The fashion of treating Latin literature as of all importance to English is passing away in the better understanding of things. It is true that the knowledge of Latin has been always more widely spread than the knowledge of Greek, and that our speech is more deeply tinged with Latinity. Yet Greek literature is the source and origin of almost all that is best in Latin, and its influence to-day is far more vital. Let it be added that, while in point of matter and thought Latin borrowed unsparingly from Greek, in point of style its principles were less sound or consistent.
Nevertheless, Latin literature is of immense importance. We may think of the prodigious historical significance of the pagan Roman Empire, and then of the prodigious spiritual significance of the Christian Roman Church. We may think of the impress that has been left on all Western Europe by these, and remember that the language of each is Latin. The necessity of not neglecting the mere language is obvious. But we are here concerned with Latin literature, of which the language is but the vehicle.
Where does Latin literature begin and end?
Writing in Latin has not ended yet. But we shall for the present confine ourselves to the Latin works of pagan Rome, in the days when Rome can fairly be called a nation of tolerably homogeneous life and pursuits. Though the writings of Tertullian, Lactantius, Jerome and Augustine, in the third and fourth centuries, are undeniably Latin, and literature also, we can on this principle draw a tolerably clear line against them. Similarly the later poets, such as Ausonius, Claudian, and Boethius, lie outside the scope of the present chapter.
From the third century B.C. onwards, the Latin-speaking Romans, beginning as a mere clan in central Italy, spread their empire gradually over the peninsula, over France, Spain and Portugal, over Great Britain to the Grampians, across the Rhine, along the Danube, over modern Turkey and Greece, over Asia Minor and Syria to the river Euphrates, over most of Arabia, Egypt, and all the southern coast of the Mediterranean. In Spain and Portugal, in France, and in Roumania they planted colonies and settlements, till the languages of those countries actually became Latin; dialects, no doubt, but Latin. Over all this empire Latin literature spread with the spreading of control and settlement, and in the first century of our era it was as natural for a Latin writer to hail from Spain as from Rome. Persons no less than Seneca, Lucan, Quintilian, and Martial are Spaniards from towns later known as Cordova, Calahorra and Bambola. Subsequently Africa (Tunis) and Gaul have their distinguished representatives.
Considerations like these should make it clear how vast an influence Latin literature must have wielded both directly and indirectly. The modern languages of France, Spain, Portugal, Roumania, and Italy are various continuations of the Latin; and France, Spain, Portugal, and Italy, despite all historical changes, have been neither able nor desirous to shake off the guidance and impulses of Latin literature. This is one reason why it is the French and Italians who find their chief study in Virgil and Horace, Cicero and Seneca, whereas the Teutons, exerting a greater freedom of choice, more distinctly recognize the superiority of Homer and Sappho, Demosthenes and Aeschylus.
Needless to say that the people which could build and govern such an empire and hold it so long together must have been a people of strong innate quality. It need be no surprise that it was hardly an imaginative or artistic quality. It is, indeed, scarcely open to dispute that the old Roman and his kindred Italian tribes were marked by a comparative lack of fine imagination. Not only in war and politics, in legal and political institutions, but in intellectual culture they were a most practical and literal-minded race.
We are apt, in looking at the modern Frenchman or Italian, to commit two large errors. Because they frequently appear excitable in temper and demonstrative in gesture, we incline to put them down not only as passionate, but as profound in sentiment, feeling, and imagination. Yet, in point of fact, still waters run deep, here as elsewhere. The second error is greater still. We judge the old Latin stock from the so-called “Neo-Latin” peoples, or those who speak the neo-Latin tongues. Yet in many cases the “Neo-Latins” have but a comparatively small infusion of Roman blood still running in their veins. In some cases their forbears must have had none at all.
We can only judge the old Latin race, as especially embodied in the Roman, from its literature, its history and its institutions. From these we gather that it was a stock excellent for great ideals in the way of conquering and administering, a people of admirable commanders and engineers and jurists, a practical people, but a people not distinguished by brilliance of fancy, great delicacy of taste, notable depth of imagination or poignancy of feeling. Roman literature, left to itself, would, we may believe, have proved a very solid and rather heavy thing. The Latin language is like the Roman people. It is a language of great logical method and strict system of structure. As languages go, it is unusually free from idioms in the proper sense of the word. It is distinctly a solid and stately, but distinctly not a flexible, speech.
And yet, despite the innate character of the Latin stock, and the unyielding nature of the language, Latin literature is not so eminently practical and massive as we might expect.
For this there are two reasons. The one is that a large number of the chief writers of Latin literature are not themselves of unmixed Latin birth; they possess Celtic blood, or Greek blood, or some other non-Roman strain. Virgil came from Mantua, Catullus from Verona, Horace from Venusia, and other writers from other northern, southern, or even Spanish towns. The second reason is that, before Roman literature had properly earned the name, it had come into contact with the fully developed art of Greece, both Attic and Alexandrian, and forthwith became a literature of imitation. Feeling its limitations, the Latin genius submitted its own tendencies to the correction of a people whom it instinctively recognized as superior in this domain. But here an important qualification must be made. It cannot be too much insisted upon that Latin literature hardly rose at all till Greek literature was far decayed. Unhappily, when the Roman writers set about imitating their masters, they exploited, it is true, the matter or substance of anything Greek, and of any period, but the style and form which they affected were rather those of the later and inferior Greeks of Alexandria, not those of the perfect earlier masters of Attica and Ionia. It is in any case easier to imitate what is affected or “loud” or artificial than what is simply and naturally strong and beautiful.
Latin literature, in the sense in which we are to treat it, may be divided into three main periods. The first is that of immature art, of vigorous but ill-disciplined imitation of Greek models, of growing mastery over language. It is a period of preparation, the “iron age,” corresponding roughly to the period of English literature before the Revival of Learning. The date of this epoch is from 250 to 80 B.C., and it embraces the best days of the republic. During all this time the literature, rough and poor as it was, was sincere enough. It was meant for the people and for a purpose. For us, however, it contains little of any consequence besides the comedies of Plautus and Terence.
The second period is that of highest excellence in prose and poetry, the age of Cicero, Lucretius, Catullus, Sallust, Caesar, Livy, Virgil, Horace, and Ovid. This is the “golden age,” and may be dated from 80 B.C. to A.D. 14, a period during which the republic was passing into an empire, and when great men played their parts in great historical dramas; men like Sulla and Pompey, Julius Caesar, Antony, and Augustus. The latter half of this period, which extends from 30 B.C. to A.D. 14, and includes the names of Livy, Virgil, Horace, and Ovid, coincides with the rule of Augustus, and is therefore called the “Augustan” age. In other words, the Augustan age is the second half of the “golden” age. It is from 80 B.C. to A.D. 14 that Latin literature and the Latin language are at their highest degree of perfection. But, unhappily, at least during the second half, it is also a time when writers and readers are coming more and more to form a special literary class, which stands far aloof from the great public and its urgent or spontaneous interests.
The third period, the “silver age,” is that of the despotic and often tyrant emperors, when freedom of speech no longer existed, when the autocrat, a servile aristocracy, and a vicious populace occupied the capital. At this date literature is but a forced product without real motive or inspiration. It is characterized by declamation and rhetoric, by smart epigram, by cynicism and satire, by clever expression. Such is the period of Seneca, Lucan, Martial, Tacitus, Pliny, Juvenal. It may be put down roughly as extending from A.D. 14 to the year 150.
