CHARACTERISTICS OF MEDIÆVAL LITERATURE—ITS ATTITUDE TO CRITICISM—IMPORTANCE OF PROSODY—THE EARLY FORMAL RHETORICS: BEDE—ISIDORE—ALCUIN (?)—ANOTHER TRACK OF INQUIRY—ST AUGUSTINE A PROFESSOR OF RHETORIC—HIS ATTITUDE TO LITERATURE BEFORE AND AFTER HIS CONVERSION—ANALYSIS OF THE ‘CONFESSIONS’ FROM THIS POINT OF VIEW—A CONCLUSION FROM THIS TO THE GENERAL PATRISTIC VIEW OF LITERATURE—SIDONIUS APOLLINARIS—HIS ELABORATE EPITHET-COMPARISON AND MINUTE CRITICISMS OF STYLE AND METRE—A DELIBERATE CRITIQUE—CASSIODORUS—BOETHIUS—CRITICAL ATTITUDE OF THE FIFTH CENTURY—THE SIXTH: FULGENTIUS—THE FULGENTII AND THEIR BOOKS—THE ‘SUPER THEBAIDEN’ AND ‘EXPOSITIO VIRGILIANA’—VENANTIUS FORTUNATUS—ISIDORE OF SEVILLE AGAIN—BEDE AGAIN—HIS ‘ARS METRICA’—THE CENTRAL MIDDLE AGES TO BE MORE RAPIDLY PASSED OVER—PROVENÇAL AND LATIN TREATISES—THE ‘DE DICTAMINE RHYTHMICO’—JOHN OF GARLANDIA—THE ‘LABYRINTHUS’—CRITICAL REVIEW OF POETS CONTAINED IN IT—MINOR RHYTHMICAL TRACTATES—GEOFFREY DE VINSAUF: HIS ‘NOVA POETRIA.’
It may seem a platitude, but it really has much more of the altitudinous than of the platitudinous about it, to say that, before entering on the consideration of mediæval criticism,[457] it is above all things necessary to clear the mind of cant about mediæval literature. For in no division of this work is such a caution a more appropriate writing on the door. On the classical |Characteristics of mediæval literature.| and on the modern sections it would be a gratuitous impertinence. In both or them, as here, there is the distinction between linguistic and literary criticism, and the further distinction between literary criticism of different kinds. But in both there are, as there always have been in relation to the classics, and as there sometimes have been in relation to modern literature, a very large number of persons who are aware of the crevasses, and who can cross them.
In mediæval literature such persons are, and for the strongest reasons, much more to seek. Until recently—it is the greatest “refusal” and the greatest misfortune in the literary history of the world—mediæval literature, which some, at least, believe to hold the keys of both ancient and modern, was utterly neglected and contemned. Then, for a time, it was praised without full knowledge, or by divination only. It is now possible to know much if not most of it; but few are they who are content to know it as literature. Not only has it had to go through, all at once, the usual diseases to which literary childhood is obnoxious, the petty grammarianisms which Latin and Greek got over in their own time, the squabbles as to interpretation from which the Renaissance, to a great extent, delivered us in their case, and the criticastry of the seventeenth-eighteenth centuries, but new ailments, diphtherias and influenzas of its own, have arisen in “phonology,” and Heaven knows what else. Even this does not exhaust the list of ills that wait upon its most unhappy state. It has been thought necessary, for political and ecclesiastical reasons, to praise the Middle Ages a little unwisely for a time, and then (more recently) to abuse them with an unwisdom so much greater, that one feels inclined to relapse upon the mood of the real Mr Kenelm Digby of The Broad Stone of Honour, and the imaginary Mr Chainmail of Crotchet Castle. Abused and extolled as “Ages of Faith,” they were really ages of a mixture of logical argument and playful half-scepticism. Regarded with scorn as “Ages of Ignorance,” they knew what they did know thoroughly, which is more than can be said of some others. Commiserated as Ages of Misery, they were probably the happiest times of the world, putting Arcadia and Fairyland out of sight. Patronised as Ages of mere preparation, they accomplished things that we have toiled after in vain for some five hundred years. They have in the rarest cases been really understood, even historically. And the understanding which has, in these rare cases, reached their history, has almost always merely scrabbled on the doors of their literature. There are exceptions, of course, some of whom have taught me all I know, and whom I honour only short of the great originals. But they are still exceptions.
Lest any one should accuse me of passing from criticism into dithyrambic, let me acknowledge at once that whatsoever the |Its attitude to criticism.| Middle Ages were or were not, they were certainly not Ages of Criticism. They could not—it has already been hinted—have been anything of the kind; it would have ruined their business and choked their vocation if they had attempted to be so. One mighty figure does indeed show himself in their midst, to pass on the torch from Aristotle and Longinus, through unknowing ages, to Coleridge and Sainte-Beuve. But their very essence was opposed to criticism in any prevalence. The incorrigible and triumphant (though or because wholly unconscious) originality which, in practice, created the Romance, revolutionised the Drama, altered History, devised a fresh Lyric, would have been constrained and paralysed in the face of theory. At no time can we be so thankful for the shortcomings of the School Rhetoric which, if it had been better, might have done frightful harm. Had the Italian critics, with their warpings of Plato and of Aristotle, appeared in the thirteenth century instead of the sixteenth, it might have been all over with us. For the thirteenth century was docile: the sixteenth, fortunately, was not.
