A History of Criticism

It is perhaps vain to attempt to tone down the audacity of the present essay by any explanations or limitations; it is certain that those who are offended by it at first blush are very unlikely to be propitiated by excuses of the faults which, excusably or inexcusably, it no doubt contains. The genesis of it is as follows. When, not much less than thirty years ago, the writer was first asked to undertake the duty of a critic, he had naturally to overhaul his own acquaintance with the theory and practice of criticism, and to inquire what was the acquaintance of others therewith. The disconcerting smallness of the first was a little compensated by the discovery that very few persons seemed to be much better furnished. Dr Johnson’s projected “History of Criticism, as it relates to Judging of Authours” no doubt has had fellows in the great library of books unwritten. But there were then, and I believe there are still, only two actual attempts to deal with the whole subject. One of these^[1] I have never seen, and indeed had vinever heard of till nearly the whole of the present volume was written. Moreover, it seems to be merely a torso. The other, Théry’s Histoire des Opinions Littéraires,^[2] a book which, after two editions at some interval, has been long out of print, is a work of great liveliness, no small knowledge, and, in its airy French kind, a good deal of acuteness. But the way in which “Critique Arabe,” “Critique Juive,” &c., are knocked off in a page or a paragraph at one end, and the way in which, at the other—though the second edition was published when Mr Arnold was just going to write, and the first when Coleridge, and Hazlitt, and Lamb had already written—the historian knows of nothing English later than Campbell and Blair, are things a little disquieting. At any rate, neither of these was then known to me, and I had, year by year, to pick up for myself, and piece together, the greater and lesser classics of the subject in a haphazard and groping fashion.

This volume—which will, fortune permitting, be followed by a second dealing with the matter from the Renaissance to the death of eighteenth-century Classicism, and by a third on Modern Criticism—is an attempt to supply for others, on the basis of these years of reading, the Atlas of which the writer himself so sorely felt the need. He may have put elephants for towns, he may have neglected important rivers and mountains, like a general from the point of view of a newspaper correspondent, or a newspaper correspondent from the point of view of a general; but he has done what he could.

The book, the plan of which was accepted by my publishers some five or six years ago, before I was appointed to the Chair which I have the honour to hold, has been delayed in its composition, viipartly by work previously undertaken, partly by professional duties. But it has probably not been injured by the necessity of reading, for these duties, some four or five times over again, the Poetics and the Rhetoric, the Institutes and the Περὶ Ὕψους,, the De Vulgari Eloquio and the Discoveries, the Essay of Dramatic Poesy and the Preface to Lyrical Ballads.

I do not know whether some apology may be expected from a man whom readers, if they know him at all, are likely to know only as a student of modern literature, for the presumption of making his own translations from Greek and Latin. But when one has learnt these languages for twelve or fifteen years, taught them for eight more, and read them for nearly another five-and-twenty, it seems rather pusillanimous to take cover behind “cribs.” I have aimed throughout rather at closeness than at elegance. An apology of another kind may be offered for the biographical and lexicographical details which, at the cost of some trouble, have been incorporated in the Index. Everybody has not a classical dictionary at hand, and probably few people have a full rhetorical lexicon. Yet it was inevitable, in a book of this kind, that a large number of persons, books, and words should be introduced, as to the date, the contents, the meaning of which or of whom, the ordinary reader might require some enlightenment. Information of the sort would have made the text indigestible and have overballasted the notes; so I have put it in the Index, where those who do not want it need not seek it, and where those who seek will, I hope, find.

It only remains to thank, with a heartiness not easily to be expressed, the friends who have been good enough to read my proofs and to give me the benefit of their special knowledge. Not always does the restless explorer of literature at large who, knowing that here also “the merry world is round And viii[he] may sail for evermore,” elects to be a world-wanderer, receive, from the legitimate authorities of the ports into which he puts, a genuine welcome, cheerful victualling, and assistance in visiting the adjacent provinces. Sometimes they fire into him, sometimes they deny him food and water, often they look upon him as a filibuster, or an interloper, or presumptuous. But Professor Butcher, Professor Hardie, and Professor Ker, who have had the exceeding kindness to read each the portion of this volume which belongs to him more specially of right, have not only given me invaluable suggestions and corrections, but have even encouraged me to hope that my treatment, however far it may fall short of what is desirable, is not grossly and impudently inadequate. May all other competent persons be equally lenient!

Edinburgh, Lammastide 1900.

Since this book was first printed, I have remembered that the story about Malatesta and the bones (note, p. 124) is told by Mr Symonds in more than one place (e.g., The Revival of Learning, new ed., p. 151) of Gemistus Pletho, the well-known Grecian and Platonist, whose appearance in Italy so much excited Humanism. This is, for many reasons, much more probable; but the mistake of “Themistius,” if mistake it be, is not mine but Dindorf’s, or rather that of Keyssler, from whom Dindorf quotes an account of the matter, and an apparently literal transcript of the inscription. Some minor emendations have been made in this edition, but it has been thought better to place the major corrections of fact and explanations of meaning in the second volume, in order that all possessors of the book may be equally furnished with these.

DELIMITATION OF FRONTIER—CLASSES OF CRITICISM EXCLUDED—CLASS RETAINED—METHOD—TEXTS THE CHIEF OBJECT—“HYPOTHESES NON FINGO”—ILLUSTRATION FROM M. EGGER—THE DOCUMENTS—GREEK—ROMAN—MEDIÆVAL—RENAISSANCE AND MODERN.

It is perhaps always desirable that the readers of a book should have a clear idea of what the writer of it proposes to give them: it is very certainly desirable that such an idea should |Delimitation of frontier.| exist in the writer himself. But if this is the case generally, it must be more especially the case where there is at least some considerable danger of ambiguity. And that there is such danger, in regard to the title of the present book, not many persons, I suppose, would think of denying. The word Criticism is often used, not merely with the laxity common to all such terms, but in senses which are not so much extensions of each other as digressions into entirely different genera. In the following pages it will be used as nearly as possible univocally. The Criticism which will be dealt with here is that function of the judgment which busies itself with the goodness or badness, the success or ill-success, of literature from the purely literary point of view. Other offices of the critic, real or so-called, will occupy us slightly or not at all. We shall meddle little with the more transcendental Æsthetic, with those ambitious theories of Beauty, and of artistic Pleasure in general, which, fascinating and noble as they appear, have too often proved cloud-Junos. The business of interpretation, a most valuable and legitimate side-work of his, though perhaps only a 4side-work, will have to be glanced at, as we come to modern times, with increasing frequency. We shall not be able entirely to leave out of the question, though we shall not greatly trouble ourselves with it, what is called the “verbal” part of his office—the authentication or extrusion of this or that “reading.” But we shall, as far as possible, neglect and decline what may perhaps best be called the Art of Critical Coscinomancy, by which the critic affects to discern, separate, and rearrange, on internal evidence not of a literary character, the authorship and date of books. Of the Criticism, so-called, which has performed its chief exploits in Biblical discussion, which has meddled a good deal with the |Classes of Criticism excluded.| Classics, and which occupies, in regard to the older and therefore more tempting documents of modern literature, a position of activity midway between that exercised towards the sacred writings and that exercised towards Greek and Roman authors, no word will, except by some accidental necessity, be found in these pages. The rules and canons of this Criticism are different from, and in most cases antagonistic to, those of Criticism proper: its objects are entirely distinct; and in particular it, for the most part if not wholly, neglects the laws of Logic. Now Criticism proper, which is but in part a limitation, in part an extension, of Rhetoric, never parts company with Rhetoric’s elder sister.

In other words, the Criticism or modified Rhetoric, of which this book attempts to give a history, is pretty much the same thing as the reasoned exercise of Literary Taste—the |Class retained.| attempt, by examination of literature, to find out what it is that makes literature pleasant, and therefore good—the discovery, classification, and as far as possible tracing to their sources, of the qualities of poetry and prose, of style and metre, the classification of literary kinds, the examination and “proving,” as arms are proved, of literary means and weapons, not neglecting the observation of literary fashions and the like. It will follow from this that the History must pursue the humble a posteriori method. Except on the rarest |Method.| occasions, when it may be safe to generalise, it will confine itself wholly to the particular and the actual. We shall not busy ourselves with what men ought to have admired, what 5they ought to have written, what they ought to have thought, but with what they did think, write, admire. To some, no doubt, this will give an appearance of plodding, if not of pusillanimity; but there may be others who will recognise in it, not so much a great refusal, as an honest attempt to provide some sound and useful knowledge which does not exist in any accessible form,—to raise, by whatsoever humble drudgery, vantage-points from which more aspiring persons than the writer may take Pisgah-sights, if they please, without fear of their support collapsing under them in the manner of a tub.

It has further seemed desirable, if not absolutely necessary for the carrying out of this scheme, to confine ourselves mainly to the actual texts. This is not, perhaps, a fashionable proceeding. Not what Plato says, but what the latest |Texts the chief object.| commentator says about Plato—not what Chaucer says, but what the latest thesis-writer thinks about Chaucer—is supposed to be the qualifying study of the scholar. I am not able to share this conception of scholarship. When we have read and digested the whole of Plato, we may, if we like, turn to his latest German editor; when we have read and digested the whole of Shakespeare, and of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, we may, if we like, turn to Shakespearian biographers and commentators. But this extension of inquiry, to apply a famous contrast, is facultative, not necessary. At any rate, in the following pages it is proposed to set forth, and where necessary to discuss, what Plato, Aristotle, Dionysius, Longinus, what Cicero and Quintilian, what Dante and Dryden, what Corneille and Coleridge, with many a lesser man besides, have said about literature, noticing by the way what effect these authorities have had on the general judgment, and what, as often happens, the general judgment has for the time made up its mind to, without troubling itself about authorities. But we shall only occasionally busy ourselves with what others, not themselves critically great, have said about these great critics, and that from no arrogance, but for two reasons of the most inoffensive character. In the first place, there is no room to handle both text and margent, with the margent’s margent ad infinitum. In the second, the handling 6of the margent would distinctly obscure the orderly setting forth of the texts.

Yet, further, leave will be taken to neglect guesswork as |"Hypotheses non fingo."| far as possible, and for the most part, if not invariably, to refrain from building any hypotheses upon titles, casual citations, or mere probabilities.

To illustrate what is meant, let us take a book which every one who makes such an attempt as this must mention with the utmost gratitude and respect, the admirable Essai sur l'Histoire de la Critique chez les Grecs^[3] of the late M. Egger. That excellent scholar and most agreeable writer was perhaps as free from “hariolation” as any one who has ever dealt with classical subjects; yet the first ninety pages of his book are practically in the air. The judges of rhapsodical competitions were the first critics; the Homeric edition of Pisistratus presupposes and implies criticism, which is equally—which is even more—presupposed and implied in the choragic system of Athens, whereby plots were chosen for performance; there are known to have been successive and corrected versions of plays, from which the same conclusions may be drawn. We are told, and can readily believe, that the actors had their parts suited to them, and this means criticism. Nay, was not the |Illustration from M. Egger.| whole Comedy, the Old Comedy at least, a criticism, and often a purely literary one? Is not the Frogs, in particular, a dramatised “review” of the most slashing kind? And have we not even the titles, at least, of regular treatises, presumably critical, by Pratinas, by Lasus, by the great Sophocles himself?

Now all this is probable; nearly all of it is interesting, and some of it is, so far as it goes, certain. But then as a certainty it goes such a very little way! M. Egger himself, with the frankness which the scholar ought to have, but has not always, admits the justice of the reproach of one of his critics, that part of it is conjecture. It would scarcely be harsh to say that all of it is, in so far as any solid information as to the critical habits of the Greeks is furnished by it. In the pages that follow at least a steady effort will be made to discard the conjectural 7altogether, and to reduce even the amount of superstructure on |The Documents.| second-hand foundations to the minimum. The extant written word, as it is the sole basis of all sound criticism in regard to particulars, so it is the only sound basis for the history of Criticism in general. The enormous losses which we have suffered in this department of Greek literature, and the scanty supply which, except in the department of the Lower Rhetoric, seems to be all that existed in Latin, may appear to make the effort to conduct inquiry in this way a rash or a barren one; but the present writer at least is convinced that no effort can usefully be made in any other. And after |Greek.| all, though so much is lost, much remains. In point of tendency we can ask for nothing better than Plato, provoking and elusive as he may seem in individual utterances; in point of particular expression and indication of general lines, the Rhetoric and the Poetics of Aristotle are admittedly priceless; and such writers as Dionysius of Halicarnassus, as Plutarch, as Dion Chrysostom, as Lucian, and above all as Longinus, leave us very little reason to complain, even when we turn from the comparative scantiness of this corpus to the comparative wealth of arid rhetorical term-splitting which still remains to us.

Nor is it at all probable that if we had more Latin literary criticism we should be so very much better off. For, once more,|Roman.| the existing work of such men as Cicero, Quintilian, Tacitus, and above all Horace, with the literary allusions of the later satirists, not to mention for the present the gossip of Aulus Gellius and the like, gives more than sufficient “tell-tales.” We can see the nature and the limitations of Roman criticism in these as well as if they filled a library.

In the great stretch of time—some thousand years—between the decadence of the pure Classics and the appearance of the |Mediæval.| Renaissance it is not the loss but the absence of material that is the inconvenience, and this inconvenience is again tolerable. The opinions of the Dark and Early Middle Ages on the Classics themselves are only a curiosity; for real criticism or matured judgment on existing work 8in the vernacular they had little opportunity even in a single language, for comparative work still less. Only the astonishing and strangely undervalued tractate of Dante remains to show us what might have been done; the rest is curious merely.

But the Renaissance has no sooner come than our difficulties assume a different form, and increase as we approach our |Renaissance and Modern.| own times. It is now not deficiency but superabundance of material that besets us; and if this work reaches its second volume, a rigid process of selection and of representative treatment will become necessary.

But in this first the problem is how to extract from comparatively, though not positively, scanty material a history that, without calling in guesswork to its assistance, shall present a fairly adequate account of the Higher Rhetoric and Poetic, the theory and practice of Literary Criticism and Taste, during ancient and during mediæval times. At intervals the narrative and examination will be interrupted for the purpose of giving summaries of a kind necessarily more temerarious and experimental than the body of the book, but even here no attempt will be made at hasty generalisation. Where the path has been so little trodden, the loyal road-layer will content himself with making it straight and firm, with fencing it from precipices, and ballasting it across morasses as well as he can, leaving others to stroll off on side-tracks to agreeable view-points, and to thread loops of cunning expatiation.

In conclusion, with special regard to this Book and the next, I would, very modestly but very strenuously, deprecate a line of comment which is not unusual from exclusively classical students, and which stigmatises “judging ancient literature from modern points of view.” Such a process is no doubt even more grossly wrong than that (not unknown) of judging modern literature from ancient standpoints. But the true critic admits neither. He endeavours—a hard and ambitious task!—to extract from all literature, ancient, mediæval, and modern, lessons of its universal qualities, which may enable him to see each period sub specie æternitatis. And nothing less than this—with the Muses to help—is the adventure of this work.

EARLIEST CRITICISM OF THE GREEKS—PROBABLY HOMERIC IN SUBJECT—PROBABLY ALLEGORIC IN METHOD—XENOPHANES—PARMENIDES—EMPEDOCLES—DEMOCRITUS—THE SOPHISTS: EARLIER—THE SOPHISTS: LATER—PLATO—HIS CROTCHETS—HIS COMPENSATIONS—ARISTOPHANES—THE ‘FROGS’—OTHER CRITICISM IN COMEDY—SIMYLUS(?)—ISOCRATES.

Although we have, putting aside Aristophanes, an almost utter dearth of actual texts before Plato, it is possible, without |Earliest criticism of the Greeks.| violating the principles laid down in the foregoing chapter, to discern some general currents, and a few individual deliverances, of Greek criticism^[4] in earlier ages. The earliest character of this criticism that we perceive is, as we should expect, a tendency towards allegorical explanations of literature. And the earliest subject of this that we discover is, again as we should expect, the work attributed to Homer.

If we had older and more certain testimony about the fact, and still more about the exact character, of the |Probably Homeric in subject.| world-famous Pisistratean redaction of the Homeric and other poems, it would be necessary to reverse the order of this statement; and even as it is, the utmost critical 10caution may admit that it was probably with Homer that Greek criticism began. We shall find nothing so constantly borne out in the whole course of this history as the fact—self-evident, but constantly neglected in its consequences—that criticism is a vine which must have its elm or other support to fasten on. And putting aside all the endless and (from some points of view at least) rather fruitless disputes about the age, the authorship, and so forth, of Homer, we know, from what is practically the unanimous and unintentional testimony of the whole of Greek literature, that “Homer” and the knowledge of Homer were anterior to almost all of it. And it was impossible that a people so acute and so philosophically given as the Greeks should be soaked in Homer, almost to the same extent as that to which the English lower and middle classes of the seventeenth century were soaked in the Bible, without being tempted to exercise their critical faculties upon the poems. It was long, as we shall see, before this exercise took the form of strictly literary criticism, of the criticism which (with the provisos and limitations of the last chapter) we call æsthetic. It was once said that the three functions of criticism in its widest sense are to interpret, to verify or sanction, and to judge, the last being its highest and purest office. |Probably allegoric in method.| But the other two commend themselves perhaps more to the natural man—they certainly commended themselves more to the Greeks—and we should expect to find them, as we do find them, earlier practised. The Pisistratean redaction, if a fact (as in some form or other it pretty certainly was), is an enterprise both bold and early in the one direction; there is no reason to doubt that many enterprises were made pretty early in the other; and not much to doubt that most of these experiments in interpretation took the allegorical form.

Modern readers and modern critics have usually a certain dislike to Allegory, at least when she presents herself honestly and by her own name. Her government has no doubt at times been something despotic, and her votaries and partisans have at times been almost intolerably tedious and absurd. Yet in the finer sorts of literature, at any rate, the apprehension of some 11sort of allegory, of some sort of double meaning, is almost a necessity. The student of any kind of poetry, and the student of the more imaginative prose, can never rest satisfied with the mere literal and grammatical sense, which belongs not to literature but to science. He cannot help seeking some hidden meaning, something further, something behind, if it be only rhythmical beauty, only the suggestion of pleasure to the ear and eye and heart. Nor ought he to help it. But the ill repute of Allegory arises from the ease with which her aid is borrowed to foist religious, philosophical, and other sermons into the paradise of art. This danger was especially imminent in a country like Greece, where religion, philosophy, literature, and art of all kinds were, from the earliest times, almost inextricably connected and blended.

Accordingly allegory, and that reverse or seamy side of allegory, rationalistic interpretation, seem to have made their appearance very early in Greece. This latter has only to do with literary criticism in the sense that it is, and always has been, a very great degrader thereof, inclining it to be busy with matter instead of form. The allegorising tendency proper is not quite so dangerous, though still dangerous enough. But in the second-hand and all too scanty notices that we have of the early philosophers, it is evident that the two tendencies met and crossed in them almost bewilderingly. When Xenophanes found fault with the Homeric anthropomorphism, when Anaxagoras and others made the scarcely audacious identification of the arrows of Apollo with the rays of the sun, and the bolder one of Penelope’s web with the processes of the syllogism, they were anticipating a great deal which has presented itself as criticism (whether it had any business to do so or not) in the last two thousand and odd hundred years. We have not a few names, given by more or less good authority and less or more known independently, of persons—Anaximander, Stesimbrotus, a certain Glaucus or Glaucon, and others—who early devoted themselves to allegorical interpretation of Homer and perhaps of other poets; but we have hardly even fragments of their work, and we can found no solid arguments upon what is told us of it. Only we can see dimly from these notices, clearly from the 12fuller and now trustworthy evidence which we find in Plato, that their criticism was criticism of matter only,—that they treated Homer as a historical, a religious, a philosophical document, not as a work of art.

Indeed, as one turns over the volumes of Karsten^[5] and Mullach^[6] with their budgets of commentary and scholia enveloping the scanty kernel of text; as one reads the |Xenophanes.| relics, so interesting, so tantalising, so pathetic, of these early thinkers who already knew of metaphysics ce qu’on a su de tous les temps,—one sees, scanty as they are, how very unlikely it is that, if we had more, there would be anything in it that would serve our present purpose. These Greeks, at any rate, were children—children of genius, children of extraordinary promise, children almost of that gigantic breed which has to be stifled lest it grow too fast. But, like children in general, when they have any great mental development, they scorned what seemed to them little things. And, also like children, they had not and could not have the accumulation of knowledge of particulars which is necessary for the criticism of art. The audacious monopantheism of Xenophanes could not, we are sure, have stooped to consider, not as it actually did^[7] whether Homer and Hesiod were blasphemers, but whether they did their blaspheming with technical cunning. In its sublimer moments and in its moments of discussion, in those of the famous single line—

as well as in the satire on the ox- and lion-creed of lions and oxen, it would have equally scorned the attempt to substitute for mere opinion a humble inductive approach to knowledge on the differences of Poetry and prose and the proper definition of Comedy. Even in those milder moods when the philosopher gave, if he did give, receipts for the proper mode of mixing 13negus,^[8] and was not insensible to the charms of a soft couch, sweet wine, and devilled peas,^[9] one somehow does not see him as a critic.

How much less even does one see anything of the kind in the few and great verses of Parmenides, that extraordinary link of union between Homer and Lucretius, the poet of |Parmenides.| the “gates of the ways of night and day,”^[10] the philosopher whose teaching is of that which “is and cannot but be?”^[11] the seer whose sight was ever “straining straight at the rays of the sun”?^[12] We shall see shortly how a more chastened and experienced idealism, combined in all probability with a much wider actual knowledge of literature and art, made the literary criticism of Plato a blend of exquisite rhapsody and childish crotchet. In the much earlier day of Parmenides not even this blend was to be expected. There could hardly by any possibility have been anything but the indulgence in allegorising which is equally dear to poets and philosophers, and perhaps the inception of a fanciful philology. Metaphysics and physics sufficed, with a little creative literature. For criticism there could be no room.

But it will be said, Empedocles? Empedocles who, according to some traditions, was the inventor of Rhetoric—who certainly was a native of the island where Rhetoric arose—the |Empedocles.| chief speaker among these old philosophers? That Empedocles had a good deal of the critical temper may be readily granted. He has little or nothing of the sublime beliefs of Parmenides; his scepticism is much more thorough-going than that which certainly does appear in the philosopher of Colophon. If a man do not take the discouragement of it too much to heart there is, perhaps, no safer and saner frame of mind for the critic than that expressed in the strongest of all the Empedoclean fragments, that which tells us how “Men, wrestling through a little space of life that is no life, whirled 14off like a vapour by quick fate, flit away, each persuaded but of that with which he has himself come in contact, darting this way and that. But the Whole man boasts to find idly; not to be seen are these things by men, nor heard, nor grasped by their minds. Thou shalt know no more than human counsel has reached.”^[13] An excellent critical mood, if not pushed to mere inaction and despair: but there is no evidence that it led Empedocles to criticism. Physics and ethics appear to have absorbed him wholly.

That the sophist was the first rhetorician would be allowed by his accusers as well as by his apologists: and though Rhetoric long followed wandering fires before it recognised its true star and became Literary Criticism, yet nobody doubts that we must look to it for what literary criticism we shall find in these times. The Sophists, on the very face of the charge constantly brought against them of attending to words merely, are almost acknowledged to be the inventors of Grammar; while from the other charge that they corrupted youth by teaching them to talk fluently, to make the worse the better reason, and the like, it will equally follow that they practised the deliberate consideration of style. Grammar is only the ancilla of criticism, but a tolerably indispensable one; the consideration of style is at least half of criticism itself. Accordingly the two first persons in whose work (if we had it) we might expect to find a considerable body of literary criticism, if only literary criticism of a scrappy, tentative, and outside kind, are the two great sophists Gorgias and Protagoras, contemporaries, but representatives of almost the two extremities of the little Greek world, of Leontini and Abdera, of Sicily and Thrace.

We have indeed a whole catalogue of work that should have been critical or nothing ascribed by Diogenes Laertius^[14] to the still greater contemporary and compatriot of Protagoras, Democritus. How happily would the days of Thalaba (supposing Thalaba to be a historian of criticism) go by, if he had that little library of works which Diogenes thus assigns and calls "Of Music"! They are eight in number: “On Rhythm and Harmony,” “On 15Poetry” (one would compound for this alone), “On the Beauty of Words,”^[15] “On Well- and Ill-sounding Letters,” “On Homer or Right Style and Glosses,”^[16] “On the Aoedic Art,” “On Verbs(?),”^[17] and an Onomasticon. But Democritus lived in the fifth |Democritus.| century before Christ, and Diogenes in the second century after Christ; the historian’s attribution is unsupported, and he has no great character for accuracy; while, worst of all, he himself tells us that there were six Democriti, and that of the other five one was a musician, another an epigrammatist, and a third (most suspiciously) a technical writer on rhetoric. It stands fatally to reason that as all these (save the Chian musician) seem to have been more modern, and as the works mentioned would exactly fall in with the business of the musician and the teacher of rhetoric, they are far more likely, if they ever existed (and Diogenes seems to cite rather the catalogue of a certain Thrasylus than the books themselves), not to have been the work of the Laughing Philosopher. At any rate, even if they were, we are utterly ignorant of their tenor.

That the other great Abderite, Protagoras, the disciple of Democritus himself, wrote on subjects of the kind, there can be no reasonable doubt. It is practically impossible that he should not have done so, though we have not the exact title of any. He is said to have been the first to distinguish the parts of an oration by name, to have made some important advances in technical grammar, and to have lectured on the poets. But here again we have no texts to appeal to, nor any certain fact.

Yet perhaps it is not mere critical whim to doubt whether, if we had these texts also, we should be much further advanced. The titles of those attributed to Democritus, if we could accept |The Sophists—earlier.| the attribution with any confidence, would make such scepticism futile. But we have no titles of critical works attributed to Protagoras; we only know vaguely that he lectured on the poets.^[18] And from all the stories 16about him as well as from the famous dialogue which puts the hostile view of his sophistry, we can conclude with tolerable certainty that his interests were mainly ethical, with perhaps a dash of grammar—the two notes, as we have seen and shall see, of all this early Greek criticism. Certainly this was the case with the Sicilian school which traditionally founded Rhetoric—Empedocles himself perhaps, Corax, Tisias, Gorgias, and the pupil of Gorgias, Polus, with more certainty. Here again most of our best evidence is hostile, and therefore to be used with caution; but the hostility does not affect the present point. Socrates or Plato could have put unfavourable views of Sophistic quite as well—indeed, considering Plato’s curious notions of inventive art, perhaps better—in regard to Æsthetics. If ethics and philology, not criticism proper, are the subjects in which their adversaries try to make Protagoras and Gorgias cut a bad figure, we may be perfectly certain that these were the subjects in which they themselves tried to cut a good one. If they are not misrepresented—are not indeed represented at all—in the strict character of the critic, it can only be because they did not, for good or for ill, assume that character. The philosophy of language, the theory of persuasion, the moral character of poetry and oratory, these were the subjects which interested them and their hearers; not the sources of literary beauty, the division of literary kinds, the nature and varieties of style. Wherever ethic and metaphysic are left, the merest philology seems to have been the only alternative—the few phrases attributed to any writers of this period that bear a different complexion being very few, uncertainly authentic, and in almost every case extremely vague.

Nothing else could reasonably be expected when we consider the nature of Rhetoric as we find it exhibited in Aristotle himself, and as it was certainly conceived by its first inventors or nomenclators. It was the Art of Persuasion—the Art of producing a practical effect—almost the Art of Succeeding in Life. We shall see when we come to Aristotle himself that this was as inevitable a priori as it is certain in fact: for the present the certainty of the fact itself may content us. Where the few 17recorded or imputed utterances of the later sophists do touch on literature they bear (with a certain additional ingenious wire-drawing) the same marks as those of the early philosophers. |The Sophists—later.| They play upon the “honourable deceit” of tragedy;^[19] they tread harder the old road of allegorical interpretations;^[20] they dwell on words and their nature;^[21] or else, overshooting mark as far as elsewhere they fall short of it, they attempt ambitious theories of beauty in general, whether it is “harmony,” utility, sensual pleasure, what not.^[22] This is—to adopt the useful, if accidental, antithesis of metaphysic—metacritic, not criticism. And we shall not, I think, be rash in assuming that if we had the texts, which we have not, we should find—we are most certainly not rash in saying that in the actual texts we do find—nothing but excursions in the vestibules of Criticism proper, or attempts more or less in vain upon her secret chambers,—no expatiation whatever in her main and open halls.^[23]

Two only, and those two of the very greatest, of Greek writers before Aristotle—Plato and Aristophanes—furnish us with literary criticism proper, while of these two the first is a critic almost against his will, and the second one merely for the nonce. Yet we may be more than thankful for what they give us, and for the slight reinforcement, as regards the nature of pre-Aristotelian criticism, which we derive from a third and much lesser man—Isocrates.

