We are somewhat apt, I fancy,
to associate the practice of recitation too exclusively with the
literary circles of the time of Nero, Domitian, and Trajan.
to associate the practice of recitation too exclusively with the
literary circles of the time of Nero, Domitian, and Trajan.
Oxford Book of Latin Verse
It is the
unelaborate magic of the Celtic temperament. Keats, I have often
thought, would have 'owed his eyes' to be able to write those three
lines. He hits sometimes a like matchless felicity:
She dwells with Beauty, Beauty that must die,
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu.
But into the effects which Catullus just happens upon by a luck of
temperament Keats puts more of his life-blood than a man can well spare.
Take, again, this from the _Letter to Hortalus_. Think not, says
Catullus, that your words have passed from my heart,
ut missum sponsi furtiuo munere malum
procurrit casto uirginis e gremio,
quod miserae oblitae molli sub ueste locatum,
dum aduentu matris prosilit, excutitur;
atque illud prono praeceps agitur decursu,
huic manat tristi conscius ore rubor,
--'as an apple, sent by some lover, a secret gift, falls from a maid's
chaste bosom. She placed it, poor lass, in the soft folds of her robe
and forgot it. And when her mother came towards her out it fell; fell
and rolled in headlong course. And vexed and red and wet with tears are
her guilty cheeks! '
That owes something, no doubt, to Alexandria. But in its exquisite
sensibility, its supreme delicacy and tenderness, it belongs rather to
the romantic than to the classical literatures.
_Molle atque facetum_: the deep and keen fire of mind, the quick glow of
sensibility--that is what redeems literature and life alike from
dullness. The Roman, the typical Roman, was what we call a 'dull man'.
But the Italian has this fire. And it is this that so often redeems
Roman literature from itself. We are accustomed to associate the word
_facetus_ with the idea of 'wit'. It is to be connected, it would seem,
etymologically with _fax_, 'a torch'. Its primitive meaning is
'brightness', 'brilliance': and if we wish to understand what Horace
means when he speaks of the element of '_facetum_' in Vergil, perhaps
'glow' or 'fire' will serve us better than 'wit'. _Facetus_, _facetiae_,
_infacetus_, _infacetiae_ are favourite words with Catullus. With
_lepidus_, _illepidus_, _uenustus_, _inuenustus_ they are his usual
terms of literary praise and dispraise. These words hit, of course,
often very superficial effects. Yet with Catullus and his friends they
stand for a literary ideal deeper than the contexts in which they occur:
and an ideal which, while it no doubt derives from the enthusiasm of
Alexandrian study, yet assumes a distinctively Italian character. Poetry
must be _facetus_: it must glow and dance. It must have _lepor_: it must
be clean and bright. There must be nothing slipshod, no tarnish. 'Bright
is the ring of words when the right man rings them. ' It must have
_uenustas_, 'charm', a certain melting quality. This ideal Roman poetry
never realizes perhaps in its fullness save in Catullus himself. In the
lighter poets it passes too easily into an ideal of mere cleverness:
until with Ovid (and in a less degree Martial) _lepor_ is the whole man.
In the deeper poets it is oppressed by more Roman ideals.
The _facetum ingenium_, as it manifests itself in satire and invective,
does not properly here concern us: it belongs to another order of
poetry. Yet I may be allowed to illustrate from this species of
composition the manner in which the Italian spirit in Roman poetry
asserts for itself a dominating and individual place. _Satura quidem
tota nostra est_, says Quintilian. We know now that this is not so: that
Quintilian was wrong, or perhaps rather that he has expressed himself in
a misleading fashion. Roman Satire, like the rest of Roman literature,
looks back to the Greek world. It stands in close relation to
Alexandrian Satire--a literature of which we have hitherto been hardly
aware. Horace, when he asserted the dependence of Lucilius on the old
Attic Comedy, was nearer the truth than Quintilian. But the influence of
Attic Comedy comes to Lucilius (and to Horace and to Juvenal and to
Persius) by way of the Alexandrian satirists. From the Alexandrians come
many of the stock themes of Roman Satire, many of its stock characters,
much of its moral sentiment. The _captator_, the μεμψίμοιρος,
the _auarus_ are not the creation of Horace and Juvenal. The seventh
satire of Juvenal is not the first 'Plaint of the Impoverished
Schoolmaster' in literature. Nor is Horace _Sat. _ II. viii the earliest
'Dinner with a Nouveau-Riche'. In all this, and in much else in Roman
Satire, we must recognize Alexandrian influence. Yet even so we can
distinguish clearly--much more clearly, indeed, than in other
departments of Latin poetry--the Roman and the primitive Italian
elements. 'Ecquid is homo habet aceti in pectore? ' asks Pseudolus in
Plautus. And Horace, in a well-known phrase, speaks of _Italum acetum_,
which the scholiast renders by 'Romana mordacitas'. This 'vinegar' is
the coarse and biting wit of the Italian countryside. It has its origin
in the casual ribaldry of the _uindemiatores_: in the rudely improvized
dramatic contests of the harvest-home. Transported to the city it
becomes a permanent part of Roman Satire. Roman Satire has always one
hero--the average _paterfamilias_. Often he is wise and mild and
friendly. But as often as not he is merely the _uindemiator_, thinly
disguised, pert and ready and unscrupulous, 'slinging vinegar' not only
at what is morally wrong but at anything which he happens either to
dislike or not to understand. The vices of his--often
imaginary--antagonist are recounted with evident relish and with parade
of detail.
It is not only in Satire that we meet this _Italum acetum_. We meet it
also in the poetry of personal invective. This department of Roman
poetry would hardly perhaps reward study--and it might very well revolt
the student--if it were not that Catullus has here achieved some of his
most memorable effects. In no writer is the _Italum acetum_ found in so
undiluted a sort. And he stands in this perhaps not so much for himself
as for a Transpadane school. The lampoons of his compatriot Furius
Bibaculus were as famous as his own. Vergil himself--if, as seems
likely, the _Catalepton_ be a genuine work of Vergil--did not escape the
Transpadane fashion. In fact the Italian aptitude for invective seems in
North Italy, allied with the study of Archilochus, to have created a new
type in Latin literature--a type which Horace essays not very
successfully in the _Epodes_ and some of the _Odes_. The invective of
Catullus has no humbug of moral purpose. It has its motive in mere hate.
Yet Catullus knew better than any one how subtle and complex an emotion
is hate. Two poems will illustrate better than anything I could say his
power here: and will at the same time make clear what I mean when I
distinguish the Italian from the Roman temperament in Latin poetry.
Let any one take up the eleventh poem of Catullus:
cum suis uiuat ualeatque moechis,
quos simul complexa tenet trecentos,
nullam amans uere sed identidem omnium
ilia rumpens.
There is invective. There is the lash with a vengeance. Yet the very
stanza that follows ends in a sob:
nec meum respectet, ut ante, amorem,
qui illius culpa cecidit uelut prati
ultimi flos, praetereunte postquam
tactus aratrost.
Turn now for an inverse effect to the fifty-eighth poem:
Caeli, Lesbia nostra, Lesbia illa,
illa Lesbia, quam Catullus unam
plus quam se atque suos amauit omnes . . .
Note the dragging cadences, the pathetic iteration, the scarce-concealed
agony of longing. Yet this five-line poem ends in a couplet of
intolerable obscenity.
There once more you have the unpredictable Celtic temperament--obscenity
of wrath dissolving in the tenderness of unbidden tears, fond regret
stung suddenly to a rage foul and unscrupulous.
But let me here guard against a misapprehension. The more closely we
study Roman poetry the more clearly do we become aware of the presence
in it of a non-Roman element: and the more does it seem as though this
non-Roman element were the originative force, as though it were to this
that Roman poetry owes most of that in it which we regard as essentially
poetical. The quickening force in the best Roman poetry is the Italian
blood. Yet we speak of this poetry as Roman: and it is not without
reason that we do so. If it was to a great extent made by Italians, it
was made by Italians who were already Romanized. Indeed the Italian and
the Roman elements are never so separate or so disparate in actuality as
they appear in literary analysis. The Italian spirit worked always under
the spell of Rome, and not under any merely external compulsion. And the
spell of Rome is over the whole of Roman poetry. The Italians were only
a nation _through Rome_: and a great poetry must have behind it a great
life: it must express a great people, their deeds and their ideals.