In one particular, however, the comparatively scanty criticism of the thousand years from the sack of Rome by Alaric to the |Importance of prosody.| fall of Constantinople before Mahomet, acquires a new significance. We have hitherto said little about the formal criticism of prosody, and for good reasons. The Greek, and in a less degree the Latin, writers on Metric, are interesting, but their interest is hardly literary at all, though it has so much to do with literature. Before we have any finished classical literature from them, Greek had by its own euphuia acquired, and Latin had forced on itself by a stern process of gymnastic, systems of prosody which, though in the former case at least easy as nature, were in both cases simply a branch of mathematics. The decay of Greek, the bursting by the strong Italian wine of the earthen or leathern vessel of artificial prosody which had so long contained it, and the rise of the new vernaculars, introduced a perfectly different situation; and the criticism, the tentative unscientific rule-of-thumb criticism, of prosody assumed an importance, at about the beginning of the fifth century of our era, which it has not lost on the eve of the twentieth. But these general questions will be further treated at the close of this Book (see Interchapter iii.) We must now turn to the details of the actual history.
The standard collection[458] of Latin Rhetorics contains four of very early date, speaking from our present point of view. The |The early formal Rhetorics—Bede.| oldest, and, if it were genuine, the most interesting, of all in point of authorship, that attributed to S. Augustine, we shall—for reasons—take last. The others, still of great interest in this respect, are by, or attributed to, the three greatest men of “regular” letters in the whole period (500-1000), except Scotus Erigena—to wit, Bede, Isidore of Seville, and Alcuin.
Bede, who has also left us work of interest on metre,[459] has included in his works a tractate on the Tropes and Figures of the Holy Scriptures which gives us, at least, a glimmer in darkness. His argument is characteristic of his time; but nobody except a churl, and an ignorant and foolish churl, will smile at it. The Figures are the most important things in style; the Scriptures are the most important of books; therefore there must be as good Figures in the Scriptures as in any other book, and better. He uses, to prove his point, seventeen figures with examples. In what follows, the chief point of interest is that he first quotes classical examples (chiefly from Virgil) and then Scriptural analogues. But he does not by any means confine himself to the chosen seventeen.
The critical importance of this, for its time especially, can be shown with little labour. The great danger, the great curse, so to say, of uncritical reading, is the taking of things as a matter of course, and the neglect to analyse and ascertain the exact causes and sources of literary excellence. Now, in itself, the comparison of the Bible and the classics, from the hard-and-fast point of view of a scholastic classification of Figures, is a very small matter—and not perhaps even a very good matter. But when these two so different things are compared, from any point of view no matter what, the curiosity is aroused; the mind begins to consider what it really does think fine in this and that; and in happy circumstances and cases a real—in any perhaps some approach to a real—appreciation of the goodness of literature will result. Bede did not intend this—he might have left no pepper to any one who suggested it to him, as a consequence of his work. But such a consequence at least might follow.
The references of that great authority of the early Middle Ages, Isidore of Seville, to Rhetoric are not copious, and are |Isodore.| chiefly made up of the already consecrated tags, while the subject is somewhat mixed with Logic. The orator is the vir bonus dicendi peritus; the parts of Rhetoric are as usual, its kinds likewise. The forensic side is almost exclusively prominent, and style has hardly any attention at all.[460]
Very much more curious is the dialogue with Charlemagne, attributed to Alcuin or Albinus. The emperor-king, in a |Alcuin (?).| rather precious but not inelegant style, beseeches instruction on the point; and his teacher, with grandiosity suitable (at least on the estimate of Martianus) to the subject, protests that the spark of his little intellect can add nothing to the flame-vomiting light of the emperor’s genius,[461] but will obey his commands, juxta auctoritatem veterum. In fact, he follows the usual lines, with occasional indulgence in the curiously, and rather barbarically, but sometimes not unpleasantly, ornate style which seems to have pleased the youthful nations of modern Europe. The hard cases of the old Declamations make a considerable appearance—in fact, very much more of the dialogue (which is neither very long nor very short) is devoted to this side of the matter than is the case with Bede and Isidore; and there is even a slight glance into the subject of Fallacies. The passage on Elocution may be scrutinised, not perhaps with very great results, but with some interest and profit, not merely because it directly concerns us, but also because one may at least hope to have the auctoritas veterum qualified by a little personal and temporal colour. From attention to style comes venustas to the cause, and dignitas to the orator. It must be facunda et aperta—that is to say, grammatically correct and clearly arranged. The best authors must be read, and their example followed. In choosing single words (here the characteristic above-mentioned may be thought to appear, while the sentiment, and even the phrase, though of course not new, leads us interestingly on to the great work of Dante) we ought to choose electa et illustria. Metaphor (translatio) brings ornament; as the first object of clothing is to keep the cold out, and then we make it ornamental, so, &c. In fact, metaphor is now quite common—the very vulgar speak of the vines “gemming,” the harvest being “luxuriant,” the crops “waving”: for what can hardly be described by a “proper” word is illustrated by a metaphor. Metaphors make things clearer, as “the sea shivers”; and sometimes save a periphrasis, as “the dart flies from the hand.” But you must be careful only to use honest metaphors; and here the old illustrations recur. Special figures are slightly touched, though Metonymy and Synecdoche occur. The remarks on Composition are very meagre, chiefly deprecating hiatus, the juxtaposition of similar syllables, &c. It is not unnoteworthy that much more time is spent on actual delivery, that no illustrations from the poets appear, and that the piece finishes with remarks on religious and moral virtue, of great excellence in themselves, but having very little to do with Rhetoric, save indirectly in the epideictic kind.
