"Quanto violentior cetero mari Oceanus, et truculentia coeli praestat Germania, tantum illa clades novitate et magnitudine excessit, hostilibus circum litoribus, aut ita vasto et profundo, ut credatur novissimum ac sine terris, mari. pars navium haustae sunt; plures, apud insulas longius sitas ejectae: milesque, nullo illic hominum cultu, fame absumptus, nisi quos corpora equorum eodem elisa toleraverant. sola Germanici triremis Chaucorum terram adpulit, quem per omnes illos dies noctesque apud scopulos et prominentis oras, cum se tanti exitii reum clamitaret, vix cohibuere amici, quo minus eodem mari oppeteret. Tandem relabente aestu, et secundante vento, claudae naves raro remigio, aut intentis vestibus, et quaedam a validioribus tractae, revertere: quas raptim refectas misit, ut scrutarentur insulas. collecti ea cura plerique: multos Angrivarii nuper in fidem accepti, redemptos ab interioribus reddidere: quidam in Britanniam rapti, et remissi a regulis" (An. II. 24, 25).
We have no means of testing by minute and accurate comparison the descriptive powers which Tacitus possessed in dealing with such a subject, because he has no account of a marine disaster in any of his works. We must then do the next best we can, see how he deals with a military calamity,—for, though in the account we are about to give, the Romans had been victorious, we must remember the sentiment of the Duke of Wellington, that next to a defeat there is nothing so miserable as a victory. The passage we shall give is that of the visit of Vitellius to the plains of Bedriacum forty days after a battle had been fought and a victory had been won by the Romans.
"Thence Vitellius turned aside to Cremona, and, after he had seen Caecina's contest of gladiators, longed to visit the plains of Bedriacum, and view the field where a victory had been lately won. Horrible and ghastly spectacle! Forty days after the battle,—and the mangled bodies, lacerated limbs and putrefying corpses of men and horses,—the ground stained with gore,—the trees and the corn levelled;—what a dismal devastation!—nor less painful the part of the road which the people of Cremona,—as if they were the subjects of a king,—had strewn with roses and laurels, altars they had raised and victims they had slain,—signs of gratulation for the moment, which very soon afterwards occasioned their destruction. Valens and Caecina were there, and told the points of the battle:—'Here the columns of the legions rushed to the fray: here the cavalry charged: there the bands of the auxiliaries routed the foe.' The tribunes and prefects then began each to praise his own deeds, and utter a medley of truths and falsehoods,—or exaggerations. The rank and file, too, of the troops with shouts that showed their joy turned from the line of march to behold again the field of battle, and wonder as they looked at the piles of arms and the heaps of bodies. And some, when the various turns of chance occurred to their minds, melted into tears and were heavy at heart from sorrow, but Vitellius did not turn aside his eyes nor shudder at so many thousands of his unburied countrymen: he was even glad, and ignorant of his all but impending fate made an offering to the gods of the place."
"Inde Vitellius Cremonam flexit, et spectato munere Caecinae, insistere Bedriacensibus campis, ac vestigia recentis victoriae lustrare oculis concupivit. Foedum atque atrox spectaculum! Intra quadragesimum pugnae diem lacera corpora, trunci artus, putres virorum equorumque formae, infecta tabo humus, protritis arboribus ac frugibus—dira vastitas: nec minus inhumana pars viae, quam Cremonenses lauro rosisque constraverant, exstructis altaribus caesisque victimis, regium in morem: quae, laeta in praesens, mox perniciem ipsis fecere. Aderant Valens et Caecina, monstrabantque pugnae locos: 'Hinc irrupisse legionum agmen: hinc equites coortos: inde circumfusas auxiliorum manus.' Jam tribuni praefectique, sua quisque facta extollentes; falsa, vera, aut majora vero miscebant. Vulgus quoque militum, clamore et gaudio deflectere via, spatia certaminum recognoscere, aggerem armorum, strues corporum intueri, mirari. Et erant, quos varia fors rerum, lacrimaeque et misericordia subiret; at non Vitellius deflexit oculos, nec tot millia insepultorum civium exhorruit: laetus ultro, et tam propinquae sortis ignarus, instaurabat sacrum diis loci" (Hist. II. 70).