These three epochs are peculiarly well defined; they are universally recognized, because so conspicuously recognizable.
The first real incentive to literature among the Romans sprang from the contact into which they came with the Greeks of southern Italy and Sicily when their conquests reached so far. This was in the third century B.C. Until the Greek influence was strongly felt, we meet only with a series of rude records, or of uncouth and clownish verses of a satirical or farcical sort. From the rude records there began to develop themselves histories and epics; from the farces and satirical verses were destined to come the drama of tragedy and comedy and the literary satire; this, however, did not occur till the communication with Greece was full and close, and Greek material at hand to be utilized.
The first branch of Latin literature with which we need deal is the drama of comedy and tragedy. Practically this limits itself to the popular comedy of Plautus and Terence in the “iron” age, and the artificial and rhetorical tragedy of Seneca in the “silver” period.
Titus Maccius Plautus, who flourished about the year 210 B.C., and Publius Terentius, a generation later, are more nearly allied to each other than are Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. It is only the special student of literature who need be concerned to elaborate the full distinction between them. Plautus has the more of broad and boisterous fun and drollery, Terence has the subtler humour and the more artistic style and architecture. But both alike borrow plots and even dialogue wholesale from those Greek comedians of whom Menander is a type. They both adapt Greek plays, just as English playwrights once adapted Molière, and recently adapted Sardou. The Latin adaptations, however, were of quite undisguised closeness, if not of positive servility. Whereas our playwrights seek to make their adaptations entirely English, Plautus and Terence did not seek to make theirs entirely Roman. It is true that their plots were based on real life, but it was a Greek life and not a Roman life. The scene was always in a Greek city. Imbecile fathers duped by spendthrift sons, jealous husbands outwitted and stultified, cunning and unscrupulous slaves playing the part of dei ex machina, armies of cooks, confidantes and nondescripts—these things, which appear monotonously, are not really Roman. Those who read the earlier plays of Molière generally grow somewhat weary of the clever valets, the Mascarilles, of the dupes, of the Sganarelles, and of the conventional tricks upon parents and husbands. The truth is that Molière, at this stage of his career, in imitating or adapting Plautus and Terence, was almost as far from the real life of Paris in his own day as Plautus and Terence were from the real life of Rome. Les Fourberies de Scapin is as distinct and as unconvincing an adaptation of the Phormio of Terence as Shakespeare’s early Comedy of Errors is of Plautus’s Menaechmi.
Now it is a noteworthy fact, as illustrating how doubly exotic a thing Latin literature was, that neither Plautus nor Terence was a true-born Roman. Plautus was a countryman of Umbria, Terence was an African of Carthage. Yet it was these two who remained the only considerable writers of Latin comedy, and the whole of their work was adaptation, free translation, or guileless plagiarism.
To our subject these writers are of no small account, in virtue of the fact that they were the progenitors of Italian comedy, thence of Molière, and, from Molière, of our own comic stage of the seventeenth, and the earlier and greater part of the eighteenth, century, the ages of Congreve and Farquhar, and of Fielding and Sheridan.
Tragedy, the other and nobler half of drama, took its rise in Latin literature as early as the year 240 B.C.; but the obscure names of Andronicus (who, as usual, was not a genuine Roman, but a Greek) and of Naevius (who likewise was not a genuine Roman, but a Calabrian) need not here detain us. The one considerable personage in the whole history of the Latin tragic stage is Seneca, the Spanish-born Roman of the middle of the first century A.D. Unfortunately, this one important figure is also the incarnation of the defects of his epoch. He touches no real chord in the public mind or heart; he borrows his subject-matter from the Greeks—Greek gods, Greek heroes, Greek plots; there is nothing national, local, nothing really natural or alive, about his work. The tragedies are mainly excuses for putting fine declamatory speeches or brilliant phrases into the mouths of the characters. They are, in short, exercises in oratory, masquerading in dramatic form. In all probability they were never intended for the stage. Those who know what Addison’s Cato is like in its coldness and artificiality, those also who know French literature and can remember the declamation in the least interesting of the works of Corneille and Racine, can form a very fair notion of the salient characteristics of the tragedy of Seneca. It was Seneca, the easily accessible Latin model, whom the Italian and French tragedians deliberately copied, and who in turn determined the style of Addison’s Cato.
It is perhaps well to remark at this point how thoroughly unreal in every domain of Latin literature is that part which deals with the gods. The native Roman religion had no Olympus, no nymphs. It was a cold and formal worship of gods either far removed or quite artificial abstractions. To a Roman the Greek gods and heroes who fill Latin poetry are more or less ornamental make-believe. They are introduced and regarded rather as poetical properties, virtually meaning little more to the cultivated Romans than the Roman gods, in their turn, mean to an English writer of the eighteenth century, when he talks of Venus or Jove. Therefore, whether it be tragedy or epic or lyric, a dispiriting artificiality generally—although Virgil is an exception—drops upon Latin literature immediately that we find ourselves among the gods and their doings. Yet it cannot be too often repeated that the saving grace of literature is sincerity. No immortal writing can base itself upon convention and a sham.
Perhaps one of the most deplorable legacies left to us by the influence of Latin literature has been the introduction of Jupiter, Juno, Venus, Cupid, Mars, Vulcan, the nymphs, the Graces and the rest into the répertoire of what is called poetic diction. As the eighteenth century, more than any other, was dominated by the artificial principles of Roman literature, both directly and through the French, so in that century these names became a set of tinsel tokens to take the place and conceal the lack of honest and genuine ideas and their natural expression.
Leaving Plautus and Terence, we turn to the golden age of Latin literature, its most classical period. Most classical, because during that period its works attain to the “class,” the class of the best in their kind. It is between the year 80 B.C. and A.D. 14 that Latin literature reaches this best, although the kind itself may be in frankness considered not of the most sublime. In point of matter and style Latin literature attains its acme during these last active days of the republic and under the fostering, but at the same time cramping, care of the first emperor, the great Augustus, and his favourite and minister, the munificent Maecenas.
Before this golden period Latin work had been crude, rough, and inharmonious. It is now perfectly polished and used for polished purposes. On the other hand, after this period, in the silver age, there is a loss of purpose, of healthy and genuine subject-matter, and consequently an indulgence in strained cleverness, far-drawn epigram, empty declamation. But during this period itself Latin in the hands of Cicero, Lucretius, Caesar, Catullus, Virgil, Livy, Horace, and Ovid is for the most part sober and restrained. It may not, in most of these cases, delve very deep or soar very high, but at least it is both admirable workmanship and marked by sober and practical sense. In the poetry of the epic, the lyric, and the elegiac; in the prose of history, oratory, and philosophy; in all but satire and epigram (which by their nature flourish best in times of decadence), this golden period far transcends the age which followed. It is not in this period that neatly executed nothings, verbal conceits in the absence of true matter, out-of-the-way learning and allusions, take the place of thinking.
It is true that during this Ciceronian and Augustan age the Roman literary art was always conscious in its workmanship, always studied and deliberate, always intentionally aiming at finish or style, at skill and beauty and harmony of expression. It is true that it was seldom prompted by instinct like the Greek. It is true that it was nearly all imitative, unoriginal. But it is also true that it was sensible withal, free from absolute rodomontade, bathos, or frivolity.
