The far bulkier work of Juvenal—work also of far higher genius in parts, but more unequal and uncertain—contains less |Juvenal.| that concerns our subject. It is impossible to mistake in Persius, young as he died, and scanty as are his remains, a very direct interest in literary form, such as did not always or often accompany Stoic philosophy. Juvenal, with a less definite philosophical creed, and perhaps a rather lower moral standard, had a higher “Pisgah-sight” and a stronger grasp of life as a whole. However long Persius had lived, it is improbable that he would ever have given us anything equal to the magnificent Tenth Satire. But Juvenal, much more of a pessimist than Persius, was less capable of enthusiasm. His general critical standpoint does not seem to have been very different from that of his predecessor, or indeed (allowing for the vastly greater difference of temperament) from that which we shall find in Martial. But to Juvenal literature as literature had no special pre-eminence among the contents of his famous farrago. It would even appear that, although practising it greatly himself, he had a rather special contempt for it.[[320]] The well-known opening of the First Satire[[321]] agrees with Persius and with Martial in its scorn of artificial Greek epics, of sham heroic subjects and forms generally. But there pierces through it something of a special contempt for “Grub Street”—for the unlucky “Codrus”—who reappears, not always to be abused, but always to be dismissed with a sort of kick of contempt. There is something more than the stock superciliousness of the satirist in the thousand times quoted

“Stulta est clementia, cum tot ubique

Vatibus occurras, perituræ parcere chartæ.”

The same tone is maintained throughout, and when poetry and literature appear (which is not extremely often), poets and men of letters are treated as practitioners of a rather troublesome, nearly superfluous, and slightly disreputable, profession, not as bad or good artists as the case may be. The stage-fright of the rhetorician who is going to make a speech at Lyons (the gird at the provincial is obvious), the book-chest of Codrus, with the mice gnawing the divine poems, the Greek mania which alternates with others in wives, and the learned lady who talks for hours on the comparative merits of Homer and Virgil, are introduced with the poet’s usual spirit and vigour, but very distinctly not from the literary point of view. They are ludicrous things and persons, good satiric matter: but the book-chest is in the same class with the lectus Procula minor, the fancy for Greek with the fancy for gladiators, the critical lady with her sister who enamels her face. It is by no means un-noteworthy that, in the Tenth itself, the vanity of literary study and success—an admirably suggestive subject—is hardly touched at all; that the careers of Demosthenes and Cicero are held up as a moral because of their political ill-success, and the sanguinary fate of each—which might have happened to the most illiterate of men. But this is most noticeable of all in the Seventh, which may be said to have a definitely literary frame and scheme, or which at least certainly would have had these in the hands of a man really inclined to literary criticism. It opens with a characteristic picture of what the Americans would call a “slump” in poetry—the most celebrated bards giving up the profession in sheer despair, becoming bath-keepers, or stokers, or auctioneers’ criers, selling their tragedies at rummage sales, or at the very best getting empty praise and no pudding from their stingy though wealthy patrons. Then Juvenal becomes a little graver, and contrasts the victim of cacoethes scribendi with the really exceptional poet (whom he cannot point out, and only imagines), who will put forth no hack-work, and writes not even for fame, but to please himself and the Muses. Such a poet must be in independent circumstances—if Virgil had had no boy to wait on him, and no tolerable lodging, all the snakes would have dropped from the hair of his Erinyes, says he in one of his most characteristic Juvenalisms. Lucan happened to be well off: but Statius, for all the popularity of his Thebais, would have gone dinnerless if he had not sold his Agave to the actor Paris (apparently to pass off as his own).[[322]] Nor is the historian’s labour more profitable. Indeed it is less so, for it consumes more paper, more time, and more oil for the lamp, as Juvenal points out in what some modern reviewers would call “his flippant manner.” Even the much-praised trade of the orator brings in wretched fees as a rule—a ham, a jar of sardines, a bunch of onions, half-a-dozen of common wine. If you wish to soar higher in the matter of receipts, you must spend greatly, have handsome horses, furniture, rings. Merely teaching to declaim may be rather more profitable, but think of the intolerable boredom of the business! the same patter of stock declamations and exercises, the unreality and folly of it all! True, there are exceptions—and here comes a curious passage, half satirical, half complimentary, on Quintilian himself, but treating him not in the least from the literary standpoint. And so to the end.

This abstract, though brief, should be sufficient to establish our point—that Juvenal, while he rarely cared to touch strictly literary subjects, hardly ever treated them in a strictly literary manner. He shared the opinion of the best Roman literary judges at all times—and especially in his own times, when the popular current was setting in the opposite direction—that literary style ought to be plain, nervous, manly; and he could express this with even better right than Persius, inasmuch as his own, though extremely allusive and of the most original character, is quite clear from involution or conceit. But he did not care in the least to investigate literary processes: nor did he trouble himself very much to contrast styles and differentiate their values. One may even, without any rashness of guess, be certain that he would have regarded criticism of form with nearly as much disfavour in a man as he expressly does in a woman. In fact, he would have considered it the occupation of a fribble.

