Chapter VI: Other Influences Summarized 216 (3)

To two of the best and purest poets of our age Greece has supplied the very breath of literary life. One is Matthew Arnold, the other is Tennyson. Matthew Arnold as critic, Matthew Arnold as poet, is equally Hellenic. He has been charged with “an air of aristocratic selectness and literary exclusiveness.” The art of Pheidias is open to the same objection. What really marks the style of Matthew Arnold is his reasoned simplicity of taste, his cultivated appreciation of the delicate aroma of words and the poetical atmosphere of thought. Like Tennyson, he has a true eye for beauty, grace, and congruity of effect. He compasses the “liquid clearness of an Ionian sky.” It may be that he lacks _abandon_. He may not feel with the poignancy, or soar with the boldness, of the greatest creators. But, artistically considered, he is as nearly perfect as it is given to man to be. His poetic style is, indeed, almost too perfect for the general. When he says

Or where the _echoing_ oars
Of Argo first
Startled the _unknown_ sea.

he is using the only two adjectives which the place required, and which it truthfully admits. They are exactly the two epithets which a Greek might put. Yet, no doubt, the untutored mind asks for something more assertive, something which will cut more sharply or press more heavily into the unready imagination. Than _Mycerinus_, than _Sohrab and Rustum_, than _Philomela_, _Thyrsis_, or _The Strayed Reveller_, one can find nothing more absolutely Greek in point of execution, though one may know Greek passages which stir profounder emotional depths.

Tennyson’s debts to classical authors have been treated by Mr. Churton Collins in a monograph. That critic is right in saying that the knowledge of a scholar is requisite to appreciate Tennyson fully, however much he may be appreciated by those who are no scholars. No man has ever been better read in previous poetry than Tennyson, and no man has known better how to assimilate what he found, or has possessed a surer tact and taste in using it. With Tennyson the Greek matter is, as with Milton, imbedded in his own, not overlaid. Greek forms of verse are moulded to his purpose. The Greek style, describing what is luminously seen in a few luminous touches, is ever conspicuous. He neither tries to disguise his borrowings, nor does he obtrude them. When he says, “for now the noonday quiet holds the hill,” he is translating Callimachus; when “the charm of married brows,” Theocritus; when “shadowy thoroughfares of thought,” Sophocles; when “sitting well in order smite the sounding furrows,” Homer. His device of making the sound answer to the sense, as in

I heard the water lapping on the crag,
And the long-ripple washing in the reeds,

is a common device of the Greeks. In point of form his _Œnone_ is modelled on Theocritus; his _Ulysses_ and his _Tithonus_ are framed after the soliloquies in Greek plays. His _Lotus-eaters_ gets its matter from Homer, Bion, and Moschus. Everywhere we meet hints and reminiscences of Simonides, or Pindar, or Theocritus, or Anacreon. But these are all incorporated, amalgamated in a body of work which is wholly in keeping with them in taste, in tone, in diction—in short, in style.

This age of ours, to put it briefly, has been an age of stylists, of artists who work on principles derived from their education in Greek, and their love, which every scholar feels, of that glorious and undying literature.

BRIEF CONSPECTUS OF GREEK LITERATURE.

