work, then, partly conservative or reactionary, in its
dealing with the instrument of the literary art; partly popular and
revolutionary, asserting, so to term them, the rights of the
proletariate of speech. More than fifty years before, the younger
Pliny, himself an effective witness for the delicate power of the Latin
tongue, had said,--"I am one of those who admire the ancients, yet I do
not, like some others, underrate certain instances of genius which our
own times afford. For it is not true that nature, as if weary and
effete, no longer produces what is admirable." And he, Flavian, would
prove himself the true master of the opportunity thus indicated. In
[96] his eagerness for a not too distant fame, he dreamed over all
that, as the young Caesar may have dreamed of campaigns. Others might
brutalise or neglect the native speech, that true "open field" for
charm and sway over men. He would make of it a serious study, weighing
the precise power of every phrase and word, as though it were precious
metal, disentangling the later associations and going back to the
original and native sense of each,--restoring to full significance all
its wealth of latent figurative expression, reviving or replacing its
outworn or tarnished images. Latin literature and the Latin tongue
were dying of routine and languor; and what was necessary, first of
all, was to re-establish the natural and direct relationship between
thought and expression, between the sensation and the term, and restore
to words their primitive power.

For words, after all, words manipulated with all his delicate force,
were to be the apparatus of a war for himself. To be forcibly
impressed, in the first place; and in the next, to find the means of
making visible to others that which was vividly apparent, delightful,
of lively interest to himself, to the exclusion of all that was but
middling, tame, or only half-true even to him--this scrupulousness of
literary art actually awoke in Flavian, for the first time, a sort of
chivalrous conscience. What care for style! what patience of
execution! what research for the significant [97] tones of ancient
idiom--sonantia verba et antiqua! What stately and regular
word-building--gravis et decora constructio! He felt the whole meaning
of the sceptical Pliny's somewhat melancholy advice to one of his
friends, that he should seek in literature deliverance from
mortality--ut studiis se literarum a mortalitate vindicet.