It must be obvious even to the most careless and least perspicacious what a striking contrast there is in the descriptive powers of the two; the objects that Tacitus depicts are not only few in number and telling in character, but seem to be presented to us on the principle of truth, as of actual occurrences; the method he adopts reminds one of that pursued by Sir Walter Scott, no matter whether the descriptive passage occur in one of his poems, as The Lady of the Lake, or in one of his romances, as The Heart of Mid-Lothian: Bracciolini, on the other hand, appears to be inventing,—or, at least, heaping together a number of real circumstances, one or two of which might have happened together, but scarcely all of them at the same time, while he so arranges them as to produce a highly poetic effect: he writes as Lord Byron made up his shipwreck in Don Juan,—as Moore shows us in his Life of the eminent poet,—by selecting here and there a telling incident from the narrative of this or that shipwrecked mariner.
II. Not only in description did Bracciolini fail to imitate the writing of Tacitus; he failed to imitate it also in sequence of ideas. There is unquestionably resemblance in the absence of circumlocution; in such considerable conciseness that words are as sentences; in there being no hyperbole, and in judicious language at all times consonant with the solidity of the instructions conducive to wisdom in political and civil life. But in order to effect this Bracciolini clipped his sentences as a gardener clips hedges: a sentence is now and then like an amputated limb; a word is wanting, like a hand or a foot cut off from an arm or a leg: sometimes the reader sees, what was evidently made with mischievous intent, a great gap in thought, at which he is stopped and disturbed,—as a farmer, when walking in his fields, is brought to a stand-still and overcome with annoyance to see an opening which his cattle have made in his fences, and which he must be at the pains of repairing: so these vacuities in thought require to be botched by the fancy of the reader; the patching may not be the requisite thing to be done: accordingly the gaps cause difficulties in rightly apprehending the meaning of the writer, who, in some passages may, possibly, never be properly understood.
The consequence of this is that no remark is so common as to hear people, especially young persons, say of Tacitus, "How difficult his Latin is!" Even Messrs. Church and Brodripp say so in the Preface to their translation of the "History." Certainly, it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to reproduce in another language the smooth style and polished phrases of Tacitus; but his Latin is easy to follow, whatever he maybe doing,—describing a battle, a riot or a flight;—recording the success of a party, the death of an Emperor, or a disturbance in the Forum. Notwithstanding his fiery, rapid style, he is regular in his connection of thought,— logical in his sequence of ideas, thereby he is always alluring and attractive, while crisp, clear and comprehensible, he dazzles and delights with his picturesque images and glittering beauties. It is otherwise with the author of the Annals, whose style is occasionally enveloped in such Cimmerian obscurities from deficiencies of expression as to beset his work with a formidable opaqueness—anything but Milton's "darkness visible". [Endnote 408]
Many specimens of this might be given, but as the mist is impenetrable, we will turn to one where the light can be seen—the story of the peasant of Termes, who assassinates a praetor, while that officer is passing along a road unattended. The assassin, being on the back of a fleet horse, gallops off to a wood, entering which, after turning his horse loose, he baffles pursuit by clambering over steep and stony parts into the pathless wilderness, "where," continues the writer, "he did not remain long concealed; FOR" (mark the sequence), "his horse having been caught and shown through all the towns round, the people knew whose it was, and that led to his apprehension":—"pernicitate equi profugus, postquam saltuosos locos adtigerat, dimisso equo, per derupta et avia sequentis frustratus est, neque diu fefellit; NAM prehenso ductoque per proximos pagos equo, eujus foret cognitum, et repertus" (An. IV. 45).
The context is not seen. A man who has committed a murder unseen by anybody effects his escape from pursuit by getting into a wood. Of what consequence was it whether his horse was known or not? for how could that help his pursuer to catch him, if, like a maroon negro, having run away safely into the impenetrable thicket, he staid in the bush for the remainder of his days,—or as long as he was not wanted for a breakfast by a hungry wild beast? The author means us to understand, after the fugitive had baffled pursuit by getting into the depth of the forest, that he lay hidden there for a certain number of days, after which, deeming that all was safe, he returned into the towns to his home: then should come the words: "where he did not remain long concealed, for his horse having been caught," &c.
This obscurity increases when the author of the Annals is in the palace of Tiberius, or in the Senate amid the deliberations of the Patres Conscripti. From his inadequate mode of speech he then outstrips the comprehension of the reader; certainly he quite baffles the intelligence of the very young, his meaning being penetrable only by the keen sagacity of ripe age, for he enters into the recesses of the heart, and reveals the secret workings of the bad passions,—envy, hatred, malice and ambition.