Roman poetry does, beyond almost any other poetry, bear the impress of a
great nation. And after all the _language_ of this poetry is the
language of the Romans. It is said of it, of course, that it is an
unpoetical language. And it is true that it has not the dance and
brightness of Greek: that it is wanting in fineness and subtlety: that
it is defective in vocabulary. All this is true. Yet the final test of
the poetical character of a language is the poetry that is written in
it. The mere sound of Roman poetry is the sound of a great nation. And
here let us remember what we ought never to forget in reading Roman
poetry. It was not made to be read. It was made to be spoken. The Roman
for the most part did not read. He was read to. The difference is plain
enough. Indeed it is common to hear the remark about this or that book,
that 'It is the kind of book that ought to be read aloud'. Latin books
_were_ read aloud. And this practice must have reacted, however
obscurely, upon the writing of them. Some tinge of rhetoric was
inevitable. And here I am led to a new theme.
II
Perhaps no poetry of equal power and range is so deeply infected with
rhetoric as the Roman. A principal cause of this is, no doubt, the
language. But there are other causes, and we shall most easily penetrate
these if we consider what I may call the environment of Roman poetry.
Two conditions in Rome helped to foster literary creation among a people
by temperament unimaginative. Of these the first is an educational
system deliberately and steadily directed towards the development of
poetical talent. No nation ever believed in poetry so deeply as the
Romans. They were not a people of whom we can say, as we can of the
Greeks, that they were _born to_ art and literature. Those of them who
attained to eminence in art and literature knew this perfectly well.
They knew by how laborious a process they had themselves arrived at such
talent as they achieved. The characteristic Roman triumphs are the
triumphs of material civilization. But the Romans were well aware that a
material civilization cannot be either organized or sustained without
the aid of spiritual forces, and that among the most important of the
spiritual forces that hold together the fabric of nationality are art
and literature. With that large common sense of theirs which, as they
grew in historical experience, became more and more spiritual, they
perceived early, and they gauged profoundly, the importance of
accomplishments not native to their genius. They knew what had happened
to the 'valiant kings' who 'lived before Agamemnon'--and why. The same
could easily happen to a great empire. That is partially, of course, a
utilitarian consideration. But the Romans believed also, and deeply, in
the power of literature--and particularly of poetry--to humanize, to
moralize, to mould character, to inspire action. It was this faith
which, as Cicero tells us, lay behind the great literary movement
associated with the circle of Scipio Africanus. It was this faith which
informed the Augustan literature. Horace was a man of the world--or he
liked to think himself one. He was no dreamer. Yet when he speaks of the
influence of high poetry upon the formation of character he speaks with
a grave Puritanism worthy of Plato. These practical Romans had a
practicality deeper than ours. The average Englishman, when he is told
that 'the battle of Waterloo was won by the sonnets of Wordsworth', is
puzzled and even offended. Nothing of Eton and its playing-fields?
Nothing of Wellington and his Guards? What have sonnets in common with
soldiering? But the Roman knew of himself that sonnets are a kind of
soldiering. And much as he admired deeds, he knew that there is no deed
greater than 'the song that nerves a nation's heart. '
These are not mere words: and this was not, in the Roman, an idle faith.
It was a practical faith; that is to say, he acted upon it. Upon this
faith was based, at any rate in the early period of Roman history, the
whole of the Roman system of education. The principal business of the
Roman schoolmaster was to take the great poets and interpret them 'by
reading and comment'. Education was practically synonymous with the
study of the poets. The poets made a man brave, the poets made a man
eloquent, the poets made him--if anything could make him--poetical. It
is hardly possible to over-estimate the obscure benefit to the national
life of a discipline in which the thought and language of the best
poetry were the earliest formative influences.
The second of the two conditions which favoured literary creation in
Rome was a social system which afforded to a great and influential class
the leisure for literary studies and the power to forward them. These
two conditions are, roughly, synchronous in their development. Both take
rise in the period of the Punic Wars. The Punic Wars not only quickened
but they deepened and purified Roman patriotism. They put the history of
the world in a new light to the educated Roman. The antagonism of Greek
and Roman dropped away. The wars with Pyrrhus were forgotten. The issue
was now no longer as between Greece and Rome, but as between East and
West. The Roman saw in himself the last guardian of the ideals of
Western civilization. He must hand on the torch of Hellenic culture.
Hence, while in other countries Literature _happens_, as the sun and the
air happen--as a part of the working of obscure natural forces--in Rome
it is from the beginning a premeditated self-conscious organization.
This organization has two instruments--the school of the _grammaticus_
and the house of the great noble. Here stands Philocomus, here Scipio.
In the period of the Punic Wars this organization is only rudimentary.
By no means casual, it is none the less as yet uninfected by
officialism. The transition from the age of Scipio to the age of
Augustus introduced two almost insensible modifications:
(1) In the earlier period the functions of the _grammaticus_ and the
_rhetor_ were undifferentiated. The _grammaticus_, as he was known
later, was called then _litteratus_ or _litterator_. He taught both
poetry and rhetoric. But Suetonius tells us that the name denoted
properly an 'interpres poetarum': and we may infer that in the early
period instruction in rhetoric was only a very casual adjunct of the
functions of the _litterator_. At what precise date the office of the
_litterator_ became bifurcated into the two distinct professions of
_grammaticus_ and _rhetor_ we cannot say. It seems likely that the
undivided office was retained in the smaller Italian towns after it had
disappeared from the educational system of Rome. The author of
_Catelepton V_, who may very well be Vergil, appears to have frequented
a school where poetry and rhetoric were taught in conjunction. Valerius
Cato and Sulla, the former certainly, the latter probably, a
Transpadane, were known as _litteratores_. But the _litterator_
gradually everywhere gave place to the _grammaticus_: and behind the
_grammaticus_, like Care behind the horseman, sits spectrally the
_rhetor_.
(2) The introduction of the _rhetor_ synchronizes with the transition
from the private patron to the patron-as-government-official. And by an
odd accident both changes worked in one and the same direction. That the
system of literary patronage was in many of its effects injurious to the
Augustan literature is a thesis which was once generally allowed. But it
was a thesis which could easily take exaggerated expression. And against
the view which it presents there has recently been a not unnatural
reaction. A moderate representative of this reaction is the late
Professor Nettleship. 'The intimacy', says Nettleship[5], 'which grew
up between Octavianus and some of the great writers of his time did not
imply more than the relation which . . . often existed between a poor poet
and his powerful friend. For as the men of nobler character among the
Roman aristocracy were mostly ambitious of achieving literary success
themselves, and were sometimes really successful in achieving it: as
they had formed a high ideal of individual culture . . . aiming at
excellence in literature and philosophy as well as in politics and the
art of war, so they looked with a kindly eye on the men of talent and
genius who with less wealth and social resources than their own were
engaged in the great work of improving the national literature. '
There is much here which is truly and tellingly said. We ought never to
forget that the system of patronage sprang from a very lofty notion of
patriotism and of the national welfare. It implies a clear and fine
recognition among the great men of affairs of the principle that a
nation's greatness is not to be measured, and cannot be sustained, by
purely material achievements. It is true, again, that the system of
patronage did not originate with Augustus or the Augustans. Augustus was
a patron of letters just as Scipio had been--because he possessed power
and taste and a wide sense of patriotic obligation. So much is true, or
fairly true. But if it is meant, as I think it is, that the literary
patronage of the Princeps was the same in kind as, and different only in
degree from, that exercised by the great men of the Republican
period--if that is meant, then we have gone beyond what is either true
or plausible.
I am not concerned here, let me say, with the _moral_ effects of
literary patronage. I am concerned only with its literary effects. Nor
will I charge these to Augustus alone. He was but one patron--however
powerful--among many. He did not create the literature which carries his
name. Nevertheless it seems impossible to doubt that it was largely
moulded under his personal influence, and that he has left upon it the
impress of his own masterful and imperial temper. Suetonius in a few
casual paragraphs gives us some insight into his literary tastes and
methods. He represents him as from his youth up a genuine enthusiast for
literature: 'Eloquentiam studiaque liberalia (i. e. _grammatice_ and
rhetoric) ab aetate prima et cupide et laboriosissime exercuit. ' Even
upon active military service he made a point of reading, composing, and
declaiming daily. He wrote a variety of prose works, and 'poetica
summatim attigit', he dabbled in poetry. There were still extant in
Suetonius' time two volumes of his poetry, the one a collection of
_Epigrammata_, the other--more interesting and significant--a hexameter
poem upon _Sicily_. [6] Moreover Augustus 'nursed in all ways the
literary talent of his time'. He listened 'with charity and
long-suffering' to endless recitations 'not only of poetry and of
history but of orations and of dialogues'.
