A still livelier picture follows of the symposium referred to in the lines above quoted as to Romulidæ saturi; of the literary dandy in hyacinthine garment mincing and twanging through his nose some morbid stuff (rancidulum quiddam) about Phyllis and Hypsipyle, and being cheered in a fashion fit to make the poet’s ashes happy, his slab lie lighter on his tomb, and violets spring therefrom.
Then he draws in his horns a little. Verse, of course, is not necessarily bad because it is popular only. But Euge! and Belle! are not the be-all and end-all of literature. What wretched stuff has not received them? How often have they not been consideration for a good dinner, and a cloak just a little torn! And what is even genuine popular judgment worth? Why do not poets adopt honest Roman subjects, instead of chattering about unreal Hellenics? And why do they affect such antiquated and unnatural style? What is the good of borrowing such stuff as
of ranging everything in doctis figuris, and of writing passages, such as two famous ones which he quotes, and which are traditionally asserted to be the work of Nero himself. He exhausts his images of scorn on these unlucky lines, and holds up Arma virum against them as an example of natural knotty strength against effeminate drivel. And to a fresh protest of his friends about the danger of this kind of criticism, he replies by an ironical consent to declare it all very good, and a coda of regret for the time when Lucilius used what freedom of speech he chose, when Horace laughed at everybody without giving offence, more seriously declaring that, whether he can publish or not, he will write as the giants of the Old Comedy wrote.
In this lively crabbed production there are two distinct strains or bents to note. All the best critics have for some time admitted that in professed satire generally, and in Roman satire more than in any other, there is, if not a touch of cant, at any rate a distinct convention of moral indignation—a sort of stock-part of bluff, honestly old-fashioned, censuring of modern corruption—which the satirist takes up as a matter of business. Even Martial, upon whom, Heaven knows! it sits oddly enough, though his consummate dexterity carries it off not ill, affects this now and then; it sometimes suggests itself even through the gloomy intensity of Juvenal; and though such a line as Persius’ famous
carries us far out of the dissenting-pulpiteer region where Seneca too often gesticulates, there is in this First Satire, at any rate, some suspicion of forced wrath, of the righteous overmuch.
But the other strand in the twist, the other glance of the view, is in a very different state. There is nothing unreal, to all appearance, in the poet’s condemnation of the preciousness |Examination of this.| and conceit of poetic and prose style in his day. That his own is very far from simple or Attic does not matter; the satire had a prescriptive right to be crabbed, archaic, irregular, bizarre. Whether political dislike of the tyrant did not sharpen literary objection to the poetaster (if the lines really are Nero’s) may be a debatable question for those who care to debate it; but, in any case, the objection was there, and seems to have been quite genuine. Now, as has been often pointed out, these definite passages, definitely objected to or praised, are precisely what we want most, and have least of, in ancient criticism. A short examination of them, therefore, will serve our turn very well.
The first passage appears to be cited chiefly as an objectionable example of archaism. We shall see that Quintilian (perhaps in obedience to this very passage, for he knew his Persius, and admired him) repeats the objection to the word ærumna[316]—to us a word not in the least objectionable, but the contrary. And if it be said that foreigners, and especially foreigners who acknowledge themselves entirely uncertain about the probable pronunciation of Latin, have no business to give an opinion about the euphony of words, the retort is obvious and pretty triumphant. To some Romans, at any rate, if not to Persius and Quintilian, the word must have sounded agreeable, or as poets they would not have used, and as hearers or readers would not have applauded, it. The conceit of “cor fulta ærumnis”—with heart stretched on pillows of woes—was no doubt another crime, and it is not improbable that luctificabile was a third. The Romans had a rather pedantic horror of long words, which is again formulated by Quintilian, just as it is implied and exemplified here.