It could not possibly be but that so great a writer as Plato, with an ethos so philosophical as his, should display a strong |Plato.| critical element. Yet there were in him other elements and tendencies, which repressed and distorted his criticism. To begin with, though he less often lingered in the vestibule than his enemies the sophists, he was by the whole tendency of his philosophy even more prompted than they were to make straight for the adytum, neglecting 18the main temple. Some form of the Ideal Theory is indeed necessary to the critic: the beauty of literature is hardly accessible, except to one who is more or less a Platonist. No system so well accounts for the ineffable poetic pleasure, the sudden “gustation of God” which poetry gives, as that of an archetypal form of every possible thought and passion, as well as person and thing, to which as the poet approaches closer and closer, so he gives his readers the deeper and truer thrill. But Plato’s unfortunate impatience of anything but the idea pure and simple, led him all wrong in criticism. Instead of welcoming poetry for bringing him nearer to the impossible and unattainable, he chides it for interfering with possession and attainment. In the Phædrus and the Republic especially, but also elsewhere, poetic genius, poetic charm, poetry itself, are described, if not exactly defined, with an accuracy which had never been reached before, and which has never been surpassed since; in the same and other places the theory of Imitation, or, as it might be much better called, Representation, is outlined with singular acuteness and, so far as we know, originality, though it is pushed too far; and remarks on the divisions of literature, at least of poetry, show that a critic of the highest order is but a little way off. But then comes that everlasting ethical and political preoccupation which is at once the real forte and the real foible of the Greek genius, and (with some other peculiarities) succeeds to a great extent in neutralising the philosopher’s critical position as a whole. In the first place, the “imitation” theory (imperfectly grasped owing to causes to be more fully dealt with later) deposes the poet from his proper position, and, combined with will-worship of the Idea, prevents Plato from seeing that the poet’s duty, his privilege, his real reason for existence, is to “dis-realise,” to give us things not as they are but as they are not. In the second, that curious, interesting, and in part most fruitful and valuable Manichæism which Idealism so often comports, makes him gradually |His crotchets.| look more and more down on Art as Art, more and more take imagination and invention as sinful human interferences with “reminiscence,” and the simple acceptance of the Divine. In the third place, the heresy of instruction grows 19on him, and makes him constantly look, not at the intrinsic value of poetry, its connection with beauty, its importance to the free adult human spirit, but at its position in reference to the young, the private citizen, and so forth. These things sufficiently account for the at first sight almost unintelligible, though exquisitely put, caprices of the Republic and the Laws, which at their worst represent the man of letters and the man of art generally as a dangerous and anti-social nuisance, at the very best admit him as a sort of Board-Schoolmaster, to be rigidly kept in his place, and to be well inspected, coded, furnished with schedules and rules of behaviour, in order that he may not step out of it.

Even here, as always, there is some excuse for the choice cum Platone errare, not merely in the exquisiteness of the literary form which this unworthy view of literature takes, but in the fact that, as usual, Plato could not go wrong without going also right. He had probably seen in Athenian life, and he had certainly anticipated in his instinctive command of human nature, the complementary error and curse of “Art for Art only”—of the doctrine (itself, like his own, partly true, but, like his own also, partly false and mischievous) of the moral irresponsibility of the artist. And looking first at morals and politics with that almost feverish eagerness of the Greek philosopher, which was in great part justified by the subsequent Greek collapse in both, he shot wide of the bow-hand from the purely critical point of aim.

Yet where shall we find earlier in time, where shall we find nobler in tone at any time, a critical position to match with that of the Phædrus and the Ion as wholes, and of |His compensations.| many other passages? That “light and winged and sacred thing the poet” had never had his highest functions so celebrated before, though in the very passage which so celebrates him the antithesis of art and delirium be dangerously over-worked. Alas! it is in the power of all of us to avoid bad art, and it is not in the power of us all to secure good delirium! But this matters little, or at worst not so very much. No one can acknowledge more heartily than Plato—no one has acknowledged more poetically—that the poet is not a mere moralist, a 20mere imitator, a mere handler of important subjects. And from no one, considering his other views, could the acknowledgment come with greater force and greater authority. In him and in that great enemy of his master, to whom we come next, we find first expressed that real enthusiasm for literature of which the best, the only true, criticism is but a reasoned variety.

If we but possessed that ode or pæan of Tynnichus^[24] of Chalcis, which, it would appear from the Ion,^[25] Plato not merely thought the only good thing among its author’s works, but regarded as a masterpiece in itself! If we could but ourselves compare the works of Antimachus with those of the more popular Chœrilus, to which Plato himself is said to have so much preferred them that he sent to Colophon to have a copy made for his own use! Then we might know what his real literary preferences in the way of poetry were, instead of being put off with beautiful, invaluable, but hopelessly vague enthusiasms about poetic beauty in the abstract, and with elaborate polemics against Homer and Hesiod from a point of view which is not the point of view of literary criticism at all. But these things have been grudged us. There are assertions, which we would not only fain believe, but have no difficulty whatever in believing, that the aversion to poets represented in the Republic and the Laws was, if not feigned, hypothetical and, as one may say, professional. But this, though a comfort generally, is of no assistance to us in our present inquiry. The old comparison of the lantern “high, far-shining, empty” recurs depressingly.^[26]

21There have been periods, not the happiest, but also not the least important of her history, when Criticism herself would have absolutely fenced her table against Aristophanes. |Aristophanes.| That a poet, and a dramatic poet, and a dramatic poet who permitted himself the wildest excesses of farce, should be dignified with the name of critic, would have seemed to the straiter sect a monstrous thing. Yet the Old Greek Comedy was emphatically “a criticism of life,” and as such it could not fail to meddle with such an important part of Athenian life as Athenian literature. It might be not uninteresting, but is at best superfluous, if not positively irrelevant here, to point out how important that part was; the fact is certain. And while it is going rather a long way round to connect the rivalries of serious poets, and the alterations which these or other causes brought about in their works, with the history of criticism proper, there is no doubt of such a connection in the case of the work—fortunately in fairly large measure preserved—of Aristophanes, and with that—unfortunately lost, except in fragments—of his fellows.

Nor can there be very much doubt that, though our possessions might be greater in volume, we could hardly have anything better in kind than the work of Aristophanes, and especially the famous play of the Frogs, which was probably the earliest of all the masterpieces of hostile literary criticism, and which remains to this day among the very finest of them. Aristophanes indeed united, both generally and in this particular instance, all the requisites for playing the part to perfection, with one single exception—the possession, namely, of that wide comparative knowledge of other literatures which the Greeks lacked, and which, in this as in other matters, was their most serious deficiency. 22His own literary faculty was of the most exquisite as well as of the most vigorous kind. His possession, not merely of wit but of humour in the highest degree, saved him from one of the commonest and the greatest dangers of criticism—the danger of dwelling too long on single points, or of giving disproportionate attention to the different points with which he dealt. And though no doubt the making a dead-set at bad or faulty literature, not because it is bad or faulty, but because it happens to be made the vehicle of views in politics, religion, or what not which the critic dislikes, is not theoretically defensible; yet the historian and the practical philosopher must admit that, as a matter of fact, it has given us some of the very best criticism we have.

Nor has it given us anything much better than the Frogs. That the polemic against Euripides, here and elsewhere, is unfairly |The Frogs.| and excessively personal, is not to be denied; and even those who almost wholly agree with it from the literary side may grant that it admits, here and there, of an answer. But still as criticism it is both magnifique and also la guerre. The critic is no desultory snarler, unprovided with theory, and simply snapping at the heels of some one he dislikes. His twenty years' campaign against the author of the Medea, from the Acharnians to the Frogs itself, is thoroughly consistent: it rests upon a reasoned view of art and taste as well as of politics and religion. He disapproves the sceptical purpose, the insidious sophistic, the morbid passion of his victim; but he disapproves quite as strongly the tedious preliminary explanations and interpolated narratives, the “precious” sentiment and style, the tricks and the trivialities. And let it be observed also that Aristophanes, fanatic as he is, and rightly is, on the Æschylean side, is far too good a critic and far too shrewd a man not to allow a pretty full view of the Æschylean defects, as well as to put in the mouth of Euripides himself a very fairly strong defence of his own merits. The famous debate between the two poets, with the accompanying observations of Dionysus and the Chorus, could be thrown, with the least possible difficulty, into the form of a critical causerie which would anticipate by two thousand years 23and more the very shrewdest work of Dryden, the most thoughtful of Coleridge, the most delicate and ingenious of Arnold and Sainte-Beuve. It is indeed rather remarkable how easily literary criticism lends itself to the dramatic-poetical form, whether the ease be owing to the fact of this early and consummate example of it, or to some other cause. And what is especially noticeable is that, throughout, the censure goes documents in hand. The vague generalities of the Poetics in verse, in which, after Horace and Vida, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries delighted, are here eschewed in favour of direct criticism of actual texts. One might call the Frogs, borrowing the phrase from mediæval French, a review par personnages, and a review of the closest, the most stringent, and the most effective. We can indeed only be surprised that with such an example as this, and others not far inferior, in the same dramatist if not in others, formal criticism in prose should have been so long in making its appearance, and when it appeared, should have shown so much less mastery of method. Beside Aristophanes, the pure critical reviewing of Aristotle himself is vague, is desultory, and begins at the wrong end; even that of Longinus is scrappy and lacking in grasp; while it would be as unfair as it would be unkind to mention, in any comparison of genius with the author of the Frogs, the one master of something like formal critical examination of particular books and authors that Greek preserves for us in Dionysius of Halicarnassus.

It is, however, extremely rash to conclude, as has sometimes been concluded, that because we find so much tendency towards |Other criticism in Comedy.| literary criticism in Aristophanes, we should find a proportionate amount in other Comic writers (at least in those of the Old Comedy, who had perhaps most genius and certainly most parrhesia), if their works existed. The contrary opinion is far more probable. For though we have nothing but fragments, often insignificant in individual bulk, of the writers of the Old Comedy except Aristophanes, and of all the writers of the Middle—nothing but fragments, though sometimes not insufficient in bulk, of Menander, Philemon, and the other writers of the New—yet it must be remembered 24that these fragments are extremely numerous, and that in a very considerable number of cases, fragments as they are, they give a fair glimpse of context and general tone. I do not hesitate to say, after most careful examination of the collections of Meineke and his successors, that there are not more than one or two faint and doubtful approaches to our subject discoverable there. The passage of Pherecrates^[27] on which M. Egger chiefly relies to prove his very wide assertion that “il n’y a peut-être pas un seul poète” of the Old Comedy “qui n’ait mêlé la critique littéraire à ses fictions comiques” deals with music, not literature. And it is exceedingly rash to argue from titles, which, as we know from those of the plays remaining to us in their entirety, bore as little necessary relation to contents in ancient as in modern times.

It may be pleaded, of course, that our comic fragments are very mainly preserved to us by grammarians, scholiasts, and lexicographers, who were more likely to find the unusual locutions for which they principally looked in those descriptions of the fishmarket and the stews, of which we have so many, than in literary disquisitions. But in these myriads of fragments, motelike as they often are, it is contrary to probability that we should not find at least a respectable proportion of allusions to any subject which was frequently treated by the comic writers, just as we do find references not merely to fish and the hetæræ, but to philosophy (such references are common enough), to cookery, politics, dress, and all manner of things except literary criticism. Parodies of serious pieces there may have been; but parody, though akin to criticism, is earlier,^[28] and is rather criticism in the rough. And it is probable, or rather certain, that the example of the greatest of Comic poets was followed by the smaller fry in attacks on Euripides; but these attacks need not have been purely literary at all. The contrast 25between comedy and tragedy attributed to Antiphanes^[29] in his Poiesis bears solely on the subject, and the necessity of greater inventiveness on the part of the comic poet.

Once only, so far as I have been able to discover, do we come upon a passage which (if it be genuine, of which there |Simylus (?).| seems to be doubt for more than one reason) has undoubted right to rank. This is the extremely, the almost suspiciously, remarkable passage attributed to the Middle Comic poet, Simylus, by Stobæus, who, be it remembered, can hardly have lived less than eight or nine hundred years later. This advances not only a theory of poetry and poetical criticism, but one of such astonishing completeness that it goes far beyond anything that we find in Aristotle, and is worthy of Longinus himself at his very happiest moment, while it is more complete than anything actually extant in the Περὶ Ὕψους. It runs as follows:^[30] “Neither is nature without art sufficient to any one for any practical achievement, nor is art which has not nature with it. When both come together there are still needed a choragia,^[31] love of the task, practice, a lucky occasion, time, a critic able to grasp what is said. If any of these chance to be missing, a man will not come to the goal set before him. Natural gifts, good will, painstaking method—this is what makes wise and good poets. Number of years makes neither, but only makes them old.”

26It would be impossible to put the matter better after more than two thousand years of literary accumulation and critical experiment. But it is very hard to believe that it was said in the fourth century before Christ. The wits, indeed, are rather those of that period than of a later; but the experience is that of a careful comparer of more than one literature. In other words, it is the voice of Aristotle speaking with the experience of Quintilian. And it stands, let me repeat, so far as I have been able to discover, absolutely alone in the extant representation of the department of literature to which it is attributed.

To pass from Aristophanes and Plato to Isocrates is to pass from persons of the first rank in literature to a person not of |Isocrates.| the first rank. Yet for our purpose the “old man eloquent” is not to be despised. On the contrary, he even has special and particular value. For the worst—as no doubt also the best—of men like Aristophanes and Plato is, that they are too little of their time and too much for all time. Moreover, in Isocrates we come not merely to a man above the common, though not reaching the summits of wit, but also to something like a “professional”—to some one who, to some extent, supplies the loss of the earlier professionals already mentioned.

To some extent only: for Isocrates, at least in so far as we possess his work, is a rhetorician on the applied sides, which commended themselves so especially to the Greeks, not on the pure side. The legend of his death, at least, fits the political interests of his life; his rhetoric is mostly judicial rhetoric; little as he is of a philosopher, he attacks the sophists as philosophers were in duty bound to do. His purely literary allusions (and they are little more) have a touch of that amusing, that slightly irritating, that wholly important and characteristic patronage and disdain which meets us throughout this period. He was at least believed to have written a formal Rhetoric, but it is doubtful whether we should find much purely literary criticism in it if we had it. His own style, if not exactly gaudy, is pretentious and artificial: we can hardly say that the somewhat vaguely favourable prophecy which 27Plato puts into the mouth of Socrates about him at the end of the Phædrus was very conspicuously fulfilled. And his critical impulses cannot have been very imperative, seeing that though he lived till nearly a hundred, he never found the “happy moment”^[32] to write about poetry spoken of in the 12th section of the Panathenaic with a scornful reference to those who “rhapsodised and chattered” in the Lyceum about Homer and Hesiod and other poets. Most of his actual literary references are, as usual, ethical, not literary. In the 12th and 13th section of the oration-epistle to Nicocles^[33] he upbraids mankind for praising Hesiod and Theognis and Phocylides as admirable counsellors in life, but preferring to hear the most trumpery of comedies; and himself declares Homer^[34] and the great tragic masters worthy of admiration because of their mastery of human nature. In the Busiris^[35] he takes quite a Platonic tone about the blasphemies of poets against the gods. There is, indeed, a curious and interesting passage in the Evagoras^[36] about the difficulties of panegyric in prose, and the advantages possessed by verse-writers. They have greater liberty of handling their subject; they may use new words and foreign words and metaphors; they can bewitch the soul with rhythm and metre till even bad diction and thought pass unnoticed. For if (says the rhetor naïvely enough) you leave the most celebrated poets their words and meaning, but strip them of their metre, they will cut a much shabbier figure than they do now. But this does not take us very far, and with Isocrates we get no further.

Nor need we expect to get any further. Criticism, in any full and fertile sense of the word, implies in all cases a considerable body of existing literature, in almost all cases the possibility of comparing literatures in different languages. The Greeks were but accumulating (though accumulating with marvellous rapidity) the one; they had as yet no opportunity of the other, and it must be confessed that they did not welcome the opportunity with any eagerness when it came. All the 28more glory to them that, when as yet the accumulation was but proceeding, they produced such work in the kind as that of Plato and Aristophanes; that at the first halt they made such astonishing, if in some ways such necessarily incomplete, use of what had been accumulated, as in the next chapter we shall see was made by Aristotle.

AUTHORSHIP OF THE CRITICISM ATTRIBUTED TO ARISTOTLE—ITS SUBJECT-MATTER—ABSTRACT OF THE ‘POETICS’—CHARACTERISTICS, GENERAL—LIMITATIONS OF RANGE—ETHICAL TWIST—DRAWBACKS RESULTING—OVERBALANCE OF MERIT—THE DOCTRINE OF ἁμαρτία—THE ‘RHETORIC’—MEANING AND RANGE OF “RHETORIC”—THE CONTENTS OF THE BOOK—ATTITUDE TO “LEXIS”—VOCABULARY: “FIGURES”—A DIFFICULTY—“FRIGIDITY”—ARCHAISM—STOCK EPITHET AND PERIPHRASIS—FALSE METAPHOR—SIMILE—“PURITY”—“ELEVATION”—PROPRIETY—PROSE RHYTHM—LOOSE AND PERIODIC STYLE, ETC.—GENERAL EFFECT OF THE ‘RHETORIC’—THE “HOMERIC PROBLEMS”—VALUE OF THE TWO MAIN TREATISES—DEFECTS AND DRAWBACKS IN THE ‘POETICS’—AND IN THE ‘RHETORIC’—MERITS OF BOTH—“IMITATION”—THE END OF ART: THE οἰκεία ἡδονή—THEORY OF ACTION—AND OF ἁμαρτία—OF POETIC DICTION.

The uncomfortable conditions which have prevailed during the examination of Greek criticism during the Pre-Aristotelian |Authorship of the criticism attributed to Aristotle.| age disappear almost entirely when we come to Aristotle himself. Hitherto we have had either no texts at all, mere fragments and titles, or else documents fairly voluminous and infinitely interesting as literature, but as criticism indirect, accidental, and destitute of professional and methodical character. With the Rhetoric and the Poetics in our hands, no such complaints are any longer possible. It is true that in both cases certain other drawbacks, already glanced at, still exist, and that the Poetics, if not the Rhetoric, is obviously incomplete. But both, and especially the shorter and more fragmentary book, give us so much that it is almost unreasonable to demand more—nay, that 30we can very fairly, and with no rashness, divine what the “more” would have been like if we had it. In these two books the characteristics of Greek criticism, such as it was and such as probably in any case it must have been, are revealed as clearly as by a whole library.

In dealing with them we are happily, here as elsewhere, freed from a troublesome preliminary examination as to genuineness. There is no reasonable doubt on this head as far as the Rhetoric goes, and I should myself be disposed to say that there is no reasonable doubt as to the Poetics, but others have thought differently. It so happens, however, that for our special purpose it really does not matter so very much whether the book is genuine or not. For it can hardly by any possibility be much later than Aristotle, and that being so it gives us what we want—the critical views of Greek literature when the first great age of that literature was pretty well closed. It is by Aristotle, probably, by X or Z possibly, but in any case by a man of wide knowledge, clear intellect, and methodical habits.

Before we examine in detail what these views were, let us clearly understand what was the literature which this person (whom in both cases we shall call, and who in both pretty certainly was, Aristotle) had before him. The bulk of it was in verse, and though unfortunately a large proportion of that bulk is now lost, we have specimens, and (it would seem) many, if not most, of the best specimens, of all its kinds. Of a great body of epic or quasi-epic verse, only Homer and Hesiod survive; but Homer was admittedly the greatest epic, and Hesiod the greatest didactic, poet of this class. In the course of less than a century an enormous body of tragic drama had been accumulated, |Its subject-matter.| by far the greatest part of which has perished; but we possess ample specimens of the (admittedly) first Three in this kind also. Of the great old comic dramatists, Aristophanes survives alone—a mere volume, so to speak, of the library which Aristotle had before him: yet it is pretty certain that if we had it all, the quantity rather than the degree and kind of literary pleasure given by the series from the Acharnians to the Plutus would be increased. We are worst off in regard to lyric: it is here that Aristotle has the greatest advantage 31over his modern readers. Yet, by accident or not (it may be strongly suspected not), it is the advantage of which he avails himself least. On the other hand, some kinds—the pastoral, the very miscellaneous kind called epigram, and others—were scarcely yet full grown; and, much of them as is lost, we have more advantage of him.

In prose he had (or at least so it would seem likely) a lesser bulk of material, and what he had was subject to a curious condition, of which more hereafter. But he had nearly all the best things that we have—Plato and Xenophon, Herodotus and Thucydides, all the greatest of the orators. Here, however, his date again subjected him to disadvantages, the greatest of which—one felt in every page of the Poetics, and not insensible in the Rhetoric—was the absence, entire or all but entire, of any body of prose fiction. The existence, the date, the subjects, the very verse or prose character of the “Milesian tales,” so often talked of, are all shadows of shades, and whatever they were, Aristotle takes no count of them. It seems to be with him a matter of course that “fiction” and “poetry” are coextensive and synonymous.^[37]

Of the enormous and, to speak frankly at once, the very disastrous, influence which this limitation of his subject-matter has on him, it will be time to speak fully later. Let us first see what this famous little treatise^[38]—than which perhaps no other document in the world, not religious or political, has been the occasion of fuller discussion—does actually contain.

32He first defines his scheme as dealing with poetry itself and its various kinds, with their essential parts, with the |Abstract of the Poetics.| structure of the plot, the number and nature of the parts, and the rest of poetic method. Then he lays it down that Epic, Tragedy, Comedy, Dithyrambic, as well as auletice and kitharistice generally, are mimesis—"imitation," as it is generally translated—but that they differ in the medium, the objects, and the manner of that imitation. And after glancing at music and dancing as non-literary mimetic arts, he turns to the art which imitates by language alone. Here he meets a difficulty: there is, he thinks, no common name which will suit the mimes of Sophron and Xenarchus, the “Socratic dialogues,” and iambic or elegiac mimesis. He objects strongly to the idea that metre makes the poet, and produces instances, among which the most striking is his refusal of the name poet to Empedocles. Having disposed of the medium—rhythm, metre, &c.—he turns to the objects. Here he has no doubt: the objects of mimesis are men in action, and we must represent them as “better than life” (heroic or idealising representation), as they are (realistic), or worse (caricature or satire). The manner does not seem to suggest to him much greater diversity than that of epic (or direct narrative), and dramatic, as to the latter of which he has a slight historical excursus.

Then he philosophises. Poetry, he says, has two causes: one the instinct of imitation, with the pleasure attached to it; the other, the instinct for harmony. And then he again becomes historical, and reviews briefly Homer, Æschylus, Sophocles, and the progress of poetry under them.

Comedy he dismisses very briefly. He thinks that it ἔλαθε διὰ τὸ μὴ σπουδάζεσθαι—little attention was paid to it, as not being taken seriously. Epic and tragedy must be treated first—tragedy first of all. And then he plunges straight into the famous definition of tragedy, discussion of which had best be reserved. The definition itself is this: “An imitation of an action, serious, complete, and possessing magnitude, in language sweetened with each kind of sweetening in the several parts, conveyed by action and not recital, possessing pity and terror, 33accomplishing the purgation of such^[39] emotions.” Tragedy will require scenic arrangements, musical accompaniments, and “words,” as modern actors say; his own term, “lexis,” is not so very different. But it will also require character, “thought,” and plot or story. The most important of all is the last, which he also describes by another name, the “setting together of incidents,” the Action—to which he thinks character quite subsidiary, and indeed facultative. There cannot, he says categorically, be tragedy without action; there may be without character. “The most powerful elements of emotional interest,” as Professor Butcher translates οἷς ψυχαγωγεῖ, “the things with which tragedy leads souls,” are revolutions and discoveries, and these are parts of action. Novices can do good things in diction and in character, not in plot. Still Character is second. Thought is third, Diction apparently a bad fourth. Song is only a chief embellishment or “sweetening,” and Scenery is the last of all, because, though influencing the soul, it is inartistic and outside poetry. So he turns once more as to the principal or chief thing, to the plot or action. This is to be a complete whole, and of a certain magnitude, with a beginning, middle, and end. A very small animal organism^[40] cannot be beautiful, as neither can one “ten thousand stadia long.” Then he comes to the great question of Unity—or, since that word is much blurred by usage, let us say “what makes the story one.” It is not enough to have a single hero; life, even a part of a life, is too complicated for that. We must have just so much and just so little that the action shall present neither gaps nor redundancies. Nor need the poet by any means stick to historical or prescribed fact—the probable, not the actual, 34is his game. He may invent wholly (subject to this law of probability) if he likes. Plots with episodes are bad.

We have, however, to go further. Not only must the action of tragedy be complete and probable, but it must deal with terrible and pitiful things: if these surprise us, so much the better. After distinguishing between simple plots (without Revolution and Discovery) or complex (with them), and describing these two elements at more length, he attacks, in a rather suspected passage, the Parts—Prologue, Episode, Exodus,^[41] the choric part, &c.—and then, preferring the complex scheme, shows how it is to be managed. The hero must not blamelessly pass from prosperity to adversity, nor blamefully in the opposite direction. He must be a person of considerable position, who by some error or weakness (ἁμαρτία) comes to misfortune. Also the special kind of pity and terror which is to be employed to make him interesting, the oikeia hedone of tragedy, is most important, not a few examples being taken in illustration from the great tragedians.

Then we pass to Character. It must be good—even a woman is good sometimes—it must be appropriate, true to life, and consistent. Probability is here as important as in Action; the Deus ex machina is to be used with extreme caution. After turning to the details of Discovery, and dealing with Gesture, Scene, &c., he goes to the two main stages of Tragedy, desis and lusis, Twisting and Unravelling, and to its four kinds (an extension of his former classification)—Simple, Complex, Pathetic, and Ethical. And the tragic poet is especially warned against Tragedy with an Epic structure—that is to say, a variety of plots. The Chorus must bear part in the action, and not give mere interludes.

“Thought” is somewhat briefly referred to Rhetoric (vide infra), and then we come to Diction. This is treated rather oddly, though the oddity will not seem so odd to those who have carefully studied the contents, still more the texts, of the foregoing chapter. Much of the handling is purely grammatical. 35The “Figures,” especially metaphor, make some appearance: and of style proper we hear little more than that it is to be clear without being mean, though we have some illuminative examples of this difference.

Then Aristotle passes briefly to Epic, his prescription for which is an application of that already given—the single action, with its beginning, middle, and end. The organism, with its oikeia hedone, the parts, the kinds are the same, with the exception of song and scenery. The only differences are scale (Epic being much larger) and metre, with a fuller allowance for the improbable, the irrational. Some rather desultory remarks on difficulties of criticism or interpretation follow, and the piece ends abruptly with a consideration of the purely academic question whether Epic or Tragedy ranks higher. Some had given the primacy to Epic: Aristotle votes for Tragedy, and gives his reasons.

This summary has been cut down purposely to the lowest point consistent with sufficiency and clearness; but I trust it is neither insufficient nor obscure. We may now see what can be observed in it.

We observe, in the first place, not merely a far fuller dose of criticism than in anything studied hitherto, but also a great |Characteristics, general.| advance of critical theory. Not only has the writer got beyond the obscure, fragmentary, often irrelevant, utterances of the early philosophers: but he is neither conducting a particular polemic, as was Aristophanes, nor speaking to the previous question, like Plato. An a posteriori proof of the depth and solidity of the inquiry may be found in the fact that it is still, after more than two thousand years, hardly in the least obsolete. But we are not driven to this: its intrinsic merit is quite sufficient.

At the same time, there are certain defects and drawbacks in it which are of almost as much importance as its merits, and which perhaps require prior treatment. That it is incomplete admits of no doubt; that part of it shows signs of corruption, that there are possible garblings and spurious insertions, does not admit of very much. But the view throughout is so firm and consistent; the incidental remarks tally so well with what 36we should expect; and, above all, the exclusions or belittlings are so significant, that if the treatise were very much more complete, it would probably not tell us very much more than we know or can reasonably infer already.

In the first place, we can see, partly as a merit and partly as a drawback, that Aristotle has not merely confined himself with philosophical exactness to the Greek literature actually before him, but has committed the not unnatural, though unfortunate, mistake of taking that literature as if it were final and exhaustive. He generalises from his materials, especially from Homer and the three Tragedians, as if they provided not merely admirable examples of poetic art, but a Catholic body of literary practice to go outside of which were sin. It is impossible not to feel, at every moment, that had he had the Divina Commedia and Shakespeare side by side with the Iliad and Æschylus, his views as to both Epic and Tragedy might have been modified in the most important manner. And I at least find it still |Limitations of range.| more impossible not to be certain that if there had been a Greek Scott or a Greek Thackeray, a Greek Dumas or a Greek Balzac before him, his views as to the constitutive part of poetry being not subjective form but “imitative” substance would have undergone such a modification that they might even have contradicted these now expressed. If tragedy, partly from its religious connection, partly from its overwhelming vogue, but most of all from the flood of genius which had been poured into the form for two or three generations past, had not occupied the position which it did occupy in fact, it would probably not have held anything like its present place in the Poetics. And so in other ways. It may be consciously, it may be unconsciously, Aristotle took the Greek, and especially the Attic, literature, which constituted his library, and treated this as if it were all literature. What he has executed is in reality an induction from certain notable but by no means all-embracing phenomena; it has too much of the appearance, and has too often been taken as having more than the appearance, of being an authoritative and inclusive description of what universally is, and universally ought to be.