We are somewhat apt, I fancy,
to associate the practice of recitation too exclusively with the
literary circles of the time of Nero, Domitian, and Trajan. Yet it is
quite clear that already in the Augustan age this practice had attained
system and elaboration. From the silence of Cicero in his Letters (the
Epistles of Pliny furnish a notable contrast) we may reasonably infer
that the custom was not known to him. It is no doubt natural in all ages
that poets and orators should inflict their compositions upon their more
intimate friends. No one of us in a literary society is safe even to-day
from this midnight peril. But even of these informal recitations we hear
little until the Augustan age. Catullus' friend Sestius perhaps recited
his orations in this fashion: but the poem[7] admits a different
interpretation. And it is significant that we are nowhere told that
Cicero declaimed to his friends the speeches of the second action
against Verres. Those speeches were not delivered in court. They were
published after the flight of Verres. If custom had tolerated it we may
be sure that Cicero would not have been slow to turn his friends into a
jury.
The formal recitation, recitation as a 'function', would seem to be the
creation of the Principate. It was the product in part, no doubt, of the
Hellenizing movement which dominated all departments of literary
fashion. But we may plausibly place its origin not so much in the vanity
of authors seeking applause, or in that absence of literary vanity which
courts a frank criticism, as in the relations of the wealthy patron and
his poor but ambitious client. The patron, in fact, did not subscribe
for what he had not read--or heard. The endless recitations to which
Augustus listened were hardly those merely of his personal friends. He
listened, as Suetonius says, 'benigne et patienter'. But it was the
'benignity and patience' not of a personal friend but of a government
official--of a government official dispensing patronage. Suetonius
allows us to divine something of the tastes of this all-powerful
official. He was the particular enemy of 'that style which is easier
admired than understood'--_quae mirentur potius homines quam
intellegant_. It looks as though the clearness and good sense which mark
so distinctively the best Augustan literature were developed to some
extent under the direct influence of the Princeps.
The Princeps and his coadjutors may perhaps be not unprofitably regarded
as the heads of a great Educational Department. Beneath them are
numberless _grammatici_ and _rhetores_. The work of these is directed
towards the ideals of the supreme heads of the Department. How far this
direction is due to accident and how far to some not very defined
control it would be impossible to say. But obviously among the conscious
aims of the schools of many of these _grammatici_ and _rhetores_ was the
ambition of achieving some of the great prizes of the literary world.
The goal of the pupil was government preferment, as we should call it.
And we may perhaps be allowed, if we guard ourselves against the peril
of mistaking a distant analogy for a real similarity of conditions, to
see in the recitations before the Emperor and his ministers, an
inspection, as it were, of schools and universities, an examination for
literary honours and emoluments. And this being so, it is not to no
purpose that the _rhetor_ in this age stands behind the _grammaticus_.
For the final examination, the inspection-by-recitation, is bound to be,
whatever the wishes of any of the parties concerned, an examination in
rhetoric. The theme appointed may be history, it may be philosophy, it
may be poetry. But the performance will be, and must be, rhetoric. The
_Aeneid_ of Vergil may be read and re-read by posterity, and pondered
word by word, line upon line. But it is going to be judged at a single
recitation. For Vergil, it is true, there may be special terms. But this
will be the lot of the many; and the many will develop, to suit it, a
fashion of poetry the influence of which even Vergil himself will hardly
altogether escape. Moreover, there will be, of course, other patrons
than the Princeps, at once less patient and less intelligent.
These effects of recitation we recognize, of course, easily enough in
the case of such a poet as Lucan. But we must go back further. Vergil
is, no doubt, as little like Lucan as he well could be. Yet he did not
sit at the feet of Epidius for nothing: and he did not forget when he
wrote the fourth book of the _Aeneid_ that he would one day read it to
Augustus. We know that there are several kinds of oratory. But we are
inclined, I think, to suppose that there is only one kind of
rhetoric--that rhetoric is always the same thing. Yet there are at least
two kinds of rhetoric. In the practical world there are two conquering
forces--the iron hand and the velvet glove. Just so in rhetoric--which
in the spiritual world is one of the greatest, and very often one of the
noblest, of conquering forces--there is the iron manner and the velvet
manner. Lucan goes home like a dagger thrust. His is the rhetoric that
cuts and beats. The rhetoric of Vergil is soft and devious. He makes no
attempt to astonish, to perplex, to horrify. He aims to move us in a
wholly different manner. And yet, like Lucan, he aims to move us _once
and for all_. He aims to be understood upon a first hearing. I know that
this sounds like a paradox. I shall be told that Vergil is of all poets
the most indirect. That is perfectly true. But _why_ is Vergil of all
poets the most indirect? Just because he is always trying at all costs
to make himself clear. Lucan says a thing once and is done with it.
Vergil cannot. He begins all over again. He touches and retouches. He
has no 'theme' not succeeded by a 'variation'. [8] In Lucan everything
depends upon concentration, in Vergil upon amplification. Both are
trying painfully to be understood on a first hearing--or, rather, to
make, on a first hearing, the emotional or ethical effect at which they
aim. Any page of Vergil will illustrate at once what I mean. I select at
random the opening lines of the third _Aeneid_:
postquam res Asiae Priamique euertere gentem
immeritam uisum superis, ceciditque superbum
Ilium, et omnis humo fumat Neptunia Troia;
diuersa exsilia et desertas quaerere terras
auguriis agimur diuum, classemque sub ipsa
Antandro et Phrygiae molimur montibus Idae,
incerti quo fata ferant, ubi sistere detur.
The first three lines might have been expressed by an ablative absolute
in two words--_Troia euersa_. But observe. To _res Asiae_ in 1 Vergil
adds the explanatory _Priami gentem_, amplifying in 2 with the new
detail _immeritam_. _Euertere uisum_ (1-2) is caught up by _ceciditque
Ilium_ (2-3), with the new detail _superbum_ added, and again echoed
(3) by _humo fumat_--_fumat_ giving a fresh touch to the picture. In 4
_diuersa exsilia_ is reinforced by _desertas terras_, _sub ipsa
Antandro_ (5-6) by _montibus Idae_ (6). In 7 _ubi sistere detur_ echoes
_quo fata ferant_. One has only to contrast the rapidity of Homer, in
whom every line marks decisive advance. But Vergil diffuses himself. And
this diffusion is in its origin and aim rhetorical.
Yet he did not write, and I do not mean to suggest that he wrote, for an
_auditorium_ and ἐς τὸ παραχρῆμα, and not for the scrupulous
consideration of after ages. He wrote to be read and pondered. But he is
haunted nevertheless by the thought of the _auditorium_. It distracts,
and even divides, his literary consciousness. He writes, perhaps without
knowing it, for two classes--for the members of his patron's salon and
for the scholar in his study. We shall not judge his style truly if we
allow ourselves wholly to forget the _auditorium_. And here let me add
that we shall equally fail to understand the style of Lucan or that of
Statius if we remember, as we are apt to do, only the _auditorium_. The
_auditorium_ is a much more dominating force in their consciousness than
it is in that of Vergil. But even they rarely allow themselves to forget
the judgement of the scholar and of posterity. They did not choose and
place their words with so meticulous a care merely for the audience of
an afternoon. If we sometimes are offended by their evident subservience
to the theatre, yet on the whole we have greater reason to admire the
courage and conscience with which they strove nevertheless to keep
before them the thought of a wider and more distant and true-judging
audience.
I have intentionally selected for notice that rhetorical feature in
Vergil's style which is, I think, the least obvious. How much of the
_Aeneid_ was written ultimately by Epidius I hardly like to inquire.
Nowhere does Vergil completely succeed in concealing his rhetorical
schooling. Even in his greatest moments he is still to a large extent a
rhetorician. Indeed I am not sure that he ever writes pure
poetry--poetry which is as purely poetry as that of Catullus. Take the
fourth book of the _Aeneid_, which has so much passionate Italian
quality. Even there Vergil does not forget the mere formal rules of
rhetoric. Analyse any speech of Dido. Dido knows all the rules. You can
christen out of Quintilian almost all the figures of rhetoric which she
employs. Here is a theme which I have not leisure to develop. But it is
interesting to remember in this connexion the immense and direct
influence which Vergil has had upon British oratory. Burke went nowhere
without a copy of Vergil in his pocket. Nor is it for nothing that the
fashion of Vergilian quotation so long dominated our parliamentary
eloquence. These quotations had a perfect appropriateness in a
rhetorical context: for they are the language of a mind by nature and by
education rhetorical.
