“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 unkind 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.
We 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 nothing. 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.
[449]. Of course I do not mean to imply that the Italiote cities were the direct source of the Greek element in classical Latin literature.
[450]. Ep., ix. 17.