Chapter VI: Other Influences Summarized 216 (4)

Often cognate to satire is epigram, as treated by Martial, a writer of the generation preceding Juvenal. An epigram is, in fact, apt to be a stinging satire in little. This is, however, a very distinct departure from the nature and province of epigram as employed by the Greeks. Of this something has already been said. It would, nevertheless, be a mistake to suppose that the narrow sense now usually, if erroneously, given to “epigram” was equally the sense in which it would have been understood by the contemporaries of Martial. The “sting in the tail” is by no means indispensable. That the wit and verbal dexterity of Martial were so often applied to caustic purposes was no hindrance to the use of the same qualities in epigrams of compliment, of fancy, of description, and of mere humour. We cannot, it is true, assign to Martial a place in “poetry” proper. A man without convictions or much refinement of feeling, but well acquainted with his world, witty, and a manipulator of phrase, he poured out more than a thousand of these little pieces, many excellent, many execrable, many indifferent. But in this species of literature—be it worth what it may—it is Martial who has determined the form and matter of the epigram for modern Europe.

* * * * *

In prose, Roman literature is very copious, although not equally rich in all domains. Its chief strength lies in history, after which come philosophical works, oratory, and letter-writing. With Roman jurisprudence and with grammatical (or philological) writing we are not here concerned. The famous Cato, the Censor (184 B.C.), has left us a treatise _On Agriculture_, consisting of practical maxims which are scarcely literature; and a large number of didactic works (many of which are not preserved, or only preserved in fragments) were produced at different dates of the republic or the empire by men of distinction. Thus Varro, a most erudite contemporary of Cicero, wrote voluminously upon _Antiquities Human and Divine_, upon _The Latin Language_, and upon _Agriculture_. Seneca the elder, in the reign of Tiberius, collected educational examples of methods of rhetorical disputation. In the time of Claudius medicine was treated by Celsus. Columella exhausted the subject of agriculture. During the Flavian _régime_ Frontinus composed a treatise on aqueducts and another upon military operations, and the laborious Pliny the elder put together thirty-seven books on _Natural History_, a vast cyclopaedia of mixed truth and untruth concerning all departments of natural science, the arts connected therewith, and the fine arts to boot. But, whatever merits and demerits of style these works display, they hardly merit discussion in so general an outline of literary history as this. It is impossible to say what information or ideas in our modern possession might be traceable to writers like these, but they can scarcely rank as appreciable “literary influences.” Doubtless Pliny’s encyclopaedia is ultimately responsible for much of the confused natural history of the middle ages, and not only Chaucer, but also the sixteenth-century Euphuists, with their egregious similitudes, are almost certainly in his debt. The affiliation of scientific knowledge and error, however, lies beyond our scope.

In the field of history, Latin literature presents us with various attitudes and styles. Historical writing in general may be of at least three salient kinds. The first kind is imaginative, credulous, careless of accuracy so long as the story is attractive, the narrative being, as Quintilian would have it, “akin to poetry.” In the second kind, sheer imagination may play no pronounced part, but there may be a rhetorical tendency to embellish and expand, and to exaggerate the lights and shades. The third kind is direct, simple, impartial, shrewdly critical. In classical Roman history we have (besides the “Lives” of Nepos), the works of Sallust, Caesar, Livy, Tacitus, and Suetonius. We cannot take all these together and refer them to any one of the above-named descriptions. So far as there is a characteristic common to any group of them it is to be found in the fact that Sallust, Livy, and Tacitus all show in various ways the customary Roman taste for rhetorical effect. To this extent they are not greater sinners than Macaulay or Carlyle, who, like them, fall into the second of the divisions described. Meanwhile the _Commentaries_ (or “Notebooks”) of Caesar offer the best example that Latin can supply of the third style. His plain narrative in straightforward Latin is easily distinguished from the rich and picturesque eloquence of Livy, the conscious stylism and laboured point of Sallust, and the epigrammatic brilliance of Tacitus. Once more Suetonius, a naturally inferior writer in a decadent age, is the precursor, in his _Lives of the Twelve Caesars_, of that less ambitious history which gossips and “deals in _ana_” concerning great personages and their surroundings. Among all the Roman writers it is in vain that we seek the historian who will, like Thucydides, describe the facts with a lucid and serene impartiality, while clothing them with that style of supreme art which makes them live before the reader.

These qualifications made, it still remains indisputable that Livy and Tacitus are two of the very foremost historians in the literature of the world. The unpretentious work of Caesar has its claim as well as its intrinsic interest, but it cannot rank with these. Sallust, despite undeniable merits, is placed in a minor rank by the triteness of his ideas and the obviousness of his reflections. But Livy, in virtue of his superb eloquence and unflagging descriptive power, and Tacitus, in virtue of his shrewd insight and vivid presentation in a style inimitable for its sparkling condensation—these will remain for ever admirable, as they were, one or other, admired and followed by Gibbon, Macaulay, or Carlyle. Of the vast work of Livy, written in the reign of Augustus, and entitled _The History of Rome from its Foundation_, we possess but a portion, although that portion is in itself of considerable dimensions. As Latin prose, the style is magnificent in variety and colour. It may be called Gibbon, without Gibbon’s sameness or too frequent ponderousness; Gibbon warmed by patriotic ardour. That it sometimes suggests the poetical is assuredly no drawback to what, after all, is a narrative intended primarily to be read. As sober history it suffers from the shortcoming that Livy hardly concerns himself with the verification and criticism of authorities. He does not wholly emancipate himself from the first type of historian. If Tacitus, a hundred years later, cannot be called credulous, neither can he be called impartial. While we have no right to doubt his moral earnestness, we have reasons for doubting his authority—or his use of his authority—for the motives and conduct of the emperors who reigned before his own time. As with Carlyle, and as with Macaulay, his temperament and views led him to darken all the shades and whiten the brightnesses. But, when we have admitted this, it is impossible to rise from his _Annals_ or _Histories_ of imperial Rome without feeling that men and women and events have been brought before the mind’s eye with a wonderful vividness, nor without remembering many a phrase amazingly packed with meaning. Whatever philosophic criticism may have to say of Livy and Tacitus as history, they possess the essential literary merit, that they captivate.

