesting section in the third chapter of the Sixth book, on Wit.[383] As is well known, this is one of the points on which ancient (especially Latin) and modern taste are most out of harmony. Except [Sidenote: _Wit._] Aristophanes at one end, with his alternations of outrageous farce and keen poetry, and Lucian at the other, with the innocent-seeming flow of his white-hot irony, there are perhaps not even any Greek authors whose command of our risibility is absolutely sure; and the average Greek joke, as reported by the anecdote-mongers, is to us but a vapid thing. In Latin it is even worse. Plautus pretty generally, but in a limited way; Catullus, when he exchanges passion for humour; sometimes Horace, for a pleasant Augustan “wit of the town”; Martial for a too often naughty _persiflage_,—these we have little doubt about. But Terence, even if we shut our eyes to his borrowed capital, is but comedy-and-water; Cicero jokes without indeed much difficulty on his part, but with surprisingly little effect on ours; and the _average_ Latin jest is far worse than the average Greek. Of course this is all natural enough; the jest always, save in certain transcendences, lies more in the ear of the hearer than the charm or quality of any other kind of literature. But it is all the more interesting and valuable to have a set discussion on the comic by a man of immense reading, excellent taste, and great acuteness. Besides, Quintilian’s Spanish blood or birth may very likely have given him a somewhat wider and more flexible appreciation of humour than the “firm Roman” wit itself allowed, or at least encouraged.

Footnote 383:

_Virtus quæ risum judicis movet_, VI. iii.

After mentioning, as a generally accepted thing, the deficiency of the comic element in Demosthenes, and the superabundant quantity and inferior quality of it in Cicero (it must be remembered that Quintilian had the Tullian _Three Books of Jests_, which time has mercifully hidden from us), he passes to the general question, and accepts the almost universal classical opinion that laughter has always something low about it.[384] In this, we know, Plato and Aristotle both agreed; it was a sort of postulate of all Greek philosophy, and though almost certainly false, was excused, partly by the extreme licence of the Comic Muse in ancient times, and partly by the rarity of humour in the best sense, and the almost non-existence of Romantic Comedy. He observes, however, acutely enough, on the insufficiency of the general explanations of the origin of laughter (an insufficiency which has certainly not been filled up to the present day), and shows that urbane shrewdness, which is one of his best points, by questioning whether deliberate cultivation of jesting as an art is an altogether satisfactory thing. But it is in his subsequent remarks on the kind of jesting admissible in oratory (we might here at least substitute, with hardly any wrong, “in literature”) that his chief merit lies. On the dangerous business of verbal distinction between _venustum_, _salsum_, _facetum_ he is luminous and useful; while his remarks, in two different places, on _urbanitas_ are not far from a _locus classicus_, and those[385] on the special treatise of Domitius Marsus on that topic have the best qualities of a review—that is to say, of the kind of review that one sees too seldom.

Footnote 384:

_Hoc semper humile._

It is not, however, till the eighth book is reached (for the seventh, except in some remarks on arrangement, is almost [Sidenote: _Book VIII.: Style._] purely legal) that we find Quintilian, for a considerable time, at close quarters with our special subject. After summarising with remarkable clearness (so that there is nowhere any better conspectus, in little, of the matter) the earlier and technically rhetorical part of the _Institutes_, he comes to the third part, which he calls “elocution.”[386] This is no other than the _lexis_, which Aristotle treats not indeed perfunctorily (it was not in Aristotle to be guilty of that crime), but with a sort of apologetic impatience, as one turning back to the Court of the Gentiles after visiting the Holy of Holies. The point of view, with some four hundred years of great work, not merely in oratory, but in general literature, behind the critic, and with the new requirement of comparison between Greek and Latin brought in, has changed remarkably. Instead of a popular and slightly vulgar appendix, it is (Quintilian tells us that all orators agreed with him) the most difficult part of the subject. At the same time, he has not attained to the almost perfect _parrhesia_ of Longinus; he dares not tell us (though we can see that he was sometimes half minded to do so) that “beautiful words are the light of thought.” He has the stereotyped caution—very wholesome in its way—to those who neglect things and attend to words. But he will not allow words to be neglected in their turn, and as a matter of fact perhaps the greater, certainly the most interesting and original, part of the five books which follow is occupied with what, disguise itself as it may under the term of “elocution,” is really “style.” Not, be it added, the mere fritter and foppery which sometimes receives that name, but literary manner and art in the great and wide sense—the proper subject, that is to say, of literary criticism.

Footnote 385:

§§ 101-112.

Footnote 386:

Some moderns (notably Campbell in his _Philosophy of Rhetoric_) have
followed Quintilian in this use of the word for “style.” But the
accepted sense in English is too well settled for this to be
permissible.

