Education of Statius. 283 grounds from the elements of his education, before he set his foot in society. He had no mind to digest the influences of that education to assimilate what was good, while it threw off the bad parts of the system. His father taught him to rhyme every sentence he spoke in his subsequent life he could not communicate with his friends except in metre. His father obliged him to make verses before he could possibly have any ideas upon the topics he suggested: words ever after became, in contradiction to Fichte's theory, the sole prompters of his thoughts, and sonorous epithets were strung together without other natural link than what material description supplied. Though Statius lived in an age of wonders-when earthquakes, political, moral, and natural rolled away under his feet-when religious and social institutions were undergoing a palpable transformation, his mind never travelled out of the narrow circle of his sire's lessons, to encounter these startling phenomena. Greek fables and Greek epics. formed alike the belief and meditation of his infancy, manhood, and old age. His attachment to the old theogony, when its follies were exploded, might be deemed as chivalrous as the devotion of the late Colonel Sibthorp to Protection, had it not served a purpose, the supplying him with a storehouse of topics for his rhyming propensity. We doubt not, however, that his piety was sincere. He had sat, with the docility of an Irish student at Louvain, on the benches of his father's ecclesiastical seminary, and heard him expound the History of Olympus with infantile credulity. Though the young nobles who aspired to the functions of the pagan priesthood soon relieved themselves of the influence of such lessons, and concealed the atheist's heart under the priestly robe, Statius clung to the doctrines thus imparted with the greatest tenacity; and even when they were openly repudiated, never seems to have been troubled with a suspicion of their veracity. It is on account of this absence of the exercise of independent opinion-of this incompetence to grapple with the startling phenomena of the age-that we must deny to Statius the attribute of genius. His father committed a great folly in setting his mind right against the current of the age, and the son had not even the sense to retrieve or understand the blunder. He went on writing epics as if he lived in the days of Homer, within view of the foundations of society, when mankind sailed in quest of foreign homes, and encountered the vessels of the gods in the Grecian seas. Even if such an egregious mistake had not argued want of discernment on the part of its author, still language and invention must have failed him in the prosecution of so false an object. The best epics are reckoned weary; and to render this Behemoth of poetic creations at all tolerable, it must more or less embody the passing features of the epoch, and take its seat in the heart of humanity. With openly professed figments no epic ever dealt without being consigned to the bookseller's dead-stock with the Thebaid of Statius, and the Prince Arthur of Sir Richard Blackmore. There were, however, other influences at work to increase the fatal bent the elder Statius had imparted, and these are to be found in the literary fashions of the epoch. Language being the pulse of civilization, its creations cannot live without being deteriorated by the united action of a complex web of operating causes, some of which are political, others moral, while more are homogeneous, and consequently direct in their agency. The former had a very remote, the latter a very decisive influence in determining the poetic tendencies of Statius. The absence of mental and political freedom which disgraced the reigns of the earlier Emperors, could hardly have fettered the mind of Statius, as he did not avail himself of the little margin which the government left for the exercise of his intellectual powers. With the moral leprosy of the age he was equally unstricken. Minds deficient in boldness of thought are generally deficient in passion. Statius was temperate simply because his blood was weak and his temperament mild and atrabilious. Though the corruption of taste and dissoluteness of manners, with the iron fetters of despotism did not touch him directly, they had, however, done their work on the masculine language of Rome, and gave him very vitiated patterns of style in the writings of his cotemporaries and immediate predecessors. The surveillance of the Roman Ediles over the works of the press, and the unscrupulous methods which they employed to banish or kill authors, introduced into the language both cramped and ambagitory expressions; and the general abandonment of moral restraint opened a way to rash innovations of speech by the coining of new terms in defiance of the Horatian injunction, 'Dixeris egregie, notum si callida verbum Epist. ad Pis. 47. or the introduction of old ones in a sense perfectly unwarranted by the best writers of the Augustan epoch. The choicest spirits could not escape the effects of such verbal improprieties, however far removed they might be from the causes in which they took their rise; but if they occasionally disfigure the pages of Juvenal and Tacitus, they overrun those of Statius, who was not distinguished by the reflective judgment of the two foremost of his cotemporaries. Rise of Public Recitation. 285 The fashion, however, which exercised the most fatal blight on the powers of Statius, was one with which his name is indissolubly connected, as its great ornament and promoter ;-public recitation. The history of this custom may be succinctly given, and is not without its lesson in showing that a literature may be corrupted by the very means taken to keep its influence alive and perpetuate its action on life and manners. Public recitation, like every other human thing, crept into Rome stealthily and by almost imperceptible degrees, first being private and confidential, then public: it began by being a mode and ended in becoming an institution. We learn that Horace invited the poets of his day to consult Quintilius Varus (Ars Poet. v. 438), whose advice he had found serviceable. He praises still more the sense and sagacity of a certain Spurius Metius Tarpa (ibid. v. 387), whose ear was sensible to the least defect of harmony, and whose candour was equal to the delicacy of his criticism. Horace offered himself in the capacity of a judge to the eldest of the Pisos, and promised him to