though Martianus does not arrange the Quadrivium exactly according to the second line of the mnemonic—

his order being Geometry, or rather Geography, Arithmetic, Astronomy, Music.

The book on Rhetoric opens literally with a flourish of trumpets,—

which, as some sixteen rather bombastic hexameters full of gradus-tags inform us, quite alarms the gods, major and minor. In the midst of it there steps forth “a stately woman of lofty stature, and confidence greater than common, but radiantly handsome, helmed and crowned, weaponed both for defence and with flashing arms wherewith she could smite her enemies with a thundering coruscation. Under her armpits, and thrown over her shoulder in Latian fashion, was a vest, exhibiting embroidery of all possible figures in varied hue, while her breast was baldricked with gems of the most exquisite colour. As she walked her arms clashed, so that you would have thought the broken levin to rattle—with explosive handclaps, like the collision of clouds, so that you might even believe her capable of wielding the thunderbolts of Jove. For she it is who, like a mighty queen of all things, can direct them whither she will and call them back whence she chooses, and unbend men to tears or incite them to rage, and sway the minds of civic crowds as of warring armies. She brought beneath her sway the senate, the rostra, the courts at Rome,” &c., &c., the innocent and transparent allegory of the earlier part changing into a half-historical, half-philosophical account of the functions of Rhetoric generally. She is followed by a great crowd of men, some Greek, some Roman, among whom (it is worth mentioning, as a proof of the taste of the age) Æschines, Isocrates, and Lysias are specially mentioned for the one tongue, and, with some uncertain names, Pliny and Fronto in the other. Cicero is later put, by Rhetoric herself, as beyond competition in either. She displays her declamatory skill in a formal exordium, and then plunges into the usual matter of Rhetorical treatises. The treatment is technical, but by no means ill-arranged, clear enough even in the bewildering labyrinths of the status, not excessive in the Figures, and altogether one of the best of the Latin Rhetorics. When she finishes, Mercury beckons to her to join the group of those who had played their part, and to salute the bride. So she walks with much confidence up to Philology, gives her “a sounding kiss—for she can do nothing silently even if she would—on the top of her head,”^[447] and joins the society of her sisters.

Recurring to the speech of one of these sisters, Grammar, and combining it with this, we shall have no ill notion of the helps to literary criticism with which the next thousand years of the world’s history were provided in the west of Europe. They were rudimentary enough, and those who were furnished with them had in most cases no thought—indeed for long centuries hardly any opportunity—of using them for any critical purpose. But they lay ready for the hand of others, and at the Renaissance, as well as in one brilliant and some minor instances earlier, they were turned with only a little delay to their proper purpose.

Grammar, with the quaintness that suffuses the whole book, says, “My parts are four—litteræ, litteratura, litteratus, litterate. ‘Letters’ are what I teach; ‘Literature’ am I who teach them; ‘the man of letters’ is he whom I shall have taught; ‘literate’ the manner in which my pupil shall skilfully handle things.” But the expectation thus raised is a little falsified, for “letters” are taken at their own foot, though Pallas pulls up Grammar and maintains that she has omitted the “historic part,” which does not mean our historic in the very least, any more than litteratura means our Literature.

There is, however, both in these places and throughout the book, a great deal of “fine confused feeding,” both on matters really literary and on those more or less subsidiary to literature, from Phonetics upwards. The citations, though not extremely frequent or copious, show pretty wide reading, especially in Latin. In the book on Rhetoric we find very particular and minute attention paid to these considerations of euphony to which attention has already been drawn, Martianus (who, whether we allow him poetry or not, was evidently a very careful and deft versifier^[448]) applying his practice in the other harmony with his usual quaint conceit here. Nowhere, perhaps, do we better perceive, though nowhere may we find it more difficult exactly to follow, the niceties of the ancient ear, than in the caution that while it is well to end a clause with a molossus (three longs), if the final word is a trisyllable you must be careful to put a trochee before it, and by no means a spondee or pyrrhic. Thus “Littus ejectis,” with which Tully finishes a clause, is all right, but “rupes ejectis” would be pessima clausula, and “apex ejectis” (where apex is described as a pyrrhic, according to its natural quantity in the oblique cases) almost worse.

