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 Virgil 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 linguistic, 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 work; 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 them 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 jam 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.