Of the same type and colour is the objection to rasa antitheta and doctæ figuræ which follows, as well as that to the vowel harmony, the soft cadence, the mouth-watering[317] tenderness of the Neronian fragments. We may, without rashness, point to the soft sound of “Berecynthius Attin,” the alliteration of “dirimebat” and “Delphin” with the internal half-rhyme of “cæruleum” and “Nerea,” the leonine effect of “longo” and “Apennino” and the two tetrasyllables, with the sudden pull up of the spondaic ending, as what irritated Persius. This same accompaniment of sound, and cunning contrast or echo of vowels, recurs in the second and more coherent extract: “Torva, cornua”; “Mimalloneis bombis,” “raptum caput”; “vitulo superbo”; “lyncem corymbis”; the long words “reparabilis” and “Mimalloneis,” with the foreign effect of the latter and others. These, no doubt, were the things which annoyed our poet here.
A little reflection will make this annoyance exceedingly interesting. Not merely is the general effect of these lines very similar to that of hundreds and thousands of lines, in the earlier English Romantic school from Marlowe to Chamberlayne, in the later from Keats to Mr Swinburne; but the indignation of Persius is exactly similar, if not to the almost incredulous and disgusted disdain with which the critics and poets of the “school of good sense” looked back on the vagaries of their predecessors, to the alarmed and furious attempt made by critics of the present century to extinguish contemporaries who indulged in such things. Persius on Nero, if Nero it was, no doubt gave hints to, and, with hardly less doubt, was himself quite in sympathy with, the Quarterly Reviewers of Keats and Tennyson. There is the same protest against the effeminate, the luscious, the unrestrained, the same indignant demand for manliness, order, sanity.
But we may go even further. These same processes, which we have ventured to point out as certainly illustrated by the gibbeted verses, and as probably accounting for the wrath of their executioner, are the very processes by which all our great nineteenth-century poets in English have produced their characteristic effects—alliteration, internal rhyme or assonance, complete or muffled, and, above all, the modulation of vowel and consonant so as to produce a sort of song without music, accompanying the actual words. And it may be noted that while some of our modern critics have objected to these things in themselves, many more, oddly enough, object to the process of pointing them out, and seem to think that there is something almost indecent in it.
It would be unreasonable to expect that in the narrow compass of some six hundred lines this passage—locus uberrimus fructuosissimusque, to borrow the Ciceronian superlatives—should repeat itself. But the literary interest of Persius, as regards criticism, is by no means exhausted. The next three satires are indeed wholly occupied by the exposition of that practical, honest, upright, rather hard, rather limited morality which it is the pride of Rome to have carried as far as mere morality of the sort can travel. But the beginnings of the fifth[318] and sixth[319] have a literary and critical turn in them, and though the course of the satire is afterwards deflected, these beginnings show the same man, the same tastes, the same standards that we have seen in the first. Don’t potter over fantastic subjects and sham Greek epics, but attack something Roman and serious. Whatever you write, write it in a manly fashion, with no æsthetic trifling. That is the critical gospel of Persius, and he sets it forth with a vigour which we shall seldom find equalled, and with (in the instance we have dwelt upon) a most fortunate fertility of illustration.
The far bulkier work of Juvenal—work also of far higher genius in parts, but more unequal and uncertain—contains less |Juvenal.| that concerns our subject. It is impossible to mistake in Persius, young as he died, and scanty as are his remains, a very direct interest in literary form, such as did not always or often accompany Stoic philosophy. Juvenal, with a less definite philosophical creed, and perhaps a rather lower moral standard, had a higher “Pisgah-sight” and a stronger grasp of life as a whole. However long Persius had lived, it is improbable that he would ever have given us anything equal to the magnificent Tenth Satire. But Juvenal, much more of a pessimist than Persius, was less capable of enthusiasm. His general critical standpoint does not seem to have been very different from that of his predecessor, or indeed (allowing for the vastly greater difference of temperament) from that which we shall find in Martial. But to Juvenal literature as literature had no special pre-eminence among the contents of his famous farrago. It would even appear that, although practising it greatly himself, he had a rather special contempt for it.[320] The well-known opening of the First Satire[321] agrees with Persius and with Martial in its scorn of artificial Greek epics, of sham heroic subjects and forms generally. But there pierces through it something of a special contempt for “Grub Street”—for the unlucky “Codrus”—who reappears, not always to be abused, but always to be dismissed with a sort of kick of contempt. There is something more than the stock superciliousness of the satirist in the thousand times quoted