III
Roman poetry continued for no less than five centuries after the death
of Vergil--and by Roman poetry I mean a Latin poetry classical in form
and sentiment. But of these five centuries only two count. The second
and third centuries A. D. are a Dark Age dividing the silver twilight of
the century succeeding the age of Horace from the brief but brilliant
Renaissance of the fourth century: and in the fifth century we pass into
a new darkness. The infection of the Augustan tradition is sufficiently
powerful in the first century to give the impulse to poetic work of high
and noble quality. And six considerable names adorn the period from Nero
to Domitian. Of these the greatest are perhaps those of Seneca, Lucan,
and Martial. All three are of Spanish origin: and it is perhaps to their
foreign blood that they owe the genius which redeems their work from its
very obvious faults. It is the fashion to decry Seneca and Lucan as mere
rhetoricians. Yet in both there is something greater and deeper than
mere rhetoric. They move by habit grandly among large ideas. Life is
still deep and tremendous and sonorous. Their work has a certain Titanic
quality. We judge their poetry too much by their biography, and their
biography too little in relation to the terrible character of their
times. Martial is a poet of a very different order. Yet in an inferior
_genre_ he is supreme. No other poet in any language has the same
never-failing grace and charm and brilliance, the same arresting
ingenuity, an equal facility and finish. We speak of his faults, yet, if
the truth must be told, his poetry is faultless--save for one fault: its
utter want of moral character. The three other great names of the period
are Statius, Silius, and Valerius. Poets of great talent but no genius,
they 'adore the footsteps' of an unapproachable master. Religiously
careful artists, they see the world through the eyes of others. Sensible
to the effects of Greatness, they have never touched and handled it.
They know it only from the poets whom they imitate. The four winds of
life have never beat upon their decorous faces. We would gladly give the
best that they offer us--and it is often of fine quality--for something
much inferior in art but superior in the indefinable qualities of
freshness and gusto. The exhaustion of the period is well seen in
Juvenal--in the jaded relish of his descriptions of vice, in the
complete unreality of his moral code, in a rhetoric which for ever just
misses the fine effects which it laboriously calculates.
The second century is barren. Yet we are dimly aware in the reign of
Hadrian of an abortive Revival. We hear of a school of _neoterici_: and
these _neoterici_ aimed at just what was needed--greater freshness and
life. They experimented in metre, and they experimented in language.
They tried to use in poetry the language of common speech, the language
of Italy rather than that of Rome, and to bring into literature once
again colour and motion. The most eminent of these _neoterici_ is Annius
Florus, of whom we possess some notable fragments. But the movement
failed; and Florus is the only name that arrests the attention of the
student of Roman poetry between Martial and Nemesianus. Nemesianus is
African, and his poems were not written in Rome. But his graceful genius
perhaps owes something to the impulsion given to literary studies by
Numerian--one of the few emperors of the period who exhibit any interest
in the progress of literature. The fourth century is the period of
Renaissance. We may see in Tiberianus the herald of this Renaissance.
The four poems which can be certainly assigned to him are distinguished
by great power and charm. It is a plausible view that he is also the
author of the remarkable _Peruigilium Veneris_--that poem proceeds at
any rate from the school to which Tiberianus belongs. The style of
Tiberianus is formed in the academies of Africa, and so also perhaps his
philosophy. The Platonic hymn to the Nameless God is a noble monument of
the dying Paganism of the era. Tiberianus' political activities took him
to Gaul: and Gaul is the true home of this fourth-century Renaissance.
In Gaul around Ausonius there grew up at Bordeaux a numerous and
accomplished and enthusiastic school of poets. To find a parallel to the
brilliance and enthusiasm of this school we must go back to the school
of poets which grew up around Valerius Cato in Transpadane Gaul in the
first century B. C. The Bordeaux school is particularly interesting from
its attitude to Christianity. Among Ausonius' friends was the austere
Paulinus of Nola, and Ausonius himself was a convert to the Christian
faith. But his Christianity is only skin-deep. His Bible is Vergil, his
books of devotion are Horace and Ovid and Statius. The symbols of the
Greek mythology are nearer and dearer to him than the symbolism of the
Cross. The last enemy which Christianity had to overcome was, in fact,
Literature. And strangely enough the conquest was to be achieved
finally, not by the superior ethical quality of the new religion, but by
the havoc wrought in Latin speech by the invasion of the Barbarians, by
the decay of language and of linguistic study. To the period of
Ausonius--and probably to Gaul--belong the rather obscure Asmenidae--the
'sons', or pupils, of Asmenius. At least two of them, Palladius and
Asclepiadius, exhibit genuine poetical accomplishment. But the schools
both of Ausonius and of Asmenius show at least in one particular how
relaxed had become the hold even upon its enthusiasts of the true
classical tradition. All these poets have a passion for triviality, for
every kind of _tour de force_, for conceits and mannerisms. At times they
are not so much poets as the acrobats of poetry.
The end of the century gives us Claudian, and a reaction against this
triviality. 'Paganus peruicacissimus,' as Orosius calls him, Claudian
presents the problem of a poet whose poetry treats with real power the
circumstances of an age from which the poet himself is as detached as
can be. Claudian's real world is a world which was never to be again, a
world of great princes and exalted virtues, a world animated by a
religion in which Rome herself, strong and serene, is the principal
deity. Accident has thrown him into the midst of a political nightmare
dominated by intriguing viziers and delivered to a superstition which
made men at once weak and cruel. Yet this world, so unreal to him, he
presents in a rhetorical colouring extraordinarily effective. Had he
possessed a truer instinct for things as they are he might have been the
greatest of the Roman satirists. He has a real mastery of the art of
invective. But, while he is great where he condemns, where he blesses he
is mostly contemptible. He has too many of the arts of the cringing
Alexandrian. And they availed him nothing. Over every page may be heard
the steady tramp of the feet of the barbarian invader.
After Claudian we pass into the final darkness. The gloom is illuminated
for a brief moment by the Gaul Rutilius. But Rutilius has really
outlived Roman poetry and Rome itself. Nothing that he admires is any
longer real save in his admiration of it. The things that he condemns
most bitterly are the things which were destined to dominate the world
for ten centuries. Christianity is 'a worse poison than witchcraft'. The
monastic spirit is the 'fool-fury of a brain unhinged'. The monasteries
are 'slave-dungeons'.
It was these 'slave-dungeons' which were to keep safe through the long
night of the Middle Ages all that Rutilius held dear. It was these
'slave-dungeons' which were to afford a last miserable refuge to the
works of that long line of poets of whom Rutilius is the late and
forlorn descendant. Much indeed was to perish even within the fastnesses
of these 'slave-dungeons': for the monasteries were not always secure
from the shock of war, nor the precious memorials which they housed from
the fury of fanaticism. Yet much was to survive and to emerge one day
from the darkness and to renew the face of the world. Rutilius wrote his
poem in 416 A. D. If he could have looked forward exactly a thousand
years he would have beheld Poggio and the great Discoverers of the
Italian Renaissance ransacking the 'slave-dungeons' of Italy, France,
and Germany, and rejoicing over each recovered fragment of antiquity
with a pure joy not unlike that which heavenly minds are said to feel
over the salvation of souls. These men were, indeed, kindling into life
again the soul of Europe. They were assisting at a New Birth. In this
process of regeneration the deepest force was a Latin force, and of this
Latin force the most impelling part was Latin poetry. We are apt
to-day, perhaps, in our zeal of Hellenism, to forget, or to disparage,
the part which Latin poetry has sustained in moulding the literatures of
modern Europe. But if the test of great poetry is the length and breadth
of its influence in the world, then Roman poetry has nothing to fear
from the vagaries of modern fashion. For no other poetry has so deeply
and so continuously influenced the thought and feeling of mankind. Its
sway has been wider than that of Rome itself: and the Genius that broods
over the Capitoline Hill might with some show of justice still claim, as
his gaze sweeps over the immense field of modern poetry, that he beholds
nothing which does not owe allegiance to Rome:
Iupiter arce sua totum cum spectat in orbem,
nil nisi Romanum quod tueatur habet.
NVMA POMPILIVS (? )
715-673 B. C.
_1. Fragments of the Saliar Hymns_
_i_
DIVOM templa cante,
diuom deo supplicate.
_ii_
QVOME tonas, Leucesie,
prae tet tremonti.
quor libet, Curis,
decstumum tonare?
