It is, however, from Cicero that Roman literary criticism, properly so called, begins,[[277]] and he, with Horace, almost exhausts |Cicero.| our supply of it from the days before the Empire. Yet he prepares us for the disappointments which meet us in Latin criticism even more than in Greek. That Cicero’s interest in literature was great no one would dream of denying. His letters swarm with quotations and literary allusion; he is constantly arranging for new bookcases and new books; he no sooner has enforced (he never had much voluntary) leisure than he sets to work to write, to translate, to compose, to discuss. But the general inconveniences just noted, and some others of a particular nature, prevent him from being of much importance as a critic. He thought himself (as Quintilian later thought him) a philosopher, and he devoted much time to composing agreeable but extremely diluted copies of the Platonic dialogues. He was an orator not merely by profession but by taste, and he has left us (even excluding the pretty certainly spurious Ad Herennium) a very respectable bulk of Rhetorical work. But, as we shall presently see more in detail, most of this belongs altogether to the non-literary side of Rhetoric. Still, in default of some regular treatise (which was hardly to be expected), it is to his abundant, varied, and interesting correspondence that we should look for material, and we find very little of it. Here is a joke on the habit of Aristarchus (and indeed of other critics), the habit of marking as spurious anything they do not like: there an equally jocular introduction of rhetorical technicalities; elsewhere a rather curious but more linguistic than literary disquisition on the way in which innocent words and phrases acquire, half by accident, awkward double meanings, or slip into the single bad meaning only. There is a passage of some interest in a letter to Atticus about Cicero’s lost Greek history of his consulship, where he describes himself as having used up all Isocrates' perfume-shop, and the cabinets of his disciples, and even Aristotelian pigments.[[278]]
But the most direct and famous piece of pure literary criticism in the letters is an unlucky one. Cicero of course came |His attitude to Lucretius.| before—or rather himself led—the most brilliant age of Latin, and could not have so much as seen the work of Virgil, of Horace, much less of Ovid, and others. But he could and he did know Lucretius, whose work an absurd tradition has it that he even revised. And what does he say of this mighty poet, who unites the poignancy of Catullus to the sustained grasp of Virgil, and adds a sublimity unknown to both? The manuscripts are said to read: Lucretii poemata, ut scribis, ita sunt: multis luminibus ingenii multæ tamen artis.[[279]] The earlier editors most naturally considered this sentence nonsense. No doubt the opposition of ingenium and ars is a common thing, almost a commonplace, in Latin. But would any one, unless he had a thesis to prove, dream of regarding tamen as admissible here? of translating it as if it were necnon? There is, of course, a certain paradoxical sense in which, at the end of the nineteenth century, a brisk young critic might say of Mr X., “He has plenty of brains, and yet he really knows how to write.” But this is not in the least Roman; and it is Ciceronian rather less than it is Roman generally. Some, recognising that there must have been a non somewhere, put it before multæ, and suppose that Cicero, as if he had been accustomed to Virgilian smoothness, thought Lucretius rough. But this, from his own verses, is very unlikely.[unlikely.] The natural emendation is to put the non (as till recently it used always to be supplied) before multis, which emendation, and which alone, makes the sentence run as, without prejudice on the score of the special meaning, we should expect it to run: “The poems of Lucretius are, as you say, not very full of brilliancy in genius, but show plenty of art.”
Supposing this to be so, some have tried to make out that Cicero’s well-known dislike of the Epicurean tenets accounts for the unfavourable criticism. So much the worse for him as a literary critic if it was so. A man who cannot taste Shelley because Shelley attacks Christianity, or laugh at the Twopenny Postbag because Moore was a Whig, may be, and very likely is, an honour to his species as a man, but the less said about him as a critic of literature the better. But there is no real probability of such a plea having any foundation. We shall see what Quintilian says about Lucretius later: we know that very few other Latin writers say anything about him at all. Cicero, who would fain have been a poet, and who sometimes could hammer out a tolerable hexameter,[[280]] could not as a mere craftsman, as a mere student of Rhetoric, fail to appreciate something of the “art” of Lucretius. The stately volume of those magnificent hexameters—the ne plus ultra of their kind in more ways than one or two—could not but appeal to him as a mere connoisseur of Latin rhythm, which (put him high or low in general literature) he most certainly was. The difference in comparison with Ennius, as a matter of art, was for such a man as Cicero simply unmistakable.
