Book 2 — CHAPTER IV. LATER WRITERS.

AULUS GELLIUS: THE ‘NOCTES ATTICÆ’—MACROBIUS: THE ‘SATURNALIA’—SERVIUS ON VIRGIL—OTHER COMMENTATORS—AUSONIUS—THE ‘ANTHOLOGIA LATINA’—THE LATIN RHETORICIANS—RUTILIUS LUPUS, ETC.—CURIUS FORTUNATIANUS, HIS CATECHISM—MARIUS VICTORINUS ON CICERO—OTHERS—MARTIANUS CAPELLA.

The period from Nero to Hadrian is not merely the central and most important period of Latin criticism, but it contains a proportion altogether disproportionate of the bulk as of the value of Latin contributions to the subject. We must, however, complete our view of that subject, before summing up its general characteristics, with another chapter surveying the yield of the second, third, and fourth—perhaps, in view of the uncertainty of date of Martianus, we should add the fifth—centuries. The crop, if not very abundant, or of the very greatest value, is neither very scanty nor very uninteresting. It shall consist, in the specimens of it which we can afford to examine, first of the two famous and by no means unamusing miscellanists, the authors of the Noctes Atticæ and the Saturnalia; then, by an easy transition, of the commentators and scholiasts represented by their prior Servius, himself an interlocutor in the Macrobian symposium; in the third place, of a poetical contingent, much less important indeed than that furnished by the satirists from Horace to Martial, but not quite insignificant; and lastly, of the technical rhetoricians, ending with one of their latest representatives, but perhaps the most interesting of all, Martianus Capella. The chapter will thus, at least, not lack variety.

323It would be difficult to have a better example of the indisposition of the Latin mind towards literary criticism proper, |Aulus Gellius: the Noctes Atticæ.| than that which is afforded by the famous Noctes Atticæ of Aulus Gellius.^[421] We know nothing of this good person except that he was probably of more or less pure Roman descent, that he probably lived for the most part of his life at Rome and at Athens in the early second century, that he was a friend of Herodes Atticus, probably knew Plutarch, and was extremely intimate with, and a great admirer of, the rhetorician Favorinus. The well-known miscellany which he has left us, and which, in purporting to give the results of study or conversation in an Attic country-house, has been for seventeen hundred years so fruitful in imitations—mother, indeed, of a family sometimes a great deal fairer than herself—is an amusing book and a valuable, because it preserves for us a great number of quotations from lost authors or books, because its farrago of matter is good pastime, and not least because of a certain Pepysian or Boswellian quality in its author. But though, amid its jumble of things ethical, physical, logical, legal, and, above all, philological, perhaps the larger part is occupied with literature or at least with books, it is quite astonishing how small is the proportion that can be called literary criticism, and how rudimentary and infantine even that small proportion is. Gellius had nearly all the qualities and acquirements of the dictionary-maker; he was interested in etymology, was a most exact and careful purist in the definition and usage of words, and evidently prided himself on his collections of illustrative phrases and passages.^[422] But almost invariably it must be said of him that hæret in litera, or, if he escapes that adhesion, that he gives himself over to the substance and meaning, not to the literary form and art, of what he quotes and studies. In all the nineteen or twenty books of his work there are probably not nineteen or twenty pages of real literary criticism; and where he does give us any it is of the “strawiest” 324character. Take, for instance, his comparison (ii. 23) of the Greek and Latin comic writers, and especially of some passages of Cæcilius with their originals in Menander. In preferring the Greek he is, of course, quite right; but it is noteworthy that he can hardly render any specific reason for his preference. He says, vaguely if truly, that the Latins seem low and sordid beside the wit and brilliancy of the Greeks, that Cæcilius appears stupid and frigid by Menander. But as to detail he prudently adds, nihil dicam ego quantum differat; and, less prudently transgressing this rule later, confines himself wholly to the matter, accusing the Roman of leaving out a simplex et verum et delectabile remark of the Greek. And if he comes a little nearer in praising (or making his favourite Favorinus praise) the flavum marmor of Ennius, it is still pretty clear that he does this merely or mainly from the side of the dictionary-maker, pleased at getting a light on the exact meaning of flavus. Although to our ears his preference (vi. 20) of “Ora” to “Nola” (in the passage which Virgil is said to have altered from a rather petty spite to the Nolans), “because it makes a sweet hiatus” with Vesevo at the end of the preceding line, may seem all wrong, the principle is æsthetic if the application is not. But, as a rule, we shall find that his critical opinions, where they are not concerned with purely verbal matters, are always decided by moral, philosophical, or in some other way extra-literary considerations. Even in an extremely interesting passage towards the end (xix. 9) where he makes Græci plusculi attack the Spanish-Latin rhetor Antonius Julianus^[423] on the score of the inferiority of Roman to Greek erotic poets, and gives the passages with which Julianus retorted, the chief interest 325for us is that even the Greeks except Catullus to some extent, and Calvus, from their censure. For there is little or nothing but logomachy to be got out of the condemnation of Hortensius as invenustus and Cinna as illepidus.

This same imputation of logomachy is hard to clear from the dispute in x. 3, whether, though Caius Gracchus is undoubtedly fortis et vehemens, it is or is not intolerable that he should be deemed severior, amplior, acrior, than Cicero. If Gellius had kept to the same words, and had said fortior and vehementior, the observation just made might seem unkind; but as it is, one seems to be dropping into the well-known jargon of our own times, and of all times, to be hearing one reviewer asserting that Johnson is “alert” and another replying that Thompson is “nimble,” or opposing the “poignancy” of Smith to the “swiftness” of Brown. But the attention to words certainly comes in better when the critic objects to the use, in an otherwise non sane incommode adapted version from Euripides by Ennius, of ignobiles and opulenti for ἀδοξοῦντες and δοκοῦντες. XII. 2, however, is a good locus for us in more ways than one. It opens with a sketch of the difference of opinion about Seneca in the age succeeding his own, a difference of which Quintilian had, a little earlier, given us an inkling. “Some,” says Gellius, “think of him as of a most unprofitable writer, one not worth reading, because they hold his style vulgar and hackneyed, his matter and opinions distinguished either by inept and empty haste (impetu) or by frivolous and Old-Bailey (causidicali) wire-drawing, his erudition vernacular and plebeian, and possessing nothing either of the dignity or the grace of the classics. Others, while not denying that he has little grace of phrase, maintain that his matter lacks neither information nor teaching power, and that he has no unhappy gravity and severity in castigating vice.” He himself will give no general censure, but consider Seneca’s opinion of Cicero and Ennius and Virgil. This “consideration,” according to his wont, is rather a string of quotations with objurgatory epithets than a regular criticism. One may not agree with Seneca or one may (there are certainly some who would indorse his confession and avoidance of Cicero’s faults in 326the words non ejus sed temporis vitium). But the words which Gellius himself uses—insulsissime, homo nugator, inepti et insubidi^[424] hominis joca—surely require some little argument to justify them, and this argument is what Gellius never gives. We may thank him, however, for the criticism as well as for the anecdote preserved (xiii. 2) in the story of the meeting of the tragic poets Pacuvius and Accius at Tarentum, in the extreme old age of the former. Pacuvius had asked his young guest and craftsfellow to read his tragedy of Atreus, and, after the reading, praised it as sonorous and grand, but perhaps a little harsh and austere. “It is so,” said the junior, “but I am not very sorry, for I hope to improve. It is the same in wits as in fruits: the hard and harsh mellow and sweeten, but those that are at first flabby, and soft, and moist, do not ripen but rot. I thought it best to have something in my genius for time and age to mitigate.” A sound principle, though not quite a universal one, as one may see in studying a certain life-work which ranges from “Claribel” to “Crossing the Bar.”

He is in his more meticulous moods when (xiii. 18) he accuses Plato of misquotation and Euripides of plagiarism; but a couple of chapters later a set discourse on euphony, starting from a saying of Valerius Probus, seems to promise well. Some one had asked Probus whether it was better to use the terminations em or im, es or is, for the accusative, where both occur. Aurem tuam interroga, said Probus, which is no doubt the conclusion of the whole matter. But his questioner, either foolish or dogged, asked how he was to do this, and Probus replied, “As Virgil did when he wrote Urbisne invisere Cæsar but Urbes habitant magnas.” Nor are we sorry to hear that when the questioner still bored on, saying that he could not understand why one should be better in one place and another in another, Probus retorted, “You need not trouble yourself; it will do you no harm whatever you use.” Prope inclementer, says Gellius (“Served him right,” most of us will say). But he goes on to accumulate some other instances of this application of the rule of euphony, and perhaps here draws as near to true criticism as he ever does. Nor is he wrong, though he may be 327fanciful, in deciding in regard to certain almost literal Virgilian imitations of Homer, that the Greek is simplicior et sincerior, Virgil νεωτερικώτερος et quodam quasi ferrumine immisso fucatior.^[425]

He may strain the word again too much, when he bestows a page on the difference of multis hominibus and multis mortalibus (xii. 28), but he recovers esteem when in xiv. 6 we find him rejecting, not without contumely, contributions to his Noctes on the questions “Who was the first grammarian?” and “Why Telemachus did not nudge his bedfellow Pisistratus but kicked him?” &c., &c. Properans reddidi, says he, with the shudder one can fancy, though, to tell the truth, he does himself “something grow to” this kind of disease.