After this proem, Quintilian begins regularly on the subject—φράσις in Greek, _elocutio_ in Latin—referring to his remarks [Sidenote: _Perspicuity._] in the first book (_vide supra_) on the avoidance of Barbarism and Solecism, and glancing at Livy’s Patavinity, and at the alleged over-Atticism of Theophrastus. He has, however, a good deal more to say on the actual lexicon; and in the course of it sharply perstringes that sort of affected periphrasis which the eighteenth century (though it thought it knew its Quintilian) so dearly loved. “The Iberian shrub” for “broom,” the “fishes solidified by brine” which he laughs at, are Thomson in his worst mood, Armstrong, Mason, even Wordsworth at times, to the very life, and Delille to more than the life—of which there is not much in that famous Abbé. The necessity of making the epithet fit the noun is excellently inculcated; the use of archaic technical terms not excessively denounced. But I grieve that Quintilian joins the herd in condemning Parenthesis, a heavenly maid whom there have been many and great ones, from Herodotus to De Quincey, to love, but whom few have dared to praise as she deserves. It is true that she speaks chiefly to the sapient; and the insipient accordingly do not love her.

Passing from perspicuity to “elegance,” as our own eighteenth-century rhetoricians would have said, Quintilian is equally admirable; but, as before, a certain amount of “hedging” is perceptible in him. True beauty, he thinks, is never separable [Sidenote: _Elegance._] from utility. It is a noble sentiment, and to a very large extent a true one; but it may be questioned whether the greatest part of its truth is not esoteric—whether it does not arise from the suppressed rider, “because true beauty, in merely being beautiful, _is_ of the highest utility.”

He himself, however, perhaps did not care to penetrate so far with his analysis; at any rate he does not, and so he rather beats about the bush. Grace of style will captivate; all the great men, Aristotle no less than Cicero, say that we ought to excite admiration. Only we must be “manly, sir, manly”; our embellishment must not be effeminate—it must be in good taste. The three kinds of oratory, too, will admit of different degrees—even different kinds of embellishment. Epideictic almost demands ostentation of ornament; debating sometimes permits it; it must be far more cautiously used in forensic speech. Even words must be most cautiously chosen—harshness, a touch of the ludicrous, and other effects, unless they are deliberately invited, must be carefully shunned. The archaic (from this point of view there is no real contradiction with the former, _v. supra_) will add picturesqueness, but we must walk warily with it, we must not say _antigerio_ for _valde_. Here, perhaps, one may presume to differ with Quintilian, who extends his condemnation to the beautiful word _ærumna_. He may have been led to dislike it by that sensitiveness of his ear to the grunt of the “um,” which we shall notice later, but which ought here to have been appeased by the musical syllables on either side.

Proceeding from individual words to connected speech, he has some capital cautions on unlucky conjunctions of words, suggesting double meaning—with, however, the still wiser reflection that if you are always looking out for this, you had better hold your tongue altogether. A handful of the rhetorical tickets—_tapeinosis_,[387] _meiosis_,[388] Homœology, Macrology, pleonasm, _cacozelon_,[389] and so forth—is taken up, and they are shaken out and shown to be at least susceptible of useful application, while in the passages that follow (the conclusion of the third chapter) some celebrated _loci_[390] are severally examined, with an admirable combination of verbal acuteness and general grasp. The shorter fourth chapter deals in the same way with the favourite figure of Amplification and its opposite Diminution, as exemplified in chosen illustrations. Then he turns (and we must remember that the turn is not arbitrary nor desultory, but follows the divisions of the older Rhetoric) to those sentences or _gnomæ_, as the Greeks termed them, which had such an effect on ancient audiences, and which, _mutatis mutandis_, are not without effect on modern readers. We have seen very recently how the mere trick of what may be called “topsy-turvyfying” accepted maxims has, not once or twice, but again and again, managed to secure an audience.

Footnote 387:

The use of undignified expression, as “a _wart_ of stone” on a
mountain.

Footnote 388:

Not in its usual equivalence with _litotes_, but in the sense of
cursory and elliptic reference.

Footnote 389:

Affected excess in _any_ direction, whether ornate or plain.

Footnote 390:

Chiefly from Virgil and Cicero.

