Only he himself declines to use the naughty words,[[362]] not out of prudery, but out of timidity. He follows this up with the sounder doctrine that everything must be judged in its own kind.
Another short letter to Antoninus (iv. 18) not merely repeats the praise of his Greek epigrams, but informs us that Pliny himself has put some of these in Latin. A longer one, which follows, to Calpurnia Hispulla, contains an elaborate eulogy of the lady’s niece, Pliny’s second wife, who shows her good taste and virtue by learning her husband’s books by heart, instructing herself in literature generally for love of him, and singing his verses. And later, with something of the same innocence or lack of humour which was a Roman—in fact, has generally been a Latin—characteristic, he tells us that he has been for three days listening cum summa voluptate to a certain Sentius Augurinus, reciting his poems or poemkins (poematia). Sentius, it seems, performed many things with lightness, many with sublimity, many with beauty, many with tenderness, many with sweetness, many with bile. It is not quite clear under which head comes the specimen he produces, which is a rather feeble compliment to Pliny himself. “Vides,” says Pliny, after quoting it, “quam acuta omnia, quam apta, quam expressa.” Besides, he is the friend of Spurinna and Antoninus. What an emendatus adolescens!
V. 8[[363]] is a not uninteresting paper on History. Tutinius Capito wishes him, as he tells us others had done, to write this. Pliny is not ill-disposed to do so, not because he thinks he shall do it very well, but (the sentiment is a fine one, though a little bombastically expressed) because “it seems to him one of the best of actions to rescue from perishing that which ought to be eternal.”[[364]] His idea of history, however, is not very lofty. Oratory and Poetry, he says, must have style; History pleases howsoever it be written, because of the natural curiosity of man—a doctrine which, in slightly changed matter, has been joyfully accepted by the usual novelist. Besides, his uncle had been a diligent historian. Then why does he delay? Because he wants to execute a careful recension of his speeches in important cases, and he hardly feels equal to both tasks, while, though there is much in common between Oratory and History, they are also different. The contrast is curious, and shows the overweening position which Oratory had with the ancients. To History, says Pliny, things humble and sordid, or at least mediocre, belong: to Oratory, all that is exquisite, splendid, and lofty.[[365]] The bare bones, muscles, and nerves suit history: Oratory must have the swelling bulk of flesh and the waving plumes of hair. History pleases by rough, bitter energy:[[366]] Oratory by long-drawn sweetness. Diction, style, construction—all are different. After which he gives a somewhat unexpected turn to the famous Thucydidean saying, by admitting that history is the ktema, and the agonisma oratory. And, therefore, he thinks that he had better not attempt at once two things so different. A letter to Suetonius about the books of both (v. 10), another to Spurinna (v. 17) about a recitation by Calpurnius Piso, a third (vi. 15) on a thin jest by Javolenus Priscus at another recitation by a descendant of Propertius (who began “Prisce jubes,” and was interrupted by Javolenus, Ego vero non jubeo), may be glanced at rather than discussed.
Perhaps there is no better document of Pliny’s literary criticism, both in its strength and in its weakness, than vi. 17. He writes in a state of indignatiuncula (let us translate “mild wrath”), which he can only relieve by working it off in a letter to his friend Restitutus. He has been at one of the eternal recitations, where the book recited was not so usual; indeed, it was absolutissimus—quite “A per se,” as our ancestors would have said. But one or two of the audience (clever[[367]] fellows, as they and a few others thought) listened to it as if they were deaf mutes. They did not open their lips: they did not clap: they did not even rise from their seats save when they were tired of sitting. What is the good of such gravity, such wisdom, nay, such laziness, arrogance, sinisterity (a good word!), or, to cut things short, madness, which leads men to spend a whole day [the terrors of recitation were obviously not exaggerated by the satirists] in offending and making an enemy of a man whom you have visited as a friend? Are you clever? Do not show envy: the envier is the lesser. Nay, whether you can yourself do as well, or less well, all the same praise him, whether he be inferior or superior or equal. Your superior, because, if he is not praiseworthy, still less are you; your equal or inferior, because the better he is, in that case, the better you are. Pliny, for his part, is wont to venerate and admire anybody who does anything in literature. It is a difficult thing, sir, an arduous, a fastidious, and it has a knack of bringing scorn on those who scorn it.[[368]] Restitutus will surely agree: he is the most amiable and considerate of judges. We may mark this passage as, of many interesting ones, that which gives us Pliny’s measure as a literary critic best.
But the list of his noteworthy “places” is by no means closed. VI. 21 gives us his standpoint in another famous quarrel—that of Ancients and Moderns. He admires the former, but by no means so as to despise the latter. He does not hold with the doctrine of the senescence of nature. He recently heard Vergilius Romanus recite a comedy in the Old Comedy kind, which was as good as it could be. The same man has written mimiambics with perfect grace, comedies in another kind as good as Menander’s; he has force, grandeur, subtlety, bitterness, sweetness, neatness, he glorifies virtue, attacks vice, invents his personages,[[369]] and uses real ones, with equal appropriateness. And (as by this time we begin to expect in such cases) “In writing about me he has only gone wrong by excessive kindness; and, after all, poets may feign.” One sees that the excellent Pliny’s geese were swans in every quill.