37We have also to take into account the Greek fancy for generalising and philosophising, especially with a strong ethical |Ethical twist.| preoccupation. Aristotle does not show this in the fantastic directions of the earlier allegorising critics, but he is doubly and trebly ethical. He has none of the Platonic doubts about Imitation as being a bad thing in itself, but he is quite as rigid in his prescription of good subjects. Although we have no full treatment of Comedy, his distaste—almost his contempt—for it is clear; and debatable as the famous “pity and terror” clause of the definition of tragedy may be, its ethical drift is unmistakable.

Thus his criticism, consciously or unconsciously, is warped and twisted by two unnecessary controlments. On the one |Drawbacks resulting.| hand, he looks too much at the actual occupants of his bookcase, without considering whether there may not be another bookcase filled with other things, as good but different. On the other, he is too prone, not merely to generalise from his facts as if they were the only possible facts, but to “overstep the genus” a little in his generalisation, and to merge Poetics in Ethics. That others went further than he did, that they said later that a hero must not only be good but white, and superadded to his Unity of Action a Unity of Time and a Unity of Place, which his documents do not admit, and which his doctrines by no means justify, are matters for which, no doubt, he is not to be blamed. But of the things for which he is legitimately responsible, some are not quite praiseworthy.

In the first place, “Imitation” is an awkward word, though no doubt it is more awkward in the English than in the Greek, and “Representation” or “Fiction” will get us out of part of the difficulty. Not only does this term for the secondary creation proper to art belittle it too much, but it suggests awkward and mischievous limitations: it ties the poet’s hands and circumscribes his aims.^[42] Indirectly it is perhaps responsible for 38Aristotle’s worst critical slip—his depreciation of Character in comparison with Action. This very depreciation is, however, a serious shortcoming; and so is the failure to recognise, despite some not indistinct examples of it in the matter before him from the Odyssey downwards, what has been called “Romantic Unity,” that is to say, the Unity given by Character itself, though the action may be linear and progressive rather than by way of desis and lusis. The attempt to extend (save in respect of scale only) the limitations of Tragedy to Epic is another fault; and so perhaps is the great complexity and the at least not inconsiderable obscurity of the definition of Tragedy itself. In such a treatise as this it is possible merely to allude to the famous clause, “through pity and terror effecting the katharsis of such emotions.” Volumes have been written on these few words,^[43] the chief crux being, of course, the word katharsis. It cannot be said that any of the numerous solutions is by itself and to demonstration correct, but it is clear that the addition is out of keeping with the rest of the definition. Hitherto Aristotle, whether we agree with him or not, has been purely literary, but he now shifts to ethics. You might almost as well define fire in terms strictly appropriate to physics, and then add, “effecting the cooking of sirloins in a manner suitable to such objects.”

Yet the advantages of this criticism far exceed its drawbacks. In the first place it is, not merely so far as we positively know, |Overbalance of merit.| but by all legitimate inference, the earliest formal treatise on the art in European literature. In the second place, even if it sticks rather too close to its individual subject, that individual subject was, as it happens, so marvellously rich and perfect that no such great harm is done. A man will always be handicapped by attempting to base criticism on a single literature, yet he who knows Greek only will be in far better case than he who only knows any one other, except in so far as the knowledge of any later literature 39inevitably conveys an indirect dose of knowledge of Greek.

Then, too, Aristotle’s use of his material is quite astonishingly judicious. In almost every single instance we might |The doctrine of ἁμαρτία.| expect his limitations to do him more harm than they have done. He might, for instance, with far more excuse than Wordsworth, have fallen into Wordsworth’s error of considering metre not merely as not essential to poetry, but as only accidentally connected with it. And it is also extremely remarkable how little, on the whole, his ethical preoccupation carries him away. He exhibits it; but it does not blind him (as it had blinded even Plato) to the fact that the special end of Art is pleasure, that the perfection of literature is not an end in itself but a means to an end. Even more surprising is the acuteness, the sufficiency, and the far-reaching character of his doctrine of the Tragic ἁμαρτία. For there can be no question that he has here hit on the real differentia of tragedy—a differentia existing as well in the tragedy of Character, which he rather pooh-poohs, and in the Romantic tragedy which he did not know, and on his actual principles was bound to disapprove if he had known it, as in the Classical. Shakespeare joins hands with Æschylus (and both stand thus more sharply contrasted with inferior tragedians than in any other point) in making their chief tragic engine “the pity of it,” the sense that there is infinite excuse, but no positive justification, for the acts which bring their heroes and heroines to misfortune. Wherever the tragedian, of whatever style and time, has hit this ἁμαρτία, this human and not disgusting “fault,” he has triumphed; wherever he has missed it, he has failed, in proportion to the breadth of his miss.

With respect to the minor and verbal points of the Poetics there is less to say, because there is very much less of them: |The Rhetoric.| and what there is to say had better be said when we have considered the contents of the other great critical book, the Rhetoric, which may be taken as holding, if not intentionally yet actually, something of the same position towards Prose as that which the Poetics holds towards verse.

40Before giving an analysis of this book,^[44] to match that given above of the Poetics, a few words may properly be said to justify |Meaning and range of “Rhetoric.”| what may seen to be the rather arbitrary proceeding of, on the one hand, attaching to Rhetoric a sense avowedly somewhat different from Aristotle’s, and on the other dropping consideration of the major part of what he has actually written in it.

It is a mistake to force too much the bare meanings of words; but I suppose one may, without much danger of controversy, take the bare meaning of Rhetoric to be “speechcraft.” Now, it is not difficult to prove that, in Aristotle’s time, speechcraft practically included the whole of prose literature, if not the whole of literature. Poems were recited; histories were read out; the entire course of scientific and philosophic education and study went on by lecture or by dialogue. Nay, it is perhaps not fanciful to point out that the very words for reading, ἀναγιγνώσκω and ἐπιλέγομαι seem to represent it as at best a secondary and parasitic process, a “going over again” of something previously said and heard.^[45]

Yet though this is an important point, and has been rather too commonly overlooked, it is no doubt inferior in gravity to the universally recognised fact that the importance of speechcraft proper, of oratory, was in Greece such as it is now only possible dimly to realise. Every public and private right of the citizen depended upon his power to speak or the power of somebody else to speak for him; a tongue-tied person not only had no chance of rising in the State, but was liable to 41be insulted, and plundered, and outraged in every way. To some it has seemed that the great and almost fatal drawback to that Athenian life, which in not a few ways was life in a sort of Earthly Paradise, was the incessant necessity of either talking or being talked to. It was therefore not in the least wonderful that the first efforts—those of the Sicilian sophists (or others)—to reduce to something like theory the art of composition, of arranging words effectively, should be directed to spoken words, and to spoken words more particularly under the all-important conditions of the public meeting and the law court—by no means neglecting the art of persuasion, as practicable in the Porch, or the Garden, or the private supper-room. That prose literature—that all literature—has for its object to give pleasure dawned later upon men. Aristotle and persons much earlier than Aristotle—Corax and Tisias themselves—would probably have acknowledged that prose, like poetry, ought to please, but only as a further means to a further end, persuasion. Its object was to make men do something—pass or negative such a law, bring in such a verdict, appoint such an officer, or (in the minor cases) believe or disbelieve such a tenet, adopt or shun such a course of conduct. Even in poetry, as we have seen, the ethical preoccupation partly obscured the clear æsthetic doctrine—you were to be purged as well as pleased, and pleased in order that you might be purged. But in prose the pleasure became still more subsidiary, ancillary, facultative. You were first of all to be “persuaded.”

Now, if this be taken as granted, and if, further, we keep in mind Aristotle’s habit of sticking to the facts before him, we |The contents of the book.| shall not be in the least surprised to find that the Rhetoric contains a great deal of matter which has either the faintest connection with literary criticism, or else no connection with it at all. It is true that of the three subjects which the Rhetoric treats, pistis (means of persuasion), lexis (style), and taxis (arrangement), the second belongs wholly and the third very mainly to our subject, while it would be by no means impossible for an ingenious arguer to make good the position that pistis, with no extraordinary violence of transition, may be laid at least under contribution for that attractive 42quality which all literature as a pleasure-giving art must have. But in actual handling Pistis has two out of the three books, and is treated, as a rule, from a point of view which leaves matters purely literary out of consideration altogether—"The Characteristics of Audiences," “The Colours of Good and Evil,” “The Passions as likely to exist in an Audience,” “The Material of Enthymeme” (the special rhetorical syllogism), and so forth.

Only in the third book (which, by the way, is shorter than either of the other two) do we get beyond these counsels to the advocate and the public speaker, into the Higher Rhetoric which concerns all prose literature and even some poetry. And even then we meet with a sort of douche of cold water which may not a little dash those who have not given careful heed to the circumstances of the case.

Inquiry into the sources and means of persuasion (our author admits graciously, but with a touch of superiority which, |Attitude to lexis.| as we shall see, accentuates itself later) does not quite exhaust Rhetoric. It must also discuss style and arrangement. But style is a modern thing, and, rightly considered, something ad captandum.^[46] Indeed Aristotle never seems to keep it quite clear from mere elocution or delivery—from the art of the actor as contradistinguished from that of the writer. He remarks that he has dealt with style fully in his Poetics; and as he has certainly not done so in the Poetics which we have, this is an argument that they are incomplete, though by no means that they are spurious. But it is almost impossible to mistake the touch of patronage, not to say of scorn, with which he deals with it here, and we need not doubt that, if we had the other handling to which he refers, something of the same sort would appear there. The fact is, that the Greeks of this period were what we may call High-fliers; anything that had the appearance of being “mechanical,” anything that seemed to subject the things of the spirit to something not wholly of the spirit, they regarded with suspicion and impatience, which rather suggests the objection of some theologians to good works. Words, like colours, materials 43of sculpture and architecture, and the like, were “filthy rags”; and if Aristotle’s common-sense carried him a little less far in this direction than his master Plato’s philosophical enthusiasm, it certainly carried him some way.

This same common-sense, however, seldom deserted him, and it makes sometimes wholly for good, sometimes a little less |Vocabulary—"Figures".| so, throughout the treatise. At the very outset he commits himself to that definition of style as being first of all clear—as giving the meaning of the writer—which has so often captivated noble wits down to Coleridge’s time, and even since, but which yet is clearly wrong, for “two and two make four” is the a per se of clearness, and there is uncommonly little style in it notwithstanding. That he himself saw this objection cannot be doubted, for he hastens to add^[47] that it must be not only clear, but neither too low nor too far above the subject, thus producing a useful and perfectly just distinction between the styles of poetry and prose. And then he gives us, as he had done in the Poetics, one of those distinctions of his which are so valuable—the distinction of vocabulary into what is κύριον or current (which conduces to clearness), and what is ξένον or unfamiliar (which conduces to elevation). Let us note that this, like the ἁμαρτία theory in the Poetics, is one of Aristotle’s great critical achievements. But the note of greatness may perhaps be discovered less in the attention which from this point he begins to pay to Metaphor. Not of course that metaphor is not a very important thing; but that the example of ticking it off in this fashion with a name spread rapidly in Rhetoric, and became a mere nuisance. Even Quintilian, who spoke words of wit and sense about the Greek mania for baptising new Figures, submitted to them to some extent: and any one who wishes to appreciate the need of Butler’s jest to the effect that

44has no farther to look than to the portentous list at the end of Puttenham’s Art of Poetry.

Yet his cautions as to metaphors themselves, which he regards as the chief means of embellishment in prose, are perfectly just and sound. They must, he says, be selected with careful reference to the particular effect intended to be produced, be euphonious, not far-fetched, and drawn from beautiful objects.

Here, perhaps as well as in reference to any single passage in the Poetics, we have an opportunity of considering for the |A difficulty.| first time a difficulty, not unexpected, not uninteresting, which meets us, and which will recur frequently, in ancient (and sometimes in the most modern) criticism. It is the difficulty which so did please Locke and his followers in the attack on the doctrine of Innate Ideas,—in other words, the difficulty of an apparently hopeless difference of standard on points of taste—the difference between Greek and modern love, between English and Hottentot beauty. One should, says the philosopher, say ῥοδοδάκτυλος rather than φοινικοδάκτυλος, while ἐρυθροδάκτυλος is the worst of all. The commentators have tried to get out of the difficulty by suggesting that the last suggests the redness of frost-bitten or domestically disfigured fingers. φοινικοδάκτυλος would in the same way, I suppose, be considered as objectionable because the colour is overcharged in the epithet, and might even suggest “red-handed” in the sense of “bloodstained.” Yet one may doubt whether Aristotle’s objection is based on anything but the fact that Homer uses the one epithet, not the others. The verb ἐρυθριάω, at any rate, is invariably used for blushing, not an unattractive or unbeautiful proceeding by any means. And we shall find very much stronger instances of this difficulty later.

The explanation is partly supplied by the very next section, which deals with ψυχρότης and is one of the most valuable |“Frigidity.”| keys existing to the whole tone of Greek, indeed of classical, criticism. It is rather unlucky that “frigidity,” our only equivalent, is not quite clear to English ears. In fact, “fustian” comes nearest to what is meant, though it is not completely adequate and coextensive. The idea is not 45difficult to follow—it is that of something which is intended to excite and inflame the auditor or reader, while in fact it leaves him cold, if it does not actually lower his spiritual temperature. Aristotle gives four cases, or (which is nearly the same thing) four kinds of it—words excessively compounded, foreign terms, too emphatic or minute epithets, and improper metaphors. To these, as generalities, few would object, but the instances are sometimes decidedly puzzling. Lycophron (the sophist, not the poet) is blamed for calling the heavens πολυπρόσωπον (“many-visaged”), the earth μεγαλοκόρυφον (“mightily mountain-topped”), and the shore στενοπόρον (“leaving a narrow passage between cliff and sea”). Now, perhaps these terms are too poetical, yet we should hardly call them frigid, for they are not untrue to nature, and they not only show thought and imagination in the writer, but excite both in the reader. Still, they are all slightly excessive; they pass measure, as do other things blamed in Alcidamas and Gorgias still more.

The second objection is of still greater interest, because it has practically supplied a shibboleth in the Classic-Romantic debate |Archaism.| up to the present moment. It is the objection to archaic, foreign, and otherwise inusitate words, which Aristotle seems to apply even to Homeric terms, not as poetic but as obsolete, just as other good persons in times nearer our own have applied the same to Chaucerisms and the like. The sounder doctrine, of course, is that nullum tempus occurrit regi in this transferred sense also—that what the old kings of literature have stamped remains current for ever, and what the new kings of literature stamp takes currency at once.

Almost as interesting is the third punishment-cell, in which epithets too long, too many, or out of place are bestowed. The |Stock epithet and periphrasis.| two habits which seem to be mainly aimed at here (Alcidamas is still the chief awful example) are the use in prose of the poetical perpetual epithet (“white milk” is the example chosen) and the undue tendency to periphrasis, which, curiously enough, reminds one of the besetting sin of the extreme “Classical” school of the last century.

Most puzzling of all are the examples pilloried for impropriety in the fourth class, the unfortunate Alcidamas being 46rebuked for calling philosophy “the intrenchment of law,” and |False metaphor.| the Odyssey a “mirror of human life.” The most, thoroughgoing Aristotelians have given up this last criticism with an acknowledgment that ancient and modern tastes differ; while Mr Cope even suggests that Aristotle “winked,” not nodded, when he wrote the whole passage. I do not so easily figure to myself a winking Stagirite.

In the chapter on Simile which follows there is much that is sensible, but nothing that is surprising—the relation of simile |Simile.| and metaphor being the main point. One’s expectations are more raised in coming to the great subject of “purity” of style—"Hellenising," “writing Greek.” This phrase, in our author, is directed against something corresponding rather to the French “fautes de Français” than to our “not English,” having regard to the syntax, the sentence-building, |“Purity.”| rather than to the actual diction. But it differs from both in having, like so much of his criticism, more to do with matter than form. In fact, it has been well observed that “Perspicuity” rather than “Purity” is really the subject of the chapter. It is, however, of great importance, and the next, on Elevation, or Grandeur, or Dignity, is |“Elevation.”| of greater still. Some slight difficulty may occur at starting with the word thus variously rendered in English, ὄγκος. In its non-rhetorical use, the word (which strictly means “bulk,” with the added notion of weight) inclines rather to an unfavourable signification, often signifying “pretentiousness,” “pomposity”: it is sometimes used later in Rhetoric itself with such a meaning; and I think those who compare the earlier passage on Frigidity will be inclined to suspect that Aristotle himself was not using it entirely honoris causa. He gives, however, some hints for its attainment, and a bundle of instances, where our ignorance of the context makes the illustrative power somewhat small.

Next we come to that quality of τὸ πρέπον, “the becoming,” “propriety,” which is commonly and not wrongly taken to be |Propriety.| the special note of “classical” writing. And we have rules for its attainment, some ethical rather than æsthetic, some æsthetic enough but curiously arbitrary, as that 47unusual words are not appropriate except to a person in a state of excitement. At the close there is an interesting glance at the irony of Gorgias and of Socrates.

The next division is one of the very apices of the whole. It deals with that subject of the rhythm of prose which, though |Prose rhythm.| (as we see from Quintilian as well as from Aristotle) never neglected by the ancients, is one of the most difficult parts of their critical Rhetoric for us to understand, and (perhaps for that reason) has been, till the last hundred years or so, strangely neglected in the criticism of modern languages.

We see from its very opening words that the great distinctions between verse and prose literature on the one hand, and between literary and non-literary composition on the other, had been already hit upon. Prose style, says he, must be neither emmetron nor arrhythmon—that is to say, it must not have metre nor lack rhythm. But he does not very accurately define the difference between these things; and it cannot be said that any of his commentators and successors have supplied this defect, though it is easy enough to do so.^[48] He, however, allows feet if not metre in prose, and proceeds to inquire what feet will do, making observations on the subject which are in the three degrees of obscurity to all who are not fond of guessing. Dactylic, iambic, and trochaic rhythms are dismissed for various reasons, rather bad than good—it not having apparently struck the critic that all these arrange themselves too easily, certainly, and definitely into metre. He pitches finally on the pæan, a foot which, though admissible in those Greek choric measures which are a sort of compromise between prose and poetry, at once reveals its suitableness for prose in modern languages by the fact that it is unsuitable for modern verse. The pæan or pæon is a tetrasyllabic foot, consisting of three short syllables and a long one, of which in strictness there may be four varieties, the long syllable being admissible in any of the four places. But Aristotle only admits two, with the long syllable in the first and fourth place respectively. And here, most tantalisingly, he breaks off.

48The distinction between loose and periodic style,^[49] which the modern composition-books have run so tiresomely to death, |Loose and periodic style, &c.| and which is really a very unimportant technical detail, follows; and then we return to those Delilahs of the ancient rhetorician, Figures—Metaphor once more, Antithesis, Personification, Hyperbole, &c. Yet even this is more to our purpose than the demonstration that follows, showing that each kind of Rhetoric, judicial, deliberative, and declamatory, should have its particular style. And with this the handling of lexis proper closes, the rather brief remainder of the book being devoted partly to taxis (ordonnance, as Dryden would say), but with special reference to the needs of the pleader, and partly to a fresh handling of the old questions of enthymeme, the dispositions of the audience, and the like.

It will be seen from this that the Rhetoric, like the Poetics, is invaluable to the historian of literary criticism, but that, in |General effect of the Rhetoric.| this case as in that, literary criticism was only partly the object in the writer’s eye, while even so far as he had it before him, his views were very largely limited, and were even in some cases distorted, coloured, and positively spoilt by certain accidents of place, time, and circumstance. As our poetical criticism was injuriously affected by the non-existence of the novelist, so our prose criticism is injuriously affected by the omnipresence of the orator. As our Poetics were adulterated with ethic and other things, so our Rhetoric is warped by poetical, jurisprudential, and other preoccupations. In the first, poetry itself is not indeed itself a secondary consideration, but divers secondary considerations ride it, like a company of old men of the sea. In the second, prose as prose is merely and avowedly a secondary consideration: it is always in the main, and sometimes wholly, a mere necessary instrument of divers practical purposes.

To supplement these two general treatises, we could wish for more particular applications, but we have not got them. We have indeed some vestiges of work of the kind which are 49not altogether encouraging. M. Egger^[50] has endeavoured to extract some references to literary criticism from the general Problems; but these deal at best with the remotest fringes of the topic—why melancholy is so often apparent in persons of genius, and the like,—questions indeed of the very first interest, but not of the kind which we are here pursuing. In the extant fragments, however, which belong or may have belonged to the lost Homeric Problems^[51] (or aporems or zetems) |The Homeric Problems.| we have metal more attractive. It may be said that the scholiasts, through whom we have most of these excerpts, were likely to select them according to the principles which, as we shall see,^[52] governed themselves; but they do not all come through scholiasts, and yet the complexion of all is more or less uniform. It is that “ethical-dramatic” complexion, as we may call it, which we have noticed and shall notice as being the Greek critical “colour”—sometimes to the utter exclusion, and almost always to the effacement, of actual criticism. “Why did Agamemnon try experiments on the Greeks? Why did Odysseus take his coat off? Why is Menelaus represented as having no female companion? Why [a curial instance of that commentatorial lues which infects the greatest commentators as the least, the most ancient as the most modern] is Lampetie represented as carrying to the Sun the news of the slaughter of his oxen, when the Sun sees everything? Why did the poet make Paris a wretch who was not only beaten in duel, who not only ran away, but who was specially excited by love immediately afterwards?”

These are mainly moral questions; but the great philosopher appears to have carried his solicitude so far as to meddle with military matters. “Why [somebody had asked], in Il. iv. 67-69, are the cavalry represented as marshalled in front, the cowards in the middle, and the best infantry behind?” If Aristotle had heard of the “cavalry screen” he would no doubt have used this lusis: as it is, it appears, he suggested that prota means not “in front” but “on the wings.” And there is all the quality which endeared Aristotle to the idler side (which 50was not the only side by any means) of Scholasticism, in his condescension to the aporia—"If the gods drank nothing but nectar, why is Calypso spoken of as ‘mixing’ for Hermes? For any ‘mixture,’ even with water, is something different from nectar; and, therefore, as the gods do not drink their nectar neat, they do not drink that only." Quoth the great master (in reply, or at least “Schol. T.” says so), “The word does not only mean to ‘mix,’ but also simply to ‘pour,’ and this is what Calypso did.” But why should Calypso herself and Circe and Ino, alone of goddesses, have the epithet αὐδήεσσα? Even he could not answer that, and was driven ignominiously to suggest a change of reading.

It is not, I hope, necessary to say that I have no intention of raising an inept laugh at the Great One. As has been already said, the attitude of the Greeks to Homer was the attitude of a seventeenth-century Puritan to the English Scriptures. Every word, almost every letter, had its reason and its meaning—often many more than one—which had to be reverently sought out. The analogy, however, itself establishes and makes clear my point, which is to show that an attitude of this kind practically excludes pure literary criticism on the one hand, and is exceedingly unlikely on the other to be taken up by any one who is strongly bent towards such criticism. We know how Milton, who must have had an exquisite critical gusto originally, and who never wholly lost it, was by the cultivation of such an attitude so stunted and checked in his taste that he could throw the reading of Shakespeare in his dead king’s face,^[53] dismiss the delightful work (hardly inferior to the best of his own) of the Cavalier poets as “vulgar amorism” and “trencher fury,” and even when he was not thinking of matter, sink all critical perspective in his blind craze against rhyme itself. The Homer-worship of the Greeks on the one hand, and their philosophical preoccupations on the other, had almost unavoidably a similar effect, though not so bad a one.

Yet the value of the two main documents is so inestimable, 51that if the incompleteness and the shortcomings of the Poetics, the unavoidable irrelevance of much of the Rhetoric, |Value of the two main treatises.| were far greater than they are, our gratitude for both would still be hard to exaggerate. We have here not merely the first constituting documents, the earliest charters at once and discussions of European criticism, but we have them from the hand of a master whose very weaknesses make him, as compared with some other masters, specially fit for the office of critic. For the magnificent but almost always a priori and unpractical metaphysics of Plato, for the shrewd but personal and rather unfair polemic of Aristophanes, we have a patient examination of a subject in itself so rich and varied, that one regrets having to point out that its riches and its variety are not quite exhaustive. Nowhere, perhaps, does Aristotle sketch the actual Wesen of the man of letters with the dæmonic completeness of the author of the extraordinary passage attributed to Simylus and quoted formerly; but that might be, and probably is, a mere flash. His own conclusions, only sometimes inadequate, very seldom positively erroneous, exhibit the true modes of criticism as perhaps they have never been exhibited since—with an equal combination of patience and of power. It is impossible for Aristotle to do harm, unless his principles are not merely taken too literally, but augmented and falsified, as was done by the “classical” criticism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is impossible for any one who undertakes the office of a critic to omit the study of him without very great harm. Let us first review briefly what seem to be the shortcomings, accidental or essential, of his performance, and then set down what its better parts establish for us as the state of Literary Criticism at the close of the first and greatest age of Greek literature, at the close of the first age of the literature of Europe as a whole.

Partly by mere induction from actual Greek practice, and partly no doubt also as a genuine result of Greek |Defects and drawbacks in the Poetics.| taste and literary philosophy, we find the importance and the character of certain kinds of literature treated with some extravagance. The importance of Tragedy (as we are enabled to see clearly by the invaluable 52though rather unfair aid of the historic estimate) is altogether exaggerated. It never, as a matter of fact, has held anything like the position here assigned to it, save twice in two thousand years and more, on each occasion for a generation or two only. And there is no reason, in the order and logic of thought, why it should hold such a position. It is again clearly evident (though we owe the clearness again not to our own wits, but to time and chance) that part of this importance is attained by an illegitimate sacrifice, or an accidental ignoring, of the just claims of other branches of literature—by making lyric a mere playhouse handmaid, by converting the stage into a pulpit, and by blocking out, not merely the existence, but the very possibility, of the prose novel. We can see further that the glorious achievements of the three great tragedians whom we in part possess, and of others, probably not much inferior, whom we have almost wholly lost, seduced their critic into taking what he found in them too hastily for what ought to be found in all—induced him (aided no doubt by the Greek taste generally) to exalt Plot, to depress Character, to put quite undue stress on artificial Unity. Lastly (to keep to the Poetics), we perceive a most unfortunate, though by no means inexplicable, tendency to give insufficient weight to Metre, and a decided inclination, on the one hand not to give quite enough importance to Diction, and on the other to lay down arbitrary rules about it.

Something of the same general tendency manifests itself in the Rhetoric, reinforced by the necessary results of the Persuasion-theory, |And in the Rhetoric.| and the inordinate importance given to Oratory. With every possible allowance for the undoubtedly true plea that Aristotle had no intention of writing a treatise on Prose Composition generally, but only one on such Prose Composition as suited the purposes of the Orator, we can see that if he had written Prosaics, to match the Poetics, the same limitations would have appeared. He cannot free himself from the notion that there is, after all, something derogatory in paying great attention to style: and it is clear that he does not wish to consider a piece of prose as a work of art destined, first of all, if not finally, to fulfil its own laws on the one hand, and to give pleasure on the other. The salutary 53but easily exaggerated difference between prose and poetic style is actually exaggerated here. Above all, the germ of mischief, if not exactly the mischief itself, is clearly discernible in his account of the Figures of Speech. It was the drawback, not merely (as is sometimes said unjustly) of the Platonic philosophy only, but of all Greek philosophy, to “multiply entities”—to take for granted that because names are given to things, things must necessarily exist behind names. And so, instead of regarding these Figures as merely rather loose, sometimes not inconvenient, but in reality often superfluous, tickets for certain literary devices and characteristics, there grew up, if not in Aristotle himself, at any rate in his followers, a tendency to regard the Figures (which were soon enormously multiplied) as drugs or simples, existing independently, acting automatically, and to be “thrown in,” as the physician exhibits his pharmacopœia, to produce this or that effect.

But enough of this. It is the pleasanter, and, though not in kind, yet in degree, the more important, business of the historian, to call attention to the enormous positive |Merits of both.| advance which we make with these two books. It is almost the advance from chaos to cosmos; and we shall find nothing in all the rest of the history quite to match it, though the resurrection of Criticism with the revival of learning, and the reformation of it at the Romantic era, come nearest.

In the first place, we find the great kinds of literature, if not finally and exhaustively, yet in nearly all their most important points, discerned, marked off, and as far as possible furnished with definitions. The most important of all demarcations, that between poetry and prose, is rather taken for granted than definitely argued out; but we see that, with whatever hesitations and reservations, it is taken for granted. So, too, with the kinds of poetry itself. If prose is inadequately treated, both in general and in its departments, we have been able to assign something like a reason for that; and a good deal is actually done in this direction. In other words, the field, the “claim,” of literary criticism is pretty fairly pegged out.

In the second place, the only sound plan—that of taking actually accomplished works of art and endeavouring to ascertain 54how it is that they give the artistic pleasure—is, with whatever falterings, pretty steadily pursued. The critic, as Simylus, Aristotle’s own contemporary, has it, consistently endeavours to “grasp” his subject; and he does grasp it over and over again.

Let us review our positive gains from this grasp.