If in the region of philosophy we include, with works of morals and politics, works on the principles and practice of rhetoric—a department to which the Romans attached an unusual, but not unaccountable, importance—we have to deal with three great names. These are Cicero, Seneca, and Quintilian. The last-mentioned concerns himself with oratory, the second with moral philosophy, while to Cicero nothing comes amiss. Here, as generally elsewhere, the Latin genius makes little claim to originality. When Cicero writes _On the Orator_ he is doubtless fully at home with his subject; nevertheless he is practically converting into Latin, with embellishments and enlargements, the system and terminology of the Greeks. His moral treatises, which are excellent reading in their kind, are but the expositions of an extremely clever man, who rightly thought that he was rendering no small service to his own countrymen by giving them in compact and intelligible form the substance of Greek philosophy. With a view to imparting lightness to his themes, and led by the example of Plato, he adopts the device of a pretended conversation or disputation, but it can scarcely be said that he lends much verisimilitude to the situation. The style everywhere is lofty, the thinking is serious and helpful, if not profound or original, and it is difficult to over-estimate the influence exercised by these books upon the later thought of Rome, of the Middle Ages, or of the Renaissance. Seneca the younger, writing under Claudius and Nero, is a philosopher in the more strict sense of the term. Living in an age which demanded striking phrase, point, and epigram, he is a master in that style. None the less he was a deep and earnest thinker. Cicero, in dealing with stoicism, is the highly intelligent amateur; Seneca is the expert, but not a pedantic one. His _Moral Epistles_ and his dialogues are essays touching upon matters of daily ethical concern, and both in their matter and its presentation they deserve a much wider recognition than they commonly receive. Some such recognition they did obtain at the Revival of Learning, when Englishmen read the classics more for what they contained than for the niceties of philology. It follows that the thoughts of Seneca, acknowledged or not, have played no small part in modern literature.

Quintilian, a salaried professor and practitioner of rhetoric under the Flavian emperors, has left us an exhaustive treatise upon _The Training of the Orator_, a training which begins at the cradle. The work sets forth in all their completeness the principles of oratory, but it is incidentally a discussion of education in a wider sense. The formation of “a good man skilled in speaking” involves more than the cultivation of language and the mastery of speech and delivery. It implies great mental culture, and particularly culture derived from literature. To subsequent ages Quintilian became an authoritative law-giver in the domain of rhetoric, criticism, and language. Doubtless it would have been intellectually better for the later European world to study its philosophy and culture in the Greek originals, but, these being commonly inaccessible, all gratitude is due to Cicero, Seneca, and Quintilian for supplying so excellent a substitute in Latin.

Roman oratory, in the form of written speeches, is fortunately represented for us by the greatest of Roman orators. It is a trite observation that oratory can have no existence, except artificially, under a despotism. Cicero, however, lived in the last days of the republic, when speech was still free, burning questions numerous, and the art of public speaking fully developed. Accordingly in his long list of public speeches he has complete liberty to express himself with such vigour, passion, pathos or humour as he chooses. The Roman ideal still demanded from a great public character the quality of _gravitas_, a moral impressiveness; that quality was in any case congenial to Cicero; but, with that maintained, his scope was unrestricted. To the modern reader the oratorical greatness of Cicero lies in the verbal eloquence rather than in strenuous cogency of thought, or in those powerful flashes which come from Demosthenes. He is an ingenious special pleader, a tactful disposer of arguments; but, above all, he is a master of full, rich, sonorous, impressive, and overwhelming language. As compared with Demosthenes, he is at times somewhat too copious, and even too florid; he is evidently speaking to a people less critical and less true in taste; his humour is apt to be awkward; nevertheless the impression left upon the reader is that of a man who employed superlative gifts, natural and acquired, in an art of which he entertained a lofty conception. It is not too much to say that the highest eloquence of Italy, France, and England has at all times striven to be Ciceronian. Cicero was the model, consciously or unconsciously, of Burke, Pitt, Fox, or Gladstone, just as he was the model of great French preachers like Bossuet. It is perhaps one mark of his inferiority to Demosthenes that he can be thus imitated. Demosthenes himself is inimitable. In its later stages Roman oratory was too much given to hunting the phrase, its decoration became vicious with efforts of preciosity. But it cannot be said that these productions of decadence have exercised any appreciable effect upon English speaking or writing.

Just as in verse the Romans invented one form of literature, the satire, so in prose they probably invented the epistle or letter. In Greek literature letters are seldom found; those which are found are of dubious authenticity, and in any case they are but essays in epistolary form. But in Latin we meet with two great letter-writers, who, if they had written nothing else, would have occupied the same positions in literature as are occupied by Horace Walpole in England and by Madame de Sévigné in France. The correspondence of Cicero was followed, a century and a half later, by the correspondence of Pliny the younger, and both are full of literary and also of historical interest. How far any of the letters of Cicero were intended for publication is doubtful; very many of them obviously were not. Those of Pliny, however, were carefully composed with the distinct object of being given to the world. Apart from the different characters and environment of the two men, there is consequently an appreciable dissimilarity in the style. Except when he is writing formal or courtesy letters to comparative strangers the correspondence of Cicero carries with it a natural and unstudied air. He is vehement, jocular, despondent, testy, as he thinks fit. He puns freely, breaks off a sentence, quotes Greek, or uses colloquial terms. It would have been well if critics of Cicero’s character had remembered to distinguish private and not always serious correspondence from public behaviour. With Pliny the case is otherwise. He was constitutionally a kindly man, with a genuine love for letters; by training he was a staid man of affairs; in circumstances he was rich, and his later years were leisured. But he was withal a man who took himself with some excess of seriousness. In any case he would not have forgotten what was orthodox for a Roman gentleman; least of all was he likely to forget it in letters destined for publication. His epistles are therefore always marked by a certain reserve and a suggestion that they are intended to rank as literature. Probably there would have been less unbending still, except for the warrant of the letters of Cicero, who is plainly his model. Yet, in spite of these drawbacks, they give an excellent picture of contemporary Roman life, and afford an insight, otherwise unattainable, into current Roman sentiment. For us it is important to note that the literary letter-writing of France and England was, in the first instance, directly suggested by these patterns of ancient Rome.