We may close this anthology of the Gellian criticisms with some account of one of the most elaborate—a discourse of Favorinus on Pindar and Virgil.^[426] After quoting the Roman poet’s traditional saying about himself—that he brought forth his verses as a bear does her cubs, licking them slowly and busily into shape—he points out that the facts exactly bear out the description, and that certain verses, not having undergone the process of licking, are very inferior to the others. Among these unlicked cubs, it seems, Favorinus would place the Etna passage. Even Pindar himself, whom Virgil followed, is, the critic thinks, ipso insolentior tumidiorque in the place; but Virgil’s verse is such that Favorinus calls it “begun, not made.” And, the two passages having been cited in full, he indulges in the following drastic verbal censure: “At the very beginning, Pindar, paying more attention to the truth, said what was the fact, and a matter of ocular demonstration, that Etna smoked by day and flamed by night. But Virgil, laboriously seeking noisy-sounding words, confuses the two. The Greek says plainly that fountains of fire are belched forth, and rivers of smoke flow, and yellow, curling volumes of flame are borne down to the shores of the sea like fiery snakes; but this fellow of ours, choosing to interpret ῥόον καπνοῦ αἴθωνα by atram nubem 328turbine piceo et favilla fumantem, makes a crass and clumsy mixture, and translates the κρουνοὺς of flames, both harshly and inexactly, into ‘globes.’ Again, when he talks of ‘licking the stars,’ he makes an idle and empty exaggeration. Nay, the phrase, ‘emitting a black cloud of smoke full of pitchy whirlwinds and glowing ashes,’ is bad style and almost nonsense.^[427] For glowing things, quoth he, neither smoke nor are black; unless by an improper vulgarism he applies candente, not to glowing but to merely ‘hot’ ash. But when he talks of ‘rocks and cliffs being belched and flung up,’ adding immediately that they are ‘melted, and groan, and are flung in handfuls into the air,’ neither did Pindar write this, nor would anybody else think of saying it, and the thing is the most monstrous of all monstrosities.”

The classical hatred of bombast and the classical propensity to “stick at the word” in criticism are both very well illustrated here; but we should hardly guess, from the sample, that there existed in classical times much power of grasping the literary and poetical merit of a passage as a whole. Virgil, if he had cared to defend himself, would, no doubt, have called attention to the Pindaric words, τέρας and θαῦμα, as justifying even “monstrosity” in his own expanded description, and have urged that this description was at least partly intended to indicate the terror and confusion of mind caused by so portentous a phenomenon.

But this absence of the synoptic grasp of æsthetic means, as applied to produce literary effect, is precisely what we notice most in the ancient criticism which has come down to us. And it may be added that it is also precisely what we should expect to follow from the limitations of the ancient Rhetoric. Grammar provided rules for the arrangement of words, and lexicography provided lists of them, with their authority and their use carefully ticketed; so here criticism was at home. Rhetoric provided lists of Figures with which a man could compare the passage before him. But there was no training in the process of simply “submitting to” this passage, interrogating oneself whether it exercised a charm or not, and then interrogating 329oneself further whether that charm was genuine, and what was its cause. After all, Gellius has, as we have seen, sometimes come near to the discovery of the true method, and that he loved literature there can be no doubt.^[428]

Nor, much later, shall we find things different with that favourite of the Middle Ages and of Dr Johnson’s youth, |Macrobius: The Saturnalia.| Macrobius,^[429] who, about the beginning of the fifth century, undertook a pendant to the work of Gellius. It is not surprising that the author, qui ot nom Macrobes,^[430] should have been a favourite (for his commentary on the Somnium Scipionis principally, no doubt) with the period between Darkness and Renaissance. He has precisely the “fine confused feeding” in the way of matter and manner that these ages loved; and they would not be likely to quarrel with him for his lack of the criticism which, as we shall see, they themselves hardly, in more than a single instance, relished or understood. But he certainly illustrates, even in a greater degree than Gellius, the small propulsion of the Romans and their vassals towards the proper subjects of this book. Once more we find that etymology, mythology, grammar, the farrago of the antiquary as distinguished from that of the literary enthusiast, of the philologist as opposed to the critic, receive ample attention. And, once more, what we are specially in quest of remains practically, if not entirely, unhandled.

There are few more striking loci in connection with this subject than the end of the first book of the Saturnalia. The guests have been talking mythology and etymology for some stricken hours, till at last a break occurs. Vettius Prætextatus, the host, has just ended a long mythological dissertation, to the admiration of everybody, when Euangelus (the irreverent humourist of the party) breaks in, with some amusement at the practice of citing Virgil as an authority. He supposes that the notion of making Latin poets into philosophers is an imitation of the Greeks, and hints that the process 330is dangerous, since even Tully himself, who was as formal a professor of philosophising as of oratory, so often as he talks of the nature of the gods, or of fate, or of divination, injures the glory which he has got together through his eloquence, by his desultory handling of things. Symmachus, the scholar-statesman, rebukes this blasphemer gravely, observing that, as for Cicero, he is conviciis impenetrabilis, and may be left aside for the moment, but that he fears Euangelus has learnt his Virgil only as boys do, and thinks him only good for boys, with nothing higher in him. Euangelus is by no means abashed, and takes the offensive. It was all very well, he says, for us as boys to take Virgil at our master’s valuation, but did not he himself pronounce himself far from faultless, inasmuch as he wished them to burn the Æneid? No doubt he was afraid, not merely of ethical blame for such scenes as the request of Venus to her lawful husband in favour of her illegitimate son, but of critical blame for his now Greek, now barbarous, diction, and for the awkward ordonnance of his work. To this, cum omnes exhorruissent, Symmachus, still calm and sententious, makes answer by putting Virgil beside Cicero, and saying of his glory, that as it can grow by no one’s praise, so it is diminished by no one’s abuse. Any grammarian, he continues, can refute these calumnies; and it would be a shame to ask Servius (the famous Virgilian scholiast, who is present) to take the trouble. But he should like to know whether, as Euangelus is dissatisfied with Virgil’s Poetic, he likes his Rhetoric better. “Oh!” says Euangelus, “you have made him a philosopher, and now you are going to make him an orator, are you?”

A conversation of this kind gives us no bad reason to expect something like literary criticism proper, something such as Coleridge has given us in the Biographia Literaria in reference to Wordsworth. But Symmachus for the time contents himself with undertaking to defend the Mantuan’s rhetoric, while the others overwhelm the impenitent Euangelus with a string of affirmations as to the poet’s proficiency in politics, law, augury, astrological and other philosophy, fidelity to the traditions of the Latin language, &c. But the justifications of these 331praises are deferred by the announcement of dinner, and for a time the conversation turns to lighter subjects—the famous string of stories for which Macrobius is most commonly quoted, including scandal about Princess Julia. Only in the third book, and then, it would seem, after a lacuna, is the detailed criticism of Virgil resumed.

There is no occasion to find fault with the quantity of it, for it fills, with a digression or two of the lighter kind, such as that on the dessert when it appears, four whole books, and some two hundred and forty pages in Eyssenhardt’s text. But the quality is, at any rate from our point of view, not quite so satisfactory. Much simply consists in citation of passages illustrating different “Figures.” A very large part, probably the largest, is mere and sheer quotation from Virgil himself, from Homer, and from other poets, Latin and Greek, with whom he is compared. And the comparison is carried on almost, if not quite entirely, on that most unsatisfying parallel-passage system which, in its abuse, has ever since been the delight of the pedantic criticaster—and the abomination of the true critic.

Of course the parallel passage, rightly handled, is invaluable—is practically indispensable to true literary criticism. The “Truth” passages of the Areopagitica and Halifax’s Character of a Trimmer, the “Death” passages of Raleigh, Marston, and Lee, the different harmonies which the motive “Ask me no more” has suggested to Carew and Tennyson, the accounts of the passing of Arthur or the parting of Lancelot and Guinevere in Malory, and in his probable verse original, are the constant, the inexhaustible, texts and exercises of the critical faculty. But I do not think it unfair to Macrobius to say that hardly in a single occasion does he make any such use of his parallels. And in literary criticism, properly so called, such parallels as

οὐδέ τις ἄλλη

φαίνετο γαιάων ἀλλ’ οὐρανὸς ἠδε θάλασσα,

and

“Nec jam amplius ulla

apparet tellus, cælum undique et undique pontus,”

are all but valueless. They merely show what might be demonstrated 332once for all in a page—what does not need demonstrating to any intelligent person who has read fifty lines of the two poets—that Virgil was an excellent translator, and was, rather more frequently than becomes a great poet, content simply to translate.

The rest of the matter lies, for the most part if not wholly, as much as this or more in the uttermost precincts of literary criticism proper. The illustrations of Virgil’s attention to that religious ritual and liturgical language which was so important at Rome are very curious, very interesting, very valuable but they scarcely touch the fringe of literature: a Roman Blackmore could be as prolific of them as the Roman Dryden.

