Part 16 (1/2)

Of mere preciosity and phrase-making without any special obscurity examples abound.[500] Pelion sinks below the horizon (ii. 6)--

iamque fretis summas aequatum Pelion ornos.

A fight at close quarters receives the following curious description (ii. 524)--

iam brevis et telo volucri non utilis aer.

A spear flying through the air and missing its mark is a _volnus raptum per auras_ (iii. 196). More startling than these is the picture of a charge of trousered barbarians (vi. 702)--

improba barbaricae procurrunt tegmina plantae.

One more peculiarity remains to be noticed. Here and there in the _Argonautica_ we meet with a strange brevity and compression resulting not from the desire to produce phrases of curious and original texture, but rather from a praiseworthy though misdirected endeavour to be concise. The most remarkable example is found in the first book, where Mopsus, the official prophet of the expedition, falls into a trance and beholds a vision of the future (211):

heu quaenam aspicio! nostris modo concitus ausis aequoreos vocat ecce deos Neptunus et ingens concilium. fremere et legem defendere cuncti hortantur. sic amplexu, sic pectora fratris, Iuno, tene; tuque o puppem ne desere, Pallas: nunc patrui nunc flecte minas. cessere ratemque accepere mari. per quot discrimina rerum expedior! subita cur pulcher harundine crines velat Hylas? unde urna umeris niueosque per artus caeruleae vestes? unde haec tibi volnera, Pollux?

quantus io tumidis taurorum e naribus ignis!

tollunt se galeae sulcisque ex omnibus hastae et iam iamque umeri. quem circ.u.m vellera Martem aspicio? quaenam aligeris secat anguibus auras caede madens? quos ense ferit? miser eripe parvos, Aesonide. cerno et thalamos ardere iugales.

Alas! what do I see! Even now, stirred by our daring, lo!

Neptune calls the G.o.ds to a vast conclave. They murmur, and one and all urge him to defend his rights. Hold as thou holdest now, Juno, hold thy brother in thine embrace: and thou, Pallas, forsake not our s.h.i.+p: now, even now, appease thy brother's threats. They have yielded: they give Argo entrance to the sea. Through what perils am I whirled along!

Why does fair Hylas veil his locks with a sudden crown of reeds? Whence comes the pitcher on his shoulder and the azure raiment on his limbs of snow? Whence, Pollux, come these wounds of thine? Ah! what a flame streams from the widespread nostrils of the bulls. Helmets and spears rise from every furrow, and now see! shoulders too! What warfare for the fleece do I see? Who is it cleaves the air with winged snakes, reeking with slaughter? Whom smites she with the sword? Ah! son of Aeson, hapless man, save thy little ones. I see, too, the bridal chamber all aflame.

These lines form a kind of abridgement or _precis_ of the whole _Argonautica_, or even more, for we can hardly believe that the scheme of it included the murder of Medea's children and her vengeance on the house of Creon[501]. They are also far too obscure to be interesting to any save a highly-trained literary audience, while their extreme compression could only be justified by their having been primarily designed for recitation in a dramatic and realistic manner with suitable pauses between the different visions.[502] A yet worse and less excusable example of this peculiar brevity is the jerky and prosaic enumeration of Medea's achievements in the black art (vi. 442)--

mutat agros fluviumque vias; suus alligat ingens cuncta sopor, recoquit fessos aetate parentes, datque alias sine lege colus.

She changes crops of fields and course of rivers. [At her bidding] deep clinging slumber binds all things; fathers outworn with age she seethes to youth again, and to others she gives new span of life against fate's ordinance.

The attempt to be concise and full[503] at one and the same time fails, and fails inevitably.

But for all these faults Valerius Flaccus offends less than any of the Silver Latin writers of epic. He rants less and he exaggerates less; above all, he has much genuine poetic merit. He has been strangely neglected, both in ancient[504] and modern times, and unduly depreciated in the latter. There has been a tendency to rank him with Silius Italicus, whereas it would be truer criticism to place him close to Statius, and not far below Lucan. He is more uneven than the former, has a far less certain touch, and infinitely less command of his instrument.

He has less mastery of words, but a more kindling and penetrating imagination. His outlines are less clear, but more suggestive. He has less rhetoric; beneath an often obscure diction he reveals a greater simplicity and directness of thought, and he has been infinitely more happy in his theme. Only the greatest of poets could achieve a genuine success with the Theban legend, only the worst of poets could reduce the voyage of the Argonauts to real dullness. On the other hand, in an age of _belles-lettres_ such as the Silver Age, and by the majority of scholars, whose very calling leads them to set a perhaps abnormally high value on technical skill, Statius is almost certain to be preferred to Valerius. About the relative position of Lucan there is no doubt. He is incomparably the superior of Valerius, both in genius and intellect. But Valerius never sins against taste and reason to the same extent, and though he has less fire, possesses a finer ear for music and rhythm, and more poetic feeling as distinct from rhetoric. Vergil was his master; it has been said with a little exaggeration that Valerius stands in the same relation to Vergil as Persius to Horace. This statement conveys but a half-truth. Valerius is as superior to Persius in technique as he is inferior in moral force and intellectual power. He is, however, full of echoes from Vergil,[505] and if his verse has neither the 'ocean roll'

of the greater poets, nor the same tenderness, he yet has something of the true Vergilian glamour. But he has weakened his hexameter by succ.u.mbing to the powerful influence of Ovid. His verse is polished and neat to the verge of weakness. Like Ovid, he shows a preference for the dactyl over the spondee, shrinks from elision, and does not understand how to vary his pauses.[506] Too many lines close with a full-stop or colon, and where the line is broken, the same pause often recurs again and again with wearisome monotony. In this respect Valerius, though never monotonously ponderous like Lucan, compares ill with Statius. As a compensation, his individual lines have a force and beauty that is comparatively rare in the _Thebais_. The poet who could describe a sea-cave thus (iv. 179)--

non quae dona die, non quae trahat aetheris ignem; infelix domus et sonitu tremibunda profundi,

That receiveth never daylight's gifts nor the light of the heavenly fires, the home of gloom all a-tremble with the sound of the deep.

is not to be despised as a master of metre. And whether for picturesqueness of expression or for beauty of sound, lines such as (iii. 596)

rursus Hylan et rursus Hylan per longa reclamat avia; responsant silvae et vaga certat imago,

'Hylas', and again 'Hylas', he calls through the long wilderness; the woods reply, and wandering echo mocks his voice.

or (i. 291)

quis tibi, Phrixe, dolor, rapido c.u.m concitus aestu respiceres miserae clamantia virginis ora extremasque ma.n.u.s sparsosque per aequora crines!

Phrixus, what grief was thine when, swept along by the swirling tide, thou lookedst back on the hapless maiden's face as she cried for thine aid, her sinking hands, her hair streaming o'er the deep.

are not easily surpa.s.sed outside the pages of Vergil. But it is above all on his descriptive power that his claim to consideration rests.[507]