That the “Imitation” doctrine of the Poetics is in some respects disputable need not be denied; and that it lends itself rather easily to serious misconstruction is certain. |“Imitation.”| But let us remember also that it is an attempt—probably the first attempt, and one which has not been much bettered in all the improvements upon it—to adjust those proportions of nature and art which actually do exist in poetry. For by Imitation, whatever Aristotle did mean exactly, he most certainly did not mean mere copying, mere tracing or plaster-of-Paris moulding from nature. It is not quite impossible that his at first sight puzzling objection to Alcidamas' use of the “mirror” as a description of the Odyssey had something to do with this.^[54] A mirror, he would or might have said, reproduces passively, slavishly, and without selection or alteration: the artist selects, adapts, adjusts, and if necessary alters. Now this is the true doctrine, and all deviations from, it, whether in the shape of realism, impressionism,^[55] and the like, in the one direction, or of adherence to generalised convention on the other, have always led to mischief soon or late. The artist must be the mime, not the mirror: the reasonable, discreet, free-willed agent, not the passive medium. The single dictum that poetry does not necessarily deal with the actual but with the possible—that it is therefore “more philosophic,” higher, more universal, than history, though it requires both extension and limitation, will put us more in the true critical position than any dictum that we find earlier, or (it may be very frankly added) than most that we shall find later.^[56]

55So, too, the all-important law that the end of art is pleasure appears solidly laid down.^[57] True, it is not laid down so explicitly as it is in the Metaphysics and the Politics, |The end of art: the οἰκεία ἡδονή.| but it is assumed throughout, and such assumption practically more valuable than argument. We have left behind us the noble wrongheadedness of the Platonic depreciation of pleasure; we are even past the stage when it might seem necessary to plead humbly and with bated breath for its locus standi. Moreover, the doctrine of the oikeia hedone not only by implication lays down the end of all art, but guards (in a fashion which should have been sovereign, though the haste and heedlessness of men have too often robbed it of its virtues) against one of the greatest dangers and mistakes of criticism in time to come. That what we have to demand of a work of literature is pleasure, and its own pleasure—how simple this seems, how much a matter of course! Alas! Aristotle himself is not entirely free from the charge of having sometimes overlooked it, while since his time the great majority of critical errors are traceable to this very overlooking. The obstinate ignoring or the captious depreciation of Latin literature by the later Greeks; the wooden “Arts of Poetry” of the Latins themselves; the scorn of Chaucer for “rim-ram-ruffing”; of the Renaissance for mediæval literature; of Du Bellay for Marot; of Harvey for the Faerie Queene; of Restoration criticism for the times before Mr Waller improved our numbers; of our Romantic critics for Dryden and Johnson; of Mr Matthew Arnold for French poetry,—all these things, and many others of the same class, come from the ignoring of the oikeia hedone, from the obstinate insistence that this thing shall be other than it is, that this poet shall be not himself but somebody else.

Again, whatever we may think of the relative importance assigned to plot and to character by Aristotle, as well as of not |Theory of Action,| a few minor details of his theory of plot or action, there is no denying the huge lift given to the intelligent enjoyment of literature by the distinction of these two important elements, and by the analysis of action if not of 56character. With the aid of such refinements we cease, as Dryden has it, to “like grossly,” to accept our pleasure without distinction of its gradations or inquiry into its source. The artist no longer aims in the dark; his processes are no longer mere rules—if rules at all—of thumb. And this is also the justification, though by no means the sole justification, of such minor matters as peripeteia and anagnorisis, as desis and lusis. True, there is here, as in the case of the Figures, a danger that a convenient designation a posteriori may be taken as a primæval and antecedent law. But this is the, in one sense, inevitable, in another very evitable and gratuitous, danger of all philosophical, scientific, and artistic inquiry. Fools can never be prevented from taking the means for the end, the ritual for the worship, the terminology for the spirit; but means and ritual and terminology are not the less good things for that.

Most of the points hitherto mentioned, though requiring, at the time and in the circumstances, immense pains, acuteness, and patience to discover and arrange them, are not beyond |and of ἁμαρτία.| the reach of somewhat more than ordinary patience, acuteness, and pains. The theory of ἁμαρτία, as has been shown since by its triumphant justification in the other great tragedy—the tragedy which seems at first sight to flout Aristotle’s rules—is a stroke of genius. To this day it has not been fully accepted; to this day persons, sometimes very far indeed from fools, persist in confusing the tragic with the merely painful, with the monstrous, with the sentimental, and so forth. Aristotle knew better, and has given here a touch of the really higher criticism—of that criticism which does not waste time over the subject as such, which does not potter overmuch about details of expression, but which goes to the root of the matter, to the causes of a certain pleasure indissolubly associated with literature, if not strictly literary.

Nor, perhaps, ought we to be least grateful for the remarks on lexis—on poetic style proper. In details we may fail fully |Of Poetic Diction.| to understand them, or, understanding, may disagree with them; and there is no doubt that they are somewhat tinged with that superior view of style, as something a little irrelevant, a little vulgar, which appears more fully in 57the Rhetoric, and which, while it has not entirely disappeared even at the present day, was naturally rife at a time fresh from the views, and still partly under the influence, of Socrates and Plato. Here once more we find those evidences of directness of grasp which are what we seek, especially in the main description of poetic style, as being on the one hand “clear,” and yet on the other not “low,” and in the further specification of the means by which these characteristics are to be secured. More particularly is this to be noticed in the indication of the ξένον—that is to say, the unfamiliar—as the means of avoiding “lowness.” Here from the very outset we see that Aristotle (as Dante far later did, and as Wordsworth later again did not) recognised the necessity of “Poetic diction,”—the necessity, that is to say, of causing a slight shock, a slight surprise, in order to bring about the poetic pleasure. And by the example which he gives of heightening and lowering the effect alternately, by substituting different words in the same general context, we see how accurately he had divined the importance of this diction, whether we may or may not think that the fact is quite consistent with his exaggerated view of Action. Aristotle’s verbal criticisms are never, as (to speak frankly) the verbal criticisms of the ancients too often are, mere glossography—mere dictionary work. They are invariably concerned with, and directed to, the literary value of the word, and that is what we have to look to.

The positive gains, of or from the Rhetoric, are less, but hardly less. It follows from the special limitations of the plan, which have already been dealt with, that we have no special theory of prose as such, and that, not merely some shortcomings, but some positive and mischievous delusions (such as the confusion of style with delivery), result from it. But, in divers casual animadversions, he shows us that if by good fortune he had given us Prosaics, the book would, though it were not more faultless than the Poetics, have been quite as valuable. And as it is, these things supply us with invaluable hints, glimpses, points de repère. The first, and not the least valuable, is the distinction, used also in the Poetics, but there only casually and in a glance, of words as κύρια and ξένα. Purity, 58“Amplification,” Propriety, while they at least suggest those dangers of misapprehended terminology which have been already dealt with, supply Criticism with those appropriate classifications, and that necessary plant, without which no art can exist. And the importance of the rhythm-section cannot be exaggerated.

Indeed I have sometimes thought that, without extreme arbitrariness or fancifulness, even the Pistis part of the Rhetoric may be made subservient to pure criticism. It is not so very far from the effect of persuading or convincing the hearer to that of producing on the reader the required effect—it may be of persuasion and conviction, it may be of information, or it may be simply of that subduing and charming which is the end and aim of the prose artist as such, whether his name be Burke or Scott, Browne or Arnold, and whether his nominal division of literature be history or fiction, criticism or philosophy, things human or things divine. The “Colours of Good and Evil,” the tendencies of the readers, the fashions of the day and the passions of all days—these are things which beyond all dispute will very mightily affect the appreciation of a book, and which, it may be argued not quite improperly, condition, in no small degree likewise, its attainment of its object, its administration of its own pleasure.

However this may be, the point, already more than once touched upon, that we have now a Literary Criticism, regularly if not fully constituted, may be regarded as established without need of further exposition or argument. In some respects, indeed, we have got no further than Aristotle; we are still arguing on his positions, defending or attacking his theses. In others we have indeed got a good deal further, by virtue chiefly of the mere accretion of material and experience. We have, perhaps, learned (or some of us have) to resign ourselves rather more to the facts than he, with the enthusiasm of the first stage still hardly behind him, was able to do. We are less inclined to prescribe to the artist what he shall do, and more tempted to accept what the artist does, and see what it can teach as well as how it can please us. But in the wider sense of critical method we have not got so very far beyond him in 59the poetical division. While if we have got beyond him in the direction of prose (as perhaps we have), the advance has been very late, and can hardly be said even now to have, by common consent and as a clear matter of fact, covered, occupied, and reduced to order the territory on to which it has pushed. Great as are Aristotle’s claims in almost every department of human thought with which he meddles, it may be doubted whether in any he deserves a higher place than in this. He is the very Alexander of Criticism, and his conquests in this field, unlike those of his pupil in another, remain practically undestroyed, though not unextended, to the present day.

DEVELOPMENT OF CRITICISM—THEOPHRASTUS AND OTHERS—CRITICISM OF THE LATER PHILOSOPHICAL SCHOOLS: THE STOICS—THE EPICUREANS: PHILODEMUS—THE PYRRHONISTS: SEXTUS EMPIRICUS—THE ACADEMICS—THE NEO-PLATONTSTS—PLOTINUS—PORPHYRY—RHETORICIANS AND GRAMMARIANS—RHETORIC EARLY STEREOTYPED—GRAMMATICAL AND SCHOLIASTIC CRITICISM—THE PERGAMENE AND ALEXANDRIAN SCHOOLS—THEIR FOUR MASTERS—THE SCHOLIASTS ON ARISTOPHANES—ON SOPHOCLES—ON HOMER—THE LITERARY EPIGRAMS OF THE ANTHOLOGY—THE RHETORIC OF THE SCHOOLS—ITS DOCUMENTS—THE ‘PROGYMNASMATA’ OF HERMOGENES—REMARKS ON THEM—APHTHONIUS—THEON—NICOLAUS—NICEPHORUS—MINORS—GENERAL REMARKS ON THE ‘PROGYMNASMATA’—THE COMMENTARIES ON THEM—THE “ART” OF HERMOGENES—OTHER “ARTS,” ETC.—TREATISES ON FIGURES—THE DEMETRIAN ‘DE INTERPRETATIONE’—MENANDER ON EPIDEICTIC—OTHERS—THE ‘RHETORIC’ OR ‘DE INVENTIONE’ OF LONGINUS—SURVEY OF SCHOOL RHETORIC—THE PRACTICAL RHETORICIANS OR MASTERS OF EPIDEICTIC—DION CHRYSOSTOM—ARISTIDES OF SMYRNA—MAXIMUS TYRIUS—PHILOSTRATUS—LIBANIUS, THEMISTIUS, AND JULIAN.

The two remarkable books which have been discussed at length in the foregoing chapter represent, no doubt, the highest condition, |Development of Criticism.| but certainly a condition, of Greek criticism in the second half of the fourth century before Christ. This criticism had not, indeed, yet assumed the position of a recognised art. It was at best a more or less dimly recognised function of Rhetoric, which on the one side was made to include a great deal which is not literary criticism at all, and on the other hand was made to exclude Poetics. But 61Rhetoric, from this time onwards, more and more tends to become the Art of Literary Criticism generally, and to absorb Poetics within itself. So that on the one hand we shall find, among the Latins, Quintilian, whose strict business is with the strictly oratorical side of prose rhetoric, dealing freely with poetry, and on the other, among the Greeks, Longinus (whose main subject is poetry), not hesitating to draw examples from prose. Nor may it be wrong to discern in this awkward separation of the two parts of criticism, and the yet more awkward adulteration of prose criticism with matters really foreign to it, an unconscious—nay, an unwilling—recognition of fact. For Poetry deals first of all with form, Prose with matter; though the matter can never be a matter of entire indifference to Poetry, and the form becomes of more and more importance as we ascend from the lower to the higher prose.

After Aristotle we fall back, for the ages immediately following, on the dreary and perilous chaos of fragments and titles. |Theophrastus and others.| From the extant work, indeed, of his chief disciple, Theophrastus, we could guess that he dealt largely in Rhetoric. It is no rash conjecture that the famous Characters themselves were intended, after a fashion of which we have but too many other examples, to provide orators and writers with cut-and-dried types on which to base their rhetorical appeals. Nay, we have titles as well as fragments of works of his bearing on the subject,—on Style, on Comedy,—but nothing whereon to base a real estimate.^[58] And what is true of Theophrastus is true of hundreds of others. Only those who are fond of the pastime of letting down buckets into empty wells can derive the slightest satisfaction from knowing, or at least being informed, that Aristotle of Cyrene wrote a Poetic of which we have nothing, and Phanias of Eresus a work On Poets of which we have a couple of scraps.^[59] It is certain that a very considerable literature, at least ostensibly 62critical, existed, dating from the third and later centuries.

Two writers, later in time, not of much critical fertility but of some interest, will illustrate for us the attitude of two Greek |Criticism of the later Philosophical Schools: The Stoics.| philosophical schools to criticism. None of these schools except the Peripatetics (and in a negative sort of way the Platonists) deserved very well of our Tenth Muse. The Stoics—when they were not in that mood of disdainful tolerance which is represented by Epictetus' doctrine of “the Inn,”^[60] of less tolerance still and more disdain as shown by Marcus Aurelius,^[61] or of affected contempt, almost pure and simple, as in Seneca,^[62] which was their later attitude—seem in their earlier days to have devoted themselves with great vigour to grammatical investigations, and at all times to have affected the allegorical style. But we cannot wonder that they spent no pains on investigating, still less that they spent no pains on championing, that mixed intellectual and sensual pleasure which is the business and the glory of literature.

The attitude, however, of their principal antagonists is all the more surprising. The Cynic vulgarity and insolence could not be expected to busy itself profitably with letters, and, as we shall see shortly, the ancient Pyrrhonists have at least left us nothing to show that they could combine with their Que sais-je? on philosophical points, the keen literary enjoyment and the discriminating literary appreciation of their great modern champion. But the attitude of the Epicureans to literature is one of the most surprising things in the history of ancient philosophy.

One might have supposed, not merely that a Hedonist philosophy would apply itself most joyfully and energetically to the 63investigation and the vindication of one of the greatest of all sources of ataraxia and aponia,^[63] but that it would do |The Epicureans: Philodemus.| so with all the more vigour as thus vindicating itself from the common charge of esteeming only sensual pleasures. Yet, though the scanty wreckage of original Epicurean writing warns us not to be too peremptory, there is absolutely no evidence that Epicurus, or any of his followers, took this side. Nay, the whole evidence available is distinctly against any such supposition. Perhaps we could have no stronger testimony to the reluctance with which antiquity took the view of literature as a pleasure-giver, or rather to the rarity with which such a view even presented itself. If we were here indulging further in speculation, it might not be improper to suggest that the atomic and necessitarian theory of Epicurus deprived the operations of the artist of half their interest. But this would be to travel out of bounds. It is enough to say that Epicurus is accused of slighting critical discussion altogether, that his chief disciple Metrodorus appears to have written a book on poetry which was a general attack on it as a useless and futile thing, and that the fragments of Philodemus of Gadara, which have been salvaged from Herculaneum, go to support the same idea.

At the same time, we must not lay too much stress on this. The charge against Epicurus and Metrodorus rests, mainly if not wholly, on the testimony of Plutarch, who, as we shall see, took the merely ethical view of literature, and is found in that treatise of the Moralia in which he sets himself to prove that Epicureanism cannot even give the pleasure at which it aims And the tolerably abundant fragments of Philodemus^[64] are, even after all the pains spent on them, in such a chaos that only extremely temerarious arguers will do more than take a vague inference from them. The remark which the latest editor of this puzzle has made about one book—"It is difficult to know whether Philodemus or his opponent is speaking"—applies, I should say, to almost all. Not only is this the case; but we can see, with hardly any danger of mistake, that 64if this difficulty were removed, and if we had the whole treatise fully and fairly written out before us, our state would be very little the more gracious. A very great, perhaps the greater, part of it seems to have been occupied with the discussion of one of those endless technical questions—"Is Rhetoric an art or is it not?"—in which antiquity seems to have taken an interest, the utter unintelligibility of which to us is only tempered by the wise reflection that plenty of our questions to-day will seem equally “ashes, cinders, dust” to students two thousand years hence. The real and solid conclusion is, once more, that we have not lost nearly so much as we seem to have lost by the disappearance of these endless treatises on rhetoric and on poetry. It is possible, of course, that one in a thousand of them might have been another Περὶ Ὕψους: it is far more probable that not one would have been anything of the kind.

If Acatalepsy^[65], the doxy of the Pyrrhonists, has been somewhat more fortunate in one way than her close connection |The Pyrrhonists: Sextus Empiricus.| the Ataraxia of the Garden, she has paid for that fortune in another. Except in the magnificent poem of Lucretius, we have no complete document of Epicurean philosophy, and there the philosophy is utterly eclipsed, burnt up, washed away, by the blaze and the torrent of the poetry. No such disturbing element enters into the two very businesslike expositions of philosophic doubt which we possess in the Pyrrhonic Sketches and the Against the Dogmatists of Sextus Empiricus.^[66] But, if the one writer is almost too much of a poet, the other is very much too little of a prose writer. Scepticism has assuredly no necessary connection with dulness, though it may have a good deal with levity. But Sextus Empiricus is one of the dullest writers of antiquity. There is not a spark, not a glimmer even, in his phrase, which is chiefly made up of the most damnable iteration of technical terms; his arrangement is desultory; and beyond a raking together of all the arguments, good, bad, and indifferent, for general or particular agnosticism, that he has read 65or can think of, he seems to find it impossible to go. At the same time, modern writers have found by no means a bad subject for such handling in the contradictions, the inconsistencies, the ineptitudes of literary critics: the eighteenth century especially, from the writings of the great Scriblerus to the Pursuits of Literature, is full of such things. And if there is little of the kind (for there is something) in Sextus, we may not improperly set it down to the fact that he found little to fasten upon.

What he gives is contained in three of the four last sections of Against the Dogmatists, those dealing with Grammarians, Rhetoricians, and Musicians respectively. In the last, which is the shortest, I do not know that the example of childish cavilling quoted by Egger—that a bard was set to look after Clytæmnestra, and Clytæmnestra murdered her husband—is more or less childish than the solemn sophism (not quoted by him) with which the chapter and the book closes, to the effect that as there is no “time”^[67] in the wide sense, so there can be no “time”—feet, rhythms, measures—in the narrow.

The section on Rhetoric is also short, and turns almost wholly upon the old aporia whether Rhetoric is an art or not, with others of a similar kind.

As for the grammatical section, that does touch us nearer; indeed, when Sextus divides Grammar into two parts, adopting for the second the definition of Dionysius of Thrace, that “Grammar is the knowledge^[68] of what is said by the poets and prose writers,”^[69] we seem to be almost at home. But in this expectation we should be counting without our host, the sceptical physician, and, indeed, without antiquity generally. We have first quibbling à perte de vue about empeiria, then other definitions, then considerations of the mere grammatical elements. Only after a long time does Sextus come to the grammarian’s business of interpreting the poets and prose writers. And then he not only seems to be dealing with men 66of straw, but answers them with, as Luther would say, a most “stramineous” argument. Poetry, it seems, they say (and it is fair to Sextus to admit that Plutarch and other people do in effect say this) is useful as containing wise saws and philosophical instances: grammar is necessary to understand poetry: therefore, grammar is good. He does not care actually to attack poetry, but observes that, in so far as it provides matter useful or necessary for life, it is always clear, and wants no grammatical exposition, while (662-663) whatsoever deals in unfamiliar stories, or is enigmatically expressed, is useless, so that grammar can do nothing useful with it. A subsequent contention, that grammarians know neither the matter nor the words of literature, though a little sweeping, might have chapter and verse given for it in the case of at least some critics. But when Sextus establishes his first point by triumphing over the poor grammarians for not having perceived in a Homeric epithet an allusion to a pharmaceutical property, and in Euripides a point of clinical practice (671), he is either making a heavy joke or is utterly off the critical standpoint.

A third school, in its various stages, has perhaps a better, if a vague, repute for attention to literature. Perverse as was in |The Academics.| many respects the attitude of Plato to the subject in detail, it was impossible (or might have seemed impossible) that his doctrine of psychagogia,^[70] and the magnificent eulogies bestowed in the Ion and the Phædrus on that poetry towards which he is elsewhere so severe, should not induce his followers—at whatever great a distance—to do likewise. It seems, however, to have been found easier by the earlier Academics to follow the crotchet than the enthusiasm, and many of the puerile and servile quibbles to which we have referred as appearing in Sextus Empiricus seem to be of Academic origin.

The Neo-Platonists, at least, might be looked to with some hope. Their spirit at any rate was not negative, and they seem, |The Neo-Platonists.| 67as a rule, to have been diligent and eager students of literature. But, on the other hand, their tendency towards mysticism, and also the strong colour which their philosophy took from the East, made them especially susceptible to the temptations of allegory, which, as we have seen and shall see, was a Delilah of criticism in almost all its stages in Greece. And when they escaped this they nearly always succumbed to the other temptations of merely grammatical and textual inquiries, or to those of an abstract and theoretical æstheticism, which leaves the actual estimation of literature as literature out of sight.

Thus, from the two great chiefs of the school, Plotinus and Proclus, we have short treatises on the Beautiful—by Proclus |Plotinus.| in the form of a commentary (not complete) on the First Alcibiades of Plato, while the tractate of Plotinus^[71] attaches itself somewhat less closely to the Hippias. From the very first this latter keeps rigidly and laboriously to the abstract. Beauty, we are told, specially affects the sense of sight, but the ear perceives it in eloquence, poetry, and music. It is also in emotions, in virtue, in science. Is all this derived from one principle or from many? What is it, or what are they? But as there is both essential and accidental beauty, we must first settle what the attractive principle is. A shrewd question, and one which, if followed out in the proper direction, would lead straight to the best criticism of literature; but, unluckily, Plotinus does not so follow it.

He proceeds to examine and expose the difficulties attending the proposition that beauty comes mainly or chiefly from proportion of parts. There must rather, he holds, be in the soul some faculty of perceiving the divine quality, whether manifested in proportion or in anything else. The beauty of bodily substances depends on their affinity with the divine: the beauty of things not recognised by the senses depends on their identity with it. In yet other words, and from a yet other point of view, Beauty 68is Good, Ugliness is Evil: the attraction of the first pair, the repulsion of the second, easily explains itself.

As for the organ wherewith beauty is perceived, it is the soul: the senses only apprehend shadow-beauties—reflections and suggestions of reality. The faculty must be cultivated; it must be refined by high thinking and plain living, and at last it will see that, though Good and Beauty are one, yet Beauty is in a lower sphere than Good—is, in fact, but an imitation of it.

All this is not merely Platonic—it is itself beautiful and good: it is noble, it is true, it deserves everything that can possibly be said in its favour. But for the actual purposes of literary criticism it is but as a sweet song in a foreign language. It will hardly help us in the very least degree to distinguish Shelley from the most estimable of minor poets, or Thackeray from the least estimable of minor novelists. It does, by way of illustration, touch literary criticism once itself, for it refers to “the admirable allegory” which represents Ulysses as using all his efforts to withdraw himself from the enchantments of Circe and the passion of Calypso, resisting all the enticements of bodily beauty and delight. To the greatest as to the least of Neo-Platonists the allegorical explanation is itself Circe, itself Calypso; and instead of endeavouring to escape from it, he willing meets it willing, and abides contented in those ever-open arms.

This is especially seen in the writings, known or attributed, of the most industrious and variously accomplished, if not the |Porphyry.| most gifted, of the Neo-Platonists, Porphyry. Porphyry has to his credit two documents which, in title and subject, are undoubtedly literary, the Quæstiones Homericæ and the De Antro Nympharum; while some would take away from Plutarch, and give to him, the work on Homer’s Life and Poems, which has undergone the indignity of being spoken of as “miserable” by M. Egger,^[72] while, on the other hand, Archbishop Trench^[73] gives the author, whoever he was, what would, if deserved, be the very high praise of having thus 69early “recognised very distinctly the charm which rhyme has for the ear.” If this were so, I should be inclined to put him together with Philostratus, as having at least stumbled on a great critical truth. But perhaps the words will hardly bear the burden, for the writer, quoting μελισσάων ἀδινάων ... ἐρχομενάων, adds, “These words and their likes add much grace and pleasure to the expression.”^[74] And unluckily, the remark occurs only in an examination of Homer by figures, where this is taken as representing homoeoteleuton. Now, homoeoteleuton, though it is a sort of poor relation of rhyme, belongs to that branch of the family which more rightly bears the name of Jingle. However this may be, the treatise, as a whole, would scarcely add to the reputation either of Plutarch or of Porphyry.

The two more certain works, on the other hand, belong only to those outskirts of our subject which have been so often characterised. The Questions^[75] busy themselves almost wholly with the text and the meaning, though it is fair to say that Porphyry is much above the usual scholiast in sense and judgment, and sometimes approaches criticism proper. This approach, however, is generally, if not always, displayed in the same direction as that of Aristotle’s extant Homeric Problems (v. supra, p. 49 sq.) and of many of the remarks made by the Master in the twenty-fifth chapter of the Poetics—the direction, namely, of solving material aporiæ, such as Aristotle’s own comment on ζωρότερον κέραιε, and Porphyry’s^[76] on the demurrer why Penelope did not send Telemachus for aid to her own parents? The process, in short, illustrates frequently, if not always, that curious swerving from the purely literary question which we so often notice. Almost any magnet is strong enough to draw the commentator away from that question. He will even ask, and gravely answer, the question, Why men, but not gods, are represented as washing their hands before dinner?

70The De Antro Nympharum,^[77] on the other hand, is the principal example, in intermediate times, of that allegorical interpretation or misinterpretation which, unless kept severely in order, is sure to usurp the place of the criticism to which it can at best be ancillary. From no other members of the school, so far as I know, have we anything that comes even as near to criticism as this.

But the Schools have led us far from our immediate context and subject, the literature of the three centuries after Aristotle. |Rhetoricians and Grammarians.| From all this literature it cannot be said that one single text, of undoubted genuineness and substantive importance, preserves for us the critical views of the something like three hundred years which passed between the philosopher’s death in 322 B.C. and the flourishing of Dionysius of Halicarnassus in the third decade before Christ. Two things, however, may be said to be, in a round and general manner, ascertained as having either taken definite form or come into existence during this time; and though both are conditioned very uncomfortably by our lack of texts, they are both of the utmost importance to the history of Criticism, and they can both be spoken of, with caution, indeed, but with some general induction not too far from certainty. The one is the establishment of the teaching of Rhetoric in a form which underwent no very important modification for five or six hundred years, and no absolute revolution for fifteen or sixteen hundred. The other is the birth of Verbal Criticism—of the kind of criticism which long arrogated to itself something like a primary title to the name, and has, in the same or other forms, not yet quite given up its pretensions—under the auspices of Aristarchus and the great Alexandrian school of commentators. The importance assigned to these can be justified from the fact, whether that fact be or be not in itself distasteful, that of such ancient criticism as remains to us, by far the larger part is 71busied rather in these two directions than in that of Criticism proper. On the one hand, we have the huge body of work, not even so quite completely collected, which fills the seven thousand pages of Walz’s Rhetores Græci, and the less voluminous thesaurus which does duty for Roman effort on the same lines. On the other, we have the body (whether as great or greater its more scattered condition does not permit one to say certainly) of Scholia. And we constantly find—to our grief—that the better writers (of whom, at least in some cases, something survives to us) are apt to stray, in one or other of these directions, from the proper path of that criticism which, though it does not neglect either Rhetorical method or verbal minuteness, yet busies itself mainly with far other questions, asking, “Is this writer or this work, on the whole, good or bad as work or writer?” “What variety of the poetical or prosaic pleasure does he or it give?” “What are the sources, so far as they are traceable, of this pleasure?” “What is the special idiosyncrasy of the author or the book?” “What place do both hold, in relation to other books or authors of the same or other times, in the same or other languages?” It will not be otiose if we attempt to sketch, from the extant examples, what the Rhetorician and the Scholiast, as a rule, actually did, what aim they seem to have set before them, what connection with the best literary criticism they seem to have had.

