The Eighth Book is again without its preface; but though there is a very large lacuna in ix., we have part of the introduction. It yields little. The last is in better case, but still not very fertile, though we have another instance of the mania for Figures. It is said of the above-quoted Oscus: “Dum nihil non schemate dicere cupit, oratio ejus non figurata erat sed prava.” Certainly there are no few examples of this “pravity” in the declamations themselves, which it would be interesting, but in our space impossible, to examine, as we have examined the prefaces.[[301]]
They, however, also contain examples of that severity of taste which has always distinguished Latin criticism, and of which Pollio is the great example. Messala, as we learn, was Latini utique sermonis observator diligentissimus, and he said of Latro (whom Seneca’s later taste admired) “sua lingua disertus est”—"He is an eloquent man in his own lingo." Seneca himself, however, is by no means tolerant of excessive conceit, and rebukes the class of “sentence” which, he tells us, some charged upon Publilius as inventor. The examples given are in the case of a disinherited son found with poison, which he spills on discovery in the interior of his father’s house: and the sentences are, “He washed out his disinheriting with poison, and what he spilt was my death,” both being supposed to be spoken by the father. And in another stock case—the curious one which has more than one historical analogue, where the Prætor Flamininus was accused of having had a condemned man’s throat cut at dinner, to amuse a courtesan who said she had never seen a man die—the unlucky Murredius is said to have arranged a tetracolon—a four-membered antithesis: “The courts are made subservient to the bed-chamber; the prætor to a harlot; the prison to the banquet; day to night”; as to which last Seneca justly asks, “What sense has it?”
On the whole, this very valuable and interesting book, which has been spoken of with surprisingly uncritical contempt by some, and to which I should like to devote much greater space, forms, with Pliny’s Letters and Quintilian, the great trinity of documents for appreciating directly the state of Latin opinion as to literature, and its causes, in the first century after Christ, while with Cicero and Horace it forms a similar trinity for that in the last century before Christ. And it is needless to say that these two periods were, early avant-coureurs and belated decadents excepted, the flourishing time of classical Latin literature. Of this state and these causes we shall speak generally later.
One writer of famous memory who belongs to this period—who |Varro.| indeed was older even than Cicero—has been hitherto unmentioned, because, as a matter of fact, we have practically no literary criticism remaining from him, and that is Varro. I should myself have been disposed to relegate the author of the De Re Rustica and the De Lingua Latina to the place of his brother (or grandson) grammarians; but this might seem unceremonious in face of the importance of the critical position which Professor Nettleship assigned to him. It is, perhaps, also a convenient place to notice the exact character of that importance. As in so many other cases, if we went by titles only, and by guesswork from them, Varro must certainly have a high rank. “On Poets,” “On Poems,” “On Characters” (in the technical Greek sense of literary differentia?), “On Scenic Action,” “Plautine Questions,” might seem at first sight likely to be, if we had them, a very El Dorado of Latin criticism. But the few surviving fragments are a little discouraging. That Varro would be fertile in grammatical, mythological, social explanation, we may be quite certain. But the fragments seldom go much farther. The report, quoted by Quintilian, of Ælius Stilo’s saying that if the Muses wrote Latin they would write in the language of Plautus, is one of those rather irritating critical catchwords which carry with them the minimum of critical illumination. It is, in fact, only an ad captandum fashion of saying that the speaker liked Plautus, or wanted to pay him a compliment at the moment. Most of the others seem (as indeed Mr Nettleship saw) to be merely examples, either of the habits of “placing” authors in this or that rank, of comparing them with this or that other, from which criticism has suffered many things and gained few, or else of the not much less barren classification of kinds.
It is on the first point that I wish to make a slight digression. It is evident from the epithets that he uses in regard to them, such as “stupid,” “trifling,” “vicious,” that these processes of placing and of comparison were not to Mr Nettleship’s taste. I shall myself admit that the addiction of Greek, and still more of Latin, criticism to them seems to me to be among the very greatest weaknesses of both. But I must add a distinction which is constantly forgotten, and which I am not sure that Mr Nettleship himself had in mind. The “placing” of A, B, C, and D in order of merit is “stupid” and “trifling” enough; the still further awarding of seventh place to A for Somethingity, and of third to B for Somethingelseness, is more stupid and more trivial still. Nor is that comparative criticism, the locus classicus of which is perhaps M. Taine’s ejaculation, “J’aime mieux Alfred de Musset,” as a criticism on Tennyson, any better; in fact, as being not merely sterile and jejune, but illogical and actively misleading, it is considerably worse. But there is a placing and there is a comparison, which are two very different things—which are, in fact, the two highways of all real literary criticism. The placing is that which sets a man, not in the first division of the first class, or the second of the third, but in his relations to time and country, to language and manner, to predecessors and successors—to the whole literary map in larger or smaller circumference. The comparison is that which does not work out a performer’s rank, but disengages his qualities. These are the methods to which all the great critics have perforce resorted, and which have made them great. That there is less of them than there should be in ancient criticism may be true enough; that the want of them (with perhaps a little want also of sympathy with the highest poetry) is what prevents Aristotle from being the greatest critic of all time, is true enough; that the presence of them in Longinus is one of the main secrets of his unmatched quality, is true enough. But they are very different things from the enumeration of Volcatius Sedigitus, and from the in argumentis Cæcilius in ethesin Terentius in sermonibus Plautus of Varro.[[302]]
[275]. Probably the very temperament, which spurs the critic on to his business, afflicts him with this thorn in the flesh. I should not be surprised if examples of it were found in the present volume. But it has been kept down as far as possible.
[276]. I am not aware of any work, corresponding to Egger’s, in reference to Latin Criticism.[Criticism.] But in English there is an Essay of the first excellence on the subject by the late Mr Henry Nettleship (reprinted at vol. ii. p. 44 of his Lectures and Essays, Oxford, 1895). In my case old personal obligations were not needed to deepen the admiration which every one, who would even like to be a scholar, must feel for Mr Nettleship’s work. I am here, however, to demur to his opening division of criticism into “criticism of philosophy, which investigates the principles of beauty,” and “isolated and spontaneous judgments, never rising beyond personal impression.” It is one main purpose of this book to show that a third course is possible and desirable, by way of the wide and systematic comparison of the manifestations of literary beauty in the accomplished work of letters.
[277]. The actual primacy is assigned to a verse canon of the Ten Latin Comic Poets by a certain Volcatius Sedigitus, who may be close to 100 B.C. This “stupid production,” as Mr Nettleship unkindly but most justly calls it, may be found in his Essay (so often quoted) in Aulus Gellius, xv. 24, or in Baehrens' Poetæ Latini Minores, vi. 279. The six-fingered one puts Cæcilius first, Plautus second, Terence sixth, Ennius tenth, antiquitatis causa. He had, of course, borrowed the “canon” system from the Alexandrians, among whose most dubious services to criticism the arrangement of such things must be placed. There are touches of literary and critical reference in Ennius, in the Prologues of Terence, &c., but nothing that need delay us.
[278]. Ad Att., ii. 1: Meus autem liber totum Isocratis μυροθήκιον, atque omnes ejus discipulorum arculas, ac nonnihil etiam Aristotelia pigmenta consumpsit.