Praecipiti modo quod decurrit tramite flumen
tempore consumptum iam cito deficiet.[1381]
His appreciation of Remigius’s declamations show the same emphasis on formal and external merits.[1382] The point is not so much that responsible poets went in for writing verses of the kind quoted, but that they attached so much importance to them.
It is striking how many of Ausonius’s poems have to do with the dead[1383] or the unreal.[1384] Even his letters are full of artificialities. In the same way Sidonius and Avitus of Vienne are always writing epitaphs. Their interest is with the past, of which they are the conscious imitators;[1385] and if Ausonius was genuinely interested in the living present when he wrote the Mosella, that is his one poem which has commended itself to readers of every age. In general, we may say that the ‘litterati’ of this time imitated the past in style and language to a degree that destroyed individuality. Though Sidonius criticizes Titianus for copying people not of his age,[1386] his own writings abound in archaisms.[1387] He praises Claudianus Mamertus[1388] and Leo, the minister of Euric,[1389] for their imitation of antiquity. Claudianus Mamertus recommends as models of style Naevius, Plautus, Cato, Varro, Gracchus, and ‘Chryssiphus’, Fronto and Cicero, adding that even the modern writers of note did not read the moderns: attention must therefore be concentrated on the ancients, for they are the source of modern merit.[1390] Nor was this merely theoretical advice. How extensive the worship of the ancients was, from the scrupulous imitation of Cicero in Eumenius and the panegyrists[1391] to the plagiarism of Vergil by everybody, has been fully demonstrated by the various editors.[1392] All this meant a turning away from the living language, the creation of a scholastic tongue, the intellectualization of education. So, when Greek literature lost its vitality, we find a rigid and senseless Atticism appearing in Dionysius of Halicarnassus during the first century B.C.; the dual was brought up from the underworld; and language, instead of developing its resources, was stretched on the Procrustes-bed of a standard that had ceased to be natural.[1393] So, too, when the living genius of Petrarch and Dante arose, it broke away from the half-dead Latin and turned to Italian. The problem here involved arises to-day in many countries. In Holland the growing Flemish Movement headed by Stijn Streuvels and others has compelled recognition; in Norway there is a similar movement; and in South Africa the Education Department is increasingly recognizing the use of Afrikaans in the schools. For the more education disregards the form of the language that lives in the hearts of the people, the less will it understand and be able to teach them effectively. In other words, an undue archaism means artificiality, means a wandering from the truth.
The result was (as we may judge from the complaints of the critics) that the product of the rhetorical system often found himself in the position of a fire-brigade without a fire. He had all the machinery, and had used it all in mock alarms, but had missed that contact with reality which makes for understanding. He had come to look on facility of speech (to which the Gauls were particularly prone)[1394] as an end in itself. He had been taught to think that everything was a matter of rule,[1395] and often found too late that life demanded a different and a deeper method.
Why was it that the rhetorical system, with all its virtues, failed in this way? To put it quite shortly, we should say that it failed because it did not aim at the best. Ennodius indicates its aims in two brief sentences. ‘Nos vitae maculas tergimus artis ope’[1396]—polish, style, external refinement; ‘Qui nostris servit studiis, mox imperat orbi’—imperial service. These were the two main objects, both of them good and desirable in themselves, but not the highest. And it was because the abuse of these two aims led to a conflict between them and the highest aim, truth, because the rhetorical system was content with a second best[1397] which could not remain uncorrupted except in connexion with the best, it was for this reason that, ultimately, failure inevitably ensued. Other and more material causes may easily be argued, but this is the inherent and fundamental cause.
How far did the Christian ideal prove a truer inspiration to education? It has been remarked that paganism had no idea of progress. The note of pessimism in Roman literature is typified in such passages as Horace’s:
Aetas parentum peior avis tulit
nos nequiores, mox daturos
progeniem vitiosiorem.