Far, very far, be it from me to speak with any ignorant or vulgar 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.
Grant 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 figure 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 their 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 supposed 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,”