Part 7

Virgil is not, indeed, the only epic poet of Rome, although immeasurably the greatest. Lucan, in the silver age, composed an epic poem of the “great action” of Julius Caesar in crushing Pompey. Like most of the productions of that period of the second best, the _Pharsalia_ is full of epigrammatic sayings, deliberate _tours de force_ and brilliant rhetoric, together with much unreal sentiment, false taste, and grotesque or repellent detail. According to Quintilian Lucan is “more fit to be ranked amongst orators than poets.” Soon afterwards comes Statius with his _Thebaid_, or epic of Thebes, a work of great pains and little life, here and there beautified with those rather morbid colours which have been known to suggest the dying dolphin, but incapable of sustaining any natural interest. If he was called “Virgil’s ape,” the censure is hardly too severe. To us, however, the poem is of some account as having formed a portion of the staple reading in the days of Chaucer, who refers to “Stace” with avowed admiration. The tale of _Palamon and Arcite_, which Chaucer so admirably transformed from Boccaccio, owes its origin to this somewhat insipid epic of the Roman. Meanwhile the world has been content to forget the partial versions of Statius essayed by Pope or Gray.

In Lyric poetry, apart from the elegiac style, there are two names, and two only, which stand out upon the chart of Roman history. One is Catullus, the other Horace, and both are of the golden age, although of different halves of that epoch. Catullus flourished under the republic about 60 B.C., Horace under Augustus a generation later. It is curious to observe how the verdict of taste is reversing the positions once held in the general estimation by these two exquisite writers. Time was, and not so long ago, when Horace was more read and quoted than any other poet of antiquity. He was quoted at dinners, in literature, in parliament. It was taken for granted that he represented the _ne plus ultra_ of lyric quality. Catullus, it is true, was praised, but comparatively neglected withal. But those who love literature as much for its substance as its form, who seek for inward warmth and for stimulation of the pulses as well as for pleasure of the palate, and who are attracted by the sterling rather than by the elaborated—these set Catullus on a plane to which Horace never reaches. Horace has been called “the poet of the man of the world,” and the phrase, while fairly true, is manifestly not the highest commendation. Those who read him without prepossession discover that under all his gracefulness he is naturally unimaginative; that, feeling little, he has little power over the heart; and, furthermore, that he is prone to a peculiar inconsequence. Among his virtues is included the characteristic Roman virtue of sound practical sense; but lyric poetry is hardly to be satisfied with that merit. As a man of letters he takes his rank from the perfection of his expression, from his consummate skill of putting the fittest word in the fittest place with a singular terseness and lucidity. To the ancient critic his work was marked by a _curiosa felicitas_—a “painstaking happiness” of phrase. Meanwhile Catullus possesses a far higher gift, the gift of experiencing a sincere emotion and of communicating it by a rare directness and simplicity of expression, almost after the manner of the Lesbian lyrists or of Robert Burns. This is not to deny that Catullus was a conscious artist, but perfect literature consists in this, that art expends itself on expressing a feeling sincerely felt or a thought sincerely conceived.

Upon English literature the Latin lyrists, and more especially Horace, have exercised a far-reaching influence, sometimes with the full consciousness of the English poet, more often indirectly. The “Horatian Ode”—that is to say, the ode in which there is but one comparative short form of stanza repeated throughout—explains its own genesis by its name. In other cases of English lyrics it is not easy, nor is it necessary, to distinguish precisely between the debt due to the Latin writers and that due to native-grown song and ballad. English lyrics of feeling would necessarily have developed themselves in some shape without the aid of foreign example, but in point of fact, the Elizabethans, and still more the “cavalier” poets of the seventeenth century, were in the habit of looking to Horace, and in a less degree to Catullus, for suggestions of form and expression and occasionally of thought. For one external indication of this attitude we may look to the practice of the school of Herrick, Suckling, Lovelace, and Waller, who (following Elizabethan sonneteers) habitually call their inspiring mistresses by the names of “Lesbia,” “Delia,” “Chloe,” and the like, for no other reason than that these are the non-committal names sanctioned by the usage of the Latin lyrists.

