In the Tristia' and 'Ex Ponto' we have an attempt to misapply the elegiac muse, and to force her whose song should be of The hope, the fear, the jealous care, The exalted portion of the pain to record the petty troubles of une âme desorientée, and ill at ease amid its surroundings. We could have well spared the 'Fasti,' a mechanical effort to produce the effect of a patriotism which the writer did not feel, and to efface the ineffaceable impression of lightness and insincerity which his poetry leaves. We wish that we had preserved in its place his tragedy the 'Medea,' which ancient critics pronounced to be his masterpiece. In the 'Remedia Amoris' and the Medicamina Facie' we have an example of the most impossible of all feats which a writer can essay-the attempt to imitate his past self. Many writers have achieved amazing imitations of others, but those who have tried to reproduce the peculiarities of their former selves have always failed pathetically. Nevertheless, no other classical poet has furnished more ideas than Ovid to the Italian poets and painters of the Renaissance, and to our own early poetry from Chaucer to Pope, who, like Ovid, 'Lisped in numbers, for the numbers came.' If we look at the Augustan Age from the spiritual point of view, Ovid may be regarded as the poet of the Transition. The Silver Age is the age of words. Ovid is to Virgil as Euripides to Sophocles, and we find that Ovid is imitated more than Virgil by the poets of the Decline,-by Lucan, Statius, Seneca, and Valerius Flaccus. But if we view the question merely materially as one of chronology, Phædrus will be the connecting link. He lived from Augustus to Nero, and is the only writer who fills the interval. There was between the Golden and the Silver Age half a century of literary darkness illumined only by the trifling contributions to literature which Phædrus has made. He is not mentioned by a single writer of the Empire except Martial under Domitian and Avianus under Theodosius. Phædrus no doubt chose the rôle of a fabulist because it was a vein hitherto neglected by the Latin poets. We know hardly anything about his life; but we are told that he incurred the resentment of Sejanus and was imprisoned. There is certainly much in his work which seems to be directed against Tiberius and Sejanus, and we must admire the bold outspokenness of many many of his fables as well as the ingenuity of one ambiguous criticism on his times, 'Utilius homini nihil est quam recte loqui,' a phrase which may mean, quite equally well, either 'nothing is more truly a man's interest than to speak honestly,' or 'it is more a man's interest to say nothing at all than to speak the straightforward truth.' Whether we believe or not that his sarcasms were resented, we may safely discredit the statement that, if resented, they were visited only with incarceration-an incredibly light sentence on blasphemy against the Emperor in an age when death was often the punishment of mere silence. Phædrus is rather a raconteur than a fabulist. He is best when he is only telling a story. His animals are but vehicles of moral reflexions. One of his fables tells how there were two mules, one of which bore a great treasure, and the other only a load of barley. The former is despoiled of his load and wounded by robbers; the latter is unhurt, and bears his burden safely to its destination. But we read that the first stepped along proudly with his head in the air, while the other trudged on his way dejected and humble. Now these (as has been remarked) are the traits not of the beasts in the story, but of the human beings there symbolized and the human qualities and conditions illustrated, luxury and poverty. Esop never makes such a mistake. His fable and his moral leap together from his brain. In Phædrus the moral comes first, and then he attaches an animal to it. Phædrus is signalized by an overweening vanity and self-esteem. He constantly plumes himself on his originality, or at least on his superiority to his model, Æsop. Like Cicero, another Transition poet, he is jealous of his fame and covetous of praise. He is very concise, but never to the point of obscurity like Persius, whose style has been compared to a too powerful glass which by excessive concentration of the rays of light actually impedes the vision. He strongly resembles the Augustan writers in his taste, his familiarity with Greek literature, and his ambition for a place in the regard of posterity. Poetry revives under Nero, and its chief representatives in that reign are Lucan and Seneca. Like Catullus and Persius, Lucan died very young, in his twenty-sixth year; but, unlike them, he found not only an untimely but a dishonourable grave. He is a black spot on the goodly fellowship of Stoics which Persius adorned. He halted between the life of a courtier and the death of a Stoic, and faced the latter only when he could no longer preserve the former. He tried unsuccessfully to make the the best of both worlds, and finally gave up his life only after the failure of a vile attempt to save it by the sacrifice of his mother's. And yet he was a member of that eminent Stoic family which shed such lustre on the dark days of Nero's reign. His father was M. Annæus, a son of Seneca the elder, and his uncle was Seneca the younger, who was high in favour at the court of Nero. Lucan himself displayed extraordinary precocity. So the infant prodigy was sent from Corduba to Rome, and put into the mill of Palamon and Flavius, who had just finished their task of ruining the style of Persius, and were now ready to take in hand a fresh victim. The story that bees settled on his lips in infancy is one which is told of many poets, but of none, surely, more inappropriately than of Lucan. The bee takes its fragrant store from Nature herself, and never did a poet owe so little to Nature as Lucan, or possess more wearisomely perfect skill in embroidering ideas which he has not completely grasped, pleading with feverish earnestness causes in which he has no interest, and making the most emphatic pronouncements on subjects on which he has no knowledge and not even prejudices. As