This section ends with a passage of such weight and importance as general criticism that we must give it nearly _in extenso_:—

“But there will be no end to it if I follow out individual forms of corrupt taste. It is better to turn to what is more necessary. There are two opposite opinions on this subject; some hardly pay attention to anything but ‘sentences’—some utterly condemn them; and with neither do I entirely agree. If sentences are too crowded they get in each other’s way, just as, with all crops and trees, nothing can grow to a proper size if it lacks room. Nor does anything stand out in a picture where there is no shading; so that artists, when they deal with many things in one canvas, leave spaces between them lest shade and object fall together. Moreover, this same profusion cuts the style too short; for each sentence stands by itself,[391] and there is, as it were, a fresh beginning after it. Whence the composition becomes too disjointed, consisting not of integral members, but of separate scraps, inasmuch as these things, each rounded and cut off from the rest, refuse conjunction.[392] Besides, the colour of the speech becomes, as it were, spotty with blotches, bright indeed, but too many and too different. For though a selvage and fringes of purple, in their proper place, light up the gown, a garment speckled with patches of colour is certainly unbecoming. Wherefore, though these sentences may seem to flash and to strike in some sense, yet they are lights which may be likened, not to flame but to sparks amid smoke: they are not even seen when the whole speech is luminous, as the stars themselves cease to be visible in sunshine. And, rising only with fitful and feeble effort, they are but unequal, and, as it were, broken, so as to attain neither the admiration due to things eminent nor the grace of a close uniformity” (VIII. v. 25-29).

Footnote 391:

_Subsistit_: or perhaps “comes to a halt,” “stops dead.”

Footnote 392:

_Insistere invicem nequeant_: or perhaps “are unable to lean upon each
other,” “to come close to each other,” “to stand in each other’s
shoes.”

The end of the Eighth book, and the beginning of the Ninth, deal with the subject—the all too famous and long-studied [Sidenote: _Books VIII., IX.: Tropes and Figures._] subject—of Tropes and Figures, which Quintilian distinguishes from one another a little artificially, and with a kind of confession that the distinction is sometimes correspondent to no real difference. It is not till rather late in his handling (IX. i. 22) that he makes that scornful reference to the Greek abundance in this kind which has been itself more than once referred to here. He is bound to say that figures are by no means so numerous as some would make them out. Nor have the names, which the Greeks can botch up at any occasion, the least influence with him.[393] And he is particularly earnest in condemning the practice of allotting a Figure to every affection of the mind—a practice certainly absurd enough, though no very unnatural consequence of the constitution of “figures” as real things.[394]

Footnote 393:

_Neque enim me movent nomina illa, quæ fingere utique Græcis
promptissimum est._

Footnote 394:

And, it may be added, pretty closely connected with the mania for
insisting that literary criticism shall perpetually mix itself up with
ethics and psychology.

He himself, however, is by no means stingy of accepted Tropes and Figures, though he treats them, with his usual common-sense, as names, not things. The first place, in his discussion and enumeration of the matter, is occupied as usual by Metaphor, a mode of speech so prevailing in both senses that, here at least, no objection can be made to its constitution into a quasi-entity. He calls it “the most frequent and by far the most beautiful,” points out, of course, that it is only Simile in another and shorter form, and illustrates its kinds by examples in the best critical style. He specifies these kinds; but once more _not_ to distinguish for the mere sake o£ distinguishing. In fact, here as elsewhere, we may notice that Quintilian, half unconsciously, stops short at the points where Rhetoric parts company with literary criticism, and becomes mere pseudo-science. From Metaphor he goes, treating them in the same way, as with all the tropes and figures that he mentions, to Synecdoche, Metonymy, Hypallage; and has some good remarks on the fine but real distinctions between the indulgences in these flights and sleights which are, and those which are not, permissible to the orator, whom he practically identifies with the prose-writer by contrasting him with the poet. Antonomasia, which is of the same family, follows, and then a rather disappointing treatment of Onomatopœia. One sees here the Roman, and the late Roman, but also the yearner after better things, in the observation that “this, which the Greeks thought one of the greatest excellences, is scarcely allowed _us_.” “We do not dare to form a new word,” he says, and tells us that even the formation of such words, on strict analogy of others, was scarcely ventured on,[395] and that the inability to compound, which has so notoriously manifested itself later in her greatest daughter, was beginning to appear in Latin. In short, Latin had reached a stationary state—the state of the nation _qui cesse de prendre_, if not quite of that _qui commence à rendre_. It had to become the picturesque and delightful, if perhaps too much crossed and blended, Low Latin of the Dark and Middle Ages before it could recover itself.

Footnote 395:

This famous horror of the _insolens_, the _inusitatum verbum_, is the
very dominant note of all Latin criticism, and will recur constantly.

Catachresis, Metalepsis, the ornamental and “perpetual” epithet follow; and then we come to the fruitful subject of Allegory.