The same tone is maintained throughout, and when poetry and literature appear (which is not extremely often), poets and men of letters are treated as practitioners of a rather troublesome, nearly superfluous, and slightly disreputable, profession, not as bad or good artists as the case may be. The stage-fright of the rhetorician who is going to make a speech at Lyons (the gird at the provincial is obvious), the book-chest of Codrus, with the mice gnawing the divine poems, the Greek mania which alternates with others in wives, and the learned lady who talks for hours on the comparative merits of Homer and Virgil, are introduced with the poet’s usual spirit and vigour, but very distinctly not from the literary point of view. They are ludicrous things and persons, good satiric matter: but the book-chest is in the same class with the lectus Procula minor, the fancy for Greek with the fancy for gladiators, the critical lady with her sister who enamels her face. It is by no means un-noteworthy that, in the Tenth itself, the vanity of literary study and success—an admirably suggestive subject—is hardly touched at all; that the careers of Demosthenes and Cicero are held up as a moral because of their political ill-success, and the sanguinary fate of each—which might have happened to the most illiterate of men. But this is most noticeable of all in the Seventh, which may be said to have a definitely literary frame and scheme, or which at least certainly would have had these in the hands of a man really inclined to literary criticism. It opens with a characteristic picture of what the Americans would call a “slump” in poetry—the most celebrated bards giving up the profession in sheer despair, becoming bath-keepers, or stokers, or auctioneers’ criers, selling their tragedies at rummage sales, or at the very best getting empty praise and no pudding from their stingy though wealthy patrons. Then Juvenal becomes a little graver, and contrasts the victim of cacoethes scribendi with the really exceptional poet (whom he cannot point out, and only imagines), who will put forth no hack-work, and writes not even for fame, but to please himself and the Muses. Such a poet must be in independent circumstances—if Virgil had had no boy to wait on him, and no tolerable lodging, all the snakes would have dropped from the hair of his Erinyes, says he in one of his most characteristic Juvenalisms. Lucan happened to be well off: but Statius, for all the popularity of his Thebais, would have gone dinnerless if he had not sold his Agave to the actor Paris (apparently to pass off as his own).[322] Nor is the historian’s labour more profitable. Indeed it is less so, for it consumes more paper, more time, and more oil for the lamp, as Juvenal points out in what some modern reviewers would call “his flippant manner.” Even the much-praised trade of the orator brings in wretched fees as a rule—a ham, a jar of sardines, a bunch of onions, half-a-dozen of common wine. If you wish to soar higher in the matter of receipts, you must spend greatly, have handsome horses, furniture, rings. Merely teaching to declaim may be rather more profitable, but think of the intolerable boredom of the business! the same patter of stock declamations and exercises, the unreality and folly of it all! True, there are exceptions—and here comes a curious passage, half satirical, half complimentary, on Quintilian himself, but treating him not in the least from the literary standpoint. And so to the end.
This abstract, though brief, should be sufficient to establish our point—that Juvenal, while he rarely cared to touch strictly literary subjects, hardly ever treated them in a strictly literary manner. He shared the opinion of the best Roman literary judges at all times—and especially in his own times, when the popular current was setting in the opposite direction—that literary style ought to be plain, nervous, manly; and he could express this with even better right than Persius, inasmuch as his own, though extremely allusive and of the most original character, is quite clear from involution or conceit. But he did not care in the least to investigate literary processes: nor did he trouble himself very much to contrast styles and differentiate their values. One may even, without any rashness of guess, be certain that he would have regarded criticism of form with nearly as much disfavour in a man as he expressly does in a woman. In fact, he would have considered it the occupation of a fribble.
When we pass to the graceful graceless crowd of motes, or rather midges (for they have a very distinct bite), which composes |Martial.| the works of Martial, we find, as has been said, very much the same general attitude towards styles in literature. But the expression is differentiated, not merely by the existence in the writer of a different moral complexion, but by the necessary conditions of his form. They could discuss; he can only glance. Further, the avowed purpose of amusement, of composing the verses of a very peculiar society, which animates the epigrams practically throughout, affects the result very considerably. Their author resembles both Persius and Juvenal in paying very elaborate attention to the outside of things, to the accidents of the literary business. We hear in him continually the echo of the sophos, the “bravo!” which the reciter and the rhetorician sought for, and which they sometimes, if not often, procured by the agency of a regular claque. We learn (not in the least to our surprise) that then, as now, there existed the kind literary friend who was quite eager to receive presentation copies, but who was by no means ready to go to the publishers and exchange even an extremely moderate number of his own denarii for a nice clean book, on polished vellum and neatly rubricated.[323] There were also then, as now, readers or reviewers who would take copyists’ (lege “printers’”) errors very seriously, and upbraid the poet for them[324]—which he did not bear patiently.
