Read Ebook: Fortuna by P Rez Escrich Enrique Hills E C Elijah Clarence Editor Reinhardt Louise Editor
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AND FIRST SATIRE--EXAMINATION OF THIS--JUVENAL--MARTIAL--THE STYLE OF THE EPIGRAMS--PR?CIS OF THEIR CRITICAL --STATIUS--PLINY THE YOUNGER--CRITICISM IN THE 'LETTERS'--THE 'DIALOGUS DE CLARIS ORATORIBUS'--MR NETTLESHIP'S ESTIMATE OF IT--THE GENERAL LITERARY TASTE OF THE SILVER AGE--"FAULTLESSNESS"--ORNATE OR PLAIN STYLE.
Footnote 303:
I use the smaller edition of B?cheler, Berlin, 1862.
Footnote 304:
There is a theory that the verses put in the mouth of Eumolpus are parodies of Lucan and Seneca.
The opening passage is occupied with that denunciation of bombastic and "precious" language which seems to have been the favourite occupation of the critics of the time. The attack is at first directed against the practice of declamation, which almost inevitably tempted boys and youthful writers to bombast, but it so quickly glides into a general literary censure that it is worth giving in full.
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Footnote 307:
"Of late this windy and extravagant loquacity has shifted from Asia to Athens, and has breathed upon the aspiring minds of youth like a pestilential star, and forthwith true eloquence, its rule corrupted, has been arrested, and put to silence. Tell me, who has since equalled the fame of Thucydides, of Hyperides? Not so much as a lyric of wholesome complexion has appeared, and everything, as if poisoned with the same food, has been unable to last to a natural grey old age. Even painting has made no better end, since the audacity of the Egyptians has cut so great an art down to shorthand."
The rhetorician Agamemnon defends scholastic procedure by the old plan of throwing the blame on parents and the like; but the story quickly turns to one of its more than "picaresque" episodes, and the subject drops.
Footnote 308:
? 118. Ed. cit., p. 71.
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Footnote 313:
The three satiric poets give us both directly and indirectly a great deal of matter; in fact, they may almost be said to provide the illustrative commentary to their contemporary and friend Quintilian's precepts. It is possible that the example of Horace may have had something to do with this; but such an example need not have been required. As we know, not merely from themselves, the first century at Rome, if not one of the very greatest times of literary production, was one of very great and very widespread literary interest. As Persius tells us--
"Ecce inter pocula quaerunt Romulidae saturi, quid dia poemata narrent;"
while Seneca's remarks, take them with what grains of salt we will, are sound corroborative evidence. Further, it appears on all hands, not merely that there was a distinct fashion of literature, but that this fashion had its own distinct characteristics, that it was one of the times of ornate as opposed to plain style in verse and prose alike, a time of "preciousness," of "raising the language to a higher power," a time when men openly called Cicero a commonplace and obvious writer, and, if they did not fail to pay a kind of conventional reverence to Virgil, wrote in a way as far as possible from being Virgilian. This always gives plenty of handles to the poetical satirist, and, as we shall see, all the three availed themselves of these handles to the full.
Footnote 314:
In two cases at least. And Quintilian might have known Persius, as he was in Rome before 59 A.D., while Persius did not die till 62.
"At pulchrum digito monstrari et dicier 'Hic est!'"
Footnote 315:
Not a few other phrases, such as--
"Cum carmina lumbum Intrant, et tremulo scalpuntur ubi intima versu"--
show what a formidable, and what an accurate and capable, reviewer, of the slashing order, Persius would have made.
"AErumnis cor luctificabile fulta,"
In this lively crabbed production there are two distinct strains or bents to note. All the best critics have for some time admitted that in professed satire generally, and in Roman satire more than in any other, there is, if not a touch of cant, at any rate a distinct convention of moral indignation--a sort of stock-part of bluff, honestly old-fashioned, censuring of modern corruption--which the satirist takes up as a matter of business. Even Martial, upon whom, Heaven knows! it sits oddly enough, though his consummate dexterity carries it off not ill, affects this now and then; it sometimes suggests itself even through the gloomy intensity of Juvenal; and though such a line as Persius' famous
"Virtutem videant intabescantque relicta"
carries us far out of the dissenting-pulpiteer region where Seneca too often gesticulates, there is in this First Satire, at any rate, some suspicion of forced wrath, of the righteous overmuch.
But the other strand in the twist, the other glance of the view, is in a very different state. There is nothing unreal, to all appearance, in the poet's condemnation of the preciousness and conceit of poetic and prose style in his day. That his own is very far from simple or Attic does not matter; the satire had a prescriptive right to be crabbed, archaic, irregular, bizarre. Whether political dislike of the tyrant did not sharpen literary objection to the poetaster may be a debatable question for those who care to debate it; but, in any case, the objection was there, and seems to have been quite genuine. Now, as has been often pointed out, these definite passages, definitely objected to or praised, are precisely what we want most, and have least of, in ancient criticism. A short examination of them, therefore, will serve our turn very well.
Footnote 316:
Footnote 317:
But we may go even further. These same processes, which we have ventured to point out as certainly illustrated by the gibbeted verses, and as probably accounting for the wrath of their executioner, are the very processes by which all our great nineteenth-century poets in English have produced their characteristic effects--alliteration, internal rhyme or assonance, complete or muffled, and, above all, the modulation of vowel and consonant so as to produce a sort of song without music, accompanying the actual words. And it may be noted that while some of our modern critics have objected to these things in themselves, many more, oddly enough, object to the process of pointing them out, and seem to think that there is something almost indecent in it.
Footnote 318:
Footnote 319:
"Stulta est clementia, cum tot ubique Vatibus occurras, periturae parcere chartae."
Footnote 320:
It has been held that Juvenal shows his "freedman" extraction by aping and overdoing patrician prejudice in this and other matters. But I had rather not think this.
Footnote 321:
Footnote 322:
This abstract, though brief, should be sufficient to establish our point--that Juvenal, while he rarely cared to touch strictly literary subjects, hardly ever treated them in a strictly literary manner. He shared the opinion of the best Roman literary judges at all times--and especially in his own times, when the popular current was setting in the opposite direction--that literary style ought to be plain, nervous, manly; and he could express this with even better right than Persius, inasmuch as his own, though extremely allusive and of the most original character, is quite clear from involution or conceit. But he did not care in the least to investigate literary processes: nor did he trouble himself very much to contrast styles and differentiate their values. One may even, without any rashness of guess, be certain that he would have regarded criticism of form with nearly as much disfavour in a man as he expressly does in a woman. In fact, he would have considered it the occupation of a fribble.
Footnote 323:
i. 117.
Footnote 324:
ii. 8.
Footnote 325:
vii. 3.
Footnote 326:
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