We need not very greatly disturb ourselves at the fact that, of complete Rhetorical treatises, we have probably nothing between Aristotle and Dionysius, if even that attributed to the latter be genuine; and that modern investigations refuse indorsement to the genuineness of the De Interpretatione attributed to Demetrius Phalereus,^[78] which would, if it were genuine, be the oldest we have. For, from myriad petty indications, there is no reasonable reason for believing that a genuine Rhetoric by Demetrius would be very different from that which is now attributed to some later Alexandrian writer. Rhetoric, as we have seen, had from the first been hampered by special attributions and limitations; nor (as so often happens in history) did these limitations cease, at any rate to some extent, 72to work when their causes ceased to exist. The sentry in St James’s Park, who continued to be posted till the other day at the garden-door of a certain house, because (as it was found out long after the reason had been forgotten) some Royal or Ambassadorial personage had been quartered there for a time generations earlier, was a great and admirable allegory—and in wiser days than our own would have remained undisturbed as such. Moreover, though the political importance of Rhetoric decreased, and the assemblies of Greece became mere parish councils; though the law courts went more and more either by fixed codes or personal influence; though philosophy became phluaria; Rhetoric, having once, with unconscious cunning, |Rhetoric early stereotyped.| got Education practically into her hands, retained that powerful engine and all the influence that it confers. It would seem however that, pretty early, a very mischievous process of stereotyping took place. Grammar and Logic, the companions of Rhetoric, were to some extent saved by their having positive things to deal with—the facts of speech and the Laws of Thought. But Rhetoric dealt with fashion, opinion, etiquette: and except when, in the hands of superior persons like Dionysius and Longinus among the Greeks, like Quintilian among the Latins, it shook itself free and became the Literary Criticism that it ought to be, it became a rather parlous thing. It early developed the disease of technical jargon, in that specially dangerous form—recognisable perhaps in times nearer our own than those of Demetrius or even of Hermogenes—the form of giving wantonly new meanings to common words. It elaborated an arbitrary and baneful system of “common form”—of schemes, and types, and conventional schedules, into which, by a minimum of intellectual exertion, the orator or writer could throw what he wanted. On the one hand, it constantly increased and multiplied the Figures; on the other hand, it invented a system of things called staseis—"states of the case"—which attempted to classify and stereotype the matter of the orator’s brief, just as the Figures classified and stereotyped his oratorical means of dealing with it. In other words, and to adopt the terms of literary criticism itself, the stop-watch ruled supreme. In the more technical examples of 73Rhetorical art, such as those of the far later but characteristic Hermogenes, it is often difficult to find anything which touches literary criticism at all. Only the greater men, as has been said, were ever able to break free; and the sort of scorn with which they speak of their predecessors—Quintilian of the figure-mongers, Longinus of Cæcilius—is invaluable (especially as neither Quintilian nor Longinus seems to have been at all a bad-blooded person) as showing how irksome the traditional Rhetoric was felt to be by men who had in them the sense of literature.

The Scholiast, on the other hand, if of a less traceable creation, is of almost equally old lineage, and he may conveniently |Grammatical and Scholiastic criticism.| be dealt with, in such detail and variety as he requires, before the more formidable bulk of the School Rhetoricians occupies us. We have already seen, in glimpses, that the restless curiosity of the Greeks took very early to purely philological inquiry, to the separation and naming of parts of speech, to the codification of grammar. And it was impossible that a people furnished with such an admirable language and so early developing accomplishment, both in music and poetry, should not, at a stage proportionately much earlier than in other cases, discover and prosecute inquiries as to Prosody. To this day, Greek grammar is, to some tastes at any rate, the only grammar which is not too arbitrary or too jejune to excite any interest. The wonderful symmetry of Greek accidence, the mazy but by no means unplanned intricacy of Greek syntax, have had power to fascinate schoolboys who, both at that age and later, were merely bored by the arbitrary niceties of Latin, and refused to accept the attempts that have been made to impose an appearance of system on the antinomianism and the compromises of English. As for Greek metre, though the subject has not the historic interest—the interest of great yet not inexplicable changes—which belongs to the prosody of the two other languages just brought into comparison, it is capable of much more exact handling. And, in particular, the peculiar structure of Greek choric verse, that hitherto unparalleled blend which unites much of the liberty of prose with the ordered charm of poetry, gave practically 74endless occupation to intellects which would soon have been satiated with the comparative monotony of Latin, and which might have recoiled before the apparent lawlessness of English.

It is not very certain at what precise time these two studies (or, if we take prosody to be a part of grammar, this joint-study) began to occupy considerable numbers of professional students. But it must have been a tolerably early one, and by degrees the grammarian in his pure function, the scholiast in his applied one, became recognised personages.

The profession, so to speak, may be said (according to the common tradition, but with sufficient justice) to have been formally constituted in the third and second centuries |The Pergamene and Alexandrian Schools.| before Christ, under the patronage of the successors of Alexander at the courts of Pergamus and Alexandria. To these schools belong the famous names of Zenodotus (the earliest, and belonging partly to the third century), of Crates of Mallos, and, above all, of Aristarchus. It is, perhaps, only at first sight surprising that, famous as the names are, they are for the most part names only. Not one single work, nor even any substantial passage of a work, by any of the three masters just mentioned, or by any of their contemporaries or near pupils, has come down to us, save in the case of one pupil of Zenodotus, more famous even than his master, the grammarian Aristophanes. Criticism indeed, it has been said, has, of all literature that is really literature, the most precarious existence. Still, we know a good deal about them from citations, allusions, and discussions in later writers, while of Aristophanes of Byzantium we have a fairly considerable collection of fragments.

The disappearance of texts, always lamentable, if not actually irremediable, is here more to be regretted than anywhere, because there is fair reason for believing that, at any rate, some of these grammarians were critics in the full and proper sense of the term. By far the greater part of their labours appears to have been directed to Homer, and there is no reason to contradict the general, the received, opinion that while the Pisistratean redaction is not quite certain in fact, and almost entirely 75unknown in nature, while it is certain that even Aristotle had before him a text differing remarkably from our own, the Alexandrian grammarians practically produced that which we have. It is accordingly from this time that the famous and formidable craft—science it would no doubt call itself—of textual criticism may be said to date; and from our information, second-hand as it is, we are enabled to recognise some types of textual critics which are not, and are never likely to be, obsolete. In Aristophanes, the spelling reformer, the practical originator of accents, it is not rash to see the great exemplar of the critic |Their Four Masters.| of the purely philological kind, who busies himself with those literary matters which are most remote from literature proper, though no doubt he is a very valuable person when he is kept in his proper place. Zenodotus stands in the same relation to the lexicographical critic, and seems also to have been the father of all those who by “a critical text” mean a text arranged at their own discretion, passages being expunged, transposed, or corrected, not in accordance with any testimony as to what the author did write, but according to the critic’s idea of what he ought to have written—in other words, what the critic himself would have liked him to write, or would, if he could, have written in his place. Aristarchus appears to have deserved the primacy generally accorded to him by being more wisely conservative than Zenodotus, and less tempted to stick in the letter than the lesser Aristophanes; as well as by a general display, in his more literary remarks, of critical faculty greater than was possessed by either, and infinitely greater than that of the average scholiast. While the still earlier, and at least equally famous or notorious, name of Zoilus is of itself sufficient to show that the critic who is merely or mainly a snarler can at least boast that he is of an ancient house.

It would be rash to deny, and even unjust to doubt, that some of these famous critics, as well as others less known or not known at all, practised criticism in its best and widest sense, regulating texts by a sanely conservative acuteness, interpreting meanings and purpose with adaptable but not too fantastic compliance, annotating matter with intelligent erudition, 76and even achieving, as best they could, the explanation of the nature and success of their author’s literary appeal, and the placing of his work in the general map of literary history. Nay, there were actually, though our remains of them are but tantalising, literary historians of tolerably old date. But it is possibly neither presumptuous nor ungenerous to suspect that, if we had the whole works of Aristarchus before us, we should find in him (allowing for his grammatical tendency) at least as much shortcoming as we found, probably far more than we found, in Aristotle from the rhetorical side. For the old disability—the absence of comparison, the possession |The Scholiasts on Aristophanes.| of not even a second literature for purposes of contrast—must have weighed upon Aristarchus just as it weighed upon Aristotle. And it is at any rate not uncharitable, it is merely a plain recognition of actual fact, to say that on the great mass of Greek grammatical criticism, as it comes down to us in the so-called scholiasts, the curse of the letter does undoubtedly rest. Nothing, for instance, is more curious than to read, from the critical point of view, the Scholia on Aristophanes,^[79] some of which are undoubtedly among the oldest that we have on any author, except Homer. The commentators are irreproachable in noting the slightest grammatical peculiarity; they map out the metres with religious care. Difficulties of mere meaning they tackle with the same imperturbable seriousness, the same grave and chaste attention to duty, whether the crux is a recondite “excursion into the blue,” or a mystery of the kitchen and the fishmarket, or a piece of legal technicality. They give careful and useful abstracts and arguments, dates now and then, sometimes not contemptible scraps of literary history. But of literary criticism proper, of appreciation of Aristophanes' ever fresh wit, of his astonishing intellectual alertness, of his wide knowledge, of his occasional bursts of magnificent poetry, there is not one word. You may spend hours, days, weeks almost over the 77huge collection; but the result will only be that, for this special purpose, page after page will be drawn blank.

But it may be said, “The scholia on Aristophanes are confessedly^[80] poor in literary annotation. Why do you take them |On Sophocles.| as an example? Why not take in preference, or give in addition, one at least of those collections of scholia which the same authorities^[81] accept as richer in the matter?” Very well: let us take those on Sophocles,^[82] the admittedly richest of all. It will—or certainly may—seem at the opening as if a more promising “pocket” had been struck, for the first annotation on the Ajax is busy with the arrangement and contents of the prologue, and its relation to what follows; and there is a good deal of similar matter throughout the commentary on this play at least. But when we come to read it in detail we find that its criticism is, at its widest departure from the mere explanatory supellex of the ordinary scholiast, almost purely theatrical. For instance, here is the note on 66: “The introduction of Ajax is persuasive; for thus the pathos of the tragedy becomes greater, the spectators perceiving him now out of his mind, and a little later in his senses.”

And again on 112: “He speaks as in other respects yielding to the goddess but in this opposing her, and the poet hence shows his disposition to be haughty (since the spectators are much disposed in favour of Ajax by his misfortunes, and all but wroth with the poet), that Ajax may seem to suffer justly from his want of submission to the divinity.”

We might quote the long and curious note on 134 as to the composition of the chorus from Salaminians; the criticism of the expostulation of the said chorus with the conduct of the Greeks to Ajax, 158; the still odder note on 201, as of one expounding to a very little school-child how Tecmessa and the Chorus exchange information; the formal explanation, on 342, why Teucer is introduced later than Tecmessa, and of the 78hero’s language to his captive mistress; the rationale, 770, of the arrival of the messenger; the description of the scene at 815. But the mere enumeration of such things as these should, without the expenditure of more space, be sufficient to show what the character of this annotation is. It is not so very different in places from the elaborate stage directions with which, for the last century, some playwrights, especially German and Scandinavian, have been wont to assist the imagination of their readers or hearers, or their own dramatic incapacity; and even when it goes beyond this, it hardly ever goes further than the explanation and justification of the action.

The same is, I think, almost without exception the character of the relatively considerable number of observations of a critical kind which I have noted on other plays. Sometimes they are actual directions to the actor—who is told on Electra 823 that he “ought, at the moment of uttering the cry, to look up to heaven, and raise his hands”—sometimes, as on Œdipus Tyrannus 141, the note is made that “this will stir the theatre.” But always, I think,—certainly in the vast majority of cases,—the critic abstains, with a rigidity which can only come from deliberate purpose (and this is unlikely), or from unconsciousness that the thing is likely to be required of him, from any comments on the beauty or appropriateness of the verse, on the idiosyncrasy of the phrase or its agreement with others, on the Sophoclean characteristics of the poetry, or even (except from the pure stage point of view) on the evolution of the characters. He has evidently learnt his Aristotle, and looks at the action first: he has not learnt him with a sufficiently independent intelligence to remember that even Aristotle does not look at the action only.

But the case becomes strongest when we come to what should be the stronghold of literary criticism in this quarter—the |On Homer.| Scholia^[83] on Homer himself. Here we have the thrice—nay, thirty times—decocted essence of the critical study of generations, centuries, almost millennia (certainly more than one millennium), of study of the writer who entered into Greek life, Greek thought, Greek education, as no 79book, save the English Bible, has ever entered into the life, the thought, the education, of any other country. We have it in ample bulk, of all ages, presented in that special fashion of comment on comment, of annotated annotation, which, whatever may be its merits or whatever may be its drawbacks, is at any rate suited to draw out examination of the common subject from almost every point of view.

And what do we find in this? We find, of course, verbal explanation in floods, in oceans, sometimes of the most valueless, often of the most valuable kind. We find laborious comment on etymology (not quite so often valuable as eccentric), on grammar (invaluable often), on mythology, &c., &c., giving us what, whether it be artistically worthy or worthless, we often could not otherwise by any possibility know. We get the most painstaking, if not always the most illuminative or illuminated, discussions of the poet’s meaning, handled simply, handled allegorically, handled “this way, that way, which way you please.” Not seldom, as elsewhere (in Eustathius, for instance), we get certain references to Figures and the technical rules of Rhetoric, which touch the outer skirts, the fringes, of literary criticism itself. But of that criticism, as represented even in Dionysius, much more in Longinus, the allowance is astonishingly small. You may read page after page, volume after volume, and find absolutely nothing, or next to nothing, of the sort. Take, for instance, the two volumes of Scholia on the Odyssey, as published by Dindorf—on the Odyssey, the very touchstone of all Greek literature for literary criticism, and one which proves the gold in Longinus at the very moment that it shows what we may think not so golden in him. You turn and turn. Besides the matter classified above, a great many extremely valuable, or at worst more or less curious, thoughts meet you. You will be informed (on Od. ii. 99) that “It is natural to women to dislike the parents of their husbands”; on vi. 137, that “All youth is fearful because of its want of experience, but especially female youth.” You will find examples of the puerile quibbling of Zoilus, such as that it was unlikely that exactly six sailors were taken from each ship; with the common-sense, if not much less puerile, retort that it is difficult 80to get ἑβδομήκοντα δύο into verse. But such things are no great windfall; and such others as the observation, at 391 of the same book, on the poet’s wonderful faculty and daring in making the sound suit the sense, and of showing in that sound “all the sorrow of the sight,” are very rare. They still more rarely soar above observations on special points, or reach criticism of general handling of the relations of one part of the story to another, of its pervading poetical quality and charm. For one note, vol. i. p. 425, a little farther on, as to the variety and aptness of the Homeric compound epithets for beasts, we shall find pages and sheets of mere trifling. And when we get a more thoughtful examination (see, for instance, that given as apparently Porphyry’s in the Appendix, ii. 789, on the conduct of Ulysses in selecting the persons to whom he shall first reveal himself), it strikes one at once that these, like the comments above cited on the Ajax, are comments on the action, on the dramatic structure, and not on the literary execution.

It is the same—it is perhaps even more the same—if we turn to the Iliad. The famous first words elicit naturally a good deal^[84] of comment, which has some promise. Why did he begin with “wrath,” which is an ill-sounding word? For two reasons. First, that he might purify the corresponding part of the souls of his readers by the passions, &c. Secondly, that he might give his “praises of the Greeks” greater verisimilitude. Besides, this was the practical subject with which he was first to deal as in a kind of tragic prologue. Then there is an odd gradation of the states of wrath itself, from ὀργὴ to μῆνις. Next, an inquiry why the poet begins with the end of the war, and so forth. This, of course, is literary criticism of a sort, but on thin and threadbare lines enough; and there is not very much even of this. The scholiasts are far more at home with accentuation and punctuation; with the endless question of athetesis (or blackmarking, as spurious); with such technical ticketings as at i. 366: “The trope is anakephalaiosis.^[85] There are four kinds of narrative—homiletic, 81apangeltic, hypostatic,^[86] and mixed”; or with such curiously unintelligent attempts to pin down poetic beauty as the note at i. 477 on ῥοδοδάκτυλος as a synecdoche, in which, by the way, even the colour-scheme seems to be misunderstood.

At the close of these remarks on the Scholiasts I must enter in a fresh form the caveat which has perhaps been wearisomely iterated, but which it is better to repeat too often than to suppress even in a single place where its omission might mislead. I am not finding fault with these laborious and invaluable persons for not doing what they had not the least intention to do. I am not (Heaven forbid!) arguing for any superiority in the modern critic over the ancient. I am only endeavouring to show that the subjects to which modern literary critics—who, as it seems to me, stick to their business most closely, and abstain most from metabasis ἐς ἄλλο γένος—pay most attention, were precisely those to which ancient critics, as a matter of fact, paid least. And this it is not only the right but the duty of the historian to point out.

Nor will it, I trust, while we are thus examining Miscellanea, be considered frivolous or superfluous to examine |The Literary Epigrams of the Anthology.| that vast mass of information on Greek life and thought after the Golden Age which is called the Greek Anthology,^[87] to see whether it can afford us any light. In this mass, with its thousands of articles ranging from exquisite to contemptible in actual literary quality, the range of subject is notoriously as wide as that of merit. The devotees of the Minor Muses of Hellas will “rhyme,” as we should say, anything from a riddle and an arithmetical conundrum, to Myron’s cow and the complimentary statues to the latest fashionable athlete. It would be odd, therefore, if books and authors escaped or were ignored, and they duly appear. In the battalions of adespota, besides a 82stray versification^[88] of the rules for making iambics, and a wail^[89] from some grammarian unnamed that he cannot write as well as Palladius or Palladas, we come to a considerable body^[90] of literary epigrams arranged, by some one or other of the numerous ancient editors of the Anthology, in vaguely chronological order of subject. First, as in duty bound, come Linus and Orpheus, then a considerable batch on Homer, and then the long succession of poets and philosophers, dramatists and historians, to follow. For the most part, of course, the epigrams contain generalities and commonplaces, but with more or less of the neatness and prettiness that we associate with the very name of the Anthology; sometimes they go a little closer to the matter, as in the piece (523 of Jacobs) on Erinna’s much-praised “Distaff.” As we have only five^[91] (and those not consecutive) out of the three hundred verses which this girl of nineteen years composed, it would be rash as well as unkind to question the judgment of the epigrammatist that they are “equal to Homer.” But it may safely be said that the judgment itself is in a rudimentary style of criticism. It is natural, but rather “tell-tale,” that the critic-poets always, when they can, take some non-literary point—Anacreon’s fondness for wine, the equality in number of the Muses and the books of Herodotus, the supposed physical and moral shortcomings of Aristotle, and the like. But sometimes they go higher. There is plenty of spirit and sense in the epigram on Panætius for pronouncing the Phædo spurious,—as is well known, this idlest of critical debauches was at least as great a favourite with the ancients as with the moderns (548). Sometimes we get valuable testimony as to popular judgments—the unfeigned admiration which was felt for Menander, though the sounder critics might put him below Aristophanes; the mighty repute of Aristides of Smyrna (see p. 113) who is pretty certainly not the Aristides congratulated ironically in another epigram as never having less than seven auditors—the four walls of the room, and the three benches in it. 83Perhaps Claudian is a little overparted with the “mind of Virgil and the Muse of Homer.” But all decadences are given to exaggeration of this kind; and the reviews of the closing years of the nineteenth century in England will furnish much more extravagant instances of comparison.

The work of known, or at least named, individuals is less noteworthy in bulk, and not much more so in kind and degree. The right happy industry of Meleager appears to have helped in preserving for us no small proportion of the minor work of the great men of old. But his own quintessenced and not seldom charming pen is devoted to subjects always less solemn, and sometimes very much less worthy, than literature. These elders themselves (as indeed we should expect) meddle with literature but rarely; while their successors, the early Alexandrians, are less copious than we might have expected. Simmias of Thebes (perhaps not the same who outraged^[92] the feelings of neo-classic critics, from Addison downwards, two thousand years later, by composing verse-eggs and -hatchets) has left us a couple of elegant and regular, though rather vague and slight, epigrams on Sophocles;^[93] Philiscus of Miletus, who was at least old enough to be a pupil of Isocrates, a pompous eulogium of Lysias;^[94] while no less a person than Thucydides has the credit of one^[95] on the Third Tragedian, which if extravagant in tone is neat in expression. Of the compliments^[96] to Aristophanes and Sappho, which are similarly attributed to Plato, the former, with its consecration of the soul of the great comic poet as the temenos of the Graces, is far the better. But the nearest approach to literature among the verses attributed to Plato’s mightiest rival is a quaint bundle (no small one)^[97] of epitaphs on the Homeric heroes. Of course these attributions are in all cases very doubtful, and possibly not in a single one correct; but the fact of them for literary history remains the same.

If we turn to others, we shall draw some of the most flourishing 84coverts in vain, but find something elsewhere. Erycius of Cyzicus^[98] has a spirited retort to an insulter of Homer, and a generous eulogium of Sophocles—it is noteworthy that these two most unite the Anthological, as the general, suffrage. Palladas handles Homer’s dealings with women,^[99] elsewhere^[100] jests ruefully about having to sell his books, even Callimachus and Pindar, and moralises^[101] the story of Circe, rather stupidly, but in a fashion for which he might find only too many compurgators in antiquity. Pollianus^[102] rallies (not disagreeably) the stealers of Homeric tags and phrases; and a certain Cyrus accomplishes^[103] a mild couplet to complete his own witty conceit of erecting a statue of Pindar at a bath. The long and curious poem^[104] of Christodorus Coptites on the statues in the Gymnasium of Zeuxippus naturally has a great many literary allusions. Agathias—a somewhat major star than most of these, and one whose pursuits earned him the special surname of Scholasticus—has, so far as I remember, only two literary epigrams^[105] on statues of Æsop and Plutarch. Another “Scholasticus,” scarcely distinguished more by the name of Thomas, announces that he has three “stars in rhetoric”—Demosthenes, Aristides, and Thucydides^[106]—praising especially the pains of the first, but seeming actually to prefer the two latter. Leon, the philosopher, has a little handful^[107] of epigrams on books, chiefly of science and philosophy, and a Homeric cento not more respectable than such things usually are.

The great name of Theocritus is attached^[108] to pieces, not inelegant but very distinctly banal, on Anacreon, Epicharmus, Archilochus, Hipponax; and that of the lesser Alcæus (not the great one of Mitylene, but the much lesser Messenian) to some praises of Homer,^[109] of Hesiod,^[110] and again of Hipponax. Dioscorides^[111] extols Sappho, defends the much-injured Philænis against those who (to judge from confirmatory testimony to the same effect elsewhere) played upon her the same ignoble trick by which a certain Frenchman, in days nearer our own, tried 85to blast the fair fame of Luisa Sigea of Toledo. He is complimentarily orthodox as to Sophocles, but not much less complimentary to Sositheus, of whom we know little, and to Macho, of whom, thanks to Athenæus, we know that he exercised his wits upon putting naughty anecdotes into uncommonly pedestrian verse. An epigram of the Grammarian Crates^[112] refers to the controversy on the respective merits of Chœrilus, Antimachus, and Homer, and would have been very welcome if it had given us some information on that matter; but as it is, the subject is a mere pretext to enable Crates to “talk greasily.” Antipater of Sidon,^[113] starting from the childish debate about the birthplace of Homer, turns it into something better by his conclusion—

and he subsequently celebrates Sappho, “Erinna of few verses,” and Pindar, returning to the same subjects (except Erinna) in another batch, and adding a group on Anacreon (who, as fertile in commonplaces, is a favourite subject of the Anthologians), Stesichorus, and Ibycus.

At least three epigrams of a different sort rather make us regret that there are not more of the same kind, instead of the iteration of stock phrases. The first,^[114] by Herodicus of Babylon, is a smart onslaught on the “fry of Aristarchus,” the “mono-syllabists” who care for nothing but ΣΦΙΝ and ΣΦΩιΝ and ΜΙΝ and ΝΙΝ. The second,^[115] by Antiphanes, hails the “busybody race” of grammarians who “dig up the roots of other people’s muses,” with a great many more abusive but not quite inappropriate epithets and comparisons. The third,^[116] by Philippus, is perhaps the best of the three, girding at the “whelps of Zenodotus” with a kind of combination of the other two, which is very likely actual and intentional. Philip (v. infra) was a careful student of the elders of his craft. Antipater of Thessalonica^[117] has quite a group of literary epigrams. He celebrates the Nine Poetesses, takes part in the Antimachus-Homer 86debate, refusing the Colophonian primacy, but granting him second rank and the praise of rough vigour (“the Hammer on the anvil of the Pierides”), &c., and honours Aristophanes. Homer once more occupies Alpheus of Mitylene^[118] and Antiphilus of Byzantium,^[119] while Philippus of Thessalonica^[120] devotes a “pretty but slim” comparison with flowers to the principal bards of the Anthology itself.

This same Philippus has also a not unhappy conceit^[121] about Hipponax bidding the usual passer-by at his tomb “not wake the sleeping wasp, Whose shafts fly straight although his metres limp.” A pale addition to the garland of Sophocles comes from the doubtless alien hand of Stratyllius Flaccus,^[122] and Hesiod supplies only a play on words to the better artistry of Marcus Argentarius,^[123] while the accident of our order of reading—a genuine accident—finishes a volume, and the tale, with the marvellously lame and only epigram of a certain Pinytus^[124] on no less a person than Sappho.

A very thankless wretch would he be who was not grateful for any legitimate excuse to wander once more through the length and breadth of the enchanted gardens of the Anthology. But the reperusal can only strengthen the opinion already formed that on the actual “evaluation of π” in criticism the Greek mind, whether wisely or unwisely, was not strongly set. Nothing can be clearer than that the forms, the range, the etiquette, so to speak, of the compositions which are here grouped, invited criticism in the graver way as thorough as that which Ben Jonson gives to Shakespeare, Camden, and a dozen others; in the lighter as sharp, and at the same time as piercing, as that of Piron on La Chaussée. But it was not the mode, and they were not in the vein. With rare exceptions they obeyed the classical principle of taking the accepted, the obvious, the orthodox, and dressing it up in their best way. It by no means follows that they were not right; but it does follow that they leave us a little unsatisfied. To tell us that Homer is great, Sappho lofty, Sophocles perfect, Aristophanes witty, is (to use the old comparison of George Gascoigne) to 87praise the “crystal eye” and the “cherry lip” of any gentle-woman. And so we may turn to the division of Greek literature most opposite to the Anthology itself.

Before considering in some, at least, representative detail the vast and arid province of the technical Greek Rhetoric, it may be |The Rhetoric of the Schools.| well, or rather is absolutely necessary, to resume the consideration of what Rhetoric really meant. As we have seen, it was at the beginning a strictly practical Art of Persuasion by Oratory; and if it tended to embrace and absorb all or most other arts and sciences, this was partly because the orator would certainly have to deal with many, and might have to deal with all, of these, partly because it was always more or less a political art, an art of public business. For the Greek politician, like others, was expected to be a Jack-of-all-trades.

But even while this practical object continued, the Greek passion for abstracting and refining tended to turn practice into theory, while the Greek love of sport, competition, public display, tended further to turn this theory into the code of a very elaborate game. Obviously enough, as the practical importance of oratory declined, the technical and “sporting” interest of Rhetoric got more and more the upper hand. Rhetoricians specialised their terminology, multiplied their classifications, and drew their rules ever finer and finer, just as croquet-players narrow their hoops and bulge out their balls, just as whist-players split and wire-draw the broad general principles of the play of Deschapelles and Clay into “American leads,” and an endless reverberation of “calls” and “echoes.” We possess a very large, and a more curious than interesting, collection of the technical writings of this half craft, half sport, and a collection, rather less in proportion, but a little more interesting, of examples of the finished handiwork or game. To both of these we must now turn, premising that the technical part has not very much, and the finished examples surprisingly little, to furnish to the stricter literature of our subject. Why, then, do we deal with it? Because even abused Rhetoric is always Literary Criticism in a more or less degraded and disguised condition. The degradation can be remedied, the disguise thrown off, whenever the hour and the man arrive. Rhetoric, in 88her worst moods, keeps the tools ready, keeps them almost too sharply ground, if she does not put them to the right use.

As Rhetoric preserved her authority not merely to the latest classical times but right through the Middle Ages, and even at |Its documents.| the close of the latter escaped, at the cost only of some minor changes and additions, the decay which fell upon the rest of Scholastic learning, it is not surprising that the Rhetores Græci received early attention from the young art of Printing. Had not Aldus, in 1508-1509, collected them in two folio volumes, it is perhaps rather unlikely that we should have had any more modern collections at all. For technical Rhetoric fell into even more disfavour than Logic with the rise of physical science and materialist philosophy in the seventeenth century; and though, in some applied senses of the word, it has never fallen into complete disuse, it has never, as Logic has, recovered position in its stricter and more formal forms. It was therefore no small feat, even of German industry, when, some seventy years ago, Christian Walz of Tübingen undertook a new edition,^[125] which, though some additions and improvements have since been made by Spengel^[126] and others, remains the main standard and thesaurus. Its ten stout volumes, of some seven thousand closely printed pages, have probably been read through, and line by line, by hardly a single person for each decade of the seven during which it has been before the world. For not only is the bulk enormous, but the matter is extremely technical; there is endless repetition, commentaries on commentaries on commentaries forming no small part of the whole, while the minute definition and special terminology^[127] 89require extremely careful reading. I shall not pretend to have read every word of it myself; but I have read a very great deal of it, and everything that follows can be guaranteed as drawn at first hand.

