Part 2

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 {mempsimoiros}, 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.