[375]. Those who have an accurate memory of M. Taine’s English Literature and of his English Notes will not object to this apparent impossibility.
[376]. I am not sure that I should have given any place here to Cornelius Fronto, if his ticket of admission had not been (rather contumeliously) countersigned by Mr Nettleship. The low opinion which Marcus Aurelius seems to have had of literature may possibly have been in part excused by his preceptor’s utterances on the subject. He appears to have been an eminent representative of the “labelling” school of critics. Lucilius is “gracile” (this is not quite Horace’s view), Albucius and Pacuvius mediocre, Accius unequal, Ennius multiform. Sallust writes history structe, Pictor incondite, Claudius lepide, Antias invenuste, Sisenna longinque, Cato verbis multijugis, Cœlius singulis. One cannot help “nodding approval and saying, ‘This is very satisfactory to know,’” as Lady Kew did when she was informed that “Alfred was a trump, and Ethel a brick, and Barnes a snob.” But if Mr Nettleship thought that æsthetic, as opposed to philosophical, criticism could not get beyond this system of tickets-of-leave, he was surely mistaken.
CHAPTER III.
QUINTILIAN.
THE ‘INSTITUTES’—PREFACE—BOOK I.: ELEMENTARY EDUCATION AND GRAMMAR—BOOKS II.-VII. ONLY RELEVANT NOW AND THEN—HOW TO LECTURE ON AN AUTHOR—WIT—BOOK VIII.: STYLE; PERSPICUITY; ELEGANCE—BOOKS VIII., IX.: TROPES AND FIGURES—COMPOSITION—PROSE RHYTHM—BOOK X.: SURVEY OF CLASSICAL LITERATURE—GREEK: HOMER AND OTHER EPIC POETS—THE LYRISTS—DRAMA—THE HISTORIANS—THE ORATORS AND PHILOSOPHERS—LATIN: VIRGIL—OTHER EPIC AND DIDACTIC POETS—ELEGIAC AND MISCELLANEOUS—DRAMA—HISTORY—ORATORY: CICERO—PHILOSOPHY: CICERO AND SENECA—MINOR COUNSEL OF THE TENTH BOOK—BOOKS XI. AND XII.—THE STYLES OF ORATORY—"ATTICISM"—LITERARY QUALITY OF GREEK AND LATIN—QUINTILIAN’S CRITICAL “ETHOS.”
In passing, say, from Cicero, the chief prose Latin critic of præ-Augustan times, to Quintilian, the chief of post-Augustan, and |The Institutes.| indeed of Latin critics of all dates, we come to a man of much less genius no doubt, and, in particular, of far less creative literary power, but still to one who, for our special purpose, has some very considerable advantages. It is not merely that the Spanish-Roman is a professional critic, as well as a rhetorician—that he is as much the professional critic of Latin as Dionysius of Halicarnassus (whom he much resembles, and to whom, as has been said, he possibly owes not a little) is of Greek. He has over the greater writer (whom he admires so generously) the further advantage of complete freedom from that touch of dilettantism (one is sometimes almost tempted to use a harsher word and call it quackery) which besets Cicero whenever he is not actually pleading or debating, and which is not invariably lost even then. Further, Quintilian is the only critic of antiquity (for even Longinus, as we saw, merely glances at the subject) who seriously takes the two languages, seriously compares them, and, by the help of the comparison, acquires a view-point over literature as such—not merely as Greek or Latin literature—which was shut to all his predecessors and most of his followers. If the Rhetoric and the Poetics of Aristotle form the great book of critical method for ancient times, if the Περὶ Ὕψους is the great book of their critical inspiration; the Institutes of Oratory contain the fullest, the most intelligent, the most satisfactory applications of criticism to literature, as it presented itself to an intelligent and thoroughly educated person, whose eyes were sharpened by long expert use, at the end of the first century, when, except for a few belated authors, mostly of curiosities, the list of the great writers of antiquity was all but closed. The book[[377]] is extremely well written; it is, with a few cruces, remarkably clear, and its range and thoroughness leave practically nothing to desire.
This wide range of it (which, according to different, but, in each case, defensible interpretations of its title, busies itself with the whole education of an orator, or with the whole theory and practice of oratory) naturally makes it include much which does not fall strictly within our subject. But nearly the whole of three books, the eighth, ninth, and tenth, and a large and important section of the twelfth, are devoted directly to that subject; while there are references to it almost throughout. We shall therefore, as we did in the case of Aristotle and Longinus, give a kind of running abstract of the whole, dwelling very briefly on the irrelevant, somewhat more fully on the partly relevant, fully on the rest, and returning to the consideration of special points later.
