We can understand, as well from the character usually given of the Arbiter elegantiarum as from the style of his curiously dismembered and rather disreputable written work,[[303]] that questions of literary criticism must have been of the first interest to him. If we had the entire Satires (supposing that they ever were more entire than Tristram Shandy or the Moyen de Parvenir), there can be very little doubt that this element would show itself in very large proportion. There must have been suppers less brutally vulgar and Philistine than that of Trimalchio; and literary discussion was as indispensable at a Roman supper of the better class as broiled bones at an English one—while suppers lasted. Even the Circes, if not the Quartillas, of the time were very frequently “blue” in the intervals of more exciting amusements, and Agamemnon, Eumolpus,[[304]] and others must have frequently spoken in character. As it is, the opening of the fragment as we have it, and a passage farther on, deal directly with the subject.
The opening passage is occupied with that denunciation of bombastic and “precious” language which seems to have been the favourite occupation of the critics of the time. The attack is at first directed against the practice of declamation, which almost inevitably tempted boys and youthful writers to bombast, but it so quickly glides into a general literary censure that it is worth giving in full.
“I believe that the reason why schoolboys and students become such fools is, that they never see or hear of anything to which we are accustomed in the actual world. They are occupied by pirates standing on the beach with chains in their hands, by tyrants ordaining that sons shall cut their fathers’ heads off, by oracles against a pestilence to the effect that three or more virgins are to be sacrificed, by little bundles of words smeared with honey, and everything, as it were, powdered with poppy-seed and sesamum. For people bred in this fashion sense is as impossible as a pleasant odour for those who live in the kitchen.[[305]] If you will excuse my saying so, you rhetoricians were the first to ruin literature. By exciting ridicule of [or playing tricks with] your light and empty phrases,[[306]] you weakened and prostrated the whole body of oratory. Youth had not yet been enslaved to declamations when Sophocles and Euripides devised the words in which they were to speak. The private schoolmaster[[307]] had not spoilt good wits when Pindar and the Nine Lyrists feared to sing in Homeric verse. And not to allege poets only, I certainly find it nowhere said that Plato and Demosthenes betook themselves to this kind of eloquence. Oratory full grown, and, if I may say so, in her maidenhood, is not spotted and swelling [like a toad], but shoots up in natural beauty.
“Of late this windy and extravagant loquacity has shifted from Asia to Athens, and has breathed upon the aspiring minds of youth like a pestilential star, and forthwith true eloquence, its rule corrupted, has been arrested, and put to silence. Tell me, who has since equalled the fame of Thucydides, of Hyperides? Not so much as a lyric of wholesome complexion has appeared, and everything, as if poisoned with the same food, has been unable to last to a natural grey old age. Even painting has made no better end, since the audacity of the Egyptians has cut so great an art down to shorthand.”
The rhetorician Agamemnon defends scholastic procedure by the old plan of throwing the blame on parents and the like; but the story quickly turns to one of its more than “picaresque” episodes, and the subject drops.
The other passage[[308]] begins with equal abruptness, and serves as preface only to a very much longer poetical recitation by Eumolpus, who speaks it. It is chiefly noteworthy for containing the phrase Curiosa felicitas, applied to Horace, which perhaps itself gives us as good a notion of Petronius’ critical faculty as anything could. But it conveys some sound doctrine. Verse itself seems easy; any boy thinks he can write it as soon as he has learnt the rules, and retired orators (a hit, I suppose, at Cicero) compose it as a relaxation, as if it were easier than their speeches. But it is no such light matter. You must take choice words [we are almost at Dante’s “sifted” words], words far from the use of the vulgar crowd,[[309]] and at the same time you must be careful that individual phrases are not too fine for the rest. Nor must you treat your subject—civil war, for instance—in the mere tone of a chronicler, but the “free spirit must be forced through[[310]] difficulties, and the ministry of the gods, and a fabulous torment of sentences, so that it may rather appear the vaticination of a frenzied mind than a trustworthy and scrupulous document under attestation.” Now this advice, though much in it is sound, takes distinctly the other side to that which Encolpius had urged in the overture.
On the whole, we must regret very keenly that we have not more of the Arbiter’s remarks on the subject. It is improbable that anything like a coherent theory of criticism on the great scale would have emerged, and very likely that (as in the two extant examples just quoted) we should rather have had ingenious centos of opposing views. But all would have been originally and brightly put, and it is by no means impossible that what we now chiefly desiderate—aperçus of particular authors, books, or passages, done with grasp and insight—would have been forthcoming. As it is, we have but what we have.
Nero’s other victim, the curious compound between Polonius and Mr Pecksniff (with, it must be owned, some merits which |Seneca the Younger.| belonged to neither), whose name was L. Annæus Seneca, has left us a great deal more work than Petronius, and was certainly a man of letters. He was even a considerable man of letters, and if he wrote the Tragedies, a very considerable man of letters indeed.[[311]] He had, moreover, though scarcely a good, a distinct and by no means commonplace style, and while Quintilian attacks him nominatim in a passage which will occupy us later, it is by no means improbable that Petronius (who must have known him well, and was probably bored by him) had Seneca himself in his mind when he talked of the ventosa et enormis loquacitas.
Seneca, however, was by profession a Stoic, and these classical Pharisees, though their sect was not exactly unliterary, pushed to an extreme the partly superfine, partly puritanic, contempt with which, as we have seen, the philosophy of antiquity generally chose to regard the minutiæ of literary criticism and literary craft. The “wise man of the Stoics” might be a perfect man of letters, as he was a perfect everything else; but it was entirely beneath him to take seriously such things as metre, or style, or the pleasure of literary art. In the Tenth Dialogue, de Brevitate Vitæ,[[312]] after the philosopher has been talking in his high-sniffing way of collecting brasses, singing, giving long and recherché dinners (but not, so far as I remember, of putting out money at usury), he begins a new chapter with things to be treated more contemptuously still.
“’Twould be long,” he says, “to track them all out—those whose life draughts, or ball-playing, or the practice of carefully cooking their flesh in the sun, has caused to waste away. They are not exactly lazy people, since their pleasures give them a great deal of trouble. For nobody can doubt that they make much ado about nothing, who are detained by the study of useless letters—there is a considerable company of them among us Romans. It has been a mania of the Greeks to inquire how many rowers Ulysses had, whether the Iliad was written earlier than the Odyssey, further, whether the two are by the same author, and other matters of the same stamp, which, if you keep to yourself, they will not help your silent conscience, while, if you talk about them, you will seem not more learned but only more of a bore.”