But it is unnecessary to hunt further through the formal Rhetorics which appeared during the Dark and earlier |Another track of inquiry.| Middle Ages, though it may be proper to return to the subject in the chapter dealing with Criticism after Dante. Conservative in all their ways, though with a conservatism compatible with limitless expatiation and rehandling, these Ages were nowhere more conservative than in regard to Rhetoric; and Martianus by himself almost represents their manual thereof. The influence of the Marriage of Philology, which is prominent at the middle in the Contention of Phyllis and Flora,[462] appears again at the very close, when Hawes “rang to even-song,” and it will dispense all but specialists from investigation under this head. We have seen how small is its contribution to criticism. We must therefore look elsewhere, and, throwing back a little to St Augustine, himself a Professor of Rhetoric, may endeavour to trace and pick up, often in bypaths, such windfalls of expression about literature as may enable us to compose something like a history, if not of definite and expressed Criticism, at any rate of Literary Taste, century by century, from the fourth to the thirteenth, through a chain of now almost wholly Christian writers.
It is probable, if not certain, that the Principia Rhetorices, which has been already referred to, and which we have |St Augustine a Professor of Rhetoric.| under the name of Aurelius Augustinus, was never written or delivered by the chief of the Latin Fathers, at Tagaste or at Carthage, at Milan or at Rome. The loss to him is certainly not great. The treatise, which is short (some ten quarto pages in Capperonnier), is based upon, and apparently to a large extent quoted or stolen from, Hermagoras, Cicero’s Rhodian master. It busies itself first with the nature of Rhetoric, and the calumnies brought against it, and proceeds to the examination of technicalities, not dictionary-fashion, as had lately become usual, but continuously. Perhaps the sole argument (a worthless one enough, for there were probably ten thousand professors of Rhetoric doing the same thing in his time) for the Saint’s authorship is, that no book could better answer to his own bitter description of his worldly profession as “selling words to boys.”
But he was a Professor of Rhetoric, and therefore, in a way, of literature; and the decisive, because in most cases unintentional, evidence of the Confessions[463] touches |His attitude to literature before and after his conversion.| our subject closely and frequently. We can not only see what was Augustine’s attitude to literature even before his conversion, but from his attitude to it after that event we can, without rashness or unfairness, discern the causes which make one huge and important division of late ancient and early mediæval literature—the works of the Fathers of the Church—almost a blank for our special purpose.
That Augustine as a little boy (Conf., I. 13) hated Greek and loved Latin, especially the Latin poets,[464] has nothing in |Analysis of the Confessions from this point of view.| it more marvellous than that any healthy English boy should hate Latin and love (it is to be hoped that he still does love) Robinson Crusoe, and Gulliver, and the Morte d’Arthur, and the Faerie Queene. And there is, no doubt, some allowance to be made for that “megalomania” of repentance which besets the strongly religious, in his regrets for the tears he shed over dead Dido, neglectful of his own death in life as far as the soul was concerned.[465] But his attitude to literature, as expressed in this chapter and onwards, is suggestive not merely of religiosity, but of a certain antiquarian priggishness. Will not even the “sellers of grammar” confess that nobody knows when Æneas came to Carthage, while the more learned know that he never did? Which is the more useful, reading and writing per se, or the figments of poetry? Homer, though full of “sweetly idle fiction,” was bitter to him, because he was difficult. And then he returns to the other line, wherein, it must be confessed, he had strong pagan as well as Christian support.
Do not the poets assign vices to the gods, or rather give the divine title to wicked men? (cap. 16.) Does not Terence actually make one of his characters shelter his own sin under Jove’s example? How absurd it was, if not worse, to have to learn by heart the wrath of Juno at her ill-success in thwarting Æneas! Nay, he proceeds to further altitudes. Grammar is more carefully observed than the Law of God. Rhetoric helps you to do harm to human beings. His own father spent more money than he could afford on sending him to Madaura and Carthage for education, but was wholly indifferent to his spiritual welfare (Book II. cap. iii.) His success in the Rhetoric school (III. 2) filled him with wicked pride. He even liked stage plays; was so wretchedly mad as to grieve at their falsehoods and shadows, and so wicked as to sympathise with the imaginary but immoral enjoyments of lovers. He read Cicero’s Hortensius with admiration, but for its wisdom, not its form. His own professorship of Rhetoric was a “covetous selling of tricks to conquer,” though he himself would not fee a wizard to gain a dramatic prize. He wrote a treatise, De Apto et Proprio, which we (like him) have not, but which was evidently, if criticism at all, criticism in the abstract. Although he refers often (e.g., V. 7) to his lectures on literature, he gives us hardly a notion of his literary preferences, estimates, views; and his Manichæan difficulties, his agonies about the origin of evil, seem to have drawn him further and further from anything but a mere professional connection with the subject. In his high eulogium of Victorinus (VIII. 2) it can hardly be said that he says a word about his literature. In all his allusions to his Chair he constantly refers to the oratorical, or rather the debating and advocating, not the literary side. And what to me seems the most conclusive and remarkable point of all, the long discourse of sinful, or at least worldly, pleasures with which Book Ten closes, contains not a reference to the pleasures of literature, which, as we know from the beginning, he did think ungodly. They have apparently not importance enough to be taken into consideration, not merely in connection with the pleasures of sense (where there might be a reason for their omission), but along with curiosity, love of praise, fear of blame, vainglory, self-conceit, and other purely intellectual temptations. The boy had been charmed by Virgil and Terence—wicked charms he acknowledges—but the man, though he certainly does not mean to deny their wickedness, has simply put them away as childish things.
