of ranging everything in doctis figuris, and of writing passages, such as two famous ones which he quotes, and which are traditionally asserted to be the work of Nero himself. He exhausts his images of scorn on these unlucky lines, and holds up Arma virum against them as an example of natural knotty strength against effeminate drivel. And to a fresh protest of his friends about the danger of this kind of criticism, he replies by an ironical consent to declare it all very good, and a coda of regret for the time when Lucilius used what freedom of speech he chose, when Horace laughed at everybody without giving offence, more seriously declaring that, whether he can publish or not, he will write as the giants of the Old Comedy wrote.
In this lively crabbed production there are two distinct strains or bents to note. All the best critics have for some time admitted that in professed satire generally, and in Roman satire more than in any other, there is, if not a touch of cant, at any rate a distinct convention of moral indignation—a sort of stock-part of bluff, honestly old-fashioned, censuring of modern corruption—which the satirist takes up as a matter of business. Even Martial, upon whom, Heaven knows! it sits oddly enough, though his consummate dexterity carries it off not ill, affects this now and then; it sometimes suggests itself even through the gloomy intensity of Juvenal; and though such a line as Persius’ famous
“Virtutem videant intabescantque relicta”
carries us far out of the dissenting-pulpiteer region where Seneca too often gesticulates, there is in this First Satire, at any rate, some suspicion of forced wrath, of the righteous overmuch.
But the other strand in the twist, the other glance of the view, is in a very different state. There is nothing unreal, to all appearance, in the poet’s condemnation of the preciousness |Examination of this.| and conceit of poetic and prose style in his day. That his own is very far from simple or Attic does not matter; the satire had a prescriptive right to be crabbed, archaic, irregular, bizarre. Whether political dislike of the tyrant did not sharpen literary objection to the poetaster (if the lines really are Nero’s) may be a debatable question for those who care to debate it; but, in any case, the objection was there, and seems to have been quite genuine. Now, as has been often pointed out, these definite passages, definitely objected to or praised, are precisely what we want most, and have least of, in ancient criticism. A short examination of them, therefore, will serve our turn very well.
The first passage appears to be cited chiefly as an objectionable example of archaism. We shall see that Quintilian (perhaps in obedience to this very passage, for he knew his Persius, and admired him) repeats the objection to the word ærumna[[316]]—to us a word not in the least objectionable, but the contrary. And if it be said that foreigners, and especially foreigners who acknowledge themselves entirely uncertain about the probable pronunciation of Latin, have no business to give an opinion about the euphony of words, the retort is obvious and pretty triumphant. To some Romans, at any rate, if not to Persius and Quintilian, the word must have sounded agreeable, or as poets they would not have used, and as hearers or readers would not have applauded, it. The conceit of “cor fulta ærumnis”—with heart stretched on pillows of woes—was no doubt another crime, and it is not improbable that luctificabile was a third. The Romans had a rather pedantic horror of long words, which is again formulated by Quintilian, just as it is implied and exemplified here.
Of the same type and colour is the objection to rasa antitheta and doctæ figuræ which follows, as well as that to the vowel harmony, the soft cadence, the mouth-watering[[317]] tenderness of the Neronian fragments. We may, without rashness, point to the soft sound of “Berecynthius Attin,” the alliteration of “dirimebat” and “Delphin” with the internal half-rhyme of “cæruleum” and “Nerea,” the leonine effect of “longo” and “Apennino” and the two tetrasyllables, with the sudden pull up of the spondaic ending, as what irritated Persius. This same accompaniment of sound, and cunning contrast or echo of vowels, recurs in the second and more coherent extract: “Torva, cornua”; “Mimalloneis bombis,” “raptum caput”; “vitulo superbo”; “lyncem corymbis”; the long words “reparabilis” and “Mimalloneis,” with the foreign effect of the latter and others. These, no doubt, were the things which annoyed our poet here.
A little reflection will make this annoyance exceedingly interesting. Not merely is the general effect of these lines very similar to that of hundreds and thousands of lines, in the earlier English Romantic school from Marlowe to Chamberlayne, in the later from Keats to Mr Swinburne; but the indignation of Persius is exactly similar, if not to the almost incredulous and disgusted disdain with which the critics and poets of the “school of good sense” looked back on the vagaries of their predecessors, to the alarmed and furious attempt made by critics of the present century to extinguish contemporaries who indulged in such things. Persius on Nero, if Nero it was, no doubt gave hints to, and, with hardly less doubt, was himself quite in sympathy with, the Quarterly Reviewers of Keats and Tennyson. There is the same protest against the effeminate, the luscious, the unrestrained, the same indignant demand for manliness, order, sanity.
But we may go even further. These same processes, which we have ventured to point out as certainly illustrated by the gibbeted verses, and as probably accounting for the wrath of their executioner, are the very processes by which all our great nineteenth-century poets in English have produced their characteristic effects—alliteration, internal rhyme or assonance, complete or muffled, and, above all, the modulation of vowel and consonant so as to produce a sort of song without music, accompanying the actual words. And it may be noted that while some of our modern critics have objected to these things in themselves, many more, oddly enough, object to the process of pointing them out, and seem to think that there is something almost indecent in it.
It would be unreasonable to expect that in the narrow compass of some six hundred lines this passage—locus uberrimus fructuosissimusque, to borrow the Ciceronian superlatives—should repeat itself. But the literary interest of Persius, as regards criticism, is by no means exhausted. The next three satires are indeed wholly occupied by the exposition of that practical, honest, upright, rather hard, rather limited morality which it is the pride of Rome to have carried as far as mere morality of the sort can travel. But the beginnings of the fifth[[318]] and sixth[[319]] have a literary and critical turn in them, and though the course of the satire is afterwards deflected, these beginnings show the same man, the same tastes, the same standards that we have seen in the first. Don’t potter over fantastic subjects and sham Greek epics, but attack something Roman and serious. Whatever you write, write it in a manly fashion, with no æsthetic trifling. That is the critical gospel of Persius, and he sets it forth with a vigour which we shall seldom find equalled, and with (in the instance we have dwelt upon) a most fortunate fertility of illustration.