DEPARTMENT OF LITERATURE.
CHIEF REPRESENTATIVE.
DATE.
CHIEF WORKS.
SOME INFLUENCES ON FOREIGN TRIBUTARIES TO ENGLISH LITERATURE.
SOME EFFECTS ON ENGLISH WRITERS.
Epic Verse
HOMER
Ninth century, B.C.?
ILIAD—martial
O´DYSSEY—romantic
Imitated by Virgil (_Aenéid_), and thence affecting Dante,
Tasso, etc.
The _Iliad_ translated by Chapman (Elizabethan), Pope,
Cowper, etc. Milton’s _Paradise Lost_ is ultimately based
on Homer (+ Virgil + Dante). Abundance of characters, similes,
etc., incorporated by all our literature.
Didactic Verse (Epic metre)
HE´SIOD
Eighth century, B.C.
WORKS AND DAYS—agricultural
THEOGONY—pedigree of the Gods
Imitated by Virgil (_Georgics_)
First model for much (mostly unimportant) didactic work,
_e.g._ Tusser’s _Five Hundred Points of Good
Husbandry_ (Elizabethan), and the verses of Dyer,
Green, Darwin, etc. (eighteenth century).
Lyric Verse
SAPPHO (and Lesbian School)
fl. 610 B.C.
ODES of love (mostly lost)
ANA´CREON
fl. 530 B.C.
ODES of love and wine
Imitated by Catullus and Horace, and thence by Italian and
French lyrists.
In English the influence was chiefly through Horace: Keynote
to many of the Elizabethan and Caroline songs, _e.g._, in
Davidson’s _Poetical Rhapsody_, Herrick, Suckling, etc.
Moore translates _Odes of Anacreon_ (many spurious). Modern
_vers de société_.
PINDAR (Simónides, etc.)
fl. 470 B.C.
ODES of victory (OLYMPIAN, ISTHMIAN, etc.)
One of the models of Horace. Deliberately imitated by Italians,
_e.g._, Chiabrera.
Directly imitated by Cowley (_Pindaric Odes_), Dryden (_Song
for St. Cecilia’s Day_, _Alexanders Feast_), Pope (_Ode
on St. Cecilia’s Day_), Gray (_Progress of Poesy_), etc.
Tragic Drama
AE´SCHYLUS
fl. 490-456 B.C.
PLAYS (7 extant, _e.g._ _Agamemnon_, _Prometheus_).
SO´PHOCLES
fl. 465-405 B.C.
PLAYS (7 extant, _e.g._, _Antigone_, _Ajax_).
EURI´PIDES
fl. 450-406 B.C.
PLAYS (17 extant, _e.g._, _Alcéstis_,_Iphigenía_).
Imitated on wrong principles by Latin writers, _e.g._, Seneca,
from whom false notions of “classical” drama came into France
(Corneille and Racine).
Effect on English drama mostly so far as that drama was
affected by Italian or French influence (pre-Shakespearean
and post-Restoration). Attempts at “classical” drama in
Milton’s _Samson Agonistes_, Addison’s _Cato_,
Swinburne’s _Atalanta in Calydon_. Much use of Greek
subject-matter and characters, _e.g._, by Shelley
(_Prometheus Unbound_), Byron (_Manfred_ and _Cain_,
with character of Prometheus). Browning’s _Balaustion’s
Adventure_ (= Euripides’ _Alcestis_).
Comic Drama
ARISTO´PHANES (and _Old_ comedy)
fl. 425-385 B.C.
PLAYS (11 extant, _e.g._, _Birds_, _Clouds_,
_Frogs_), (political and personal).
MENA´NDER (and _New_ comedy)
fl. 310 B.C.
PLAYS of character and manners (fragments extant).
Adapted by Plautus and Terence, and thence borrowed by Molière.
Shakespeare’s _Comedy of Errors_ from Plautus (_Menaechmi_)
from the Greek. Ben Jonson’s comedies of “humours.” English
translations from Molière (Dryden, Fielding, etc. ) can be
affiliated to Greek. Thence English comedy so far as
determined by French, from Goldsmith to modern adaptations.
Pastoral Idylls
THEO´CRITUS (and his school)
fl. 270 B.C.
IDYLLS of country life (and pastoral “laments” by his
disciples Bion, Moschus).
Imitated by Virgil (_Eclogues_), and thence by Sannazaro, etc.
Pastorals proper by Spenser (_Shepheard’s Calender_), Drayton,
Pope, etc. Mixed with ‘romance’ in Sidney’s _Arcadia_. Pastoral
laments in Milton’s _Lycidas_, Shelley’s _Adonais_, Matthew
Arnold’s _Thyrsis_. Idylls in Tennyson (_Œnone_).
History
HERO´DOTUS
lived 484-428 B.C.
HISTORY (conflict of Asia and Europe).
THUCY´DIDES
lived 471-400 B.C.
HISTORY (of Peloponnesian War)
XE´NOPHON
lived 430-355 B.C.
ANA´BASIS, HELLE´NICA, etc.
Models of Latin historians, _e.g._, Sallust, Livy, Tacitus.
Theoretically English historians emulated Thucydides. In
practice they rather follow the Romans. The influence of
the Greek “inventors” of history is everywhere, but does
not admit of brief specification.
Oratory
DEMOS´THENES (and the “Attic canon,” ISOCRATES, etc.)
lived 384-322 B.C.
SPEECHES (public, _e.g._, _Philippics_, and private).
The Roman orators were avowed students of Greek methods. French
oratory follows.
Influence indirect. _See_ “Conspectus of Latin Literature.”
Philosophy
PLATO
lived 429-347 B.C.
DIALOGUES (ethical, politico-ethical, etc.)—_e.g._,
_Republic_, _Symposium_.
Affects all subsequent philosophy.
Platonic thought and terms are an element in all modern
English philosophy. The thoughts markedly present in many
poets, _e.g._, Shelley, Wordsworth (_Intimations of
Immortality_). Plato’s literary method (dialogue) adopted
by Berkeley (_Alciphron_), Landor, etc. Plato’s _Republic_
the starting point for ideal commonwealths, _e.g._, More’s
_Utopia_, Bacon’s _New Atlantis_.
ARISTOTLE
lived 384-322 B.C.
ETHICS, POLITICS, METAPHYSICS, RHETORIC, etc.
Affects all subsequent thought.
Aristotelian philosophy was a kind of religion with mediaeval
scholars. Its influence at present on the increase. Translated
into Arabic (twelfth century) by Averrhoes, thence into Latin.
Dominates the thinking of the Middle Ages (“schoolmen”). His
literary criticism carried on by Horace, garbled by Boileau.
Literary criticism of Aristotle leads to Puttenham’s _Art
of English Poesie_, Sidney’s _Defense of Poesie_, Dryden’s
_Of Dramatic Poesie_, etc. The erroneous “Aristotelian”
doctrines of Boileau, etc., dominate English style of the
“correct” age (Pope, etc.).
Biography and Essays
PLUTARCH
fl. A.D. 80
PARALLEL LIVES
The model for later writers. French translation by Amyot,
favourite reading of Montaigne.
Starting-point for biographies and biographical essays (_e.g._
of Macaulay). North’s translation of Plutarch’s _Lives_
supplied Shakespeare with subjects and characters (Coriolanus,
Julius Caesar, Brutus, Antony).
MORAL ESSAYS
Greatly read after Revival of Learning.
Humorous and Satirical Essays
LUCIAN
fl. A.D. 160
DIALOGUES AND SKETCHES
Affecting Rabelais, Voltaire.
Effect not reducible to a few words. Swift’s _Gulliver’s
Travels_ takes its rise from Lucian’s _True History_.
Sterne is sometimes called “the English Lucian.”
Fable
Aesop
Sixth century B.C.?
FABLES
Passed on from Phaedrus, etc., to all W. Europe.
Source of the majority of our fables since Alfred (in Caxton,
etc.).
Character Sketches
Theophrastus
fl. 320 B.C.
CHARACTERS
Imitated by La Bruyère
“Characters” of Hall, Overbury, Earle, etc.

SYNOPTICAL VIEW OF RELATIONS OF GREEK LITERATURE WITH ENGLISH.

II

LATIN LITERATURE AND ENGLISH

The fashion of treating Latin literature as of all importance to English is passing away in the better understanding of things. It is true that the knowledge of Latin has been always more widely spread than the knowledge of Greek, and that our speech is more deeply tinged with Latinity. Yet Greek literature is the source and origin of almost all that is best in Latin, and its influence to-day is far more vital. Let it be added that, while in point of matter and thought Latin borrowed unsparingly from Greek, in point of style its principles were less sound or consistent.