Ausonius, the poet of Bordeaux, owed to the favourable horoscope, which fired the ambition of his parents, that start in life which he used so well that beginning as a teacher of rhetoric he finally became consul, verifying the verse of Juvenal, 'Si fortuna volet fies de rhetore consul'; so Lucan owed to the chance that he possessed a relative influential at court, his early introduction to Roman life and fashion. But the young Spaniard would have profited far more by the curb than the spur. The precocious bud of his genius needed pruning, to prevent its blowing into a flower too soon. His teachers and admirers would not even leave the bud to Nature, but tried to pull open the leaves and make it look like a flower before its time. Thrust while still a child into a position which Lucretius, Virgil, and Horace with difficulty achieved for themselves, and with all his worst tendencies not corrected but fostered, did not the young genius afford a perfect illustration of that saddest and truest of sayings corruptio optimi pessima? At first he enjoyed high favour with the Emperor, who made him a quæstor. It is true that by statute he was not yet eligible for the office. But what matter? In those days it often happened that the first time one heard of a law was when it was set aside by the Emperor. But jealousy soon troubled the smooth current of Lucan's prosperity. The Emperor and he were equally prolific poets, but the Emperor's "Mimallonean boomings' boomings' commanded only enforced applause, while those of his young rival were received with real enthusiasm. It is singular that, though Nero was so proud of his poetry, he so utterly failed to bring about its survival. Few even of the titles of his poems have come down to us. It seems as if a great reputation, either for good or for evil, in the sphere of action is unfavourable to survival in the realms of art. The hand of Time has smeared out the imperial boomings in the blood of his innocent victims. Lucan was forbidden to read his verses in public. One might as well have taken away books from Cicero, meats from Vitellius, or men from Cleopatra. The applause of the salon was the air which Lucan breathed. Full of bitterness, he threw himself into the conspiracy of Piso, resenting not so much the suppression of the liberties of his country as of his own right to thrill the ears of the applauding public. By no writer has the Republic been more ardently beloved than by Lucan, but he loved it not as a form of government but as a subject for rhetoric, not as the creation of the Roman people but as the theme of the Pharsalia.' If Martial is to be believed when he tells of the profits earned by that poem,† we may say that few have sold their country more advantageously than Lucan. He was a political economist, too: Roman citizenship was at a discount: he bought it in the cheapest market, the comitia, and sold it in the dearest, the Argiletum, or Booksellers' Street, of Rome. What did a Spaniard care about Rome? He would never have come near it, but that it was the best opening for a young man of talent, and the best market for the gaudy wares which he had to sell. 6 We know how Piso's conspiracy was discovered, and how, among all the nobles and poets that took part in it, there was not one who was not as ready as an Irish Invincible to purchase his own safety by denouncing the rest, save one poor harlot, Epicharis, whom perhaps some womanish weakness, may be indignation at the judicial murder of a lover, had driven into the plot, but from whom, in the words of Tacitus, neither scourge nor fire, nor the fury of the torturers, who were loth to be beaten by a woman,' could extort one word of confession, betrayal, or retractation. Lucan surpassed the rest in his eagerness to save his life even by denouncing his own mother, an * Mimalloneis bombis' (Pers. I. 99). † Martial, xiv. 194, makes Lucan say of himself: 'Sunt quidam qui me dicunt non esse poetam : Sed qui me vendit bibliopola putat.' act act which gives a new and literal meaning to Juvenal's scathing line, Et propter vitam vivendi perdere causas.' But the imperial matricide was not impressed by the sacrifice of a mother, and Lucan was forced to confront what he calls 'the greatest of horrors,' the face of Death. He bled to death. at the age of six-and-twenty, reciting some verses from the 'Pharsalia.' He can hardly have been in love with death, which he tried so basely to shun; yet he is never tired of glorifying it. Of facing death he writes: 'Happiest who can, next happiest he who must.'* And again: 'God cheats men into living on by hiding God certainly seems to have succeeded in concealing the charms of death from this pseudo-Stoic, who was as unworthy of his family as of his age, and who was not ashamed to try to claim credit for a great death after exhausting all the devices of turpitude to avoid it. Quintilian said of the 'Pharsalia' that it was perhaps rhetoric rather than poetry-an excellent criticism, which might well be applied to certain modern poets. Admirable as are the 'Lays of Ancient Rome' and 'Lalla Rookh,' we feel that the main ingredient in the handiwork of Macaulay and Moore is not poetry but rhetoric when we compare them with 'Christabel' or 'Maud'; and the same will be the result of a comparison between the Pharsalia' and the Æneid.' Lucan, as has been observed by Mr. Crutwell, has not the reverence of Virgil for the gods nor the antagonism of Lucretius; he does not rise above a flippant and shallow scepticism. Hence he is hampered in the use of the supernatural, and is obliged to have recourse to witches, demons, ghosts, and visions. The real strength of this epic poem without a hero is in the rhetorical skill displayed in those parts of it where rhetoric is appropriate, as for instance in the magnificent reflections on the death of Pompey. It is his matchless powers as a rhetorician and a phrasemonger that have made a poem, perused throughout by few, such a fruitful source of quotations 'Scire mori sors prima viris, sed proxima cogi' (Phars. Ix. 211). 'Victurosque dei celant, ut vivere durent, Quintilian calls him sententiis clarissimus. |