But the qualities of the Lucretian “genius,” as distinguished from the Lucretian art, were not suited to attract Cicero—were, we may say, without fear of injustice, suited to attract very few Romans of the true type.[[281]] That type was, as far as the defects went, distinctly “barbarian,” in the sense in which Mr Matthew Arnold (very unjustly) applied the word to the English aristocracy—full of vigour, instinct with the faculty of ruling, magnanimous after a fashion, but impenetrable to ideas, only formally religious, shutting off its keen perception of a certain justice with huge blinkers, and, above all, curiously insensible to the vague, the mystical, the sense of wonder. Now, Lucretius, though he had chosen for himself a creed approaching mere materialism, had treated it in a fashion constantly and unabashedly ideal. It does not need the “flaming bastions of the world” or the sense of the néant, splendidly as he can describe both, to awake the poetical faculty in him. He can make poetry out of the exiguum clinamen, and out of things less promising if even more abstract still. With him it is always “the riding that does it”; the subject hardly matters at all. Lucretius, in short, was one of the great poets—sheerly and merely as poets—of the world. The didactics in which our eighteenth-century versemen so dismally failed offer no more difficulties to him than a love-poem or a flowery description. He will do you a science, or an atomic system, as another might do an Odyssey or a story of Lancelot. Now this was what the ancients, with all their acuteness and originality, could seldom understand or like; and what Cicero (a man of genius in some ways, but something of a Philistine and nothing of a poet) could like least of all those who can in any way be compared with him. Many of the beauties of the Lucretian imagination would be no doubt simply lost on him; and others he would consider wasted on the wrong subjects, if not positively applied in the wrong manner. Let us, however, for fairness' sake, accept the MS. reading, allow that tamen may be the same or nearly the same as necnon, and further allow that as Marcus is only echoing words of Quintus which we do not possess, equity would in any case require that we should lay no very great stress on his own. There will still remain the objection that a poem of this character and importance, brought directly under his notice, and already as is clear within his knowledge, does not tempt him to do anything more than echo his correspondent’s words in a cut-and-dried formula which would be applicable to any tolerably good composition in verse, and which does not touch nor approach the idiosyncrasy of the poem itself. We cannot therefore very greatly regret that we have so little pure literary criticism from him. But still we must, for the sake of completeness, give some account of his Rhetorical works, which, in a manner, play the same complementary part to the Ars Poetica of Horace that the twin treatises of the Stagirite play to each other.
There is, however, no small difference between the values of the Rhetorical works themselves. The Ad Herennium, even if |His Rhetorical works.| it were as certainly Cicero’s as it is almost certainly not his, would require very small attention, for it is a strict Techne or Art of Rhetoric, of the kind which we have thoroughly examined in the First Book, rigidly limited to Oratory, and containing nothing that may not be found in a dozen or a hundred other places. The De Inventione—more probably, if still not certainly, Cicero’s—is equally technical, and has hardly anything of interest for us except a quotation from Curio, which gives the lie direct to the “saw” of our “dead shepherd,”[[282]] Nemo potest uno aspectu neque præteriens in amorem incidere. It is to Cicero’s credit that he cites this as a rhetorical assumption, as saying that what happens rarely does not happen at all. The De Oratore looks more promising, especially as there are references, in its very exordia, to the study of letters and its difficulty. There is a passage of some interest in Book II., cap. 12, 13, on the connection of oratory and history, with a short review of the Greek historians; and another of somewhat wider reference in cap. 7 of Book III., besides, it may be, others still here and there, especially that which begins about the 37th chapter of the third book. The Brutus is the best of all, with its survey of the Latin orators and its account of the author’s literary education. The Orator deals still more closely with oratorical style, as does the little tract, De Optimo Genere Oratorum. The Partitiones and the Topica are again mainly, if not even merely, technical.
It will be seen from this, not only that there is little purely literary criticism in Cicero, but that it is rather unjust to expect any from him. It was not his business; he had hardly any examples of it before him (and Cicero, like most other Latins, was a man who could do little without a pattern); the mere subject-matter (at least as far as Latin was concerned) was far from very abundant or specially interesting. Moreover, he was constantly occupied on other things. We know, from passages cited above, and others, that he had the purely grammatical and lexicographical interest which was so strong in the Romans; he must have had real feeling for poetry, or he would not be so constantly quoting it, nor would he have made his unequal attempts at writing it; he would fain, in the same way, have been a historian. But these were mere pastimes; and both from that vanity which was his master passion, and from an honest conviction which, as we have seen, was widely spread in antiquity, he seems to have thought Oratory the roof and crown of things literary, the queen of literary kinds, to which all others were ancillary, pedagogic, mere exercising-grounds and sources of convenient ornament. No one so thinking could make any great proficiency in literary criticism, and Cicero did not make any such.