I have thought it well to be somewhat particular in regard to this appearance of what we may call the Puritan attitude to |A conclusion from this to the general patristic view of literature.| literature, in its earliest and perhaps almost its greatest exponent. It is of course not entirely new—nothing indeed is ever that; and it is not merely foreshadowed, but to a certain extent fathered, by the Platonic views of poetry, and the Academic and Pyrrhonist views of literature generally. But these older things here acquire an entirely new character and importance—a character and an importance which can hardly be said to be merely matters of history yet. Moreover, as I have hinted above, the attitude is that—varied only by the personal factor—of all the Fathers, more or less, until, and for some time after, the complete downfall of Paganism, and of the great majority of ecclesiastical writers for a thousand years later still.
Its justifications, or at least its excuses, have been often put, and must in great measure be allowed. Not merely had it, as has been said, a most respectable pedigree in purely Pagan philosophy, but, as a fighting creed, it was almost indispensable to the Church Militant. Literature, and Heathen religion, and the Seven Deadly Sins, were, it might even seem, inextricably connected. If you wrote an epic you had to begin with Jove or some other false god; if you wrote a parcel of epigrams it was practically de rigueur to accuse somebody of unnatural vices, or affect a partiality for them yourself. But even if things had been better—if there had been no danger of relapses in faith, and none of the worst kind in practice—it was inevitable that the poor Fine Arts should seem vain and trifling exercises to that intense “otherworldliness” which had come (as no doubt it will at some time or other have to come again) as an alternative to secular absorption in things secular. To Augustine, as to monk and homilist long afterwards, not merely was the theology of literature false, and its morals detestable, but it was—merely as occupation—frivolous and puerile, a thing unworthy not only of a Christian but even of a reasonable being. We shall have to count with so much of this in the present book (and not there only) that it seemed worth while to take note of it at the outset. It probably did no great harm, for, as has been repeated more than once, what was wanted was a new development of literature, as fresh and as spontaneous as possible: and this might have been more hindered than helped by too great a devotion to the old. Meanwhile the Seven Liberal Arts were not much interfered with, either by the Seven Deadly Sins or by their opponent Virtues, and the mere necessities of preaching and homily-writing, of controversy with heretics, and of historical summaries, obliged to practise in the more scholastic branches of literature itself. As for the less scholastic, they came soon enough, and more than well enough, as the rains of heaven descended and the wind of the Spirit blew—the Northern wind.
In such a state of mind literary criticism, though the fact is not even yet universally recognised, is practically impossible. It is the furthest stage, and to some extent the converse, of the famous fallacy—stated once by a critic[466] of great though one-sided ability, and probably accepted, tacitly or implicitly, by the majority of critics still—that a man “must take pleasure in the thing represented before he can take pleasure in the representation.” Here the assumption is that, if you take pleasure in the representation, you take pleasure in the thing represented. And there is more also. Not only are the subjects of literature in part men or devils masquerading as gods, in part men committing more or less shameful acts; but, even when they are in themselves unobjectionable, they are idle fiction, there is no truth or usefulness in them. Men with immortal souls to be saved or lost should at the worst be horrified at touching such pitch, at the best be ashamed of burdening themselves with such trumpery. Great as is St Augustine’s genius for producing literature, one doubts whether he had much taste for estimating it. The story of the famous pears, which he stole, comes in rather fatally pat. He stole them, he says, not because he wanted them or liked them, but because it was naughty to do it. This, though no uncommon mood, is the worst possible for the critic. It leads him, in the same way, to praise a book or an author, not because he really likes them, but because they are naughty—the reverse of the other fallacy and its punishment.
Taking this fact into consideration, and adding to it the facts already glanced at,—the sickness incidental to the moulting of language, the want of helpfulness in such ancient critics as were likely to fall in the writer’s way, the increasing scarcity, for hundreds of years, of books, and other things of the same kind,—it will be seen to have been not nearly but wholly impossible that the Dark and the Early Middle Ages could produce much criticism—or any, strictly speaking. The importance of what they did produce, with the much greater importance of the wholly new material they offered (to be long slighted by the critical world), will be considered at length in the Interchapter succeeding this Book. In the course of the Book itself we shall have to consider a few rhetorical and art-poetical treatises, entirely in Latin, between the sixth century and the thirteenth, the solitary document of the De vulgari Eloquio at the central point of the history, and perhaps some more Rhetorics and Poetics, now dealing in increasing measure for moderns with the modern tongues, between 1300 and 1500. But we shall derive most of our material, and almost all the more interesting part of it, from incidental expressions on literary matters in books not professedly rhetorical or critical. And, taking century by century and beginning with the Fifth, we are lucky in finding at once, in the latter part of this, an interesting and half-famous writer who stands at the gate of the Dark Ages, but is something of a Janus, avowedly looking back on classical times, and, Christian as he is, admiring classical writers.
The literary references in the works of Sidonius Apollinaris[467] are pretty numerous, and no small proportion of them possesses |Sidonius Apollinaris.| direct or indirect critical bearing. On the rather numerous occasions when the good count-bishop puts a little thing of his, in easy or flebile verse, into his letters, he by no means seldom prefaces or follows it with a little modest depreciation; he has not a few references to books and reading, and now and then he criticises in form. We could therefore hardly have a fairer chance of knowing what, at the very eleventh hour and fiftieth minute of the classical period, was the general state of literary taste in the West. That Sidonius was a very well-read man, not merely for his time, and that he had access not merely to most of the things that we have but to many that we have not, is sufficiently established by this evidence. And that he did not merely read but marked—that he endeavoured to shape a style for himself from his reading—is equally certain. Nor would it be any argument against his critical competence that this style is, if not exactly harsh, or even very barbarous, marked by the affectation and involution which seem to beset alike periods of immaturity and periods of decadence, and which were specially likely to affect a period of both at once.