Nevertheless, Latin literature is of immense importance. We may think of the prodigious historical significance of the pagan Roman Empire, and then of the prodigious spiritual significance of the Christian Roman Church. We may think of the impress that has been left on all Western Europe by these, and remember that the language of each is Latin. The necessity of not neglecting the mere language is obvious. But we are here concerned with Latin literature, of which the language is but the vehicle.

* * * * *

Where does Latin literature begin and end?

Writing in Latin has not ended yet. But we shall for the present confine ourselves to the Latin works of pagan Rome, in the days when Rome can fairly be called a nation of tolerably homogeneous life and pursuits. Though the writings of Tertullian, Lactantius, Jerome and Augustine, in the third and fourth centuries, are undeniably Latin, and literature also, we can on this principle draw a tolerably clear line against them. Similarly the later poets, such as Ausonius, Claudian, and Boethius, lie outside the scope of the present chapter.

From the third century B.C. onwards, the Latin-speaking Romans, beginning as a mere clan in central Italy, spread their empire gradually over the peninsula, over France, Spain and Portugal, over Great Britain to the Grampians, across the Rhine, along the Danube, over modern Turkey and Greece, over Asia Minor and Syria to the river Euphrates, over most of Arabia, Egypt, and all the southern coast of the Mediterranean. In Spain and Portugal, in France, and in Roumania they planted colonies and settlements, till the languages of those countries actually became Latin; dialects, no doubt, but Latin. Over all this empire Latin literature spread with the spreading of control and settlement, and in the first century of our era it was as natural for a Latin writer to hail from Spain as from Rome. Persons no less than Seneca, Lucan, Quintilian, and Martial are Spaniards from towns later known as Cordova, Calahorra and Bambola. Subsequently Africa (Tunis) and Gaul have their distinguished representatives.

Considerations like these should make it clear how vast an influence Latin literature must have wielded both directly and indirectly. The modern languages of France, Spain, Portugal, Roumania, and Italy are various continuations of the Latin; and France, Spain, Portugal, and Italy, despite all historical changes, have been neither able nor desirous to shake off the guidance and impulses of Latin literature. This is one reason why it is the French and Italians who find their chief study in Virgil and Horace, Cicero and Seneca, whereas the Teutons, exerting a greater freedom of choice, more distinctly recognize the superiority of Homer and Sappho, Demosthenes and Aeschylus.

Needless to say that the people which could build and govern such an empire and hold it so long together must have been a people of strong innate quality. It need be no surprise that it was hardly an imaginative or artistic quality. It is, indeed, scarcely open to dispute that the old Roman and his kindred Italian tribes were marked by a comparative lack of fine imagination. Not only in war and politics, in legal and political institutions, but in intellectual culture they were a most practical and literal-minded race.

We are apt, in looking at the modern Frenchman or Italian, to commit two large errors. Because they frequently appear excitable in temper and demonstrative in gesture, we incline to put them down not only as passionate, but as profound in sentiment, feeling, and imagination. Yet, in point of fact, still waters run deep, here as elsewhere. The second error is greater still. We judge the old Latin stock from the so-called “Neo-Latin” peoples, or those who speak the neo-Latin tongues. Yet in many cases the “Neo-Latins” have but a comparatively small infusion of Roman blood still running in their veins. In some cases their forbears must have had none at all.

We can only judge the old Latin race, as especially embodied in the Roman, from its literature, its history and its institutions. From these we gather that it was a stock excellent for great ideals in the way of conquering and administering, a people of admirable commanders and engineers and jurists, a practical people, but a people not distinguished by brilliance of fancy, great delicacy of taste, notable depth of imagination or poignancy of feeling. Roman literature, left to itself, would, we may believe, have proved a very solid and rather heavy thing. The Latin language is like the Roman people. It is a language of great logical method and strict system of structure. As languages go, it is unusually free from idioms in the proper sense of the word. It is distinctly a solid and stately, but distinctly not a flexible, speech.

And yet, despite the innate character of the Latin stock, and the unyielding nature of the language, Latin literature is not so eminently practical and massive as we might expect.

For this there are two reasons. The one is that a large number of the chief writers of Latin literature are not themselves of unmixed Latin birth; they possess Celtic blood, or Greek blood, or some other non-Roman strain. Virgil came from Mantua, Catullus from Verona, Horace from Venusia, and other writers from other northern, southern, or even Spanish towns. The second reason is that, before Roman literature had properly earned the name, it had come into contact with the fully developed art of Greece, both Attic and Alexandrian, and forthwith became a literature of imitation. Feeling its limitations, the Latin genius submitted its own tendencies to the correction of a people whom it instinctively recognized as superior in this domain. But here an important qualification must be made. It cannot be too much insisted upon that Latin literature hardly rose at all till Greek literature was far decayed. Unhappily, when the Roman writers set about imitating their masters, they exploited, it is true, the matter or substance of anything Greek, and of any period, but the style and form which they affected were rather those of the later and inferior Greeks of Alexandria, not those of the perfect earlier masters of Attica and Ionia. It is in any case easier to imitate what is affected or “loud” or artificial than what is simply and naturally strong and beautiful.

Latin literature, in the sense in which we are to treat it, may be divided into three main periods. The first is that of immature art, of vigorous but ill-disciplined imitation of Greek models, of growing mastery over language. It is a period of preparation, the “iron age,” corresponding roughly to the period of English literature before the Revival of Learning. The date of this epoch is from 250 to 80 B.C., and it embraces the best days of the republic. During all this time the literature, rough and poor as it was, was sincere enough. It was meant for the people and for a purpose. For us, however, it contains little of any consequence besides the comedies of Plautus and Terence.