Elegiac poetry, which, though properly a branch of lyric, has acquired a form and character practically constituting it a class apart, was cultivated and brought to perfection by a group of poets in the last third of the last century before Christ. Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid are the representatives in Latin of a form of art which had flourished greatly in the lyric age of classical Greece, and had been revived with much distinction, but with a new tone of sentiment, by Callimachus in the age of Alexandria. In Latin Catullus had already taken Callimachus for a model, and transplanted the elegy to Rome. But it was the group above-named who in turns imparted to such compositions a specially Roman character in respect of exacting rules of form. The elegy in early Greece found various themes in martial and social exhortations, moral sentiments, and advice, or in the expression of personal feelings in different moods. If at Alexandria its matter consisted most frequently of the thoughts and moods of the lover, the modification was due to altered social conditions. It is hard to say what themes might not be treated in the elegiac form, provided they were of moderate length and scope. The Latin poets use the fullest liberty in this respect. Thus Ovid not only writes his _Amores_ or love-poems in the usual sense, his _Tristia_ or personal sorrows in banishment, and his _Letters of Heroines_, in which the writers pour out their feelings to their absent or unfaithful lovers or husbands, but he also puts together stories of Roman history into a sort of calendar, which is accordingly named the _Fasti_. A modern poem of reflection, an “occasional” poem, a sonnet, or even Milton’s _Lycidas_, would alike be fitly converted into Latin elegiac verse.

Of the three elegists, Propertius, though remarkably unequal in quality, and often rough and obscure (with an obscurity which suggests Browning), in both expression and allusion, shows the most of native strength and emotional sincerity. Tibullus is the lucid and graceful exponent of the pensive commonplace. Ovid, the master of verbal polish and concision, is to the elegy very much what Horace is to the ode. Facile and prolific, he touches few subjects which he does not adorn. Unfortunately the subjects which he touches are too often shallow and morally unworthy. His attitude is that of a man not only without moral care, but without capacity for any genuine ardour or emotion. He charms with his variety, and with his grace and dexterity of treatment, but he strikes none of those full or poignant chords which are wont to be stirred by elegies in Greek or English literature.

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Other forms of poetical composition among the Romans were the bucolic (or pastoral eclogue), the philosophic, the didactic, the narrative, and the poetry of fable.

Of bucolic or pastoral poetry, as written by the Greeks, something has already been said, as also of the pedigree of this species before its arrival in the literature of England. In Latin literature it is represented almost solely by Virgil, his later imitator Calpurnius being of little account either in himself or his effects. Virgil is the first to introduce the species into Latin, and the line of descent from Theocritus through Virgil to the Italians Sannazaro and Mantuan, and thence to Spenser, is distinct and undisguised. In verse of a certain subtle charm of movement, tinged occasionally with a deliberate rusticity, and pervaded with a suggestion of pensive sympathy rare in Latin writers, Virgil ostensibly tells in dramatic or semi-dramatic form of the loves, labours, sorrows, and songs of shepherds, goatherds, and other simple rural folk. Under this cover, however, he is often in reality touching upon his own personal experiences and those of his friends, or gently couching some poetical moral, or finding a safe vent for the mild philosophizings of his meditative youth. Something of the kind had already been done by the Greek imitators of Theocritus, but Virgil goes much further than they. He has thus changed the whole nature of the pastoral, and, artistically considered, for the worse. The shepherds are no longer real and convincing, and the truth of nature’s mirror is destroyed. Nevertheless, through a happy trick of cadence, felicitous touches of natural description, and an indescribable atmosphere of sympathy, the _Eclogues_ are wont to exert a charm which defies criticism to do its worst.

Didactic poetry is met with in Virgil’s _Georgics_, or _Rules for Husbandmen_. In four compositions he deals with corn-crops, fruit-trees, cattle-breeding, and bee-keeping. The model was supplied, as usual, by the Alexandrian Greeks, and for these the ancient inventor and the source was Hesiod. There is no reason to doubt Virgil’s genuine interest in these practical rustic themes. But, being essentially a poet and not a farmer, he is not to be satisfied with versifying, however skilfully, a list of useful precepts. If the work was, as Merivale considers it, the “glorification of labour,” it served meanwhile as a frame for special passages of great beauty upon topics more or less naturally associated with the matter in hand. The poet on occasion finds it no long step to take from the weather to eclipses, from eclipses to the death of Caesar, and from Caesar to patriotic reflections. The digressions are not so far afield, nor so numerous as in Cowper’s _Task_, but that work may perhaps be cited in partial illustration.

