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The Terentian comedy is in a way the turning-point of Roman literature. Plautus and Ennius, however largely they drew from Greek originals, threw into all their work a manner and a spirit which were essentially those of a new literature in the full tide of growth. The imitation of Greek models was a means, not an end; in both poets the Greek manner is continually abandoned for essays into a new manner of their own, and they relapse upon it when their imperfectly mastered powers of invention or expression give way under them. In the circle of Terence the fatal doctrine was originated that the Greek manner was an end in itself, and that the road to perfection lay, not in developing any original qualities, but in reproducing with laborious fidelity the accents of another language and civilisation. Nature took a swift and certain revenge. Correctness of sentiment and smooth elegance of diction became the standards of excellence; and Latin literature, still mainly confined to the governing class and their dependents, was struck at the root (the word is used of Terence himself by Varro) with the fatal disease of mediocrity.
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| Terence |
But in Terence himself (as in Addison among English writers) this mediocrity is, indeed, golden—a mediocrity full of grace and charm. The unruffled smoothness of diction, the exquisite purity of language, are qualities admirable in themselves, and are accompanied by other striking merits; not, indeed, by dramatic force or constructive power, but by careful and delicate portraiture of character, and by an urbanity (to use a Latin word which expresses a peculiarly Latin quality) to which the world owes a deep debt for having set a fashion. In some curious lines preserved by Suetonius, Julius Caesar expresses a criticism, which we shall find it hard to improve, on the "halved Menander," to whom his own fastidious purity in the use of language, no less than his tact and courtesy as a man of the world, attracted him strongly, while not blinding him to the weakness and flaccidity of the Terentian drama. Its effect on contemporary men of letters was immediate and irresistible. A curious, if doubtfully authentic, story is told of the young poet when he submitted his first play, The Maid of Andros, for the approval of the Commissioners of Public Works, who were responsible for the production of plays at the civic festivals. He was ordered to read it aloud to Caecilius, who, since the death of Plautus, had been supreme without a rival on the comic stage. Terence presented himself modestly while Caecilius was at supper, and was carelessly told to sit down on a stool in the dining-room, and begin. He had not read beyond a few verses when Caecilius stopped him, and made him take his seat at table. After supper was over, he heard his guest's play out with unbounded and unqualified admiration.
But this admiration of the literary class did not make the refined conventional art of Terence successful for its immediate purposes on the stage: he was caviare to the general. Five of the six plays were produced at the spring festival of the Mother of the Gods—an occasion when the theatre had not to face the competition of the circus; yet even then it was only by immense efforts on the part of the management that they succeeded in attracting an audience. The Mother-in-Law (not, it is true, a play which shows the author at his best) was twice produced as a dead failure. The third time it was pulled through by extraordinary efforts on the part of the acting-manager, Ambivius Turpio. The prologue written by Terence for this third performance is one of the most curious literary documents of the time. He is too angry to extenuate the repeated failure of his play. If we believe him, it fell dead the first time because "that fool, the public," were all excitement over an exhibition on the tight-rope which was to follow the play; at the second representation only one act had been gone through, when a rumour spread that "there were going to be gladiators" elsewhere, and in five minutes the theatre was empty.
The Terentian prologues (they are attached to all his plays) are indeed very interesting from the light they throw on the character of the author, as well as on the ideas and fashions of his age. In all of them there is a certain hard and acrid purism that cloaks in modest phrases an immense contempt for all that lies beyond the writer's own canons of taste. In hac est pura oratio, a phrase of the prologue to The Self-Tormentor, is the implied burden of them all. He is a sort of Literary Robespierre; one seems to catch the premonitory echo of well-known phrases, "degenerate condition of literary spirit, backsliding on this hand and on that, I, Terence, alone left incorruptible." Three times there is a reference to Plautus, and always with a tone of chilly superiority which is too proud to break into an open sneer. Yet among these haughty and frigid manifestoes some felicity of phrase or of sentiment will suddenly remind us that here, after all, we are dealing with one of the great formative intelligences of literature; where, for instance, in the prologue to the lively and witty comedy of The Eunuch, the famous line—
_Nullumst iam dictum quod non dictum sit prius— drops with the same easy negligence as in the opening dialogue of The Self-Tormentor, the immortal—Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto— falls from the lips of the old farmer.
Congreve alone of English playwrights has this glittering smoothness, this inimitable ease; if we remember what Dryden, in language too splendid to be insincere, wrote of his young friend, we may imagine, perhaps, how Caecilius and his circle regarded Terence. Nor is it hard to believe that, had Terence, like Congreve, lived into an easy and honoured old age, he would still have rested his reputation on these productions of his early youth. Both dramatists had from the first seen clearly and precisely what they had in view, and had almost at the first stroke attained it: the very completeness of the success must in both cases have precluded the dissatisfaction through which fresh advances could alone be possible.
This, too, is one reason, though certainly not the only one, why, with the death of Terence, the development of Latin comedy at once ceased. His successors are mere shadowy names. Any life that remained in the art took the channel of the farces which, for a hundred years more, retained a genuine popularity, but which never took rank as literature of serious value. Even this, the fabula tabernaria, or comedy of low life, gradually melted away before the continuous competition of the shows which so moved the spleen of Terence—the pantomimists, the jugglers, the gladiators. By this time, too, the literary instinct was beginning to explore fresh channels. Not only was prose becoming year by year more copious and flexible, but the mixed mode, fluctuating between prose and verse, to which the Romans gave the name of satire, was in process of invention. Like the novel as compared with the play at the present time, it offered great and obvious advantages in ease and variety of manipulation, and in the simplicity and inexpensiveness with which, not depending on the stated performances of a public theatre, it could be produced and circulated. But before proceeding to consider this new literary invention more fully, it will be well to pause in order to gather up, as its necessary complement, the general lines on which Latin prose was now developing, whether in response to the influence of Greek models, or in the course of a more native and independent growth.