The rest of the chapter draws up a long list of similar enormities of curiosity—historical and literary. “Who had the first naval triumph?” &c. Seneca even ironically supplies questions of the kind, and information about them, to those who like such things. Elsewhere in the 88th (the third of the thirteenth book)[[313]] of those not disagreeable epistles which he composed for the edification of a man of straw called Lucilius, and for the display of his own ability, he supposes the definite question to be put to him, “What do you think of liberal studies?” and he goes off at score in the true style of the Stoic pulpit. He respects none, counts none as good. They are all very well as exercises, as preparations; you may stick to them as long as you can do nothing better. They are called “liberal,” as worthy of a free man: but there is only one study worthy of a freeman (does one not hear the very drone of the ancestor of Mr Chadband?), and that is the study of WISDOM. All else is petty and puerile: it has nothing to do with making a GOOD man. Will the grammarian, who, if he does not stick to mere philology, goes to history or, at farthest, to poetry, be a road-maker for us to VIRTUE, my brethren? Will syntax and prosody banish fear, quench cupidity, bridle lust? And so forth. He makes, indeed, not bad fun of the attempts to make out Homer now a Stoic, now an Epicurean, now a Peripatetic. But he soon relapses into the “chaff and draff” of the conventional moralists at all times. What are the tempests that impelled Ulysses to the storms of the mind? What does it matter whether Penelope was chaste? Teach me what Chastity is. Et patati et patata. From a man in this frame of mind comes no good critical thing; though we certainly should like to have heard from the Tragedian, whoever he was, what put into his head the idea of that remarkable compromise between Classic and Romantic Tragedy which gave us the Latin Hippolytus and the Octavia.
The three satiric poets give us both directly and indirectly a great deal of matter; in fact, they may almost be said to provide the illustrative commentary to their contemporary and friend[[314]] Quintilian’s precepts. It is possible that |The satirists.| the example of Horace may have had something to do with this; but such an example need not have been required. As we know, not merely from themselves, the first century at Rome, if not one of the very greatest times of literary production, was one of very great and very widespread literary interest. As Persius tells us—
“Ecce inter pocula quærunt
Romulidæ saturi, quid dia poemata narrent;”
while Seneca’s remarks, take them with what grains of salt we will, are sound corroborative evidence. Further, it appears on all hands, not merely that there was a distinct fashion of literature, but that this fashion had its own distinct characteristics, that it was one of the times of ornate as opposed to plain style in verse and prose alike, a time of “preciousness,” of “raising the language to a higher power,” a time when men openly called Cicero a commonplace and obvious writer, and, if they did not fail to pay a kind of conventional reverence to Virgil, wrote in a way as far as possible from being Virgilian. This always gives plenty of handles to the poetical satirist, and, as we shall see, all the three availed themselves of these handles to the full.
The scanty and notable work of Persius—work which, in the junction of these two qualities, has hardly a parallel in literary |Persius.| history, except that of Collins in English—is soaked in criticism of literature as well as of life. The poet’s turbid rush of thought and style, forcing its way through self-created obstacles but still forcing it, thick with suspended matter, but all the richer therefor, allows him not merely to deal directly with this subject, but in dealing with others to make constant allusion and by-blow. The famous |The Prologue and First Satire.| scazontic prologue, with its affected language, satirising affectation, and its conceits, giving an object-lesson of conceited style, is all literary except the moral, quoad “Master Gaster, first Master of Arts,” as Rabelais refashioned it fifteen hundred years later. The “horsy fountain” and the sleep on “two-headed” Parnassus, the relinquishment of the Muses to those whom such ladies concern, and the final fling about the crow-poets and poetess-magpies, may be gibes at dabblers in literature: but they show that the giber is steeped in literature himself, and has taken a critical as well as a delighted bath therein. And the first satire (the longest but one) is wholly and directly devoted to the subject. With the old device of a cool objecting friend, Persius takes occasion, while declaring (also an old trick) his own honest desire to keep to better matters, to draw a lively picture of the professional poet, or declamation-writer, scribbling in his locked study, arraying himself in his best clothes, and even with such jewelry as he can muster, carefully gargling his throat, and then tickling the ears of his audience, and comforting himself, when anybody objects the worthlessness of such applause, by the plea—
“At pulchrum digito monstrari et dicier ‘Hic est!’”[[315]]
A still livelier picture follows of the symposium referred to in the lines above quoted as to Romulidæ saturi; of the literary dandy in hyacinthine garment mincing and twanging through his nose some morbid stuff (rancidulum quiddam) about Phyllis and Hypsipyle, and being cheered in a fashion fit to make the poet’s ashes happy, his slab lie lighter on his tomb, and violets spring therefrom.
Then he draws in his horns a little. Verse, of course, is not necessarily bad because it is popular only. But Euge! and Belle! are not the be-all and end-all of literature. What wretched stuff has not received them? How often have they not been consideration for a good dinner, and a cloak just a little torn! And what is even genuine popular judgment worth? Why do not poets adopt honest Roman subjects, instead of chattering about unreal Hellenics? And why do they affect such antiquated and unnatural style? What is the good of borrowing such stuff as
“Ærumnis cor luctificabile fulta,”