The department of poetry from which Latin literature derives most nobility, if no other quality, is the epic. The two greatest epics of the world are indisputably the Iliad of Homer and the Aeneid of Virgil. The Jerusalem Delivered of the Italian poet Tasso and the Paradise Lost of the English Milton rank next, but the distance between either of these works and the Greek and Roman epics is scarcely to be bridged. Probably an epic in the old-world sense is scarcely possible under our modern social conditions and philosophic limitations.
The epic is the poem of a great action of a great hero. There may be many episodes in the shape of other actions performed by other characters, but, if the art is to be true, all must bear some appreciable relation to, or centre upon, the said great action of the chief great figure. Virgil’s Aeneid is an epic left somewhat incomplete; its hero is Aeneas, and the great action is the founding of the Roman race. In the poem are described the wanderings of Aeneas from Troy, his adventures by sea and land, his love of Dido and its calamitous ending, his landing in Italy, his descent to the nether world and the sights he there beholds, his wars and victories over the native Italian princes. But the foundation of the Roman race is never reached, the work, which consists already of some 10,000 lines, having been left unfinished.
The more serious purpose of this fine and noble work was to give to the Romans a great national poem, and to supply them, now that they were masters of the world, with an origin of which to be proud. In this aim the poet completely succeeded, establishing himself at the same time as the supreme national poet of the Empire. We may refrain from blaming him if, meanwhile, he sought to offer poetical incense to the emperor Augustus, by connecting him in direct descent with the Aeneas of heroic exploits and half-divine birth. In such conscious purposes Virgil differs entirely from Homer. Homer composed his verse to be heard or read by all and sundry for its own sake, as a narrative full of life and interest and verbal charm. His works have a nearer claim to be called effusions. But Virgil necessarily writes without a simple strong conviction, with more conscious toil of art, as a greatly gifted man of letters writing for men of culture. Spontaneous he assuredly is not. Homer had described battles and councils in the Iliad, and wanderings and marvels in the Odyssey. Virgil borrows the battles or the wanderings, and weaves them with wonderful art into one poem. He takes the similes and imagery of Homer and other Greeks; he translates or paraphrases much of their diction; he “finds his good things wherever he can” and works all into a mosaic, which is exceedingly dexterous, vigorous and polished, but which cannot be called original. The chief sphere of his originality is perhaps to be found in the rhetorical strength and adroitness of many of the speeches which he puts into the mouths of his characters.
Virgil is essentially a writer for the lover of verbal art. For those who can read Latin with easy and scholarly apprehension he appears to combine the splendid harmonies of Milton with the studied grace of Tennyson and often the polished conciseness of Pope. It is impossible to translate him so as to convey any adequate idea of these qualities, for it is exactly these which are untranslatable. Matthew Arnold, in his Essays in Criticism, speaks of individual lines which may serve as touchstones of poetic virtue. In the mere matter of sound each great writer is apt to be distinguishable by such isolated lines. Milton, for example, is only one of many who have written in blank verse. Yet a fragment like
instantly reveals Milton. Virgil answers to the same test of indescribable and incommunicable quality.
To the ignorant Middle Ages Virgil became a name to conjure with. He grew, with little apparent reason except his general poetic fame, to be regarded as the embodiment of all pagan wisdom, and it is for this reason that Dante puts himself under the guidance of Virgil in his Hell and Purgatory, though it is the Christian Beatrice, and not the pagan poet, who accompanies him into Paradise. Dante’s Inferno is the sixth book of Virgil’s Aeneid expanded and adapted to the strange blend of rapt mysticism and crude realism which prevailed under mediaeval Catholicism. It is from Virgil’s sixth book, combined with Dante, that Milton derives the main hint and many of the particular suggestions for his Hell in Paradise Lost. And it is, in short, to Virgil that all epics have looked since his Aeneid once appeared.
Virgil is not, indeed, the only epic poet of Rome, although immeasurably the greatest. Lucan, in the silver age, composed an epic poem of the “great action” of Julius Caesar in crushing Pompey. Like most of the productions of that period of the second best, the Pharsalia is full of epigrammatic sayings, deliberate tours de force and brilliant rhetoric, together with much unreal sentiment, false taste, and grotesque or repellent detail. According to Quintilian Lucan is “more fit to be ranked amongst orators than poets.” Soon afterwards comes Statius with his Thebaid, or epic of Thebes, a work of great pains and little life, here and there beautified with those rather morbid colours which have been known to suggest the dying dolphin, but incapable of sustaining any natural interest. If he was called “Virgil’s ape,” the censure is hardly too severe. To us, however, the poem is of some account as having formed a portion of the staple reading in the days of Chaucer, who refers to “Stace” with avowed admiration. The tale of Palamon and Arcite, which Chaucer so admirably transformed from Boccaccio, owes its origin to this somewhat insipid epic of the Roman. Meanwhile the world has been content to forget the partial versions of Statius essayed by Pope or Gray.
In Lyric poetry, apart from the elegiac style, there are two names, and two only, which stand out upon the chart of Roman history. One is Catullus, the other Horace, and both are of the golden age, although of different halves of that epoch. Catullus flourished under the republic about 60 B.C., Horace under Augustus a generation later. It is curious to observe how the verdict of taste is reversing the positions once held in the general estimation by these two exquisite writers. Time was, and not so long ago, when Horace was more read and quoted than any other poet of antiquity. He was quoted at dinners, in literature, in parliament. It was taken for granted that he represented the ne plus ultra of lyric quality. Catullus, it is true, was praised, but comparatively neglected withal. But those who love literature as much for its substance as its form, who seek for inward warmth and for stimulation of the pulses as well as for pleasure of the palate, and who are attracted by the sterling rather than by the elaborated—these set Catullus on a plane to which Horace never reaches. Horace has been called “the poet of the man of the world,” and the phrase, while fairly true, is manifestly not the highest commendation. Those who read him without prepossession discover that under all his gracefulness he is naturally unimaginative; that, feeling little, he has little power over the heart; and, furthermore, that he is prone to a peculiar inconsequence. Among his virtues is included the characteristic Roman virtue of sound practical sense; but lyric poetry is hardly to be satisfied with that merit. As a man of letters he takes his rank from the perfection of his expression, from his consummate skill of putting the fittest word in the fittest place with a singular terseness and lucidity. To the ancient critic his work was marked by a curiosa felicitas—a “painstaking happiness” of phrase. Meanwhile Catullus possesses a far higher gift, the gift of experiencing a sincere emotion and of communicating it by a rare directness and simplicity of expression, almost after the manner of the Lesbian lyrists or of Robert Burns. This is not to deny that Catullus was a conscious artist, but perfect literature consists in this, that art expends itself on expressing a feeling sincerely felt or a thought sincerely conceived.
