Of the other kinds we have much more scattered and less satisfactory observations. The Greeks were clearly not happy with their Comedy; they were half ashamed of Aristophanes, who might suffice for the glory of a whole literature; and they seem to have too often ranked the ingenious and fertile, but distinctly thin and “pretty,” talent of Menander above his. The same curious kind of mistaken belittling would appear to have hung upon Lyric. Both upon these and several other kinds, from Dithyramb to Mimiambics, they remind us of the apologetic remarks of our own eighteenth-century censors on the work of their own time, which, from the point of view of universal literature, will last longest and rank highest—fiction, essay, and the like. In fact, this mistaken calculus of appraisement of kinds is one of the main notes of the whole subject.

The punishment, as usual, has been adjusted to the crime; and the merit, as usual also, has met with its reward from the secure judgment of the world. The more a man knows Greek literature the more deeply will he be impressed with the inestimable services which, in criticism as elsewhere, the Greeks rendered to humanity. But the more he knows other literatures, besides Greek, the more will he be convinced of the necessity of enlarging, extending, and at the same time correcting, the Greek point of critical view.

BOOK II
LATIN CRITICISM

“At demonstrare virtutes, vel si quando ita incidat vitia,

id ... maxime proprium est.”—Quintilian[Quintilian].

CHAPTER 1.
BEFORE QUINTILIAN—CICERO, HORACE, SENECA THE ELDER, VARRO.

THE CONDITIONS OF LATIN CRITICISM—CICERO—HIS ATTITUDE TO LUCRETIUS—HIS RHETORICAL WORKS—HIS CRITICAL VOCABULARY—HORACE—THE ‘AD PISONES’—ITS DESULTORINESS—AND ARBITRARY CONVENTIONALITY—ITS COMPENSATIONS—BRILLIANCY—TYPICAL SPIRIT—AND PRACTICAL VALUE—THE ‘SATIRES’ AND ‘EPISTLES’—"DECLAMATIONS"—THEIR SUBJECTS: EPIDEICTIC AND FORENSIC—THEIR INFLUENCE ON STYLE—SENECA THE ELDER—THE “SUASORIES”—THE ‘CONTROVERSIES’: THEIR INTRODUCTIONS—VARRO.

The conditions of Latin criticism.

Those who direct their literary ideas by considerations of what they think likely to happen, or of what they think ought to have happened, would probably expect—neither without some reason nor without a certain amount of confirmation from experience—a considerable development of literary criticism under the Latin dispensation.[[276]] In the first place, the Romans had what the Greeks at first lacked, and afterwards too often disdained, that opportunity of Comparison, which, as has been said so often, is the very life and soul and breath of the higher and better critical exercise. In the second place, the whole literature of their classical period was itself a kind of critical imitation—sometimes pretty slavish, sometimes freer—of Greek: and it was practically impossible for a Roman to write without the exercise, independent or second-hand, of processes of study and thought which were critical or nothing. Against this must be set the facts—first, that the Latin literary genius was somewhat timid, that it felt itself rebuked by the majesty of Greece; and secondly, that the tendency of the race was not, till it was much mixed with others, very decidedly literary. Few Romans dared to approach the masterpieces of Greek literary art in a thoroughly critical spirit, and fewer had the sense of literature which might have enabled them to do so usefully. Further, their own period of consummate production was distinctly short, and not excessively fruitful, while those authors of their own to whom they devoted most attention stimulated only certain kinds of criticism. Virgil and Cicero are very great writers, doubtless, but everybody does not feel much enthusiasm for the first, and some people do not feel much enthusiasm for the second. The curious perfection of Horace is, after all, as limited as it is curious—there are no vistas in it; and the same may be said of the easy flow of Livy, the artificial, and, for its range, intense idiosyncrasy of Sallust, and the artful fancy of Ovid. These six writers seem to have always attracted the lion’s share of Roman admiration, though at one time there might be a taste for the tricks, precious or slightly obscure, of Seneca in prose and Persius in verse, at another for other things. For their two most poetical poets, Lucretius and Catullus, the Romans never seem to have felt any deep or widespread admiration; their proseman of greatest genius, Tacitus, came too late, and was too unpopular in his sentiments, to attract much. Even so late as the latter days of Quintilian, when the Silver Age itself was drawing to a close, we find that it was customary to devote chief attention to Greek, and that it was thought necessary to argue for Latin as for a novice, who, if well trained and encouraged, might become a pretty fighter in time. As for Cicero’s time, there is no reason to suppose him an exception: yet we know how, when not in full public dress, he takes refuge in Greek at every moment, and sometimes seems almost inclined to echo a phrase of Ascham’s in the dawn of modern English letters, and say it would be “more easier” for him to write in Greek, as it was for the author of the Toxophilus to have written in Latin.