But it is not easy to rank him very high. His critical utterances have a besetting tendency to run off into those epithet-tickets which have been referred to more than once, and which were the curse of the routine criticism of antiquity. Still, he is very interesting both for his position and for his intrinsic characteristics: and a selection from the passages bearing on the subject which I have noted in my reading may, as in former cases, be of service.
The very dedication of the Epistles to Constantius shows him to us as modestly endeavouring to follow, if without presumptuous footsteps, “the roundness of Symmachus, the discipline and maturity of Pliny,” for he will not say a word of Cicero, referring only to an odd criticism of that master[468] by Julius Titianus, and to an expression of the school of Fronto, “the ape of the orators,” applied to Titianus himself. The description[469] of the villa at Nîmes which, from Gibbon’s[470] introduction of it, is perhaps better known than anything else of Sidonius, includes that of a library containing religious works arranged in cases among the armchairs of the ladies, and a collection of profane authors near the men’s seats. Thus not merely Augustine, Prudentius, and the Latin translation of Origen by Rufinus, but Varro and Horace, received attention; while the excellence of Rufinus’ work is brought out by a critical allusion to the translations by Apuleius of the Phædo, and by Cicero of the De Corona.
The metrical questions which were becoming of such immense critical importance, in consequence of the impingence of vernacular accent and rhythm on Latin, are frequently touched upon by Sidonius, not, of course, with a full (that was impossible), but with a fair, sense of their magnitude. He thinks, justly enough (Ep. ii. 10),[471] that “unless a remnant, at any rate,[472] vindicates the purity of the Latin tongue from the rust of barbarism, we shall soon have to bewail it as utterly abolished and made away with.” And then he justifies himself for writing a “tumultuous poem” on the church of “Pope”[473] Patiens at Lyons in hendecasyllabics (which he seems oddly to call “trochaic triplets” here, as looking at the end only), because he wished not to vie with the hexameters of the eminent poets Constantius and Secundinus.
There is a glance in iii. 3,[474] which may excite indignation in the apostles of the “Celtic Renascence,” at the nobility of |His elaborate epithet-comparison| his correspondent “dropping its Celtic slough” and “imbuing itself, now with the style of oratory, now with Camenal measures.” This was his brother-in-law Ecdicius, son of the Emperor Avitus. The epithets come now in single spies, now in battalions. In a very interesting letter (iv. 3), addressed Claudiano suo (not, of course, the poet, who was dead before Sidonius was born), he says that if the “prerogative of antiquity” does not overwhelm him he will refuse, as equals, the gravity of Fronto and the thunder of the Apuleian weight; nay, both the Varros, both the Plinys. Then, after an equally hyperbolical praise in detail, he addresses Claudian’s work as “O book, multifariously pollent! O language, not of a thin, but of a subtle mind! which neither bombasts itself out with hyperbolical effusion, nor is thinned to tameness by tapeinosis!” And later:—
“Finally, no one in my time has had such a faculty of expressing what he wished to express. When he[475] launches out against his adversary he claims, of right, the symbola of the characters and studies of either tongue. He feels like Pythagoras, he divides like Socrates, he explains[476] like Plato, he is pregnant like Aristotle; he coaxes like Æschines, and like Demosthenes is wroth; he has the Hortensian bloom of spring, and the fruitful summer[477] of Cethegus; he is a Curio in encouragement, and a Fabius in delay; a Crassus in simulation, and in dissimulation a Cæsar. He ‘suades’ like Cato, dissuades like Appius, persuades like Tully. Yea, if we are to bring the holy fathers into comparison, he is instructive like Jerome, destructive like Lactantius, constructive like Augustine; he soars like Hilary, and abases himself like John; reproves like Basil, consoles like Gregory; has the fluency of Orosius, and the compression of Rufinus; can relate like Eusebius, implore like Eucherius; challenges like Paulinus, and like Ambrose perseveres.”
As for hymns "your commatic is copious,[478] sweet, lofty, and overtops all lyrical dithyrambs in poetical pleasantness and historical |and minute criticisms of style and metre.| truth. And you have this special peculiarity, that while keeping the feet or your metres, the syllables of your feet, and the natures of your syllables, you can, in a scanty verse, include rich words within its limits, and the shortness of a restricted poem does not banish the length of a fully equipped prose phrase: so easily do you manage, with tiny trochees and tinier pyrrhics, to surpass, not merely the ternaries of the molossus and the anapæst, but even the fourfold combination of the epitrite and the pæon."
In this extravagant, but really interesting and important, passage, we may probably see the critical taste of the meeting of the fifth and sixth centuries—of the late classical and the Dark ages, at its best and most characteristic. Although the mere taste has lost the power of distinction, it retains distinguishing formulas. It has learnt, only too much by heart, certain stock ticket-epithets for distinguished writers, and it applies them fearlessly and, as far as rote goes, well. Secondly, we see that a not unimportant habit of comparison had grown up between the old Pagan and the new Christian literature. Thirdly, that Sidonius was well aware that all poets of his time by no means kept “the feet of their metres, and the syllables of their feet, and the natures of their syllables.” And fourthly, that a lively sense of metrical quality—of the effects that a poet can get out of metre—existed in him. Fortunately, this sense survived and flourished: and it had almost everything to do with the formation of the prosody of the new languages.