Further than this, however, Low Latin was not encouraged by its tutor Martianus to advance. Nor is it surprising that with such teaching we find no such advance in the first lisping of the modern literatures themselves, till the strangely articulate speech of their greatest critic, as he was their greatest creator—Dante the Wingbearer.

In considering and summing up the contribution of ancient Latin literature to the history and achievements of Criticism, we may conveniently adopt a threefold division and arrangement, so as to see, first, what was the general character of Latin criticism as contrasted with Greek, and with that comparative study of literature which has only recently become possible; secondly, its actual and positive achievement; thirdly, the state in which it left the chances of the future.

The first point under the first head is obvious at once, and has been repeatedly glanced at and referred to already. The Romans had what the Greeks had not and could not have—the advantage of literary comparison in two tongues. This—it may be said a thousand times over, and not be said too often—is an advantage so enormous that nothing else is required to show the wonderful faculty of the nation which could effect so much without it. Without comparison, not merely is the diagnosis of qualities mostly guesswork, but even the discovery of them becomes extremely difficult. With comparison, the qualities almost “leap to the eyes,” and the difference of their results goes far to help in the differentiation of their natures.

At the same time, this advantage, huge as it still was, was conditioned and hampered by the fact that Latin, as a language, was an extremely close connection of Greek, and, as a literature, was daughter and pupil in one. It would be stepping out of the safe and solid, if not often trodden, path which has been prescribed for this book, to inquire whether, if more scope had been given to the Italian and less to the Italiote^[449] element, this need have been the case; it is sufficient for our strictly historical inquiry that it was the case as a matter of fact. With rare exceptions, of which the Satire itself is a doubtful chief, with few and more doubtful followers, the Romans invented no form of literature whatsoever. Nor did they, as more literary races have so often done, re-create and make their own the forms that they borrowed. The earlier lost Roman tragedy was, it is clear, simply calqué upon Greek, as was the Roman comedy (though the mother-wit of Plautus, one of the most original of Latin writers not of the decadence, gives it an original air) absolutely calqué upon the later forms of the Attic. The Epic was even more slavishly imitative—those who rate Virgil highest must admit that, delicately as he walks, and elegant as is his footgear, he simply steps in the footprints, now of Homer, now of Apollonius, now, in all probability, of writers who happen to be lost. The Latin Lyric poets dare invent no fresh scheme; the historians, even those of genius, have the fear, or at any rate the following, of the Greeks always before them. And so they deprive themselves, from the critical point of view, of the very advantage with which they start—they lose their chance of finding out the real forms of literature, transcending those of any particular tongue, by assimilating the forms of their own as exactly as possible to another’s.

And this lack of independence continues to betray itself throughout, and at once to lessen their opportunities for criticism, and dilute the quality of such criticism as they do venture upon. The Roman—it has been observed, and truly observed, a thousand times—is a man of letters almost always by accident, and on the way to being something else. When he is not, he is generally of the second class. Virgil, Horace, and Cicero perhaps are the chief exceptions, and the two first at any rate, if not the third, were among the most artificial, if also of the most artful, imitators of the Greeks. To Catullus, his exquisite and hardly surpassed poetical faculty was evidently little more than a toy or a pastime—helpful to express his moods of love or of laughter, and that was all. So the magnificent singing robes of Lucretius cover a man who has hardly a thought of being a poet, who aims mainly at being a philosopher; and the scarcely inferior Muse of Juvenal positively turns her back on her sisters, and busies herself with a sardonic “criticism of life,” in which indignant disdain is oddly blended with a strange interest in all trifles, and all serious things, that are not literary. The men with whom literature is, if not exactly a passion, a really serious interest, are, on the other hand, “polyhistoric” persons of talent, in strengths varying from Cicero himself to Pliny, or else men like Martial, admirable practitioners, and something more, in a limited and not very high kind.

Yet, again, though the Roman talent was extremely businesslike, it was by no means subtle. It could, at any rate to some extent, borrow the fanciful Greek refinements; but it found a necessity of changing them into hard and fast rules.

