Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/287

 secret of its strength and an evidence of literary decay. The condensed brevity with which he writes is not, like the brevity of Thucydides, a mark of undeveloped prose, not, like that of Aristotle, an effort to be scientifically accurate in the use of words, but rather like the epigram itself the outcome of an age which thinks it knows all that men can know, and seeks to make up for the triteness of its ideas by packing them in small bundles, weighty yet portable, and in themselves complete. It is possible for communities, no less than individuals, to exhaust their old stock of ideas without acquiring new; and such an age of exhaustion, reduced to the elegant or brief expression of small witticisms, is marked by the epigrams of Martial, the contemporary of Tacitus.

§ 70. Beyond Martial (who died between 102 and 104 ) we need not pass. The world-literature of Rome, which had from the first been an imitative toy made and intended to be appreciated by a narrowly exclusive class of cultured men, never heartily sought the only fountains of true literary inspiration-popular life and the life of nature. There was now not much to inspire song in the life of Rome-that cascade of contempt which we may conceive as perpetually falling from the wealthy patrician to the poor patrician, from the poor patrician to the plebeian, from the plebeian to the provincial, and from all these to the slaves. Such was the miserable state of social life which drew forth from Pliny the remark that "there is nothing more proud or more paltry than man." A society of such limited sympathies and unlimited selfishness was unsuited to the production of song, save such as "the flock of mockbirds" (as Apollonius Rhodius, Quintus Calaber, Nonnus, Lucan, Statius, Claudian, are termed by Shelley) could produce by imitation. Perhaps the making of oratorical prose (which, by