_iii_
CONSE, ulod oriese:
omnia tuere,
adi, Patulci, coi isse:
Sancus Ianes Cerus es.
unelaborate magic of the Celtic temperament. Keats, I have often
thought, would have 'owed his eyes' to be able to write those three
lines. He hits sometimes a like matchless felicity:
She dwells with Beauty, Beauty that must die,
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu.
But into the effects which Catullus just happens upon by a luck of
temperament Keats puts more of his life-blood than a man can well spare.
Take, again, this from the _Letter to Hortalus_. Think not, says
Catullus, that your words have passed from my heart,
ut missum sponsi furtiuo munere malum
procurrit casto uirginis e gremio,
quod miserae oblitae molli sub ueste locatum,
dum aduentu matris prosilit, excutitur;
atque illud prono praeceps agitur decursu,
huic manat tristi conscius ore rubor,
--'as an apple, sent by some lover, a secret gift, falls from a maid's
chaste bosom. She placed it, poor lass, in the soft folds of her robe
and forgot it. And when her mother came towards her out it fell; fell
and rolled in headlong course. And vexed and red and wet with tears are
her guilty cheeks! '
That owes something, no doubt, to Alexandria. But in its exquisite
sensibility, its supreme delicacy and tenderness, it belongs rather to
the romantic than to the classical literatures.
_Molle atque facetum_: the deep and keen fire of mind, the quick glow of
sensibility--that is what redeems literature and life alike from
dullness. The Roman, the typical Roman, was what we call a 'dull man'.
But the Italian has this fire. And it is this that so often redeems
Roman literature from itself. We are accustomed to associate the word
_facetus_ with the idea of 'wit'. It is to be connected, it would seem,
etymologically with _fax_, 'a torch'. Its primitive meaning is
'brightness', 'brilliance': and if we wish to understand what Horace
means when he speaks of the element of '_facetum_' in Vergil, perhaps
'glow' or 'fire' will serve us better than 'wit'. _Facetus_, _facetiae_,
_infacetus_, _infacetiae_ are favourite words with Catullus. With
_lepidus_, _illepidus_, _uenustus_, _inuenustus_ they are his usual
terms of literary praise and dispraise. These words hit, of course,
often very superficial effects. Yet with Catullus and his friends they
stand for a literary ideal deeper than the contexts in which they occur:
and an ideal which, while it no doubt derives from the enthusiasm of
Alexandrian study, yet assumes a distinctively Italian character. Poetry
must be _facetus_: it must glow and dance. It must have _lepor_: it must
be clean and bright. There must be nothing slipshod, no tarnish. 'Bright
is the ring of words when the right man rings them. ' It must have
_uenustas_, 'charm', a certain melting quality. This ideal Roman poetry
never realizes perhaps in its fullness save in Catullus himself. In the
lighter poets it passes too easily into an ideal of mere cleverness:
until with Ovid (and in a less degree Martial) _lepor_ is the whole man.
In the deeper poets it is oppressed by more Roman ideals.
The _facetum ingenium_, as it manifests itself in satire and invective,
does not properly here concern us: it belongs to another order of
poetry. Yet I may be allowed to illustrate from this species of
composition the manner in which the Italian spirit in Roman poetry
asserts for itself a dominating and individual place. _Satura quidem
tota nostra est_, says Quintilian. We know now that this is not so: that
Quintilian was wrong, or perhaps rather that he has expressed himself in
a misleading fashion. Roman Satire, like the rest of Roman literature,
looks back to the Greek world. It stands in close relation to
Alexandrian Satire--a literature of which we have hitherto been hardly
aware. Horace, when he asserted the dependence of Lucilius on the old
Attic Comedy, was nearer the truth than Quintilian. But the influence of
Attic Comedy comes to Lucilius (and to Horace and to Juvenal and to
Persius) by way of the Alexandrian satirists. From the Alexandrians come
many of the stock themes of Roman Satire, many of its stock characters,
much of its moral sentiment. The _captator_, the μεμψίμοιρος,
the _auarus_ are not the creation of Horace and Juvenal. The seventh
satire of Juvenal is not the first 'Plaint of the Impoverished
Schoolmaster' in literature. Nor is Horace _Sat. _ II. viii the earliest
'Dinner with a Nouveau-Riche'. In all this, and in much else in Roman
Satire, we must recognize Alexandrian influence. Yet even so we can
distinguish clearly--much more clearly, indeed, than in other
departments of Latin poetry--the Roman and the primitive Italian
elements. 'Ecquid is homo habet aceti in pectore? ' asks Pseudolus in
Plautus. And Horace, in a well-known phrase, speaks of _Italum acetum_,
which the scholiast renders by 'Romana mordacitas'. This 'vinegar' is
the coarse and biting wit of the Italian countryside. It has its origin
in the casual ribaldry of the _uindemiatores_: in the rudely improvized
dramatic contests of the harvest-home. Transported to the city it
becomes a permanent part of Roman Satire. Roman Satire has always one
hero--the average _paterfamilias_. Often he is wise and mild and
friendly. But as often as not he is merely the _uindemiator_, thinly
disguised, pert and ready and unscrupulous, 'slinging vinegar' not only
at what is morally wrong but at anything which he happens either to
dislike or not to understand. The vices of his--often
imaginary--antagonist are recounted with evident relish and with parade
of detail.
It is not only in Satire that we meet this _Italum acetum_. We meet it
also in the poetry of personal invective. This department of Roman
poetry would hardly perhaps reward study--and it might very well revolt
the student--if it were not that Catullus has here achieved some of his
most memorable effects. In no writer is the _Italum acetum_ found in so
undiluted a sort. And he stands in this perhaps not so much for himself
as for a Transpadane school. The lampoons of his compatriot Furius
Bibaculus were as famous as his own. Vergil himself--if, as seems
likely, the _Catalepton_ be a genuine work of Vergil--did not escape the
Transpadane fashion. In fact the Italian aptitude for invective seems in
North Italy, allied with the study of Archilochus, to have created a new
type in Latin literature--a type which Horace essays not very
successfully in the _Epodes_ and some of the _Odes_. The invective of
Catullus has no humbug of moral purpose. It has its motive in mere hate.
Yet Catullus knew better than any one how subtle and complex an emotion
is hate. Two poems will illustrate better than anything I could say his
power here: and will at the same time make clear what I mean when I
distinguish the Italian from the Roman temperament in Latin poetry.
Let any one take up the eleventh poem of Catullus:
cum suis uiuat ualeatque moechis,
quos simul complexa tenet trecentos,
nullam amans uere sed identidem omnium
ilia rumpens.
There is invective. There is the lash with a vengeance. Yet the very
stanza that follows ends in a sob:
nec meum respectet, ut ante, amorem,
qui illius culpa cecidit uelut prati
ultimi flos, praetereunte postquam
tactus aratrost.
Turn now for an inverse effect to the fifty-eighth poem:
Caeli, Lesbia nostra, Lesbia illa,
illa Lesbia, quam Catullus unam
plus quam se atque suos amauit omnes . . .
Note the dragging cadences, the pathetic iteration, the scarce-concealed
agony of longing. Yet this five-line poem ends in a couplet of
intolerable obscenity.
There once more you have the unpredictable Celtic temperament--obscenity
of wrath dissolving in the tenderness of unbidden tears, fond regret
stung suddenly to a rage foul and unscrupulous.
But let me here guard against a misapprehension. The more closely we
study Roman poetry the more clearly do we become aware of the presence
in it of a non-Roman element: and the more does it seem as though this
non-Roman element were the originative force, as though it were to this
that Roman poetry owes most of that in it which we regard as essentially
poetical. The quickening force in the best Roman poetry is the Italian
blood. Yet we speak of this poetry as Roman: and it is not without
reason that we do so. If it was to a great extent made by Italians, it
was made by Italians who were already Romanized. Indeed the Italian and
the Roman elements are never so separate or so disparate in actuality as
they appear in literary analysis. The Italian spirit worked always under
the spell of Rome, and not under any merely external compulsion. And the
spell of Rome is over the whole of Roman poetry. The Italians were only
a nation _through Rome_: and a great poetry must have behind it a great
life: it must express a great people, their deeds and their ideals.