Quintilian is perhaps not exactly the writer from whom we should expect a thoroughly satisfactory treatment of this great subject—a subject which, far more than metaphor, escapes the state of a mere rhetorical ticket, and challenges that of a real literary quality or kind. Although it is unjust to represent him as merely conversant in details and afraid to rise, a certain timidity serves as the Nemesis of his common-sense. Besides, his materials were not favourable: the great allegorical style of Plato had long passed, not to be revived; the magnificent exuberance of mediæval fancy in this kind was far in the future; the exercises which Quintilian had before him were either mere phrases in the poets, tedious didactic things in the philosophers, or such easy examples as Horace’s “O navis,” which he quotes. We have therefore no such handling of the matter as we might have had from Longinus. And when we are told that the most ornamental kind of writing by far is that in which the three figures—simile, metaphor, and allegory—are mixed, we seem to see the worst side of Rhetoric as we seldom do in Quintilian. Once more there arises the picture of a dismal sort of library-laboratory, with bottles and drawers full of ready cold-drawn or ready short-cut figures—of the literary dispenser, with his apron on and his balance adjusted, taking a handful of this, two ounces of that, three drachms of the other, and compounding a draught or a pill to be exhibited in the forum, or the lecture-room, or the courts of justice, as the case may be. But he recovers himself soon, if only by the dry fashion in which he observes that, if anybody does not know it, the Greeks call certain kinds of allegory sarcasm, asteism, antiphrasis, and parœmia, to which it may be well to add mycterism,[396] a kind of derision which is dissembled, but not altogether concealed—as very neatly by M. Fabius Quintilianus in the passage before us.

Footnote 396:

_I.e._, suppressed sneering.

Periphrasis, Hyperbaton, Hyperbole close the chapter, and the book, and Quintilian shines on the latter, while at the end he refers to his lost dialogue _On the Causes of the Corruption of Eloquence_, one of the things of its kind which we must regret most.

The Ninth book opens with the distinction between Trope and Figure,[397] and with some general remarks on the latter word which illustrate rather amusingly the Delilah-effect of it on those who use it. We should not have been sorry to have had that treatise of Apollodorus which Quintilian seems only to have known through Cæcilius (the writer on the Sublime), and in which the author by no means frivolously argued that, in the common sense of Figure, everything is a figure, and the enumeration of figures is impossible and useless. We should have thanked Time for sparing that other of the Homeromastix, in which Zoilus, with better sense apparently than when he talked of matters too high for him, limited the word Figure to a phrase, in which the apparent or first meaning is different from the second or real. And Quintilian himself, when he comes to the distinction between Figures of Thought and Figures of Speech, illustrates (whether purposely or not it is difficult to say) the purely childish side of the matter, by remarking that in one of the Verrines, _jamjam_ and _liberum_ are figures of speech. For, as the commentators have gravely worked it out, _jamjam_ is a Palillogia or repetition, and _liberum_, contracted from _libeirum_, is an instance of Syncope. Verily, one exclaims, there is much to be said for Apollodorus! And when he further observes that the greatest power of Figures is to render oratory attractive, one feels inclined to say, “The figure is nothing, and the power of making figures is less; but there _are_ attractive qualities in oratory, and you may ticket them as figures, within moderation, as you like.”

Footnote 397:

_Trope_ = an expression altered from its natural and obvious _sense_.
_Figure_ = an expression differing in _form_ from the ordinary mode.

But it would be a delusion to suppose Quintilian himself deluded. Immediately after the passage just quoted comes his Declaration of Independence in regard to the Greek nomenclature, a fresh observation in the same key “to exhibit anger or grief, or any other passion in literature, is not of itself to be figurative, though one may use figures in the expression,” and—after two quotations from Cicero, in which crowds of figures are introduced and named—a distinct, though gentle, hint that, much as he admires Cicero, he thinks him too prodigal here.

Two long chapters, the second and third of the Ninth Book, contain Quintilian’s own survey of figures as distinguished from tropes, and as divided into figures of thought and speech respectively. He opens the first division with Interrogation—the rhetorical interrogation, of course; he goes on to Anticipation (_prolepsis_ in a sense different from the usual one); Feigned Doubt, Communication,[398] Feigned Passion, Prosopopeia, Apostrophe, Hypotyposis, and then regains more open and higher ground for a time with the great figure of Irony, of which, however, he makes relatively as little as of Allegory. Aposiopesis, Ethopœia, and Emphasis follow, with something to which he gives no definite name, but which approaches Parable. After this he becomes rather technically forensic, and winds up with a shower of names of the verbal hair-splitting kind.

Footnote 398:

In the technical sense of “taking the audience into confidence,” of
asking the jury what _they_ would do in such a case, &c.