Here we have the certainly pointed, if not very polite, excuse for not submitting to the same tax of presentation copies, that he fears his friend may reply with a present of his works:[325] elsewhere (in those triumphs of ingenious trifling the apophoreta, or gift-tickets) the neat suggestion, with a blank album, that a poet can offer no more acceptable present than paper not written upon.[326] In one place there is, to carry off a piece of sheer begging, an irresistibly comic anecdote of a “curious impertinent,” who after asking whether the poet is not the Martial whom everybody not a fool admires, and receiving a confession of the soft impeachment, abruptly demands why such a poet has such a shocking bad great-coat, and receives the meek reply, quia sum malus poeta.[327] But these, and a good many others, which an easy reading, and a not very troublesome classification, of the Epigrams will enable any one to produce, are examples parallel rather to our citations from Juvenal than to the capital one from Persius. That is to say, they are examples rather of the selection of a particular subject, as one of a hundred suitable to the special mode of treatment, than of the assertion or the display of any particular interest in that subject, or any special theories upon it. So, too, in some cases of more special reference, Martial’s habits of flattery, and the unblushing way in which (not for the first or the last time) men of letters in his generation were wont to fish for presents, make it not always quite easy to know how much seriousness to attach to his expressions of opinion on particular writers. Did he, for instance, really think Silius Italicus such a great poet?[328] One cannot say: it is certain that Silius was rich, and a person who seems to have been able to keep his head above water, and on his shoulders, during all the stormy changes of his lifetime. And if such a man wrote poetry, if he was not his enemy—still more if, as was the case here, he was his friend—we know but too well that Marcus Valerius Martialis was never likely to publish any unflattering opinion of it.
But, in a very large number of cases, there was no possibility of hoodwinking, nor any object in attempting the operation. In |The style of the Epigrams.| the very numerous references to his own books, Martial shows us that he wrote, not at haphazard but with the keenest critical knowledge of the requirements of the form. That he recognises, in more places than one,[329] Catullus as his own master, model, and superior, is itself a critical document and testimonial of the first value. For it is notorious that the Romans, as a rule, by no means rated the great poet of Verona at his due; and though the sneer of Horace[330] may have been dictated by a sufficiently ignoble but very intelligible jealousy, the slight and passing note of Quintilian[331] admits of no such explanation. But it was the Catullus of the epigrams that Martial endeavoured to rival. In doing so he shows that he had a very definite, and a very just, notion of the versification and diction necessary to his purpose. His praise of the Romana simplicitas shown in the style of the lampoon of Augustus on Fulvia, in respect to which one can only refer modern readers to the original,[332] is capable of being mistaken for a mere laudation of coarse language—for an anticipation of that curious fallacy which has more than once made men regret the withdrawal of the licence to “talk greasily.” But this is unfair both to the poet and to the Emperor. Martial certainly does talk greasily with a vengeance; but the last line of this Imperial fescenninity depends for its point by no means merely on the obscene, and is an excellent example of clear-cut, straight-hitting phrase.