The promise of the twelfth epistle of the same book,[479] which opens with a picture of the poet-bishop’s son reading Terence (the Hecyra), while his father expounded the parallel passages in Menander’s Ἐπιτρέπων is not maintained. But the words, Gaius Tacitus unus ex majoribus tuis, opening another letter[480] to a certain Polemius, bring us once more close to literary matters, though only to hear that (in a characteristically Sidonian calculus) Polemius might vanquish, not only Tacitus in oratory but Ausonius (another, and perhaps more authentic, ancestor) in verse. If we had a few more details, the letter to Syagrius (v. 5) on his acquired skill in German speech[481] would be priceless; as it is, it is rather tantalising. But yet another list[482] of flattering comparative tickets is valuable because it refers in the main to lost authors. The diction of Sapaudus is tam clara tam spectabilis, that “the division of Palæmon,[483] the gravity of Gallio, the copiousness of Delphidius, the discipline of Agroecius, the strength of Alcimus and the tenderness of Adelphius, the rigour of Magnus and the sweetness of Victorius, are not only not superior but scarcely equal.” And then, with a sort of apology for this hyperbolical catalogue, he cites the “acrimony” of Quintilian and the “pomp” of Palladius as perhaps comparable. The sixth and seventh books are, the first wholly, the second mainly, occupied with letters to bishops, of whose interest in literature Sidonius might not be sure, or to whom he might not care to parade his own. But the eighth[484] opens with one of those references to the nasty critics, the envious rivals and derogators, who play the part of Demades to Demosthenes and Antony to Cicero, and of whose likes we have perhaps heard from writers later than the Bishop of Clermont. Their “malice is clear while their diction is obscure,” a play, of course, on the double meanings of clarus as “clear” and “illustrious,” and of “obscure” as still observed. And the third letter of the same has reference to an accompanying translation of the Life of Apollonius, not straight from Philostratus, but as Taxius Victorianus did it from a recension by one Nicomachus—which the author depreciates as, by reason of haste, a confused and headlong and “Opic” translation, thrown out in a rough-and-ready draft.
The eleventh[485] contains a much longer critical passage, of something the same character as that quoted and analysed |A deliberate critique.| above. The death of a certain Lampridius gives Sidonius an opportunity of copying one of the little things above noted, which had been composed in the lifetime of its subject, instead of an elegy, and of praising the Ciceronian, Virgilian, Horatian, and other accomplishments of that subject as usual. A prose eulogy follows—a passage among the best of its author’s for the real feeling and force of its descant on the necessitas abjecta nascendi, vivendi misera, dura moriendi, in which we hear approaching the true Mediæval tone. The praise is by no means unmixed as far as character goes; it only approaches panegyric when it comes to the literary part. In orations, it seems, the defunct was “keen, round, well composed and well struck off,”[486] in poems “tender, good at various metres, and a cunning craftsman.” His verses were “very exact but singularly varied both in foot and measure,” his hendecasyllables were “smooth and knotless,” his hexameters “detonating[487] and cothurned (fitted for the buskin)”; his elegiacs “now echoing, now recurrent, now joined at end and beginning by anadiplosis” (the “turn of words” in which the decadence bettered Ovid). In his “ethica dictio” (probably equal to “ethopoeia”) he did not use words as they came, but selected “grand, beautiful, carefully polished” ones.[488] In controversy he was strong and nervous, in satire careful[489] and biting, in tragic passions fierce or plaintive, in comic urbane and multiform, in his fescennines showing the bloom of spring (we know this Euphuism) in his words, the warmth of summer in his wishes; watchful, economical, and “carminabund”[490] in bucolics, and in Georgics so rustical as to have nothing clownish about him. His epigrams aimed not at abundance but point; they were not shorter than a distich or longer than a quatrain; they were not seldom peppered, often honeyed, always salt. He followed Horace in swift iambics, weighty choriambics, supple Alcaics, inspired Sapphics. In short, into whatever form of expression his mind carried him, he was subtle, apt, instructed, most eloquent, a swan like to soar, with wings only inferior to those of Horace himself and Pindar. And envious fate has left us not a note of this swan’s song![491]
We may close the account of the Sidonian criticism in prose with a mere reference to the curious list of symbolic gestures and features of the philosophers in ix. 9. His poems need not detain us; but reference should also be made to the verse enclosure in Epist. ix. 13, containing glosses on different metres[492] and poetic forms; to the exposition of “recurrent” verses in the succeeding letter, as well as, in the Carmina, to the long list, with critical remarks, of authors in ix.; to the very interesting, and to this day sound, justification of the introduction of exotic words and neologisms when necessary, in the prose preface to xiv.; and to a crowd of literary references in xxiii.
I have been somewhat copious in dwelling on the bishop-count-poet, because he is infinitely the most valuable document |Cassiodorus.| that we have as to the highwater-mark of the state of critical knowledge and opinion with which the Dark or Earlier Middle Ages started.[493] We have in the last book examined the chief text-book of formal grammar and Rhetoric, that of Martianus, with which they were already provided, and we need only glance at two other standards of theirs, Boethius and Cassiodorus, who come close in time to Sidonius, and probably to Martianus likewise. Cassiodorus wrote, like Capella, on the Liberal arts, though in a manner at once informal and less fantastic, and his influence in encouraging the frequenters of the mediæval scriptorium to copy ancient manuscripts deserves eternal gratitude. But I have not yet discovered in him much material for our special inquiry.