* * * * *

Despite the fact that there were three well marked periods in the history of classical Latin literature, there are, nevertheless, certain characteristics which appertain to that literature considered as a whole. To say this is not to maintain that all Latin writers are monotonously alike. Enough has been said already to demonstrate the contrary. It is only meant that, taking writer after writer, and department of literature after department, we can discover certain traits common to the majority of them, and that these traits give a national character to the total body of production. In the case of the Greeks the characteristic was the clear-cut presentation of genuine thought or feeling at first-hand. In the case of the Latins the case can hardly be stated so simply. Yet the following observations may assist towards a fair generalization.

In the first place Latin literature is for the most part confessedly imitative. It sets itself foreign models. Its standard of excellence does not so much lie in the consciousness of having given a completely truthful expression to a thought or emotion, as in the supposed success with which a writer reproduces or transplants some Greek exemplar, modifying it to what is believed to be unavoidably required by conditions of the Roman tongue and Roman culture. It is in this spirit that the comedians, the tragedians, the epic, lyric, and elegiac poets—Plautus, Terence, Seneca, Virgil, Horace, Ovid—set about their work. It is in this spirit that historians like Sallust, literary critics like Horace, philosophic writers like Cicero, set about theirs. They are all avowedly adapting Greek thoughts, Greek plots, Greek rhythms, and Greek expressions, so far as the Latin can be made to admit them with elegance. And in this secondary kind of work they were eminently successful. They contrived somehow to make the Latin tongue do the work which they asked of it. Horace and Virgil are consummate masters in this tasteful but unoriginal labour. Thanks to them the forms and metres of Sappho and Alcaeus, of Homer and Theocritus, were reproduced with only just so much difference as the nature of the Latin tongue rendered unavoidable. The result was verse of perfect polish and ease, and of splendid harmony. But creators in any large sense they were not. They were magnificent technical artists, of the kind who can reproduce an original picture as a perfect etching with modifications, or who can carve and elaborate artistic decorations if they are supplied with a portfolio of designs. Possibly in this proceeding they worked some injustice to Latin capabilities. It is conceivable that a number of Latin writers might have left us work of much more essential strength if they had allowed their own creative genius freer play. It was well that they should learn from the Greeks, but not so well that they should mimic them. It is somewhat as if the Germans, instead of writing from the full nature of a Goethe, a Schiller, or their balladists, had followed the example of Frederick the Great and put themselves into as complete a pupilage to the models from France. There are instances in which the Latin genius did actually follow its own course after gathering technical lessons from the Greeks, and the result is then of such excellence that we cannot help feeling some regret at the prevalence of deliberate imitation. The most truly spontaneous, and therefore most creative, writers in Latin are Lucretius the philosophic poet, Catullus the lyrist, Juvenal the satirist, the letter-writers Cicero and Pliny, and the historians Caesar, Livy, and Tacitus. Of these Lucretius, Catullus, and Caesar are frank and genuine men with corresponding thoughts. They learn what Greece can teach in the way of form, and then set themselves to deliver their own souls. In letter-writing and in satire the native genius, strong in those directions, broke out without assistance.

The first prevailing characteristic of Latin literature, then, is its deliberate secondariness, which too often goes with lack of serious purpose.

The second consists in a remarkable zest for polish of expression, a studied elaboration of elegant diction and pointed phrase, which may recall in some cases Pope, in others Tennyson. Something of this is due to a necessarily disproportionate care for words in the absence of substantial or novel matter; something is also due to the constitutional Italian genius, which excels in cameo-cutting, whether in the literal or the metaphorical sense. Doubtless the ideal literature combines the exquisite expression with the original thought, but, if we must make some surrender, we should naturally prefer to leave the brilliancy in the thought. Latin writers, however, on the whole rather agreed with Boileau and Pope, that the aim of literature was to utter “what oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed.” The result with them is that the most famous of their poets are unsurpassable verbal artists, and that their silver age writers are in particular exceedingly deft in the command of terse and pointed phrase. But the result is also that their inferior writers were apt to become mere tricksters and contortionists in words. Nevertheless, it is one indefeasible ground of praise of the literature of Rome that it did thus set itself and us a high ideal in the way of melodious or compact and rememberable diction.

There is a third consideration. Greek literature reached its perfection in the midst of free and stirring democratic activities; it was therefore addressed to the mind and heart of the people at large. At Rome, on the contrary, literature only reached its technical acme when freedom was practically extinct. The work of Virgil, Horace, and Ovid, belongs already to a period of despotism. It is addressed first to imperial ears and then to those of an aristocracy more or less idle. It is in a large measure written by a coterie for a coterie, or by a dependant for patrons, its object being to entertain elegantly. For that reason it avoids emotional depths and altitudes, and shuns intellectual audacities. It seeks to say clever things, displaying culture and knowledge agreeable to a society which plays with such matters. It adheres to a certain ideal of “good form,” which, however, does not preclude plenty of such allusion as will show wide reading and social experience. Ardours for the vital interests of society, and the frankness of large natures communicating with their fellow men, are necessarily taboo. Whether these existed largely in Roman natures is, as has been said already, matter for doubt, but almost certainly they existed beyond the extent to which expression was countenanced. It is therefore with more justice than is commonly perceived that the “Augustan” age of English literature has received that name.

It seems not unjust to sum up Roman literature—allowing for the exceptions already made—as a literature largely imitative and secondary, highly polished and elegant in execution, but limited in its intellectual and emotional range as in its originality.

* * * * *

The influence, direct and indirect, of Latin literature upon English is perhaps best realized from the tabulations which appear in this volume. Nevertheless it may be helpful to make sundry notes upon certain more obvious debts taken in chronological order.