This phrase Martial himself almost always achieved, though in a few cases his points are still dark to us, and though he had not the slightest objection to using Greek words, vulgar words, and so forth when it suited his purpose. The misty magniloquence which attracted so many men of his time had no charms for him. When he rises, as he sometimes does, from sheer naughtiness or playful trifling to pathos, to seriousness, to graceful description of landscape—in the well-known Pætus and Arria piece, in the epitaphs on Erotion, and the still finer one on Paris, in his country poems and elsewhere—he is purely Attic. No style can have a simpler and a less affectedly simple grace. And that he did this deliberately—that it was his theory as well as his practice—we may see very well from a sort of cento of passages bearing on the subject. He differs not merely from Catullus but from Prior (who is perhaps his nearest analogue in almost all ways) by having obviously no velleities towards the grand style. We can imagine Prior writing, and writing quite as well, the piece which tells how pretty Phyllis, when her lover was racking his brains for some elegant present to reward her kindness past, exerted fresh coaxing before asking him for—a jar of wine,[333] or describing the singular history of Galla on the stock- and share-lists of Love.[334] But we cannot imagine Martial writing Alma or Solomon. And all his critical observations, direct or indirect, testify to a conception of literature perfectly clear and not really deserving the term narrow, if only because the poet quite frankly limits it to the kind in which he wishes to, and knows that he can, excel, the kind indicated in his own famous quatrain:—
Let us see what morsels of criticism such handling furnishes.
The prose preface and the opening epigrams of the first book contain humorous statements of his own fame, excuses (not quite valid) for his licence of speech, and jocose exaggerations of the critical temper of the times; but there is not much doctrine in them. There is more in ii. 77, where, not in the best temper |Précis of their critical contents.| (for Martial, like some other persons, though he loved to criticise, was not excessively fond of being criticised), he points out to a certain Cusconius what the French wit afterwards borrowed from him in the phrase “ce n’est pas long, mais il y a des longueurs.” Verses, he says, like his own, though there may be many of them, are not long because they can spare nothing, because there is nothing otiose in them. Cusconius, on the other hand, can write distichs which are long. There is a not uninteresting glance at the fashionable literary subjects and kinds—History of the times of Claudius, criticism of the myths about Nero (these could be safely done under the Flavian emperors), fables in the style of Phædrus, tender elegiacs and stern hexameters, Sophoclean tragedy or Attic salt—in iii. 20. Another French jest—one of the very best of Piron on La Chaussée—is anticipated with variation in the 25th of the same book, by the suggestion to a friend whose baths have been overheated, that he should ask Sabinæus the rhetor to bathe. He can reduce the temperature of the Thermæ of Nero themselves. IV. 49 gives us another critical laudation of the epigram. Flaccus is quite wrong to think it child’s play. The poet is much more guilty of that who busies himself with Tereus and Thyestes and Dædalus and Polyphemus. There is no mere bombast in his book: his Muse is not frounced with senseless tragic train.[335] “But,” says Flaccus, “the others are the things that people praise.” “Perhaps,” says Martial, “they praise them: but they read me,” with of course the implied and very sound criticism that it is not so easy to write what shall be easy to read. V. 10 ends with a jest, the poet saying that if his fame is to come after his death he hopes it will come late. But it treats rather seriously the other “touch of nature” (opposite to that of which Shakespeare speaks and complementary to it), that in literature, and at times [not always, O Martial!] men do not “praise new-born gauds.” They read Ennius in the lifetime of Virgil, laughed at Homer [the evidence for this?] in his own days, preferred Philemon to Menander, and left Ovid to the appreciation of Corinna.[336] But he shows his less critical mood in setting this down to envy rather than to the undoubted fact that, in at least many cases, poets anticipate, if they do not exactly create, the taste for them—that, as it has been said, a poet’s chief admirers are born at about the time when he writes. The necessity of some “bite”[337] in epigrams, vii. 25, is counsel at least as much of common-sense as of literature. In the 85th of the same, the poet objects to Sabellus that he can write a few quatrains rather well, but not a book—by which he probably glances at the necessity, in a book, of varying and sorting the kinds, as well as of providing a mere quantity of monotonous stuff. And in the 90th again of the same book he is still more explicitly argumentative. A certain Matho, it seems, went about saying that Martial’s books were unequal. If this be so, retorts our bard, it is because Calvinus (? or Cluvienus, as in Juvenal) and Umber write “equal” verses, and a bad book is always an “equal” one.
