No More Learning

The Roman
for the most part did not read. He was read to. The difference is plain
enough. Indeed it is common to hear the remark about this or that book,
that 'It is the kind of book that ought to be read aloud'. Latin books
_were_ read aloud. And this practice must have reacted, however
obscurely, upon the writing of them. Some tinge of rhetoric was
inevitable. And here I am led to a new theme.


II

Perhaps no poetry of equal power and range is so deeply infected with
rhetoric as the Roman. A principal cause of this is, no doubt, the
language. But there are other causes, and we shall most easily penetrate
these if we consider what I may call the environment of Roman poetry.

Two conditions in Rome helped to foster literary creation among a people
by temperament unimaginative. Of these the first is an educational
system deliberately and steadily directed towards the development of
poetical talent. No nation ever believed in poetry so deeply as the
Romans. They were not a people of whom we can say, as we can of the
Greeks, that they were _born to_ art and literature.
Those of them who
attained to eminence in art and literature knew this perfectly well.
They knew by how laborious a process they had themselves arrived at such
talent as they achieved. The characteristic Roman triumphs are the
triumphs of material civilization. But the Romans were well aware that a
material civilization cannot be either organized or sustained without
the aid of spiritual forces, and that among the most important of the
spiritual forces that hold together the fabric of nationality are art
and literature. With that large common sense of theirs which, as they
grew in historical experience, became more and more spiritual, they
perceived early, and they gauged profoundly, the importance of
accomplishments not native to their genius. They knew what had happened
to the 'valiant kings' who 'lived before Agamemnon'--and why. The same
could easily happen to a great empire. That is partially, of course, a
utilitarian consideration. But the Romans believed also, and deeply, in
the power of literature--and particularly of poetry--to humanize, to
moralize, to mould character, to inspire action. It was this faith
which, as Cicero tells us, lay behind the great literary movement
associated with the circle of Scipio Africanus. It was this faith which
informed the Augustan literature. Horace was a man of the world--or he
liked to think himself one. He was no dreamer. Yet when he speaks of the
influence of high poetry upon the formation of character he speaks with
a grave Puritanism worthy of Plato. These practical Romans had a
practicality deeper than ours. The average Englishman, when he is told
that 'the battle of Waterloo was won by the sonnets of Wordsworth', is
puzzled and even offended.