In and before the age of Chaucer the poems of Ovid upon love and its cure were much drawn upon by writers of romances and allegories. They were the direct inspiration of much of the troubadour poetry of Provence and thence of the mediaeval lyric verse of Europe in general. Ovidian borrowings are manifest in the _Romance of the Rose_. Chaucer himself was a student of Ovid, Lucan, Virgil, “Stace,” and also Livy. From Ovid’s _Metamorphoses_ and love-elegies in particular he took much matter. His _Knight’s Tale_ is ultimately from the _Thebaid_ of Statius. The reading of his contemporary Gower, and of his successor Lydgate, was even more deep in the same authors. At the beginning of the sixteenth century Gawin Douglas translated the _Aeneid_, and soon afterwards Wyatt and Surrey show themselves steeped in Seneca and the epigrams of Martial; Surrey also translated portions of the _Aeneid_. Before Marlowe and Shakespeare the more scholarly pioneers of drama, such as Sackville, sought for tragic models in Seneca and for comic models in Plautus. Elizabethan readers ransacked all available Latin books. Spenser’s _Eclogues_ follow Virgil’s, and his _Faerie Queene_ is full of borrowings from the _Aeneid_ and from Ovid’s _Metamorphoses_. The effect of Ovid on Shakespeare himself is manifest in his _Venus and Adonis_. Bacon who, like all the great prose-writers of his time, could use both English and Latin, shows in especial the influence of Seneca. Ben Jonson, who translated portions of Horace and Martial, is an imitator of Horace in the way of poetical epistles and short lyrics, and of Martial in epigram. In the school of the “Sons of Ben” and the “Cavalier poets,” we meet with very distinct manifestations of the combined influence of the lyrists Horace and Catullus and the epigrammatist Martial. We know these to have been favourite poetic reading of the period. Simultaneously the general style of prose-writing, whether as in Milton or as in Jeremy Taylor, was imagined to be based upon the rounded periodic style of Cicero, and the language itself is deliberately Latinized to a remarkable degree. Milton, who wrote Latin poems as well as English, is greatly and openly indebted in his epics to both the matter and the manner of Virgil. The post-Restoration comedy derives itself through a French medium from that of Plautus and Terence. At the same time the second-hand critical principles of Rome begin to prevail in England. Roscommon translates the _Ars Poetica_ of Horace; Dryden translates the _Aeneid_ and passages of Ovid; he also writes powerful satire in direct imitation of Juvenal. Addison produced his _Campaign_ under the influence of Lucan, and his _Cato_ under the influence of Seneca. Pope begins with pastorals after the manner of Virgil and Theocritus, composes _Imitations of Horace_, and copies the _Ars Poetica_ and Epistles and Satires in his own poetical essays on criticism and morals. His _Messiah_ is a recasting of Virgil’s fourth Eclogue and his _Eloisa to Abelard_ is based on Ovid’s _Heroides_. Samuel Johnson’s _London_ and _Vanity of Human Wishes_ are similar copies of Juvenal, while his prose seeks to model itself upon the Ciceronian. The great preachers and orators of the eighteenth century are Latinists in their rhetorical principles. During the same age the didactic poems, such as Dyer’s _Fleece_ or Akenside’s _Pleasures of the Imagination_, are the outcome of the study of Lucretius and the _Georgics_ of Virgil. The letters of Pope or Walpole no less distinctly take their hint from Cicero and Pliny.

It is unnecessary to elaborate further a bare catalogue of such obligations. It is, perhaps, more useful to emphasize one consideration which should bring home the vast, if undefinable, influence necessarily exercised by Latin thoughts and Latin expression upon English writers. Before the days of Alfred and the days of Chaucer the chief writers of prose in England composed in some sort of Latin. They knew Latin, and read such Latin books as they could get. From the Revival of Learning Latin came more and more to be studied as modern languages are studied now, for the sake of actual speech, correspondence, or controversy. The pens of Englishmen like Sir Thomas More, Bacon, and Milton, were fluent in Latin. Ben Jonson, Cowley, Addison, and Samuel Johnson were great Latinists among a society in which Latin knowledge was general. Landor and De Quincey were no less great. There are few writers in the English language who have not received at least some tinge of Latin education. Familiar as all these generations have been with Latin books, practised in the imitation of Latin diction, filling the language with Latin terms, it is quite impossible to determine how deeply we are steeped in the influence which has passed through them. During the last century it is true that education has not cultivated that fluency in spoken Latin which marked the two or three centuries preceding. Latin is no longer necessary as a medium for the interchange of thought, and the increasing number of arts and sciences restricts the prominence of any one study. On the other hand it is no less true that almost every considerable writer and speaker of the century had received that more recent form of Latin education which consists in an accurate and tasteful study of the words, styles and thoughts of the best, or most classic, of the Roman writers—Catullus, Lucretius, Cicero, Virgil, Horace, Livy, Ovid—rather than Lucan or Statius. The influence of Roman literature during that period has been more wholesome than during the later period of the seventeenth and the greater part of the eighteenth century, an epoch in which English writers delivered themselves over to almost as servile a subjection to Latin (or rather Latin-French) patterns as the Romans had once, with more reason, assumed towards the Greeks. That era, the era of Dryden, Pope, Addison, Johnson, is in this sense the most Roman period of our literary history. To it, unfortunately, we owe all that personification of abstract qualities by the simple device of a capital letter; all that use of “nymph” for “woman” and “fire” for “love”; all that stereotyped phraseology, such as “reddening Phoebus lifts his golden fire” for the “sun is rising,” from which we were delivered by Burns and Wordsworth. To the Romans themselves these terms were artificial enough, to the English they were doubly artificial.