Didactic in another kind is that short _Art of Poetry_, written in deft verse by Horace, which was copied by Boileau in his _Art Poétique_, and freely utilized by Pope in his _Essay on Criticism_. Its professed aim is to inculcate certain principles of poetic composition, and, in particular, the composition of drama. Inasmuch as Horace was drawing upon Greek doctrines derived from Aristotle, but not always understood by their somewhat superficial Roman poetizer; inasmuch also as poetic drama had no real existence in the days of Horace, there was little prospect that the _Art of Poetry_ would shed any new illumination upon the world. To those who have read the seminal work of Aristotle, the precepts of Horace inevitably appear rather trite and shallow. The writer here, as elsewhere, is marked by shrewd and humorous good sense and a gift of terse expression, and it must be admitted that these form an excellent endowment for the middleman of intellectual traffic. The essay would doubtless be read by his contemporaries with enjoyment, and in many cases with edification. The misfortune is that, from the later seventeenth century onwards, it was the superficial Horace rather than the fundamental Aristotle who served as dictator of the laws of verse to both England and France.

Philosophic verse, which is, of course, a species of the didactic, finds its best representative, not merely for Latin literature, but for the literature of the world, in Lucretius, who wrote during the latter days of republican Rome. His poem _On the Nature of Things_ is an exposition of the philosophy of Epicurus, as developed from the physical speculations of Democritus. According to this philosophy the original contents of the universe were minute atoms, the “seeds” or “elements” of things, moving in a void. By their fortuitous collisions and various combinations were formed all things as they are or have been. To this extent had ancient speculation, combining bold imagination with close reasoning, anticipated modern chemistry and astronomical hypothesis. From crude and accidental beginnings, says Lucretius, there ensues a “survival of the fittest,” and thus, though unaided by modern scientific appliances, and imperfectly directed from the point of view of modern scientific method, ancient speculation anticipates also the doctrines of modern evolutionists. In the application of these results to the conduct of life (which is the practical aim of philosophy) it is evident that current theology must receive a severe blow. To Lucretius the chief blessing derived from the true philosophy is that man is emancipated from superstition, with all its terrors in life and death and all the mischiefs it has worked. We may conjecture that the soul of the poet himself, which was brooding and melancholy, would have been eminently impressible by superstitious dread, if it had not been fortified by this wisdom of “the master.” His fervent onslaught on _religio_ (in the Latin sense) and its crushing effects can hardly be otherwise explained. He does not—nor did Epicurus—absolutely deny the existence of gods; these are logically as producible as other “things.” What he denies is their interference with the processes of nature. All this and more he sets forth in the six books of the _De Rerum Natura_.

In the use of verse as the vehicle of philosophic teaching, Lucretius is but following the lead of the older Greeks, Empedocles, Xenophanes, or Parmenides. The task is technically difficult, and in modern times it would be purposeless. But for Lucretius we must not only grant the utility of the method in awakening intellectual interest as widely as possible among a community less prepared for philosophy than for poetry; we are also compelled to recognize that his effort to make philosophy talk in Latin verse was technically a triumph. Yet Lucretius is much more than a translator of Greek philosophy into Latin hexameters. He is a poet. Doubtless the passages in which he is setting forth bare statement of theory, or bare argument, are of necessity as dull as many passages of theologizing in Milton’s _Paradise Lost_ or _Paradise Regained_, or as many passages in Wordsworth’s _Excursion_. But when the poetic opportunity arrives, and when he is irresistibly borne away with such reflections as those upon the life and death of man, he writes in lines as splendid as those of Milton and Wordsworth at their best. Through all the work there is a tone of the ardent missionary of intellectual deliverance, blent with a certain melancholy which recalls Ecclesiastes. Latin literature is not strong in great intellectual forces, but among these Lucretius must hold a foremost place.

Narrative poetry, apart from epic, occupies no large space in the literature of Latin. The _Metamorphoses_ of Ovid practically stand alone. These, written in a lighter and more fluent hexameter than that of Virgil’s _Aeneid_, are a series of stories dealing, as the title shows, with the various transformations undergone by human beings in mythology or legend. If there is anything in Latin answering to the “romantic” elements in Ariosto or Spenser it is to be found here. The author, knowing the stories to be fabulous, employs all his fancy and inventiveness, his descriptive power and gift of language, in embellishing them. Men and women are turned into beasts, birds, monsters, trees, or stones with much poetic gusto of circumstance. The want of real unity is no drawback to the work; the telling of the legends is brilliant; the stories themselves are such as at all times appeal to the lovers of the romantic and the marvellous, and particularly to the young. From these causes it is not too much to say that the influence of the _Metamorphoses_ has been immeasurable. The usual mediaeval, renaissance, and modern _répertoires_ of mythological story have been almost entirely derived from Ovid. To the better read contemporaries of Chaucer, as of Shakespeare, Ovid supplied not only the matter, but the spirit of such narrative. Such a familiar legend as that touching one of Philemon and Baucis may be Greek in origin, but it is Ovid who has made it the property of the later western world.