The contents of Book IV. may, perhaps, be urged against me; and I shall confess that they come nearer to a certain conception of literary criticism. But I should reply that this conception itself is an argument on the side I am taking. One of the gaps, common at the opening of the books of the Saturnalia, plunges us into the midst of a demonstration of Virgil’s pathos, that word being sometimes used in the Greek plural pathe, and referring to the Rhetorical “passions” appealed to. We find, however, almost directly, that the citations are only applied to illustrate and enforce Virgil’s technical command of rhetoric, as Symmachus had foreshadowed. The parts are accordingly dealt out in the orthodox way between accuser and defendant, and the passages quoted are distributed once more under figures—Irony, Hyperbole, and the rest. This, of course, is literary criticism after a fashion, though a fashion which Quintilian had already treated with some disdain (abandoning it almost entirely in the best parts of his own critical work), and which Longinus, though he too was not quite bold enough to discard it entirely, avoids, either cunningly or instinctively, in all his best passages. Macrobius and his distinguished company seem to wish for nothing better, and after they have complacently ticked off the sorts and sources of the pathos—time, place, circumstance, age, mood, manner, and so forth—they decide triumphantly, at the beginning of the Fifth Book, that Virgil must be held no less of an orator than of a poet. Indeed, Eusebius, who has conducted the rhetorical inquiry, draws a neat parallel between 333Virgil and Cicero himself. The eloquence, he says, of the Mantuan is multiplex and multiform, and comprehends every kind of speech. In your Cicero [Eusebius of course is a Greek] there is one tenor of eloquence, the abundant, and torrential, and copious. For the nature of orators is not uniform, but one flows and overflows, another affects a brief and concise manner. The thin and dry and sober speaker loves, as it were, a parsimony of words, his rival revels in full and florid and amply illustrated rhetoric. Virgil is the only man who, while others are so dissimilar, blends his own eloquence of every kind. And he subsequently distributes these kinds more specially to Cicero, Sallust, Fronto, and the younger Pliny. The passage which follows, for three or four pages, till the scoffer Euangelus brings on the Homeric parallels by asking whether they think a Venetian farmer’s boy is likely to have known Greek literature, is one of the most literary in the book. But it is (as a devil’s advocate must point out) curious and a little unfortunate that once more we find the subject drawn, as it were, irresistibly to the oratorical side. In no other branch of literature, it seems, could a Roman or a late Greek (which Macrobius probably was) taste the minutiæ of difference, the savours and qualities which concern criticism proper. Elsewhere he “stuck in letters,” or in Figures, or in the merest schematic construction of prosody, or in the matter, as opposed to the form and spirit, of the literature.

Another piece of criticism, proper if not consummate, will be found in the seventeenth chapter of the Fifth Book, in the shape of a fresh comparison, to be itself compared with that cited above from Gellius, between Pindar’s Ætna, in the First Pythian and Virgil’s in the third Æneid. It is an even weaker piece. For the critic, a Greek, cavils at Virgil quite in the Rymer-and-Dennis style, not merely because he speaks of an atram nubem as fumantem candente favilla, but (exactly as if he were an eighteenth-century French critic speaking of Shakespeare) because the poet actually indulges in such shocking words as eructans.

The Sixth Book deals with Virgil’s borrowing of diction and phrase from the older Latin poets, and has, of course, great 334linguistic, and a certain portion of literary, interest. But it is again remarkable how little this latter is improved or worked out. As in the Homeric case, the literary interest of the fact that Virgil was content simply to “lift” Ennian phrases, like stellis fulgentibus or tollitur in cælum clamor, is limited to the demonstration that Virgil “stole his brooms ready made,” as the Berkshire broom-squire did. And no attempt is made (as might easily have been done, and in fairness to Virgil should have been done) to show the taste with which the poet selected beautiful words and happy phrases. Servius, later in the book, has some not uninteresting verbal criticism, but attempts nothing more. In fact, in all this bulk of work there is not as much literary criticism in the proper sense as Longinus has often given us in a paragraph, and hardly an attempt at even that general characterisation which we find sometimes in Gellius and still more in Quintilian. The place and power of Virgil remain untouched, or are referred to only in the vaguest conventionalisms.

Servius on Virgil.

One of the contributors, as has been said, to the Macrobian symposium is no less a person than Maurus (or Marius) Servius Honoratus, the greatest commentator on the greatest Latin poet in general repute, and obviously, from the figure he makes in the Saturnalia, a man held in very high esteem for erudition and ability. We have his commentary,^[431] together with those of other ancient commentators of less repute. They are extremely voluminous;^[432] they are, and always have been, justly respected for their value in the interpretation of the poet. Servius had before him, and undoubtedly used, a very large bulk of precedent annotation, and represents, almost fully, the “Variorum” editor of modern times. We might therefore expect to find in him, if not something like the proceedings and results of Mr Furness in his Shakespeare, at any rate something like those of the Johnson-Malone time. Let us see what we actually do find. He gives us, at the very first, a definition of the duties of a critical editor, in which, on the face of it, there is very little to blame. The life of the poet; the titles of his 335work; the quality of the poem; the intention of the writer; the number of the books, the order of them, the explanation of them. Looking at this off-hand, one may wonder a little at the elevation to co-ordinate honours of the number and order of the books, and of course perceive that qualitas carminis, the critical point, is susceptible of rather widely differing interpretations as a promise. In the vague modern sense of “quality”—a sense, too, not absolutely unknown in ancient times—it covers by itself almost all that the most accomplished and wide-ranging criticism—the criticism of Coleridge or of Arnold, of Hazlitt or of Sainte-Beuve—can extend unto. In the narrow technical sense of the Greek ποιότης, it comes to very little more than the mere technical classification of the piece as epic or what not, and offers us food as little sappy with critical juice as the most arid distinctions of Rhetoric.

But we have barely turned a page when the sense in which Servius understands the comparative extent of the duties he has so lucidly mapped out breaks upon us. The “life,” brief and business-like, leaves no special room for complaint except to anecdote-mongers. But all the rest, except the “explanation,” is huddled up in less than a page, and in forms as succinct as the answers to a catechism. Title? “Æneis,” derived from Æneas, cf. Juvenal’s “Theseis.” Quality? Quite clear: the metre is heroic, the action “mixed” (i.e., the poet sometimes speaks himself, sometimes introduces others speaking). It is also Heroic, because it contains a mixture of divine and human things, of truth and fiction. For Æneas really did come to Italy, but clearly the poet made it up^[433] when he represented Venus speaking to Jupiter, or the mission of Mercury. The style is grandiloquent—that is to say, the phrase is lofty and the sentiments noble. Besides, are there not three kinds of speaking, the low, the middle, the grand? This is the grand style. Virgil intended first to imitate Homer, then to magnify the ancestry of Augustus (proofs of this latter given). Here there is no dispute about the number of the author’s books, though in other cases (such as that of Plautus) there is. And there is not much doubt about the order, though a mere crotcheteer might put 336them in the order 2, 3, 1, in his ignorance that the art of the poet consists in beginning at the middle and anticipating the future (see Horace). This shows that Virgil was a skilful bard. That is all. Sola superest explanatio quæ in sequenti expositione probabitur.

Sola superest explanatio! All, except the mere verbal part, is swept aside, as settled and done for, in these thirty or forty lines. Of the quality, in the fuller and higher sense, of the Virgilian art nothing; nothing of its comparative value even with that of Homer himself, still less of other Greeks, or with that of Ennius, of Lucretius, of Statius, of the scores of Roman epic or “heroic” poets whom and whose books Servius had before him, while their names only are before us. Nothing of his way of managing his metre, his diction, his prosopopœia, his scenery, his dialogue. And in the settlement of the questions that are attacked, the most schoolboy-like abstinence from anything but reference to stock authorities, stock classifications. Nothing, for instance, one would think, would be easier and more attractive, for a man who thinks that Virgil’s is the grand style, than to prove it to be so, nothing more curious and fascinating than to reply to the objections of those who think it is not, if there be such heretics (and, as we know from the Euangelus of the Saturnalia, there were such, even in those days). But no glimpse or glimmer of any such thing enters the mind of our scholiast. There are, everybody allows, three styles: Low, Middle, and Grand. Nobody calls Virgil low; you surely would not call him middle; therefore he must be grand. Q.E.D.; and demonstrated it is most mathematically. Then what kind of poem is it? You run your finger down the official list of kinds and find “Heroic; written in hexameters and dealing with mixed kinds.” Virgil is in hexameters, but is he mixed? Let us run the careful finger down yet another table, “Mixed: that which is partly divine and partly human, partly false, partly true.” Let us see whether this will apply to Virgil. It does. Then Virgil is Heroic. Next, about order and so forth. Ought not Books II. and III., which tell the voyage of Æneas up to the events recorded in the opening of Book I., to come before it? This gives a moment’s pause, but let us look at our Horace—Ut 337jam nunc dicat, and so forth. Once more, we need not trouble ourselves: the order is all right.

To some readers this account may savour of flippancy; and to them it is impossible to offer any excuse. To others, who may not be likely to take the trouble to read Servius for themselves, it will be enough to say that practically nothing is put in his mouth which he does not say, that his method is hardly caricatured even in form. It is one of the best illustrations we have, or could reasonably expect to have, of the whole system of ancient criticism, save in its very greatest examples, and to some extent even in these. You construct, or accept from tradition as already constructed, a vast classification of terms and kinds, hierarchically arranged; and when a subject presents itself you simply refer it to the classification. Practically no intellectual labour is required, and still less—a mere minus quantity indeed—of cultivation of the æsthetic sentiment. The necessary cards, with the necessary descriptions on them, are in cell B or A, compartment x or y, case 3 or 5, room I. or VI. You take them out and you tie them on, and there’s an end of the matter. Nay, some fifteen hundred years after Servius, there are other authorities who conduct criticism—and are indignant when it is not conducted—in the very self-same way.

But, it may be said, superest explanatio; the explanation does remain, and there may be much in that. In point of bulk there is very much; in point of value there is a great deal; but in point of strict criticism there is simply nothing, though the same reference to card, and cell, and compartment, and case abounds, as thus:—

Arma virumque. Arma means “war”: it is the trope called Metonymy. So toga, for “peace,” see Cic. As for Arma virumque, it is another figure—that by which we change the order: some call it Hyperbaton. The whole phrase is a professive poetic beginning; Musa, &c., an invocative, and urbs antiqua a narrative. As for virum, he does not mention the name, but indicates the person circumstantially. And now, as Thackeray says somewhere, “we know all about it, and can proceed” to write the exordium of an Æneid.