Nor is the great name of Boethius here as great as elsewhere. He wrote, indeed, on rhetorical loci, and the author of the |Boethius.| metres in the Consolatio[494] deserves no mean place in creative literature. But if he had taken any really keen critical interest in books, for their form as distinguished from their matter, it must have appeared in the Consolatio itself. On the contrary, as everybody knows who has ever looked at the book, it begins with Philosophy packing the Muses off as “strumpets and mermaidens” in a tone half-suggestive of Plato a little the worse for Augustine. And though the “suasion of sweetness rhetorien” is afterwards patronisingly spoken of (Book II., Prose i.), and Homer with the honey-mouth, Lucan, and others are quoted, yet Rhetoric is expressly warned that “she goeth the right way only when she forsaketh not my statutes.” Moreover, the beautiful metre Vela Neritii ducis is a merely moral, and almost merely allegorical, playing on the story of Circe.
We can, however, see from the comparison some useful things. The stock of actual erudition possessed by at any rate some persons was considerable; but the number of these persons was not very large, and both the |Critical attitude of the fifth century.| “remnant” itself[495] and its accomplishments were likely to decline and dwindle. The new vernaculars were already assuming importance; men were likely[496] to be chosen for positions of ecclesiastical eminence (almost the only ones in which study of literature was becoming possible), because of their bilingual skill, or to be driven by such positions to study of the vernacular. And this bilingualism was likely not merely to barbarise even their Latin style, but to draw them away from the study of classical Latin, and still more Greek. In regard to the latter, we see further, from two passages of Sidonius quoted above, that persons of very considerable education were apt to use translations of the Greek fathers, as well as of Pagan writings, in preference to the original. Yet again we see that even the most accomplished scholars of the time (and Sidonius himself may certainly claim that distinction) were, on the one hand, more and more acquiescing in what, to borrow Covenanting phraseology, we may call the “benumbing, deadening, and soul-destroying” list of ticket-epithets: and, on the other, were gradually losing a sense of the relative proportions of things—of the literary ratio of patristic to classical literature, and of the productions of their own day to those of the great masters, whether classical or patristic. And thirdly, we see that even so careful a metrical student as the Bishop of Clermont was succumbing to the charm of “recurrent” verses, acrostics, telestics, and all the rest of it.
On the other hand, this process of “losing grip” is very far from the state in which we find it by the time that we are in full Middle Age: and, for good as well as for evil, the glorious hotch-potch of that period is still distant. Virgil is not yet an enchanter or anything like it: he and his works are perfectly well placed in their proper literary and historical connections. If, on the side of form, there is perhaps already a rather perilous tendency to see no very great difference between Orosius and Livy, there is none to put Dares (who probably did not exist) on a level as an authority with Homer, or above him, in point of matter. And while the fables about Alexander probably did exist, men of education did not think of mixing them up with the facts.
The most favourable sign of all, however, is that metrical solicitude which has been already more than once referred to. The anxiety which Sidonius shows to suit his metres to his subject would do credit to a much better poet in a much more “enlightened” age; and it is surely not fantastic to see in his constant reference to success or failure in adjusting “syllables to feet, and feet to measures,” that the difference of the classical prosody from the newer, half-accentual quantification even in Latin, and from the vernacular rhythms sounding all over Europe, was forcing itself, consciously or unconsciously, on his mind. And it cannot be repeated too often that to construct and perfect new prosodies, in Latin and in the vernaculars alike, was perhaps the greatest critical-practical problem that the Middle Age had before it.
The sixth century has even fewer lights among its gathering gloom; in the beginning and at the end of the seventh a kind of rally of torches is made by Isidore and Bede. |The sixth—Fulgentius.| There are, however, two authors at least in the sixth who are full of significance, even if that significance be too much of a negative kind. These are the African grammarian Fulgentius, with his Expositio Virgiliana, probably in the earlier half, and the poet-priest Venantius Fortunatus, certainly in the later.
Fulgentius[497] holds something like a position in the history of Allegory, being not infrequently breveted with the rank of go-between, or the place of fresh starting-point, between the last development of the purely classical allegory in Claudian, and the thick-coming allegoric fancies of the early Christian homilists and commentators, which were to thicken ever and spread till the full blossoming of Allegory in the Romance of the Rose, and its busy decadence thenceforward. Unluckily, Allegory was, as we have seen, no novelty in criticism; but rather a congenital or endemic disease—and Fulgentius only marks a fresh and furious outburst of it. Virgil, a favourite everywhere in the late Roman world, was, it has been said, an especial favourite in Africa: and Fulgentius would appear to have given the reins, not exactly to the steed, but to the ass, of his fancy, in reference to the Mantuan.
The writings of the Fulgentian clan (none of which, fortunately, is long) consist of (1) three books of Mitologiæ (Mythologiæ), of (2) the Expositio Virgilianæ Continentiæ |The Fulgentii and their books.| secundum Philosophos Morales which is our principal text, and of (3) a shorter Expositio Sermonum Antiquorum, attributed to Fabius Planciades Fulgentius, who was probably of African birth, and probably lived in the early sixth century; of (4) a tractate, De Ætatibus Mundi et Hominis, attributed to Fabius Claudius Gordianus Fulgentius; and (5) of a note on the Thebaid of Statius, attributed to Fulgentius, Saint and Bishop. The personalities of these persons are to the last degree unknown; and it is very uncertain whether they were in reality one or two or three. The books we may best cite as 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
4 is far better written and more sensible than the others; but it has nothing to do with our subject. 3 is a short list (sixteen pages and sixty-two articles) of notes on out-of-the-way words (abstrusi sermones), where it is curious to find among really unusual locutions—friguttire, suggrundaria, tittivilitium, and the like—such to us everyday ones as problema and auctio. 2 and 5 concern our business, equally in substance, unequally in importance and extent, and to understand them both, it is desirable to read 1 at least cursorily, although it, like them, is a tissue of appallingly barbarous Latin—enshrining allegorical interpretations as ridiculous as the most absurd in the Gesta Romanorum,[498] and derivations which in their sheer serious insanity surpass the most promising efforts of the clever and sportive schoolboy in the same kind. As no one, I think, who reads this book will regard me as a detractor of the Dark and Middle Ages, I may speak here without fear and without favour.
