BOOKS.
MR. FORSYTH'S LIFE OF CICERO.*
PERHAPS Cicero might be described as a second-rate character in a first-rate state of moral and intellectual effervescence. The beautiful medal reproduced by Mr. Forsyth at the head of his gossipy and interesting life of Cicero embodies in a wonderful degree the impression left upon our minds by the history itself. The brow is that of an ingenuous, open-hearted, vain, and intensely ambitious school-boy—the eye is the eye of a hawk—and the nose and month are those of a highly nervous, sensitive, irritable, and sagacious femme incomprise. The most conspicuous expres- sion of the whole physiognomy is that of an ardent, almost pea- cockish vanity, and of a frank but restless self-consciousness. Everything is there except greatness—eandour, even a certain nobility, uprightness, immense perceptive talent, without the heavy strength of genius or of dreamers. That Cicero may have been beloved we can understand. We can also under- stand the contempt which mingled with the admiration raised by his eloquence and versatility. To Cato he must have seemed a miraculous and disagreeable insect. Men like the Caesars and Pompeys must have looked upon him much as a bloodhound would look upon an accomplished poodle,—as the first Napo- leon looked upon the Abbe Sieyes,—as the second Napoleon probably looks upon such men as M. Thiers, or as the late Duke of Wellington or Mr. Disraeli might, from their point of view (we do not say a just one), look upon Mr. Gladstone. Having mentioned Mr. Gladstone, we will only add, by the way, that putting Cicero's faults entirely out of the ques- tion, we could not, perhaps, better describe our impression of his whole character than by saying, that if Mr. Gladstone and Madame de Steel could by any possibility be compounded in equal parts with that element in Earl Russell which enables him to be ready to take the command of the -Channel Fleet in twenty-four hours, and to forsake the Danes in time of danger, they would together make up an identical English Cicero of the present day, mutatis mutandis. There is in Cicero the true Gladstonian element of rotund and universal, yet thin perfection,—the same universality of perception amid the multiplex and infinite surface aspects of routine life,—the same, if we may use the expression, Oxonian culture, the excess of which has been happily described as a mixture of Plato and • Life_ntMares r!iYeys Cicero. ByForsyth, M.A., Q.C., late Fellow a That, College, Cambridge. Rosewater, and which, unless balanced byunusual circumstances, always leaves the flavour of an academic something other than the man's own individuality—a something always distasteful to, generally a little contemptible and odious in the eyes of the genuine militant man of the world. How supreme a matter of indifference this is to the typical Academician, or how well he can pity those who pity him we do not say. We are only trying to paint Cicero in modern colours. Madame de Stael he resembles much in his cultivation of conversation as an art only second to the art of oratory, and in the quality and immense variety which in conversation he attained, keeping strictly within a popular focus. His enthusiasm and appreciation of Greek philosophy and literature, too, were curiously analogous to Madame de Steel's enthusiasm for German literature. As Madame de Stael made German authors marvel and smile, yet withal contrived to give the first great impulse to the study of German literature in France, so, although Cicero's views of Greek literature and phi- losophy were not very profound, he did more to acclimatize Greek-studies in Rome than, perhaps, any other Roman.
Cicero has been compared with Burke. No two men, we think, were more essentially alien and unlike. Nor is he, on the whole, much more like Earl Russell, except in his belief that he was competent to undertake any conceivable task, and a certain aggressive spirit of personal enterprise, which unfortunately in some instances deserted him at the critical moment. Nor, finally, can it be denied, we think, that there was a strong element of priggishness in Cicero, which though absent from one at least out of the three characters with which we have compared him, would inevitably be the result of compounding the three together.