The second period is that of highest excellence in prose and poetry, the age of Cicero, Lucretius, Catullus, Sallust, Caesar, Livy, Virgil, Horace, and Ovid. This is the “golden age,” and may be dated from 80 B.C. to A.D. 14, a period during which the republic was passing into an empire, and when great men played their parts in great historical dramas; men like Sulla and Pompey, Julius Caesar, Antony, and Augustus. The latter half of this period, which extends from 30 B.C. to A.D. 14, and includes the names of Livy, Virgil, Horace, and Ovid, coincides with the rule of Augustus, and is therefore called the “Augustan” age. In other words, the Augustan age is the second half of the “golden” age. It is from 80 B.C. to A.D. 14 that Latin literature and the Latin language are at their highest degree of perfection. But, unhappily, at least during the second half, it is also a time when writers and readers are coming more and more to form a special literary class, which stands far aloof from the great public and its urgent or spontaneous interests.

The third period, the “silver age,” is that of the despotic and often tyrant emperors, when freedom of speech no longer existed, when the autocrat, a servile aristocracy, and a vicious populace occupied the capital. At this date literature is but a forced product without real motive or inspiration. It is characterized by declamation and rhetoric, by smart epigram, by cynicism and satire, by clever expression. Such is the period of Seneca, Lucan, Martial, Tacitus, Pliny, Juvenal. It may be put down roughly as extending from A.D. 14 to the year 150.

These three epochs are peculiarly well defined; they are universally recognized, because so conspicuously recognizable.

* * * * *

The first real incentive to literature among the Romans sprang from the contact into which they came with the Greeks of southern Italy and Sicily when their conquests reached so far. This was in the third century B.C. Until the Greek influence was strongly felt, we meet only with a series of rude records, or of uncouth and clownish verses of a satirical or farcical sort. From the rude records there began to develop themselves histories and epics; from the farces and satirical verses were destined to come the drama of tragedy and comedy and the literary satire; this, however, did not occur till the communication with Greece was full and close, and Greek material at hand to be utilized.

The first branch of Latin literature with which we need deal is the drama of comedy and tragedy. Practically this limits itself to the popular comedy of Plautus and Terence in the “iron” age, and the artificial and rhetorical tragedy of Seneca in the “silver” period.

Titus Maccius Plautus, who flourished about the year 210 B.C., and Publius Terentius, a generation later, are more nearly allied to each other than are Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. It is only the special student of literature who need be concerned to elaborate the full distinction between them. Plautus has the more of broad and boisterous fun and drollery, Terence has the subtler humour and the more artistic style and architecture. But both alike borrow plots and even dialogue wholesale from those Greek comedians of whom Menander is a type. They both adapt Greek plays, just as English playwrights once adapted Molière, and recently adapted Sardou. The Latin adaptations, however, were of quite undisguised closeness, if not of positive servility. Whereas our playwrights seek to make their adaptations entirely English, Plautus and Terence did not seek to make theirs entirely Roman. It is true that their plots were based on real life, but it was a Greek life and not a Roman life. The scene was always in a Greek city. Imbecile fathers duped by spendthrift sons, jealous husbands outwitted and stultified, cunning and unscrupulous slaves playing the part of _dei ex machina_, armies of cooks, confidantes and nondescripts—these things, which appear monotonously, are not really Roman. Those who read the earlier plays of Molière generally grow somewhat weary of the clever _valets_, the Mascarilles, of the dupes, of the Sganarelles, and of the conventional tricks upon parents and husbands. The truth is that Molière, at this stage of his career, in imitating or adapting Plautus and Terence, was almost as far from the real life of Paris in his own day as Plautus and Terence were from the real life of Rome. _Les Fourberies de Scapin_ is as distinct and as unconvincing an adaptation of the _Phormio_ of Terence as Shakespeare’s early _Comedy of Errors_ is of Plautus’s _Menaechmi_.

Now it is a noteworthy fact, as illustrating how doubly exotic a thing Latin literature was, that neither Plautus nor Terence was a true-born Roman. Plautus was a countryman of Umbria, Terence was an African of Carthage. Yet it was these two who remained the only considerable writers of Latin comedy, and the whole of their work was adaptation, free translation, or guileless plagiarism.

To our subject these writers are of no small account, in virtue of the fact that they were the progenitors of Italian comedy, thence of Molière, and, from Molière, of our own comic stage of the seventeenth, and the earlier and greater part of the eighteenth, century, the ages of Congreve and Farquhar, and of Fielding and Sheridan.

Tragedy, the other and nobler half of drama, took its rise in Latin literature as early as the year 240 B.C.; but the obscure names of Andronicus (who, as usual, was not a genuine Roman, but a Greek) and of Naevius (who likewise was not a genuine Roman, but a Calabrian) need not here detain us. The one considerable personage in the whole history of the Latin tragic stage is Seneca, the Spanish-born Roman of the middle of the first century A.D. Unfortunately, this one important figure is also the incarnation of the defects of his epoch. He touches no real chord in the public mind or heart; he borrows his subject-matter from the Greeks—Greek gods, Greek heroes, Greek plots; there is nothing national, local, nothing really natural or alive, about his work. The tragedies are mainly excuses for putting fine declamatory speeches or brilliant phrases into the mouths of the characters. They are, in short, exercises in oratory, masquerading in dramatic form. In all probability they were never intended for the stage. Those who know what Addison’s _Cato_ is like in its coldness and artificiality, those also who know French literature and can remember the declamation in the least interesting of the works of Corneille and Racine, can form a very fair notion of the salient characteristics of the tragedy of Seneca. It was Seneca, the easily accessible Latin model, whom the Italian and French tragedians deliberately copied, and who in turn determined the style of Addison’s _Cato_.

It is perhaps well to remark at this point how thoroughly unreal in every domain of Latin literature is that part which deals with the gods. The native Roman religion had no Olympus, no nymphs. It was a cold and formal worship of gods either far removed or quite artificial abstractions. To a Roman the Greek gods and heroes who fill Latin poetry are more or less ornamental make-believe. They are introduced and regarded rather as poetical properties, virtually meaning little more to the cultivated Romans than the Roman gods, in their turn, mean to an English writer of the eighteenth century, when he talks of Venus or Jove. Therefore, whether it be tragedy or epic or lyric, a dispiriting artificiality generally—although Virgil is an exception—drops upon Latin literature immediately that we find ourselves among the gods and their doings. Yet it cannot be too often repeated that the saving grace of literature is sincerity. No immortal writing can base itself upon convention and a sham.

