former oppression,” acted upon Juvenal. There is no evidence
that these two great writers, who lived and wrote at the same
time, who were animated by the same hatred of the tyrant under
whom the best years of their manhood were spent, and who both
felt most deeply the degradation of their times, were even known
to one another. Tacitus belonged to the highest official and
senatorial class, Juvenal apparently to the middle class and to
that of the struggling men of letters; and this difference in position
had much influence in determining the different bent of their
genius, and in forming one to be a great national historian, the
other to be a great social satirist. If the view of the satirist is
owing to this circumstance more limited in some directions, and
his taste and temper less conformable to the best ancient standards
of propriety, he is also saved by it from prejudices to which
the traditions of his class exposed the historian. But both
writers are thoroughly national in sentiment, thoroughly masculine
in tone. No ancient authors express so strong a hatred of
evil. The peculiar greatness and value of both Juvenal and
Tacitus is that they did not shut their eyes to the evil through
which they had lived, but deeply resented it—the one with a
vehement and burning passion, like the “saeva indignatio” of
Swift, the other with perhaps even deeper but more restrained
emotions of mingled scorn and sorrow, like the scorn and sorrow
of Milton when “fallen on evil days and evil tongues.” In one
respect there is a difference. For Tacitus the prospect is not
wholly cheerless, the detested tyranny was at an end, and its
effects might disappear with a more beneficent rule. But the
gloom of Juvenal’s pessimism is unlighted by hope.
A. C. Swinburne has suggested that the secret of Juvenal’s concentrated power consisted in this, that he knew what he hated, and that what he did hate was despotism and democracy. But it would be hardly true to say that the animating motive of his satire was political. It is true that he finds the most typical examples of lust, cruelty, levity and weakness in the emperors and their wives—in Domitian, Otho, Nero, Claudius and Messalina. It is true also that he shares in the traditional idolatry of Brutus, that he strikes at Augustus in his mention of the “three disciples of Sulla,” and that he has no word of recognition for what even Tacitus acknowledges as the beneficent rule of Trajan. So too his scorn for the Roman populace of his time, who cared only for their dole of bread and the public games, is unqualified. But it is only in connexion with its indirect effects that he seems to think of despotism; and he has no thought of democracy at all. It is not for the loss of liberty and of the senatorian rule that he chafes, but for the loss of the old national manliness and self-respect. This feeling explains his detestation of foreign manners and superstitions, his loathing not only of inhuman crimes and cruelties but even of the lesser derelictions from self-respect, his scorn of luxury and of art as ministering to luxury, his mockery of the poetry and of the stale and dilettante culture of his time, and perhaps, too, his indifference to the schools of philosophy and his readiness to identify all the professors of stoicism with the reserved and close-cropped puritans, who concealed the worst vices under an outward appearance of austerity. The great fault of his character, as it appears in his writings, is that he too exclusively indulged this mood. It is much more difficult to find what he loved and admired than what he hated. But it is characteristic of his strong nature that, where he does betray any sign of human sympathy or tenderness, it is for those who by their weakness and position are dependent on others for their protection—as for “the peasant boy with the little dog, his playfellow,”[1] or for “the home-sick lad from the Sabine highlands, who sighs for his mother whom he has not seen for a long time, and for the little hut and the familiar kids.”[2]
If Juvenal is to be ranked as a great moralist, it is not for his greatness and consistency as a thinker on moral questions. In the rhetorical exaggeration of the famous tenth satire, for instance, the highest energies of patriotism—the gallant and desperate defence of great causes, by sword or speech—are quoted as mere examples of disappointed ambition; and, in the indiscriminate condemnation of the arts by which men sought to gain a livelihood, he leaves no room for the legitimate pursuits of industry. His services to morals do not consist in any positive contributions to the notions of active duty, but in the strength with which he has realized and expressed the restraining influence of the old Roman and Italian ideal of character, and also of that religious conscience which was becoming a new power in the world. Though he disclaims any debt to philosophy (xiii. 121), yet he really owes more to the “Stoica dogmata,” then prevalent, than he is aware of. But his highest and rarest literary quality is his power of painting characters, scenes, incidents and actions, whether from past history or from contemporary life. In this power, which is also the great power of Tacitus, he has few equals and perhaps no superior among ancient writers. The difference between Tacitus and Juvenal in power of representation is that the prose historian is more of an imaginative poet, the satirist more of a realist and a grotesque humorist. Juvenal can paint great historical pictures in all their detail—as in the famous representation of the fall of Sejanus; he can describe a character elaborately or hit it off with a single stroke. The picture drawn may be a caricature, or a misrepresentation of the fact—as that of the father of Demosthenes, “blear-eyed with the soot of the glowing mass,” &c.—but it is, with rare exceptions, realistically conceived, and it is brought before us with the vivid touches of a Defoe or a Swift, or of the great pictorial satirist of the 18th century, Hogarth. Yet even in this, his most characteristic talent, his proneness to exaggeration, the attraction which coarse and repulsive images have for his mind, and the tendency to sacrifice general effect to minuteness of detail not infrequently mar his best effects.
The difficulty is often felt of distinguishing between a powerful rhetorician and a genuine poet, and it is felt particularly in the case of Juvenal. He himself knew and has well described (vii. 53 seq.) the conditions under which a great poet could flourish; and he felt that his own age was incapable of producing one. He has little sense of beauty either in human life or nature. Whenever such sense is evoked it is only as a momentary relief to his prevailing sense of the hideousness of contemporary life, or in protest against what he regarded as the enervating influences of art. Even his references to the great poets of the past indicate rather a blasé sense of indifference and weariness than a fresh enjoyment of them. Yet his power of touching the springs of tragic awe and horror is a genuine poetical gift, of the same kind as that which is displayed by some of the early English dramatists. But he is, on the whole, more essentially a great rhetorician than a great poet. His training, the practical bent of his understanding, his strong but morose character, the circumstances of his time, and the materials available for his art, all fitted him to rebuke his own age and all after-times in the tones of a powerful preacher, rather than charm them with the art of an accomplished poet. The composition of his various satires shows no negligence, but rather excess of elaboration; but it produces the impression of mechanical contrivance rather than of organic growth. His movement is sustained and powerful, but there is no rise and fall in it. The verse is most carefully constructed, and is also most effective, but it is so with the rhetorical effectiveness of Lucan, not with the musical charm of Virgil. The diction is full, even to excess, of meaning, point and emphasis. Few writers have added so much to the currency of quotation. But his style altogether wants the charm of ease and simplicity. It wearies by the constant strain after effect, its mock-heroics and allusive periphrasis, and excites distrust by its want of moderation.
On the whole no one of the ten or twelve really great writers of ancient Rome leaves on the mind so mixed an impression, both as a writer and as a man, as Juvenal. He has little, if anything at all, of the high imaginative mood—the mood of reverence and noble admiration—which made Ennius, Lucretius and Virgil the truest poetical representatives of the genius of Rome. He has nothing of the wide humanity of Cicero, of the urbanity of Horace, of the ease and grace of Catullus. Yet he
