We may close the account of the Sidonian criticism in prose with a mere reference to the curious list of symbolic gestures and features of the philosophers in ix. 9. His poems need not detain us; but reference should also be made to the verse enclosure in Epist. ix. 13, containing glosses on different metres[[492]] and poetic forms; to the exposition of “recurrent” verses in the succeeding letter, as well as, in the Carmina, to the long list, with critical remarks, of authors in ix.; to the very interesting, and to this day sound, justification of the introduction of exotic words and neologisms when necessary, in the prose preface to xiv.; and to a crowd of literary references in xxiii.
I have been somewhat copious in dwelling on the bishop-count-poet, because he is infinitely the most valuable document |Cassiodorus.| that we have as to the highwater-mark of the state of critical knowledge and opinion with which the Dark or Earlier Middle Ages started.[[493]] We have in the last book examined the chief text-book of formal grammar and Rhetoric, that of Martianus, with which they were already provided, and we need only glance at two other standards of theirs, Boethius and Cassiodorus, who come close in time to Sidonius, and probably to Martianus likewise. Cassiodorus wrote, like Capella, on the Liberal arts, though in a manner at once informal and less fantastic, and his influence in encouraging the frequenters of the mediæval scriptorium to copy ancient manuscripts deserves eternal gratitude. But I have not yet discovered in him much material for our special inquiry.
Nor is the great name of Boethius here as great as elsewhere. He wrote, indeed, on rhetorical loci, and the author of the |Boethius.| metres in the Consolatio[[494]] deserves no mean place in creative literature. But if he had taken any really keen critical interest in books, for their form as distinguished from their matter, it must have appeared in the Consolatio itself. On the contrary, as everybody knows who has ever looked at the book, it begins with Philosophy packing the Muses off as “strumpets and mermaidens” in a tone half-suggestive of Plato a little the worse for Augustine. And though the “suasion of sweetness rhetorien” is afterwards patronisingly spoken of (Book II., Prose i.), and Homer with the honey-mouth, Lucan, and others are quoted, yet Rhetoric is expressly warned that “she goeth the right way only when she forsaketh not my statutes.” Moreover, the beautiful metre Vela Neritii ducis is a merely moral, and almost merely allegorical, playing on the story of Circe.
We can, however, see from the comparison some useful things. The stock of actual erudition possessed by at any rate some persons was considerable; but the number of these persons was not very large, and both the |Critical attitude of the fifth century.| “remnant” itself[[495]] and its accomplishments were likely to decline and dwindle. The new vernaculars were already assuming importance; men were likely[[496]] to be chosen for positions of ecclesiastical eminence (almost the only ones in which study of literature was becoming possible), because of their bilingual skill, or to be driven by such positions to study of the vernacular. And this bilingualism was likely not merely to barbarise even their Latin style, but to draw them away from the study of classical Latin, and still more Greek. In regard to the latter, we see further, from two passages of Sidonius quoted above, that persons of very considerable education were apt to use translations of the Greek fathers, as well as of Pagan writings, in preference to the original. Yet again we see that even the most accomplished scholars of the time (and Sidonius himself may certainly claim that distinction) were, on the one hand, more and more acquiescing in what, to borrow Covenanting phraseology, we may call the “benumbing, deadening, and soul-destroying” list of ticket-epithets: and, on the other, were gradually losing a sense of the relative proportions of things—of the literary ratio of patristic to classical literature, and of the productions of their own day to those of the great masters, whether classical or patristic. And thirdly, we see that even so careful a metrical student as the Bishop of Clermont was succumbing to the charm of “recurrent” verses, acrostics, telestics, and all the rest of it.
On the other hand, this process of “losing grip” is very far from the state in which we find it by the time that we are in full Middle Age: and, for good as well as for evil, the glorious hotch-potch of that period is still distant. Virgil is not yet an enchanter or anything like it: he and his works are perfectly well placed in their proper literary and historical connections. If, on the side of form, there is perhaps already a rather perilous tendency to see no very great difference between Orosius and Livy, there is none to put Dares (who probably did not exist) on a level as an authority with Homer, or above him, in point of matter. And while the fables about Alexander probably did exist, men of education did not think of mixing them up with the facts.
The most favourable sign of all, however, is that metrical solicitude which has been already more than once referred to. The anxiety which Sidonius shows to suit his metres to his subject would do credit to a much better poet in a much more “enlightened” age; and it is surely not fantastic to see in his constant reference to success or failure in adjusting “syllables to feet, and feet to measures,” that the difference of the classical prosody from the newer, half-accentual quantification even in Latin, and from the vernacular rhythms sounding all over Europe, was forcing itself, consciously or unconsciously, on his mind. And it cannot be repeated too often that to construct and perfect new prosodies, in Latin and in the vernaculars alike, was perhaps the greatest critical-practical problem that the Middle Age had before it.
The sixth century has even fewer lights among its gathering gloom; in the beginning and at the end of the seventh a kind of rally of torches is made by Isidore and Bede. |The sixth—Fulgentius.| There are, however, two authors at least in the sixth who are full of significance, even if that significance be too much of a negative kind. These are the African grammarian Fulgentius, with his Expositio Virgiliana, probably in the earlier half, and the poet-priest Venantius Fortunatus, certainly in the later.
Fulgentius[[497]] holds something like a position in the history of Allegory, being not infrequently breveted with the rank of go-between, or the place of fresh starting-point, between the last development of the purely classical allegory in Claudian, and the thick-coming allegoric fancies of the early Christian homilists and commentators, which were to thicken ever and spread till the full blossoming of Allegory in the Romance of the Rose, and its busy decadence thenceforward. Unluckily, Allegory was, as we have seen, no novelty in criticism; but rather a congenital or endemic disease—and Fulgentius only marks a fresh and furious outburst of it. Virgil, a favourite everywhere in the late Roman world, was, it has been said, an especial favourite in Africa: and Fulgentius would appear to have given the reins, not exactly to the steed, but to the ass, of his fancy, in reference to the Mantuan.
The writings of the Fulgentian clan (none of which, fortunately, is long) consist of (1) three books of Mitologiæ (Mythologiæ), of (2) the Expositio Virgilianæ Continentiæ |The Fulgentii and their books.| secundum Philosophos Morales which is our principal text, and of (3) a shorter Expositio Sermonum Antiquorum, attributed to Fabius Planciades Fulgentius, who was probably of African birth, and probably lived in the early sixth century; of (4) a tractate, De Ætatibus Mundi et Hominis, attributed to Fabius Claudius Gordianus Fulgentius; and (5) of a note on the Thebaid of Statius, attributed to Fulgentius, Saint and Bishop. The personalities of these persons are to the last degree unknown; and it is very uncertain whether they were in reality one or two or three. The books we may best cite as 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
4 is far better written and more sensible than the others; but it has nothing to do with our subject. 3 is a short list (sixteen pages and sixty-two articles) of notes on out-of-the-way words (abstrusi sermones), where it is curious to find among really unusual locutions—friguttire, suggrundaria, tittivilitium, and the like—such to us everyday ones as problema and auctio. 2 and 5 concern our business, equally in substance, unequally in importance and extent, and to understand them both, it is desirable to read 1 at least cursorily, although it, like them, is a tissue of appallingly barbarous Latin—enshrining allegorical interpretations as ridiculous as the most absurd in the Gesta Romanorum,[[498]] and derivations which in their sheer serious insanity surpass the most promising efforts of the clever and sportive schoolboy in the same kind. As no one, I think, who reads this book will regard me as a detractor of the Dark and Middle Ages, I may speak here without fear and without favour.