Far, very far, be it from me to speak with any ignorant or 338vulgar contempt of Servius. His erudition is very great; his verbal expositions are almost always very sound and grammatical; but for him we should lack a whole world of traditional information, without which the meaning of Virgil would either be entirely dark to us, or attainable only by the rashest of guesswork. And it must be admitted that according to the “figure” system of criticising he is, as the Roman orators say, accuratissimus. When Virgil, as he so often does, borrows a phrase from Ennius with a slight alteration, Servius points out that it is an acyrologia, and no doubt feels much comforted by the fact. Something else is an amblysia (a “blunting,” lessening, litotes). There are derivations, anticipating the modern philologist, of the most scientific kind, as that of consilia for considia, because people’s minds become quieter when they sit down. There is, indeed, a very great deal of miscellaneous information of all kinds.

But of criticism nothing, or less than nothing. Occasionally, at the beginning of the books, it does seem to occur to the excellent commentator that something more may be expected of him. Especially, and indeed most naturally, is this the case with the Fourth. He tells us, quite properly, that Apollonius had written an Argonautica, and that the whole book is borrowed from it.^[434] It is; a fact of which those persons who (having better knowledge than Dante had) still take Virgil for a supreme poet might perhaps take more notice than they have usually taken. But to Servius, and persons of Servius’ way of thinking, there would not have been much in this. He goes on. It is almost entirely in affection, though it has pathos in the end, where the departure of Æneas begets sorrow. It consists entirely in counsels and subtleties. The style is very nearly comic—which is not surprising, considering that it treats of love. But there is a proper junction with the former book, which is a proof of art, as we have often said. An abrupt transition is a bad transition, though some people foolishly say that this junction is not well managed, &c., &c.

339Grant that Virgil shows his want of originality by his relying on Apollonius. Grant that in the delineation of Dido’s tragic “All for Love and the World well Lost” for such a tame scoundrel as Æneas, he has none of the lightning strokes of Lucretius or Catullus. Yet most of us think that the Fourth book is a great thing, some that it is a much greater thing than the Æneid of which it forms part. Servius might think, was entitled to think, and has the consent of many respectable moderns in thinking, differently. But it does not appear that he thought about it at all. He found in his books a distinction between “affection” and “pathos,” and applied it. He had learnt from the same books that Love was an inferior subject, Comedy an inferior style, and the former a proper theme of the latter. So the Fourth book, with its steady rise towards the hopeless, the hapless, the inevitable end, is pæne comicus. Certainly the criticism is, from our point of view.

But the very value of Servius, as of so many other writers, is precisely this, that he is not writing from our point of view, that he is writing from a point of view entirely different. When he annotates Est in secessu “Topothesia est—i.e., fictus secundum poeticam licentiam locus.... Nam topographia est rei veræ descriptio,” it may be difficult to repress a smile. So also when he points out, in respect to one of Anna’s speeches to Dido, not that it is touching, or eloquent, or indicative of a wonderful knowledge of the human heart, and an equally wonderful grasp of pathetic expression, but that it is regular Rhetoric—suasione omni parte plena; nam purgat objecta, et ostendit utilitatem, et a timore persuadet. But, after all, he is only playing his own game, not ours. It is impossible, or at any rate very difficult, to be sure whether it is in innocent unconsciousness or dry humour that he quotes, without comment, the objection to the phrase nepos Veneris that it is unbecoming to represent Venus as a grandmother. Again, in one of his short prefaces to the Seventh book—at the point when, to modern readers, the interest of the Æneid is all but over, and the romantic wanderings of Æneas, the passion of the Fourth book, the majesty and magnificence of the Sixth, are exchanged for the kite-and-crow battles of Trojans and Rutulians, the doll-like 340figure of Lavinia, and the unjust fate of the hero Turnus at the hands of a divinely helped invader—he tells us that the earlier books have been like the Odyssey (as indeed they are), not because of the romantic interest, which of course he did not see, but as being graviores varietate personarum et allocutionum, while the last books are like the Iliad, as being negotiis validiores!

So, again, the relatively long preface to the Bucolics tells us that the word comes from the Greek for oxen, which are the principal rustical animals; that these poems were invented in the time of Xerxes, when the Laconians (one does not quite see why, as Xerxes never landed in the Peloponnese) were kept to their walls or the mountains; that the qualitas is a humilis character, thus, with the medius of the Georgics, vindicating all the three styles for Virgil. For we must not require lofty speaking from humble rustics. He then gives us a curious specimen of the critical punctiliousness in matters of mint, anise, and cumin which accompanied blindness to weightier things. In bucolic verse there ought, it seems, to be a pause at the fourth foot; and if that foot is a dactyl so much the better; and it is better also that the first foot should be a dactyl and included in the word, and so forth.

For a final specimen he tells us, in the corresponding introduction to the Georgics themselves, that as Virgil had followed Homer, and had not come near him in the Æneid, as he had followed Theocritus and run a good second in the Eclogues, so he followed Hesiod, and “simply left him” (penitus reliquit) in the Georgics. It required enormous skill to do what he has done. (So far so good, but before very long we come again to the parting of the ways.) The book is didactic, and therefore it should be written to somebody, for teaching presupposes two personages—the teacher and the taught. Again, one does not know whether to smile or not, to take the matter gravely and urge that any lector benevolus will occupy quite sufficiently the personam discipuli, or to pass the matter, olli subridens, and reflecting that our legs also are not unexposed to the arrows.

It can scarcely be necessary to take special examples from the minor commentators on Virgil or on other Latin poets: for 341their characteristics are, so far as I know, exactly uniform with |Other commentators.| those of Servius and with those of the Greek scholiasts. In explanation of words and things diligent to admiration, and extremely serviceable, if not always (according to modern standards, which are very likely temporary) scientific. In matters of prosody excellently minute and regular, though occasionally a little arbitrary. Not very seldom careful, to an almost touching extent, of referring phrases to the accepted categories of Figure, and applying the stock Rhetorical divisions and classifications. But not merely in the higher, but even in the middle regions of criticism proper, so meagre that they may almost be called entirely to seek. Quite rudimentary in Comparison; in indicating character, content to accept stock divisions, and not even attempting individual signalement. Abstaining with such uniformity that one can easily perceive the entire absence of any demand for it, from, any attempt to deal with the literary beauty of phrase or of passage, to bring out its effect on the reader, to estimate it as a work of art, like a picture or a statue. And now and then, as we have seen, not merely not applying the right, but applying totally wrong, tests to literature and especially to poetry, demanding from this latter compliance with the arbitrary requirements of traditional Rhetoric, and praising it for such compliance. Are they to be blamed for all this? Certainly not; no one is to be blamed for not doing what he never intended to do and what nobody wanted him to do, for doing what was his commission and his business. But they are to be cited, and examined, and recorded as witnesses to prove that, for the most part at any rate, criticism, in the best and highest sense, was what no critic thought of giving, and no reader thought of demanding, under the Latin dispensation.

It may not be uninteresting to accompany (as we did in the case of Greek) this view of the later criticism, more or less formal, with some account of the poets where they touch the subject. These touches are not frequent or important, but we find some in Ausonius for the end of the fourth century, and in the curious collection bearing (with what imparity of suggested contrast!) the title of the Latin Anthology, and 342supposed to have been put together at Carthage, at the end of the fifth, or a little later.

The unequal and decadent, but sometimes fascinating, author^[435] of the Mosella and the Cupido cruci affixus, of the two charming epigrams to wife and mistress—

“Uxor vivamus,”

and

“Deformem quidam te dicunt, Crispa”—

has, in his epigrams themselves, followed Martial in directions where he is a less blameless guide than in his literary criticism. |Ausonius.| But he has not followed him here; and though much of the collection is simply a translation of the Greek Anthology, I do not remember any literary following thereof. But the curious verse celebration of what we may call the University of Bordeaux, with its “commemoration,” in separate pieces of varying length and metre, of a couple of dozen of Professors; the Fourth Idyll, to his namesake and grandson on his studies; and the Epistles, especially those to Paullus the Rhetor and to Tetradius, all have more or less to do with the subject.