CONSPECTUS OF LATIN LITERATURE

DEPARTMENT OF LITERATURE.
CHIEF REPRESENTATIVES. LATIN NAME. | ENGLISH NAME.
DATE.
CHIEF WORKS.
THEIR RELATION TO GREEK LITERATURE.
SOME INFLUENCES ON FOREIGN TRIBUTARIES TO ENGLISH LITERATURE.
SOME EFFECTS ON ENGLISH WRITERS.
Tragic Drama
Gnaeus NAEVIUS | NAEVIUS
fl. 230 B.C.
Quintus ENNIUS | ENNIUS
fl. 200 B.C.
TRAGEDIES (only fragments extant).
Crudely translated from the Greek, chiefly Euripides.
Lucius Annaeus SENECA | SENECA
ob. A.D. 65
TRAGEDIES, e.g., _Medea_, _Hippolytus_, etc.
Imitating Greek subjects, metres, and treatment (chorus, etc.);
but more rhetorical, epigrammatic, and moralizing.
Served as type for Italian Renaissance drama and for the French
declamatory tragedy of Corneille, Racine, etc.
Little effect on English drama. Addison’s _Cato_ the best
instance of attempt at the Roman “classical.”
Comic Drama
Titus Maccius PLAUTUS | PLAUTUS
fl. 210 B.C.
COMEDIES, _e.g._, _Aulularia_, _Menaechmi_ (20 extant).
From Middle and New comedy, chiefly Menander; almost mere
adaptations, but broader and rougher. The scene is always
in Greek cities.
Type for Italian comedy of Renaissance. Great influence on
Molière, whose _L’Avare_ is from the _Aulularia_, and
his _Amphitryon_ from _Amphitruo_.
Shakespeare’s _Comedy of Errors_ is from Plautus’s
_Menaechmi_. Dryden’s _Amphitryon_ through Molière
from Plautus. So Fielding’s _The Miser_ = _L’Avare_ from
_Aulularia_. French comedy of intrigue (from Plautus and
Terence) reproduced in Congreve, Farquhar, etc.
Publius TERENTIUS AFER | TERENCE
fl. 160 B.C.
COMEDIES, _e.g._, _Phormio_, _Adelphi_, etc. (6 extant).
As with Plautus, but less boisterous.
As with Plautus. Molière’s _École des Maris_ is from the
_Adelphi_, and _Les Fourberies de Scapin_ from the
_Phormio_.
English comedy of intrigue, after the Restoration.
Epic Verse
Quintus ENNIUS | ENNIUS
fl. 200 B.C.
EPIC (on Roman history and legend) called _Annales_.
Copies the Homeric hexameter and borrows the Olympic deities.
Called the “Roman Homer,” but crude and inartistic.
Publius VERGILIUS MARO | VIRGIL
lived 70-19 B.C.
_AENEID_ (epic of Aeneas, legendary founder of Roman people).
Copies _Odyssey_ in first six books (wanderings), and _Iliad_
in last six (battles); borrows images and incidents from all
Greek writers. But more descriptive, philosophical, and
fastidious of expression.
The basis for subsequent epics. Utilized by Dante, Ariosto,
Tasso, etc., in Italy. Model for the French epic, _e.g._,
Voltaire’s _Henriade_.
Translated by Gawain Douglas (1513), Dryden, etc. Very
important for Milton’s _Paradise Lost_, Spenser’s
_Faerie Queene_, and to all modern poets of classical
training. See Tennyson’s poem, “To Virgil.”
Marcus Annaeus LUCANUS | LUCAN
lived A.D. 39-65
_Pharsalia_ (epic of civil wars between Caesar and Pompey).
Departing further from Greek directness. Cleverness in rhetoric,
epigram, description, satire, etc., aimed at. Fondness for
details of horror.
Publius Papinius STATIUS | STATIUS (“Stace” in Chaucer)
fl. A.D. 70
_Thebaid_ (epic of Thebes and its heroes).
Clever and facile verse: elegant simile, etc., of more
importance than the matter.
Two favourite writers in the early middle ages. Statius
affected by Dante and Boccaccio (who founds his _Teseide_
upon him).
Lucan and “Stace” were among the chief Latin reading of
Chaucer’s day. [_The Knight’s Tale_ (of Palamon and
Arcite, modernized by Dryden) is from the _Thebaid_.]
Comparatively little read in modern times. Addison’s
_Campaign_ has clear traces of Lucan; so has Drayton’s
_Barons’ Wars_.
Lyric Verse
Gaius Valerius CATULLUS | CATULLUS
lived 84-54 B.C.
POEMS (odes, epigrams, and occasional pieces—especially
love-poems to “Lesbia”).
Imitates metre and style of Greek lyrists (Sappho, etc.) and
Alexandrian elegists (Callimachus, etc.). Most Greek of all
Romans in his simplicity and spontaneity.
His works lost during Middle Ages, and always less read than
Horace.
Quintus HORATIUS Flaccus | HORACE
lived 65-8 B.C.
_ODES AND EPODES_ (love, politics, _vers de société_,
moralizings).
Avowed imitation of Sappho, Alcaeus, Pindar, Anacreon. Adapts
Greek lyrical metres. Deft but unimpassioned.
The model for lyrists and writers of social verse in France
and Italy.
These combined are the type for all such English odes and
short pieces as are addressed to “Lesbia,” “Delia,” “Celia,”
etc. (Ben Jonson). Horace in particular was imitated by the
seventeenth-century “cavalier” poets (Suckling, Herrick,
etc.), and (unconsciously) guides later writers of
_pièces de circonstance_.
Elegiac Verse
Albius TIBULLUS | TIBULLUS
Sextus Aurelius PROPERTIUS | PROPERTIUS
fl. 20 B.C.
ELEGIES (of affection and sentiment).
Direct imitations of Alexandrian Greek elegists.
Exerted an influence similar to that of Ovid, but in a less
degree.
Publius OVIDIUS Naso | OVID
fl. 43 B.C.-A.D. 17.
VARIOUS POEMS, _e.g._, _Heroides_ (in the form of
letters). _Tristia_, _Amores_, etc.
The Greek models are less epigrammatic. Ovid affects pointed