To all this we must add another thing of the first importance. Great as were the accidental advantages of oratory in Greece, they were almost greater at Rome. During every age of the Republic a good speaker had a great weight in his favour; but in its last age, unless the luck was strangely against him, honours and wealth were to be had by him simply for the asking. Under the Empire his position as to the honours of the state was a little more precarious, and his talents (if he was a very honest man and not a very discreet one) were not unlikely to bring him into trouble. But if he were not too scrupulous—as in the case of Eprius Marcellus, of that Regulus whom Pliny evidently admired almost as much as he loathed him, of Fabricius Veiento, and others—these talents could be dishonestly made subservient to fortune. Even in the worst times of the worst emperors their exercise in the law courts was fairly safe, and extremely profitable; while the rage for declamations also gave the art of speaking a factitious but very great popularity.

Hence there was no fear, or hope, of Oratory being brought to its proper place among the departments of literature. On the contrary, the practical prosaic character of the people tended to exalt it higher than ever over such kickshaws as poetry. Probably nine out of ten Romans would have agreed with Aper in the Dialogus.

All this was not particularly favourable to any practice of criticism, and particularly unfavourable to a fresher and wider interpretation of it. Yet, as we have seen, there was something of a set towards literary criticism of a kind in Rome. There, fashion was at once very powerful and very conservative: and the fashion of literary conversations, especially after dinner, set by the Scipios and others when they came into contact on their foreign campaigns with lettered Greeks, seems never to have died out till the very incoming of the Dark Ages, if then. It may have been—it was—more philological, antiquarian, “folklorish,” and what not, than strictly literary, but it was sometimes this. The other fashion of recitation and declamation, closely connected with this, provided also material for it. Sometimes, no doubt, these literary conversations were a terrible bore, as the satirists not obscurely tell us, and as Pliny, in a letter^[450] full of good sense and pleasantness, points out to a friend of his who had been bored at another kind of dinner, where the fun was provided by scurræ, moriones, and other professional persons not to be mentioned in English.

From all this we find, and are not surprised to find, that literary critical talk, and literary critical writing, in Rome, turned much more upon oratory than upon any other department, and that, when they did turn on others, these were often merely or mainly regarded as storehouses of quotation and patterns of imitation for the orator. There was, indeed, one additional reason for this which has not yet been mentioned, but which was not unnaturally among the most powerful of all. Oratory was about the only division of literature in which even a very patriotic Roman could, with any show of reason, consider his countrymen the equals of the Greeks. Here the flattering unction was often laid; and though as regards Cicero and Demosthenes, the inevitably selected champions, we may hardly think the match an equal one, it must be remembered that the extraordinary, and not quite comprehensible, loss of nearly all other Roman orators puts Latin at a very great disadvantage. We have Æschines, Lysias, Isæus, something, if not much, of Hyperides, a good deal of Isocrates, on the literary side of oratory. But we have nothing by which fairly to judge Hortensius or Catulus, Calvus or Pollio or Messala. What is certain is that men of cool judgment, who did not venture to set up even Virgil against Homer, and who practically let all Roman minor poetry go by the board, did think they could make a fight for Rome in symbouleutic and dikanic, if not in epideictic, oratory.

It follows from all these things that, strong as is the oratorical preoccupation in Greek, it is stronger still in Roman Rhetoric and criticism. Even the men who take the widest view of literature, and are most familiar with it—Cicero, Pliny, nay, Quintilian himself—fall, as has been said, unconsciously, or in the way of bland assumption as of a matter not worth arguing about, into the habit of regarding it either primarily as an exercising-ground, a magazine, a source of supply and training for the orator, or as a means of sport and pastime to him in the intervals of his more serious business. The utterly preposterous notion (as it seems to us) of trying a poet like Virgil by the rules of the rhetorician, classifying his speeches, pointing out his deft use of “means of persuasion,” laying stress on the proprieties and felicities of his use of language according to the rhetorical laws, taking examples of Figures from him and the like, could arise from nothing but this preliminary assumption or confusion, and could only be excused by it. It is in fact all-pervading—forget or lose sight of it, and there is hardly a Roman utterance about literature which will not be either quite unmeaning, or very seriously misleading.

