Part 4

Horace had long been a classic when Persius dodged his school-tasks and was a dab at marbles. Indeed, nothing is more remarkable about Roman literature than the rapidity with which the images of its Augustan heroes took on the _patina_ of age. The half-century that lay between Horace and Persius drew itself out to a distant perspective, and Virgil and Horace had all the authority of _veteres_. They not only dictated the forms of poetry, but permeated and dominated prose. True, the hostility to Virgil and Horace had not ceased; the _antiquarii_ were not dead; but the ground had been shifted. The admirers of republican poetry in the time of Horace were republicans-- in the time of Persius they were imperialists, and the maintenance of the authors of the Augustan age as the true classics was a part of the programme of the opposition. The court literature of the Neronian period found its models in the earlier epic essays of Catullus rather than in the poems of Virgil. Virgil had modified the Greek norms to suit the Latin tongue; but these men went back of malice aforethought to the Greek standard, and emulated the proportions of the Greek versification of the Alexandrian period. They were impatient of the classic vocabulary, and found the classic rhythms tame, and so they betook themselves to the earlier language and set it to more exact harmonies. It was no heresy with this set to consider Virgil at once light and rough. The mouth-filling words of the older and bolder period, marshaled in serried ranks, no gap, no break, as they kept time to a rhythmical cadence that was marked by all the music of consonance and assonance-- this was the ideal of the school which Persius assailed, just as an admirer of Pope or Goldsmith might assail the dominant poetry of our day, with its sensuous melody and its revived archaisms. Surely the worshippers of recent poets might pause before accepting the narrow literary creed of Persius. But, not to imitate the example of Nisard, and indulge in dangerous parallelisms, it is sufficient for our purpose to note that Persius's close study of the language of Horace was not only a part of a liberal education, but a necessity of the school to which he belonged. If he was to write satire at all, he must needs take Horace for his model. If he had written an epic, he would have taken Virgil.

Besides this, we may boldly say that reminiscence is no robbery. The verses, the phrases, the arguments that we know by heart often become so wholly ours that they weave themselves unconsciously into the texture of our speech. We use them as convenient forms of expression, without the least thought of plagiarism. We quote them, thinking that they are as familiar to others as they are to ourselves. They constitute, as it were, a sympathetic medium between men of culture. And so Persius repeated group after group of the words of Horace as innocently as the Augustan poets translated their Greek models, and thought no more harm than did the Emperor Julian when he Platonized, or Thackeray when he transfused the classics that he learned at the Charter House into his own matchless English. That he did it to excess is not to be denied. He never learned the lesson of Apelles-- what is enough.

Having thus briefly disposed of those turns which are common to the Latin tongue, and those which ran freely into the pen of the writer, we have now to deal with a considerable number of passages in which the memory of Persius must have lingered over the words of Horace, in which his painstaking genius has hammered the thoughts of Horace into a more compact or a more angular utterance. To the majority of readers his condensations and his amplifications will alike appear to be so many distortions of the original. So, notably, where he characterizes Horace himself, and substitutes for the simple _naso adunco_ the puzzling _excusso naso_, where 'the dreams of a sick man' become the 'dreams of a sick dotard,' where 'telling straight from crooked' is twisted into 'discerning the straight line where it makes its way up between crooked lines,' and where he wrings from the natural phrase 'drink in with the ear' the odd combination 'bibulous ears.' In the longer passages the wresting is still more pronounced; and those who refuse to take into consideration the moral attitude of Persius may well wonder at the perversity with which he distorts the lines and overcharges the colors of the original. But it is tolerably evident that, with all Persius's admiration of Horace as an artist, he felt himself immeasurably superior to him morally, and looked upon these adaptations and alterations as so much gained for the effect of his discourse. The slyness of Horace might have answered well enough for his day and for the kind of vices that he reproved, but the depth over which Persius stood gave him a more than Stoic stature. Horace might have been content with a flute; nothing less resonant than a trumpet would have suited the moral elevation of Persius. Horace is a consummate artist, and not less an artist in the conduct of his life than in the composition of his poems. Persius is the prototype of the sensational preacher, and preachers of all centuries, from Augustin and Jerome to Macleane and Merivale, have had a weakness for him.