This estimate of Cicero may seem audaciously unfair, if not grossly incompetent, to those who accept the more usual one. So far as much, if not all, very high authority goes, I must acknowledge, though I do not recant, my heresy. Mr Nettleship, for instance, while acknowledging that Cicero “threw his whole strength into the criticism of oratorical prose,” still speaks of his work, especially of the Brutus, with something like enthusiasm, claims “genius” and “fulness of light” for him, and even makes what is to me, I confess, the astonishing remark that he “follows in the same track as the Greek critics in all probability had done before him, as undoubtedly Dionysius and the author of the Περὶ Ὕψους did after him.” I should have myself thought that if there were two critics who might be pedantically symbolised as A and not-A, they were Cicero and Longinus. But to give the other side, in the case of so important a client with such an admirable advocate, I may say that Mr Nettleship, while admitting Cicero’s tendency to the wooden placing and comparison borrowed from the Greeks, and naturally made more wooden by the Latins, and granting his inadequacy as to History (which he, like so many others whom we have seen and shall see, regards as a mere ancilla of Oratory), claims for him the origination of the principle that the general as well as the connoisseurs must stamp the value of a work (Brutus, 183), approves his distaste (De Oratore, iii. 96) for “precious” style, and gives a most interesting cento from the Brutus (93, [125], [139], [143], [148], [201], 261, [274], 301). In these characterisations of the great orators he finds qualities of the highest kind, completing the panegyric by saying, “His usual prolixity is thrown aside, and he returns to obey the true laws of expression. As a critic he can write with all Tacitus' terseness and without any of Tacitus' affectation.” I quote, though—and indeed because—I cannot agree.
One point of great interest, however, in which there may be general agreement as to Cicero’s achievement, Mr Nettleship |His Critical Vocabulary.| did not treat in his Essay, though a passage therein leads straight to it. This passage gives a very useful list[[283]] (elsewhere referred to) of some of the technical terms of criticism which appear to have accumulated in Greek literature during the post-Aristotelian period. Some of these are either used in their ordinary sense, or in senses easily and closely tropical; others are more far-fetched, and, as has also been noted elsewhere, remind one of the technicalities of wine-tasting (especially in French), or of pictorial art. Some are very hard to render exactly in other languages.
It has always been noticed that Cicero—a master of language, and though far from the pedantic prejudice which then tabooed Greek words in Latin, just as it now taboos French words in English, always anxious to enrich his own tongue when he could—has shown special ingenuity in translating, paraphrasing, and adding to this rhetorical and critical dictionary. It is not, however, very many years since the interesting labour of a French scholar[[284]] made it possible, without very considerable trouble on one’s own part, to get the results of this process ready for study. With the Ciceronian terms of mere forensic Rhetoric (though all students of the Greek and Latin Rhetoricians will agree with M. Causeret that these terms have been, with a very mischievous result, transferred to other branches) we need not busy ourselves. It is under the usual head of “Elocution” that we shall find most to interest us. The abundance of the Ciceronian vocabulary every one will recognise; it is less certain whether we are to admire its precision. But it is at least an innocent, and may sometimes be a profitable, pleasure to classify the usages of inusitatum and insolens, to separate the nuances of obsoletum, priscum, and vetustum, of grandia and gravia, of majestas and splendor. The Latin rather than the Teutonic languages admit the distinctions of juncta, cohærentia, apta, and coagmentata, if distinction there be; but it would be of real value to ascertain whether there was any between modus and numerus. Sometimes at least it seems as if it might coincide with that between “rhythm” and “metre”: while often numerus itself seems to be “rhythm.”
By no means uninteresting, again, are the numerous metaphorical expressions from actual physiology—lacerti, sanguis, nervi, succus, exsanguis, enervatus—which we find applied to style, and the still more numerous but vaguer terms, most of them with modern equivalents, which express its qualities by comparison with moral ones.