Verbal figures—"Figures of Speech" proper—begin, after some general remarks, by examples which seem to bring us back to the old conclusion that “everything is a figure,” and which are sometimes barely intelligible, as where _Sthenelus sciens pugnæ_, which seems to us a most ordinary expression, is said to show two figures combined.[399] The Figures themselves, where named distinctly, range from such familiar things as Parenthesis and Climax to more technical ones in Epanodos[400] and Paradiastole.[401] Others, familiar and less familiar, follow, but at last Quintilian grows impatient, and after plumply denying that Paromologia[402] and Parasiopesis[403] are figures at all, declares roundly that he shall pay no attention to authors who have made no end of mere term-seeking, and have classed arguments among Figures. And he winds up the whole with a weighty caution against abusing even those Figures which he has admitted. Of such abuse, almost all times, whether they have been devoted to nominated Figures or not, leave more than sufficient record: but it can never have been more tempting or more frequent than when the process of peppering style with the contents of a certified chemist’s shop of Figures was almost prescribed by the orthodox curriculum of literary education.

Footnote 399:

_Sciens_ being used for _scitus_ and _pugnæ_ for _pugnandi_, and each
use of one word for another being reckoned as one figure.

Footnote 400:

Deliberate repetition.

Footnote 401:

Antithetic distinction.

Footnote 402:

Concession in order to strengthen argument.

Footnote 403:

Pretended reticence, implying what is meant.

The connection, however, with strictly literary criticism becomes closer still in the following (fourth) chapter of the Ninth [Sidenote: _Composition._] Book, which, together with the surveys of literature in the Tenth and Twelfth, is _the_ “place” of Quintilian for our subject. For it deals directly with Composition, in the higher sense of attention to style, and before very long we see that what is immediately uppermost in Quintilian’s mind at the moment is the order of the words, and the consequent rhythmical effect. He spends, after a fashion pardonable to the professional declaimer and teacher of rhetoric, some time on general remarks, rebutting the silly talk, common then as now, about the superiority of natural to artificial eloquence, the frippery of style, and the like. And then he mounts the battle-horse of all true critics, the argument from alteration of arrangement of words, adding, truly enough, that the more beautiful the sentence which is thus distorted, the worse will the distortion seem. He turns to an interesting and quite relevant historical digression on the lateness of deliberate style, and on its differences, narrowing these for the present to two, “loose” and “firm,” by which it would appear that he does not mean the usual contrast of “loose” and “periodic,” but merely that between irregular conversational style and set speech. Then, noting the technical divisions of phrases, clauses, and sentences, he considers the order of words, and (being a Latin) of course urges the conclusion of the sentence with a verb, where possible, and perstringes certain sentences of Mæcenas, a notedly “precious” writer, in which we can only dimly perceive the offence.

Remarks on emphasis, hiatus, cacophonous conjunction of consonants, jingle, plethora of monosyllables, and the like, [Sidenote: _Prose rhythm._] follow, and then the great and difficult subject of rhythm is tackled directly. Distinguishing it from metre, correctly if not quite sufficiently, by the necessity that the latter should show a certain order, he proceeds to deal with the proper rhythm of prose in the most difficult, but not least important, passage of his book, rightly insisting in sum on the presence of _numbers_, which are not to be monotonous. Some of his minor directions are, indeed, dark to us, especially his objection, not merely in prose, but even in verse, to polysyllables at the end. And though we are in full light again when he denounces complete verses in prose (the chief formal fault of Mr Ruskin), he, here also, goes too far for us. The most delicate English ear would not object to the equivalent of Sallust’s “Falso queritur de natura sua,”[404] to the commencement of a hexameter in the _Timæus_,[405] or to the muffled Galliambic of Thucydides.[406]

Footnote 404:

Said to be an iambic decasyllable—hobbling enough!

Footnote 405:

Εἷς δύο τρεῖσ· ὁ δὲ δὴ τέταρτος ἡμῶν ὧ φίλε. The first words to δὴ
make the beginning of a hexameter or a penthemimer elegiac, the whole,
omitting Εἷς, a very “lolloping” iambic trimeter, while ὁ to ἡμῶν is
an Anacreontic. Plato would certainly have retorted that where so many
metres are possible no one can arise distinctly, and therefore
disagreeably, to the ear.

Footnote 406:

ὑπὲρ ἥμισυ Κᾶρες ἐφάνησαν. Spalding, I think, detected Galliambic
cadence here, regarding the first foot as an anapæst and the rest as
two third pæons. You may also begin with a third pæon (ὑπὲρ ἥμι), as
do many of the lines of the _Atys_ itself. Therefore I call it
“muffled,” and have dwelt on the pæon, though the Galliambic is more
commonly thought of as Ionic _a minore_. Professor Hardie, however,
suggests to me that Quintilian was actually thinking of the Sotadean
metre of which he himself, lower in the chapter, quotes an example
beginning rather like this.

