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III
Roman poetry continued for no less than five centuries after the death of Vergil—and by Roman poetry I mean a Latin poetry classical in form and sentiment. But of these five centuries only two count. The second and third centuries A.D. are a Dark Age dividing the silver twilight of the century succeeding the age of Horace from the brief but brilliant Renaissance of the fourth century: and in the fifth century we pass into a new darkness. The infection of the Augustan tradition is sufficiently powerful in the first century to give the impulse to poetic work of high and noble quality. And six considerable names adorn the period from Nero to Domitian. Of these the greatest are perhaps those of Seneca, Lucan, and Martial. All three are of Spanish origin: and it is perhaps to their foreign blood that they owe the genius which redeems their work from its very obvious faults. It is the fashion to decry Seneca and Lucan as mere rhetoricians. Yet in both there is something greater and deeper than mere rhetoric. They move by habit grandly among large ideas. Life is still deep and tremendous and sonorous. Their work has a certain Titanic quality. We judge their poetry too much by their biography, and their biography too little in relation to the terrible character of their times. Martial is a poet of a very different order. Yet in an inferior genrehe is supreme. No other poet in any language has the same never-failing grace and charm and brilliance, the same arresting ingenuity, an equal facility and finish. We speak of his faults, yet, if the truth must be told, his poetry is faultless—save for one fault: its utter want of moral character. The three other great names of the period are Statius, Silius, and Valerius. Poets of great talent but no genius, they 'adore the footsteps' of an unapproachable master. Religiously careful artists, they see the world through the eyes of others. Sensible to the effects of Greatness, they have never touched and handled it. They know it only from the poets whom they imitate. The four winds of life have never beat upon their decorous faces. We would gladly give the best that they offer us—and it is often of fine quality—for something much inferior in art but superior in the indefinable qualities of freshness and gusto. The exhaustion of the period is well seen in Juvenal—in the jaded relish of his descriptions of vice, in the complete unreality of his moral code, in a rhetoric which for ever just misses the fine effects which it laboriously calculates.
The second century is barren. Yet we are dimly aware in the reign of Hadrian of an abortive Revival. We hear of a school of neoterici: and these neotericiaimed at just what was needed—greater freshness and life. They experimented in metre, and they experimented in language. They tried to use in poetry the language of common speech, the language of Italy rather than that of Rome, and to bring into literature once again colour and motion. The most eminent of these neotericiis A
The end of the century gives us Claudian, and a reaction against this triviality. 'Paganus peruicacissimus,' as Orosius calls him, Claudian presents the problem of a poet whose poetry treats with real power the circumstances of an age from which the poet himself is as detached as can be. Claudian's real world is a world which was never to be again, a world of great princes and exalted virtues, a world animated by a religion in which Rome herself, strong and serene, is the principal deity. Accident has thrown him into the midst of a political nightmare dominated by intriguing viziers and delivered to a superstition which made men at once weak and cruel. Yet this world, so unreal to him, he presents in a rhetorical colouring extraordinarily effective. Had he possessed a truer instinct for things as they are he might have been the greatest of the Roman satirists. He has a real mastery of the art of invective. But, while he is great where he condemns, where he blesses he is mostly contemptible. He has too many of the arts of the cringing Alexandrian. And they availed him nothing. Over every page may be heard the steady tramp of the feet of the barbarian invader.
After Claudian we pass into the final darkness. The gloom is illuminated for a brief moment by the Gaul Rutilius. But Rutilius has really outlived Roman poetry and Rome itself. Nothing that he admires is any longer real save in his admiration of it. The things that he condemns most bitterly are the things which were destined to dominate the world for ten centuries. Christianity is 'a worse poison than witchcraft'. The monastic spirit is the 'fool-fury of a brain unhinged'. The monasteries are 'slave-dungeons'.
It was these 'slave-dungeons' which were to keep safe through the long night of the Middle Ages all that Rutilius held dear. It was these 'slave-dungeons' which were to afford a last miserable refuge to the works of that long line of poets of whom Rutilius is the late and forlorn descendant. Much indeed was to perish even within the fastnesses of these 'slave-dungeons': for the monasteries were not always secure from the shock of war, nor the precious memorials which they housed from the fury of fanaticism. Yet much was to survive and to emerge one day from the darkness and to renew the face of the world. Rutilius wrote his poem in 416 A.D. If he could have looked forward exactly a thousand years he would have beheld Poggio and the great Discoverers of the Italian Renaissance ransacking the 'slave-dungeons' of Italy, France, and Germany, and rejoicing over each recovered fragment of antiquity with a pure joy not unlike that which heavenly minds are said to feel over the salvation of souls. These men were, indeed, kindling into life again the soul of Europe. They were assisting at a New Birth. In this process of regeneration the deepest force was a Latin force, and of this Latin force the most impelling part was Latin poetry. We are apt to-day, perhaps, in our zeal of Hellenism, to forget, or to disparage, the part which Latin poetry has sustained in moulding the literatures of modern Europe. But if the test of great poetry is the length and breadth of its influence in the world, then Roman poetry has nothing to fear from the vagaries of modern fashion. For no other poetry has so deeply and so continuously influenced the thought and feeling of mankind. Its sway has been wider than that of Rome itself: and the Genius that broods over the Capitoline Hill might with some show of justice still claim, as his gaze sweeps over the immense field of modern poetry, that he beholds nothing which does not owe allegiance to Rome: