The Modern Note in Seneca's Letters

Abstract

The literary world is prone to eye askance one who mingles types, or, to borrow a phrase from Latin comedy, practices contaminatio. In the drama, lyric, no matter how inspiring, must be subordinate to the action; for this reason the public has not bestowed immortality upon George Darley, the belated Elizabethan. Nor will the lyric itself permit much moralizing; for this reason many of Wordsworth's poems met with a storm of disapproval. If the epic ceases to tell a story and dwells too much upon description, the reader is wearied; for this reason the narrative poetry of Southey and Landor is no longer read except by the specialist or the curio-hunter. Seneca was similarly handicapped; his prose could not be identified with the direct study of oratory, as could that of his father; nor with the drama of history, as Tacitus; nor with the professional side of Stoicism, as Epictetus; nor with the descriptive charms of an epistolographer like Pliny. In the Epistulae morales, he has tried to write a personal letter, to move his correspondent with the beauty of philosophy and virtue, to deal directly with the throbbing facts of his own epoch, and to suggest remedies for its shortcomings. Hence he is judged at every point of approach. And it is only by virtue of his message to the world of today, to his modern element, that we can insist on his enduring value. I hope to show, perhaps by a sort of paradox, that this very mixing of literary types, this habit of scorning the liturgical form, has resulted in the catholicity of his appeal to so many thinkers in subsequent ages. It is well known that his successors under the empire subjected him to much criticism. He was a puzzle to his own contemporaries. Just as some gifted Hibernian, who settles in the literary world of London and conceals a genuine message beneath the mask of paradox and pose, is greeted with cheers of approval and hisses of scorn,