Roman poetry does, beyond almost any other poetry, bear the impress of a
great nation. And after all the _language_ of this poetry is the
language of the Romans. It is said of it, of course, that it is an
unpoetical language. And it is true that it has not the dance and
brightness of Greek: that it is wanting in fineness and subtlety: that
it is defective in vocabulary. All this is true. Yet the final test of
the poetical character of a language is the poetry that is written in
it. The mere sound of Roman poetry is the sound of a great nation. And
here let us remember what we ought never to forget in reading Roman
poetry. It was not made to be read. It was made to be spoken. The Roman
for the most part did not read. He was read to. The difference is plain
enough. Indeed it is common to hear the remark about this or that book,
that 'It is the kind of book that ought to be read aloud'. Latin books
_were_ read aloud. And this practice must have reacted, however
obscurely, upon the writing of them. Some tinge of rhetoric was
inevitable. And here I am led to a new theme.
II
Perhaps no poetry of equal power and range is so deeply infected with
rhetoric as the Roman. A principal cause of this is, no doubt, the
language. But there are other causes, and we shall most easily penetrate
these if we consider what I may call the environment of Roman poetry.
Two conditions in Rome helped to foster literary creation among a people
by temperament unimaginative. Of these the first is an educational
system deliberately and steadily directed towards the development of
poetical talent. No nation ever believed in poetry so deeply as the
Romans. They were not a people of whom we can say, as we can of the
Greeks, that they were _born to_ art and literature. Those of them who
attained to eminence in art and literature knew this perfectly well.
They knew by how laborious a process they had themselves arrived at such
talent as they achieved. The characteristic Roman triumphs are the
triumphs of material civilization. But the Romans were well aware that a
material civilization cannot be either organized or sustained without
the aid of spiritual forces, and that among the most important of the
spiritual forces that hold together the fabric of nationality are art
and literature. With that large common sense of theirs which, as they
grew in historical experience, became more and more spiritual, they
perceived early, and they gauged profoundly, the importance of
accomplishments not native to their genius. They knew what had happened
to the 'valiant kings' who 'lived before Agamemnon'--and why. The same
could easily happen to a great empire. That is partially, of course, a
utilitarian consideration. But the Romans believed also, and deeply, in
the power of literature--and particularly of poetry--to humanize, to
moralize, to mould character, to inspire action. It was this faith
which, as Cicero tells us, lay behind the great literary movement
associated with the circle of Scipio Africanus. It was this faith which
informed the Augustan literature. Horace was a man of the world--or he
liked to think himself one. He was no dreamer. Yet when he speaks of the
influence of high poetry upon the formation of character he speaks with
a grave Puritanism worthy of Plato. These practical Romans had a
practicality deeper than ours. The average Englishman, when he is told
that 'the battle of Waterloo was won by the sonnets of Wordsworth', is
puzzled and even offended. Nothing of Eton and its playing-fields?
Nothing of Wellington and his Guards? What have sonnets in common with
soldiering? But the Roman knew of himself that sonnets are a kind of
soldiering. And much as he admired deeds, he knew that there is no deed
greater than 'the song that nerves a nation's heart. '
These are not mere words: and this was not, in the Roman, an idle faith.
It was a practical faith; that is to say, he acted upon it. Upon this
faith was based, at any rate in the early period of Roman history, the
whole of the Roman system of education. The principal business of the
Roman schoolmaster was to take the great poets and interpret them 'by
reading and comment'. Education was practically synonymous with the
study of the poets. The poets made a man brave, the poets made a man
eloquent, the poets made him--if anything could make him--poetical. It
is hardly possible to over-estimate the obscure benefit to the national
life of a discipline in which the thought and language of the best
poetry were the earliest formative influences.
The second of the two conditions which favoured literary creation in
Rome was a social system which afforded to a great and influential class
the leisure for literary studies and the power to forward them. These
two conditions are, roughly, synchronous in their development. Both take
rise in the period of the Punic Wars. The Punic Wars not only quickened
but they deepened and purified Roman patriotism. They put the history of
the world in a new light to the educated Roman. The antagonism of Greek
and Roman dropped away. The wars with Pyrrhus were forgotten. The issue
was now no longer as between Greece and Rome, but as between East and
West. The Roman saw in himself the last guardian of the ideals of
Western civilization. He must hand on the torch of Hellenic culture.
Hence, while in other countries Literature _happens_, as the sun and the
air happen--as a part of the working of obscure natural forces--in Rome
it is from the beginning a premeditated self-conscious organization.
This organization has two instruments--the school of the _grammaticus_
and the house of the great noble. Here stands Philocomus, here Scipio.
In the period of the Punic Wars this organization is only rudimentary.
By no means casual, it is none the less as yet uninfected by
officialism. The transition from the age of Scipio to the age of
Augustus introduced two almost insensible modifications:
(1) In the earlier period the functions of the _grammaticus_ and the
_rhetor_ were undifferentiated. The _grammaticus_, as he was known
later, was called then _litteratus_ or _litterator_. He taught both
poetry and rhetoric. But Suetonius tells us that the name denoted
properly an 'interpres poetarum': and we may infer that in the early
period instruction in rhetoric was only a very casual adjunct of the
functions of the _litterator_. At what precise date the office of the
_litterator_ became bifurcated into the two distinct professions of
_grammaticus_ and _rhetor_ we cannot say. It seems likely that the
undivided office was retained in the smaller Italian towns after it had
disappeared from the educational system of Rome. The author of
_Catelepton V_, who may very well be Vergil, appears to have frequented
a school where poetry and rhetoric were taught in conjunction. Valerius
Cato and Sulla, the former certainly, the latter probably, a
Transpadane, were known as _litteratores_. But the _litterator_
gradually everywhere gave place to the _grammaticus_: and behind the
_grammaticus_, like Care behind the horseman, sits spectrally the
_rhetor_.
(2) The introduction of the _rhetor_ synchronizes with the transition
from the private patron to the patron-as-government-official. And by an
odd accident both changes worked in one and the same direction. That the
system of literary patronage was in many of its effects injurious to the
Augustan literature is a thesis which was once generally allowed. But it
was a thesis which could easily take exaggerated expression. And against
the view which it presents there has recently been a not unnatural
reaction. A moderate representative of this reaction is the late
Professor Nettleship. 'The intimacy', says Nettleship[5], 'which grew
up between Octavianus and some of the great writers of his time did not
imply more than the relation which . . . often existed between a poor poet
and his powerful friend. For as the men of nobler character among the
Roman aristocracy were mostly ambitious of achieving literary success
themselves, and were sometimes really successful in achieving it: as
they had formed a high ideal of individual culture . . . aiming at
excellence in literature and philosophy as well as in politics and the
art of war, so they looked with a kindly eye on the men of talent and
genius who with less wealth and social resources than their own were
engaged in the great work of improving the national literature. '
There is much here which is truly and tellingly said. We ought never to
forget that the system of patronage sprang from a very lofty notion of
patriotism and of the national welfare. It implies a clear and fine
recognition among the great men of affairs of the principle that a
nation's greatness is not to be measured, and cannot be sustained, by
purely material achievements. It is true, again, that the system of
patronage did not originate with Augustus or the Augustans. Augustus was
a patron of letters just as Scipio had been--because he possessed power
and taste and a wide sense of patriotic obligation. So much is true, or
fairly true. But if it is meant, as I think it is, that the literary
patronage of the Princeps was the same in kind as, and different only in
degree from, that exercised by the great men of the Republican
period--if that is meant, then we have gone beyond what is either true
or plausible.
I am not concerned here, let me say, with the _moral_ effects of
literary patronage. I am concerned only with its literary effects. Nor
will I charge these to Augustus alone. He was but one patron--however
powerful--among many. He did not create the literature which carries his
name. Nevertheless it seems impossible to doubt that it was largely
moulded under his personal influence, and that he has left upon it the
impress of his own masterful and imperial temper. Suetonius in a few
casual paragraphs gives us some insight into his literary tastes and
methods. He represents him as from his youth up a genuine enthusiast for
literature: 'Eloquentiam studiaque liberalia (i. e. _grammatice_ and
rhetoric) ab aetate prima et cupide et laboriosissime exercuit. ' Even
upon active military service he made a point of reading, composing, and
declaiming daily. He wrote a variety of prose works, and 'poetica
summatim attigit', he dabbled in poetry. There were still extant in
Suetonius' time two volumes of his poetry, the one a collection of
_Epigrammata_, the other--more interesting and significant--a hexameter
poem upon _Sicily_. [6] Moreover Augustus 'nursed in all ways the
literary talent of his time'. He listened 'with charity and
long-suffering' to endless recitations 'not only of poetry and of
history but of orations and of dialogues'.
