Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 13.djvu/843

j U X J U X 809 meaning,. by comparing him with the great pictorial satirist of the last century, Hogarth. 1 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 unfrequently mar his best effects. The difficulty is often felt of distinguishing between a powerful rhetorician and a genuine poet, and there is no writer about whom it is more difficult to determine to which of the two classes he belongs than about Juvenal. He himself knew and has well described (vii. 53 sq.) 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 hideous- ness of contemporary life, or in protest to what he regarded as the enervating influences of art. Even his references to the great poets of the past indicate rather a blase sense of indifference and weariness than a fresh enjoy ment 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 essen tially 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 to charm them with the art of an accomplished post. The composition of his various satires shows no negligence, but rather the 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. He seems to forget how much more telling indignation is when it is severely controlled, but allowed occasionally to break forth in blasting scorn and wrath, as it is in Tacitus, than when it shows itself as the habitual mood of the writer. The verse is most carefully constructed, and is also most effec tive, but it is so with the rhetorical effectiveness of Lucan, not with the musical charm of Virgil. It was calculated to bring down the applause of an excited audience, not to perpetuate its melody through all succeeding times. So, too, 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. It excites distrust by its want of moderation. It makes us long to return to nature and to the apparently more careless but really truer art and the lighter touch of the satirist of the Augustan age " Parcentis viribns atque Extenuantis eas consulto. " On the whole no one of the ten or twelve really great writers whom ancient Rome produced 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 represents another mood of ancient Rome, the mood natural to her before she was humanized by the lessons of Greek art and thought. If we could imagine the elder Cato living under Domitian, cut off from all share in public 1 Lewis, Introduction, p. 215. life, and finding no sphere for his combative and censorious energy except that of literature, we should perhaps under stand the motives of Juvenal s satire and the place which is his due as a representative of the genius of his country. Asa man he shows many of the strong qualities of the old Roman plebeian, the aggressive boldness, the intolerance of superiority and privilege, which animated the tribunes in their opposition to the senatorial! rule. Even where we least like him we find nothing small or mean to alienate our respect from him. Though he loses no opportunity of . being coarse, he is not licentious ; though he is often trucu lent, he cannot be called malignant. It is, indeed, impos sible to say what motives of personal chagrin, of love of detraction, of the mere literary passion for effective writing, may have contributed to the indignation which inspired his verse, But the prevailing impression, we carry away after reading him is that, in all his early satires, he was animated by a sincere and manly detesta tion of the tyranny and cruelty, the debauchery and luxury, the levity and effeminacy, the crimes and frauds, which we know from other sources were rife in Rome in the century in which Christianity made its first converts there, and that a more serene wisdom and a happier frame of mind were attained by him when old age had somewhat allayed the fierce rage which vexed his manhood. It would be impossible to enumerate here the various editions and works forming the literature connected with Juvenal which have sprung up between the appearance of the cditio princcps in 1470 and the present day. They occupy more than five pages of E. Hiibner s Grundrisszu Vorlcsungcn iibcr die Eomische Literatvr- gcschichte. Among the best critical editions of the text is that of 0. Jahn, and among those which may be most recommended to students are the editions of Heinrich, Macleane, Mayor, and Lewis. The last is accompanied by a literal prose translation. The verse translations of Dryden and Gifford, and Johnson s imitations of the third and tenth satires in the London and Vanity of Human Wishes, will convey to readers ignorant of Latin a good impression of the power of the original. There is no better criticism of Juvenal as a writer than that contributed by the late Professor Ramsay to Dr Smith s Dictionary of Ancient Biography and Mythology. (W.Y.S.) JUXON, WILLIAM (1582-1663), archbishop of Canter bury, was born at Chichester in 1582. Through the in terest of his father with the Company of Merchant Taylors he received an appointment to their school, after which he entered St John s College, Oxford, where lie was elected a fellow in 1598. - In 1603 he became a student of Gray s Inn, but afterwards he took holy orders, and in 1609 had become vicar of St Giles, Oxford, au appointment which he resigned for the rectorship of Somerton, Oxfordshire, in 1615. On the recommendation of Laud he succeeded him in November 1621 as president of St John s College ; and in 1626 lie became vice-chancellor of the university. Having by the continued favour of Laud been promoted successively dean of Worcester, prebendary of Chichester, bishop of Hereford, and bishop of London, he attained finally a dignity outside the ordinary sphere of ecclesiastical aspiration, by being appointed in 1625 to the office of lord high treasurer. The appointment, unusual in itself, was preposterously beyond Juxon s claims, but his strict pro bity, his prudence, and his quiet and conciliating behaviour won him the regard and goodwill even of those most opposed to him in politics. He resigned this office in 1641. Charles I. chose Juxon to administer to him the last consolations of religion. During the period of puritan ascendancy the bishop retired to his estate of Little Compton, Gloucestershire, where he kept a pack of hounds much famed in the district. At the Restoration he was, on September 20, 1660, promoted to the see of Canterbury. He died at Lambeth palace, June 4, 1663. Juxon was the author of the Subjects Sorrow, or Lamentations upon Hit, Death of Britain s Josiah, King Charles, a Sermon, 1660, and Some Considerations upon the Act of Uniformity, 1662. See Memoirs of Archbishop Juxon and his Times, Oxford, 1869. XIII. T02