couplets (compare Pope).
Ovid was a favourite author even in the early Middle Ages. His
love-elegies were particularly affected (as in the _Romance
of the Rose_), and are best represented (in a shorter form)
by the sonnet of the Italians and of the sixteenth-century
English. The Italian painters and poets of the Renaissance
made great use of him, and Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Pope
are much indebted to him. The favourite work, however, was
his _Metamorphoses_, which is not in elegiac, but in
heroic verse, being narrative.
Satiric Verse
Gaius LUCILIUS | Lucilius
fl. 120 B.C.
SATIRES on politics, literature (fragments), etc.
Quintus HORATIUS Flaccus | HORACE
65-8 B.C.
_SATIRES AND EPISTLES_ (genial).
Aulus PERSIUS Flaccus | Persius
fl. A.D. 60
SATIRES (crabbed style)
Decimus Junius JUVENALIS | JUVENAL
fl. A.D. 120
_SATIRES_ (polished, terse, trenchant).
A native Latin growth (Greek satire takes a different form and
medium).
Models for much Italian satire (Aretino, etc.), and French
(Regnier, _Satyre Ménippée_, Boileau, etc.).
In English the best examples out of many are the _Moral
Essays_ and _Imitations of Horace_ by Pope, his
_Dunciad_, and the satires of Dryden (_MacFlecknoe_,
etc.). Compare Byron’s _English Bards and Scotch Reviewers_.
Johnson copies Juvenal in _London_ and _Vanity of Human
Wishes_.
Didactic (and “philosophical”) Verse
Titus LUCRETIUS CARUS | LUCRETIUS
fl. 60 B.C.
_DE RERUM NATURA_ (“the Constitution of Nature”).
In form follows old Greek philosophical poets, and in matter
expounds the philosophy of Epicurus.
Seen directly in the philosophical verse-essay (Pope’s
_Essay on Man_, Akenside’s _Pleasures of the
Imagination_, etc.): but Lucretius has also been the
favourite reading of many poets, _e.g._, Shelley.
Compare Tennyson’s Poem on “Lucretius,” Wordsworth’s
_Excursion_.
Publius VERGILIUS MARO | VIRGIL
lived 70-19 B.C.
_GEORGICS_ (poems on husbandry).
The idea taken from Hesiod.
[See HESIOD in the Greek Table.]
Quintus HORATIUS Flaccus | HORACE
lived 65-8 B.C.
_ARS POETICA_ (an essay in literary criticism).
An ill-digested _rechauffé_ of Aristotle and later Greek critics.
The source of the shallow criticism of Boileau and his school.
And of Pope and his school.
Pastoral Verse
VIRGIL
_BUCOLICS_ (or _ECLOGUES_).
From Theocritus, but moralized and sometimes artificial.
Imitated by Mantuan and Sannazaro in Italy, and Marot in
France.
Spenser’s _Shepheard’s Calender_ etc. [_See_ Greek
Table: PASTORAL.]
Epigram
Marcus Valerius MARTIALIS | MARTIAL
fl. A.D. 90.
_EPIGRAMS_ (various subjects).
The conception of Greek epigram is polish and delicacy. Of Latin
it is chiefly point and sting.
The modern conception of epigram is entirely taken from the
Latin form. Martial is the one model.
History
Gaius Julius CAESAR | CAESAR
lived 100-44 B.C.
_COMMENTARIES_ (on the Gallic and the Civil Wars; simple,
straightforward narrative).
Gaius SALLUSTIUS Crispus | SALLUST
fl. 45 B.C.
_Catilina_ and _Jugurtha_
Attempts to imitate Thucydides. A commonplace moralizer.
Titus LIVIUS Patavinus | LIVY
Ob. A.D. 17
_HISTORY_ (of Rome); (rich style, ample, pathetic).
Adopts the Greek custom of putting _verbatim_ speeches
into the mouths of his characters.
Gaius Cornelius TACITUS | TACITUS
fl. A.D. 100
_HISTORIES_ and _ANNALS_ (of Emperors); (epigrammatic,
terse, satirical).
Aims at the condensation of Thucydides.
It is impossible to estimate the great influence of these
writers on later historians. Livy (with Cicero) is the model
(in point of style) followed by Gibbon. [Compare remark in
Greek Table: HISTORY.]
Oratory
Marcus TULLIUS CICERO | CICERO (and “Tully.”)
lived 106-43 B.C.
SPEECHES (59 extant, _e.g._, _Philippics_,
_Against Verres_, etc.).
Follower of Demosthenes, but in a more rotund and loaded style.
The model of most French oratory and preaching (Bossuet,
etc.) (Otherwise Seneca is followed).
The model of speakers and preachers of seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries (Jeremy Taylor, etc., to Burke, etc.).
The “Johnsonian” style is based on Cicero.
Marcus Fabius Quintilianus | Quintilian
fl. A.D. 100
_The Training of the Orator._
Letter-Writing
CICERO
106-43 B.C.
LETTERS (“To Atticus,” “To Friends”).
Gaius PLINIUS Secundus | PLINY (the Younger.)
fl. A.D. 100
LETTERS (to friends, to Trajan, etc.).
A specially Roman department of literature.
Type followed in France (Madame de Sévigné, etc.).
The model for published letters like those of Horace Walpole
and Pope.
Philosophy
CICERO
_Academica_, _De Officiis_, etc.
A reproducer of Greek systems in popular expositions.
SENECA
A brilliantly epigrammatic moralizer on old lines of thought.
Seneca was favourite reading of moralizers of all European
countries after the Renaissance.
Fable
Phaedrus | PHAEDRUS
fl. A.D. 15
FABLES
Reproducer of Aesop
_See_ “Aesop” in Greek Conspectus.
Encyclopaedic
Gaius Plinius Secundus | PLINY (the Elder.)
fl. A.D. 70
_Natural History_
Storehouse of mediaeval science.