We find, and are not surprised to find, that of the Professors at Bordeaux the majority are Professors of Rhetoric. Compliment has naturally rather the better of criticism in the addresses to them, but certain things emerge. Tib. Victor Minervius is “another Quintilian,” especially for fluency and for the Demosthenicum (I suppose δεινότης); but it is a little suspicious that the fullest praise is given to his memory. Latinus Alcimus Alethius seems to have been himself a careful critic, and appears to have written specially on Sallust and on the Emperor Julian—perhaps the books are somewhere? Attius Patera was “a descendant of the Druids,” and we should have been glad to know whether he displayed that “Celtic spirit” in literature of which we have heard more than enough in these days. But Ausonius is vague as 343the Celtic vague itself. Attius Tiro Delphinius was a poet as well as an orator. Others—the dead Luciolus, Alethius Minervius the Younger, the Grammarian Lentulus, “cognomine Lascivus” (quite innocent, Ausonius tells us), his brother Jucundus, are more generally commended. Pieces, two grouped and some single, to the Greek and the Latin grammarians of Bordeaux—show that the languages, as well as the literatures, received plentiful attention. The compliment to Exuperius of Toulouse goes closer, and is decidedly double-edged.^[436] Erudition is specially attributed to Staphylius, who knew not only Livy and Herodotus, but “all that is stored in the thousand volumes of Varro” (sexcentis, of course). It is observable that the grammarians^[437] appear to have chiefly lectured on poetry, the Rhetors on prose, and the whole, with touches numerous, if not very definite, suggests to us a study liberal enough, but perhaps not very wide, rather undiscriminating. The Idyll to his nephew enters naturally into a few more particulars. A generous but general incitement to the study of the tongues is followed by detail. The, as it seems to us, very odd conjunction of Homer and Menander is an additional testimony to the popularity of the great New Comic. It can hardly be accidental, for it is separated by some lines from any other mention. In fact, Ausonius is not prodigal of names, only those of Horace, Virgil, and Terence being mentioned for Latin poetry, and the work, though not the name, of Sallust, with some other histories of the last Republican period. Lastly, the Epistles, besides supplying fresh instances of Ausonius’ rococo fancy for the cento—even the Macaronic cento—supply a perhaps humorous prose criticism in form of his own work, which is worth subjoining.^[438]

344The Anthologia Latina,^[439] which a certain noble youth of the name of Octavian composed at the bidding of some Vandal |The Anthologia Latina.| chieftain, perhaps as late as 532, at the extreme verge of the twilight of the West, is not entirely deserving of the transferred sense attached to its patron’s nationality. It has preserved one or two pretty things for us, and more curious ones. And, in our particular relation, it shows that literary society and occupation had by no means gone wholly out of fashion. Both with individuals and coteries Virgil was a perversely favourite subject; and the deplorable persons who called themselves the Twelve Wise Men wrote distichs, and pentastichs, and polystichs, à dormir debout, on the contents of the books of the Æneid and other subjects. The epigrams attributed to Seneca are probably, whether they belong to any of the known Senecas or not, of an older and better time; and the pair (Nos. 27 and 28) on the theme of Ære perennius, though the sentiment is of course a commonplace, have a grip and ring of style which, at any rate after the flaccid barbarisms of the sixth century, shows well. But for the literary taste of this time itself, the works of a certain Luxorius (a contemporary it would seem, and, from the word spectabilis, probably of official rank) are most valuable. They are of some bulk, consisting of not much less than a hundred pieces, filling some forty pages in Baehrens’s edition. The body of the work, according to the usual prava docilitas of the epigrammatist, consists of things licentious or trivial enough; but Luxorius had read his Martial in this respect more closely than Ausonius, that he begins with three or four pieces of a critical or semi-critical kind. He is thoroughly convinced of the danger of writing after the ancients; but, as he says with some force to the Reader, “If you think them of better quality, why don’t you read them and not me?” He consoles his book, should it meet with contempt at Rome and Carthage, with the observation that things must be content with their proper places; and in a fourth piece 345pleads that if his epigrams are short, why, the reading will be the sooner finished. The tone, with a good deal less disguised conceit, is very much that of a literary abbé or President of the eighteenth century—a kind of person with whose general tastes, literary and other, Luxorius would probably have sympathised well enough.

We may now complete our survey of the actual documents by dealing with such remnants as we have of the technical |The Latin Rhetoricians.| treatises on Rhetoric in Latin. These are neither numerous nor bulky, nor, with one exception at the very end of the classical, and gate of the mediæval, period (to which latter some of them even belong), of much interest or importance. The fact may seem a little surprising, in face of the immense interest in the practice of the subject, which not merely Seneca, and Quintilian, and Pliny, but all others, show. But the surprise will vanish at a little consideration. Before the Romans attempted it, the technical part of Rhetoric had been reduced, as we saw, to a settled scheme of extreme intricacy by the Greeks, and these claimed to be as much the masters of the subject as Jews were of Medicine in the Middle Ages. Probably every Roman, though he might attend his own countrymen’s declamations, learnt the art of Rhetoric from a Greek professor at one time or another, and was familiar with the Greek technæ. It was only after the separation of the Empires, and not even immediately then, that Greek ceased to be the language of education. Moreover, the Romans, though of orderly and business-like habits of thought, had neither the liking nor the language suited for the intenser and minuter technicalities of the Art.

It may be almost sufficient justification of the last paragraph to mention that the whole body of Latin Rhetoricians, as given in the standard edition of Capperonnier,^[440] fills but a volume of 346some 400 not very large quarto pages; and that this is made up by the insertion not merely of the Rhetorical part of Martianus Capella, but of such purely mediæval or “Dark Age” work as that of Bede, Isidore, and possibly Alcuin. These latter will find better place in the next Book. Martianus shall be noticed by himself presently; we may meanwhile run over the rest.

The first in order, and perhaps the oldest, is the Treatise on the Figures of P. Rutilius Lupus, a rhetorician often quoted |Rutilius Lupus, &c.| by Quintilian. It is in the dictionary form, but not alphabetically arranged. The definitions are technical, meagre, and chiefly limited to that jejune splitting of kinds which has been noticed under the head of Greek. The illustrative quotations, which are numerous and not useless, are wholly from Greek authors, many of them indicating by their time that the Gorgias, whose four books Quintilian tells us that Rutilius abstracted into one, was not the sophist of Leontini, but a later Athenian rhetorician. Except for the close connection which—until quite recently if not still—has existed between the Figures and criticism, this has little interest for us.

The next treatise, that of Aquila Romanus, is in the same way only a Latin accommodation of the work of Alexander (v. supra, p. 102). It is of the same class, a non-alphabetical dictionary in miniature, and devoted to the same subject. Of the same class again, exactly, is the tractate of Julius Rufinianus, who, since he keeps, as Rutilius and Aquila had not done, the Greek words schema for figura, and lexis for elocutio, was probably a closer adapter, paraphrast, or translator of his original even than they. He has added a short parallel treatment of the other division of schemata, the intellectual or dianoetic.

Curius or Chirius Fortunatianus (a writer at any rate senior to Cassiodorus, who epitomised him) was more ambitious, |Curius Fortunatianus: his Catechism.| and instead of confining himself to the Figures, composed a regular art of the Rhetoric of the Schools in three books. It supplies an interesting and early example of the catechetical form which was so popular during the middle ages, which continued to 347flourish till within the memory of the present generation, and the disuse of which has certainly been accompanied by a loss in exactness of actual knowledge, compensated, or not, by a gain in the philosophical character of such as is acquired.

“Q. What is Rhetoric? A. The science of speaking well. Q. What is an orator? A. A good man skilled in speaking. Q. What is the duty of an orator? A. To speak well in civil cases. Q. What is his end? A. To persuade so far as the condition of things and persons allows.”

And so forth—the writer proceeding by the simple method of throwing into catechism-form the same kind of dictionary matter which we have just noticed, sometimes with very odd effect, as in Quæ est anæschyntos?—a question which, if Mrs. Quickly had heard it and had understood Greek, would doubtless have made her adjust to the occasion her objection to “Jenny’s case.” The thing, though curious, drags Rhetoric farther out of its proper course than ever, and one perhaps at no time feels more inclined to join in the contempt of scholastic methods, mistaken as one knows it to be, than when reading such questions as—Assumpta qualitas facit statum? and the rest of this liturgy of abracadabra in catechetical form. In no rhetorical treatise, indeed, is the question of style so unceremoniously ignored. A long handling of the staseis is followed by shorter ones of other technical divisions, “Elocution” receiving the most perfunctory treatment possible (though with a certain practicality). How are you to acquire diction? By reading, speaking, hearing others speak, and inventing new words (which must not be done too often). Put your long words last; but begin a sentence if you can with a long syllable, and do not keep too many short ones, or too many monosyllables, together; avoid archaisms; and attend to such minute, but in at least some cases arbitrary, rules as the following^[441]:—

“Let your construction be more frequently round than flat; let it not gape with too frequent collision of vowels, especially long ones; nor be rough with the conflict of two consonants; let not many monosyllables be joined together; let there be no 348great stretch of short syllables nor many long ones; let not the first syllable of a word be the same as the last of the word before, nor let the two together make any awkward compound; let not the oration be deformed by many thin^[442] words or vast syllables; and let not many genitive plurals come together.”^[443]

Cautions, it will be observed, sometimes judicious, sometimes capricious, but never reasoned.

The commentary of Marius Victorinus on Cicero’s Rhetoric is the longest of all these treatises. It contains a great deal of |Marius Victorinus on Cicero.| matter, and there is no discoverable reason why it should not have contained a great deal more. For the very first note on Cicero’s words, “I have thought to myself of this often and very much,” is as follows: “If there be only one of these, it does not indicate a sufficiently lengthy cogitation. For we may frequently think of a thing, but immediately desist from the thinking. We may also think long upon a thing, but do it only on a single day. He therefore has properly joined the two, and said: ‘Often and much have I thought to myself on this.’ And because a thing ought not to be published unless it be certain and the result of deliberation, he rightly says: ‘I thought of this to myself.’”

All this is exceedingly true; but it is also exceedingly trivial. And the second is like unto it. Bonine an mali plus attulerit hominibus et civitatibus sc. eloquentia: “The cause of his deliberation is not whether eloquence be good or bad, but whether it have more of good or of bad in it. The order of the words, however, is not unimportant, for he might have said, ‘of bad or of good.’ But Cicero stuck to the nature of eloquence, which, when it first began, did good to men, for it brought them together. But later, when it was depraved by the ingenuity of bad men, it hurt the republic very much. So he arranged the words in the proper order in saying Bonine, &c. The republic consists of two parts, private and public—that is to say, of men and states. We may notice this also in the Verrines, how Cicero always defends either men or cities.”

349A man who is content to write like this need never stop while paper, pen, and ink hold out, or till the kindness of nature, or the impatience of men, puts an end to his life. Sometimes the comment is not quite so nugatory, especially when Victorinus illustrates the differences between Cicero and Hermagoras. But he seldom even approaches literary criticism.

