As one great furnace flamed
instantly reveals Milton. Virgil answers to the same test of indescribable and incommunicable quality.
To the ignorant Middle Ages Virgil became a name to conjure with. He grew, with little apparent reason except his general poetic fame, to be regarded as the embodiment of all pagan wisdom, and it is for this reason that Dante puts himself under the guidance of Virgil in his Hell and Purgatory, though it is the Christian Beatrice, and not the pagan poet, who accompanies him into Paradise. Dante’s Inferno is the sixth book of Virgil’s Aeneid expanded and adapted to the strange blend of rapt mysticism and crude realism which prevailed under mediaeval Catholicism. It is from Virgil’s sixth book, combined with Dante, that Milton derives the main hint and many of the particular suggestions for his Hell in Paradise Lost. And it is, in short, to Virgil that all epics have looked since his Aeneid once appeared.
Virgil is not, indeed, the only epic poet of Rome, although immeasurably the greatest. Lucan, in the silver age, composed an epic poem of the “great action” of Julius Caesar in crushing Pompey. Like most of the productions of that period of the second best, the Pharsalia is full of epigrammatic sayings, deliberate tours de force and brilliant rhetoric, together with much unreal sentiment, false taste, and grotesque or repellent detail. According to Quintilian Lucan is “more fit to be ranked amongst orators than poets.” Soon afterwards comes Statius with his Thebaid, or epic of Thebes, a work of great pains and little life, here and there beautified with those rather morbid colours which have been known to suggest the dying dolphin, but incapable of sustaining any natural interest. If he was called “Virgil’s ape,” the censure is hardly too severe. To us, however, the poem is of some account as having formed a portion of the staple reading in the days of Chaucer, who refers to “Stace” with avowed admiration. The tale of Palamon and Arcite, which Chaucer so admirably transformed from Boccaccio, owes its origin to this somewhat insipid epic of the Roman. Meanwhile the world has been content to forget the partial versions of Statius essayed by Pope or Gray.
In Lyric poetry, apart from the elegiac style, there are two names, and two only, which stand out upon the chart of Roman history. One is Catullus, the other Horace, and both are of the golden age, although of different halves of that epoch. Catullus flourished under the republic about 60 B.C., Horace under Augustus a generation later. It is curious to observe how the verdict of taste is reversing the positions once held in the general estimation by these two exquisite writers. Time was, and not so long ago, when Horace was more read and quoted than any other poet of antiquity. He was quoted at dinners, in literature, in parliament. It was taken for granted that he represented the ne plus ultra of lyric quality. Catullus, it is true, was praised, but comparatively neglected withal. But those who love literature as much for its substance as its form, who seek for inward warmth and for stimulation of the pulses as well as for pleasure of the palate, and who are attracted by the sterling rather than by the elaborated—these set Catullus on a plane to which Horace never reaches. Horace has been called “the poet of the man of the world,” and the phrase, while fairly true, is manifestly not the highest commendation. Those who read him without prepossession discover that under all his gracefulness he is naturally unimaginative; that, feeling little, he has little power over the heart; and, furthermore, that he is prone to a peculiar inconsequence. Among his virtues is included the characteristic Roman virtue of sound practical sense; but lyric poetry is hardly to be satisfied with that merit. As a man of letters he takes his rank from the perfection of his expression, from his consummate skill of putting the fittest word in the fittest place with a singular terseness and lucidity. To the ancient critic his work was marked by a curiosa felicitas—a “painstaking happiness” of phrase. Meanwhile Catullus possesses a far higher gift, the gift of experiencing a sincere emotion and of communicating it by a rare directness and simplicity of expression, almost after the manner of the Lesbian lyrists or of Robert Burns. This is not to deny that Catullus was a conscious artist, but perfect literature consists in this, that art expends itself on expressing a feeling sincerely felt or a thought sincerely conceived.
Upon English literature the Latin lyrists, and more especially Horace, have exercised a far-reaching influence, sometimes with the full consciousness of the English poet, more often indirectly. The “Horatian Ode”—that is to say, the ode in which there is but one comparative short form of stanza repeated throughout—explains its own genesis by its name. In other cases of English lyrics it is not easy, nor is it necessary, to distinguish precisely between the debt due to the Latin writers and that due to native-grown song and ballad. English lyrics of feeling would necessarily have developed themselves in some shape without the aid of foreign example, but in point of fact, the Elizabethans, and still more the “cavalier” poets of the seventeenth century, were in the habit of looking to Horace, and in a less degree to Catullus, for suggestions of form and expression and occasionally of thought. For one external indication of this attitude we may look to the practice of the school of Herrick, Suckling, Lovelace, and Waller, who (following Elizabethan sonneteers) habitually call their inspiring mistresses by the names of “Lesbia,” “Delia,” “Chloe,” and the like, for no other reason than that these are the non-committal names sanctioned by the usage of the Latin lyrists.
Elegiac poetry, which, though properly a branch of lyric, has acquired a form and character practically constituting it a class apart, was cultivated and brought to perfection by a group of poets in the last third of the last century before Christ. Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid are the representatives in Latin of a form of art which had flourished greatly in the lyric age of classical Greece, and had been revived with much distinction, but with a new tone of sentiment, by Callimachus in the age of Alexandria. In Latin Catullus had already taken Callimachus for a model, and transplanted the elegy to Rome. But it was the group above-named who in turns imparted to such compositions a specially Roman character in respect of exacting rules of form. The elegy in early Greece found various themes in martial and social exhortations, moral sentiments, and advice, or in the expression of personal feelings in different moods. If at Alexandria its matter consisted most frequently of the thoughts and moods of the lover, the modification was due to altered social conditions. It is hard to say what themes might not be treated in the elegiac form, provided they were of moderate length and scope. The Latin poets use the fullest liberty in this respect. Thus Ovid not only writes his Amores or love-poems in the usual sense, his Tristia or personal sorrows in banishment, and his Letters of Heroines, in which the writers pour out their feelings to their absent or unfaithful lovers or husbands, but he also puts together stories of Roman history into a sort of calendar, which is accordingly named the Fasti. A modern poem of reflection, an “occasional” poem, a sonnet, or even Milton’s Lycidas, would alike be fitly converted into Latin elegiac verse.
Of the three elegists, Propertius, though remarkably unequal in quality, and often rough and obscure (with an obscurity which suggests Browning), in both expression and allusion, shows the most of native strength and emotional sincerity. Tibullus is the lucid and graceful exponent of the pensive commonplace. Ovid, the master of verbal polish and concision, is to the elegy very much what Horace is to the ode. Facile and prolific, he touches few subjects which he does not adorn. Unfortunately the subjects which he touches are too often shallow and morally unworthy. His attitude is that of a man not only without moral care, but without capacity for any genuine ardour or emotion. He charms with his variety, and with his grace and dexterity of treatment, but he strikes none of those full or poignant chords which are wont to be stirred by elegies in Greek or English literature.
Other forms of poetical composition among the Romans were the bucolic (or pastoral eclogue), the philosophic, the didactic, the narrative, and the poetry of fable.