Aside from the moral tone, which is enough to give a different ring to the most similar expressions in the two poets, there is an artistic difference of great significance in the handling of the dramatic element, which they both recognized as fundamental in the satire. The dramatic satires of Horace will not bear dislocation without destruction. In Persius the characters are always shifting, always fading away into an impersonal _Tu_. This may be partly due to the interval which he allowed to elapse between the periods of composition; but it is possible that he recognized the limitation of his own powers, that his satires were intended to be a knotted thong, and not a smooth horsewhip. This piecemeal composition, be it the result of poverty or of economy, makes Persius the very author for 'Elegant Extracts.' Hence it is not hard to defend him, as it is not hard to defend Seneca, and on similar grounds. Single verses ring in the ear for months and years. What line, for instance, more quoted than

_Tecum habita: noris quam sit tibi curta supellex_?

What line sinks deeper than the sombre verse,

_Virtutem videant intabescantque relicta_?

Single scenes, whether of dialogue or of description, possess every requirement of dramatic vividness. On every page of the commentary we call him bookish, and yet his pictures stand out from the canvas with a boldness which makes us concede that his books did not keep him from seeing, if they did not teach him to see, what was going on around him. What is not a little remarkable in so young a man is the honesty of his painting. A home-keeping youth, Persius gives us living pictures of what he saw at home, whether at Rome, at Volaterrae, or at Luna; in the school-room, in the lecture-room, in the court of justice, on the wharf, at the country cross-roads. He has watched the carpenter stretching his line, the potter whirling his wheel, the physician adjusting his scales. He has heard the horse-laugh of the burly centurion, and shivered; has heard, with a young Stoic sneer, a cooing and mincing declaimer. He knows all about ink and paper and parchment and reeds; he has not outlived his knowledge of marbles, and one might fancy that the lustral spittle of his aunty was still fresh on his brow. The fact that there is no breeziness about his poems, nothing that tells us of the liberal air beyond, is another sign of his truthfulness. His life is like his own 'ever retreating bay' of the Sixth Satire, with the cliffs of Stoic philosophy between him and the wintry sea without. Arretium he knows-- it was not so far from Volaterrae-- and Bovillae, in the neighborhood of which he had a farm, and Luna, and the world of Rome; but the rest of his geography is in the inane. Horace, on the other hand, ambles all over Italy, and treats us every now and then to a foreign tour with the air of a man who had run across the sea in his time; and even if he who takes us in his sweeping flight from Cadiz to Ganges be not the real Juvenal, the undisputed Juvenal has a far wider geographical outlook than Persius. This very limitation is one of the best signs of the artistic worth of Persius, and justifies the regret that he had not made himself the Crabbe of Roman poetry.

We have seen that Persius was not slavishly dependent on Horace, assimilated the material that he derived from him, raised the worldly wisdom of Horace to the ideal standard of the Stoic, and followed a different canon of dramatic art. To this we may add that Persius, with a certain aristocratic disdain of conventionalities, goes deeper into the current of vulgar diction than the freedman's son dared. Persius felt that he could afford to talk slang, and he talked it; and the commentators have found it necessary to hold Petronius in the left hand, as well as Horace in the right.

We now proceed to yet another formal element, which is no less significant to the close student of antique literature. The Roman handling of the hexameter was artificial in the extreme. Reasoning backward from the Latin hexameter, scholars have been prone to transfer the conscious symbolism of the Roman poets to the Greek originals; and if they had stopped, say, at Apollonius Rhodius, they might have been justified, for in the later Greek poets something of the sort is not to be denied. But the healthier period of Greek poetic art was lifted far above such toying adaptations of sound to sense as commentators still discover in Homer when they enlarge on the symbolism of this or that spondaic verse, the beauty of this or that combination of diaeresis and caesura. A recent comparison of Homer with his successors has shown that, of all the spondaic verses in Homer, scarcely one in a hundred can be traced to any 'picturesque' motive, and the rapid movement of so many five-dactyl hexameters is simply the normal pace of the verse. When we come to Latin metres, however, we must take a different standard, and recognize a conscious modification of the Greek rule. The Ovidian pentameter of the best period-- to cite a familiar instance-- is subject to minute laws, which are transgressed at every turn in Greek elegiac poetry, and the different ideals of Persius and Horace are distinctly traceable in their treatment of the hexameter. Horace, as is well known, broke the lofty movement of the hexameter to suit the easy gait of the satire. Persius is more rhetorical than Horace, and, although he admits elision with as great freedom as his master, his verse has a more mechanical structure than the verse of Horace, and many of the conversational peculiarities of the Horatian hexameter are much less conspicuous in Persius. Horace weakens the caesura, employs a great number of spondaic words, and neglects the variety at which the epic aims; and perhaps the trained ear of a determined scholar might hear in the jog-trot of his satiric rhythms the hoofs of his bob-tailed mule and the lazy flapping of his portmanteau. Persius, on the other hand, hammers out his thoughts in a far more orthodox cadence. Comparing the first six hundred and fifty verses of the first book of the satires of Horace with the six hundred and fifty verses of Persius, we find that more than eight per cent. have five spondees against less than five per cent. in Persius. The so-called third trochee or feminine caesura of the third foot is found in one of ten of Horace's hexameters, and only in one of twenty-six in Persius-- a low proportion even for a Latin poet. Still more striking is the rare use which Persius makes of the masculine caesura of the sixth foot, with its consequent monosyllabic close. Aside from all idle symbolism, this arrangement, which is comparatively common in Horace, gives the verse a certain familiar roughness, especially where the final word forces a union with the following line. These diversities can not be accidents, and serve to show that, although Persius might weave himself a garment from the dyed threads of Horatian diction, he was not bold enough to wear the _discincta tunica_ of Horace's Muse. But we must not forget to be just, and it is only fair to add that such a garb would have been as inappropriate to his severe and lofty, though narrow spirit, as the Coan vestments of Ovid's 'kept goddess'-- if we may borrow the _déesse entretenue_ of Heinrich Heine.