Whoever first extends in a very great and unprecedented degree the range of a language, and fixes its popular forms, is tolerably secure of a long reputation. It may be safely said that Cicero's enduring fame is due, above all, to Cicero's Latinity. Mr. Forsyth says very forcibly that " no greater master of the music" of speech has ever yet appeared amongst man- kind; and he adds, " The benefit he conferred upon his own language is incalculable, and the way to measure it is to compare the Latinity of the authors who preceded him, of whose works we possess a few fragments, or even his contempo- raries, with the Latinity of Cicero." And it is also reasonable to presume that a mind so constituted as to be able greatly to en- large the popular boundaries of a language in its most abiding form must have very remarkable qualities. Yet they are not necessarily those which make a great man. Cicero has been held at different times in as great veneration as almost any saint in the Calendar, and at other times treated with the utmost contumely. Mr. Forsyth, steeling his course between Middleton and Niebuhr on the one hand, and Drumaun and Mommsen on the other, attempts, with Abeken, to hold the scales evenly between the factions. He owns frankly that his aim has been rather to paint a good than a great Irian. And through the whole there is a too transparent tendency to look upon Cicero as, in some sense, a godlike individual and a shining light, a sort of moral /uses amid the black night of Roman life ; and there is, too, an unavowed but implicit resentment against the feeling,—the very natural feeling, we think, of repulsion which Cicero's character as a character begot and begets in certain other characters not by any means in themselves the worse on that account. His palpitating vanity, that letter of his to Cato about the supplicatio, his everlasting flutter, his childish eagerness, his boundless self-assertion, his vacillation, and, along with his candour, his hypocrisy, the festive apparatus and artisan- ship, the moral varnish of all his thoughts and sentiments, the constant cant of " accomplishment," all these do not make a bad man, they are consistent with extreme amiability, and some con- siderable worth, but they do warrant and render perfectly legiti- mate a certain uncontrollable contempt and aversion on the part of differently constituted, more masculine, and broader minds. That many bad men hated Cicero is certain, but we do not think they were bad because they hated him. In our opinion, moreover, it seems almost a self-evident truth that although Cicero had that purity of character, not a little of which was in him synonymous with priggishness, he was not, except by his talents, far removed above the 'general tone and temper of his day. No man who transacts business ou a large scale for and with his countrymen can ever be so. M. Glad- stone was at one time considered a purist in morals. But even in his younger days his morality was not, except in the colour of his talents, so far above that of average young Englishmen, ntakingallowances, of course, for differences of opinion and temper, that he could ever be said not to be of' them as well as among them. At any time these twenty years back a thousand young English- men, of similar education, and similar views, and similar habits, might have been picked out, though not of the same talents, and so more roughly all the way down the scale of society. Nor have we any reason to suppose that Cicero's relation to the men of his day was in any degree different. There were Stoics, and Epicureans, and Eclectics, there were believers and infidels, there were moral men and immoral then as now. And when people talk of the heathen immorality of the men of those days they seem to forget the days of the Regency in Franco, and of our own Elizabethan, and Jacobite, and Hauovcrian times. Can anything in heathen days surpass the days of the French Regency ? But the modern principles were different, it is said. So much the worse for the morality of modern times, we answer. But the fact that Cicero's treatise " Do Officiis" lays down a purer morality than that we read of in the history of the contemporary intrigues, no more proves that he was separated by a gulf from the morality of his countrymen, than Bishop Butler's works prove that the ordinary Englishmen of his day were grossly immoral, because they did not conform to his principles in every particular, and because many of the statesmen lived a life of the most profligate and abandoned intrigue. We take it, on the contrary, that Cicero's moral treatises prove, as far as analogy can prove anything, that the views therein contained were, in reality, the embellished reflex of the great orthodox body of opinion among his countrymen at that time. It is not in the nature of things that a practical statesman and a popular barrister, without anything beyond brilliant talent and an ex- quisite sense of language, should write a popular treatise on morals, and that treatise should prove to be some two thousand years ahead of the men among whom he gained his popularity by magnifying some of their excellencies. Cicero was neither a Mahomet, nor a Socrates, nor a Buddha.
Mr. Forsyth is well known by his manly and readable history of trial by jury, and of his classical attainments it is almost enough to say that he was a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. He was, therefore, more or less qualified to undertake the task. The result is a sensible, straightforward, and manly account, which aims at putting in a connected and interesting form the results of modern scholarship. There is no affectation of penetrating insight or original views, no salient portraiture or epigrammatic condensa- tion, but a plain scholarly narration of facts, in the plain, homely, confidential and rather gossipy style in which it is now becoming the fashion to write books for circulating libraries and lectures for literary institutes. That kind of biography which leaves a final impression upon the mind as of a perfect sculpture, in which at the end of the book all material seems to have dis- appeared in the one salient statue, is alien to the fleeting literary habits of the day, which forbid the repose, the concentration, and brooding essential to art, except in the case of very excep- tional genius. It is a relief to escape from the magniloquence of the Middleton school of biography, but we are not certain that we are entirely satisfied with the confidential, button- hole biography which pours all its treasures uudigested into the reader's bosom. There is about the biography of the pre- sent day much less of the lees Boswelliana, but the excessive praise of the subject of a biography has given way to something even less palateable, and that is the edification of the reader. The reader is nowadays too often mistaken for and patronized and patted on the head like a village audience. However, although there is nothing in the least sculpturesque in Mr. Forsyth's workmanship; it is much above the common-place style, which we have been describing only that we might exempt his life of Cicero. It will doubtless be found of interest not only by the general reader, but we trust most of all by competitive stu- dents, whose besetting temptation it is to read as much Latin and Greek as they can, and to know as little about what they are reading as is possible consistently with an accurate know- ledge of the words and particles in both languages. Mr. Forsyth has deserved well of Latin scholarship by writing such a very readable and circumstantial account of the life of the greatest master of melody in speech within the memory of history.
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