Now, what exactly did he mean by “equal”? When we say that a book is unequal, we generally mean that it has faults as well as beauties, that it is not equally good, and in this sense Martial would merely be vindicating himself from the charge of a tame faultlessness, from that æqualis mediocritas which Quintilian smites in passing. But, if we take it in conjunction with the Sabellus epigram just quoted, I think it will not be unfair to allow to æqualis also its other sense of “unvarying,” “monotonous,” and give the prominence to this in the equivalence with malus of the last line.[338] Martial specially and critically prided himself on the variety of his books, on their containing something for every taste, and something (almost) about every subject. And the book, he says therefore, that has not this quality is a bad book. The same doctrine pierces through the laudation of the prose preface of the Eighth to Domitian, and points the hope that the celestial verecundia of the “bald Nero” will not be offended by the naughtier epigrams.
The third of this eighth book contains an interesting dialogue between the Poet and his Muse. Were it not, says he, better to stop? Are not six or seven books enough and too much? Their fame is far and widely spread, and when the monuments of the great are dust they will be, and strangers will take them to their own country. It is never quite easy to know whether Martial is laughing in his sleeve or not in these boastings. But the ninth of the sisters, her hair and garments dripping with perfume (probably Thalia, certainly not one of the Musæ severiores), upbraids him with ingratitude and folly. Why drop these pleasantries? What better pastime will he find? Will he change his sock for the buskin, or arrange hexameters to tell of wars, that pedants may spout him, and that good boys and fair girls may loathe his name? Let the grave and precise write such things by their midnight lamp. But for him, let an elegant saltness dash his Roman books, let real living people recognise and read their own actions and characters; and if the oat be thin, remember that it conquers the trumpets of many. The Epigram here, it will be seen, arrogates to itself something like the place of the full Satire.
This, one of the best and most spirited of Martial’s literary pronouncements, is followed up in a lower key by the 56th epigram of the same book, addressed to that Flaccus who is elsewhere the recipient of the poet’s literary confidences. It contains the famous line—
and elaborates the doctrine that the patron makes the poet, comfort, if not luxury, the poetry, in an ingenious but impudent manner, carrying off the impudence, however, by the close. What, he supposes Flaccus to say, will you be a Virgil if I give you what Mæcenas gave him? Well, no, perhaps: but I may be a Marsus—a poet who wrote many things, but chiefly in the occasional kind, whom Martial greatly admired, and whose epilogue on Tibullus—
with two or three other fragments, we possess.[340] And the same doctrine, that love and luxury are needful to the bard, reappears in 73.
Martial does not often come down to the minutiæ of criticism, but he sometimes does, and once in a very noteworthy passage, ix. 11. Here, in some of his most gracefully fluttering verses, he celebrates the charm of the name[341] Eiarinos or Earinos, notes that unless he takes the epic licence of the first form it will not come into verse, and then adds—
There are two things noticeable here—first, Martial’s truly poetical sensitiveness to the beauty of a name, for certainly there is none prettier than Earine (let him keep the masculine to himself!) which also appears elsewhere; and secondly his equally poetical yearning for that licence of “common” quantification, which has made Greek and English the two great poetical languages of the world.[342] If he would have developed these views a little oftener, and at a little greater length, we really could have spared a considerable number of epigrams imputing unmentionable offences to the persons he did not like. It was his cue, however, to profess (though half his charm comes from his sense of them) disdain for such niceties, as in the 81st epigram of the same book, which is one of his neatest turns. Readers, he says, and hearers like his books, but a certain poet denies that they are correctly finished (exactos). It does not trouble him much, for he would rather that the courses of the feast he offers pleased the guests than that they pleased the cooks. In this, light as it is, there lurks the germ of a weighty criticism, and one which would, had it been worked out, have carried Martial far from the ordinary critical standpoint of his time. That, in homely phrase analogous to his own, the proof of the pudding is in the eating—that the production of the poetical satisfaction afterwards, not the satisfaction of the examiners beforehand as to the observation of the rules, is the thing—that Martial doubtless saw, and that he, by implication, says. But he does not say it quite openly, and it might have shocked Quintilian (though it would not have shocked Longinus) if he had.