The original treatises of the collection form its smallest part, and none of them is very early; indeed, of the earlier formal Rhetoric, as has been said, Aristotle is almost our only representative, though, luckily, he is worth all the others. If the περὶ ἑρμηνείας, or De Interpretatione, which goes by the name of Demetrius, had been rightly referred (in accordance with nearly all the MSS., as far as the name goes, and with the assent of so distinguished and acute a scholar as Petrus Victorius in regard to the person) to Demetrius of Phalerus,—the Athenian statesman and orator of the latter half of the fourth century B.C., the antagonist of his namesake the City-Taker and lover of Lamia, the scholar of Theophrastus, the schoolfellow of Menander, the probable consulting founder of the Alexandrian library—its interest of authorship would be only inferior to that of the work of the greatest writers. But the allusions and citations in the treatise itself (unless we suppose it to have been edited and interpolated to an extent such as to make it useless as a document) are such as to put this attribution out of the question. And while Dionysius and others have been put forward as possible claimants, there seems no reason to doubt that the most probable author is to be found in some Alexandrian grammarian or sophist of the name of Demetrius (perhaps the one actually named by Diogenes Laertius as having written rhetorical treatises), who may have lived under the Antonines. There is, therefore, no reason for disturbing Walz’s actual order.^[128]

His first volume is composed of divers more or less original treatises, which are of the kind called προγυμνάσματα, “Preliminary Exercises,” and which in most cases actually bear that title. The first is by the famous Hermogenes (ob. c. 170 A.D.), 90the Phœnix of rhetoricians pure and simple, who became a master at fifteen and an idiot at five-and-twenty, whose “heart was covered with hair,” and whose works not only followed him, but were followed by libraries-full of scholiasts and commentators. The next, itself a sort of adaptation of Hermogenes, is by Aphthonius of Antioch, a teacher of the beginning of the fourth century A.D., who had the rather curious good fortune not merely to secure a long vogue in the late classical ages, but to be current in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Theon, an Alexandrian, but not the father of Hypatia, follows, with the less-known names of Nicolas, Nicephorus, Adrian, Severus, and the better known George Pachymeres, as well as another collection by an anonym. Of these, the works attributed to Adrian and Severus are not called προγυμνάσματα, but in the first case μελέται, in the second διηγήματα καὶ ἠθοποΐαι.^[129] The most famous and popular of the sets, those of Hermogenes and Aphthonius, are very short, and, like that of Georgius Pachymeres, do not exceed fifty pages. The others are longer, and in the case of the work of Nicolas, some three times as long.

The opening of the Progymnasmata of Hermogenes is a curious and slightly bewildering mixture of definition, literary |The Progymnasmata of Hermogenes.| history, and the kind of “Manual for Young Writers” (lege orators), which, after long disuse, has recently begun to be prepared for the aspiring journalist. The first chapter is on Fables. They are supposed to be good things for the young. They have various authors and titles, but there is a tendency to give the name of Æsop to all of them. They are not true to fact; but should be plausible, and can be made so by suiting the action to the characters and making the peacock stand for beauty and vanity, the fox for wisdom, the ape for mimicry. Sometimes you should give them shortly, sometimes spin them out. (Example given.) You may put them in different places of your speech, and they will do instead of an actual example.

The second chapter is of Narration (διήγημα), which is distinguished 91from Fable as being the story of something which has either actually happened or is told as if it had. Homer and Herodotus are both “narrators.” There are five kinds of it (one thinks of Polonius)—the directly declaratory, the indirectly ditto, the elenchtic, the loose, the periodic—with examples of each kind.^[130] The first is good for story, the second for debate, “the elenchtic [confuting] is rather for elenchs,” and the loose for epilogues, as being pathetic.

We might at very little expense of trouble, if at much of space, go through the whole of the little treatise and show how the hairy-hearted one of Tarsus deals in the same way with “Uses,”^[131] Maxims, Refutation and Confirmation, Commonplace, Encomium, Comparison, Character-drawing,^[132] Ecphrasis,^[133] Thesis,^[134] and Introduction. But the examples given will suffice. Each chapter consists of a definition, a division, sometimes very finely drawn, of kinds, examples, and generally a scrap of advice as to how, when, and where to introduce them.

The good and the evil of this kind of thing, as well as its special bearings on literary criticism, are not difficult to discern. |Remarks on them.| It necessitates the narrowest and most accurate investigation of the kinds and characteristics of literature, of literary means, of “composition,” in the wide and the narrow sense. It confers on apt students, besides the mere ability to play the special game of artificial oratory, a great acuteness of analysis. It entirely avoids, no doubt, the danger which is charged constantly, and sometimes not without a certain justice, on the more æsthetic kind of literary study and 92literary criticism—the danger of desultory chatter. It has, in short, though to a less degree, the virtues of Formal Logic. And if the subject of Education, and fresh nostrums in it, were not a weariness to all intelligent mankind, one might say that not a few things in our present curricula might with advantage be excluded to make room for a course (with some due alterations) of Rhetoric according to Hermogenes. But, at the same time, its own shortcomings and its own dangers are equally obvious. The greatest of them—indeed one which in a manner swallows up and contains within itself all the others—is the almost irresistible temptation to regard literature as something according to scheme and schedule, something that the pocket ivory rule of the architect, and his neatly latticed paper, and a short handbook like this before us, will enable you to despatch and dispose of. Acute as are the divisions and definitions, they are dead things; and nothing that imitates and follows them can be really alive.

Aphthonius adopts the same divisions of Progymnasmata, save that he makes them fourteen instead of twelve, by |Aphthonius.| separating ἀνασκευὴ [rebutting] from κατασκευὴ [confirming], and adding a section on Blame. His object was evidently to make even the business-like handling of his predecessor more precise still; and the long and revived popularity which, as has been said, he achieved, was not an undue reward for one of the most craftsmanlike crambooks that ever deserved the encomium of the epithet and the discredit of the noun. Aphthonius substitutes for the simple heading “Of Myth,” &c., “Definition of Myth,” &c.; and though he still keeps his sections very short, he manages, instead of the rather brachygraphic indication of examples in the text, to give an appendix of complete if miniature pattern at the end of each section—a fable of the ants and grasshoppers, urging youth to industry, for the first; the story of the rose and its acquiring redness from the blood of Aphrodite when she struck her foot against its thorns in trying to shield Adonis from Ares, for the second; and so on. In every respect, Aphthonius has studied clearness, and he has certainly achieved it. If it were not for the dangers of the whole 93method, and especially that greatest one, of encouraging the mistake of classification for fact, terms for things, orderly reference to a schedule for æsthetic appreciation, he would deserve very hearty applause. And even as it is, one could, as has been said above, see the study which he facilitates substituted for any one of at least a dozen subjects of our modern overcrowded curriculum with a great deal of equanimity. Short as the piece is, some of the examples, such as the encomia of Thucydides and of Wisdom, are compositions of considerable finish. But it is significant that in the first there is, strictly speaking, no literary criticism at all, and that even the inevitable comparison with Herodotus is poorly shuffled off with the stock reproach that Herodotus writes to please, Thucydides to speak the truth.

Theon, with greater space at his command, employs a different method. It is uncertain whether he preceded or followed |Theon.| Aphthonius; but the former theory is favoured by the fact that he, like Hermogenes, has twelve subjects only, those which Aphthonius put asunder being still united. He begins with a general disquisition on, and encomium of, the Progymnasmata, widening them somewhat, so as to bring in Figures to some extent, but also describing some of these as “contentious” or “disputed.” Then he has a rather curious chapter, nearer to our special purpose than usual, showing how, not merely the great orators, but the great writers of old, used these forms, or rather things which can be brought under these forms, citing the famous speech of Sophocles as to his emancipation from love in the Republic, the fable of the flute-player in Herodotus, others in other historians, and a very great many more things, not a few of which are lost. This enumeration is not only interesting as pointing to these desiderata, but as showing how unhappy the Greek was unless he could arrange and classify and ticket, as well as, distinguish and enjoy, the parts and characteristics of literature. The spirit is not dead yet: it has prompted a much-respected living author on Rhetoric to describe In Memoriam as “a combined Hyperbole of Affection and Sorrow.” And this may undoubtedly be said in its 94favour, that its exercise does really require and promote a certain intellectual alertness and activity. But the question is, Do this alertness and this activity exert themselves in actual progress, or in mere marking-time? Is the comprehension (one can hardly even ask Is the enjoyment) of In Memoriam furthered by its orderly arrangement in the case generally labelled “Hyperbole,” and in the compartment labelled “Combined Hyperboles,” and in the further pigeon-hole labelled “Of Affection and Sorrow”? Is it really important to decide whether Sophocles’s variation on “sour grapes” is a χρεία or an apophthegm, and which are the most remarkable examples of διήγημα in the orators and the historians respectively? Such things may appear to some specially and fatally to underlie the Platonic curse on the appearance of knowledge without the reality. But they have, as we see, very strong and long prescription, and there are still some who bitterly resent the exclusion of them from the teaching, not merely of technical Rhetoric, but of literature—who regard a system of “leaden rules,” of individual appreciation without classes and compartments and indorsements, as dilettante, unscientific (which it would certainly allow itself to be), and effeminate. Between the two, opinion, a little assisted by Logic and History, must be left to decide.

Theon’s handling of the Progymnasmata (which he often speaks of without the pro) is, as has been said, much fuller than those of Hermogenes and Aphthonius. He does not, like the latter of these, give a regular formal pattern of each kind; but he has a great many illustrative references to literature, and he has a good deal of discussion on what may be called the philosophy of the several kinds. Nor is it unnoteworthy that in dealing with Commonplace he drops the “common,” substitutes prosopopœia for ethopœia, and introduces the curious new heading of “Law.” On the whole, Theon is more “for thoughts” than either of his forerunners;^[135] he might profit a clever boy more, and he has much more numerous and deeper glimmerings of insight into the purely critical side of the 95matter. But he lacks system, and this, in dealing with a subject which is systematic or nothing, is a drawback.

There was a rhetorical Nicolaus (indeed the name was very common) who was a student of Proclus; but the author of the |Nicolaus.| Progymnasmata we possess seems to have flourished later, under the Emperor Leo and after him. For some reason or none, MSS. of him seem to be specially found at Oxford. They are merely examples, several of each kind, and sometimes minutely subdivided, there being, for instance, separate patterns of mixed, unmixed, logical, and practical “Use.” They form, in fact, a curious bundle, and by no means a very small one, of partial declamations in common form, the examples of Ethopœia being especially remarkable: “What sort of things Niobe would say,” “What Menœceus the patriotic suicide,” “What Cassandra at the sight of the horse,” &c. No less than fourteen in all are given.

This is also the principle of the Progymnasmata of Nicephorus Basilicus, a notary (not the son-in-law chronicled by |Nicephorus.| Scott) of Alexius Comnenus, who gives no less than three-and-twenty Ethopœiæ on subjects Pagan and Christian. In fact, these two collections, which together fill some two hundred and fifty well-packed pages, may be regarded rather as rhetorical reading-books, designedly intended to possess a certain interest, than as anything else. Familiarity with them would be likely to produce much the same sort of literary facility, and in a sense “correctness,” as that which we find in the minor French writers of the eighteenth century. It could, after mere childhood (when it might insensibly inculcate some good principles and some sound models), have little other good effect.

The few μελέται of Adrianus, the successor and funeral eulogist of Herodes Atticus, are whole declamations, not |Minors.| brought under any of the heads. The Diegemata and Ethopœiæ of Severus, after what has been said of these kinds, will need no special characterisation; and the Progymnasmata of George Pachymeres (who was nearly contemporary with Dante) and of the Anonymus are, like so many of the others, pure examples, indeed (as the former 96are well called in one MS.) Meletæ on the Progymnasmata themselves.

No great resumption or amplification of the scattered comments already made on these works can be necessary. They form a by no means contemptible group of "Composition |General remarks on the Progymnasmata.| books," creditably distinguished from some more modern examples of the same kind by being busy with something better than mere grammar, but not as a rule showing any of that conception of style which is visible as early as Dionysius, distinct in Quintilian, and present in a form at once vigorous and exquisite in Longinus. They are by no means ill calculated to excite an interest in literature, and even to facilitate the production, in not contemptible form, of certain kinds of it. But there is upon all of them the curse of beginning at the wrong end—of constructing an elaborate skeleton system of forms, and kinds, and sub-kinds, and then classifying literature under these, instead of beginning with the literature, separating the good from the bad, and examining, as far as may be possible, the sources of goodness and badness. A man trained in them would have many advantages over our heaven-born, but hardly even earth-instructed, reviewers and students of literature. But he would be very apt to miss the finer touches, to lose the nobler gusts, of literature; and he would be especially disposed towards that worst disease of criticism, so often manifested in its history, which leads men to ignore, or even blaspheme, great work, because it refuses to be classified, or to obey the arbitrary rules which have been foisted into, or encrusted upon, the classification.

Not from such a point of view did the still later teachers, who set themselves to comment on the comment of Hermogenes |The Commentaries on them.| and Aphthonius, regard their authorities. The second volume of Walz—a stout one of nearly seven hundred pages—is entirely occupied with scholia on Aphthonius alone, at the rate, that is to say, of about fourteen pages of margent to one of text. This flood of words about words has been too much for the patience even of the editor, who gives specimens only of some, and in just wrath labels one as “a futile opuscule botched together with utter 97stupidity.” Much, indeed, is of the usual kind which we associate with scholia—verbal interpretation, sometimes not useless, but as a rule singularly pedestrian and uninspired, introduced with a monotonous rattle of clichés and catchwords. But there are also better things, and the so-called “Homilies” of Doxopater, besides being of very considerable bulk (they fill some four hundred pages, not of mere scrappy annotation but of substantive commentary), attest the intelligence as well as the industry of their author, a Byzantine of the eleventh century. But they are (necessarily, no doubt) cribbed and cabined by the circumscriptions of their text.

In the third volume we return to comparatively original work, with Hermogenes once more at the head of the authors. |The "Art" of Hermogenes.| We have left the vestibule—the Progymnasmata—and are now in the main courts of pure Rhetoric herself. Much more than half the volume is occupied by the four divisions of the master’s Technic: the first of “Staseis,” the second, in four parts, of “Inventions,” the third of “Ideas,” and the fourth of “Cleverness^[136] of Method.” One synopsis of about a hundred pages, an anonymous epitome of fifty, with eleven shorter epitomes, and other tractates, scarcely averaging a dozen pages each, complete the volume.

There is no doubt that the manual of Hermogenes is the text-book of later Greek Rhetoric. Five mortal volumes of Walz, one of nearly nine hundred pages, are occupied by scholia upon it, two of these being devoted to the Staseis alone; and it seems to have been the model subject even of those who did not ostensibly range themselves as its commentators. The book of the Staseis, which produced fifteen hundred pages of extant and printed commentary, has itself but fifty or sixty, the great bulk of the treatise being contained under the heads of “Inventions” and “Ideas.” There is a table of contents, but it may be feared that this will be of but partial service to any one not acquainted with the technicalities of the subject. Others may 98indeed be relieved by the names of well-known Greek orators and historians, who appear to be discussed under “Ideas,” and even by those of some commonly known Figures in the last division. But on the whole Terminology revels in all her wildest Greek luxuriance. Hypodiæresis and Prodiegesis guard the labyrinth with Antenclema and Procatastasis^[137] ready at hand; more familiar words have obviously assumed new senses; and it is not even the very easiest thing to acquire a distinct and satisfactory idea of the connotation of the great section-headings themselves, while, when that idea is at last attained, we may find that it is for our special purpose irrelevant, or nearly so.

The best instance stands, at the very threshold of the investigation, in the very name of those Staseis which, as we have seen, attracted the commentators as a candle does flies. Στάσις is a term which appears impossible to translate into any single English word, even in that legal vocabulary to which (far more than to anything having to do with literature) it really belongs. Its Latin equivalent is status or constitutio:^[138] M. Egger renders it in French as état de cause; Liddell and Scott do not attempt to render it at all; but it and its Latin equivalents have been variously translated as “state of the case,” “issue,” “point.” Sometimes it seems as if it might be not impossibly translated “plea.” Hermogenes (who plunges at once, after his fashion, into a wilderness of the most wiredrawn distinctions) gives no general definition, but says that στάσις ὁρικὴ is “the search for a name for a thing,” and instances the case of a man who has stolen the private property of a priest. Is this Sacrilege or Theft? The opening for hair-splitting which such an inquiry gives is, of course, a very wide one, and Hermogenes simply revels in the indulgence thereof. But for us 99there is hardly a blade of pasture in the field on which centuries of commentators browsed so greedily.

Εὑρέσις again may be “for thoughts.” Again we can find no single word for them, how much less for such niceties as procatastasis and prodiegesis? The term covers the additions to the case introduced by the speaker’s own invention, and ranges over a vast variety of subtleties, ending with a treatment of some Figures. The examination of “Ideas”^[139] shifts to the qualities of the speech or speaker—clearness, purity, dignity, energy, brilliancy, and very many others, ending with that survey of great speakers and writers which has been noted. And finally the treatise on “Cleverness of method” contains, not only more figures, but a profusion of mostly brief and rather desultory cautions. Throughout the book the author seems in a sort of paroxysm of distinction and nomenclature: he is always striving to make out some one thing to be at least two things, and to fit each of the two with some technological form.

We turn, naturally enough, to the dealings with great writers mentioned above to see what this method, of analysis pushed to the verge of mania, will give us. They are very short—not in all filling twenty pages—and, as we might have expected, they contain little more than simple reference to the technicalities on which so much time has been spent. Literary criticism, in short, becomes a form of chemical analysis. We all know how this runs, as posted up, say, outside the walls of a pump-room. The water contains iron so many grains, sulphur so much, chlorine so much, nitrates a trace, and so forth. So here. Lysias has moderate ἐπιμέλια, only a trace of γοργότης, a certain amount of περιβολή κατ’ ἔννοιαν, but hardly any of it κατὰ μέθοδον, very little that is axiomatic, but a great deal of cleverness of method. On the other hand, Isæus has a great deal of γοργότης,^[140] more abundant ἐπιμέλεια, and so with other 100things. He is not so good as Demosthenes (who, be it observed, is Hermogenes' ideal), but much better than Lysias, though he has not so much clearness of method, yet still a good deal. Of the historians, Xenophon is very particularly ἀφελὴς and also “sweet,” &c., &c.

Perhaps the following sentence may serve as well as any other as an example of the method of Hermogenes. It is from the fourth chapter of the third book, περὶ εὑρέσεων:—

“Since many have set out many things about epicheiremes^[141] and have spent much speech on this, and nobody has been able to bring it home to the mind clearly, I shall endeavour, as clearly as I can, to decide what is the invention of the epicheireme which constructs the kephalaion or the lusis, and what the invention of the ergasia which constructs the epicheireme, and what the invention of the enthymeme which constructs the ergasia.” I quote this with none of that ignorant scorn of terminology, as such, which authorities so different as Hamilton and Mill have justly denounced in reference to the common eighteenth-century judgments of the schoolmen. But it will be obvious to anybody that this kind of writing tends to the construction of a sort of spider’s web of words, the symmetry and exactness of construction whereof are in inverse ratio to substance and practical use. It may catch flies; it undoubtedly gives a sense of ingenuity and mastery to the spider. But it has extremely little sweetness: it rather obstructs the light: and it is not capable of being put (for it will not even staunch wounds) to any of those practical purposes which objects possessing very little sweetness, and no light at all, not unfrequently subserve.

We shall still have something to say of Hermogenes when we come to the conclusion of this Rhetorical matter; but for the |Other “Arts,” &c.| present it is necessary to pass on to the writers associated with him in this third volume of Walz. The Art of Rhetoric of Rufus, whose age and identity are quite unknown, is a very brief and rather slight skeleton, with classifications, definitions of terms, and a few examples. Perhaps 101the most interesting thing about it is the addition of a fourth kind—historic—to the usual three—forensic, and symbouleutic, and epideictic. The very common habit, to which reference has been already made, of taking examples almost indiscriminately from orators and historians, has evidently a logical connection (whether of cause or effect) with this. An anonymous “Synopsis” is busied with Hermogenes only. Joseph the Rhacendyte, who seems to have been a thirteenth-century man and a native of the “little isle” of Ithaca, is much fuller, has written an argument of his book in about 150 iambic trimeters, of a kind which would bring severe tribulation on the British schoolboy, and is noteworthy (though he would be more so if it were not for his late day) because he has evidently reached the stage where Rhetoric is recognised as the Art of Literature. His chapter-headings have the curious confusion and jumble which characterises much, if not most, Rhetoric since the strict oratorical side was lost sight of,—he has one on epistolary writing, one even on verse: and from several points of view his interest is not infinitesimal. It is very far from superfluous to note, though it may be impossible to discuss in detail, the significance of the fact that while another Anonym gives us four parts of a perfect speech—proem, diegesis, agon, and epilogue, a third notes eight parts of rhetorical speech—conception, style, figure, method, clause, composition, punctuation, and rhythm.

For, arbitrary and “cross,” in the technical sense, as these divisions are (and as, it may be noted in passing, are all subsequent attempts to produce things of the same kind), they testify to a salutary sense of dissatisfaction. They make tacit or more than tacit acknowledgment that something must be put in the place of the old, defunct, purely oratorical Rhetoric—nay, that that Rhetoric itself was incomplete, and would have needed extension even if it had not been defunct of its old office. Of still further Anonyms one (only partly given in Walz) is interesting because it attempts a kind of historical introduction; another is couched in “political” (accent-scanned) verses, with curious refrains in the different sections, and with odd prose insertions, as are the acknowledged epitomes of 102Tzetzes and Psellus. The remainder of the volume consists of a brief dictionary of figures, a treatise of some interest on “Rhetorical Metres” by a certain Castor, and a brief ecthesis or exposition of rhetoric generally.

The enormous collection of the scholia on Hermogenes fortunately requires no detailed notice.^[142] At most could we pick out a few isolated passages bearing more or less directly on our subject, and even these would be of scarcely any value, seeing that the authorship and date of most of them are quite unknown, and that hardly any can be said to possess that intrinsic literary interest which might make questions of date and authorship unimportant.

The eighth and ninth volumes (really the ninth and tenth) present matter of more individual interest—the eighth because of the principal subject, which with comparatively little alteration is treated by a great number of authors, the ninth for other reasons. This subject—a subject which was to exercise a disastrous attraction on the Rhetoric of the Renaissance and even of later times—consists of the famous, or infamous, Figures.^[143]

We know from a contemptuous phrase of Quintilian (see post) that long before his time the facility of compounds in |Treatises on Figures.| Greek had induced the Greeks to multiply Figures beyond all sense and endurance. Yet as we have partly seen, in the so numerously attended school of Hermogenes, these famous playthings, though not exactly neglected, did not receive the first attention. Others, however, made up for any apparent neglect of them. We have, specially devoted to the subject, under the head of σχήματα or of τρόποι, some fifteen or sixteen treatises—some by named authors, others anonymous. The first, by a certain Alexander, divides Figures as usual into those of the meaning and those of the style, and enumerates twenty of the former and twenty-seven 103of the latter; Phœbammon deals more shortly with a somewhat smaller number of figures, brought under more general heads; and Tiberius the rhetorician confines himself to the figures in Demosthenes. Herodian has a very large number of poetical examples—a device which, as we shall see, served to keep Rhetoric nearer and nearer to literature as time went on. The little treatise of Polybius of Sardis deals less with figures individually than with figurativeness; while an Anonymus, neglecting to some extent the usual phraseology, but reducing the usual procedure unawares to the absurd, manages to give a vast number by taking individual expressions from Homer and making a figure out of each. Zonæus follows more succinctly on the lines of Alexander; another Anonymus busies himself with Synecdoche only, and yet another adopts the dictionary arrangement, as do divers others with Tropes. One of the best pieces of the whole is the treatise of Georgius Choeroboscus, a writer of the fourth or fifth century. It is short, and deals with only a few figures; but these are the important ones, the definitions are mostly clear and sensible, and the examples, though not numerous, are well chosen.

The ninth volume opens with the not unimportant work to which reference has been made above, the De Interpretatione |The Demetrian De Interpretatione.| of Demetrius the Uncertain. But it also contains six other works on various divisions of Rhetoric, one of which is at least interesting for the great name of Longinus attached to it (as some would have it with greater certainty than in the case of the work that we would rather wish his), and others for other matter.

Demetrius takes a somewhat independent view of his subject, which he puts on a level with Poetics, but does not call Rhetoric. As Poetry, he states, deals with—or at least is distinguished and divided by—metres (this netteté is refreshing, and we shall go farther to fare very often worse), so what are called clauses^[144] divide and distinguish the interpretation of prose speech. Then, directing attention directly to clauses, he illustrates their kinds from the respective beginnings 104of the histories of Hecatæus and the Anabasis of Xenophon, and prefers (though not to the exclusion of what he does not prefer) short clauses to long. From clauses he goes to periods, discussing and analysing their composition rather narrowly, and then returns to parallel clauses, whence striking off to homœoteleuta he continues his treatise under a great number of similar heads, betraying the slightly heterogeneous and higgledy-piggledy arrangement which, as we have said already, is so apt to beset these writers on Rhetoric. But he maintains throughout a creditable desire to identify his subject with the Art of Prose Composition, and not merely with Persuasion, or with the composition of an extremely artificial kind of prize essay on lines more artificial still.

The rhetor Menander, who has left us a treatise on the third division of rhetorical speeches, Epideictic (generally subdivided |Menander on Epideictic.| into encomia and invectives), is thought to have lived at the end of the third century. From the first his treatment is of considerable literary interest, because he handles the sources of the material of these curiously artificial compositions. First, he takes the hymns about the gods, and here, according to the way of his class, he rushes at once into a classification. There are, it seems, nine kinds of hymns—Cletic, apopemptic,^[145] physic, mythic, genealogical, artificial, prayerful, deprecating, and mixed—the appearance of which last heading, here and elsewhere, always makes one wonder how a person of any logical gifts could write it down without seeing that he made his whole classification ridiculous if not fraudulent thereby. Then he quotes a great number of authors, ranging them under the heads. A separate chapter is next given to each kind, still referring to many authors, but unluckily seldom or never citing the actual passages. Next he passes to the Praising of Cities, that very important part of the bread-study of the travelling rhetor, who had to make himself welcome by accommodating his lectures to local patriotism, as we see, for instance, in Dion Chrysostom (v. infra). Hardly in the whole of this dully fantastic division of literature shall we find anything quainter 105than the sections devoted to this subject. If the city is a landward one, you will point out how safe it is from piratical attacks; if it is on the coast, you will dwell on the splendours and advantages of the sea. “How to praise Harbours,” “How to praise Gulfs,” “What is the best fashion of encomium for an Acropolis?”—these actual headings meet us. At even fuller length the orator is told how to praise not merely the site but the population and its origin, the neighbours (perhaps dispraising them might come in best here), the customs, and so forth. In short, the little treatise reminds one most of those modern cookery-books which—assuming the housewives who will read them to be of Paraguayan kin, and to continue idiots—give not only prescriptions for dishes but lists of dinners and rules of etiquette. One hardly wonders that a man like Lucian, of mother-wit compact to the finger-tips, should have soon left a profession in which the average practitioner seems to have been taken for granted as next door to a fool, without either common-sense or imagination enough to meet the most obvious requirements of his business.

One MS. of Menander stops here, but another gives us much more of the same kind, dealing with the βασιλικὸς |Others.| λόγος—flattery of kings—with epithalamia, with consolations, et cetera. The general scheme is much the same, and at least does not disincline us to believe it from the same hand. The short treatise of Alexander on Rhetorical Starting-points is very technical and not very profitable; but it falls in with the Menandrine books in showing how this business of flattery—the reducing to system of the “dodges” of the auctioneer or the advertising agent—was, latterly at least, the mainstay of the rhetorician. The two books of Aristides' Art of Rhetoric, on the other hand, busy themselves not with the epideictic but with the political speech, and deal chiefly with its technical qualities, our old friends. Apsines deals with the exordium only, and Minucianus with the epicheireme or imperfect rhetorical argument. Between them comes the treatise attributed to Longinus by some, and for that reason, if for no other, worth a little fuller examination.

106“That^[146], so to speak, there is nothing better in man’s possession than memory, who in his senses will deny? Some indeed praise Oblivion, as Euripides—

as he calls it. But I should say that Lethe and the outgoing of memory help us little or nothing, hurt the best and greatest things of life, defraud and keep us short of happiness. For the most hateful of sins and crimes, ingratitude, we find oft occurring when memory’s powers fail; but he who remembers benefits is neither ungrateful nor unjust. When men forget the laws and the doctrines that keep us straight, needs must they become poor creatures, and bad, and shameless. Yea, all folly and all inculture of soul occur through forgetfulness. But he who remembers best is chiefly wise.”

This may not itself be the very crown of wisdom; it is not Plato; it is not even Ecclesiasticus. But it is at any rate the work of a man who can look a little beyond stasis and diegema. As if we were to have nothing certain from this great critic, the attribution of this treatise also to him is only based on a conjecture of Ruhnken’s, itself depending on a citation by the commentator John of Sicily in the thirteenth century. It is devoted to the subject of Εὔρεσις—so badly translated by “Invention”—and it treats of its subject under the heads of prosopopœia, starting-points, elocutory mimicry, memory, topics |The Rhetoric or De Inventione of Longinus.| drawn from things connected with the chief good, and passion. There is a fairly wide range of literary reference, though few citations are given at length. And it is only fair to bear in mind that even in the Περὶ Ὕψους, short and broken as it is, there are signs of a certain weakness for Figures and other technicalities, indications that in his more professional moments, and when inspiration deserted him, even the author of that wonderful little masterpiece might have approached (though he never could long have been satisfied with) the endless, the fruitless, the 107exasperating distinguo which seemed to be art, and wisdom, and taste, to Hermogenes and the rest. And though one cannot quite agree with Walz that there is in this De Inventione a “doctrine drawn from Homer and the poets, elegantly and equably disposed,” yet one must admit that the handling shows something different from, and above, the heartbreaking jargon-mongering of the usual rhetorician. What follows is not the style of the Longinus that we know; it seems to come short of his manly sense almost as much as of his far-reaching flights of poetical appreciation. But it is a long way from the mere arrangement of compartments and ticket-boxes, and the mere indulgence in a kind of game of rhetorical “egg-hat” in and out of them when they are made.