III

LITERARY CURRENTS OF THE DARK AGES

Latin literature, despite its decline after the classical period, is marked by a number of names which merit eminence in their several domains. The era succeeding the silver age hardly deserves to be called leaden. Literature does, indeed, both descend from the Virgilian and Ciceronian style of language, and also adopt a less classic attitude in its themes and sentiment, but it is not without a life and value of its own. Some of the writers are pagan, some are Christian, but their religious professions are not to be determined by their dates. Apuleius, the African writer, a professional rhetorician and man of letters, who wrote his prose _Metamorphoses_ or _Golden Ass_ in the second century, is, of course, a pagan, and by no means a model one. The work just mentioned, probably based on current folk-tales, is entirely fiction, narrating the story of a man turned by sorcery into an ass, and describing his adventures, scandalous, distressful, or amusing, in the hands of robbers and other low types of a society which, we may trust, was not really so bad as it is here painted. Yet into this otherwise not very edifying work there comes the exquisite story of Cupid and Psyche, which has been so frequently translated or recast in literature—best of all by William Morris in the _Earthly Paradise_—and so frequently utilized as the subject of pictorial or plastic art.

From the beginning of the third century until the fifth, Christian views find their exponents in Tertullian, Lactantius, Ambrose, Prudentius, Jerome, and Augustine. To Jerome is due in particular that Latin version of the Bible of which the present _Vulgate_ represents successive partial revisions, to Augustine the _City of God_, to Ambrose the initiation of the Christian hymn, and to Prudentius its development. Christian also is the Gallo-Roman poet Ausonius, of the later fourth century, but his verse is by no means dedicated to Christian teaching. In him appears what might seem to be a modern, if not fully “romantic,” partiality for affectionate observation of natural scenery, best illustrated by his well-known description of the stream and banks of the Moselle.

Meanwhile among pagan writers must be reckoned Ammianus, a picturesque and interesting historian, who undertook to bring the work of Tacitus up to the year 378; Macrobius, whose _Saturnalia_ discourses in a desultory fashion on a variety of literary and social topics; and Claudian, the composer of polished poems on contemporary history, in which extremely skilful polish of verse is united to brilliant gifts of description. The religion of Boethius, the last man of letters who can be said to linger on the border of the classical world, but who in style and thought stands nearer to it than many an earlier writer, is doubtful. In all probability he was a pagan, but he concerned himself, not with religion, but with philosophy as reflected from Plato. His _De Consolatione_, or _Consolations of Philosophy_, is a prose work interspersed with verses, and in virtue of this production, which often rises to great excellence, Boethius stood to the Dark Ages for the exemplar of the philosopher. His place in mediaeval reading was a very high one, and may be gauged from the fact that in England Alfred the Great translated his _Consolations_ into Anglo-Saxon, though with insertions and comments of his own. To Chaucer, as to all the mediaeval world, “Boece” was part of the staple library.

* * * * *

During the centuries from the decay of the literature of Rome till the emergence of the modern literatures of western Europe there occur the great migrations of conquering peoples and the forming of the new nations. The Gothic conquests of Italy and Spain, the movements of the Franks, Burgundians, and Lombards, the story of Alaric or Theodoric, of Pharamond or Clovis, belong to history, as do the settlement of the Anglo-Saxon and Danish tribes in Britain and the occupation of Normandy by the men from whom it is named. Against these Teutonic triumphs and their influence to the north must be set the Moslem triumphs and influence to the south. Not only did the Moors conquer and hold for centuries the greater part of the Spanish peninsula, but Sicily also passed for five generations into the hands of the Saracens. In England a national history commences with Alfred at the close of the ninth century, but its development, both from a literary and social point of view, was deeply modified at the Norman Conquest. In France and Germany the empire of Charlemagne, the great fact of the eighth century, had done much towards consolidating culture and reviving learning. At the end of the eleventh century began the Crusades, which helped to bring the western nations into closer touch with each other and also into contact with the Greek world and with legends of the east. Meanwhile, the Christians of north-west Spain were gradually winning back their country from the Moors, but, in the process, absorbing no little of their Arabic culture.

By the twelfth century the modern Romance tongues, Italian, French, Provençal, and Castilian, are sufficiently formed for literary purposes, and the speakers of those languages have attained to the position of steady and settled communities. Though the English language is temporarily in abeyance for literary uses, the English nation is free from further disturbance, while nevertheless it is now happily placed in direct communication with continental tendencies and ideas. In the meantime it must not be forgotten that Europe had now become Christian, and that in the west the teaching of one great Church was common to all the nations.

This long period of disintegration and reconstruction is for the most part so little studied, and is, in fact, comparatively so studiously ignored, that we are apt to forget how long it actually was. The literary productions of nearly seven hundred years are regarded as of so little moment that we forget there were any at all. Yet for a proper comprehension of the inter-relations of literature as affecting the development of our own, it is necessary to form some conception of the various literary currents of these “Dark Ages.”

* * * * *

As might perhaps be anticipated after a survey of the historical movements and situations, we have to reckon with:

(1) Such Latin literature, of classical or later date, as survived after the wreck of the empire and still formed part of, at least, the higher reading.

(2) Such new productions in Latin as appeared before the new tongues were formed.

(3) The matter and influence of the literature of the Church, comprising the Hebrew Scriptures, chiefly in the shape of the Vulgate, commentaries, moral works, and also religious legends, lives of saints, and the like.

(4) The material and spirit brought in by the Teutons in the shape of their own old epics and sagas, with the myths which formed their basis.

(5) The Celtic feeling, traditions, and compositions which made their way into the _répertoire_ of such countries as contained a Celtic population.

(6) The learning, literary matter, and literary art of the Saracens, whether introduced by way of Spain or by that of Sicily, and whether derived from Oriental or from Greek sources.

(7) Literary influences from the Greek world, including remnants of classical and post-classical compositions, mediaeval productions of Byzantium, and tales of the East which had been rendered into a Greek form.

It is difficult to disentangle these various threads, which interlace each other in complex ways, but on the whole the most satisfactory procedure will be to make a note or two upon each. Such notes will necessarily be brief to the point of mere hinting.