The Tenth book is particularly rich in literary epigrams. It opens with a batch of them,—one of his pleasant excuses for yet another reappearance (the pieces are so short that if you don’t like the book you can lay it down as finished at any moment), an honest indication of the fact that some of the epigrams are only new editions, so to speak, of old ones, smoothed with a recent file, one of the not disagreeably boasting reminders that letters outlive brass and marble (a boast justified in his own case, but not so, alas! in those of Marsus and others whom he admitted as his masters), a strongly worded protest against some clandestine poet who has been forging bad epigrams in his name, a repetition of the old contemptuous pooh-poohing of stock Greek subjects, and the old exhortation to study the life. The 19th, in a pleasant envoy of the book to Pliny, bids the Muse who carries it observe her time, and not disturb the grave man at his graver hours. The 21st is an expostulation with a certain Sextus, who seems to have prided himself on the eccentric vocabulary of his poems. What is the use of writing so that Modestus and Claranus themselves (known men of learning) can scarcely understand you, and so that your books demand not an ordinary reader but the Delphic Apollo? You would prefer to Virgil Cinna—Helvius Cinna, whose fancy for out-of-the-way words we can see, even in the petty wreckage of his work that time has fated to us.[343] Perhaps, Martial admits, such poems may be praised; but he would rather have grammarians like his work, and not be necessary to its liking.[344] The 35th is a specially graceful compliment to the poetess Sulpicia, who wrote her love poems (apparently rather warm ones[345]) to her husband only, and with whom, says Martial, for schoolmate or schoolmistress, Sappho herself would have been doctior et pudica—a right happy blending of comparative and positive. 70 is a quaint apology, not for writing so much but for writing so little, the satire of which is so ingeniously airy that it is possible to interpret its irony in more ways than one. Potitus calls him lazy because he does not bring out more than one book a-year. What time has a man to write poetry? Calls and congratulations (which, somehow, he does not find returned), attendances at religious and official functions, listening the whole day long to other poets, to advocates, to declaimers, to very grammarians, the bath, the sportula—why, the whole day slips away sometimes without one’s being able to settle to work at all!
The 78th, addressed to Macer, contains the graceful request—
which shows Martial’s faithfulness to his exquisite master.
The Eleventh and Twelfth, the last of the epigrams proper (for the Xenia and Apophoreta[346] have been dealt with so far as the little that they have concerns us, and the Liber de Specta culis is out of the question), are also fruitful. The common habit of addressing the book itself at its beginning frequently has a literary turn given to it by Martial, and as in the Tenth so in the Eleventh, not one but a batch appears as overture, chiefly dedicatory; while another batch farther on is opened by the promise, certainly not falsified, that the book is going to be the naughtiest of all. The 90th, however, is important for us, though by no means immaculateimmaculate, because the sudden fling of a handful of mud, in which Martial too often delights, is led up to by satire on that same preference for uncouth and archaic language, which, as we have seen, so often defrays the satiric criticism of the time. Chrestillus, the victim, it seems, approves no smooth verses; they must roll over rocks and jolt on half-made roads to please him. A verse like
is better to him than all Homer, and he worships terrai frugiferai and all the jargon of Attius and Pacuvius.
The prose preface of the Twelfth book starts with an excuse for a three years’ silence (it would appear that for a considerable time Martial had produced a book yearly), due to the poet’s return to Spain. He had been, as the epigram above quoted pleads, too busy or too lazy to write in town; in the country he found himself deprived of the material for writing. The stimulating, teasing occupations of Rome had given place to mere clownish vacancy. However, to please Priscus, he has busied himself again, and he only hopes that his friend will not find his work “not merely Spanish of the Roman Pale, but Spanish pure and simple.”[347] In the third epigram there is a half-rueful recommendation (which Thackeray would have translated impeccably) to his book to revisit the dear old places, ending with a distich revindicating, in no wise foolishly, the crown of style—
He was right. Nobody but Martial could have written Martial except Catullus himself in his less noble moods; and the boast is in itself a criticism and a just one. Yet Martial had his dignity, and an odd epigram, the 61st of this book, disclaims the mere coarse language in which he seems to us too often to have indulged. And the tale of literary epigrams ceases (I apologise for omissions in the bright and shifting bevy) with another odd piece, which may be either gross flattery, irony of a rather sanguinary kind, or mere playfulness, and in which he remonstrates with his friend Tucca for touching and executing, so as to make competition impossible, every kind of poetry.poetry. Epic, tragedy, lyric, satire, epigram itself—Martial has tried them all and dropped them, because he feels himself beaten by Tucca. This is not fair; let Tucca leave him at least one kind, the kind that he doesn’t care for. It is not fanciful, surely, to find a critique of poetical polypragmatism here also.