Perhaps one of the most deplorable legacies left to us by the influence of Latin literature has been the introduction of Jupiter, Juno, Venus, Cupid, Mars, Vulcan, the nymphs, the Graces and the rest into the _répertoire_ of what is called poetic diction. As the eighteenth century, more than any other, was dominated by the artificial principles of Roman literature, both directly and through the French, so in that century these names became a set of tinsel tokens to take the place and conceal the lack of honest and genuine ideas and their natural expression.

* * * * *

Leaving Plautus and Terence, we turn to the golden age of Latin literature, its most classical period. Most classical, because during that period its works attain to the “class,” the class of the best in their kind. It is between the year 80 B.C. and A.D. 14 that Latin literature reaches this best, although the kind itself may be in frankness considered not of the most sublime. In point of matter and style Latin literature attains its acme during these last active days of the republic and under the fostering, but at the same time cramping, care of the first emperor, the great Augustus, and his favourite and minister, the munificent Maecenas.

Before this golden period Latin work had been crude, rough, and inharmonious. It is now perfectly polished and used for polished purposes. On the other hand, after this period, in the silver age, there is a loss of purpose, of healthy and genuine subject-matter, and consequently an indulgence in strained cleverness, far-drawn epigram, empty declamation. But during this period itself Latin in the hands of Cicero, Lucretius, Caesar, Catullus, Virgil, Livy, Horace, and Ovid is for the most part sober and restrained. It may not, in most of these cases, delve very deep or soar very high, but at least it is both admirable workmanship and marked by sober and practical sense. In the poetry of the epic, the lyric, and the elegiac; in the prose of history, oratory, and philosophy; in all but satire and epigram (which by their nature flourish best in times of decadence), this golden period far transcends the age which followed. It is not in this period that neatly executed nothings, verbal conceits in the absence of true matter, out-of-the-way learning and allusions, take the place of thinking.

It is true that during this Ciceronian and Augustan age the Roman literary art was always conscious in its workmanship, always studied and deliberate, always intentionally aiming at finish or style, at skill and beauty and harmony of expression. It is true that it was seldom prompted by instinct like the Greek. It is true that it was nearly all imitative, unoriginal. But it is also true that it was sensible withal, free from absolute rodomontade, bathos, or frivolity.

* * * * *

The department of poetry from which Latin literature derives most nobility, if no other quality, is the epic. The two greatest epics of the world are indisputably the _Iliad_ of Homer and the _Aeneid_ of Virgil. The _Jerusalem Delivered_ of the Italian poet Tasso and the _Paradise Lost_ of the English Milton rank next, but the distance between either of these works and the Greek and Roman epics is scarcely to be bridged. Probably an epic in the old-world sense is scarcely possible under our modern social conditions and philosophic limitations.

The epic is the poem of a great action of a great hero. There may be many episodes in the shape of other actions performed by other characters, but, if the art is to be true, all must bear some appreciable relation to, or centre upon, the said great action of the chief great figure. Virgil’s _Aeneid_ is an epic left somewhat incomplete; its hero is Aeneas, and the great action is the founding of the Roman race. In the poem are described the wanderings of Aeneas from Troy, his adventures by sea and land, his love of Dido and its calamitous ending, his landing in Italy, his descent to the nether world and the sights he there beholds, his wars and victories over the native Italian princes. But the foundation of the Roman race is never reached, the work, which consists already of some 10,000 lines, having been left unfinished.

The more serious purpose of this fine and noble work was to give to the Romans a great national poem, and to supply them, now that they were masters of the world, with an origin of which to be proud. In this aim the poet completely succeeded, establishing himself at the same time as the supreme national poet of the Empire. We may refrain from blaming him if, meanwhile, he sought to offer poetical incense to the emperor Augustus, by connecting him in direct descent with the Aeneas of heroic exploits and half-divine birth. In such conscious purposes Virgil differs entirely from Homer. Homer composed his verse to be heard or read by all and sundry for its own sake, as a narrative full of life and interest and verbal charm. His works have a nearer claim to be called effusions. But Virgil necessarily writes without a simple strong conviction, with more conscious toil of art, as a greatly gifted man of letters writing for men of culture. Spontaneous he assuredly is not. Homer had described battles and councils in the _Iliad_, and wanderings and marvels in the _Odyssey_. Virgil borrows the battles or the wanderings, and weaves them with wonderful art into one poem. He takes the similes and imagery of Homer and other Greeks; he translates or paraphrases much of their diction; he “finds his good things wherever he can” and works all into a mosaic, which is exceedingly dexterous, vigorous and polished, but which cannot be called original. The chief sphere of his originality is perhaps to be found in the rhetorical strength and adroitness of many of the speeches which he puts into the mouths of his characters.

Virgil is essentially a writer for the lover of verbal art. For those who can read Latin with easy and scholarly apprehension he appears to combine the splendid harmonies of Milton with the studied grace of Tennyson and often the polished conciseness of Pope. It is impossible to translate him so as to convey any adequate idea of these qualities, for it is exactly these which are untranslatable. Matthew Arnold, in his _Essays in Criticism_, speaks of individual lines which may serve as touchstones of poetic virtue. In the mere matter of sound each great writer is apt to be distinguishable by such isolated lines. Milton, for example, is only one of many who have written in blank verse. Yet a fragment like

A dungeon horrible on all sides round
As one great furnace flamed

instantly reveals Milton. Virgil answers to the same test of indescribable and incommunicable quality.