Having surveyed Mythology from the point of view of the most grovelling allegory, etymologically assisted by such fancies as that Teiresias (Teresias in his spelling) is derived |The Super Thebaiden and Expositio Virgiliana.| from theros and æon, meaning “eternal summer,” and that Ulixes Græce (it will go near to be thought shortly that Fulgentius knew less Greek than Shakespeare) is “quasi-olon xenos id est omnium peregrinus,” Fulgentius seems to have turned to literature. If he also wrote the note on the Thebaid attributed to the Sainted Bishop (and it is very much in the same style), he confined himself to a brief argument of the story, with a few etymologies, such as “Creon quasi cremens omnia,” and a short preface. In this he tells us that he “can never without grand ammiration[499] retract the ininvestigable prudence of the poets, and the immarcescible vein of their genius”: and having thus prepared rejoicing for the heart of the Limousin scholar nine hundred years ahead, he sets the fashion to Lyly by observing “Diligit puer nucem ad ludum integram: sapiens autem et adultus frangit ad gustum.” But this, though not insignificant, is a slight thing.
The Expositio Virgiliana or Virgiliana Continentia (this word being late Latin for “contents”) is itself not long: it fills, with apparatus criticus, some five-and-twenty pages. If it were not written in a most detestable style, combining the presence of more than the affectation and barbarism of Martianus with a complete absence of his quaintness and full-blooded savour, it would be rather agreeable to read: even as it is, it is full of interest. We catch Virgil in mid-flight through the void, from that position of universal exponent of sober literary art which we have seen him occupy with Macrobius, to his rank as beneficent enchanter a few centuries later. The Bucolics and Georgics are full of such Phisica secreta, such misticæ rationes, that they are actually dangerous to touch. He has passed over the interna viscera nullius pæne artis in these books. In the first Eclogue he has physically summed up the three lives (active, contemplative, and enjoying); in the fourth, he is a prophet; in the fifth, a priest; in the sixth, partly a musician, partly a physiologist; in the seventh, botanicen dinamin tetigit, he has touched the power of botany;[500] in the eighth he has pointed out magic and the apotelesmatic of the musician; combining this with euphemesis,[501] in the ninth.
In the first Georgic he is throughout an astrologer and then a “eufemetic”; in the second, a physiologist and medical man; in the third, wholly an aruspex; and in the fourth, is to the fullest musical. But Fulgentius will not meddle further with the details of these books; and, after a breathless and intricate prologue, attacks the Æneid in a manner easily to be conjectured from what has been said. Every word, every syllable almost, of the first line, is tortured to yield an allegory; the account being thrown into the form, first of a dialogue between poet and interpreter, and then of a long speech from the former. Achates is “Græce quasi aconetos id est tristitiæ consuetudo.” Iopas is “quasi siopas id est taciturnitas puerilis.” The progress of the story is the growth of human life. The wanderings of the first three books are the tales that amuse youth; the fourth shows how love distracts early manhood; the fifth displays it turning to generous exercises; the sixth is deep study of nature and things; the rest active life. And if anybody wishes to know why Turnus’ charioteer was called Metiscus, “Metiscos enim Græce est ebriosus.”
It cannot be necessary to say much of this, which speaks for itself; it is, as we said at first, the intellectus (or rather the want of intellect) sibi permissus and expatiating unchecked. Qui l’aime le suive!
Venantius Honorius Clementianus Fortunatus[502] (for a plethora of names was as characteristic of the Latin as of other decadences) is a much more interesting figure, and his |Venantius Fortunatus.| critical importance, if less direct, is not really inferior. He goes in the general literary memory with Sidonius, as the twin-light of not yet wholly barbaric Gaul; and he had probably more original poetic gift than his predecessor. At least, I can find nowhere in Sidonius anything approaching the throb and thrill of his two great and universally known hymns, Pange Lingua and Vexilla Regis—the earliest, perhaps, to attain that ineffable word-music of hymn-Latin, which is entirely independent of mere tune, mere setting, and which is not only equal to, but independent of, the choicest sound-music of either ancient or modern verse. He was also a livelier writer; and though he has made even further progress in the direction of affectation and bombast, these things rather add a piquancy, if not to his painful official praises of Queen Brunehault, at any rate to his expression of his half-pious, half-human affection for Radegund the Queen and Agnes the Abbess, his account of the sad results when the hospitable Mummolenus[503] would make him eat too many peaches, and his admirable description of his sail on the Moselle.
Moreover, he was certainly accomplished in all the learning of his time. He could even write very fair, if not delightful, sapphics. And he is not to be treated with the scornful contempt which some have heaped upon him, merely because he composed (with an amount of labour which makes one’s brain and eyes ache to think of) acrostics and cross-poems of various degrees of artificiality. He has one marvellous structure of the latter kind,[504] in which not only do the frame-letters of the scheme make sense, but correspondences, interwoven in the text trace out, also in sense, a sort of cross patée, as thus:—