(1) It was, perhaps, to be expected that, with the decline of Latin culture, the “fittest” part of Latin literature to survive in the knowledge of the semi-barbarized west should be that which lacked the highest artistic qualities. It is only with the dawn of the first Renaissance, which led up to and was assisted by the great Tuscan trio, that the true classics began to reappear among the common reading of men of superior learning. Virgil, indeed, was not wholly forgotten, nor was Cicero, and in the age of Charlemagne there was promise of a much wider scope. But, unless with the piously inclined—and often even with them—the Dark Ages were more interested in scraps of miscellaneous information containing a spice of the wonderful, derived and garbled from Pliny, in stories with a similar spice of the marvellous and, by preference, of the licentious, such as are to be found in the _Satyricon_ of Petronius and the _Golden Ass_ of Apuleius, or in traditions of the art of love culled from Ovid and crudely transmitted. For those of a more serious turn there were the mild philosophizing of Boethius, the history of the Spaniard Orosius, and the encyclopaedic educational medley of Martianus Capella; and, for the religious, the hymns of Prudentius served as a model. Yet, though sparingly met, the reading of literary Latin never quite failed, and verses, for example, continued to be written as much in the style of Claudian as writers could command. Latin comedy was not unknown to the monasteries, since the German nun Hrotswith is found in the tenth century composing prose imitations of Terence. It is impossible, in the defect of our material, to tell with any precision the extent to which Latin reading was directly kept in vogue. Capella and Orosius, at least, were accepted as standard works, but in respect of the legends, stories, mythologies, and pseudo-marvels of natural history, such matter as shows itself at the birth of the new literatures had in a large measure come back in roundabout ways and through other channels.

(2) It is more easy to name the chief Latin productions of the Dark Ages themselves. If we regard Boethius as the last figure in Roman literature proper, the series consists mainly—for the sixth century—of the voluminous writings of Cassiodorus, historical and educational; the informal _History of the Franks_ by Gregory of Tours; and the work of the Goth Jordanes concerning his own people. To the seventh century belong the Christian and didactic _Moralia_ of Gregory the Great, and the encyclopaedic _Origines_ of Isidore of Seville. To these we must add two writers of Great Britain; the one, Gildas, who wrote in Wales, in the middle of the sixth century, his dolorous account of the conquest of Britain by the Saxons; the other, the Englishman Bede, whose _Ecclesiastical History_ and biographical works belong to the eighth. The age of Charlemagne, with its vigorous encouragement of education, consolidated all the promiscuous learning of the time, in which style plays a part altogether subordinate to the multifarious contents. From a literary point of view the creations above-named are of little moment to our subject, except in so far as information and misinformation from this uncritical mass of material found its way into all the work of our pre-Renaissance writers. Their chief merit is that they kept the channels of classical influence from being completely blocked. We must, however, note one important innovation in literary form. This was the introduction of rhyme into Latin hymns. The exact source of the novelty is unknown, but it began as early as the fourth century, and, together with Arabic influence, it helps to account for the use of rhyme which became current in the neo-Latin countries before their modern languages produced a real literature.

(3) The Hebraic influence which came through Christianity is as obvious as it was far-reaching. Every step in the Christianizing of Europe meant the conveying, not only of new sentiment and new ways of regarding things, but also of new materials in the way of Biblical history, however distorted in perspective. From the new doctrines of self-mortification there grew legends of the saints; from the traditions of their sanctity, legends of miracles; from the persecutions, legends of the martyrs. Both the Old and the New Testament already existed in a Latin form even before the more competent and authoritative version of Jerome (about A.D. 400). It should also be observed that the Bible which was thus rendered accessible was then read, far more than in later times, as a book containing matter interesting in itself, and therefore to be utilized and recast in story, apart from its uses in theology. Meanwhile round the original Scriptures both the earlier and later “Fathers” built up large masses of comment. When we remember that in the Dark Ages it was the churchmen who kept alive literary cultivation and production, and that the Bible narrative, the legends, martyrologies, and Christian doctrines were conveyed to every mind by sermons and other agencies, it is manifest how extensive must have been the effect upon thought and matter before the newly forming literatures emerged. On actual literary art and style it is true that there could be but little palpable influence, until, or unless, the Bible came to exist and to be widely read, as it eventually did in England, in the vernacular. But of this something more will be said in a later section of this book.

(4) With the Teutonic invaders of France there came in the spirit of feudal relationship. For centuries this spirit survived. Combined with the Celtic exaltation which is so pronounced in the Arthurian legends, and also with the sentiments of Christianity, it became embellished into the well-known mediaeval conception of knighthood with its vows of utter loyalty and self-devotion. The way was thus prepared for the knightly, or chivalrous, romances which are to be described in the chapter on the literature of France.

But, besides this feudal spirit shown in the Franks, there had already existed among the Germanic tribes before their settlement in France or Britain an orally transmitted literature. Its form was epic, and its themes the superhuman exploits of heroes among scenes of slaughter and carousal, in contest with huge monsters, and under the dispensation of rude pagan deities, Woden, Thor, and the rest of the Teutonic pantheon. Between the fourth and sixth centuries this heroic poetry of Germany grows into appreciable form, and both the Franks of the Continent and the Anglo-Saxons of England bring with them their several portions. In Germany itself it is much later that the _Nibelungen Lied_ is edited into a connected shape; but to England there came in the sixth century the epic legend of _Beowulf_, of which the source is to be found in events of southern Sweden and the Western Baltic dimly recorded. This poem was edited in Christian times, and with some Christian additions, during the literary flourishing of northern England in the early part of the eighth century. Another poem carried from the mainland by the Englecyn was the _Song of Widsith_ (the _Far-Traveller_), a wandering gleeman who has much to say of the deeds and generosity of the Gothic and other German chiefs among whom he roamed “as his fate willed,” and to whom he “unlocked his word-hoard.”

In point of matter this Germanic contribution to Dark Age literature is perhaps of little account. But its vigour of action and strenuous temper did no little towards determining the virility of the French _chansons de geste_, which formed so large a portion of English reading in the pre-Chaucerian period. In point of form it is necessary to note that the Anglo-Saxon method of versification, based on accent, alliteration and assonance, is naturally inherited from the German tradition. With very slight modification the method of Anglo-Saxon poetry is also that of Langland in his _Piers Plowman_ of the Chaucerian age. Though this was subsequently abandoned by English poets in favour of the French system of rhyme and numbered syllables, the use—all the more artistic for being disguised—of alliteration and accent has survived as one of the chief formal beauties of all our poetry.

Whereas the Teutonic poetry, when it came in contact with Christianity in England or France, soon lost its characteristic themes, its mythology, and much of its savagery, the older matter and spirit still flourished among the pagan Norsemen, and were re-imported into northern England with the invasions of the Danes.