But this in the last case is, perhaps, due to the fact that the pæon is hardly an English poetic foot at all, and in the first to the fact that we have nothing corresponding to the strangely broken rhythm of the Latin comic senarius and tetrameter. It is, however, in dealing with the feet of prose that Quintilian, like Aristotle, gets most out of our depth, and for the same reason, that we really do not know enough—if we know anything—about the pronunciation, or intonation, of Greek and Latin. Yet the general drift, if here and there we do not quite “feel our feet,” is unmistakable and unmistakably correct, and the whole is an excellent sample of a kind of criticism most necessary, much neglected in modern times till very recently, and entirely independent of any mere rhetorical technicality. And it is followed—at section 116 onward—by some general remarks of capital importance, laying down among other things that the chief touchstone of composition is the ear, and admitting that in many cases, both of selection of single words and _ordonnance_ of phrases, it is impossible to render an exact reason why one thing is right and another wrong. It is so: and there’s an end on’t! In the peroration of the Book, first the orator receives some special, and then (at 138 onward) the author, in verse as well as in prose, some general, cautions and admonitions as to musical effect.

But all this, good as it is, could be easily spared, if the choice lay between it and the Tenth book. For here, and here only, do [Sidenote: _Book X.: Survey of Classical Literature._] we get, from an eminent critic of the first rank, a critical survey of the joint literatures of Greece and Rome, during the main classical course of both. Interesting as this would be from any one of tolerable ability, seeing that it is precisely what we lack—doubly interesting as it is from a man of Quintilian’s learning, long practice in teaching, and interest in the subject—it becomes trebly so from certain characteristics of his which have been more than once glanced at, and which make him an almost perfect, certainly a typical, exponent in rational form of what may be regarded as the standard orthodoxy—the _textus receptus_ of the critical creed—of the ancients. Aristotle came too early to give this opinion with full knowledge, and would, perhaps, always have been disinclined to give it in the same way. Longinus, we feel, is an exception of genius. But what Quintilian says the enormous majority of cultivated Greeks and Romans (allowing in the former case for particularist and parochial contempt of the latter) are likely to have thought. He prefaces the survey by an interesting, and perhaps not really equivocal, explanation of the reasons for its insertion. I say “perhaps not really equivocal,” because Quintilian, a very genuine person, would not have hesitated to give it the form of an apology if he had meant it apologetically. The orator on his probation must, he says, study and imitate for himself all the best authors, not merely the orators themselves, but, as no less an authority than Theophrastus recommended, poets, and historians, and philosophers. But this must be done with care and judgment; for the methods of history are not the same as those of oratory, and it is no use addressing one kind of juryman with the pregnant terseness of Sallust, or another kind with the _lactea ubertas_ of Livy, while the philosophers require the same caution, put in a different way. And some remarks of his on at least the more celebrated authors will be expected by his friends—to which friends we owe more thanks than is always the case.

He “begins with Zeus,” that is to say, Homer, and delivers a very neat set criticism on him from that oratorical point of view which was so common in regard to both Homer and Virgil.

“For he, as,” in his own words, "the violence of rivers and the courses of the springs take their beginning from the ocean, [Sidenote: _Greek: Homer and other Epic poets._] has given an example and a starting-point to all parts of eloquence. Him none has excelled, for great things in sublimity as for small ones in propriety of speech. At once abundant and compressed, agreeable and serious, wonderful now in volume, now in terseness, is he; and not only in poetical, but also in oratorical, virtue most eminent. For, not to say anything of his panegyrics, his hortatives, his consolations, do not the Ninth Book, with the embassy sent to Achilles, and the quarrel between the generals in the First, and the sentences expressed in the Second, set forth every device of advocacy and debate?" &c., &c.

Others he treats more briefly. Hesiod is in the middle style only, but easy and sententious in that. Antimachus[407] (one of our losses) is second to Homer, has force, energy, originality, but is deficient in attractiveness and in _ordonnance_. Panyasis (another) excels Hesiod in subject and Antimachus in treatment. Apollonius has an evenly sustained mediocrity. Aratus is “equal to the work to which he thought himself equal”—an ingeniously double-edged compliment. Theocritus (one must quote the whole of this, and waive the discussion of it) “is admirable in his peculiar style, but his rustic and pastoral muse shrinks not only from appearing in the forum, but even from approaching the city.” And then Pisander, Nicander, Euphorion, Tyrtæus, Callimachus, Philetas are slid over rapidly, while, though Aristarchus had sanctioned three _iambographi_, Simonides and Hipponax are passed in silence, Archilochus only receiving very high praise for vigour and all similar qualities.