apply unhesitatingly whenever a line grated on his ear, the favourite phrase of Quintilius Varus 'corrige sodes, Hoc, aiebat, et hoc.' Epist. ad Pis. 438. By this free communication between the poet and his critic, poetry was kept in the path of reason and correct taste; and whatever inspiration it might lack in the hands of such aristocratic bards as the Pisos, it never swerved from the highest canons of criticism. The convenient opinion, however, began to gain ground that individual criticism served no other purpose than that of clipping the wings of genius. The meeting of one or two discerning critics was insensibly enlarged till it embraced the whole circle of the author's acquaintance. The throng of auditors soon increased from a half-a-dozen to twenty, and from twenty to a hundred, till the voice of individual discrimination was lost in the tumult of a confused suffrage. Why confine a source of so much gratulation and pleasure to a limited number? was the exclamation of the rhyming throng. Why not hold these recitations in the Campus Martius or the Forum, and invite the entire city? The suggestion came very opportunely to Augustus. He had just abolished the Comitia, and removed all political power from the Forum to the palace on the Palatine; but dreading the void which these changes had created in the minds of the people, he eagerly caught at every means calculated to divert their attention from his political purposes. Hence, Augustus was not content with giving his sanction to public recitations; he took the new institution under the protection of the State, defined its laws, and ensured the attendance of the Court by his presence. On these occasions the reciter, accompanied by a troop of parasites and friends, entered the hall they had engaged for the purpose, and taking up his position in front of the benches, unfolded his parchment manuscript amidst a buzz of eager curiosity. After some apologies for the length of the piece, and fulsome compliments to the auditory, the mouthing commenced. The reciter beat time to his hexameters with the movement of his hand, and gesticulated those passages which he thought choice with so marked an intonation, as to coerce the vulgar part of his hearers into expression of applause. The men of taste whom the poet had succeeded in bringing to his reading looked on in sad silence, while the hall shook with deafening approvals of mere turgidity and bombast. The bard might have read their opinion in their attitude of resigned despair, as they sat on the foremost benches; but he avoided their gaze, and, like a ranting actor, turned his eyes to the galleries, as if to command the triumphal shouts with which the worst portions of his poem were greeted. Horace knew the tendency of such recitals to degrade his art by subjecting it to the ignorant control of the multitude, and could hardly be prevailed upon to read his pieces before a few select friends, whose sincerity he knew, and whose judgment he acknowledged (Hor. i. Sat. 4, 73). Gifted with a keen appreciation of the just and beautiful in art, and fastidious to a fault, he trusted more to his own powers of criticism than to those of his friends. Ovid, in this respect, presented a bold contrast to his predecessor. As much as Horace shunned the delicious publicity of public recitations, Ovid courted it. During his exile among the Getæ, the chief complaint of Ovid was that of having no auditors to whom he could recite his compositions (Pont. iv., 2, 34; Trist. iii., 14, 39); and being deprived of this incitement to glory, he began to languish, and became as insensible as his barbarous neighbours. The glory that Ovid sought was a mere noisy repute that took all the airs of fame, and which Horace fled from as a disgrace. Horace courted solitude, Ovid publicity, clamour, shouting, and clapping of hands. A poet who so enthusiastically admired one of the first causes of the corruption of Roman taste and genius, has a fair title to the appellation of the first poet of the decline. Under Nero and Domitian public recitation became the reigning fashion, and was honoured with the patronage of the court, and the encouragement of the leading men of the day. Evils of Public Recitation. 287 The imperial incendiary entered into the lists with Lucan and the other rhymers of the hour-ordered the pontiffs to offer up sacrifices to the gods for his literary triumph, and, writing his verses in gold, dedicated them to the Capitoline Jupiter. Domitian was as sedulous in his attendance upon public readings as Augustus; admitted the most successful reciters to his table, and conferred upon them the highest honours of the city. A practice thus regally supported could not fail to attract an immense number of feeble spirits, whose petty emulation carried the custom to a perfect fury. Every place where the poet had the remotest chance of collecting a crowd became a salle de lecture ; and baths, quadrangles, and porticos resounded with the deafening clamour of the reciters. The lines in which Juvenal alludes to the nuisance must be fresh in the recollection of every schoolboy. 'Nota magis nulli domus est sua, quàm mihi lucus Vulcani: quid agant venti, quas torqueat umbras Sat. i. 7. Of course under such a system anything like a judicious The hearers of to-day were the censorship was unavailing. readers of to-morrow. They expected the same indulgence they meted out to others, and puffed their brethren into the same notoriety which they expected to be helped to in return. When the reciter, after continuing some time, in order to be pressed to pursue his subject, signified his intention to cease through fear of fatiguing his auditors, he was met with the cry of Perge, Perge, from a sea of voices, among which those were the loudest who really wished him to be silent. (Sen. Ep. 95.) If the poet on such occasions, producing a formidable roll of manuscript, ventured to say their indulgence would be too severely taxed, he was generally told by one of the boldest of the crowd to continue, and that to-morrow, and the day after, would be given him if it were necessary. All this courtesy was the code of honour; a part of the regulation of the institution. There cannot be a doubt, not only with respect to the evil effect of such a practice on the literature of the epoch, but also as regards the precise nature of the mischief caused and the When an art is submitted to the judgmanner of its operation. ment and control of ignorant umpires, it must necessarily fall to |