We are somewhat apt, I fancy,
to associate the practice of recitation too exclusively with the
literary circles of the time of Nero, Domitian, and Trajan. Yet it is
quite clear that already in the Augustan age this practice had attained
system and elaboration. From the silence of Cicero in his Letters (the
Epistles of Pliny furnish a notable contrast) we may reasonably infer
that the custom was not known to him. It is no doubt natural in all ages
that poets and orators should inflict their compositions upon their more
intimate friends. No one of us in a literary society is safe even to-day
from this midnight peril. But even of these informal recitations we hear
little until the Augustan age. Catullus' friend Sestius perhaps recited
his orations in this fashion: but the poem[7] admits a different
interpretation. And it is significant that we are nowhere told that
Cicero declaimed to his friends the speeches of the second action
against Verres. Those speeches were not delivered in court. They were
published after the flight of Verres. If custom had tolerated it we may
be sure that Cicero would not have been slow to turn his friends into a
jury.
The formal recitation, recitation as a 'function', would seem to be the
creation of the Principate. It was the product in part, no doubt, of the
Hellenizing movement which dominated all departments of literary
fashion. But we may plausibly place its origin not so much in the vanity
of authors seeking applause, or in that absence of literary vanity which
courts a frank criticism, as in the relations of the wealthy patron and
his poor but ambitious client. The patron, in fact, did not subscribe
for what he had not read--or heard. The endless recitations to which
Augustus listened were hardly those merely of his personal friends. He
listened, as Suetonius says, 'benigne et patienter'. But it was the
'benignity and patience' not of a personal friend but of a government
official--of a government official dispensing patronage. Suetonius
allows us to divine something of the tastes of this all-powerful
official. He was the particular enemy of 'that style which is easier
admired than understood'--_quae mirentur potius homines quam
intellegant_. It looks as though the clearness and good sense which mark
so distinctively the best Augustan literature were developed to some
extent under the direct influence of the Princeps.
The Princeps and his coadjutors may perhaps be not unprofitably regarded
as the heads of a great Educational Department. Beneath them are
numberless _grammatici_ and _rhetores_. The work of these is directed
towards the ideals of the supreme heads of the Department. How far this
direction is due to accident and how far to some not very defined
control it would be impossible to say. But obviously among the conscious
aims of the schools of many of these _grammatici_ and _rhetores_ was the
ambition of achieving some of the great prizes of the literary world.
The goal of the pupil was government preferment, as we should call it.
And we may perhaps be allowed, if we guard ourselves against the peril
of mistaking a distant analogy for a real similarity of conditions, to
see in the recitations before the Emperor and his ministers, an
inspection, as it were, of schools and universities, an examination for
literary honours and emoluments. And this being so, it is not to no
purpose that the _rhetor_ in this age stands behind the _grammaticus_.
For the final examination, the inspection-by-recitation, is bound to be,
whatever the wishes of any of the parties concerned, an examination in
rhetoric. The theme appointed may be history, it may be philosophy, it
may be poetry. But the performance will be, and must be, rhetoric. The
_Aeneid_ of Vergil may be read and re-read by posterity, and pondered
word by word, line upon line. But it is going to be judged at a single
recitation. For Vergil, it is true, there may be special terms. But this
will be the lot of the many; and the many will develop, to suit it, a
fashion of poetry the influence of which even Vergil himself will hardly
altogether escape. Moreover, there will be, of course, other patrons
than the Princeps, at once less patient and less intelligent.
These effects of recitation we recognize, of course, easily enough in
the case of such a poet as Lucan. But we must go back further. Vergil
is, no doubt, as little like Lucan as he well could be. Yet he did not
sit at the feet of Epidius for nothing: and he did not forget when he
wrote the fourth book of the _Aeneid_ that he would one day read it to
Augustus. We know that there are several kinds of oratory. But we are
inclined, I think, to suppose that there is only one kind of
rhetoric--that rhetoric is always the same thing. Yet there are at least
two kinds of rhetoric. In the practical world there are two conquering
forces--the iron hand and the velvet glove. Just so in rhetoric--which
in the spiritual world is one of the greatest, and very often one of the
noblest, of conquering forces--there is the iron manner and the velvet
manner. Lucan goes home like a dagger thrust. His is the rhetoric that
cuts and beats. The rhetoric of Vergil is soft and devious. He makes no
attempt to astonish, to perplex, to horrify. He aims to move us in a
wholly different manner. And yet, like Lucan, he aims to move us _once
and for all_. He aims to be understood upon a first hearing. I know that
this sounds like a paradox. I shall be told that Vergil is of all poets
the most indirect. That is perfectly true. But _why_ is Vergil of all
poets the most indirect? Just because he is always trying at all costs
to make himself clear. Lucan says a thing once and is done with it.
Vergil cannot. He begins all over again. He touches and retouches. He
has no 'theme' not succeeded by a 'variation'. [8] In Lucan everything
depends upon concentration, in Vergil upon amplification. Both are
trying painfully to be understood on a first hearing--or, rather, to
make, on a first hearing, the emotional or ethical effect at which they
aim. Any page of Vergil will illustrate at once what I mean. I select at
random the opening lines of the third _Aeneid_:
postquam res Asiae Priamique euertere gentem
immeritam uisum superis, ceciditque superbum
Ilium, et omnis humo fumat Neptunia Troia;
diuersa exsilia et desertas quaerere terras
auguriis agimur diuum, classemque sub ipsa
Antandro et Phrygiae molimur montibus Idae,
incerti quo fata ferant, ubi sistere detur.
The first three lines might have been expressed by an ablative absolute
in two words--_Troia euersa_. But observe. To _res Asiae_ in 1 Vergil
adds the explanatory _Priami gentem_, amplifying in 2 with the new
detail _immeritam_. _Euertere uisum_ (1-2) is caught up by _ceciditque
Ilium_ (2-3), with the new detail _superbum_ added, and again echoed
(3) by _humo fumat_--_fumat_ giving a fresh touch to the picture. In 4
_diuersa exsilia_ is reinforced by _desertas terras_, _sub ipsa
Antandro_ (5-6) by _montibus Idae_ (6). In 7 _ubi sistere detur_ echoes
_quo fata ferant_. One has only to contrast the rapidity of Homer, in
whom every line marks decisive advance. But Vergil diffuses himself. And
this diffusion is in its origin and aim rhetorical.
Yet he did not write, and I do not mean to suggest that he wrote, for an
_auditorium_ and ἐς τὸ παραχρῆμα, and not for the scrupulous
consideration of after ages. He wrote to be read and pondered. But he is
haunted nevertheless by the thought of the _auditorium_. It distracts,
and even divides, his literary consciousness. He writes, perhaps without
knowing it, for two classes--for the members of his patron's salon and
for the scholar in his study. We shall not judge his style truly if we
allow ourselves wholly to forget the _auditorium_. And here let me add
that we shall equally fail to understand the style of Lucan or that of
Statius if we remember, as we are apt to do, only the _auditorium_. The
_auditorium_ is a much more dominating force in their consciousness than
it is in that of Vergil. But even they rarely allow themselves to forget
the judgement of the scholar and of posterity. They did not choose and
place their words with so meticulous a care merely for the audience of
an afternoon. If we sometimes are offended by their evident subservience
to the theatre, yet on the whole we have greater reason to admire the
courage and conscience with which they strove nevertheless to keep
before them the thought of a wider and more distant and true-judging
audience.
I have intentionally selected for notice that rhetorical feature in
Vergil's style which is, I think, the least obvious. How much of the
_Aeneid_ was written ultimately by Epidius I hardly like to inquire.
Nowhere does Vergil completely succeed in concealing his rhetorical
schooling. Even in his greatest moments he is still to a large extent a
rhetorician. Indeed I am not sure that he ever writes pure
poetry--poetry which is as purely poetry as that of Catullus. Take the
fourth book of the _Aeneid_, which has so much passionate Italian
quality. Even there Vergil does not forget the mere formal rules of
rhetoric. Analyse any speech of Dido. Dido knows all the rules. You can
christen out of Quintilian almost all the figures of rhetoric which she
employs. Here is a theme which I have not leisure to develop. But it is
interesting to remember in this connexion the immense and direct
influence which Vergil has had upon British oratory. Burke went nowhere
without a copy of Vergil in his pocket. Nor is it for nothing that the
fashion of Vergilian quotation so long dominated our parliamentary
eloquence. These quotations had a perfect appropriateness in a
rhetorical context: for they are the language of a mind by nature and by
education rhetorical.