Upon English literature the Latin lyrists, and more especially Horace, have exercised a far-reaching influence, sometimes with the full consciousness of the English poet, more often indirectly. The “Horatian Ode”—that is to say, the ode in which there is but one comparative short form of stanza repeated throughout—explains its own genesis by its name. In other cases of English lyrics it is not easy, nor is it necessary, to distinguish precisely between the debt due to the Latin writers and that due to native-grown song and ballad. English lyrics of feeling would necessarily have developed themselves in some shape without the aid of foreign example, but in point of fact, the Elizabethans, and still more the “cavalier” poets of the seventeenth century, were in the habit of looking to Horace, and in a less degree to Catullus, for suggestions of form and expression and occasionally of thought. For one external indication of this attitude we may look to the practice of the school of Herrick, Suckling, Lovelace, and Waller, who (following Elizabethan sonneteers) habitually call their inspiring mistresses by the names of “Lesbia,” “Delia,” “Chloe,” and the like, for no other reason than that these are the non-committal names sanctioned by the usage of the Latin lyrists.
Elegiac poetry, which, though properly a branch of lyric, has acquired a form and character practically constituting it a class apart, was cultivated and brought to perfection by a group of poets in the last third of the last century before Christ. Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid are the representatives in Latin of a form of art which had flourished greatly in the lyric age of classical Greece, and had been revived with much distinction, but with a new tone of sentiment, by Callimachus in the age of Alexandria. In Latin Catullus had already taken Callimachus for a model, and transplanted the elegy to Rome. But it was the group above-named who in turns imparted to such compositions a specially Roman character in respect of exacting rules of form. The elegy in early Greece found various themes in martial and social exhortations, moral sentiments, and advice, or in the expression of personal feelings in different moods. If at Alexandria its matter consisted most frequently of the thoughts and moods of the lover, the modification was due to altered social conditions. It is hard to say what themes might not be treated in the elegiac form, provided they were of moderate length and scope. The Latin poets use the fullest liberty in this respect. Thus Ovid not only writes his Amores or love-poems in the usual sense, his Tristia or personal sorrows in banishment, and his Letters of Heroines, in which the writers pour out their feelings to their absent or unfaithful lovers or husbands, but he also puts together stories of Roman history into a sort of calendar, which is accordingly named the Fasti. A modern poem of reflection, an “occasional” poem, a sonnet, or even Milton’s Lycidas, would alike be fitly converted into Latin elegiac verse.
Of the three elegists, Propertius, though remarkably unequal in quality, and often rough and obscure (with an obscurity which suggests Browning), in both expression and allusion, shows the most of native strength and emotional sincerity. Tibullus is the lucid and graceful exponent of the pensive commonplace. Ovid, the master of verbal polish and concision, is to the elegy very much what Horace is to the ode. Facile and prolific, he touches few subjects which he does not adorn. Unfortunately the subjects which he touches are too often shallow and morally unworthy. His attitude is that of a man not only without moral care, but without capacity for any genuine ardour or emotion. He charms with his variety, and with his grace and dexterity of treatment, but he strikes none of those full or poignant chords which are wont to be stirred by elegies in Greek or English literature.
Other forms of poetical composition among the Romans were the bucolic (or pastoral eclogue), the philosophic, the didactic, the narrative, and the poetry of fable.
Of bucolic or pastoral poetry, as written by the Greeks, something has already been said, as also of the pedigree of this species before its arrival in the literature of England. In Latin literature it is represented almost solely by Virgil, his later imitator Calpurnius being of little account either in himself or his effects. Virgil is the first to introduce the species into Latin, and the line of descent from Theocritus through Virgil to the Italians Sannazaro and Mantuan, and thence to Spenser, is distinct and undisguised. In verse of a certain subtle charm of movement, tinged occasionally with a deliberate rusticity, and pervaded with a suggestion of pensive sympathy rare in Latin writers, Virgil ostensibly tells in dramatic or semi-dramatic form of the loves, labours, sorrows, and songs of shepherds, goatherds, and other simple rural folk. Under this cover, however, he is often in reality touching upon his own personal experiences and those of his friends, or gently couching some poetical moral, or finding a safe vent for the mild philosophizings of his meditative youth. Something of the kind had already been done by the Greek imitators of Theocritus, but Virgil goes much further than they. He has thus changed the whole nature of the pastoral, and, artistically considered, for the worse. The shepherds are no longer real and convincing, and the truth of nature’s mirror is destroyed. Nevertheless, through a happy trick of cadence, felicitous touches of natural description, and an indescribable atmosphere of sympathy, the Eclogues are wont to exert a charm which defies criticism to do its worst.
Didactic poetry is met with in Virgil’s Georgics, or Rules for Husbandmen. In four compositions he deals with corn-crops, fruit-trees, cattle-breeding, and bee-keeping. The model was supplied, as usual, by the Alexandrian Greeks, and for these the ancient inventor and the source was Hesiod. There is no reason to doubt Virgil’s genuine interest in these practical rustic themes. But, being essentially a poet and not a farmer, he is not to be satisfied with versifying, however skilfully, a list of useful precepts. If the work was, as Merivale considers it, the “glorification of labour,” it served meanwhile as a frame for special passages of great beauty upon topics more or less naturally associated with the matter in hand. The poet on occasion finds it no long step to take from the weather to eclipses, from eclipses to the death of Caesar, and from Caesar to patriotic reflections. The digressions are not so far afield, nor so numerous as in Cowper’s Task, but that work may perhaps be cited in partial illustration.
Didactic in another kind is that short Art of Poetry, written in deft verse by Horace, which was copied by Boileau in his Art Poétique, and freely utilized by Pope in his Essay on Criticism. Its professed aim is to inculcate certain principles of poetic composition, and, in particular, the composition of drama. Inasmuch as Horace was drawing upon Greek doctrines derived from Aristotle, but not always understood by their somewhat superficial Roman poetizer; inasmuch also as poetic drama had no real existence in the days of Horace, there was little prospect that the Art of Poetry would shed any new illumination upon the world. To those who have read the seminal work of Aristotle, the precepts of Horace inevitably appear rather trite and shallow. The writer here, as elsewhere, is marked by shrewd and humorous good sense and a gift of terse expression, and it must be admitted that these form an excellent endowment for the middleman of intellectual traffic. The essay would doubtless be read by his contemporaries with enjoyment, and in many cases with edification. The misfortune is that, from the later seventeenth century onwards, it was the superficial Horace rather than the fundamental Aristotle who served as dictator of the laws of verse to both England and France.
Philosophic verse, which is, of course, a species of the didactic, finds its best representative, not merely for Latin literature, but for the literature of the world, in Lucretius, who wrote during the latter days of republican Rome. His poem On the Nature of Things is an exposition of the philosophy of Epicurus, as developed from the physical speculations of Democritus. According to this philosophy the original contents of the universe were minute atoms, the “seeds” or “elements” of things, moving in a void. By their fortuitous collisions and various combinations were formed all things as they are or have been. To this extent had ancient speculation, combining bold imagination with close reasoning, anticipated modern chemistry and astronomical hypothesis. From crude and accidental beginnings, says Lucretius, there ensues a “survival of the fittest,” and thus, though unaided by modern scientific appliances, and imperfectly directed from the point of view of modern scientific method, ancient speculation anticipates also the doctrines of modern evolutionists. In the application of these results to the conduct of life (which is the practical aim of philosophy) it is evident that current theology must receive a severe blow. To Lucretius the chief blessing derived from the true philosophy is that man is emancipated from superstition, with all its terrors in life and death and all the mischiefs it has worked. We may conjecture that the soul of the poet himself, which was brooding and melancholy, would have been eminently impressible by superstitious dread, if it had not been fortified by this wisdom of “the master.” His fervent onslaught on religio (in the Latin sense) and its crushing effects can hardly be otherwise explained. He does not—nor did Epicurus—absolutely deny the existence of gods; these are logically as producible as other “things.” What he denies is their interference with the processes of nature. All this and more he sets forth in the six books of the De Rerum Natura.