A comparison of Persius with Juvenal-- a favorite theme with editors-- does not enter into the plan of this study. It suffices for our present purpose to note that the practiced rhetorician of the time of Trajan could not have shared Quintilian's admiration of his youthful predecessor. The parallel passages which have been cited belong to the common stock of satirical strokes or to the thesaurus of proverbial phrases. Who can believe that Juvenal took _usque adeo_ from Persius, or borrowed from him the familiar _rara avis_? There are three or four touches in the Tenth Satire which recall some of the more striking expressions of Persius; but Ribbeck's objections to the genuineness of this sophistic declamation, if not convincing, are at least sufficiently well founded to make us pause in citing them. In moral earnestness, Persius is as far superior to Juvenal as he is inferior to him in the rhetorical treatment of his themes; and so long as men will take into consideration this moral element, which modern critics are prone to eliminate from works of art, so long as they will say _pectus est quod satiricum facit_ as well as _quod theologum_, Persius will command a personal esteem which does not attach to the satires of Juvenal. The ingenious theory of Boissier, that the great satirist of the Caesars was a snubbed snob, brings out in still more striking contrast the figure of Persius as the reserved provincial aristocrat, and may be worthy of a more ample development than it has yet received. But Juvenal is a dangerous theme. As M. Martha has admirably observed, Juvenal is an author whose declamatory tone has infected his eulogists; and those who are not carried away by an 'admiration which disfigures while it exalts,' may readily be tempted into the opposite extreme. Let us turn, then, to other matters which illustrate more directly the character of our author's compositions. And first a word or two of Stoicism.

With the strong practical tendencies of the Romans, the only systems of Greek philosophy that ever found large acceptance at Rome were the Epicurean and the Stoic; and in the Stoic school the only doctrines that commanded much attention were the ethic. The subtle dialectic of the Stoics, of which we have some unjoyous specimens in Cicero's philosophical compilations, was not congenial to the Roman mind; but the Stoic creed was the creed of the nobler spirits of the imperial time. Excluded from public life, or, at all events, from the satisfactory exercise of public functions, the elect few took refuge in Stoic philosophy.[1]

[Footnote 1: In this section of the Introduction I follow Zeller's Essay on Marcus Aurelius (_Vorträge u. Abhandlungen_) so closely that some special acknowledgment seems to be necessary.]

The object of Stoicism is by means of virtue and knowledge to make men independent of all without them, and happy in that independence. It is a pantheism: God revealed in every thing; God's law recognized in every thing; God the substance from which every thing proceeds, to which every thing returns; the Original Fire, from which every thing is born again. God is the all-pervasive Spirit, Fate, Providence. Obedience to his eternal laws constitutes virtue and happiness. Good and evil are to be measured by this standard. All that brings us toward this is Good; all that carries us away from it is Evil. Every thing else is indifferent.

In Grace or out of Grace, says the Christian; or, as Calvin expresses it in his nervous language, _Qui Christum dimidium habere vult, totum perdit_. In Virtue or out of Virtue, says the Stoic. There is nothing between. The wise are perfectly wise; the foolish are totally foolish. 'There is not a half-ounce of rectitude in the fool.' The vicious man is as mad as Orestes-- nay, madder.