Footnote 407:

_V. supra_, pp. 20, 85. Perhaps no single “windfall of the Muses”
would be so great a gain to literary criticism, in respect of Greek,
as the recovery of a substantial portion of Antimachus.

So, too, of the nine canonical lyrists, Bacchylides, Ibycus, Anacreon, Alcman, and even Sappho, are overlooked. Pindar [Sidenote: _The Lyrists._] has a brilliant testimonial, to which, however, the authority of Horace seems to be thought necessary as an indorsement. Stesichorus is “equal to a great subject, strong, dignified, but exuberant.” Alcæus is magnificent, but descends to sportive and amorous subjects (_ecce idola scholæ!_); and Simonides, though of no very lofty genius, is correct and pleasing.

The Old Comedy, with the usual three selected, but not characterised separately, is better adapted for the orator’s use [Sidenote: _Drama._] than anything save Homer: it is the cream of Attic; it is graceful, elegant (and one may wonder for a moment, but it is a useful warning as to the connotation of the word), “sublime.” The judgment of the three tragedians is scarcely worthy of Quintilian. He speaks of Æschylus very much as a Frenchman, not in the times of utter ignorance, used to speak of Shakespeare. He is half silent, half enigmatic, on Sophocles; but he gives Euripides obviously heartfelt praise, and thinks him the most serviceable study of all for the orator. To which observations Aristophanes would pretty certainly have retorted (clothing the retort in language perhaps sadly lacking in decorum) that it was not very wonderful that the sophist should be useful to the rhetorician.

Very high, too, is the praise of Menander. Indeed, as we have seen before, Menander held a much higher position with the ancients than, if we had more than fragments of him, he would, from those fragments, be likely to hold with the moderns. He is praised (almost in the very words) for his “criticism of life,”[408] and a tradition is mentioned that he was an orator as well as a poet. But whether this be the case or not, passages in his plays are cited as possessing all the charms of eloquence, and he is especially extolled for that presentation of character—_ethopœia_—which the ancients exacted from the orator even more than from the poet. Philemon is the other late comic mentioned, and though the taste of the age that preferred him is denounced as bad, he is admitted as a fair second.

Footnote 408:

_Ita omnem vitæ imaginem expressit._

Herodotus and Thucydides are of course put in front of the historians, and are contrasted fairly, though not with a great [Sidenote: _The Historians._] deal of penetration. Theopompus, Philistus, Ephorus, Clitarchus, and Timagenes are slightly mentioned: but Xenophon, somewhat to our surprise, is put off to the philosophers. Yet this is of itself a useful _datum_ for our inquiry, when we think how low _we_ should put Xenophon’s contributions to philosophy (as distinguished of course from philosophical biography), how much higher even the rather dry annals of the _Hellenics_, how much higher still the agreeable miscellanies, and the pleasant didactic romance of the _Cyropædia_, and how far highest of all, the _Anabasis_, with its vivid realisation of action and scenery, and the narrative power which gives a romantic interest to the rather undeserved escape of a gang of mercenary filibusters.

Conscious, probably, that the comparison of them must be hackneyed, Quintilian does not dwell long on the Greek orators, [Sidenote: _The orators and philosophers._] even on that half of The Ten which he selects, and of the later speakers mentions only Demetrius Phalereus. He is much more enthusiastic about the philosophers, discerning “agreeableness” of style[409] in Aristotle, a judgment in which few of us who have groaned over the not indeed obscure, but hard and juiceless, language of the _Ethics_ and the _Organon_, will quite acquiesce, while we might think it rather kind even for that which clothes the more popular matter of the _Politics_, _Poetics_, and _Rhetoric_. But it would not be easy better to recognise the mastery of Plato, “whether in acumen of argument, or in a certain divine and Homeric faculty of style.” He rises far above mere prose, and seems instinct, not with human reason, but with a sort of Delphic inspiration. Xenophon at last receives due meed for his “unaffected delightfulness beyond the reach of affectation,” and the “persuasive goddess that sits on his lips.”[410] Perhaps Theophrastus may be a “little overparted” with “divine brilliance,”[411] though of course the epithet is a mere translation of the name Aristotle gave him.

Footnote 409:

_Eloquendi suavitas._ Cicero is equally complimentary, however, in
speaking of his _flumen aureum_: and the charitable have thought that
these qualities were discoverable in the lost _Dialogues_.