In the use of verse as the vehicle of philosophic teaching, Lucretius is but following the lead of the older Greeks, Empedocles, Xenophanes, or Parmenides. The task is technically difficult, and in modern times it would be purposeless. But for Lucretius we must not only grant the utility of the method in awakening intellectual interest as widely as possible among a community less prepared for philosophy than for poetry; we are also compelled to recognize that his effort to make philosophy talk in Latin verse was technically a triumph. Yet Lucretius is much more than a translator of Greek philosophy into Latin hexameters. He is a poet. Doubtless the passages in which he is setting forth bare statement of theory, or bare argument, are of necessity as dull as many passages of theologizing in Milton’s Paradise Lost or Paradise Regained, or as many passages in Wordsworth’s Excursion. But when the poetic opportunity arrives, and when he is irresistibly borne away with such reflections as those upon the life and death of man, he writes in lines as splendid as those of Milton and Wordsworth at their best. Through all the work there is a tone of the ardent missionary of intellectual deliverance, blent with a certain melancholy which recalls Ecclesiastes. Latin literature is not strong in great intellectual forces, but among these Lucretius must hold a foremost place.
Narrative poetry, apart from epic, occupies no large space in the literature of Latin. The Metamorphoses of Ovid practically stand alone. These, written in a lighter and more fluent hexameter than that of Virgil’s Aeneid, are a series of stories dealing, as the title shows, with the various transformations undergone by human beings in mythology or legend. If there is anything in Latin answering to the “romantic” elements in Ariosto or Spenser it is to be found here. The author, knowing the stories to be fabulous, employs all his fancy and inventiveness, his descriptive power and gift of language, in embellishing them. Men and women are turned into beasts, birds, monsters, trees, or stones with much poetic gusto of circumstance. The want of real unity is no drawback to the work; the telling of the legends is brilliant; the stories themselves are such as at all times appeal to the lovers of the romantic and the marvellous, and particularly to the young. From these causes it is not too much to say that the influence of the Metamorphoses has been immeasurable. The usual mediaeval, renaissance, and modern répertoires of mythological story have been almost entirely derived from Ovid. To the better read contemporaries of Chaucer, as of Shakespeare, Ovid supplied not only the matter, but the spirit of such narrative. Such a familiar legend as that touching one of Philemon and Baucis may be Greek in origin, but it is Ovid who has made it the property of the later western world.
Not inappropriately may be introduced here the mention of a minor writer, whose work, despite its slender substance and its narrow range of genius, has been far-reaching in its legacy. This is Phaedrus, the versifier of fables in the reign of Tiberius. With no special brilliancy or gift of invention, but with a style of lucid simplicity which is excellent for such narration, Phaedrus puts into verse the Greek fables—commonly fathered all alike on “Aesop”—which he could find current in his day. The collection is probably much the same as that of the Greek Demetrius Phalereus (300 B.C.). From the point of view of both morals and language the book served admirably for schoolboys, and it is at least one of the main sources of the fables which found their way into England, first with Alfred, and later, in more force, with Caxton’s “Aesop.”
In one branch of verse-writing, which must next be considered, the Roman writers have every claim to the credit of originality. There has always been, as there is at the present day, in the Italian mind a pronounced strain of satire and irony, a tendency to lampoon and epigram, a disposition to look on the seamy or ridiculous side of things. The Aretino of later Italy is a true descendant of the Lucilius of ancient Rome. The Romans themselves claimed as their very own the form of composition known as satura. Satire, as a tone, may appear in Greek writers of various kinds; it may even approach a special recognition in certain portions of the Old Comedy of Athens; but there existed no Greek example of a separate composition with the character implied in “a satire.” The word itself, however, demands some examination. To us it primarily implies fault-finding, general or particular, and such the satire became, particularly in the hands of Juvenal. But originally satura meant a mixed dish, a medley of observations upon society and men. These observations naturally took the form of describing habits and revealing motives. It would follow that, according to the temperament of the writer, the satura might become either a moral essay or a satire in the modern sense. Bitterness is not properly essential to such compositions, and in the Satires of Horace there is comparatively little of that quality. His Epistles, which are practically only saturae under another name, are still more distinguished by geniality. Nevertheless, just as “censure” began by meaning “judgement” and has come to mean unfavourable judgement, so “satire” speedily limited its implication even among the Romans. A hundred years before Horace a certain Lucilius (of whom only fragments remain) had practised a vigorous but rough invective in his saturae, but for us it is Horace who represents the establishment of satire as a species of cultivated writing. To him these compositions were sermones, or “talks,” and they were permitted to serve as the vehicle for a frank egotism not unlike that of the Essais of Montaigne. They are “satirical” in that they from time to time administer more or less caustic chastisement to contemporary follies or vices. Three-quarters of a century later, in the silver age, Persius put forth a small book of satires full of promise, but also full of faults in the way of obscurities and artificialities of style. Trained as a philosopher, he had studied mankind from books, and particularly from Horace, rather than from experience, and, as he died at twenty-eight, it may be presupposed that his insight is far from deep. Fortunately he was withheld from the savage invective customary with youth by his philosophic sincerity and the mildness of his nature. It is early in the next century that satire, in the hands of Juvenal, becomes the polished and trenchant weapon of offence now commonly understood by the term. Juvenal became, and has remained, the very prince of those who condense wit and sarcasm into pungent and rememberable lines of the most consummate terseness. He possesses a singular power of presenting moral vices and social foibles and follies in all their contemptibleness, and there is ample reason to believe that, as he expressed it, it was indignation which created his lines. It is Juvenal and Horace, though chiefly the former, who have served as models for Dryden and Pope, for Hall and Butler, and for Byron in his English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. The less fierce and more descriptive part of Juvenal’s work also found a notable imitation in Johnson, whose London is copied from one satire and his Vanity of Human Wishes from another.
Often cognate to satire is epigram, as treated by Martial, a writer of the generation preceding Juvenal. An epigram is, in fact, apt to be a stinging satire in little. This is, however, a very distinct departure from the nature and province of epigram as employed by the Greeks. Of this something has already been said. It would, nevertheless, be a mistake to suppose that the narrow sense now usually, if erroneously, given to “epigram” was equally the sense in which it would have been understood by the contemporaries of Martial. The “sting in the tail” is by no means indispensable. That the wit and verbal dexterity of Martial were so often applied to caustic purposes was no hindrance to the use of the same qualities in epigrams of compliment, of fancy, of description, and of mere humour. We cannot, it is true, assign to Martial a place in “poetry” proper. A man without convictions or much refinement of feeling, but well acquainted with his world, witty, and a manipulator of phrase, he poured out more than a thousand of these little pieces, many excellent, many execrable, many indifferent. But in this species of literature—be it worth what it may—it is Martial who has determined the form and matter of the epigram for modern Europe.
