“Ut pueris placeas et declamatio fias.”
Seneca has been treated already in his proper place. The Pseudo-Quintilian (for there is hardly a page of the Declamations which does not fly in the face of the Institutes) gives us speeches, adjusted to the strict canons of status and the rest, written in the well-known style of the Ciceronian superlative (one wonders that, simply to save breath and time, the bar of Rome did not agree that any one who said -issimus should be sconced an amphora, or, if that seem excessive, at least a congius), extremely ingenious now and then, but of the most fantastic and arbitrary quality. The chief interest of them, at least from our point of view, is, that in the mere reading one understands how impossible it was that attention to such things should consist with attention to true literary criticism.
The Dialogus de Claris Oratoribus, traditionally ascribed to Tacitus, though some will have it to be nothing less than the |The Dialogus de Claris Oratoribus.| otherwise lost De Causis corruptæ Eloquentiæ which Quintilian, as we know from himself, certainly wrote, is a much more meritorious performance. The style is very unlike[[372]] that of the surely unmistakable author of the Germania and the Annals, the method does not seem, to me at least, after a good deal of study of Quintilian, to be his. But it is very likely about their date, and by no contemptible author. The opening certainly chimes in not ill with the title of Quintilian’s missing treatise. A certain Justus Falinus had asked why, after the magnificent crops of oratory which former ages had yielded, the very name of orator had almost died out, and had been supplanted by “counsel”[[373]] and “advocate” and “patron.” The author replies, with a due Ciceronianism, that he had better rub up his memory of a remarkable conversation on the subject heard in his youth. Curiatius Maternus, both poet and orator, had recited a tragedy on Cato which excited the town nearly as much as another piece of the same name sixteen hundred years later; and Marcus Aper, a man of Gaulish origin, consular rank, and great fame, and Julius Secundus, met (with the writer) at Maternus’ house to talk over it. The first of these rather despised literature, relying on mother-wit; the second was said to be indebted more to art than to nature: but both were among the leading counsel of their day. Secundus gently suggests that Cato is a dangerous subject, and Maternus says that he has another tragedy in hand (Thyestes) with which to follow it. Then Aper opens fire upon him: first, for deserting oratory and the bar for idle play-writing; secondly, for choosing foolish fancy subjects like Thyestes. Maternus appeals to Secundus. He is accustomed to Aper’s denunciations of poetry. Will not Secundus act as judge? Secundus says that he is not quite impartial because of his friendship for Saleius Bassus (a contemporary epic poet of whom we hear in Quintilian as a particular friend of his). Oh, says Aper, let Bassus and others, who cannot compass oratory, cultivate poetry if they like. Here is Maternus who can: so he is wasting his time. And he embarks on a warm and by no means ineloquent eulogy of eloquence from its practical side, urging not merely its great political importance but other points. Eloquence opens positions of opulence and power, makes you valuable to your friends and the State, is a safeguard to yourself, gives fame, wealth, dignity. As for poetry, it brings none of these things. It is of no use, and the pleasure it gives is short, idle, and unprofitable. What is the good of it? Who thinks much even of Bassus himself? And if he or his friends are in any difficulty, to whom will they go? Why, to an orator. The poet spends an infinity of labour on his poem, compasses heaven and earth to whip an audience together, and gets nothing from it. Certainly Vespasian did give Bassus five hundred sestertia, and very noble it was of him; but this was mere alms. An orator earns his money. Besides, your poets have to skulk in the country, and even if they stay in town, who cares about them, or goes to see them? Of course, as before said, if a man cannot be an orator, why, let him be a poet. But eloquence is as great a thing from the merely literary point of view, and far more useful.
Maternus takes this diatribe quite coolly, and replies readily enough. He has had some little experience, he says, and some little fame in both oratory and poetry: he does not care for the publicity (so precious to Aper) which the former brings, and, holding the contrary opinion to his friend’s, he thinks the country life far higher and better than that of the town. The great poets of old, if you reckon mere fame, are at least the equals of the orators, and (here we come to another point of contact with Quintilian) there are more nowadays who run down Cicero than Virgil. The unquiet and anxious life of the orator has no charms for him. He wants neither more money nor more power: and he would have himself figured on his tomb, not serious and frowning, but merry and crowned. At the peroration of Maternus comes in Vipsanius[[374]] Messalla, who, being informed by Secundus of the nature of the dispute, expresses his approval of it, but hints a strong preference for the older orators. Aper catches this up rather hotly, after his manner: and after a little general conversation puts the obvious aporia, Who are the old orators? running over the history of Roman oratory, with some not uninteresting criticisms, and a strong contention in favour of his own contemporaries. Maternus and Messalla take up the same matter from other sides, and the dialogue ends.
