which Cornelius Severus borrowed, and improved into—

This anecdote is interesting in many ways,—first for the protest of Pollio, almost equally piquant whether it proceeded from critical severity, from personal jealousy, or from political feeling; and secondly, for the evidence it gives of the straining for point and rhetorical “hit,” in verse and prose alike.

The Preface of the First Book of the Controversies—addressed to the three sons—gives a rather interesting view of the scheme |The Controversies: their Introductions.| of these curious compositions, which seems to have been that Seneca the father should brush up his memory of the golden or nearly golden age of Latin Rhetoric which immediately followed Cicero, and illustrate it from more strictly literary sources. A good deal in the piece (as is usual in the better class of rhetorical writing) bears directly on our subject. The old rhetorician commends his sons for extending their view beyond their own age, for wanting to know what Roman eloquence there was to set against “insolent Greece”^[299]—in short, for endeavouring to take that comparative view of at least one division of literature the want of which (as we have so fully set forth) was the crying sin and yet the inevitable weakness of Greek criticism. He has the usual complaint of luxury withdrawing men from literature, which was doubtless as true, and as little peculiar, then as at all other times. He lets us know that there were none (or no good) commentarii of the best declaimers, that he himself had heard them all except Cicero, whom, as far as chronology went, he might have heard,^[300] but for the confusions of the state: he points out that the regular declamation was a rather late growth, and extols the character of Porcius Latro, one of its oldest practitioners. The Introduction to the Second Book is much shorter, and principally celebrates the ability of Arellius Fuscus. The Third (for the text of which we only have the Excerpts, not the full articles) has an important preface, which starts from the fact or assertion that Cassius Severus, a great orator on serious occasions, was not a good declaimer, though he had good bodily advantages, a voice at once powerful and sweet, a delivery with all the merits and none of the drawbacks of the stage, and an extraordinary faculty of improvisation. It seems that Seneca once asked him why these faculties failed him in set agonismata, and his answer (whether to the point or not) is of the very first interest, as illustrating that difficult point of the ancient conjunction of oratory and literature, and also as a counterblast to the Plinian idea (v. infra) of the poly-historic littérateur. “What great wit,” said he, “has ever been good at more than one thing [whereby, let it be observed, he separates declamation from oratory]? Did not Cicero’s eloquence fail him in verse? Virgil’s genius in prose? We read the orations of Sallust simply as a compliment to the historian: and the oration of that most eloquent man Plato, which is written for Socrates, is worthy neither of counsel nor of client.”

All these things invite comment—the last most of all. I put aside, as entirely irrelevant, certain modern dubitations as to the genuineness of the Platonic Apology. They rest upon no warranty of scripture, and opinion is simply opinion, to be received politely, and to be “laid on the table.” But it is worth dwelling on the point that the Apology as we have it, though to all competent judges of literature one of the capital works of antiquity, arch-worthy of Plato, more than arch-worthy of Socrates, might very well seem to a Roman lawyer unworthy of both, and might possibly have so seemed to Aristotle himself.himself. For of all recorded plaidoyers it is perhaps, in the temper of the jury and the circumstances of the case, the least likely to secure an acquittal, and the most likely to render condemnation inevitable. The other remarks do not matter so much; but it is of weight that a man should seriously put the difference between Declamation and practical Oratory on the same footing as the difference between poetry and prose. It shows how ill-adjusted, as yet, the grasp of literary criticism was, and also how necessary it is to keep an eye on everything that is said about Rhetoric, if we are really to master what was thought about Criticism. The introduction to the Fourth Book, again one of Excerpts only, gives the information that Asinius Pollio (whose works, if we had them, would probably be of the greatest possible value to us) disliked declaiming in public, but was, on the rare occasions when he could be heard thus exercising himself, more florid than in his actual orations. We can well believe it, and it shows that Pollio had the root of the matter in him. In the same way a man with critical sense will allow himself, in a rough draft, flowers which he cuts out in the most ruthless manner before he prints.

The Fifth and Sixth books, which are in the same fragmentary condition, have no introductions at all; but the seventh is in better case. Like the others, it is mainly devoted to the characteristics of a single orator—in this case Silius Albucius. Some of the things said about him touch us nearly, as, for instance, Pollio’s—the severe Pollio’s—description of his sentences (axioms, maxims, apophthegms) as “white”—that is to say, simple, clear, with nothing obscure or unexpected,—but “vocal” and “splendid.” It was impossible, continues Seneca, to complain of the poverty of the Latin tongue when you heard him: he was never in the very least in pain for a word. Yet, on the other hand, he was not equal. His language was at one moment magnificent, at another he would mention the most sordid things—"vinegar, and pennyroyal, and lanterns, and pumice, and sponges." He thought “nothing must not be named in a declamation [and the reason is valuable or invaluable] because he feared to smack of the Schools.” And yet further we get the important obiter dictum: “Familiar phrase is, among oratorical virtues, a thing which rarely succeeds.” And then there is a very luminous and jocund anecdote of the real trouble into which the devotion to Figures might even then bring men. Albucius had rhetorically proposed to administer certain oaths. His opponent, L. Arruntius, very coolly rose and said, “We accept the condition: he shall swear.” Albucius protested that this would do away with Figures altogether. Quoth Arruntius (very sensibly), “Let them go—we can do without them”: and the centumviri allowed the catch. The unlucky orator was so annoyed that he renounced actual pleading from that day, because of the insult done to his beloved Figures.