In prose, Roman literature is very copious, although not equally rich in all domains. Its chief strength lies in history, after which come philosophical works, oratory, and letter-writing. With Roman jurisprudence and with grammatical (or philological) writing we are not here concerned. The famous Cato, the Censor (184 B.C.), has left us a treatise On Agriculture, consisting of practical maxims which are scarcely literature; and a large number of didactic works (many of which are not preserved, or only preserved in fragments) were produced at different dates of the republic or the empire by men of distinction. Thus Varro, a most erudite contemporary of Cicero, wrote voluminously upon Antiquities Human and Divine, upon The Latin Language, and upon Agriculture. Seneca the elder, in the reign of Tiberius, collected educational examples of methods of rhetorical disputation. In the time of Claudius medicine was treated by Celsus. Columella exhausted the subject of agriculture. During the Flavian régime Frontinus composed a treatise on aqueducts and another upon military operations, and the laborious Pliny the elder put together thirty-seven books on Natural History, a vast cyclopaedia of mixed truth and untruth concerning all departments of natural science, the arts connected therewith, and the fine arts to boot. But, whatever merits and demerits of style these works display, they hardly merit discussion in so general an outline of literary history as this. It is impossible to say what information or ideas in our modern possession might be traceable to writers like these, but they can scarcely rank as appreciable “literary influences.” Doubtless Pliny’s encyclopaedia is ultimately responsible for much of the confused natural history of the middle ages, and not only Chaucer, but also the sixteenth-century Euphuists, with their egregious similitudes, are almost certainly in his debt. The affiliation of scientific knowledge and error, however, lies beyond our scope.
In the field of history, Latin literature presents us with various attitudes and styles. Historical writing in general may be of at least three salient kinds. The first kind is imaginative, credulous, careless of accuracy so long as the story is attractive, the narrative being, as Quintilian would have it, “akin to poetry.” In the second kind, sheer imagination may play no pronounced part, but there may be a rhetorical tendency to embellish and expand, and to exaggerate the lights and shades. The third kind is direct, simple, impartial, shrewdly critical. In classical Roman history we have (besides the “Lives” of Nepos), the works of Sallust, Caesar, Livy, Tacitus, and Suetonius. We cannot take all these together and refer them to any one of the above-named descriptions. So far as there is a characteristic common to any group of them it is to be found in the fact that Sallust, Livy, and Tacitus all show in various ways the customary Roman taste for rhetorical effect. To this extent they are not greater sinners than Macaulay or Carlyle, who, like them, fall into the second of the divisions described. Meanwhile the Commentaries (or “Notebooks”) of Caesar offer the best example that Latin can supply of the third style. His plain narrative in straightforward Latin is easily distinguished from the rich and picturesque eloquence of Livy, the conscious stylism and laboured point of Sallust, and the epigrammatic brilliance of Tacitus. Once more Suetonius, a naturally inferior writer in a decadent age, is the precursor, in his Lives of the Twelve Caesars, of that less ambitious history which gossips and “deals in ana” concerning great personages and their surroundings. Among all the Roman writers it is in vain that we seek the historian who will, like Thucydides, describe the facts with a lucid and serene impartiality, while clothing them with that style of supreme art which makes them live before the reader.
These qualifications made, it still remains indisputable that Livy and Tacitus are two of the very foremost historians in the literature of the world. The unpretentious work of Caesar has its claim as well as its intrinsic interest, but it cannot rank with these. Sallust, despite undeniable merits, is placed in a minor rank by the triteness of his ideas and the obviousness of his reflections. But Livy, in virtue of his superb eloquence and unflagging descriptive power, and Tacitus, in virtue of his shrewd insight and vivid presentation in a style inimitable for its sparkling condensation—these will remain for ever admirable, as they were, one or other, admired and followed by Gibbon, Macaulay, or Carlyle. Of the vast work of Livy, written in the reign of Augustus, and entitled The History of Rome from its Foundation, we possess but a portion, although that portion is in itself of considerable dimensions. As Latin prose, the style is magnificent in variety and colour. It may be called Gibbon, without Gibbon’s sameness or too frequent ponderousness; Gibbon warmed by patriotic ardour. That it sometimes suggests the poetical is assuredly no drawback to what, after all, is a narrative intended primarily to be read. As sober history it suffers from the shortcoming that Livy hardly concerns himself with the verification and criticism of authorities. He does not wholly emancipate himself from the first type of historian. If Tacitus, a hundred years later, cannot be called credulous, neither can he be called impartial. While we have no right to doubt his moral earnestness, we have reasons for doubting his authority—or his use of his authority—for the motives and conduct of the emperors who reigned before his own time. As with Carlyle, and as with Macaulay, his temperament and views led him to darken all the shades and whiten the brightnesses. But, when we have admitted this, it is impossible to rise from his Annals or Histories of imperial Rome without feeling that men and women and events have been brought before the mind’s eye with a wonderful vividness, nor without remembering many a phrase amazingly packed with meaning. Whatever philosophic criticism may have to say of Livy and Tacitus as history, they possess the essential literary merit, that they captivate.
If in the region of philosophy we include, with works of morals and politics, works on the principles and practice of rhetoric—a department to which the Romans attached an unusual, but not unaccountable, importance—we have to deal with three great names. These are Cicero, Seneca, and Quintilian. The last-mentioned concerns himself with oratory, the second with moral philosophy, while to Cicero nothing comes amiss. Here, as generally elsewhere, the Latin genius makes little claim to originality. When Cicero writes On the Orator he is doubtless fully at home with his subject; nevertheless he is practically converting into Latin, with embellishments and enlargements, the system and terminology of the Greeks. His moral treatises, which are excellent reading in their kind, are but the expositions of an extremely clever man, who rightly thought that he was rendering no small service to his own countrymen by giving them in compact and intelligible form the substance of Greek philosophy. With a view to imparting lightness to his themes, and led by the example of Plato, he adopts the device of a pretended conversation or disputation, but it can scarcely be said that he lends much verisimilitude to the situation. The style everywhere is lofty, the thinking is serious and helpful, if not profound or original, and it is difficult to over-estimate the influence exercised by these books upon the later thought of Rome, of the Middle Ages, or of the Renaissance. Seneca the younger, writing under Claudius and Nero, is a philosopher in the more strict sense of the term. Living in an age which demanded striking phrase, point, and epigram, he is a master in that style. None the less he was a deep and earnest thinker. Cicero, in dealing with stoicism, is the highly intelligent amateur; Seneca is the expert, but not a pedantic one. His Moral Epistles and his dialogues are essays touching upon matters of daily ethical concern, and both in their matter and its presentation they deserve a much wider recognition than they commonly receive. Some such recognition they did obtain at the Revival of Learning, when Englishmen read the classics more for what they contained than for the niceties of philology. It follows that the thoughts of Seneca, acknowledged or not, have played no small part in modern literature.
Quintilian, a salaried professor and practitioner of rhetoric under the Flavian emperors, has left us an exhaustive treatise upon The Training of the Orator, a training which begins at the cradle. The work sets forth in all their completeness the principles of oratory, but it is incidentally a discussion of education in a wider sense. The formation of “a good man skilled in speaking” involves more than the cultivation of language and the mastery of speech and delivery. It implies great mental culture, and particularly culture derived from literature. To subsequent ages Quintilian became an authoritative law-giver in the domain of rhetoric, criticism, and language. Doubtless it would have been intellectually better for the later European world to study its philosophy and culture in the Greek originals, but, these being commonly inaccessible, all gratitude is due to Cicero, Seneca, and Quintilian for supplying so excellent a substitute in Latin.