The rest, save one, may be almost silence. The ambitiously entitled Institutiones Oratoriæ of Sulpicius Victor is incomplete. |Others.| What we have of it follows the usual order of “states” narration, &c., with some, but only a few, peculiarities. Most of the other articles are both meagre and late. Emporius deals with ethopœia, the Commonplace, and one or two other matters. There is a Latin version of the Progymnasmata of Hermogenes. The probably spurious Principia Rhetorices, attributed to St Augustine, are at least commended by his name, yet hardly by anything else; and the same may be said in lesser degree of the Compendium of Cassiodorus.^[444] The verses of Rufinus, on the rhythms suitable to oratory, have more interest. And so we may come to Martianus.

Inferior as Latin criticism, on the Rhetorical side, is in comparison with Greek, it is not fanciful to say that it ends with a better note, though a quaint and fantastic one. The later stages in Greek, as we have seen, were mere arid technicalities or idle epideictic—ghosts of things no longer alive, and never perhaps alive with the best kind of life. What followed in the Byzantine age had at best the character of literary research. Such a book as that of Photius, invaluable as it is to us, has no life-promise in it, either as regards its own generation or for the future.

On the contrary, there is much of both, as we look back on it, in the eccentric treatise on the Marriage of Philology and |Martianus Capella.| Mercury, by Martianus Capella.^[445] Of the author and date of the book we know, with accuracy, hardly anything at all. His full name appears to have been Martianus Minneius Felix Capella, and he is described as a Carthaginian. His date is much contested, as well as his religion, his occupations, 350and other things which no mortal need trouble himself about; while this date, which is of some importance, cannot be adjusted very exactly. There is, however, not very much dispute that it must have been somewhere in the fifth century. “Before 439” is all that his latest editor, Eyssenhardt, will say.

What is certain is that the treatise is written in a very late and not a little barbarous Latin style, and that it was popular in the Middle Ages, with that peculiar popularity which seems to have settled itself upon Boethius, Orosius, and other writers of the last age before chaos—the age to which those who kept up education in chaos itself would be most likely to look back, as connecting them with the greater past yet not too far off.

Further, while we find in Martianus a firm outline of the exact scheme of Humaner Letters which prevailed from 500 to 1500, we find in his frame and setting, slightly preposterous and more than slightly fantastic as it is, just that touch of romance—of youth, with its promise as well as its foolishness—which is wanting in Byzantine work, and which has Future in it. On both these characteristics of the whole book we must say something, before coming to its rhetorical part.

The title of the book (to observe Servian formality) has been already given. Its form is that of the Varronian satura, or mingle-mangle of prose and verse; and it is divided into nine books. The first two of these serve as an introduction, containing a wonderful rigmarole, in more wonderful jargon,^[446] about things in general, divine and human, the old mythology and physics, with abstract philosophical personifications, Sophia, Phronesis, and so forth, coming in. At last it settles down to the real plan of the treatise, which is that the Seven Liberal Arts, as adopted (very mainly from this book) by the Middle Ages, being estated as bridesmaids (or something like it) to Philology, each Art has a book to herself, and, in the flowery fantastic fashion of the Introduction, gives a summary of her 351teaching to the assembled gods. This summary is of the most precise and business-like character, despite its “trimmings,” so that Grammar is not ashamed to inform the gods that “Ulcus makes ulceris, but pecus pecoris,” and Logic rattles off things like Primæ formæ primus modus est in quo conficitur ex duobus universalibus, and so forth, after a fashion which suggests that the marriage itself might have been celebrated by Dean Aldrich with great propriety. The beginnings and ends of the books are generally decorated with verse, and with fancy prosopopœiæ of different kinds: but the stuff of the text is exactly what it was intended to be—solid schoolbook matter.

The book devoted to Rhetoric is the fifth, being preceded by those of Grammar and Logic, in the usual and indeed natural order of the Trivium:—

“Gram. loquitur, Dia. vera docet, Rhet. verba colorat,”

though Martianus does not arrange the Quadrivium exactly according to the second line of the mnemonic—

“Mus. canit, Ar. numerat, Geo. ponderat, Ast. colit Astra,”

his order being Geometry, or rather Geography, Arithmetic, Astronomy, Music.

The book on Rhetoric opens literally with a flourish of trumpets,—

“Interea sonuere tubæ,”—

which, as some sixteen rather bombastic hexameters full of gradus-tags inform us, quite alarms the gods, major and minor. In the midst of it there steps forth “a stately woman of lofty stature, and confidence greater than common, but radiantly handsome, helmed and crowned, weaponed both for defence and with flashing arms wherewith she could smite her enemies with a thundering coruscation. Under her armpits, and thrown over her shoulder in Latian fashion, was a vest, exhibiting embroidery of all possible figures in varied hue, while her breast was baldricked with gems of the most exquisite colour. As she walked her arms clashed, so that you would have thought the broken levin to rattle—with explosive handclaps, 352like the collision of clouds, so that you might even believe her capable of wielding the thunderbolts of Jove. For she it is who, like a mighty queen of all things, can direct them whither she will and call them back whence she chooses, and unbend men to tears or incite them to rage, and sway the minds of civic crowds as of warring armies. She brought beneath her sway the senate, the rostra, the courts at Rome,” &c., &c., the innocent and transparent allegory of the earlier part changing into a half-historical, half-philosophical account of the functions of Rhetoric generally. She is followed by a great crowd of men, some Greek, some Roman, among whom (it is worth mentioning, as a proof of the taste of the age) Æschines, Isocrates, and Lysias are specially mentioned for the one tongue, and, with some uncertain names, Pliny and Fronto in the other. Cicero is later put, by Rhetoric herself, as beyond competition in either. She displays her declamatory skill in a formal exordium, and then plunges into the usual matter of Rhetorical treatises. The treatment is technical, but by no means ill-arranged, clear enough even in the bewildering labyrinths of the status, not excessive in the Figures, and altogether one of the best of the Latin Rhetorics. When she finishes, Mercury beckons to her to join the group of those who had played their part, and to salute the bride. So she walks with much confidence up to Philology, gives her “a sounding kiss—for she can do nothing silently even if she would—on the top of her head,”^[447] and joins the society of her sisters.

Recurring to the speech of one of these sisters, Grammar, and combining it with this, we shall have no ill notion of the helps to literary criticism with which the next thousand years of the world’s history were provided in the west of Europe. They were rudimentary enough, and those who were furnished with them had in most cases no thought—indeed for long centuries hardly any opportunity—of using them for any critical purpose. 353But they lay ready for the hand of others, and at the Renaissance, as well as in one brilliant and some minor instances earlier, they were turned with only a little delay to their proper purpose.

Grammar, with the quaintness that suffuses the whole book, says, “My parts are four—litteræ, litteratura, litteratus, litterate. ‘Letters’ are what I teach; ‘Literature’ am I who teach them; ‘the man of letters’ is he whom I shall have taught; ‘literate’ the manner in which my pupil shall skilfully handle things.” But the expectation thus raised is a little falsified, for “letters” are taken at their own foot, though Pallas pulls up Grammar and maintains that she has omitted the “historic part,” which does not mean our historic in the very least, any more than litteratura means our Literature.

There is, however, both in these places and throughout the book, a great deal of “fine confused feeding,” both on matters really literary and on those more or less subsidiary to literature, from Phonetics upwards. The citations, though not extremely frequent or copious, show pretty wide reading, especially in Latin. In the book on Rhetoric we find very particular and minute attention paid to these considerations of euphony to which attention has already been drawn, Martianus (who, whether we allow him poetry or not, was evidently a very careful and deft versifier^[448]) applying his practice in the other harmony with his usual quaint conceit here. Nowhere, perhaps, do we better perceive, though nowhere may we find it more difficult exactly to follow, the niceties of the ancient ear, than in the caution that while it is well to end a clause with a molossus (three longs), if the final word is a trisyllable you must be careful to put a trochee before it, and by no means a spondee or pyrrhic. Thus “Littus ejectis,” with which Tully finishes a clause, is all right, but “rupes ejectis” would be pessima clausula, and “apex ejectis” (where apex is described as a 354pyrrhic, according to its natural quantity in the oblique cases) almost worse.

Further than this, however, Low Latin was not encouraged by its tutor Martianus to advance. Nor is it surprising that with such teaching we find no such advance in the first lisping of the modern literatures themselves, till the strangely articulate speech of their greatest critic, as he was their greatest creator—Dante the Wingbearer.

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INTERCHAPTER II.

In considering and summing up the contribution of ancient Latin literature to the history and achievements of Criticism, we may conveniently adopt a threefold division and arrangement, so as to see, first, what was the general character of Latin criticism as contrasted with Greek, and with that comparative study of literature which has only recently become possible; secondly, its actual and positive achievement; thirdly, the state in which it left the chances of the future.

The first point under the first head is obvious at once, and has been repeatedly glanced at and referred to already. The Romans had what the Greeks had not and could not have—the advantage of literary comparison in two tongues. This—it may be said a thousand times over, and not be said too often—is an advantage so enormous that nothing else is required to show the wonderful faculty of the nation which could effect so much without it. Without comparison, not merely is the diagnosis of qualities mostly guesswork, but even the discovery of them becomes extremely difficult. With comparison, the qualities almost “leap to the eyes,” and the difference of their results goes far to help in the differentiation of their natures.

