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]] element, 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 philosopher; 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.
All 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 not 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.