Roman oratory, in the form of written speeches, is fortunately represented for us by the greatest of Roman orators. It is a trite observation that oratory can have no existence, except artificially, under a despotism. Cicero, however, lived in the last days of the republic, when speech was still free, burning questions numerous, and the art of public speaking fully developed. Accordingly in his long list of public speeches he has complete liberty to express himself with such vigour, passion, pathos or humour as he chooses. The Roman ideal still demanded from a great public character the quality of gravitas, a moral impressiveness; that quality was in any case congenial to Cicero; but, with that maintained, his scope was unrestricted. To the modern reader the oratorical greatness of Cicero lies in the verbal eloquence rather than in strenuous cogency of thought, or in those powerful flashes which come from Demosthenes. He is an ingenious special pleader, a tactful disposer of arguments; but, above all, he is a master of full, rich, sonorous, impressive, and overwhelming language. As compared with Demosthenes, he is at times somewhat too copious, and even too florid; he is evidently speaking to a people less critical and less true in taste; his humour is apt to be awkward; nevertheless the impression left upon the reader is that of a man who employed superlative gifts, natural and acquired, in an art of which he entertained a lofty conception. It is not too much to say that the highest eloquence of Italy, France, and England has at all times striven to be Ciceronian. Cicero was the model, consciously or unconsciously, of Burke, Pitt, Fox, or Gladstone, just as he was the model of great French preachers like Bossuet. It is perhaps one mark of his inferiority to Demosthenes that he can be thus imitated. Demosthenes himself is inimitable. In its later stages Roman oratory was too much given to hunting the phrase, its decoration became vicious with efforts of preciosity. But it cannot be said that these productions of decadence have exercised any appreciable effect upon English speaking or writing.
Just as in verse the Romans invented one form of literature, the satire, so in prose they probably invented the epistle or letter. In Greek literature letters are seldom found; those which are found are of dubious authenticity, and in any case they are but essays in epistolary form. But in Latin we meet with two great letter-writers, who, if they had written nothing else, would have occupied the same positions in literature as are occupied by Horace Walpole in England and by Madame de Sévigné in France. The correspondence of Cicero was followed, a century and a half later, by the correspondence of Pliny the younger, and both are full of literary and also of historical interest. How far any of the letters of Cicero were intended for publication is doubtful; very many of them obviously were not. Those of Pliny, however, were carefully composed with the distinct object of being given to the world. Apart from the different characters and environment of the two men, there is consequently an appreciable dissimilarity in the style. Except when he is writing formal or courtesy letters to comparative strangers the correspondence of Cicero carries with it a natural and unstudied air. He is vehement, jocular, despondent, testy, as he thinks fit. He puns freely, breaks off a sentence, quotes Greek, or uses colloquial terms. It would have been well if critics of Cicero’s character had remembered to distinguish private and not always serious correspondence from public behaviour. With Pliny the case is otherwise. He was constitutionally a kindly man, with a genuine love for letters; by training he was a staid man of affairs; in circumstances he was rich, and his later years were leisured. But he was withal a man who took himself with some excess of seriousness. In any case he would not have forgotten what was orthodox for a Roman gentleman; least of all was he likely to forget it in letters destined for publication. His epistles are therefore always marked by a certain reserve and a suggestion that they are intended to rank as literature. Probably there would have been less unbending still, except for the warrant of the letters of Cicero, who is plainly his model. Yet, in spite of these drawbacks, they give an excellent picture of contemporary Roman life, and afford an insight, otherwise unattainable, into current Roman sentiment. For us it is important to note that the literary letter-writing of France and England was, in the first instance, directly suggested by these patterns of ancient Rome.
Despite the fact that there were three well marked periods in the history of classical Latin literature, there are, nevertheless, certain characteristics which appertain to that literature considered as a whole. To say this is not to maintain that all Latin writers are monotonously alike. Enough has been said already to demonstrate the contrary. It is only meant that, taking writer after writer, and department of literature after department, we can discover certain traits common to the majority of them, and that these traits give a national character to the total body of production. In the case of the Greeks the characteristic was the clear-cut presentation of genuine thought or feeling at first-hand. In the case of the Latins the case can hardly be stated so simply. Yet the following observations may assist towards a fair generalization.
In the first place Latin literature is for the most part confessedly imitative. It sets itself foreign models. Its standard of excellence does not so much lie in the consciousness of having given a completely truthful expression to a thought or emotion, as in the supposed success with which a writer reproduces or transplants some Greek exemplar, modifying it to what is believed to be unavoidably required by conditions of the Roman tongue and Roman culture. It is in this spirit that the comedians, the tragedians, the epic, lyric, and elegiac poets—Plautus, Terence, Seneca, Virgil, Horace, Ovid—set about their work. It is in this spirit that historians like Sallust, literary critics like Horace, philosophic writers like Cicero, set about theirs. They are all avowedly adapting Greek thoughts, Greek plots, Greek rhythms, and Greek expressions, so far as the Latin can be made to admit them with elegance. And in this secondary kind of work they were eminently successful. They contrived somehow to make the Latin tongue do the work which they asked of it. Horace and Virgil are consummate masters in this tasteful but unoriginal labour. Thanks to them the forms and metres of Sappho and Alcaeus, of Homer and Theocritus, were reproduced with only just so much difference as the nature of the Latin tongue rendered unavoidable. The result was verse of perfect polish and ease, and of splendid harmony. But creators in any large sense they were not. They were magnificent technical artists, of the kind who can reproduce an original picture as a perfect etching with modifications, or who can carve and elaborate artistic decorations if they are supplied with a portfolio of designs. Possibly in this proceeding they worked some injustice to Latin capabilities. It is conceivable that a number of Latin writers might have left us work of much more essential strength if they had allowed their own creative genius freer play. It was well that they should learn from the Greeks, but not so well that they should mimic them. It is somewhat as if the Germans, instead of writing from the full nature of a Goethe, a Schiller, or their balladists, had followed the example of Frederick the Great and put themselves into as complete a pupilage to the models from France. There are instances in which the Latin genius did actually follow its own course after gathering technical lessons from the Greeks, and the result is then of such excellence that we cannot help feeling some regret at the prevalence of deliberate imitation. The most truly spontaneous, and therefore most creative, writers in Latin are Lucretius the philosophic poet, Catullus the lyrist, Juvenal the satirist, the letter-writers Cicero and Pliny, and the historians Caesar, Livy, and Tacitus. Of these Lucretius, Catullus, and Caesar are frank and genuine men with corresponding thoughts. They learn what Greece can teach in the way of form, and then set themselves to deliver their own souls. In letter-writing and in satire the native genius, strong in those directions, broke out without assistance.
The first prevailing characteristic of Latin literature, then, is its deliberate secondariness, which too often goes with lack of serious purpose.
The second consists in a remarkable zest for polish of expression, a studied elaboration of elegant diction and pointed phrase, which may recall in some cases Pope, in others Tennyson. Something of this is due to a necessarily disproportionate care for words in the absence of substantial or novel matter; something is also due to the constitutional Italian genius, which excels in cameo-cutting, whether in the literal or the metaphorical sense. Doubtless the ideal literature combines the exquisite expression with the original thought, but, if we must make some surrender, we should naturally prefer to leave the brilliancy in the thought. Latin writers, however, on the whole rather agreed with Boileau and Pope, that the aim of literature was to utter “what oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed.” The result with them is that the most famous of their poets are unsurpassable verbal artists, and that their silver age writers are in particular exceedingly deft in the command of terse and pointed phrase. But the result is also that their inferior writers were apt to become mere tricksters and contortionists in words. Nevertheless, it is one indefeasible ground of praise of the literature of Rome that it did thus set itself and us a high ideal in the way of melodious or compact and rememberable diction.