The consequence is that very seldom do we get literary criticism of anything like the best kind—of any kind that deserves the name in meaning at once full and strict—from a Roman. There is no Latin Longinus—Quintilian himself is but at best a rather less technical Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and it is even very uncertain whether he does not owe a good deal directly to Dionysius himself. At any rate, much as we owe him, we owe it rather to his ineradicable and inevitable good sense, his thorough grasp of the educational values of things, and his unfeigned love of literature, than to any full conception on his part of the art of criticism as an art of appreciation—as a reasoned valuing and analysing of the sources of literary charm.

Another consequence (of the illustrative kind chiefly) is that the spell of the Figures is even more heavy on the Roman than on the Greek. That horrified cry^[451] of the unlucky Albucius, schemata tollis ex rerum natura, is as much the note of the average Roman critic as the quotation given above from Simylus^[452] is above the note both of Roman and even of Greek as a rule. It could hardly out of the head of a critic of this stamp, that if you took the proper number of scruples of hyperbole, so many drams of antiphrasis, and so on, you would make a fine sentence—that so many sentences thus formed and arranged, with proper regard to inventio, narratio, and the rest, would make a fine chapter, so many chapters a fine book. The whole process, once more, is topsy-turvy, and can come to no good end.

In Poetic of the limited kind we have, of course, from Rome one document, the historical importance of which it is impossible to exaggerate. But the intrinsic importance, even of this, is singularly out of proportion to its reputation and its influence. As has been explained in detail above, it may be unjust to regard the Epistola ad Pisones as a designed and complete tract De Arte Poetica. But make as much allowance as we may and can for scheme and purpose, the intrinsic quality of such criticism as it does give will remain clear and unaltered. Neither of the real nature, requirements, capabilities of any one literary form, nor of the character of any one source of literary beauty, does Horace show himself in the very least degree conscious. His precepts are now precepts of excellent commonsense, not less—perhaps rather more—applicable to life than to literature: now purely arbitrary rules derived from the practice—sometimes the quite accidental practice—of great preceding writers.

Yet, all the same, Horace unconsciously and almost indirectly does take up a very decided critical side, and expresses, with the neatness and in the rememberable fashion to be expected from so consummate a master, one of the two great critical creeds. Nor is there any doubt that this creed, so far as literary criticism appealed to the Roman mind at all, was that of by far the larger number of persons. This is—not necessarily in a ne varietur shape, but put very clearly in a certain form—the creed of what is known as “Classicism,” the creed which recommends, first of all, as the probable, if not the certain, road to literary success, adherence to the approved traditions, the elaboration of types and generalisations rather than indulgence in the eccentric and efforts to create the individual, the preference of the regular to the vague, &c., &c.

This, it may be repeated without much rashness, was even more the critical orthodoxy of Rome than it was the critical orthodoxy of Greece. We see it in the stock preference of the Attic to the Asiatic style in oratory; it simply defrays the whole of the just-mentioned criticism of Horace; it animates the campaign of the satirists against archaic and euphuist phraseology; it is clearly the proper thing to think in the literary miscellanies of Gellius, and even of Macrobius. The precepts of the formal treatises, so far as they touch on style at all, never fail to express this general tendency; and the even more deliberate and canonical “correctness” of the modern Latin races and literatures, if not directly and unavoidably inherited, is a very legitimate attempt to recover and improve the lost heritage of their ancestor.

Nor will any other conclusion, I think, be drawn from the study of those grammarians in the strict sense, of whom little or nothing has been said in the main body of this Book, for the simple reason that there was little or nothing to say. From Varro to Festus the symptoms which we have noted elsewhere recur with unmistakable fidelity. The etymology and signification of words; the explanation of customs, rites, myths; the arrangements of accidence and syntax—all these things awake evident interest, and receive careful and often most intelligent pains. These grammarians (and, of course, still more professedly metrical writers like Terentianus Maurus) are diligent on metre, and even behind metre, on that most difficult of subjects, in all times and languages, the metrical quality and quantity as distinguished from the metrical arrangement of words. But where all these things begin to group and crystallise themselves into higher criticism of literary form and charm, there our authors, I think it will be found with hardly an exception, stop dead. I shall be surprised (to stick to the example formerly given) to have pointed out to me a single passage in which the poetical quality of the Ennian, the Lucretian, and the Virgilian hexameter is discussed.