When we pass to the graceful graceless crowd of motes, or rather midges (for they have a very distinct bite), which composes |Martial.| the works of Martial, we find, as has been said, very much the same general attitude towards styles in literature. But the expression is differentiated, not merely by the existence in the writer of a different moral complexion, but by the necessary conditions of his form. They could discuss; he can only glance. Further, the avowed purpose of amusement, of composing the verses of a very peculiar society, which animates the epigrams practically throughout, affects the result very considerably. Their author resembles both Persius and Juvenal in paying very elaborate attention to the outside of things, to the accidents of the literary business. We hear in him continually the echo of the sophos, the “bravo!” which the reciter and the rhetorician sought for, and which they sometimes, if not often, procured by the agency of a regular claque. We learn (not in the least to our surprise) that then, as now, there existed the kind literary friend who was quite eager to receive presentation copies, but who was by no means ready to go to the publishers and exchange even an extremely moderate number of his own denarii for a nice clean book, on polished vellum and neatly rubricated.[[323]] There were also then, as now, readers or reviewers who would take copyists’ (lege “printers’”) errors very seriously, and upbraid the poet for them[[324]]—which he did not bear patiently.

Here we have the certainly pointed, if not very polite, excuse for not submitting to the same tax of presentation copies, that he fears his friend may reply with a present of his works:[[325]] elsewhere (in those triumphs of ingenious trifling the apophoreta, or gift-tickets) the neat suggestion, with a blank album, that a poet can offer no more acceptable present than paper not written upon.[[326]] In one place there is, to carry off a piece of sheer begging, an irresistibly comic anecdote of a “curious impertinent,” who after asking whether the poet is not the Martial whom everybody not a fool admires, and receiving a confession of the soft impeachment, abruptly demands why such a poet has such a shocking bad great-coat, and receives the meek reply, quia sum malus poeta.[[327]] But these, and a good many others, which an easy reading, and a not very troublesome classification, of the Epigrams will enable any one to produce, are examples parallel rather to our citations from Juvenal than to the capital one from Persius. That is to say, they are examples rather of the selection of a particular subject, as one of a hundred suitable to the special mode of treatment, than of the assertion or the display of any particular interest in that subject, or any special theories upon it. So, too, in some cases of more special reference, Martial’s habits of flattery, and the unblushing way in which (not for the first or the last time) men of letters in his generation were wont to fish for presents, make it not always quite easy to know how much seriousness to attach to his expressions of opinion on particular writers. Did he, for instance, really think Silius Italicus such a great poet?[[328]] One cannot say: it is certain that Silius was rich, and a person who seems to have been able to keep his head above water, and on his shoulders, during all the stormy changes of his lifetime. And if such a man wrote poetry, if he was not his enemy—still more if, as was the case here, he was his friend—we know but too well that Marcus Valerius Martialis was never likely to publish any unflattering opinion of it.

But, in a very large number of cases, there was no possibility of hoodwinking, nor any object in attempting the operation. In |The style of the Epigrams.| the very numerous references to his own books, Martial shows us that he wrote, not at haphazard but with the keenest critical knowledge of the requirements of the form. That he recognises, in more places than one,[[329]] Catullus as his own master, model, and superior, is itself a critical document and testimonial of the first value. For it is notorious that the Romans, as a rule, by no means rated the great poet of Verona at his due; and though the sneer of Horace[[330]] may have been dictated by a sufficiently ignoble but very intelligible jealousy, the slight and passing note of Quintilian[[331]] admits of no such explanation. But it was the Catullus of the epigrams that Martial endeavoured to rival. In doing so he shows that he had a very definite, and a very just, notion of the versification and diction necessary to his purpose. His praise of the Romana simplicitas shown in the style of the lampoon of Augustus on Fulvia, in respect to which one can only refer modern readers to the original,[[332]] is capable of being mistaken for a mere laudation of coarse language—for an anticipation of that curious fallacy which has more than once made men regret the withdrawal of the licence to “talk greasily.” But this is unfair both to the poet and to the Emperor. Martial certainly does talk greasily with a vengeance; but the last line of this Imperial fescenninity depends for its point by no means merely on the obscene, and is an excellent example of clear-cut, straight-hitting phrase.

This phrase Martial himself almost always achieved, though in a few cases his points are still dark to us, and though he had not the slightest objection to using Greek words, vulgar words, and so forth when it suited his purpose. The misty magniloquence which attracted so many men of his time had no charms for him. When he rises, as he sometimes does, from sheer naughtiness or playful trifling to pathos, to seriousness, to graceful description of landscape—in the well-known Pætus and Arria piece, in the epitaphs on Erotion, and the still finer one on Paris, in his country poems and elsewhere—he is purely Attic. No style can have a simpler and a less affectedly simple grace. And that he did this deliberately—that it was his theory as well as his practice—we may see very well from a sort of cento of passages bearing on the subject. He differs not merely from Catullus but from Prior (who is perhaps his nearest analogue in almost all ways) by having obviously no velleities towards the grand style. We can imagine Prior writing, and writing quite as well, the piece which tells how pretty Phyllis, when her lover was racking his brains for some elegant present to reward her kindness past, exerted fresh coaxing before asking him for—a jar of wine,[[333]] or describing the singular history of Galla on the stock- and share-lists of Love.[[334]] But we cannot imagine Martial writing Alma or Solomon. And all his critical observations, direct or indirect, testify to a conception of literature perfectly clear and not really deserving the term narrow, if only because the poet quite frankly limits it to the kind in which he wishes to, and knows that he can, excel, the kind indicated in his own famous quatrain:—

“Ille ego sum nulli nugarum laude secundus