Enough, perhaps, has been said of the defects of this great mass of composition, both from the point of view of our special |Survey of School Rhetoric.| investigation and from more general ones. It remains to say something of its merits from the former. As will have been seen, the relations of the rhetoricians to literary criticism differ at first sight surprisingly—less so, perhaps, when they come to be examined. Sometimes the general literary view seems to be almost entirely lost in a wilderness of details and technicalities. But sometimes also the merely forensic tendency disappears, the merely technical one in the narrow sense effaces itself, and we have an almost pure treatise on Composition, limited it may be by arbitrary restrictions, conditioned by professional needs, but still Composition in general—that is to say, after a fashion, and in a manner, Literature. Every now and then, as we saw above, the writer rises to the conception of Rhetoric as Prosaics—as the other half of that Art of Literature of which Poetics is the one. And—a less good thing, but also not without its good side—we even find glimpses and glimmerings of the notion, to be taken up and widely developed later, of Rhetoric as including Poetics.

But the best and most important part of the matter has yet to be summarised. The technical study of Rhetoric, even when pushed to the extremities of the terminological and classifying mania, encouraged and almost necessitated constant overhauling 108of actual literature for examples, and encouraged the characterisation of famous authors from this point of view. Even the orators by themselves formed no inconsiderable or undistinguished corpus of Greek prose literature. But, as we have seen, it was customary, even for very strict formalists, to include the historians whose connection with the orators was so close; and it was very difficult to exclude philosophical writers, especially Plato. A man must have been of preternatural stolidity if he could ransack Demosthenes and Isæus, Herodotus and Thucydides and Xenophon, Plato, and the school philosophers whom we have so freely lost, and if he did not in the process develop some notion of prose literary criticism at large, nay, formulate some rules of it. And, as we have also seen from the very first, poetry was by no means barred. The orator might very often quote it; he was constantly to go to it for suggestions of subject or treatment, beauties of style, examples of figure and form. Therefore, directly if not indirectly, the rhetorical teacher and the historical student accepted the whole of literature for their province.

Of the actual results of this enormous period, the best part (even if we cut off the Dark Ages) of a thousand years of |The Practical Rhetoricians or Masters of Epideictic.| elaborate concentration upon an extremely artificial art, our remains are in proportion much less than we should expect; in fact, it is hardly too much to say that they are less than those of the technical books which taught how to produce them. It is scarcely fair to call Dionysius of Halicarnassus a rhetorician, though he sometimes goes near to being one. He is a serious teacher of Rhetoric, not a giver of displays in it, a real literary critic, a laborious historian. Plutarch is saved from inclusion in the class by the very same characteristic which interferes so sadly with his literary criticism as such. He is too practical, too keenly interested in life, too busy about the positive sciences of ethical and physical inquiry, to devote himself to rhetorical exercises of the pure declamatory kind. That Lucian did so devote himself for no inconsiderable time, we know from his own description of his breaking away from the Delilah Rhetoric; and there are scraps of purely or mainly 109rhetorical matter in him even as it is. But though it be perfectly possible to serve two mistresses, no man ever could have, for his Queens of Brentford, Irony and the falser and more artificial kind of Rhetoric. The two are irreconcilable enemies: they would make their lover’s life an impossible and maddening inconsistency. We must therefore look elsewhere, and in writers on the whole lesser, for the artificial Rhetorical composition which is of interest to us, not merely inasmuch as it sometimes deals with or comes near to literary criticism itself, but as it is, even on other occasions, a valuable and undeniable evidence as to the state of universal crisis, the condition of literary taste, at its time. We shall find such witnesses in Dion Chrysostom for the late first and early second century; in Aristides of Smyrna and Maximus Tyrius for the second exclusively; in Philostratus for the end of the second and the beginning of the third; while to these we may perhaps add Libanius and Themistius for the fourth, with the imperial rhetorician Julian to keep them company.

Of these, Dion Chrysostom is not merely the earliest in date, but, on the whole, the most important to literature. He |Dion Chrysostom.| appears to have been a distinguished and rather fortunate example of a “gentleman of the press” (as we should now say) before the press existed. He travelled over aover a great part of the Roman Empire in the pursuit of his profession as Lecturer—that perhaps comes nearest to it—and would appear to have been well rewarded. The description of his morning’s employment, which begins his study of the three Poets' plays on Philoctetes,^[147] is one of the most interesting passages in the later and less-known classics, and so is worth giving here, though it exists in at least one unlearned language: “I rose about the first hour of the day, both because I was poorly, and because the air was cooler at dawn, and more like autumn, though it was midsummer. I made my toilette, said my prayers, and then getting into my curricle, went several times round the Hippodrome, driving as easily and quietly as possible. Then I took a walk, rested shortly, bathed 110and anointed myself, and after eating a slight breakfast, took up some tragedies.” The careful “study of the body,” the quiet affluence of a well-to-do professional man, and the attention to professional work without any hurry or discomfort, are all well touched off here; and what follows gives us, as it happens, the closest approach to our subject proper to be found in the considerable collection of Dion’s Orations, or, as they have been much more properly called, Essays. There are, however, others which are more characteristic of this division of literature, and we may deal with these first.

The whole conception of the kind of piece, of which Dion himself has left us some fourscore examples, is a curious, and to merely modern readers (nor perhaps to them only) something of a puzzling one. It is called an Oration because it was intended to be delivered by word of mouth; but it often, if not usually, has no other oratorical characteristic. The terms “lecture” and “essay” have also been applied to it incidentally above, and both have some, while neither has exact, application. Except that its subject is generally (not always) profane, it has strong points of resemblance to some kinds of Sermon. Classified by the subject, it presents at first sight features which look distinct enough, though perhaps the distinctness rather vanishes on examination. Not a few of the examples (and probably those which were more immediately profitable, though they could not be used so often) are what may be called local panegyrics, addresses to the citizens of Corinth, Tarsus, Borysthenes, New Ilium, in which their historical and literary associations are ingeniously worked in, and the importance of the community is more or less delicately “cracked up.” Others are moral discourses on Vices and Virtues, others abstract discussions on politics, others of yet other sorts. But the point in which they all agree, the point which is their real characteristic, is that they are all rather displays of art, rather directly analogous to a musical “recital” or an entertainment of feats of strength and skill, than directed to any definite purpose of persuasion, or to the direct exposition of any subject. The object is to show how neatly the speaker can play the rhetorical game, how well he can do his theme. Each 111is, in fact (what Thucydides so detested the idea of his history appearing to be), a distinct agonisma, a competitive display of cleverness and technical accomplishment.

Nothing perhaps is more tedious than a game that is out of fashion; and this game has been out of fashion for a very long time. Moreover, it has been out of fashion so long, and its vogue depended upon conditions now so entirely changed, that it is for us occasionally difficult, even by strong effort of mental projection into the past, to discover where the attraction can ever have lain. Equally good style (and Dion’s is beyond question good) could surely have been expended on something less utterly arbitrary and unreal. Nor do these reflections present themselves more strongly anywhere than in regard to the pieces which touch more directly on our subject. Take, for instance, the Trojan oration, which has for its second title “That Troy was not captured.” It is supposed to be addressed to the citizens of the New Ilium, and to clear away the reproach of the Old. The means taken to do this are mainly two. In the first place, the authority of an entirely unnamed Egyptian priest, the author of a book named unintelligibly, is invoked as giving the lie direct to Homer, and supporting himself on the documentary evidence of stelæ, which (unluckily) had perished. The second argument (obviously thought of most weight) is an elaborate examination of the Homeric narrative itself from the point of view of what seems probable, decent, and so forth to Dion the Golden-mouthed. Some of the objections are new; most of them very old. Is it likely that a lady who had the honour of being the bedfellow of Zeus would be doubtful of her beauty if an Idæan shepherd did not certify to it? Would a goddess have given such improper rewards to Paris, and put herself in such an ugly relation to Helen, who, by one story, was her sister? What a shocking thing that the poet should constantly speak well of Ulysses and yet represent him as a liar! How could Homer have had any knowledge of the language of the gods, or have seen through the cloud on Ida? And so forth, for some sixty mortal pages.

From such a procedure no literary criticism is to be expected; and, as has been said, the difficulty is to discern what was its 112original attraction. As a serious composition it is clearly nowhere; as a jeu d’esprit, the rules of the game quite puzzle us, and the spirit seems utterly to have evaporated. The Olympic^[148] “On the Idea of God” has been cited by some as a contribution to our subject, and certainly contains some remarks about Plato and about Myths—interesting remarks too. In substance it is a supposed discourse of Phidias to the assembled Greeks on the principles he had in mind in the conception of his statue of Zeus; but its most interesting passage is a comparison of poetry and sculpture. The mixture of dialects in Homer is compared to the making up of the palette and the use of “values” in painting; the selection of archaic words to the choice of the virtuoso lighting on an antique medal. The variety of epithet and synonym for the description of natural and other objects is contrasted with the restraint and simplicity of the sculptor’s art. The passage is a really remarkable one, and stands almost alone, in elaboration if not in suggestion, as the forerunner of a kind of criticism, fruitful but rather dangerous, which has often been supposed to have originated with Winckelmann and Lessing and Diderot in the last century. But it stands almost alone.

The greater apparent promise of the paper on the synonymous plays is less well fulfilled. Dion seems to imply that this was the only instance where the Three competed on the very same subject, and he finds in the three pieces agreeable instances of the well-known general characteristics of their authors—the grandeur, simplicity, and audacity of Æschylus; the artifice, variety, rhetorical skill of Euripides; the mediocrity (in no evil sense) and the charm of Sophocles. He has also some interesting remarks on the chorus, together with some others less interesting, because more in the common style of ancient criticism, on impossibilities, improbabilities, breaches of usage and unity, and the like. Dion, in fact, goes so far as to express an indirect wish that the chorus were cut out of tragedy. He had, no doubt, lost the sense of the religious use which certainly existed in Æschylus, and perhaps survived in Sophocles; he could not but observe the combination of 113nullity and superfluity (which may too often be detected even in these great poets) of the chorus, if regarded as anything else than an intercalated lyric of the most exquisite beauty; and he of course saw that the choruses of Euripides were often as merely parabasic, as entirely separated from all strict dramatic connection, as any address to the audience in Aristophanes himself.

On the whole, it may best be said of the Golden-mouthed that, in other circumstances, and if he had cared, he might have made a critic perhaps better than Dionysius, and perhaps not so very far below Longinus; but that, as a matter of fact, neither time, circumstances, nor personal disposition attracted him, save here and there, to the subject.

There is another author, not far removed in age from Dion Chrysostom, whom I should be sorry to pass without at least |Aristides of Smyrna.| as minute an examination. Had we only the notices of him which exist, with a few fragments, there is perhaps no Greek writer from whom it would be reasonable to expect an abundance of literary criticism, of a type almost as startlingly modern as that of Longinus himself, with more confidence than that with which we might expect it from Aristides of Smyrna.^[149]

Longinus has been blamed by M. Egger^[150] for comparing^[151] this rhetorician with Demosthenes. But the excellent historian of Greek criticism must have forgotten the epigram, quoted 114elsewhere,^[152] in which Aristides is frankly ranked, not merely with Demosthenes but with Thucydides, as a writer, as well as the other testimonies, both of antiquity and of the Renaissance, which are conveniently collected in an article of Jebb’s edition, to be found in that of Dindorf.^[153] It is true that Dindorf himself speaks contemptuously of his client, but Dindorf was too deeply sworn a servant of strictly classical Greek to tolerate the pretensions of a précieux of the Antonine age. As a matter of fact, not only is Aristides a good, though by no means easy,^[154] writer of Greek, but both the qualities and the defects of his writing and the causes of his difficulty are such as ought to have disposed him to literary criticism in the best sense. This hardness does not arise from irregular syntax, nor from any of the commoner causes of “obscurity.” What makes it necessary to read him with no common care and attention is, in the first place, the cobweb-like subtlety, not to say tenuity and intricacy, of his thought; and, in the second, his use of not ostensibly strange or archaic language with the most elusive nuances of difference from its common employment.

Now these are characteristics which are by no means uncommonly found in persons and in times friendly to criticism. And the love of Aristides for literature (at least for the rhetorical side of it) is not only outspoken, but to all appearance unfeigned. His devotion is not merely valetudinarian, but voluntary. If there is a rhetorical extravagance in the phrase, there is a more than rhetorical sincerity in the sentiment of his declarations that, while others may find love or bathing or drinking or hunting sweet, speeches^[155] 115are his sole delight: they absorb all his friendship and all his faculties; they are to him as parents and children, as business and pastime. It is about them that he invokes Aphrodite: he plays with them and works with them, rejoices in them, embraces them, knocks only at their doors. Elsewhere, “the whole gain and sum of life to man is oratorical occupation”; and elsewhere again, “I would rather have the gift of speech, with a modest and honourable life as man best may, than be Darius the son of Hystaspes two thousand times over: and everything seems to me little in comparison with this.”

This is something like a “declaration.”

Nor, on merely running down the list of the fairly voluminous extant works of Aristides (especially when the inner meanings, which do not always appear in the titles, are grasped), do matters look unpromising. The majority of the pieces are indeed pure epideictic—discourses to or about the gods, a mighty “Panathenaic” (the chef d'œuvre, with only one rival, of the author)—panegyrics of Smyrna, Rome, and other places, “Leuctrics” (i.e., debating-society speeches, on the side of the Lacedæmonians, on the side of the Thebans, and neutral), arguments for and against sending assistance to the Athenian expedition at Syracuse, all the stock—a stock surprise to us—of this curious declamation-commonplace. But there are four pieces (between them making up the stuff of a good-sized volume) in which, from such a man, literary criticism might seem to be inevitable. They are the περὶ τοῦ μὴ δεῖν κωμῳδεῖν^[156] (a discourse whether comedy shall be permitted or not), the long Defence of Rhetoric (περὶ ῥητορικῆς)^[157] against Plato’s attacks, especially in the Gorgias, the very much longer and oddly named ὑπὲρ τῶν τεττάρων,^[158] an apology for Miltiades, Themistocles, Pericles, and Cimon, which completes this, and the still more oddly named περὶ τοῦ παραφθέγματος^[159] (“Concerning my blunder”), which meets, with not a little tartness and wounded conceit, but with a great deal of ingenuity, the suggestion, through a third person, of some “d——d good-natured 116friend,”^[160] that Aristides had committed a fault of taste by insinuating praises of himself in an address to the divinity. We turn to these, and we find as nearly as possible nothing critical. Glimmers of interest appear, as in the description of historians (ii. 513), as “those between poetry and rhetoric,” but they are extinguished almost at once. It would be quite impossible to treat the comedy question from a less literary standpoint than that of Aristides; we might have Plutarch speaking, except that the writing is more “precious” and point-de-vice. The “Apology for my blunder” consists mainly in a string, by no means lacking in ingenuity, of citations from poets, orators, and others, in which they indulge, either for themselves or their personages, in strains somewhat self-laudatory. As for the more than four hundred pages of “On Rhetoric” and “For the Four,” they also avoid the literary handling, the strictly critical grip of the subject, with a persistency which, as has been observed in other cases, is simply a mystery, unless we suppose that the writer was either laboriously shunning this, or quite unconscious of its possibility and promise. Pages after pages on the old aporia whether Rhetoric is an art or not, sheets after sheets on the welldoing of the Four, on Plato’s evil-speaking, we have. But, unless I have missed it, never a passage on the magnificent literature with which Rhetoric has enriched Greece, on the more magnificent rhetoric which the accuser of the brethren has himself displayed in accusing her. To a man of the subtlety of Aristides, of his enthusiasm for literature, of his flair for a popular and striking paradox, one would imagine that this beating up of the enemy’s quarters would be irresistibly tempting. But it is certainly not in his main attack: and though, in the vast stretch of wiredrawn argument and precious expression, one may have missed something, I do not think that it is even in the reserves or the parentheses.

There are perhaps few, at least among the less read Greek writers, who, in small compass and at no great expense of trouble, throw more negative light on Greek criticism than 117|Maximus Tyrius.| Maximus Tyrius.^[161] This rhetorician or philosopher (he would probably have disclaimed the first epithet and modestly demanded promotion to the second) has left us, in a style as easy as that of Aristides is difficult, and showing at least a strong velleity to be Platonic, some forty essays, or dissertations, or theses. They are on questions or propositions of the usual kind, as these: “Pleasure may be a good but is not a stable thing.” “On Socratic Love” (an amiable but slightly ludicrous example of whitewashing everybody, from Socrates himself to Sappho). “On the God of Socrates and Plato,” &c., &c. Several of them might, at any rate from the titles, seem to touch our subject; two at least might seem to be obliged to touch it. These are the Tenth (in Reiske’s order), “Whether the poets or the philosophers have given the soundest ideas of the gods?” and the Twenty-third, “Whether Plato was right in banishing Homer from his Republic?” Yet, apt to slip between our fingers as we have found and shall find apparently critical theses of this sort, hardly one (at least outside Plutarch) is so utterly eel-like as those of Maximus of Tyre. As to the first,^[162] he suggests that the very question is a misunderstanding—as no doubt it is, though not quite in his sense. Philosophy and poetry are really the same thing. Poetry is a philosophy, “senior in time, metrical in harmony, based on fiction as to its arguments.” Philosophy is a poetry “renewed in youth, more lightly equipped in harmony, more certain in sense.” They are, in short, as like as my fingers to my fingers, “and there are ænigmas in both.” If you are wise you will interpret the poets allegorically, but go to the philosophers for clear statements. And we must allow, to the credit of the former, that there is no poet who talks such mischievous nonsense as Epicurus.

This is all that, as a critic, Maximus has to say on this head; and though at least equally ingenious in evasion, he gives us nothing more solid in the debate on Homer and Plato.^[163] He speaks, indeed, words of sense (by no means always kept in 118mind by critics) as to the absolute compatibility of admiration of Homer with admiration of Plato. But his argument for this, and at the same time the whole argument of the essay, is only a kind of “fetch.” Homer was banished from the Platonic Republic not because Plato thought him bad per se, but because the special conditions of the Republic itself made Homer an inconvenient inmate. He was not qualified for admission to this particular club: that was all. Equally far from our orbit is a third essay, the Thirty-second,^[164] the subject of which is, “Is there any definite philosophic opinion^[165] in Homer?” Elsewhere Maximus has refused to include literary criticism where it might justly have been expected: here (with, it must be admitted, much countenance from persons in more recent times, and especially in the present day) he determines to import into literary criticism things which have no business there. He begins, indeed, with a hearty and not unhappy eulogy of Homer himself for his range of subject and knowledge: but the rest of the piece is little more than an application of the theory laid down earlier, that philosophers and poets are only the same people in different coats, of antique or modern cut as the case may be, dancing to different tunes, and gesticulating in a different way. It may be so; but whether it is or not, Maximus has nothing more to tell us in our own division.^[166]

There are not many positions in literary history more apparently covetable than that of being the first certain authority |Philostratus.| for a definition of Imagination which (in a sense different from Sir Thomas Browne’s) “antiquates antiquity,” which anticipates Shakespeare, which has been piously but vainly thought to have been first reached in criticism by Addison, and which, in its fulness, and as critically put, waited for the Germans of the late eighteenth century, if not for their greater scholar Coleridge, to display it in perfection. When it is added that this person was a professional 119rhetorician, that he had sufficient original, or at least mimetic, skill to supply the pattern of

and of others of the prettiest if not the greatest things in literature, with sufficient appreciation of arts other than literature to have left us a capital collection of descriptions of painting,—it may seem that great, or at least interesting, literary criticism must have proceeded from him.

Yet whoso shall go to the work of Flavius Philostratus^[167] in search of this will be wofully disappointed, unless (and perhaps even if) he have the wisdom necessary to the acceptance of what the gods provide, and the more or less resigned relinquishment of what they do not.

Philostratus is in fact a writer of considerable charm. The Life of Apollonius is readable, not only for its matter and its literary associations with Keats through Burton; and the smaller Lives of the Sophists are not unimportant for literary history. The Eikones are perhaps the best descriptions of pictures before Diderot,^[168] and the Letters are really nectareous. Gifford, when deservedly trouncing Cumberland (alias Sir Fretful Plagiary) for finding fault with Jonson because he made up the exquisite poem above cited from Philostratus, would have done better to vindicate the original as well from Cumberland’s bad taste and ignorance. “Despicable sophist,” “obscure collection of love-letters,” “parcel of unnatural, far-fetched conceits,” “calculated to disgust a man of Jonson’s classical taste,” are expressions which, as Gifford broadly hints, probably express not so much Cumberland’s own taste as that of his grandfather Bentley, who, if one of the greatest of scholars, was sometimes, if not always, one of the worst of literary critics. But Gifford, who, with all his acuteness, wit, and polemic power, represented too much the dregs of the neo-classic school on points of taste, was probably of no very different opinion. The fact is that, not merely in the 120passages which Ben has adapted, sometimes literally, for this marvellous cento, but in many others, the very wine, the very roses, of the luscious and florid school of poetical sentiment are given by Philostratus himself.

But if they are his own, and not, as seems more likely, prose paraphrases of lost poems by some other, he was not one of the “poets who contain a critic.” Not only does he put the remarkable definition^[169] of φαντασία, which it is not clear that even Longinus fully grasped, in the mouth of Apollonius; but it is very noticeable that Apollonius is there speaking not of literary art, but of sculpture and painting. In the description of paintings themselves there is no criticism. And perhaps among the numerous examples which we have of the strange difference of view between the ancients and at least some of ourselves on the suggestiveness of literature, there is no passage more striking than the Heroic Dialogue^[170] on the subject of Homer between a Phœnician stranger and a vine-dresser at Eleus in the Thracian Chersonese, where Protesilaus was supposed to be buried. The stuff of this fantastic piece is the information, about the matters of the Trojan war, supposed to be supplied to the vine-dresser by Protesilaus himself. There is one passage of literary estimate of the ordinary kind, but the whole is one of those curious corrections of Homeric statement which served as the ancestors of the new and anti-Homeric “tale of Troy” in the Middle Ages, and which are among the numerous puzzles of ancient literature to us, until we have mastered the strange antique horror of fiction as fiction. We cannot conceive any one—after childhood—otherwise than humorously attempting to make out that Sir Walter Scott did injustice to Waverley, and that in the duel with Balmawhapple 121the Baron was only second, not principal, insinuating that the novelist has concealed the real secret of Flora’s indifference to her lover, which was that she was determined, like Beatrix Esmond, to be the Chevalier’s mistress, or declaring that Fergus, instead of being captured and executed, died gloriously in a skirmish omitted by historians, after putting the English to flight. But this is what the ancients were always doing with Homer; and it is scarcely too much to say that until this attitude of mind is entirely discarded, literary criticism in the proper sense is impossible.

The relatively considerable space, some six or seven pages, which is allotted to Libanius in Egger’s book, may have encouraged |Libanius.| readers to expect some considerable contribution to critical literature from that sophist and rhetorician. But a careful reading of the French historian’s text will show that he has really nothing to produce to justify the space assigned: and an independent examination of Libanius himself (which, as hinted already, is not too easy to make^[171]) will more than confirm this uncomfortable suspicion. Libanius is enormously copious, and he is not exactly contemptible,^[172] seeing that he can apply the sort of “Wardour Street” Attic, in which he and the better class of his contemporaries wrote, to a large number of subjects with a great deal of skill. But the curse of artificiality is over everything that he writes:^[173] and, to do him justice, his writings proclaim the fact beforehand with the most praiseworthy frankness. They belong almost entirely to those classes of conventional exercise of which full account has been given, and will be given, in the present Book and its successor. They are Progymnasmata, Meletæ, “orations,” 122that is to say, rather more practical compositions of the same class, ethical dissertations, letters of the kind in which A writes that B is a new Demosthenes, and B replies that A really is a second Plato. The Progymnasmata include all the kinds mentioned earlier in this chapter, fables and narrations, uses and sentences, encomia and ethopoiæ and the rest; the Meletæ range from the complaint of a parasite who has been done out of his dinner, through all manner of historical, mythical, and fantastic cases, to the question whether Lais (after being exiled) had not better be recalled as a useful member of society. But literary criticism is nullibi. If it were anywhere we should look for it in the comparison of Demosthenes and Æschines which figures among the Progymnasmata, in the Life^[174] of the first-named orator and the arguments to his speeches, and perhaps in the Apologia Socratis. In the first there is not a scintilla of the kind: the comparison wholly concerns the lives, characters, and successes of the two. In the Apologia there is pretty constant reference to Socrates' conversation, with some to that of others, Prodicus, Protagoras, &c. But any literary consideration is avoided with that curious superciliousness, or more curious subterfuge, which we have noticed often already, and which is so rigid and so complete that it suggests malice prepense—a deliberate and perverse abstention. The “editorial” matter (to vary a happy phrase of M. Egger) on Demosthenes is even more surprisingly barren,—mere biography, and mere reference to the stock technicalities and classifications of stasis and the like, practically exhaust it. I do not know how far the fact that he composed, in answer to Aristides,^[175] a defence of stage dancing or pantomime, may by some be reckoned to him as literary righteousness. In his wordy Autobiography^[176] I can find nothing to our purpose: and though, in the difficulties of study of him referred to, I daresay I have not thoroughly sifted the huge haystack of the Orations, I think there is very little more there. The For Aristophanes^[177] has nothing to do with the Aristophanes 123we know or with literature, except that it seems to have been the speech in which Julian (v. infra, p. 126) discovered such wonderful qualities.

The “Monody” and the “Funeral Oration” on Julian himself may again excite expectation, for the dead Emperor was certainly a man of letters; but they will equally disappoint it. The quaintly named “To Those Who Do Not Speak” (pupils of his who on growing up and entering the senate or other public bodies prove dumb dogs) might help us, but does not. Libanius merely exhorts these sluggards, in the most general way, to be good boys, to pay less attention to chariot-racing and more to books. By far the larger number of the “Orations” are on political or legal subjects, and it would be unreasonable to expect critical edification from them; but even where it might seem likely to come in, it does not. The “Against Lucian” (Reiske, vol. iii.) is in the same case as the “For Aristophanes.” The not uninteresting oration in defence of the system of his School (No. LXV., the last of Reiske’s third volume) constantly refers to a matter which might be of great concern to us—the difficulty which schoolmasters or professors had at this time in keeping their pupils up to the mark in the two languages and literatures, Greek and Latin. But the discourse is not turned our way.

Nor do the Letters, our last resort, furnish us with much consolation. Their enormous number—there are over 1600 in Wolf’s edition of the Greek originals, while the editio princeps of Zambicarius, in Latin only, adds problems of divagation and duplication to the heart’s content of a certain order of scholar—is to some extent mitigated by their usual brevity. But this very brevity is often an aggravation not a mitigation of teen. Very many are mere “notes,” as we should say, written, indeed, with the pomp and circumstance of the epistoler-rhetorician, but about nothing or next to nothing. Very often Libanius seems to be unconsciously anticipating the young person who said that he did not read books, he wrote them. Sometimes, at least, an apparently promising reference leads to a bitter disappointment, as in the case of that to Longinus. The reader—his appetite only whetted by the exertion of rectifying a miscitation in Wolf’s Preface (it quotes the Letter as 990, while 124it is really 998)—at last approaches his quest, and reads as follows: To Eusebius, “The speech [or book] which I want is Odenathus, and it is by Longinus. You must give it me, and keep your promise.” This is indeed precious; though a remembrance of the information, epistolary and other, vouchsafed in many modern biographies, may moderate sarcastic impulses. No sarcasm, but profound sympathy, should be excited by the professor’s constant complaints of headache; yet again they are unilluminative for our purpose. In fact, such examination as I have been able to give to these Epistles shows that it is unreasonable to demand from them what they have no intention to supply. Very likely there are passages in this mass, as in that other of the Orations, which might be adduced: but I am pretty sure that they would not invalidate the general proposition that, to Libanius also, those who want literary criticism proper need not go. Perhaps the nearest approaches to it are such things as the curious mention to Demetrius (128, Wolf, p. 67) of parts of an artificial epistolary discourse of his friend’s which he, Libanius, received when he had pupils with him, and, after being much bored by their recitations, read to them instead of lecturing himself.

The titles at least of his correspondent Themistius^[178] are sometimes a little more promising, and Themistius, a man of considerable |Themistius.| and varied public employment, might seem less likely to indulge in the excesses of mere scholastic exercise which Libanius permitted himself. But, on the whole, we shall have to acknowledge that this other famous rhetorician also is drawn practically blank for our purpose. “The Philosopher,” “The Sophist,” “How a man should address 125the public”—these are subjects on which one might surely think that a little criticism would break in somehow and somewhere. But it never does. To Themistius, as to so many others, the great writers of old are persons worthy of infinite respect, to be quoted freely, but to be quoted as a lawyer quotes this or that year-book, report, decision, for the substance only. The general banality of his literary references may be tested by anybody who chooses to refer to his citations and discussions of various authors in the Basanistes (Orat. xxi., ed. cit. in note, p. 296), or more succinctly still, to the reference to “golden Menander, and Euripides, and Sophocles, and fair Sappho, and noble Pindar” in the pleasant little piece, “To his Father,” which comes before it.