At the same time, it would be uncritical not to perceive, and unhistorical not to note, the existence in the history of Latin literature of a current running strongly in the opposite direction, making itself distinctly felt at more than one period, and, finally, in creative literature at least, going near to triumph. We have seen, both directly and indirectly, that in the first century of our era there was a very strong set towards archaism and euphuism, that it had the patronage of Seneca the father, certainly, if not also that of his more famous and more influential son; that it was not by any means wholly disapproved by Pliny; and that though what we may call literary orthodoxy was against it, a very large bulk (perhaps the great majority) of the prose declamations and the verse exercises of the time must have exhibited its influence. What is more, it is certain that in more than one of the Roman colonial or provincial districts, which furnished fresher and more vigorous blood than the Eternal City herself, or her Italian precinct, could now supply, this tendency received very strong accessions from various local peculiarities. It seems to have been least prevalent in Gaul, though by no means unknown there; the Senecas, and Quintilian himself, show at what an early date Spanish blood or birth inclined those who had it to what was long afterwards to take names from Guevara and Gongora. But the great home of Roman Euphuism was Africa. To say nothing of ecclesiastical writers like Tertullian (who might be supposed to have their style affected by Eastern influences), Apuleius earlier, and Martianus later, are more than sufficient, and luckily pretty fully extant, witnesses to the fact.

Yet this tendency is not represented in criticism at all. Apuleius, who was a very pretty pleader as well as an accomplished Euphuist in original composition, might well have left us a parallel to De Quincey’s own vindications of the ornate style, if he had chosen; but it did not apparently occur to him though the Florida would have given a quite convenient and proper home to such a dissertation.^[453] Con amore as Martianus describes (in the passage above translated) the gorgeousness of Rhetoric, it is strictly in reference to her oratorical practice. If the satires of the later Cæsars’ time take the other side, and so do give us some criticism on that, it is pretty certainly because all the greatest satirists, from Aristophanes downwards, have always been Tories, and have selected the absurdities of innovation more gladly than those of tradition for their target. Nay, it is a question whether Petronius, in one direction, and Persius in another, do not, so far as their own compositions are concerned, somewhat incur the blame of which they are so lavish, though Martial and Juvenal certainly do not. On all sides the conviction comes in that for strictly literary criticism the time was not ripe, or that the country, the nation, was indisposed and unprepared for it.

In no point, perhaps, is this so noteworthy and so surprising as in regard to what we may call the literary criticism of metre. For this Latin offered, at both ends of the history of Latin proper, temptations and opportunities which, so far as we know, were unknown to the Greeks. At the one end there were the remains, scanty, but significant even now, then probably abundant, of “Saturnian” prosody. Of this, of course, Roman writers, technical and other, do take notice: they even, with the antiquarian and mythological patriotism so common at Rome, take a fairly lively interest in it. But of the remarkable literary difference between it and the accepted literary metres—a point almost exactly on a par with that of the difference between our ballad metre and the accepted literary poetic forms of the eighteenth century—they do not, so far as I remember, seem to have taken any notice at all. There must have been—in fact we know perfectly well that there were—Roman literary antiquaries as diligent, as enthusiastic, and, no doubt, at least as intelligent as any of our own, from Percy and Hurd to Tyrwhitt and Ritson. There is no reason in the nature of things (indeed, Varro is a very fair analogue to the historian of English poetry) why there should not have been Romans of the calibre at least of Warton, if not even of Gray. But hardly a vestige of the combined antiquarian, philological, and literary interest, which animates all these men of ours, appears in the extant fragments of any Roman writer.