To the ignorant Middle Ages Virgil became a name to conjure with. He grew, with little apparent reason except his general poetic fame, to be regarded as the embodiment of all pagan wisdom, and it is for this reason that Dante puts himself under the guidance of Virgil in his Hell and Purgatory, though it is the Christian Beatrice, and not the pagan poet, who accompanies him into Paradise. Dante’s _Inferno_ is the sixth book of Virgil’s _Aeneid_ expanded and adapted to the strange blend of rapt mysticism and crude realism which prevailed under mediaeval Catholicism. It is from Virgil’s sixth book, combined with Dante, that Milton derives the main hint and many of the particular suggestions for his Hell in _Paradise Lost_. And it is, in short, to Virgil that all epics have looked since his _Aeneid_ once appeared.

Virgil is not, indeed, the only epic poet of Rome, although immeasurably the greatest. Lucan, in the silver age, composed an epic poem of the “great action” of Julius Caesar in crushing Pompey. Like most of the productions of that period of the second best, the _Pharsalia_ is full of epigrammatic sayings, deliberate _tours de force_ and brilliant rhetoric, together with much unreal sentiment, false taste, and grotesque or repellent detail. According to Quintilian Lucan is “more fit to be ranked amongst orators than poets.” Soon afterwards comes Statius with his _Thebaid_, or epic of Thebes, a work of great pains and little life, here and there beautified with those rather morbid colours which have been known to suggest the dying dolphin, but incapable of sustaining any natural interest. If he was called “Virgil’s ape,” the censure is hardly too severe. To us, however, the poem is of some account as having formed a portion of the staple reading in the days of Chaucer, who refers to “Stace” with avowed admiration. The tale of _Palamon and Arcite_, which Chaucer so admirably transformed from Boccaccio, owes its origin to this somewhat insipid epic of the Roman. Meanwhile the world has been content to forget the partial versions of Statius essayed by Pope or Gray.

In Lyric poetry, apart from the elegiac style, there are two names, and two only, which stand out upon the chart of Roman history. One is Catullus, the other Horace, and both are of the golden age, although of different halves of that epoch. Catullus flourished under the republic about 60 B.C., Horace under Augustus a generation later. It is curious to observe how the verdict of taste is reversing the positions once held in the general estimation by these two exquisite writers. Time was, and not so long ago, when Horace was more read and quoted than any other poet of antiquity. He was quoted at dinners, in literature, in parliament. It was taken for granted that he represented the _ne plus ultra_ of lyric quality. Catullus, it is true, was praised, but comparatively neglected withal. But those who love literature as much for its substance as its form, who seek for inward warmth and for stimulation of the pulses as well as for pleasure of the palate, and who are attracted by the sterling rather than by the elaborated—these set Catullus on a plane to which Horace never reaches. Horace has been called “the poet of the man of the world,” and the phrase, while fairly true, is manifestly not the highest commendation. Those who read him without prepossession discover that under all his gracefulness he is naturally unimaginative; that, feeling little, he has little power over the heart; and, furthermore, that he is prone to a peculiar inconsequence. Among his virtues is included the characteristic Roman virtue of sound practical sense; but lyric poetry is hardly to be satisfied with that merit. As a man of letters he takes his rank from the perfection of his expression, from his consummate skill of putting the fittest word in the fittest place with a singular terseness and lucidity. To the ancient critic his work was marked by a _curiosa felicitas_—a “painstaking happiness” of phrase. Meanwhile Catullus possesses a far higher gift, the gift of experiencing a sincere emotion and of communicating it by a rare directness and simplicity of expression, almost after the manner of the Lesbian lyrists or of Robert Burns. This is not to deny that Catullus was a conscious artist, but perfect literature consists in this, that art expends itself on expressing a feeling sincerely felt or a thought sincerely conceived.

Upon English literature the Latin lyrists, and more especially Horace, have exercised a far-reaching influence, sometimes with the full consciousness of the English poet, more often indirectly. The “Horatian Ode”—that is to say, the ode in which there is but one comparative short form of stanza repeated throughout—explains its own genesis by its name. In other cases of English lyrics it is not easy, nor is it necessary, to distinguish precisely between the debt due to the Latin writers and that due to native-grown song and ballad. English lyrics of feeling would necessarily have developed themselves in some shape without the aid of foreign example, but in point of fact, the Elizabethans, and still more the “cavalier” poets of the seventeenth century, were in the habit of looking to Horace, and in a less degree to Catullus, for suggestions of form and expression and occasionally of thought. For one external indication of this attitude we may look to the practice of the school of Herrick, Suckling, Lovelace, and Waller, who (following Elizabethan sonneteers) habitually call their inspiring mistresses by the names of “Lesbia,” “Delia,” “Chloe,” and the like, for no other reason than that these are the non-committal names sanctioned by the usage of the Latin lyrists.

Elegiac poetry, which, though properly a branch of lyric, has acquired a form and character practically constituting it a class apart, was cultivated and brought to perfection by a group of poets in the last third of the last century before Christ. Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid are the representatives in Latin of a form of art which had flourished greatly in the lyric age of classical Greece, and had been revived with much distinction, but with a new tone of sentiment, by Callimachus in the age of Alexandria. In Latin Catullus had already taken Callimachus for a model, and transplanted the elegy to Rome. But it was the group above-named who in turns imparted to such compositions a specially Roman character in respect of exacting rules of form. The elegy in early Greece found various themes in martial and social exhortations, moral sentiments, and advice, or in the expression of personal feelings in different moods. If at Alexandria its matter consisted most frequently of the thoughts and moods of the lover, the modification was due to altered social conditions. It is hard to say what themes might not be treated in the elegiac form, provided they were of moderate length and scope. The Latin poets use the fullest liberty in this respect. Thus Ovid not only writes his _Amores_ or love-poems in the usual sense, his _Tristia_ or personal sorrows in banishment, and his _Letters of Heroines_, in which the writers pour out their feelings to their absent or unfaithful lovers or husbands, but he also puts together stories of Roman history into a sort of calendar, which is accordingly named the _Fasti_. A modern poem of reflection, an “occasional” poem, a sonnet, or even Milton’s _Lycidas_, would alike be fitly converted into Latin elegiac verse.

