The foreign debt of English literature

by T. G. Tucker

The second period is that of highest excellence in prose and poetry, the age of Cicero, Lucretius, Catullus, Sallust, Caesar, Livy, Virgil, Horace, and Ovid. This is the “golden age,” and may be dated from 80 B.C. to A.D. 14, a period during which the republic was passing into an empire, and when great men played their parts in great historical dramas; men like Sulla and Pompey, Julius Caesar, Antony, and Augustus. The latter half of this period, which extends from 30 B.C. to A.D. 14, and includes the names of Livy, Virgil, Horace, and Ovid, coincides with the rule of Augustus, and is therefore called the “Augustan” age. In other words, the Augustan age is the second half of the “golden” age. It is from 80 B.C. to A.D. 14 that Latin literature and the Latin language are at their highest degree of perfection. But, unhappily, at least during the second half, it is also a time when writers and readers are coming more and more to form a special literary class, which stands far aloof from the great public and its urgent or spontaneous interests.

The third period, the “silver age,” is that of the despotic and often tyrant emperors, when freedom of speech no longer existed, when the autocrat, a servile aristocracy, and a vicious populace occupied the capital. At this date literature is but a forced product without real motive or inspiration. It is characterized by declamation and rhetoric, by smart epigram, by cynicism and satire, by clever expression. Such is the period of Seneca, Lucan, Martial, Tacitus, Pliny, Juvenal. It may be put down roughly as extending from A.D. 14 to the year 150.

These three epochs are peculiarly well defined; they are universally recognized, because so conspicuously recognizable.

The first real incentive to literature among the Romans sprang from the contact into which they came with the Greeks of southern Italy and Sicily when their conquests reached so far. This was in the third century B.C. Until the Greek influence was strongly felt, we meet only with a series of rude records, or of uncouth and clownish verses of a satirical or farcical sort. From the rude records there began to develop themselves histories and epics; from the farces and satirical verses were destined to come the drama of tragedy and comedy and the literary satire; this, however, did not occur till the communication with Greece was full and close, and Greek material at hand to be utilized.

The first branch of Latin literature with which we need deal is the drama of comedy and tragedy. Practically this limits itself to the popular comedy of Plautus and Terence in the “iron” age, and the artificial and rhetorical tragedy of Seneca in the “silver” period.

Titus Maccius Plautus, who flourished about the year 210 B.C., and Publius Terentius, a generation later, are more nearly allied to each other than are Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. It is only the special student of literature who need be concerned to elaborate the full distinction between them. Plautus has the more of broad and boisterous fun and drollery, Terence has the subtler humour and the more artistic style and architecture. But both alike borrow plots and even dialogue wholesale from those Greek comedians of whom Menander is a type. They both adapt Greek plays, just as English playwrights once adapted Molière, and recently adapted Sardou. The Latin adaptations, however, were of quite undisguised closeness, if not of positive servility. Whereas our playwrights seek to make their adaptations entirely English, Plautus and Terence did not seek to make theirs entirely Roman. It is true that their plots were based on real life, but it was a Greek life and not a Roman life. The scene was always in a Greek city. Imbecile fathers duped by spendthrift sons, jealous husbands outwitted and stultified, cunning and unscrupulous slaves playing the part of dei ex machina, armies of cooks, confidantes and nondescripts—these things, which appear monotonously, are not really Roman. Those who read the earlier plays of Molière generally grow somewhat weary of the clever valets, the Mascarilles, of the dupes, of the Sganarelles, and of the conventional tricks upon parents and husbands. The truth is that Molière, at this stage of his career, in imitating or adapting Plautus and Terence, was almost as far from the real life of Paris in his own day as Plautus and Terence were from the real life of Rome. Les Fourberies de Scapin is as distinct and as unconvincing an adaptation of the Phormio of Terence as Shakespeare’s early Comedy of Errors is of Plautus’s Menaechmi.

Now it is a noteworthy fact, as illustrating how doubly exotic a thing Latin literature was, that neither Plautus nor Terence was a true-born Roman. Plautus was a countryman of Umbria, Terence was an African of Carthage. Yet it was these two who remained the only considerable writers of Latin comedy, and the whole of their work was adaptation, free translation, or guileless plagiarism.

To our subject these writers are of no small account, in virtue of the fact that they were the progenitors of Italian comedy, thence of Molière, and, from Molière, of our own comic stage of the seventeenth, and the earlier and greater part of the eighteenth, century, the ages of Congreve and Farquhar, and of Fielding and Sheridan.

Tragedy, the other and nobler half of drama, took its rise in Latin literature as early as the year 240 B.C.; but the obscure names of Andronicus (who, as usual, was not a genuine Roman, but a Greek) and of Naevius (who likewise was not a genuine Roman, but a Calabrian) need not here detain us. The one considerable personage in the whole history of the Latin tragic stage is Seneca, the Spanish-born Roman of the middle of the first century A.D. Unfortunately, this one important figure is also the incarnation of the defects of his epoch. He touches no real chord in the public mind or heart; he borrows his subject-matter from the Greeks—Greek gods, Greek heroes, Greek plots; there is nothing national, local, nothing really natural or alive, about his work. The tragedies are mainly excuses for putting fine declamatory speeches or brilliant phrases into the mouths of the characters. They are, in short, exercises in oratory, masquerading in dramatic form. In all probability they were never intended for the stage. Those who know what Addison’s Cato is like in its coldness and artificiality, those also who know French literature and can remember the declamation in the least interesting of the works of Corneille and Racine, can form a very fair notion of the salient characteristics of the tragedy of Seneca. It was Seneca, the easily accessible Latin model, whom the Italian and French tragedians deliberately copied, and who in turn determined the style of Addison’s Cato.

It is perhaps well to remark at this point how thoroughly unreal in every domain of Latin literature is that part which deals with the gods. The native Roman religion had no Olympus, no nymphs. It was a cold and formal worship of gods either far removed or quite artificial abstractions. To a Roman the Greek gods and heroes who fill Latin poetry are more or less ornamental make-believe. They are introduced and regarded rather as poetical properties, virtually meaning little more to the cultivated Romans than the Roman gods, in their turn, mean to an English writer of the eighteenth century, when he talks of Venus or Jove. Therefore, whether it be tragedy or epic or lyric, a dispiriting artificiality generally—although Virgil is an exception—drops upon Latin literature immediately that we find ourselves among the gods and their doings. Yet it cannot be too often repeated that the saving grace of literature is sincerity. No immortal writing can base itself upon convention and a sham.