The facts at the other end point to the same conclusion. From no Roman critic, so far as I know, have we any notice whatsoever of that insurrection or resurrection (whichever word may be preferred) of accentual against quantitative rhythm which is one of the most interesting, and certainly one of the most mysterious, phenomena of the literary history of the world. Grant that early in the third century (if that be the right date) no cultivated student was likely to pay much attention to the barbarous rhythms of a Commodian,^[454] to be prepared even to consider

as a hexameter. But a hundred and fifty years later things were different. Before Macrobius wrote, before Servius commented, the verse of Prudentius had been given to the world. Now, the mere classical scholar has no doubt been usually unkind to Prudentius,^[455] but few people who have read him without a fixed idea that anybody who writes in Latin is bound to confirm to the prosody of the Augustan age, can have read him without frequent satisfaction. At any rate, he is a literary person; and his personality is emphasised by the fact that at one time he tries to write, and not infrequently succeeds in writing, very fair orthodox hexameters and trimeters; at others (and in the best work of the Cathemerinon and Peristephanon) his verse, whether answering to the test of the finger or not in metre, is clearly accentual in rhythm, and seems to be yearning for rhyme to complete and dress it. Now, if literary criticism in the full sense had been common, such a phenomenon must have attracted attention. The orthodox critics would have attacked it as furiously as the orthodox critics in England attacked Coleridge’s system of metrical equivalence, or the orthodox critics in France attacked Victor Hugo’s enjambements. The unorthodox critics, the revolutionary and romantic party, would, as in each case, have welcomed it with pæans. But, so far as we know, not the slightest notice was taken of Prudentius by the literary wits of the Saturnalia, or by any one else.

In part, no doubt, this silence may be set down to accidental and extra-literary causes. The very growth of provincial literatures would at once have rendered the productions of these literatures less likely to reach Rome, and have disinclined the literary critics of the capital to listen to provincial productions. Even the debate of Christian and Pagan,^[456] as it became more and more of a conflict between triumphant youth and declining eld, less and less of the resurrection of a desperate and despised minority against established order, may have had something to do with the matter. But, however this may be, the facts are the facts.

We shall do well to accept them as they are, and to recognise that Latin had the criticism which it deserved, the criticism which was made necessary by the conditions of its own classical literature, and, lastly, the criticism which was really most useful both for itself and for its posterity—that is to say, in greater or less degree, not merely the so-called Romance tongues, but all the literary languages of modern Europe. The first two points must be tolerably clear to any tolerable Latinist, but they may be freshly put. A literature like classical Latin, which is from first to last in statu pupillari, which, with whatever strength, deftness, elegance, even originality at times, follows in the footsteps of another literature, must for the very life of it have a critical creed of order, discipline, moderation. Otherwise it runs the risk of being a mere hybrid, even a mere monstrosity.

Still more certainly, nothing could have been better for the future of the world than the exact legacy which Latin left, not merely in its great examples of literature, but in the forms of the scholastic Grammar and Rhetoric, to that millennium of reconstruction and recreation which is called the Middle Age. For that wonderful period—which even yet has never been put in its right place in the history of the world—a higher lesson would have been thrown away, or positively injurious. No instruction in Romanticism was wanted by the ages of Romance: for full literary knowledge of the ancient literatures they were in no wise suited or prepared. Their business was, after a long period of mere foundation-work in the elaboration of the modern speeches, to get together the materials of the modern literatures, and to build up the structure of these as well as they could. So strongly did they feel the nisus towards this, that they even travestied into their own likeness such of the old literature as remained.

But still Grammar and Rhetoric abode—to be a perpetual grounding and tutelage, a “fool-guard” and guide-post in these ages of exploration and childhood. That the Rhetoric was meagre and arbitrary, that a great deal of it had nothing to do with literature at all, but was a sort of fossilised skeleton of a bygone philosophy, or else a mere business training, mattered nothing. The Trivium and Quadrivium, the legacies of the classics, especially of Latin, gave in every one of their divisions, and not least in Rhetoric, precisely the formal stays, the fixed norms and forms of method, which were required in the general welter.

Had the appreciative criticism of Latin been stronger and wider, had it left any tradition in its own last age, and so been able to throw that tradition as a bridge over the dark time to come, it would have been no advantage, but a loss and a mischief. Not only would it have been waste of time for the Middle Ages to appreciate Greek and Latin literature critically, if they could have done so, but it would have hampered them in the doing of their own great day’s, or rather night’s, work—their work of assimilation, of recuperation, and, not least, of dream.