Not inappropriately may be introduced here the mention of a minor writer, whose work, despite its slender substance and its narrow range of genius, has been far-reaching in its legacy. This is Phaedrus, the versifier of fables in the reign of Tiberius. With no special brilliancy or gift of invention, but with a style of lucid simplicity which is excellent for such narration, Phaedrus puts into verse the Greek fables—commonly fathered all alike on “Aesop”—which he could find current in his day. The collection is probably much the same as that of the Greek Demetrius Phalereus (300 B.C.). From the point of view of both morals and language the book served admirably for schoolboys, and it is at least one of the main sources of the fables which found their way into England, first with Alfred, and later, in more force, with Caxton’s “Aesop.”

In one branch of verse-writing, which must next be considered, the Roman writers have every claim to the credit of originality. There has always been, as there is at the present day, in the Italian mind a pronounced strain of satire and irony, a tendency to lampoon and epigram, a disposition to look on the seamy or ridiculous side of things. The Aretino of later Italy is a true descendant of the Lucilius of ancient Rome. The Romans themselves claimed as their very own the form of composition known as _satura_. Satire, as a tone, may appear in Greek writers of various kinds; it may even approach a special recognition in certain portions of the Old Comedy of Athens; but there existed no Greek example of a separate composition with the character implied in “a satire.” The word itself, however, demands some examination. To us it primarily implies fault-finding, general or particular, and such the satire became, particularly in the hands of Juvenal. But originally _satura_ meant a mixed dish, a medley of observations upon society and men. These observations naturally took the form of describing habits and revealing motives. It would follow that, according to the temperament of the writer, the _satura_ might become either a moral essay or a satire in the modern sense. Bitterness is not properly essential to such compositions, and in the _Satires_ of Horace there is comparatively little of that quality. His _Epistles_, which are practically only _saturae_ under another name, are still more distinguished by geniality. Nevertheless, just as “censure” began by meaning “judgement” and has come to mean unfavourable judgement, so “satire” speedily limited its implication even among the Romans. A hundred years before Horace a certain Lucilius (of whom only fragments remain) had practised a vigorous but rough invective in his _saturae_, but for us it is Horace who represents the establishment of satire as a species of cultivated writing. To him these compositions were _sermones_, or “talks,” and they were permitted to serve as the vehicle for a frank egotism not unlike that of the _Essais_ of Montaigne. They are “satirical” in that they from time to time administer more or less caustic chastisement to contemporary follies or vices. Three-quarters of a century later, in the silver age, Persius put forth a small book of satires full of promise, but also full of faults in the way of obscurities and artificialities of style. Trained as a philosopher, he had studied mankind from books, and particularly from Horace, rather than from experience, and, as he died at twenty-eight, it may be presupposed that his insight is far from deep. Fortunately he was withheld from the savage invective customary with youth by his philosophic sincerity and the mildness of his nature. It is early in the next century that satire, in the hands of Juvenal, becomes the polished and trenchant weapon of offence now commonly understood by the term. Juvenal became, and has remained, the very prince of those who condense wit and sarcasm into pungent and rememberable lines of the most consummate terseness. He possesses a singular power of presenting moral vices and social foibles and follies in all their contemptibleness, and there is ample reason to believe that, as he expressed it, it was indignation which created his lines. It is Juvenal and Horace, though chiefly the former, who have served as models for Dryden and Pope, for Hall and Butler, and for Byron in his _English Bards and Scotch Reviewers_. The less fierce and more descriptive part of Juvenal’s work also found a notable imitation in Johnson, whose _London_ is copied from one satire and his _Vanity of Human Wishes_ from another.

Often cognate to satire is epigram, as treated by Martial, a writer of the generation preceding Juvenal. An epigram is, in fact, apt to be a stinging satire in little. This is, however, a very distinct departure from the nature and province of epigram as employed by the Greeks. Of this something has already been said. It would, nevertheless, be a mistake to suppose that the narrow sense now usually, if erroneously, given to “epigram” was equally the sense in which it would have been understood by the contemporaries of Martial. The “sting in the tail” is by no means indispensable. That the wit and verbal dexterity of Martial were so often applied to caustic purposes was no hindrance to the use of the same qualities in epigrams of compliment, of fancy, of description, and of mere humour. We cannot, it is true, assign to Martial a place in “poetry” proper. A man without convictions or much refinement of feeling, but well acquainted with his world, witty, and a manipulator of phrase, he poured out more than a thousand of these little pieces, many excellent, many execrable, many indifferent. But in this species of literature—be it worth what it may—it is Martial who has determined the form and matter of the epigram for modern Europe.

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