Footnote 410:

Eupolis on Pericles.

Footnote 411:

_Nitor divinus._

When the critic approaches his own countrymen his words have, perhaps, an even greater interest. He begins of course [Sidenote: _Latin—Virgil._] with Virgil, and, as in duty bound, ranks him next to Homer, and nearer Homer than any one is near himself. Yet a suspicion crosses one’s mind whether Quintilian was exactly enthusiastic about the elegant Mantuan, for he talks about his being “obliged to take more care,”[412] about his losing in the higher qualities, but finding compensations, &c.

Footnote 412:

_Ei fuit magis laborandum._

So far so good. But what shall we say of this: “All others must follow afar off. For Macer and Lucretius are indeed to [Sidenote: _Other epic and didactic poets._] be read, but not for supplying phrase—that is to say, the body of style. Each is elegant in his own subject, but the one is tame and the other difficult.” Now, as to Macer we know little or nothing; he seems to have been a sort of Roman Armstrong or Darwin, who wrote about herbs, drugs, &c.[413] But Lucretius—a greater master of phrase than Landor himself, nay, a greater, perhaps, than Milton—"not good for supplying" it, and merely “difficult”? One wants, again, some Aristophanic interjection. Varro is damned with faint praise as not indeed despicable (_non spernendus quidem_), but _parum locuples_. Ennius is spoken of as some of our own critics used to speak of Chaucer—as a gigantic and aged oak, venerable but not beautiful. Ovid is “wanton,” and too fond of his own conceits. Valerius Flaccus is a great loss. Others—Severus, Bassus, Rabirius, Pedo[414]—names to us mostly, though we have fragments of at least three, are dismissed, the two first with high praise, the two last with the scarcely enthusiastic remark that the orator may read them, if _he has time_. Lucan is ardent, eager, and of noble sententiousness, but rather an orator than a poet. Domitian would have been the greatest of poets, _if_ the gods had pleased. But, unluckily, they did not please!

Footnote 413:

His fragments in Baehrens’s _Poetæ Minores_, vol. vi. pp. 344, 345,
run to seventeen, none exceeding two lines, and only two so long. The
most complete is this—

“Cygnus in auspiciis semper lætissimus ales:
Hunc optant nautæ, quia se non mergit in undis.”

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

Footnote 414:

Of Cornelius Severus, a friend of Ovid, who wrote on the Sicilian war,
and of whom Quintilian thinks that, had he lived, he might have been
second to Virgil, we have some dozen odd lines, and a more solid
fragment of twenty-five, enshrining that plagiarism from Sextilius Ena
which has been noticed above (p. 235). It has some merit. For Saleius
Bassus see above (p. 281). The five scraps which we possess of
Rabirius warrant no judgment. But Seneca the Rhetorician in a context
noticed above (p. 234), has preserved a block of twenty-three lines of
Albinovanus Pedo on the voyage of Germanicus, which have a certain
declamatory vigour. See Baehrens, vi. 351-356. (Some elegies have also
been attributed to Pedo.)

In elegy Tibullus is Quintilian’s choice, but he admits that others prefer Propertius. Ovid is more luxuriant than either; [Sidenote: _Elegiac and miscellaneous._] Gallus harsher. Horace receives praise thrice over as terse, pure and just in satire, bitter in iambics (lampoons), and almost the only Roman deserving to be read[415] in lyric—where he sometimes soars. He is full of pleasant grace, and is agreeably audacious. After this, or rather before it, it is not surprising that Catullus is only mentioned for “bitter” iambics. As older satirists (“Satire is _ours_!” says Quintilian with a pleasant patriotic exaltation), Lucilius and Varro have praise.

The remarks on Tragedy we are unfortunately unable to check; but it is interesting that Quintilian apparently thought [Sidenote: _Drama._] Latin better off here than in Comedy, which we certainly should not have expected. He quotes the traditional praise of the language of Plautus without expressing any opinion on it, but in a fashion pretty clearly intimating that he was unable to agree.[416] “The ancients extol Cæcilius,”—another phrase which can only be pointed in one way; and Terence, though extremely elegant in his kind, scarcely attains to a faint image of Greek. It seems, however, as if he would have thought better of Afranius had it not been for that foulness of subject which, from the frequency of mention of it in connection with the author, seems to have turned the by no means squeamish stomach even of less moral Romans.

Footnote 415:

_At Lyricorum idem Horatius fere solus legi dignus._

Footnote 416:

_In comœdia maxime claudicamus: licet Varro, Musas (Ælii Stilonis
sententia), Plautino dicat sermone locuturas fuisse, si Latine loqui
vellent._