In a sort of Advertisement, to and for the use of his publisher Trypho, and in a prefatory dedication to his friend Marcellus |Preface.| Victorius, Quintilian gives some information about the origin and object of the work. From this we learn, among other things, that part-cause at least of its actual appearance was the fact, not unknown in more modern times, of unauthorised publication of his lectures by note-taking pupils.
The first book is devoted to the subject of the education of boys from the earliest age, a subject on which Quintilian speaks |Book I. Elementary Education| with much knowledge and good sense, as well as kindliness. But from this he soon passes to Grammar, and his importance for us begins. For his treatment of the subject is quite in the larger and humaner sense, insisting from the first on critical reading, though he seems, as indeed we should expect, to regard the “desperate hook” of the extremer kind of verbal critic with little favour. It is noteworthy that he alleges music to be necessary, because the grammarian has to speak of metre and rhythm. And passing rapidly from considerations of orthography, right pronunciation, and audience, he arrives at the all-important subject of “correctness,” and of its attainment, negatively by the avoidance of barbarisms and solecisms, positively by the selection of the best words in the best arrangement. Observations of special importance in this context may be cited: That the word in itself (i.e., out of connection) has no merit except its inherent euphony; that (a most pregnant remark) it is often difficult to distinguish Faults from Figures of speech; and some exceedingly |and Grammar.| interesting, but also more than ordinarily difficult, remarks on tone and accent-variation. In all these grammatical notes, which are pretty full and numerous, and often very curious—showing that, as he himself says pleasantly, though he is not writing a treatise on Grammar, yet as it lay in his way he did not like not to be polite to it—there is a pervading quality of not at all Philistine common-sense which shows the best side of the Roman temperament. Although Quintilian acknowledges the convenience of Greek for terminology, and makes fairly free use of the terms, it is quite evident that he has (long before he formulates it later) a profound and very wholesome distrust of the Greek rhetorical practice of splitting a thing up, naming the splinters, and then passing on, as if a real, solid, and final examination had been attained. And the same quality appears eminently in the summing up of his discourse on words, “Custom in speaking I shall call the agreement of the educated, as custom in living is the agreement of the good.”
Remarks on orthography follow, and some on reading, valuable, though not so valuable, as those on the same |Books II.-VII. only relevant now and then.| subject which come later. And then he passes to certain of the progymnasmata of the Greek rhetoricians, fables, uses, sentences, and “ethologies,” which, though they have puzzled some, are clearly the same as the ethopœiæ of Hermogenes and his fellows.[[378]] All these are, in fact, exercises in composition. The rest of the book is occupied with the discussion of other subjects of the school curriculum, subsidiary to rhetoric. The second book continues the subject of Composition, but with more special reference to Oratory proper—a tendency which naturally increases; and for some five or six books the technicalities of the rhetoric-school and the courts have the better of literature. There are, however, two exceptions, which require notice—the first a remarkable passage[[379]] on reading or lecturing on authors.
“But”—he has just ruled out the explanation of the mere meaning of uncommon words as below the duties of a Professor of Rhetoric—"to point out the merits, and if it so happen, the faults, is the properest of all things for the profession and for the promise by which he holds himself out as a master of eloquence...." (He should make the students read in turn, and then), "after setting forth the case on which the oration was composed (for thus it will be more clearly understood), he should leave nothing unnoticed which may be noteworthy in the invention or the elocution, pointing out the manner of conciliating the jury in the proem, the clearness, conciseness, persuasive force of the narration, the occasional design and hidden artifice (for that alone is true art here, which can only be understood by an artist), what foresight there is in division, what subtle and thronging[[380]] argumentation, the strength of the inspiration, the attraction of the winning passages, the roughness[[381]] of the objurgation, and the humour of the jokes; how, finally, the man |How to lecture on an author.| shows mastery of feeling, makes his way into the very heart, and adjusts the minds of the jury to his own contention. Then, as for style, we must point out what words are proper, ornate, sublime, where the amplification is to be praised, what excellence there is in the contrary direction,[[382]] what is ingeniously transferred; what the figurativeness of the words is, how smooth and squared, yet manly, the composition." And then he proceeds to recommend the occasional selection of passages which are not to be praised—the exhibition, in short, of a rhetorical helotry.