This piece at first promises considerably, and it cannot be said to perform badly in any place; but its conclusion and middle part are of less importance to us than seemed likely at the beginning. The panegyrics of Oratory and Poetry respectively, in which Aper and Maternus indulge, might well have led to a fuller and more searching analysis of the respective literary merits of the two—instead of which we have from Aper only a rather Philistine exaltation of the superior use and profit of oratory, from Maternus a generous, but slightly vague and rhetorical, exaltation of the qualities of poetry and the delights of the poet. From the entrance of Messalla the piece becomes little more than a contribution to the everlasting ancient-and-modern quarrel on the one hand, and to the history of Roman oratory on the other. Yet in Aper, at least, we have a vigorous projection of the positive Roman spirit, combined with a fancy for pregnant and precious style; in Maternus, an indication of that mainly dilettante and bookish temper which the satirists blame in their literary, and especially their poetical, contemporaries; and in Messalla (who is taken by the partisans of the Tacitean authorship to represent Tacitus himself), an instance of that looking back to better times which is, at any rate sometimes, if not invariably, a token of literary decadence.
Here again, as in the case of Cicero, it is necessary to break the rule of not entering upon controversy, lest by silence one |Mr Nettleship’s estimate of it.| incur the blame of neglecting more than competent authority. As in that other case, Mr Nettleship’s estimate of the critical value of the Dialogus (which he unhesitatingly attributes to Tacitus) is higher, though not so much higher, than mine. He ranks it with, but above, the Brutus, as “the two great documents of Latin criticism”: I should put both as such (though Cicero and Tacitus were both of them far cleverer than Quintilian) below the Institutes, and also below other things.
The reason of the difference somewhat consoles me for the fact. Mr Nettleship was evidently bitten with that noble error, the belief that criticism of literature must be criticism of something that is not literature. Tacitus seems to him to ask “under what social conditions great writing and great speaking arise,”—a most interesting question, but an excursus from criticism proper. “He sees clearly, and this is the important point which characterises the treatise, that literature must be taken and judged as the expression of national life, not as a matter of form and of scholastic teaching.”
For “scholastic teaching” so be it: that also is extraneous to the central matter. But on the other point one must throw away the scabbard. Never will literature be judged adequately—seldom will it be, even within limits, judged accurately—as “an expression of national life.” From this and kindred fallacies come, and always have come, a brood of monsters, the folly, almost as great as its opposite, that “a poet must be a good man,” the folly that you can judge literature by remembering that there is much water-meadow in England[[375]]—hundreds of others. That literature is an expression of national life nobody need deny—that national life can never be estimated without an estimate of literature is, if anything, still more true. But literature is first of all literature, and it must be judged, like all other things, by the laws of its essence, and not by the laws of even its inseparable accidents.
How different was Mr Nettleship’s point of view may be judged from the mere fact that he actually passes over the first fifteen chapters, which to me seem to contain most of the literary criticism of the piece. Nor can I (though he himself fully admits the oratorical preoccupation both here and still more in Cicero) help thinking that the substitution of the English “style” for “eloquentia” and “oratio” amounts to a certain begging of the question. Much that is true of the orator is no doubt also true of the writer, but not all: and the connection with life, with public national life, on which such stress is here laid, undoubtedly applies to oratory, whether of the pulpit, the senate-house, or the bar, far more than it applies to books. The most literary side of oratory (I am not ashamed to make the concession) is the lowest—that of pure epideictic. But then, that is because oratory is, after all, only applied, not pure literature.
We see, then, from this interesting piece, almost as much as from the poets and Pliny, that the age was, so to say, poly-historic |The general literary taste of the Silver Age.| rather than original, and that, while it was no stranger to the very sound opinion that the goodness of a thing must be measured in its own kind, it still had not cleared up its mind about the relative value of different kinds. Although oratory had, with the rarest exceptions, become the mere art of the advocate, or the mere business of the travelling or resident rhetorician, it still had a most disproportionate position. Although the satirist laughed at the custom of writing artificial Greek epics and tragedies, it is clear that these still held the highest place in the general opinion. The bilingual practice, not merely in these but in other kinds, of itself inferred a certain lack of “race,” vernacularity, genuineness, in either literature. Some kinds of letters were still hardly known; Pliny’s own indulgent reference to fabellæ is all the more interesting that we are not so very far from the Lucius and the Golden Ass. In almost all departments odd conventions and assumptions prevailed, such as the necessity of loose subjects, and even of coarse language, in vers de société. And it was probably the working of this, and of the strict ideas as to certain forms and their laws, that caused the jack-of-all-trade tendency to which we have more than once referred. If the rules are pretty clearly laid down, and if you are a man of reasonable learning and intelligence, attention to such rules will secure success. There is no reason why as Pliny himself seems to have thought in his own case and the cases of many of his friends, you should not be at once an orator and a historian, an epic poet and a comic, a dramatist and an epigram-writer. And the age still believed devoutly in the rules, though free-lances like Martial might kick at them in verse, and though Quintilian, with his unfailing good sense, might hint that there were far too many Figures, and that the subdivisions of Greek rhetoric were in many cases idle.