III
Roman poetry continued for no less than five centuries after the death
of Vergil--and by Roman poetry I mean a Latin poetry classical in form
and sentiment. But of these five centuries only two count. The second
and third centuries A. D. are a Dark Age dividing the silver twilight of
the century succeeding the age of Horace from the brief but brilliant
Renaissance of the fourth century: and in the fifth century we pass into
a new darkness. The infection of the Augustan tradition is sufficiently
powerful in the first century to give the impulse to poetic work of high
and noble quality. And six considerable names adorn the period from Nero
to Domitian. Of these the greatest are perhaps those of Seneca, Lucan,
and Martial. All three are of Spanish origin: and it is perhaps to their
foreign blood that they owe the genius which redeems their work from its
very obvious faults. It is the fashion to decry Seneca and Lucan as mere
rhetoricians. Yet in both there is something greater and deeper than
mere rhetoric. They move by habit grandly among large ideas. Life is
still deep and tremendous and sonorous. Their work has a certain Titanic
quality. We judge their poetry too much by their biography, and their
biography too little in relation to the terrible character of their
times. Martial is a poet of a very different order. Yet in an inferior
_genre_ he is supreme. No other poet in any language has the same
never-failing grace and charm and brilliance, the same arresting
ingenuity, an equal facility and finish. We speak of his faults, yet, if
the truth must be told, his poetry is faultless--save for one fault: its
utter want of moral character. The three other great names of the period
are Statius, Silius, and Valerius. Poets of great talent but no genius,
they 'adore the footsteps' of an unapproachable master. Religiously
careful artists, they see the world through the eyes of others. Sensible
to the effects of Greatness, they have never touched and handled it.
They know it only from the poets whom they imitate. The four winds of
life have never beat upon their decorous faces. We would gladly give the
best that they offer us--and it is often of fine quality--for something
much inferior in art but superior in the indefinable qualities of
freshness and gusto. The exhaustion of the period is well seen in
Juvenal--in the jaded relish of his descriptions of vice, in the
complete unreality of his moral code, in a rhetoric which for ever just
misses the fine effects which it laboriously calculates.
The second century is barren. Yet we are dimly aware in the reign of
Hadrian of an abortive Revival. We hear of a school of _neoterici_: and
these _neoterici_ aimed at just what was needed--greater freshness and
life. They experimented in metre, and they experimented in language.
They tried to use in poetry the language of common speech, the language
of Italy rather than that of Rome, and to bring into literature once
again colour and motion. The most eminent of these _neoterici_ is Annius
Florus, of whom we possess some notable fragments. But the movement
failed; and Florus is the only name that arrests the attention of the
student of Roman poetry between Martial and Nemesianus. Nemesianus is
African, and his poems were not written in Rome. But his graceful genius
perhaps owes something to the impulsion given to literary studies by
Numerian--one of the few emperors of the period who exhibit any interest
in the progress of literature. The fourth century is the period of
Renaissance. We may see in Tiberianus the herald of this Renaissance.
The four poems which can be certainly assigned to him are distinguished
by great power and charm. It is a plausible view that he is also the
author of the remarkable _Peruigilium Veneris_--that poem proceeds at
any rate from the school to which Tiberianus belongs. The style of
Tiberianus is formed in the academies of Africa, and so also perhaps his
philosophy. The Platonic hymn to the Nameless God is a noble monument of
the dying Paganism of the era. Tiberianus' political activities took him
to Gaul: and Gaul is the true home of this fourth-century Renaissance.
In Gaul around Ausonius there grew up at Bordeaux a numerous and
accomplished and enthusiastic school of poets. To find a parallel to the
brilliance and enthusiasm of this school we must go back to the school
of poets which grew up around Valerius Cato in Transpadane Gaul in the
first century B. C. The Bordeaux school is particularly interesting from
its attitude to Christianity. Among Ausonius' friends was the austere
Paulinus of Nola, and Ausonius himself was a convert to the Christian
faith. But his Christianity is only skin-deep. His Bible is Vergil, his
books of devotion are Horace and Ovid and Statius. The symbols of the
Greek mythology are nearer and dearer to him than the symbolism of the
Cross. The last enemy which Christianity had to overcome was, in fact,
Literature. And strangely enough the conquest was to be achieved
finally, not by the superior ethical quality of the new religion, but by
the havoc wrought in Latin speech by the invasion of the Barbarians, by
the decay of language and of linguistic study. To the period of
Ausonius--and probably to Gaul--belong the rather obscure Asmenidae--the
'sons', or pupils, of Asmenius. At least two of them, Palladius and
Asclepiadius, exhibit genuine poetical accomplishment. But the schools
both of Ausonius and of Asmenius show at least in one particular how
relaxed had become the hold even upon its enthusiasts of the true
classical tradition. All these poets have a passion for triviality, for
every kind of _tour de force_, for conceits and mannerisms. At times they
are not so much poets as the acrobats of poetry.
The end of the century gives us Claudian, and a reaction against this
triviality. 'Paganus peruicacissimus,' as Orosius calls him, Claudian
presents the problem of a poet whose poetry treats with real power the
circumstances of an age from which the poet himself is as detached as
can be. Claudian's real world is a world which was never to be again, a
world of great princes and exalted virtues, a world animated by a
religion in which Rome herself, strong and serene, is the principal
deity. Accident has thrown him into the midst of a political nightmare
dominated by intriguing viziers and delivered to a superstition which
made men at once weak and cruel. Yet this world, so unreal to him, he
presents in a rhetorical colouring extraordinarily effective. Had he
possessed a truer instinct for things as they are he might have been the
greatest of the Roman satirists. He has a real mastery of the art of
invective. But, while he is great where he condemns, where he blesses he
is mostly contemptible. He has too many of the arts of the cringing
Alexandrian. And they availed him nothing. Over every page may be heard
the steady tramp of the feet of the barbarian invader.
After Claudian we pass into the final darkness. The gloom is illuminated
for a brief moment by the Gaul Rutilius. But Rutilius has really
outlived Roman poetry and Rome itself. Nothing that he admires is any
longer real save in his admiration of it. The things that he condemns
most bitterly are the things which were destined to dominate the world
for ten centuries. Christianity is 'a worse poison than witchcraft'. The
monastic spirit is the 'fool-fury of a brain unhinged'. The monasteries
are 'slave-dungeons'.
It was these 'slave-dungeons' which were to keep safe through the long
night of the Middle Ages all that Rutilius held dear. It was these
'slave-dungeons' which were to afford a last miserable refuge to the
works of that long line of poets of whom Rutilius is the late and
forlorn descendant. Much indeed was to perish even within the fastnesses
of these 'slave-dungeons': for the monasteries were not always secure
from the shock of war, nor the precious memorials which they housed from
the fury of fanaticism. Yet much was to survive and to emerge one day
from the darkness and to renew the face of the world. Rutilius wrote his
poem in 416 A. D. If he could have looked forward exactly a thousand
years he would have beheld Poggio and the great Discoverers of the
Italian Renaissance ransacking the 'slave-dungeons' of Italy, France,
and Germany, and rejoicing over each recovered fragment of antiquity
with a pure joy not unlike that which heavenly minds are said to feel
over the salvation of souls. These men were, indeed, kindling into life
again the soul of Europe. They were assisting at a New Birth. In this
process of regeneration the deepest force was a Latin force, and of this
Latin force the most impelling part was Latin poetry. We are apt
to-day, perhaps, in our zeal of Hellenism, to forget, or to disparage,
the part which Latin poetry has sustained in moulding the literatures of
modern Europe. But if the test of great poetry is the length and breadth
of its influence in the world, then Roman poetry has nothing to fear
from the vagaries of modern fashion. For no other poetry has so deeply
and so continuously influenced the thought and feeling of mankind. Its
sway has been wider than that of Rome itself: and the Genius that broods
over the Capitoline Hill might with some show of justice still claim, as
his gaze sweeps over the immense field of modern poetry, that he beholds
nothing which does not owe allegiance to Rome:
Iupiter arce sua totum cum spectat in orbem,
nil nisi Romanum quod tueatur habet.
NVMA POMPILIVS (? )
715-673 B. C.
_1. Fragments of the Saliar Hymns_
_i_
DIVOM templa cante,
diuom deo supplicate.
_ii_
QVOME tonas, Leucesie,
prae tet tremonti.
quor libet, Curis,
decstumum tonare?
_iii_
CONSE, ulod oriese:
omnia tuere,
adi, Patulci, coi isse:
Sancus Ianes Cerus es.