At the same time, this advantage, huge as it still was, was conditioned and hampered by the fact that Latin, as a language, was an extremely close connection of Greek, and, as a literature, was daughter and pupil in one. It would be stepping out of the safe and solid, if not often trodden, path which has been prescribed for this book, to inquire whether, if more scope had been given to the Italian and less to the Italiote^[449] 356element, this need have been the case; it is sufficient for our strictly historical inquiry that it was the case as a matter of fact. With rare exceptions, of which the Satire itself is a doubtful chief, with few and more doubtful followers, the Romans invented no form of literature whatsoever. Nor did they, as more literary races have so often done, re-create and make their own the forms that they borrowed. The earlier lost Roman tragedy was, it is clear, simply calqué upon Greek, as was the Roman comedy (though the mother-wit of Plautus, one of the most original of Latin writers not of the decadence, gives it an original air) absolutely calqué upon the later forms of the Attic. The Epic was even more slavishly imitative—those who rate Virgil highest must admit that, delicately as he walks, and elegant as is his footgear, he simply steps in the footprints, now of Homer, now of Apollonius, now, in all probability, of writers who happen to be lost. The Latin Lyric poets dare invent no fresh scheme; the historians, even those of genius, have the fear, or at any rate the following, of the Greeks always before them. And so they deprive themselves, from the critical point of view, of the very advantage with which they start—they lose their chance of finding out the real forms of literature, transcending those of any particular tongue, by assimilating the forms of their own as exactly as possible to another’s.

And this lack of independence continues to betray itself throughout, and at once to lessen their opportunities for criticism, and dilute the quality of such criticism as they do venture upon. The Roman—it has been observed, and truly observed, a thousand times—is a man of letters almost always by accident, and on the way to being something else. When he is not, he is generally of the second class. Virgil, Horace, and Cicero perhaps are the chief exceptions, and the two first at any rate, if not the third, were among the most artificial, if also of the most artful, imitators of the Greeks. To Catullus, his exquisite and hardly surpassed poetical faculty was evidently little more than a toy or a pastime—helpful to express his moods of love or of laughter, and that was all. So the magnificent singing robes of Lucretius cover a man who has hardly a thought of being a poet, who aims mainly at being a 357philosopher; and the scarcely inferior Muse of Juvenal positively turns her back on her sisters, and busies herself with a sardonic “criticism of life,” in which indignant disdain is oddly blended with a strange interest in all trifles, and all serious things, that are not literary. The men with whom literature is, if not exactly a passion, a really serious interest, are, on the other hand, “polyhistoric” persons of talent, in strengths varying from Cicero himself to Pliny, or else men like Martial, admirable practitioners, and something more, in a limited and not very high kind.

Yet, again, though the Roman talent was extremely businesslike, it was by no means subtle. It could, at any rate to some extent, borrow the fanciful Greek refinements; but it found a necessity of changing them into hard and fast rules.

To all this we must add another thing of the first importance. Great as were the accidental advantages of oratory in Greece, they were almost greater at Rome. During every age of the Republic a good speaker had a great weight in his favour; but in its last age, unless the luck was strangely against him, honours and wealth were to be had by him simply for the asking. Under the Empire his position as to the honours of the state was a little more precarious, and his talents (if he was a very honest man and not a very discreet one) were not unlikely to bring him into trouble. But if he were not too scrupulous—as in the case of Eprius Marcellus, of that Regulus whom Pliny evidently admired almost as much as he loathed him, of Fabricius Veiento, and others—these talents could be dishonestly made subservient to fortune. Even in the worst times of the worst emperors their exercise in the law courts was fairly safe, and extremely profitable; while the rage for declamations also gave the art of speaking a factitious but very great popularity.

Hence there was no fear, or hope, of Oratory being brought to its proper place among the departments of literature. On the contrary, the practical prosaic character of the people tended to exalt it higher than ever over such kickshaws as poetry. Probably nine out of ten Romans would have agreed with Aper in the Dialogus.

358All this was not particularly favourable to any practice of criticism, and particularly unfavourable to a fresher and wider interpretation of it. Yet, as we have seen, there was something of a set towards literary criticism of a kind in Rome. There, fashion was at once very powerful and very conservative: and the fashion of literary conversations, especially after dinner, set by the Scipios and others when they came into contact on their foreign campaigns with lettered Greeks, seems never to have died out till the very incoming of the Dark Ages, if then. It may have been—it was—more philological, antiquarian, “folklorish,” and what not, than strictly literary, but it was sometimes this. The other fashion of recitation and declamation, closely connected with this, provided also material for it. Sometimes, no doubt, these literary conversations were a terrible bore, as the satirists not obscurely tell us, and as Pliny, in a letter^[450] full of good sense and pleasantness, points out to a friend of his who had been bored at another kind of dinner, where the fun was provided by scurræ, moriones, and other professional persons not to be mentioned in English.

From all this we find, and are not surprised to find, that literary critical talk, and literary critical writing, in Rome, turned much more upon oratory than upon any other department, and that, when they did turn on others, these were often merely or mainly regarded as storehouses of quotation and patterns of imitation for the orator. There was, indeed, one additional reason for this which has not yet been mentioned, but which was not unnaturally among the most powerful of all. Oratory was about the only division of literature in which even a very patriotic Roman could, with any show of reason, consider his countrymen the equals of the Greeks. Here the flattering unction was often laid; and though as regards Cicero and Demosthenes, the inevitably selected champions, we may hardly think the match an equal one, it must be remembered that the extraordinary, and not quite comprehensible, loss of nearly all other Roman orators puts Latin at a very great disadvantage. We have Æschines, Lysias, Isæus, something, if 359not much, of Hyperides, a good deal of Isocrates, on the literary side of oratory. But we have nothing by which fairly to judge Hortensius or Catulus, Calvus or Pollio or Messala. What is certain is that men of cool judgment, who did not venture to set up even Virgil against Homer, and who practically let all Roman minor poetry go by the board, did think they could make a fight for Rome in symbouleutic and dikanic, if not in epideictic, oratory.

It follows from all these things that, strong as is the oratorical preoccupation in Greek, it is stronger still in Roman Rhetoric and criticism. Even the men who take the widest view of literature, and are most familiar with it—Cicero, Pliny, nay, Quintilian himself—fall, as has been said, unconsciously, or in the way of bland assumption as of a matter not worth arguing about, into the habit of regarding it either primarily as an exercising-ground, a magazine, a source of supply and training for the orator, or as a means of sport and pastime to him in the intervals of his more serious business. The utterly preposterous notion (as it seems to us) of trying a poet like Virgil by the rules of the rhetorician, classifying his speeches, pointing out his deft use of “means of persuasion,” laying stress on the proprieties and felicities of his use of language according to the rhetorical laws, taking examples of Figures from him and the like, could arise from nothing but this preliminary assumption or confusion, and could only be excused by it. It is in fact all-pervading—forget or lose sight of it, and there is hardly a Roman utterance about literature which will not be either quite unmeaning, or very seriously misleading.

The consequence is that very seldom do we get literary criticism of anything like the best kind—of any kind that deserves the name in meaning at once full and strict—from a Roman. There is no Latin Longinus—Quintilian himself is but at best a rather less technical Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and it is even very uncertain whether he does not owe a good deal directly to Dionysius himself. At any rate, much as we owe him, we owe it rather to his ineradicable and inevitable good sense, his thorough grasp of the educational values of things, and his unfeigned love of literature, than to any full conception 360on his part of the art of criticism as an art of appreciation—as a reasoned valuing and analysing of the sources of literary charm.

Another consequence (of the illustrative kind chiefly) is that the spell of the Figures is even more heavy on the Roman than on the Greek. That horrified cry^[451] of the unlucky Albucius, schemata tollis ex rerum natura, is as much the note of the average Roman critic as the quotation given above from Simylus^[452] is above the note both of Roman and even of Greek as a rule. It could hardly out of the head of a critic of this stamp, that if you took the proper number of scruples of hyperbole, so many drams of antiphrasis, and so on, you would make a fine sentence—that so many sentences thus formed and arranged, with proper regard to inventio, narratio, and the rest, would make a fine chapter, so many chapters a fine book. The whole process, once more, is topsy-turvy, and can come to no good end.

In Poetic of the limited kind we have, of course, from Rome one document, the historical importance of which it is impossible to exaggerate. But the intrinsic importance, even of this, is singularly out of proportion to its reputation and its influence. As has been explained in detail above, it may be unjust to regard the Epistola ad Pisones as a designed and complete tract De Arte Poetica. But make as much allowance as we may and can for scheme and purpose, the intrinsic quality of such criticism as it does give will remain clear and unaltered. Neither of the real nature, requirements, capabilities of any one literary form, nor of the character of any one source of literary beauty, does Horace show himself in the very least degree conscious. His precepts are now precepts of excellent commonsense, not less—perhaps rather more—applicable to life than to literature: now purely arbitrary rules derived from the practice—sometimes the quite accidental practice—of great preceding writers.

Yet, all the same, Horace unconsciously and almost indirectly does take up a very decided critical side, and expresses, with the neatness and in the rememberable fashion to be expected from 361so consummate a master, one of the two great critical creeds. Nor is there any doubt that this creed, so far as literary criticism appealed to the Roman mind at all, was that of by far the larger number of persons. This is—not necessarily in a ne varietur shape, but put very clearly in a certain form—the creed of what is known as “Classicism,” the creed which recommends, first of all, as the probable, if not the certain, road to literary success, adherence to the approved traditions, the elaboration of types and generalisations rather than indulgence in the eccentric and efforts to create the individual, the preference of the regular to the vague, &c., &c.

