He was right. Nobody but Martial could have written Martial except Catullus himself in his less noble moods; and the boast is in itself a criticism and a just one. Yet Martial had his dignity, and an odd epigram, the 61st of this book, disclaims the mere coarse language in which he seems to us too often to have indulged. And the tale of literary epigrams ceases (I apologise for omissions in the bright and shifting bevy) with another odd piece, which may be either gross flattery, irony of a rather sanguinary kind, or mere playfulness, and in which he remonstrates with his friend Tucca for touching and executing, so as to make competition impossible, every kind of poetry.[poetry.] Epic, tragedy, lyric, satire, epigram itself—Martial has tried them all and dropped them, because he feels himself beaten by Tucca. This is not fair; let Tucca leave him at least one kind, the kind that he doesn’t care for. It is not fanciful, surely, to find a critique of poetical polypragmatism here also.
It may well seem to some that too much space has been accorded to Martial; but it has been allotted on the principle which, be it mistaken or not, is the principle that underlies this book. We have, in this good-for-nothing trifler, a very considerable number of pronouncements on critical points, or points connected with criticism, and, what is more, we have in him a writer who has a very clear notion of literary criticism in and for his own work. A great poet Martial is not: he has no fine madness, or only the remotest touches of it. He does not look back to the way in which Lucretius had infused that quality into the language; I do not think, speaking under correction, that he ever so much as names him. He does not anticipate (and if he had anticipated, he would not, I think, have welcomed with any pleasure) the tide which, welling in upon the severer Muses of classical Latin style, gave them once more the Siren quality in the Low Latin of the Middle Ages. Farther, he can hardly be said to have any “wood-notes wild”; even his country descriptions, charming as they are, are distinctly artificial. Much as he adores Catullus, it is not for the flashes of pure poetry which we see in that poet. But, on the other hand, Martial sees, not merely with instinctive but with critical certainty, that gift of precision, clearness, felicity, venustas, which the Greek-Latin blend of the Golden and Silver Ages had. He practises and he preaches the cultivation of this. He preaches it at no tedious length: his chosen form as well as his common-sense would have prevented that. But he directly extols the cultivation of style—of that quality which will make any decent judge identify a poet when he has heard three lines of his poem. And he practises what he preaches. Even what the grave and precise (quite truly one must confess) call his moral degradation saves him from confusing the moral with the literary quality of literature—the noble error of most ancient criticism. He has, as scarcely any other ancient writer has, formulated the great critical question, “L’ouvrage est-il bon ou est-il mauvais?” And if he had chosen to write a De Arte Poetica, I am bound, shocking as the confession may seem, to say that I think it would have been superior to that of Horace, while he has provided no unimportant progymnasmata towards one as it is.
From “the mixed and subtle Martial,” as Gavin Douglas excellently |Statius.| calls him, we may pass to the poet, perhaps the rival, whom he never mentions[[348]]—the author of that only adequate Roman description of Lucretius which has been referred to above.[[349]] The precise sources of the popularity of Statius in the Middle Ages have never yet, I think, been thoroughly investigated. It is, however, not difficult to discern them afar off, and to include among them a certain touch of that uncritical quality which, as we shall see, was one of the main notes of the Middle Ages themselves. Yet the author of the words furor arduus Lucreti[[350]] must have been able at least to appreciate. And the poem which contains that phrase, as well as the prose prefaces of the Sylvæ where it occurs, will yield something more bearing on our subject. The first of these prefaces is a curious if not particularly felicitous plea for the legitimacy—indeed, for the necessity—of a poet’s indulging in lighter work in the intervals of Thebaids and Achilleids. This is something like the view of Pliny: the poet must be a Jack-of-all-poetical-trades. Martial knew better. But it is a noteworthy thing (and Martial himself would have been pungent on it) that Statius cannot make his trifles brief. Domitian’s horse has nearly three hundred lines. I do not think that there is a single poem in the five books of the Sylvæ which falls short of several scores, whatever its metre. In the preface of the second he apologises to his friend Melior for some of the pieces, as libellos quasi epigrammatic loco scriptos, and here again Martial might have had something to say about epigrams seventy-seven lines long. That Statius had not cleared up his own mind about criticism appears from the touching and attractive, though not quite consummate, Ad Claudiam Uxorem, where the poet, beaten in the public competitions where he had long triumphed, proposes that Naples, and his wife’s caresses, shall console him for the loss of tasteless and thankless Rome. But the Genethliacon Lucani, a commemorative birth-day poem on Lucan (which would have been a little more effective if we could forget that this tribute to the victim of Nero was written by a flatterer of Domitian), contains the central utterance of Statius about other poets. It is, as nearly everything of Statius has been said to be, too long and too much improvised, though also, like most things, if not everything, of his, it contains fine touches, especially that of Lucan in the shades:—
“Seu magna sacer et superbus umbra
Nescis Tartaron, et procul nocentum
Audis verbera, pallidumque visa
Matris lampade respicis Neronem.”
But its interest for us, besides the Lucretian description, which is itself not improved by docti, consists in the long eulogy of Lucan himself, and the repeated, and therefore not probably conventional, advice to him not to be afraid of Virgil—
“Bætin Mantua provocare noli;”
and after some time—