The Eighth Book is again without its preface; but though there is a very large lacuna in ix., we have part of the introduction. It yields little. The last is in better case, but still not very fertile, though we have another instance of the mania for Figures. It is said of the above-quoted Oscus: “Dum nihil non schemate dicere cupit, oratio ejus non figurata erat sed prava.” Certainly there are no few examples of this “pravity” in the declamations themselves, which it would be interesting, but in our space impossible, to examine, as we have examined the prefaces.^[301]

They, however, also contain examples of that severity of taste which has always distinguished Latin criticism, and of which Pollio is the great example. Messala, as we learn, was Latini utique sermonis observator diligentissimus, and he said of Latro (whom Seneca’s later taste admired) “sua lingua disertus est”—"He is an eloquent man in his own lingo." Seneca himself, however, is by no means tolerant of excessive conceit, and rebukes the class of “sentence” which, he tells us, some charged upon Publilius as inventor. The examples given are in the case of a disinherited son found with poison, which he spills on discovery in the interior of his father’s house: and the sentences are, “He washed out his disinheriting with poison, and what he spilt was my death,” both being supposed to be spoken by the father. And in another stock case—the curious one which has more than one historical analogue, where the Prætor Flamininus was accused of having had a condemned man’s throat cut at dinner, to amuse a courtesan who said she had never seen a man die—the unlucky Murredius is said to have arranged a tetracolon—a four-membered antithesis: “The courts are made subservient to the bed-chamber; the prætor to a harlot; the prison to the banquet; day to night”; as to which last Seneca justly asks, “What sense has it?”

On the whole, this very valuable and interesting book, which has been spoken of with surprisingly uncritical contempt by some, and to which I should like to devote much greater space, forms, with Pliny’s Letters and Quintilian, the great trinity of documents for appreciating directly the state of Latin opinion as to literature, and its causes, in the first century after Christ, while with Cicero and Horace it forms a similar trinity for that in the last century before Christ. And it is needless to say that these two periods were, early avant-coureurs and belated decadents excepted, the flourishing time of classical Latin literature. Of this state and these causes we shall speak generally later.

One writer of famous memory who belongs to this period—who |Varro.| indeed was older even than Cicero—has been hitherto unmentioned, because, as a matter of fact, we have practically no literary criticism remaining from him, and that is Varro. I should myself have been disposed to relegate the author of the De Re Rustica and the De Lingua Latina to the place of his brother (or grandson) grammarians; but this might seem unceremonious in face of the importance of the critical position which Professor Nettleship assigned to him. It is, perhaps, also a convenient place to notice the exact character of that importance. As in so many other cases, if we went by titles only, and by guesswork from them, Varro must certainly have a high rank. “On Poets,” “On Poems,” “On Characters” (in the technical Greek sense of literary differentia?), “On Scenic Action,” “Plautine Questions,” might seem at first sight likely to be, if we had them, a very El Dorado of Latin criticism. But the few surviving fragments are a little discouraging. That Varro would be fertile in grammatical, mythological, social explanation, we may be quite certain. But the fragments seldom go much farther. The report, quoted by Quintilian, of Ælius Stilo’s saying that if the Muses wrote Latin they would write in the language of Plautus, is one of those rather irritating critical catchwords which carry with them the minimum of critical illumination. It is, in fact, only an ad captandum fashion of saying that the speaker liked Plautus, or wanted to pay him a compliment at the moment. Most of the others seem (as indeed Mr Nettleship saw) to be merely examples, either of the habits of “placing” authors in this or that rank, of comparing them with this or that other, from which criticism has suffered many things and gained few, or else of the not much less barren classification of kinds.

It is on the first point that I wish to make a slight digression. It is evident from the epithets that he uses in regard to them, such as “stupid,” “trifling,” “vicious,” that these processes of placing and of comparison were not to Mr Nettleship’s taste. I shall myself admit that the addiction of Greek, and still more of Latin, criticism to them seems to me to be among the very greatest weaknesses of both. But I must add a distinction which is constantly forgotten, and which I am not sure that Mr Nettleship himself had in mind. The “placing” of A, B, C, and D in order of merit is “stupid” and “trifling” enough; the still further awarding of seventh place to A for Somethingity, and of third to B for Somethingelseness, is more stupid and more trivial still. Nor is that comparative criticism, the locus classicus of which is perhaps M. Taine’s ejaculation, “J’aime mieux Alfred de Musset,” as a criticism on Tennyson, any better; in fact, as being not merely sterile and jejune, but illogical and actively misleading, it is considerably worse. But there is a placing and there is a comparison, which are two very different things—which are, in fact, the two highways of all real literary criticism. The placing is that which sets a man, not in the first division of the first class, or the second of the third, but in his relations to time and country, to language and manner, to predecessors and successors—to the whole literary map in larger or smaller circumference. The comparison is that which does not work out a performer’s rank, but disengages his qualities. These are the methods to which all the great critics have perforce resorted, and which have made them great. That there is less of them than there should be in ancient criticism may be true enough; that the want of them (with perhaps a little want also of sympathy with the highest poetry) is what prevents Aristotle from being the greatest critic of all time, is true enough; that the presence of them in Longinus is one of the main secrets of his unmatched quality, is true enough. But they are very different things from the enumeration of Volcatius Sedigitus, and from the in argumentis Cæcilius in ethesin Terentius in sermonibus Plautus of Varro.^[302]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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