VII. 4 deals at some length with his own poems, and gives some hexameters about Tiro and Cicero, which are in style quite worthy of the subject. There are some elegiacs (rather better) in vii. 8, which is an elaborate recommendation of literary study—the turning of Greek into Latin, and vice versa, the refashioning and rearrangement of work already done, the alternation of oratorical practice with history, letter-writing, and verse of the lighter kind, which receives an elaborate and not unhappy encomium. As for reading, read all the best models in all the styles in which you write. VII. 17 is on recitation; 20 of the same book is one of several interesting, though slightly amusing, letters to Tacitus, in which Pliny implies it to be his own opinion, and quotes it as that of others, that he and Tacitus were the two greatest literary men of Rome, and that it was quite wonderful that they were such friends. What Tacitus thought of the conjunction we do not know; he was probably too well bred a man to put his thought in words, though a Tacitean expression of it would indeed be a treasure. In vii. 25 we meet another “swan,” Terentius Junior, who writes things quam tersa omnia! quam Latina! quam Græca! Later, in the 30th, a friend having compared his work, in vindication of Helvidius Priscus, to that of Demosthenes against Midias, he confesses that he had had the piece in view, though he thinks it would have been improbum et pæne furiosum to have imagined rivalry possible. In viii. 4 he encourages the friend to write an epic poem in Greek on the Dacian war, thereby incurring a considerable responsibility. The descendant of Propertius, on whom Javolenus Priscus made that surpassing joke, recurs in ix. 22 with fresh praise; and the last literary letter of importance (the 26th of the same) is on what may be called the grand style in oratory.
Here, as elsewhere, there may no doubt be room for difference of opinion as to the space and importance allowed to our witnesses. From the point of view of this book, however, Pliny’s testimony is of the utmost importance. We may regret—I certainly do—that an equal abundance of documents of the same character has not come to us from some one of greater literary competence—from Aristotle, or even from Dionysius, from Longinus, or even from Quintilian. But this is distinctly a case where the better is enemy to the good. For the purpose of ascertaining what was the actual state of critical opinion and literary taste at a given time, it is of more value to possess such a collection as this of Pliny’s than to have fifty Arts of Poetry.
Let us “write off” liberally at the outset for the drawbacks of the document. Pliny’s Letters, pleasant as they are, are not free from a suspicion, and, considering some statements of their own, something more than a suspicion, of being not entirely spontaneous: they were, at any rate in some cases, evidently written for publication. The author himself, though a man of excellent learning, of the completest cultivation of his day, of wide and ardent literary interests, and of no little common-sense, was, as some of his quoted judgments will have shown, not quite sufficiently possessed of the finest or most discriminating literary judgment. Moreover, he had a somewhat omnivorous and disproportionate opinion of the value of literary work, merely as such, even merely as something that looked such—compilation, translation, copying verse and prose, what not. Further, in these characteristics he to a great extent reflected those of his time—a time of great and active attention to literature, but rather one of talent than of genius, a period of decadence in many respects, and hardly of resurrection in any, and lastly, a period of doubtful literary taste, inclining, when it was sincere, to the florid and Asiatic, when it affected superiority, to a forced Pseudo-Atticism and concinnity.
Yet it will readily be perceived that none of these allowances is damning to the individual, while most of them even increase his value as a representative of the period itself. That he was, and was regarded by the time itself as, one of the most eminent of contemporary men of letters, cannot reasonably be doubted, though he certainly yokes himself rather unequally with Tacitus. And he is none the worse witness that, though a generous admirer of antiquity, he avowedly was by no means so out of conceit with his own time as men of letters often are. That this age was no decrepit one need hardly be said—with Persius “dead ere his prime,” and Martial, Juvenal, Quintilian, Tacitus, Statius, and Pliny himself, in full flourishing, with Marcus Aurelius and Arrian coming, with Lucian and Apuleius not far off—to mention no others—it had something considerable to show and say for itself. If we can obtain anything like a clear view of its opinions on literary criticism (to which it was naturally inclined, as being itself not of the very first, and having pasts of the very first behind it), we shall not do ill. And Pliny gives us help of a very special kind, and in very abundant degree, for the attainment of such a view, which we may proceed to take, after noticing briefly the only other documents of the time which require notice for our purpose.
These are the Apocrypha[[370]] of Quintilian, which are, for more reasons than one, best regarded apart from the Institutes. There are, in the first place, the Declamations, already referred to[[371]]—nineteen complete, with sketches, fragments, and skeletons of a much larger number, which even thus falls short of the huge total of nearly four hundred assigned to him after a fashion. If the whole were written on the scale of the score that we possess, they would fill some four thousand closely printed pages. Interesting, in a fashion, they are; as pointed out above, they supply, with the works of the elder Seneca, our only considerable bodies in Latin of that work of the schools which for centuries occupied the growing intellects of the two great ancient literary nations, and which supplied the never-blunted point of the satirist’s