The difference between human beings is slight. Alkibiades, the high-born and the handsome, is no better than shriveled old Baukis, who makes her livelihood by selling greens. All external distinctions sink into utter insignificance by the side of this great contrast of knowledge and ignorance into which virtue and vice are resolved.

All humanity is one people; all the world one state; its ruler the Deity; its constitution the eternal law of the universe. The more unconditionally a man submits to the guidance of this law, the more exclusively he seeks his happiness in virtue, the more independent he will be of all without him, the more contented in himself, and yet the readier to enter into communion with others, and to do his duty to the whole of which he is a part.

But it is to be observed that the Stoicism of Persius, like the Stoicism of Marcus Antoninus, was of a softer, milder, more religious character than that of Zeno and Chrysippus; and when the Stoic discourses on the nothingness of all earthly things, the ills of life, man's moral weakness, and his need of help, we hear language that reminds us now of the epistles of the New Testament, now of the doctrines of Buddha. 'The philosopher,' says Zeller, 'is a physician for the soul, a priest and servant of the Deity among men, and this he shows by the most unlimited, devoted, unreserved philanthropy.' And not only so, but the Stoic does not disdain to make life brighter in the social circle; and the Sixth Satire of our author, which Nisard considers to be a youthful escapade of the poet-- _qui s'évertue comme un écolier qui sort de classe_-- is no less truly Stoic than the high-strung Third.

In speaking of this subject it is difficult to keep from using the word religion, for the emotional element, which is so characteristic of religion, is not wanting in a system which is the popular synonym for suppression of emotion. This is the thesis which M. Martha has brought out into clear relief, and illumined by many apposite examples-- a thesis which will not be strange to those who have studied with any care the social aspects of the later life of antiquity. Under the empire morality was more than morality-- it was a religion; and all the formulae of certain phases of Christian ascetics may be applied to the ethical side of Stoic philosophy. It is difficult to approach the subject without seeming irreverence; but the faith of the Christian must be far from robust who can shrink from a parallel that goes no farther than the machinery-- that does not involve the motive power. It is not the aim of this study to determine whether this parallelism is to be recognized as a _praeparatio Evangelica_, or as the like result of similar forces at work in different systems of thought and belief. It is enough to present the parallelism, to excuse the phraseology.

Our ancestors, at all events, were not afraid to recognize 'natural Christians' in such men as Socrates, in such youths as Persius. Why, even Seneca figured for a long time as St. Seneca; and Jeremy Taylor was following old example when he cited the Stoic as well as the Christian code. It is only one step from the recognition of this spiritual kindred to the recognition of the practical methods of spiritual work as anticipated in the life of antiquity-- practical methods which for our purposes are even better described by an unbeliever like Lucian than by a believer like Marcus Antoninus. In that age of transition we find father confessors, private chaplains, mendicant friars, missions, revivals, conversions, ecstasies-- all showing the deep needs of the human heart, which refused to be satisfied with the outworn gods of the Pantheon, and, in ignorance of the divine Person, who alone can answer a personal love, sought solace in the mechanism of morality. In characterizing Cornutus, I have already borrowed a phrase from M. Martha, and called him, as M. Martha calls Seneca, a spiritual director; and I have already ventured to call Persius a sensational preacher. His stock of philosophy or theology is not as large as some commentators suppose; and all the elaborate attempts to show by the satires that Persius was a thoroughly trained and consistent Stoic have failed. The most elementary knowledge of Stoic ethics is sufficient for the comprehension of Persius. Whatever else he knew he kept back for practical considerations. He sticks to the marrow of morality, and reiterates the cardinal doctrines of Stoicism with the vehemence of a Poundtext. This vehemence, this enthusiasm, may be explained by his youth, his Etruscan blood, his profession as a moral reformer. A critic with M. Taine's resources might account for it by the climate of Volaterrae; but, however it may be accounted for, certain it is that he himself is much impressed with the profundity of the doctrines which he professes; that he warms and glows as he imparts to his auditors the great secret that they are not free because they are slaves to vice; that a man who does not understand his relations to his Maker can not move a finger without sinning; that in the flesh there is no good thing; and that the anguish of a tortured conscience is the worst of hells. But the difficulties of Persius are not due to recondite Stoic thought, and can not be cleared up by reference to Stoic philosophy. The trouble lies in the slangy expressions, the lack of organic development, the restless zeal to force his message home to the heart of every hearer, and the consequent shifting of the personages of his dialogue to suit the cases as they rose before his mind.