This, it may be repeated without much rashness, was even more the critical orthodoxy of Rome than it was the critical orthodoxy of Greece. We see it in the stock preference of the Attic to the Asiatic style in oratory; it simply defrays the whole of the just-mentioned criticism of Horace; it animates the campaign of the satirists against archaic and euphuist phraseology; it is clearly the proper thing to think in the literary miscellanies of Gellius, and even of Macrobius. The precepts of the formal treatises, so far as they touch on style at all, never fail to express this general tendency; and the even more deliberate and canonical “correctness” of the modern Latin races and literatures, if not directly and unavoidably inherited, is a very legitimate attempt to recover and improve the lost heritage of their ancestor.

Nor will any other conclusion, I think, be drawn from the study of those grammarians in the strict sense, of whom little or nothing has been said in the main body of this Book, for the simple reason that there was little or nothing to say. From Varro to Festus the symptoms which we have noted elsewhere recur with unmistakable fidelity. The etymology and signification of words; the explanation of customs, rites, myths; the arrangements of accidence and syntax—all these things awake evident interest, and receive careful and often most intelligent pains. These grammarians (and, of course, still more professedly metrical writers like Terentianus Maurus) are diligent on metre, and even behind metre, on that most difficult of subjects, in all times and languages, the metrical quality and 362quantity as distinguished from the metrical arrangement of words. But where all these things begin to group and crystallise themselves into higher criticism of literary form and charm, there our authors, I think it will be found with hardly an exception, stop dead. I shall be surprised (to stick to the example formerly given) to have pointed out to me a single passage in which the poetical quality of the Ennian, the Lucretian, and the Virgilian hexameter is discussed.

At the same time, it would be uncritical not to perceive, and unhistorical not to note, the existence in the history of Latin literature of a current running strongly in the opposite direction, making itself distinctly felt at more than one period, and, finally, in creative literature at least, going near to triumph. We have seen, both directly and indirectly, that in the first century of our era there was a very strong set towards archaism and euphuism, that it had the patronage of Seneca the father, certainly, if not also that of his more famous and more influential son; that it was not by any means wholly disapproved by Pliny; and that though what we may call literary orthodoxy was against it, a very large bulk (perhaps the great majority) of the prose declamations and the verse exercises of the time must have exhibited its influence. What is more, it is certain that in more than one of the Roman colonial or provincial districts, which furnished fresher and more vigorous blood than the Eternal City herself, or her Italian precinct, could now supply, this tendency received very strong accessions from various local peculiarities. It seems to have been least prevalent in Gaul, though by no means unknown there; the Senecas, and Quintilian himself, show at what an early date Spanish blood or birth inclined those who had it to what was long afterwards to take names from Guevara and Gongora. But the great home of Roman Euphuism was Africa. To say nothing of ecclesiastical writers like Tertullian (who might be supposed to have their style affected by Eastern influences), Apuleius earlier, and Martianus later, are more than sufficient, and luckily pretty fully extant, witnesses to the fact.

Yet this tendency is not represented in criticism at all. Apuleius, who was a very pretty pleader as well as an accomplished 363Euphuist in original composition, might well have left us a parallel to De Quincey’s own vindications of the ornate style, if he had chosen; but it did not apparently occur to him though the Florida would have given a quite convenient and proper home to such a dissertation.^[453] Con amore as Martianus describes (in the passage above translated) the gorgeousness of Rhetoric, it is strictly in reference to her oratorical practice. If the satires of the later Cæsars’ time take the other side, and so do give us some criticism on that, it is pretty certainly because all the greatest satirists, from Aristophanes downwards, have always been Tories, and have selected the absurdities of innovation more gladly than those of tradition for their target. Nay, it is a question whether Petronius, in one direction, and Persius in another, do not, so far as their own compositions are concerned, somewhat incur the blame of which they are so lavish, though Martial and Juvenal certainly do not. On all sides the conviction comes in that for strictly literary criticism the time was not ripe, or that the country, the nation, was indisposed and unprepared for it.

In no point, perhaps, is this so noteworthy and so surprising as in regard to what we may call the literary criticism of metre. For this Latin offered, at both ends of the history of Latin proper, temptations and opportunities which, so far as we know, were unknown to the Greeks. At the one end there were the remains, scanty, but significant even now, then probably abundant, of “Saturnian” prosody. Of this, of course, Roman writers, technical and other, do take notice: they even, with the antiquarian and mythological patriotism so common at Rome, take a fairly lively interest in it. But of the remarkable literary difference between it and the accepted literary metres—a point almost exactly on a par with that of the difference between our ballad metre and the accepted literary poetic forms of the eighteenth century—they do not, so far as I remember, seem to have taken any notice at all. There must have been—in fact we know perfectly well that there were—Roman literary 364antiquaries as diligent, as enthusiastic, and, no doubt, at least as intelligent as any of our own, from Percy and Hurd to Tyrwhitt and Ritson. There is no reason in the nature of things (indeed, Varro is a very fair analogue to the historian of English poetry) why there should not have been Romans of the calibre at least of Warton, if not even of Gray. But hardly a vestige of the combined antiquarian, philological, and literary interest, which animates all these men of ours, appears in the extant fragments of any Roman writer.

The facts at the other end point to the same conclusion. From no Roman critic, so far as I know, have we any notice whatsoever of that insurrection or resurrection (whichever word may be preferred) of accentual against quantitative rhythm which is one of the most interesting, and certainly one of the most mysterious, phenomena of the literary history of the world. Grant that early in the third century (if that be the right date) no cultivated student was likely to pay much attention to the barbarous rhythms of a Commodian,^[454] to be prepared even to consider

“Audite quoniam propheta de illo prædixit”

as a hexameter. But a hundred and fifty years later things were different. Before Macrobius wrote, before Servius commented, the verse of Prudentius had been given to the world. Now, the mere classical scholar has no doubt been usually 365unkind to Prudentius,^[455] but few people who have read him without a fixed idea that anybody who writes in Latin is bound to confirm to the prosody of the Augustan age, can have read him without frequent satisfaction. At any rate, he is a literary person; and his personality is emphasised by the fact that at one time he tries to write, and not infrequently succeeds in writing, very fair orthodox hexameters and trimeters; at others (and in the best work of the Cathemerinon and Peristephanon) his verse, whether answering to the test of the finger or not in metre, is clearly accentual in rhythm, and seems to be yearning for rhyme to complete and dress it. Now, if literary criticism in the full sense had been common, such a phenomenon must have attracted attention. The orthodox critics would have attacked it as furiously as the orthodox critics in England attacked Coleridge’s system of metrical equivalence, or the orthodox critics in France attacked Victor Hugo’s enjambements. The unorthodox critics, the revolutionary and romantic party, would, as in each case, have welcomed it with pæans. But, so far as we know, not the slightest notice was taken of Prudentius by the literary wits of the Saturnalia, or by any one else.

In part, no doubt, this silence may be set down to accidental and extra-literary causes. The very growth of provincial literatures would at once have rendered the productions of these literatures less likely to reach Rome, and have disinclined the literary critics of the capital to listen to provincial productions. Even the debate of Christian and Pagan,^[456] as it became more and more of a conflict between triumphant youth and declining eld, less and less of the resurrection of a desperate and despised minority against established order, may have had something to do with the matter. But, however this may be, the facts are the facts.

366We shall do well to accept them as they are, and to recognise that Latin had the criticism which it deserved, the criticism which was made necessary by the conditions of its own classical literature, and, lastly, the criticism which was really most useful both for itself and for its posterity—that is to say, in greater or less degree, not merely the so-called Romance tongues, but all the literary languages of modern Europe. The first two points must be tolerably clear to any tolerable Latinist, but they may be freshly put. A literature like classical Latin, which is from first to last in statu pupillari, which, with whatever strength, deftness, elegance, even originality at times, follows in the footsteps of another literature, must for the very life of it have a critical creed of order, discipline, moderation. Otherwise it runs the risk of being a mere hybrid, even a mere monstrosity.

Still more certainly, nothing could have been better for the future of the world than the exact legacy which Latin left, not merely in its great examples of literature, but in the forms of the scholastic Grammar and Rhetoric, to that millennium of reconstruction and recreation which is called the Middle Age. For that wonderful period—which even yet has never been put in its right place in the history of the world—a higher lesson would have been thrown away, or positively injurious. No instruction in Romanticism was wanted by the ages of Romance: for full literary knowledge of the ancient literatures they were in no wise suited or prepared. Their business was, after a long period of mere foundation-work in the elaboration of the modern speeches, to get together the materials of the modern literatures, and to build up the structure of these as well as they could. So strongly did they feel the nisus towards this, that they even travestied into their own likeness such of the old literature as remained.

But still Grammar and Rhetoric abode—to be a perpetual grounding and tutelage, a “fool-guard” and guide-post in these ages of exploration and childhood. That the Rhetoric was meagre and arbitrary, that a great deal of it had nothing to do with literature at all, but was a sort of fossilised skeleton of a bygone philosophy, or else a mere business training, mattered 367nothing. The Trivium and Quadrivium, the legacies of the classics, especially of Latin, gave in every one of their divisions, and not least in Rhetoric, precisely the formal stays, the fixed norms and forms of method, which were required in the general welter.

Had the appreciative criticism of Latin been stronger and wider, had it left any tradition in its own last age, and so been able to throw that tradition as a bridge over the dark time to come, it would have been no advantage, but a loss and a mischief. Not only would it have been waste of time for the Middle Ages to appreciate Greek and Latin literature critically, if they could have done so, but it would have hampered them in the doing of their own great day’s, or rather night’s, work—their work of assimilation, of recuperation, and, not least, of dream.

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