Of the three elegists, Propertius, though remarkably unequal in quality, and often rough and obscure (with an obscurity which suggests Browning), in both expression and allusion, shows the most of native strength and emotional sincerity. Tibullus is the lucid and graceful exponent of the pensive commonplace. Ovid, the master of verbal polish and concision, is to the elegy very much what Horace is to the ode. Facile and prolific, he touches few subjects which he does not adorn. Unfortunately the subjects which he touches are too often shallow and morally unworthy. His attitude is that of a man not only without moral care, but without capacity for any genuine ardour or emotion. He charms with his variety, and with his grace and dexterity of treatment, but he strikes none of those full or poignant chords which are wont to be stirred by elegies in Greek or English literature.

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Other forms of poetical composition among the Romans were the bucolic (or pastoral eclogue), the philosophic, the didactic, the narrative, and the poetry of fable.

Of bucolic or pastoral poetry, as written by the Greeks, something has already been said, as also of the pedigree of this species before its arrival in the literature of England. In Latin literature it is represented almost solely by Virgil, his later imitator Calpurnius being of little account either in himself or his effects. Virgil is the first to introduce the species into Latin, and the line of descent from Theocritus through Virgil to the Italians Sannazaro and Mantuan, and thence to Spenser, is distinct and undisguised. In verse of a certain subtle charm of movement, tinged occasionally with a deliberate rusticity, and pervaded with a suggestion of pensive sympathy rare in Latin writers, Virgil ostensibly tells in dramatic or semi-dramatic form of the loves, labours, sorrows, and songs of shepherds, goatherds, and other simple rural folk. Under this cover, however, he is often in reality touching upon his own personal experiences and those of his friends, or gently couching some poetical moral, or finding a safe vent for the mild philosophizings of his meditative youth. Something of the kind had already been done by the Greek imitators of Theocritus, but Virgil goes much further than they. He has thus changed the whole nature of the pastoral, and, artistically considered, for the worse. The shepherds are no longer real and convincing, and the truth of nature’s mirror is destroyed. Nevertheless, through a happy trick of cadence, felicitous touches of natural description, and an indescribable atmosphere of sympathy, the _Eclogues_ are wont to exert a charm which defies criticism to do its worst.

Didactic poetry is met with in Virgil’s _Georgics_, or _Rules for Husbandmen_. In four compositions he deals with corn-crops, fruit-trees, cattle-breeding, and bee-keeping. The model was supplied, as usual, by the Alexandrian Greeks, and for these the ancient inventor and the source was Hesiod. There is no reason to doubt Virgil’s genuine interest in these practical rustic themes. But, being essentially a poet and not a farmer, he is not to be satisfied with versifying, however skilfully, a list of useful precepts. If the work was, as Merivale considers it, the “glorification of labour,” it served meanwhile as a frame for special passages of great beauty upon topics more or less naturally associated with the matter in hand. The poet on occasion finds it no long step to take from the weather to eclipses, from eclipses to the death of Caesar, and from Caesar to patriotic reflections. The digressions are not so far afield, nor so numerous as in Cowper’s _Task_, but that work may perhaps be cited in partial illustration.

Didactic in another kind is that short _Art of Poetry_, written in deft verse by Horace, which was copied by Boileau in his _Art Poétique_, and freely utilized by Pope in his _Essay on Criticism_. Its professed aim is to inculcate certain principles of poetic composition, and, in particular, the composition of drama. Inasmuch as Horace was drawing upon Greek doctrines derived from Aristotle, but not always understood by their somewhat superficial Roman poetizer; inasmuch also as poetic drama had no real existence in the days of Horace, there was little prospect that the _Art of Poetry_ would shed any new illumination upon the world. To those who have read the seminal work of Aristotle, the precepts of Horace inevitably appear rather trite and shallow. The writer here, as elsewhere, is marked by shrewd and humorous good sense and a gift of terse expression, and it must be admitted that these form an excellent endowment for the middleman of intellectual traffic. The essay would doubtless be read by his contemporaries with enjoyment, and in many cases with edification. The misfortune is that, from the later seventeenth century onwards, it was the superficial Horace rather than the fundamental Aristotle who served as dictator of the laws of verse to both England and France.

Philosophic verse, which is, of course, a species of the didactic, finds its best representative, not merely for Latin literature, but for the literature of the world, in Lucretius, who wrote during the latter days of republican Rome. His poem _On the Nature of Things_ is an exposition of the philosophy of Epicurus, as developed from the physical speculations of Democritus. According to this philosophy the original contents of the universe were minute atoms, the “seeds” or “elements” of things, moving in a void. By their fortuitous collisions and various combinations were formed all things as they are or have been. To this extent had ancient speculation, combining bold imagination with close reasoning, anticipated modern chemistry and astronomical hypothesis. From crude and accidental beginnings, says Lucretius, there ensues a “survival of the fittest,” and thus, though unaided by modern scientific appliances, and imperfectly directed from the point of view of modern scientific method, ancient speculation anticipates also the doctrines of modern evolutionists. In the application of these results to the conduct of life (which is the practical aim of philosophy) it is evident that current theology must receive a severe blow. To Lucretius the chief blessing derived from the true philosophy is that man is emancipated from superstition, with all its terrors in life and death and all the mischiefs it has worked. We may conjecture that the soul of the poet himself, which was brooding and melancholy, would have been eminently impressible by superstitious dread, if it had not been fortified by this wisdom of “the master.” His fervent onslaught on _religio_ (in the Latin sense) and its crushing effects can hardly be otherwise explained. He does not—nor did Epicurus—absolutely deny the existence of gods; these are logically as producible as other “things.” What he denies is their interference with the processes of nature. All this and more he sets forth in the six books of the _De Rerum Natura_.