There is a third consideration. Greek literature reached its perfection in the midst of free and stirring democratic activities; it was therefore addressed to the mind and heart of the people at large. At Rome, on the contrary, literature only reached its technical acme when freedom was practically extinct. The work of Virgil, Horace, and Ovid, belongs already to a period of despotism. It is addressed first to imperial ears and then to those of an aristocracy more or less idle. It is in a large measure written by a coterie for a coterie, or by a dependant for patrons, its object being to entertain elegantly. For that reason it avoids emotional depths and altitudes, and shuns intellectual audacities. It seeks to say clever things, displaying culture and knowledge agreeable to a society which plays with such matters. It adheres to a certain ideal of “good form,” which, however, does not preclude plenty of such allusion as will show wide reading and social experience. Ardours for the vital interests of society, and the frankness of large natures communicating with their fellow men, are necessarily taboo. Whether these existed largely in Roman natures is, as has been said already, matter for doubt, but almost certainly they existed beyond the extent to which expression was countenanced. It is therefore with more justice than is commonly perceived that the “Augustan” age of English literature has received that name.
It seems not unjust to sum up Roman literature—allowing for the exceptions already made—as a literature largely imitative and secondary, highly polished and elegant in execution, but limited in its intellectual and emotional range as in its originality.
The influence, direct and indirect, of Latin literature upon English is perhaps best realized from the tabulations which appear in this volume. Nevertheless it may be helpful to make sundry notes upon certain more obvious debts taken in chronological order.
In and before the age of Chaucer the poems of Ovid upon love and its cure were much drawn upon by writers of romances and allegories. They were the direct inspiration of much of the troubadour poetry of Provence and thence of the mediaeval lyric verse of Europe in general. Ovidian borrowings are manifest in the Romance of the Rose. Chaucer himself was a student of Ovid, Lucan, Virgil, “Stace,” and also Livy. From Ovid’s Metamorphoses and love-elegies in particular he took much matter. His Knight’s Tale is ultimately from the Thebaid of Statius. The reading of his contemporary Gower, and of his successor Lydgate, was even more deep in the same authors. At the beginning of the sixteenth century Gawin Douglas translated the Aeneid, and soon afterwards Wyatt and Surrey show themselves steeped in Seneca and the epigrams of Martial; Surrey also translated portions of the Aeneid. Before Marlowe and Shakespeare the more scholarly pioneers of drama, such as Sackville, sought for tragic models in Seneca and for comic models in Plautus. Elizabethan readers ransacked all available Latin books. Spenser’s Eclogues follow Virgil’s, and his Faerie Queene is full of borrowings from the Aeneid and from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The effect of Ovid on Shakespeare himself is manifest in his Venus and Adonis. Bacon who, like all the great prose-writers of his time, could use both English and Latin, shows in especial the influence of Seneca. Ben Jonson, who translated portions of Horace and Martial, is an imitator of Horace in the way of poetical epistles and short lyrics, and of Martial in epigram. In the school of the “Sons of Ben” and the “Cavalier poets,” we meet with very distinct manifestations of the combined influence of the lyrists Horace and Catullus and the epigrammatist Martial. We know these to have been favourite poetic reading of the period. Simultaneously the general style of prose-writing, whether as in Milton or as in Jeremy Taylor, was imagined to be based upon the rounded periodic style of Cicero, and the language itself is deliberately Latinized to a remarkable degree. Milton, who wrote Latin poems as well as English, is greatly and openly indebted in his epics to both the matter and the manner of Virgil. The post-Restoration comedy derives itself through a French medium from that of Plautus and Terence. At the same time the second-hand critical principles of Rome begin to prevail in England. Roscommon translates the Ars Poetica of Horace; Dryden translates the Aeneid and passages of Ovid; he also writes powerful satire in direct imitation of Juvenal. Addison produced his Campaign under the influence of Lucan, and his Cato under the influence of Seneca. Pope begins with pastorals after the manner of Virgil and Theocritus, composes Imitations of Horace, and copies the Ars Poetica and Epistles and Satires in his own poetical essays on criticism and morals. His Messiah is a recasting of Virgil’s fourth Eclogue and his Eloisa to Abelard is based on Ovid’s Heroides. Samuel Johnson’s London and Vanity of Human Wishes are similar copies of Juvenal, while his prose seeks to model itself upon the Ciceronian. The great preachers and orators of the eighteenth century are Latinists in their rhetorical principles. During the same age the didactic poems, such as Dyer’s Fleece or Akenside’s Pleasures of the Imagination, are the outcome of the study of Lucretius and the Georgics of Virgil. The letters of Pope or Walpole no less distinctly take their hint from Cicero and Pliny.
It is unnecessary to elaborate further a bare catalogue of such obligations. It is, perhaps, more useful to emphasize one consideration which should bring home the vast, if undefinable, influence necessarily exercised by Latin thoughts and Latin expression upon English writers. Before the days of Alfred and the days of Chaucer the chief writers of prose in England composed in some sort of Latin. They knew Latin, and read such Latin books as they could get. From the Revival of Learning Latin came more and more to be studied as modern languages are studied now, for the sake of actual speech, correspondence, or controversy. The pens of Englishmen like Sir Thomas More, Bacon, and Milton, were fluent in Latin. Ben Jonson, Cowley, Addison, and Samuel Johnson were great Latinists among a society in which Latin knowledge was general. Landor and De Quincey were no less great. There are few writers in the English language who have not received at least some tinge of Latin education. Familiar as all these generations have been with Latin books, practised in the imitation of Latin diction, filling the language with Latin terms, it is quite impossible to determine how deeply we are steeped in the influence which has passed through them. During the last century it is true that education has not cultivated that fluency in spoken Latin which marked the two or three centuries preceding. Latin is no longer necessary as a medium for the interchange of thought, and the increasing number of arts and sciences restricts the prominence of any one study. On the other hand it is no less true that almost every considerable writer and speaker of the century had received that more recent form of Latin education which consists in an accurate and tasteful study of the words, styles and thoughts of the best, or most classic, of the Roman writers—Catullus, Lucretius, Cicero, Virgil, Horace, Livy, Ovid—rather than Lucan or Statius. The influence of Roman literature during that period has been more wholesome than during the later period of the seventeenth and the greater part of the eighteenth century, an epoch in which English writers delivered themselves over to almost as servile a subjection to Latin (or rather Latin-French) patterns as the Romans had once, with more reason, assumed towards the Greeks. That era, the era of Dryden, Pope, Addison, Johnson, is in this sense the most Roman period of our literary history. To it, unfortunately, we owe all that personification of abstract qualities by the simple device of a capital letter; all that use of “nymph” for “woman” and “fire” for “love”; all that stereotyped phraseology, such as “reddening Phoebus lifts his golden fire” for the “sun is rising,” from which we were delivered by Burns and Wordsworth. To the Romans themselves these terms were artificial enough, to the English they were doubly artificial.