Today | News | Books | Recipes Adventure | Science Fiction | Ghost stories | Poetry | Children | History Booktation seems to be Lucilius;
and if he lashes vice with less severity than his great prototype, the
cause must not be sought in any desire to spare what he so evidently
condemned. But he was thrown "on evil times;" he was, besides, of a
rank distinguished enough to make his freedom dangerous, and of an age
when life had yet lost little of its novelty; to write, therefore,
even as he has written, proves him to be a person of very singular
courage and virtue.
In the interval between Horace and Persius, despotism had changed its
nature: the chains which the policy of Augustus concealed in flowers,
were now displayed in all their hideousness. The arts were neglected,
literature of every kind discouraged or disgraced, and terror and
suspicion substituted in the place of the former ease and security.
Stoicism, which Cicero accuses of having infected poetry, even in his
days, and of which the professors, as Quintilian observes, always
disregarded the graces and elegancies of composition, spread with
amazing rapidity.[22] In this school Persius was educated, under the
care of one of its most learned and respectable masters.
Satire was not his first pursuit; indeed, he seems to have somewhat
mistaken his talents when he applied to it. The true end of this
species of writing, as Dusaulx justly says, is the improvement of
society; but for this, much knowledge of mankind ("quicquid agunt
homines") is previously necessary. Whoever is deficient in that, may be
an excellent moral and philosophical poet; but can not, with propriety,
lay claim to the honors of a satirist.
And Persius was moral and philosophical in a high degree: he was also
a poet of no mean order. But while he grew pale over the page of Zeno,
and Cleanthes, and Chrysippus; while he imbibed, with all the ardor
of a youthful mind, the paradoxes of those great masters, together
with their principles, the foundations of civil society were crumbling
around him, and soliciting his attention in vain. To judge from what
he has left us, it might almost be affirmed that he was a stranger
in his own country. The degradation of Rome was now complete; yet he
felt, at least he expresses, no indignation at the means by which it
was effected: a sanguinary buffoon was lording it over the prostrate
world; yet he continued to waste his most elaborate efforts on the
miserable pretensions of pedants in prose and verse! If this savor
of the impassibility of Stoicism, it is entitled to no great praise
on the score of outraged humanity, which has stronger claims on a
well-regulated mind, than criticism, or even philosophy.
Dryden gives that praise to the dogmas of Persius, which he denies to
his poetry. "His verse," he says, "is scabrous and hobbling, and his
measures beneath those of Horace." This is too severe; for Persius has
many exquisite passages, which nothing in Horace will be found to equal
or approach. The charge of obscurity has been urged against him with
more justice; though this, perhaps, is not so great as it is usually
represented. Casaubon could, without question, have defended him more
successfully than he has done; but he was overawed by the brutal
violence of the elder Scaliger; for I can scarcely persuade myself that
he really believed this obscurity to be owing to "the fear of Nero, or
the advice of Cornutus." The cause of it should be rather sought in his
natural disposition, and in his habits of thinking. Generally speaking,
however, it springs from a too frequent use of tropes, approaching in
almost every instance to a catachresis, an anxiety of compression,
and a quick and unexpected transition from one overstrained figure to
another. After all, with the exception of the sixth Satire, which, from
its abruptness, does not appear to have received the author's last
touches, I do not think there is much to confound an attentive reader:
some acquaintance, indeed, with the porch "braccatis illita Medis,"
is previously necessary. His life may be contemplated with unabated
pleasure: the virtue he recommends, he practiced in the fullest extent;
and at an age when few have acquired a determinate character, he left
behind him an established reputation for genius, learning, and worth.
JUVENAL wrote at a period still more detestable than that of Persius.
Domitian, who now governed the empire, seems to have inherited the bad
qualities of all his predecessors. Tiberius was not more hypocritical,
nor Caligula more bloody, nor Claudius more sottish, nor Nero more
mischievous, than this ferocious despot; who, as Theodorus Gadareus
indignantly declared of Tiberius, was truly πηλον αἱματι πεφυραμενον· a
lump of clay kneaded up with blood!
Juvenal, like Persius, professes to follow Lucilius; but what was
in one a simple attempt, is in the other a real imitation, of his
manner.[23] Fluent and witty as Horace, grave and sublime as Persius;
of a more decided character than the former, better acquainted with
mankind than the latter; he did not confine himself to the mode of
regulating an intercourse with the great, or to abstract disquisitions
on the nature of scholastic liberty; but, disregarding the claims of
a vain urbanity, and fixing all his soul on the eternal distinctions
of moral good and evil, he labored, with a magnificence of language
peculiar to himself, to set forth the loveliness of virtue, and the
deformity and horror of vice, in full and perfect display.
Dusaulx, who is somewhat prejudiced against Horace, does ample justice
to Juvenal. There is great force in what he says; and, as I do not know
that it ever appeared in English, I shall take the liberty of laying a
part of it before the reader, at the hazard of a few repetitions.
"The bloody revolution which smothered the last sighs of liberty,[24]
had not yet found time to debase the minds of a people, among whom the
traditionary remains of the old manners still subsisted. The cruel
but politic Octavius scattered flowers over the paths he was secretly
tracing toward despotism: the arts of Greece, transplanted to the
Capitol, flourished beneath his auspices; and the remembrance of so
many civil dissensions, succeeding each other with increasing rapidity,
excited a degree of reverence for the author of this unprecedented
tranquillity. The Romans felicitated themselves at not lying down, as
before, with an apprehension of finding themselves included, when they
awoke, in the list of proscription: and neglected, amid the amusements
of the circus and the theatre, those civil rights of which their
fathers had been so jealous.
"Profiting of these circumstances, Horace forgot that he had combated
on the side of liberty. A better courtier than a soldier, he clearly
saw how far the refinement, the graces, and the cultivated state of his
genius (qualities not much considered or regarded till his time[25]),
were capable of advancing him without any extraordinary effort.
"Indifferent to the future, and not daring to recall the past, he
thought of nothing |