In the use of verse as the vehicle of philosophic teaching, Lucretius is but following the lead of the older Greeks, Empedocles, Xenophanes, or Parmenides. The task is technically difficult, and in modern times it would be purposeless. But for Lucretius we must not only grant the utility of the method in awakening intellectual interest as widely as possible among a community less prepared for philosophy than for poetry; we are also compelled to recognize that his effort to make philosophy talk in Latin verse was technically a triumph. Yet Lucretius is much more than a translator of Greek philosophy into Latin hexameters. He is a poet. Doubtless the passages in which he is setting forth bare statement of theory, or bare argument, are of necessity as dull as many passages of theologizing in Milton’s _Paradise Lost_ or _Paradise Regained_, or as many passages in Wordsworth’s _Excursion_. But when the poetic opportunity arrives, and when he is irresistibly borne away with such reflections as those upon the life and death of man, he writes in lines as splendid as those of Milton and Wordsworth at their best. Through all the work there is a tone of the ardent missionary of intellectual deliverance, blent with a certain melancholy which recalls Ecclesiastes. Latin literature is not strong in great intellectual forces, but among these Lucretius must hold a foremost place.

Narrative poetry, apart from epic, occupies no large space in the literature of Latin. The _Metamorphoses_ of Ovid practically stand alone. These, written in a lighter and more fluent hexameter than that of Virgil’s _Aeneid_, are a series of stories dealing, as the title shows, with the various transformations undergone by human beings in mythology or legend. If there is anything in Latin answering to the “romantic” elements in Ariosto or Spenser it is to be found here. The author, knowing the stories to be fabulous, employs all his fancy and inventiveness, his descriptive power and gift of language, in embellishing them. Men and women are turned into beasts, birds, monsters, trees, or stones with much poetic gusto of circumstance. The want of real unity is no drawback to the work; the telling of the legends is brilliant; the stories themselves are such as at all times appeal to the lovers of the romantic and the marvellous, and particularly to the young. From these causes it is not too much to say that the influence of the _Metamorphoses_ has been immeasurable. The usual mediaeval, renaissance, and modern _répertoires_ of mythological story have been almost entirely derived from Ovid. To the better read contemporaries of Chaucer, as of Shakespeare, Ovid supplied not only the matter, but the spirit of such narrative. Such a familiar legend as that touching one of Philemon and Baucis may be Greek in origin, but it is Ovid who has made it the property of the later western world.

Not inappropriately may be introduced here the mention of a minor writer, whose work, despite its slender substance and its narrow range of genius, has been far-reaching in its legacy. This is Phaedrus, the versifier of fables in the reign of Tiberius. With no special brilliancy or gift of invention, but with a style of lucid simplicity which is excellent for such narration, Phaedrus puts into verse the Greek fables—commonly fathered all alike on “Aesop”—which he could find current in his day. The collection is probably much the same as that of the Greek Demetrius Phalereus (300 B.C.). From the point of view of both morals and language the book served admirably for schoolboys, and it is at least one of the main sources of the fables which found their way into England, first with Alfred, and later, in more force, with Caxton’s “Aesop.”

In one branch of verse-writing, which must next be considered, the Roman writers have every claim to the credit of originality. There has always been, as there is at the present day, in the Italian mind a pronounced strain of satire and irony, a tendency to lampoon and epigram, a disposition to look on the seamy or ridiculous side of things. The Aretino of later Italy is a true descendant of the Lucilius of ancient Rome. The Romans themselves claimed as their very own the form of composition known as _satura_. Satire, as a tone, may appear in Greek writers of various kinds; it may even approach a special recognition in certain portions of the Old Comedy of Athens; but there existed no Greek example of a separate composition with the character implied in “a satire.” The word itself, however, demands some examination. To us it primarily implies fault-finding, general or particular, and such the satire became, particularly in the hands of Juvenal. But originally _satura_ meant a mixed dish, a medley of observations upon society and men. These observations naturally took the form of describing habits and revealing motives. It would follow that, according to the temperament of the writer, the _satura_ might become either a moral essay or a satire in the modern sense. Bitterness is not properly essential to such compositions, and in the _Satires_ of Horace there is comparatively little of that quality. His _Epistles_, which are practically only _saturae_ under another name, are still more distinguished by geniality. Nevertheless, just as “censure” began by meaning “judgement” and has come to mean unfavourable judgement, so “satire” speedily limited its implication even among the Romans. A hundred years before Horace a certain Lucilius (of whom only fragments remain) had practised a vigorous but rough invective in his _saturae_, but for us it is Horace who represents the establishment of satire as a species of cultivated writing. To him these compositions were _sermones_, or “talks,” and they were permitted to serve as the vehicle for a frank egotism not unlike that of the _Essais_ of Montaigne. They are “satirical” in that they from time to time administer more or less caustic chastisement to contemporary follies or vices. Three-quarters of a century later, in the silver age, Persius put forth a small book of satires full of promise, but also full of faults in the way of obscurities and artificialities of style. Trained as a philosopher, he had studied mankind from books, and particularly from Horace, rather than from experience, and, as he died at twenty-eight, it may be presupposed that his insight is far from deep. Fortunately he was withheld from the savage invective customary with youth by his philosophic sincerity and the mildness of his nature. It is early in the next century that satire, in the hands of Juvenal, becomes the polished and trenchant weapon of offence now commonly understood by the term. Juvenal became, and has remained, the very prince of those who condense wit and sarcasm into pungent and rememberable lines of the most consummate terseness. He possesses a singular power of presenting moral vices and social foibles and follies in all their contemptibleness, and there is ample reason to believe that, as he expressed it, it was indignation which created his lines. It is Juvenal and Horace, though chiefly the former, who have served as models for Dryden and Pope, for Hall and Butler, and for Byron in his _English Bards and Scotch Reviewers_. The less fierce and more descriptive part of Juvenal’s work also found a notable imitation in Johnson, whose _London_ is copied from one satire and his _Vanity of Human Wishes_ from another.