It may well seem to some that too much space has been accorded to Martial; but it has been allotted on the principle which, be it mistaken or not, is the principle that underlies this book. We have, in this good-for-nothing trifler, a very considerable number of pronouncements on critical points, or points connected with criticism, and, what is more, we have in him a writer who has a very clear notion of literary criticism in and for his own work. A great poet Martial is not: he has no fine madness, or only the remotest touches of it. He does not look back to the way in which Lucretius had infused that quality into the language; I do not think, speaking under correction, that he ever so much as names him. He does not anticipate (and if he had anticipated, he would not, I think, have welcomed with any pleasure) the tide which, welling in upon the severer Muses of classical Latin style, gave them once more the Siren quality in the Low Latin of the Middle Ages. Farther, he can hardly be said to have any “wood-notes wild”; even his country descriptions, charming as they are, are distinctly artificial. Much as he adores Catullus, it is not for the flashes of pure poetry which we see in that poet. But, on the other hand, Martial sees, not merely with instinctive but with critical certainty, that gift of precision, clearness, felicity, venustas, which the Greek-Latin blend of the Golden and Silver Ages had. He practises and he preaches the cultivation of this. He preaches it at no tedious length: his chosen form as well as his common-sense would have prevented that. But he directly extols the cultivation of style—of that quality which will make any decent judge identify a poet when he has heard three lines of his poem. And he practises what he preaches. Even what the grave and precise (quite truly one must confess) call his moral degradation saves him from confusing the moral with the literary quality of literature—the noble error of most ancient criticism. He has, as scarcely any other ancient writer has, formulated the great critical question, “L’ouvrage est-il bon ou est-il mauvais?” And if he had chosen to write a De Arte Poetica, I am bound, shocking as the confession may seem, to say that I think it would have been superior to that of Horace, while he has provided no unimportant progymnasmata towards one as it is.
From “the mixed and subtle Martial,” as Gavin Douglas excellently |Statius.| calls him, we may pass to the poet, perhaps the rival, whom he never mentions[348]—the author of that only adequate Roman description of Lucretius which has been referred to above.[349] The precise sources of the popularity of Statius in the Middle Ages have never yet, I think, been thoroughly investigated. It is, however, not difficult to discern them afar off, and to include among them a certain touch of that uncritical quality which, as we shall see, was one of the main notes of the Middle Ages themselves. Yet the author of the words furor arduus Lucreti[350] must have been able at least to appreciate. And the poem which contains that phrase, as well as the prose prefaces of the Sylvæ where it occurs, will yield something more bearing on our subject. The first of these prefaces is a curious if not particularly felicitous plea for the legitimacy—indeed, for the necessity—of a poet’s indulging in lighter work in the intervals of Thebaids and Achilleids. This is something like the view of Pliny: the poet must be a Jack-of-all-poetical-trades. Martial knew better. But it is a noteworthy thing (and Martial himself would have been pungent on it) that Statius cannot make his trifles brief. Domitian’s horse has nearly three hundred lines. I do not think that there is a single poem in the five books of the Sylvæ which falls short of several scores, whatever its metre. In the preface of the second he apologises to his friend Melior for some of the pieces, as libellos quasi epigrammatic loco scriptos, and here again Martial might have had something to say about epigrams seventy-seven lines long. That Statius had not cleared up his own mind about criticism appears from the touching and attractive, though not quite consummate, Ad Claudiam Uxorem, where the poet, beaten in the public competitions where he had long triumphed, proposes that Naples, and his wife’s caresses, shall console him for the loss of tasteless and thankless Rome. But the Genethliacon Lucani, a commemorative birth-day poem on Lucan (which would have been a little more effective if we could forget that this tribute to the victim of Nero was written by a flatterer of Domitian), contains the central utterance of Statius about other poets. It is, as nearly everything of Statius has been said to be, too long and too much improvised, though also, like most things, if not everything, of his, it contains fine touches, especially that of Lucan in the shades:—