It is no doubt extremely unjust to argue from the performance of the pupil to the quality of the teacher; but we may at least say that, if there was any stronger critical tendency |Julian.| in Libanius or Themistius than appears in their own works, it is not reflected in one of their most diligent and distinguished pupils.^[179] The references to literature in the extant works^[180] of Julian the Apostate are, in a certain sense and way, extremely numerous; in fact, it was almost vital to the odd mixture of dupery and quackery which had mastered him that he should be constantly quoting classical, if only because they were heathen, authors. His Orations^[181] are crammed with such quotations. Moreover, we have from him a declaration in form of love for books. “Some,” he says, at the beginning of his epistle (the ninth) to Ecdicius,^[182] “love horses, some birds, some other beasts; in me from a child there has raged a dire longing for the possession of books.” But in this, as in other cases, Desire seems rather to have excluded Criticism. One is rather annoyed than edified by the banal reference, at the 126beginning of the Misopogon,^[183] to his having seen “the barbarians beyond the Rhine singing wild songs composed in a speech resembling the croakings of rough-voiced fowls, and rejoicing in this music.” If only the princely pedant would have copied a few of these croaks, and studied them, instead of trying to put back the clock of the world! His compliments and thanks to Libanius himself for the above-mentioned speech (Ep. 14) are of the most hackneyed character. He read it, he says, nearly all before breakfast, and finished it between breakfast and siesta.^[184] “Thou art blessed to write thus, and still more to be able to think thus! O speech! O brains! O composition! O division! O epicheiremes! O ordonnance! O departures of style! O harmony! O symphony!” To which we may add “O clichés! O tickets! O [in Mr Burchell’s rudeness] Fudge!”

In Ep. 24 there is a playful and pleasant discourse on the sense of the epithet γλυκὺς given by the poets and others to figs and honey, but it is only a trifle; and in 34, to Iamblichus, it is noteworthy how entirely the philosophic interest of literature overshadows, or rather how completely it blocks out, the literary whole. In 42, on education, and literature as its instrument, the old Plutarchian view^[185] is refurbished, almost without alteration, and with only a fling or two at the Galilæans as an addition; while in 55 Eumenius and Pharianus are explicitly adjured “not to despise” logic, rhetoric, poetics, to study mathematics “more carefully,” but to give their whole mind to the understanding of the dogmas of Aristotle and Plato. This is to be “the real business, the foundation and the structure and the roof,” the rest are πάρεργα. The assertion is of course the reverse of original; but at this juncture it is all the more valuable to us, as a sort of summary and clincher at once of a large and important part of ancient opinion. In the borrower of it, as in those from whom it was borrowed, literary criticism, to full purpose and with full freedom, simply could not exist.

DIONYSIUS OF HALICARNASSUS—HIS WORKS—THE ‘RHETORIC’—THE ‘COMPOSITION’—CENSURES AND COMMENTARIES ON ORATORS, ETC.—THE MINOR WORKS—THE JUDGMENT OF THUCYDIDES—GENERAL CRITICAL VALUE—PLUTARCH—THE ‘LIVES’ QUITE BARREN FOR US—THE ‘MORALIA’ AT FIRST SIGHT PROMISING—EXAMINATION OF THIS PROMISE—THE “EDUCATION”—THE PAPERS ON “READING”—THE ‘LIVES OF THE ORATORS’—THE ‘MALIGNITY OF HERODOTUS’—THE “COMPARISON OF ARISTOPHANES AND MENANDER”—THE ‘ROMAN QUESTIONS’—THE ‘SYMPOSIACS’—LUCIAN—THE ‘HOW TO WRITE HISTORY’—THE ‘LEXIPHANES’—OTHER PIECES: THE ‘PROMETHEUS ES’—WORKS TOUCHING RHETORIC—HIS CRITICAL LIMITATIONS—LONGINUS: THE DIFFICULTIES RAISED—“SUBLIMITY”—QUALITY AND CONTENTS OF THE TREATISE—PRELIMINARY RETROSPECT—DETAILED CRITICISM: THE OPENING—THE STRICTURE ON THE ‘ORITHYIA’—“FRIGIDITY”—THE “MAIDENS IN THE EYES”—THE CANON “QUOD SEMPER”—THE SOURCES OF SUBLIMITY—LONGINUS ON HOMER—ON SAPPHO—“AMPLIFICATION”—“IMAGES”—THE FIGURES—“FAULTLESSNESS”—HYPERBOLES—“HARMONY”—THE CONCLUSION—MODERNITY OF THE TREATISE, OR RATHER SEMPITERNITY.

From a certain point of view, no critical writer of antiquity has a greater interest than the rhetorician Dionysius of Halicarnassus. |Dionysius of Halicarnassus.| It is true, of course, that this view is at once strictly limited and decidedly complex. As Dionysius is not even to be mentioned with Longinus for what may be called critical inspiration, so he falls simply out of sight when he is compared with Aristotle in point of authority, of method, and, above all, of that somewhat indirect and illegitimate, but real, importance which is derived 128from a long tradition. So, too, there is nothing in him of that “flash,” that illumination, which we still receive from the turning-on of the lamp of satiric genius to the critical field by Lucian, as long before by Aristophanes. But the treatise On the Sublime is, after all, but an inestimable fragment: the loss to criticism, had the Rhetoric and the Poetics shared the fate of some others of their author’s works, would consist partly in the loss of what has been written about them and in following of them; while Aristophanes and Lucian are only critics at intervals and by accident. In Dionysius we have a critic by profession, and not merely a rhetorician, of whose critical work an assortment, varied in matter and considerable in bulk, survives, who had an evident love for his business, and whose talents for it were very much greater than some authorities seem willing to allow.

It would be unnecessary to observe (if there were not a sort of persons who, in such cases, take the absence of mention for |His works.| the presence of ignorance) that the work attributed to Dionysius, and his identity and unity as an author, have been subjected to the common processes of attempted disintegration. We are told, as usual, that the works are to be credited or debited not to one Dionysius, but to two or even three Dionysii or others; and that individual pieces must or may be split up into genuine and spurious parts. But this, besides that it is usual and inevitable, concerns us here little or not at all. Hardly anything that is about to be said would have to be altered, if it were quite certain that the critical works of Dionysius of Halicarnassus were the production of a whole club of contributors, or had accumulated as the successive productions of a family of rhetoricians, as long-lived and pertinacious in Rhetoric as the Monros of Edinburgh in another art or science. They consist, taking the order of the edition of Reiske,^[186] of a treatise of some length on Composition 129in the literal sense of the putting together of words; of a set treatise on Rhetoric; of a collection of brief judgments on the principal authors in Greek, and another of much longer ones, which is unfortunately not complete, but which contains elaborate handlings of Lysias, Isocrates, Isæus, and Deinarchus; of a letter to a certain Ammæus, arguing that Demosthenes was not indebted to the rhetorical precepts of Aristotle; of another to Cnæus Pompey on Plato and the Historians; of a second to Ammæus on the idioms of Thucydides; of a celebrated and interesting examination, at great length, of the chief historians of Greece; and of another, also well known, which is usually quoted by its Latin title, De Admiranda Vi dicendi Demosthenis, where δεινότης, perhaps, might be more properly translated “Of Demosthenes' oratorical resourcefulness.”

Of these the least interesting by far is the professed Rhetoric: and it is with the less reluctance that we may resign it to those |The Rhetoric.| who pronounce it, in whole or in part, spurious. It opens, in the very worst and most sterile form of the ancient Rhetoric, by a series of chapters on the different commonplaces available for orations on different stock subjects and occasions,—a panegyric, a marriage, a birthday, a funeral, an exhortation to athletes—things trite and obvious to desperation, the very cabbage of the schools, the opprobrium of all ancient literature, though perhaps not worse than our own frantic efforts to avoid the obvious. It passes to the favourite sub-subject of the Figures, but does not treat these in the worst way, gives the usual, chiefly poetical, illustrations, and concludes with observations on the (again usual) subdivisions of the matter. There is nothing in it that is original and nothing that is characteristic, and the most Dionysian traits, such as the curious stress laid upon the Herodotean episode of Gyges, might as well have been copied by an imitator as duplicated by the author himself.

The remaining works are much better and much more important. It is true that the De Compositione (as its title |The Composition.| honestly holds forth) belongs to the lower, not the higher, division of the school-grouping of the subject—to Composition, not to Rhetoric. But proper Composition, 130even in the school sense, is the necessary vestibule of style; and, until attention has been paid to it, there is no hope of anything further that shall be of real use in literary criticism. And it is also not only something, but a great thing, to make an advance upon that (one had but for a sacred shame, almost said) ignorant and unintelligent contempt of words as words which we find in Aristotle himself. Dionysius indeed, as in duty bound, glances at the contempt of lexis which the great Master of the Walk had made fashionable. It is true, he says, that boys are caught by the bloom of style, but it takes the experience of years to judge it rightly. And he promises a supplementary treatise On the Choice of Words, which we should be very glad to possess. But for the present he is busied, not with their choice, but with their arrangement after they are chosen; and he deals with this partly by positive precept, but chiefly by the use of examples, from Homer in poetry and Herodotus in prose. Dionysius was a fervent devotee of his admirable countryman, allowing his devotion, indeed, to carry him to the length of distinct injustice to that countryman’s great rival Thucydides; but it has here inspired him well enough. And Homer could not lead him wrong; though perhaps we may note here, as elsewhere with the ancients, a distinctly insufficient appreciation of the differences between poetry and prose. He begins quite at the beginning with the letters, touches on onomatopœia—that process which the great poetic languages like Greek and English admit so readily, and of which the less poetic like Latin and French are so afraid—and on the practice (of which, like a true critic, he has no fear) of reviving archaisms when desirable. Then he attacks the question how beautiful diction and composition are to be attained. Here again, and necessarily, he proceeds more by example than by precept, for indeed precept, of the a priori kind, is in these matters mostly valueless. But one sentence (p. 96, Reiske) is worth quoting at length, because it puts boldly the truth which Aristotle had evaded or pooh-poohed in his excessive devotion to the philosophy of literature rather than to literature itself: “So that it is necessary that that diction should be beautiful in which there are beautiful words, and 131that of beautiful words beautiful syllables and letters are the cause.” Dionysius knew this, as Longinus knew it three hundred, as Dante knew it thirteen hundred, years after him: but, six hundred years after Dante, there are still persons who seem to regard the fact as somehow or other degrading.

Then he goes to what even Aristotle had not disdained,—though, in common with Dionysius himself, Quintilian, and others, he speaks on the subject in terms not easy for modern comprehension,—the rhythmical adjustment of prose as well as of verse, admitting even in Thucydides, to whom he is as a rule not too just, an abundant possession of this gift of rhythm.

A very striking passage, and the oldest of its kind, occurs at p. 133, R, in which Dionysius declares his own conviction that the style is noblest of all which has greatest variety, most frequent changes of harmony, most transitions from periodic to extra-periodic arrangement, most alternations of short and long clauses, rapid and slow movements, and greatest shift of rhythmical valuation. For we must remember that, even after the advances which the study of seventeenth- and the practice of nineteenth-century writers have made in English prose rhythm, it can probably never attain to the formal particularity—I do not say perfection—of Greek. We cannot—at least the present writer, who has been told that he has no ill ear, cannot—appreciate the effect of a dochmiac as a single foot; it is hard to do more than guess at the effect on a Greek of the use of the different pæons; and in at least one famous passage of Quintilian all candid moderns have confessed themselves baffled.^[187]

His Pindaric example is interesting because it is about the only considerable fragment which we have of the master’s Dithyrambic writing.^[188] His Thucydidean specimen is the well-known proem to the History. The criticism of the Pindaric extract may seem to modern readers a rather odd pot-pourri of merely grammatical or linguistic, and of strictly critical, observations. Thus Dionysius observes that the first 132member^[189] consists of four parts of speech: a verb, two nouns, and a “conjunction” (he expressly, in another passage, intimates doubts whether this or “preposition” is the proper word to use), and then, after this mere “parsing,” handles the construction of the phrase and the juxtaposition of it, attributing a certain designed discord or clash as the general motive of the piece. And he recognises the same clash in the Thucydidean passage, in which, while (like a rhetorician as he is) half regretting the absence of panegyric and theatrical grace, he admits “an archaic and headstrong beauty,”^[190] supporting this general verdict with the same minute examination as before. Next he quotes Sappho’s great hymn to Aphrodite, as Longinus was afterwards to quote its greater companion, allowing (and no wonder!) felicity of diction and grace to this in the fullest degree. And later he occupies a good deal of space with those approximations between oratory and poetry, which may seem to us otiose, but which have more than one good side, the best of all perhaps being the fact that they induced critics, as in the instances referred to, to quote, and so preserve, precious fragments which we should otherwise have lost.

On the whole, this treatise, if studied carefully, must raise some astonishment that Dionysius should have been spoken of disrespectfully by any one who himself possesses competence in criticism. A good deal of the work is, no doubt, for us, a little out of fashion; the traditional technicalities seem jejune; the processes are out of date. Yet, from more points of view than one, the piece gives Dionysius no mean rank as a critic. To those who want characteristic aspects, aspects put in striking phrase, that attribution of “headstrong beauty” to Thucydides should excuse a good deal: that is no mere dead ticket of the schools. To the more methodical critic of criticism the minute processes of investigation, the careful estimate of the incidence of such a sound in such and such a position, even the mere parsing view of clauses and sentences, are things themselves worthy of minute study. And it is not only fair, 133but no more than necessary, to remember that this, after all, is only a treatise on a certain aspect or department of criticism, and that we have no right to demand from it more than satisfactory treatment of its special subject—the “composition,” the symphonic arrangement of words and the elements of words. To some moderns Dionysius may seem too attentive to mint and anise and cumin; but he would have no great difficulty in retorting equally contemptuous comparisons for the windy generalisations on one hand, and the sheer neglect of all minutiæ of form on the other, which characterise too much modern critical work.

The short “censures” of ancient writers have, perhaps, an interest of curiosity greater than their interest of value. It is |Censures and Commentaries on Orators, &c.| not improbable that they served as a pattern to Quintilian, who often suggests a knowledge of Dionysius.^[191] But though they are ushered in with some quite irreproachable commonplaces as to the excellence of contemplating excellent models, they are themselves, at least sometimes, too brief, and too specifically sententious, to have much intrinsic interest or much teaching power. We are not greatly advanced in the understanding of Hesiod, whether we have read him or not, by being told that he paid attention to pleasure, and the smoothness of words, and harmonious composition. Nor can any of the poetical labels of our Halicarnassian be said to be very much more informing, while in dramatic writers he does not go beyond “The Three,” and has little to tell us that is newer than the tolerably obvious things that Æschylus is magnificent in his language, Sophocles noble in his characterisation, Euripides questionable in both. The historians he treats at first in contrasted pairs—Herodotus and Thucydides, of course, Philistus and Xenophon,—then 134Theopompus alone. The philosophers he polishes off in a combined paragraph of a dozen lines, which hardly attempts to be characteristic save in the case of Aristotle. And then, with a half apology for so summarily despatching these, he turns, as to his proper business, to the orators. But even here we have mere summary, and must turn to the far fuller, but, unluckily, not quite complete, Commentaries on the same subject.

These, addressed to his favourite correspondent Ammæus, begin with the familiar complaint (which no critical experience of the past ever drives from a critic’s mouth) about the badness of the literary times. The good old Attic Muse herself, like a neglected wife, is insulted, deprived of her rights, and even menaced in her existence, by impudent foreign baggages, Phrygian, or Carian, or Barbarian out and out. But we are rather surprised (till we remember that Dionysius was a settler at Rome, and that it was his interest, if not to do as the Romans did, at any rate to please them) to hear that things are improving, owing to the good sense of the governors of the Roman state, itself the governess of the world. There is some hope that this “senseless eloquence will not last for another generation.”^[192] And Dionysius will do what he can to help the good work by a study of the six greatest of the old Attic orators, Lysias, Isocrates, Isæus, Demosthenes, Hyperides, Æschines. Unluckily we only have the first three of these, though a judgment of Deinarchus, not promised, exists, and the De Admiranda Vi supplies the gap, as far as Demosthenes goes, in even fuller measure than in proportion to the others. We may as well take these and other things together, in order to have something like a conspectus of the case before summing up the critical characteristics of this most interesting critic.

If they are somewhat disappointing, this (to borrow the convenient bull) is not much more than we might have expected. |The minor works.| The De Admiranda Vi is by far the best of them, and contains a great deal of excellent criticism, both particular and general. But the orators had already for centuries been the very parade-ground of Rhetoric; and as paradoxical excursions from orthodox limits were, though by 135no means unknown to the ancients, not in great favour with them, everything that was likely to be said of the Ten was trite and hackneyed. The smaller epistles and the judgment of Thucydides (perverse as this last exploit is) are, on the whole, more interesting. The little paper on the Rhetoric of Aristotle and the Speeches of Demosthenes, arguing that the latter are anterior to the former, is of a kind with which modern times are only too familiar, but displays none of the puerility and false logic which, in our modern instances, that familiarity has taught us to associate with the kind. The contention is undoubtedly sound: the handling is reasonable, and the whole makes us distinctly sorry that Dionysius, who had access to so much that we have lost, did not write a complete History of Greek Literature, which would have been invaluable, instead of his History of Rome, which we could have done without, though it is far from valueless. As it is, this is one of the few important contributions to such a history that we possess, of really ancient date. If he is less happy in the judgment of Plato, inserted (with some on the historians) in the letter to Cnæus Pompey, this is principally due to that horror of poetic prose, of dithyrambic expression, which (perhaps for better reasons than we know) was then creeping over criticism, and which we shall find dominant in critical, though not in popular, estimate during the earlier centuries of the Roman Empire.

The second epistle to Ammæus seems to be one of the latest of the numerous utterances of Dionysius on the great Athenian historian. It is somewhat meticulous and verbal; but it is curious that the just-mentioned horror of gorgeousness reappears in it.

And so we come to the famous onslaught in form against the son of Olorus. It is introduced by a somewhat elaborate |The judgment of Thucydides.| apology—the critic going so far as to shelter himself under the leading case of Aristotle v. Plato. Thence he passes to a short sketch of the predecessors of Thucydides in history, commends him for dropping their fables, &c., but soon settles down to a regular éreintement—a “slating” criticism of the familiar type, wherein the desire to “dust the varlet’s jacket” is evidently not merely superior but 136anterior to any desire whatsoever to criticise varlet or jacket on the merits of either. The division into winters and summers, the setting forth of the causes of the war, the conduct and details of the story, the speeches—all come in for reprehension. But Dionysius is, as we should expect from his other handlings, much kinder to the style, though he objects to its occasional obscurity, urges difficulties on the score of the Figures, criticises some passages at great length, and ends by noticing the chief of the historian’s imitators, among whom he includes Demosthenes. On the whole, the article (as we may call it), though one-sided, is less so than some current descriptions of it may have conveyed to those who have not read it. But still it belongs to the class of critiques indicated above, a class in which few of the best examples of criticism are to be found, except from the point of view of those who hold the true business of that art to be, like the “backward voice” of Trinculo-Caliban, “to utter foul speeches and to detract.”

Yet, on the whole, it need not interfere with the emphatic repetition of the opinion, with the expression of which this |General critical value.| notice of the Halicarnassian began, that he is a very considerable critic, and one to whom justice has not usually, if at all, yet been done. Great as is the place which he gives to oratory, there is no ancient writer (except Longinus) who seems so free from the intention to allow it any really mischievous primacy. If he is, as might be expected from a teacher, sometimes a little meticulous in his philology and lower Rhetoric, yet this very attention to detail saves him from the distinctly unfortunate and rather unphilosophical superciliousness of Aristotle towards style, and from the equally unfortunate divagation, both of that great man and of all his followers, into questions vaguely æsthetic instead of questions definitely literary. The error which, at the new birth of criticism in Europe, was so lucklessly reintroduced and exaggerated by the Italian critics of the sixteenth century—the error of wool-gathering after abstract questions of the nature and justification of poetry, of the a priori rules suitable for poetic forms, of Unities, and so forth—meets very little encouragement from Dionysius, and it is perhaps for this very 137reason that he has been slighted by high-flying æstheticians. Not thus will the wiser mind judge him, but as a critic who saw far, and for the most part truly, into the proper province of literary criticism—that is to say, the reasonable enjoyment of literary work and the reasonable distribution of that work into good, not so good, and bad. Here, and not in the Laputan meteorosophia of theories of poetry, is criticism’s main work; not that she may not justly imp her wings for a higher flight now and then, but that she must beware of flapping them in the inane.

If the opinions of the criticism of the critical power and position of Dionysius of Halicarnassus have varied rather |Plutarch.| strangely, those uttered concerning Plutarch as a critic are still more irreconcilable. For he has not only been casually suggested but elaborately championed^[193] as a candidate for the signal honour of the authorship of the Περὶ Ὕψους—that is to say, as one capable of producing what is perhaps the critical masterpiece of antiquity, and certainly one of the few critical masterpieces of the world. From this one would be prepared to expect at least very strong evidences of critical faculty, and some noteworthy pieces of critical accomplishment, in his extant works, which, it must be remembered, are extremely voluminous, and of a character remarkably well suited for the exercise of literary criticism. The Vitæ Parallelæ at least might have been frequently directed in this way; while the enormous miscellany of the Moralia corresponds more closely to the “Essays” of modern writers than any collection of the kind that we have from ancient times. Now, it is hardly necessary to say that the modern Essay has from the very first set strongly in the literary direction, and that up to the present time the amount of literary criticism, in essay form, is probably not less, while the value of it is infinitely greater, than that of all the formal treatises and non-essay-fashioned handlings of the subject.

On turning to the Lives we meet with an almost complete disappointment. If it be said that Plutarch’s object was to give us contrasts of practical men—soldiers and statesmen, not 138philosophers or men of letters—that is, no doubt, a valid answer as far as it goes, though it would scarcely be unfair to argue from the fact that, at any rate, matters literary were not of the first importance to him. But in one famous instance, the parallel of Demosthenes and Cicero, he not only had a most proper opportunity for dealing with the subject, but was almost obliged to deal with it. It must therefore be worth while to look at his dealing.

He begins the “Demosthenes” with an excuse for his small knowledge of Latin, and makes this a pretext for deliberately excluding all literary and even all oratorical comparison |The Lives quite barren for us.| of the two. Nay, he goes further, and actually upbraids Cæcilius (apparently the same person whose treatment of the Sublime Longinus did not like) with having made this. After such a refusal it is surely idle to contend for any real or strong literary and critical nisus in the agreeable moralist and biographer of Chæronea. Had there been any such tendency in him, he simply could not have avoided such a palmary occasion of giving it course. Even if he really considered himself incompetent to deliver an opinion of Cicero, he would have had something to say about Demosthenes even if this declared incompetence was only a disguise for the reluctance to treat Latin literature seriously, which is so noticeable in Greeks, this would not invalidate the reasoning.

Let us, however, for the sake of the argument, and out of pure generosity, accept his excuse, put the Lives out of the question, and turn to the Moralia.^[194] As has been |The Moralia at first sight promising.| said above, if we do not find literary criticism, and good literary criticism, in such a collection of a man’s work, it must be either because he has no taste for it, or because he has the taste without the faculty. For the collection is very large, and it is almost absolutely miscellaneous: the mere title Moralia is nothing more than an unauthorised ticket, and has really nothing to do with the contents. Neither Montaigne nor De Quincey takes a more absolute liberty of speaking on any subject that happens to 139strike his fancy than Plutarch. And it cannot be said that at least some of his subjects are without direct connection with criticism. The two opening papers, “On the Education of Children” and "How a young man should read [“listen to,” literally, but this means what we mean by "read"] the Poets," would seem, the one almost necessarily (considering the humanism of ancient education), and the other inevitably, to lead to the subject. The next on “Hearing” (i.e., “Reading”) generally, might even seem to strengthen the necessity. Many of the |Examination of this promise.| other titles are promising, and, both in the nature of the case and from what we know of the general course of ancient table-talk, the bulky volume of Symposiac Questions might seem likely to be most prolific, while it is actually not infertile in matter of our kind. Let us examine what is the performance of these promises.

Englishmen, and especially students of English literature, ought to take no mean interest in the tractate on Education, |The “Education.”| if only for the reason that it had a most powerful influence on the great Elizabethan age, both directly and through the medium of Lyly’s Euphues, which is in part^[195] almost a translation of it. But though, not merely for this but other more intrinsic reasons, the treatise is interesting, it is not of much good to us. In fact, it is scarcely a paradox to say that it is one of its merits not to be of much good to us. It is a truism that the very noblest characteristic of Greek education, a characteristic never fully recovered since, was its combination of high literary ideas with the most perfect and practical recognition of the fact that book-education by itself is education of the most wretchedly inadequate character. Plutarch (and again it is much to his credit) thoroughly shared this view—so thoroughly that he begins his treatise a little before the birth of the children to be educated, and continues it (quite in the Rousseau style) by insisting that mothers shall suckle their own offspring. From the first the importance of inculcating good habits, of not telling children immoral or silly stories, of 140being careful in the selection of nurses and tutors,—this is the thing that Plutarch busies himself about. He will have them learn all the usual arts and sciences, but he dwells on these very little. How to give them good morals and healthy bodies; how to keep them or wean them from bad company and foul language; how to practise them in manly sports and exercises—these are Plutarch’s cares. Excellent, nay! thrice excellent preoccupation! but it necessarily makes the treatise of no use to us.

No one can reasonably blame its author for this, especially as he seems likely to fill up the gap in the two following Essays. |The Papers on “Reading.”| “How a young man should read Poetry” is a title which would serve well for the very best and most stimulating critical observations of a Coleridge or an Arnold; or to go nearer to its own times, it might really do for an alternative heading to the Περὶ Ὕψους itself. Yet we very soon see—and we must know our Plutarch very little if we do not foresee it—that the ethical preoccupation is just as supreme and exclusive here. The piece is in itself an interesting one, and preserves for us a large number of quotations, some of which are unique. But Plutarch’s handling of them is as little literary as he can make it. You cannot (he tells his friend Marcus Sedatus with a kind of gloomy resignation) prevent clever boys from reading poetry, so you must make the best of it. It is like the head of an octopus, very nice to eat, nourishing enough, but apt to give restless and fantastic dreams. So you must be careful to administer pædagogic correctives, and to put the right meaning on dangerous things, like the account of Helen’s complaisance to Paris after his disgraceful flight from battle, and of Hera’s bewitching Zeus with the aid of the Cestus. This kind of thing runs throughout the piece—the most famous certainly, and perhaps the most diverting instance of Plutarch’s mania for moralising, being his dealing with the delightful passage of the meeting of Nausicaa and Odysseus. He does not indeed go the entire length of the neo-classical critics of the French school as to this gem. He only says that if the Princess fell in love with Odysseus at first sight, her boldness and impudence are very shocking. But if 141she perceived what a sensible man he was, and preferred him to some rich dandy of her fellow-citizens, it was most creditable. It is not of course worth while to waste any good indignation, or any otherwise utilisable scorn, upon this priggish silliness, the dregs of older Platonism-and-water, the caricature and reduction-to-the-absurd of a confusion only too common among ancient critics, and not quite unknown among modern. It is only necessary to point out that, from a man capable of it, good literary criticism would be surprising, and that as a matter of fact there is here no strictly literary criticism at all. The paper ends as it began, with the general doctrine that the young must be well steered in their reading, so that they may be kindly handed on by Poetry to Philosophy.

The more general tract, “How one should [hear or] read,” is shorter, has few quotations or none, and is less obtrusively moral in tone. But it still regards hearing, or reading, not in any way as the means of enjoying an artistic pleasure, but as the means of acquiring or failing to acquire information or edification. You must listen (or read) attentively: not take unreasonable likes and dislikes, excessive admirations and contempts. You must more particularly not take special pleasure in style and phrase. (Here we come not so much to neglect of literary criticism as to positive blasphemy against it.) A man who will not attend to a useful statement, because its style is not Attic, is like a man who refuses a wholesome drug because it is not offered him in Attic pottery. Later, there are some remarks on actual tricks of style. But, on the whole, it would be possible for a man to be educated, to live his life, carefully observing the precepts of this little batch of tracts, and to die a most respectable person, after perhaps having lived a happy and useful life, yet never to know or to care whether or why Plato was a better prose-writer than any tenth-rate sophist, Tennyson a better poet than Tom Sternhold or Tom Shadwell.

Turn to the Lives of the Orators.^[196] There is no question here, under the head of Demosthenes, of any inability to understand Latin; and the various styles of the famous Ten might have tempted most, and did tempt many, Greeks to indulge in 142literary analysis and literary comparison. In the tractate |The Lives of the Orators.| before us, be it Plutarch’s or be it somebody else’s, the author avoids touching upon even the fringe of the literary part of his subject with an ingenuity that is quite marvellous, or a stolidity that is more marvellous still. All these great masters of Greek might be generals or mere jurists, sculptors or fishmongers, for any allusion that he makes to the means by which they won their fame.

Everybody hopes that Plutarch did not write the Malignity of Herodotus.^[197] But somebody wrote it: and while the general |The Malignity of Herodotus.| handling is by no means alien from Plutarch’s the tractate, even if apocryphal, very adequately represents the attitude of no inconsiderable section of Greek men of letters to literature. Silly as it is, it illustrates rather usefully the curious parochiality of the Greeks, to some extent visible even at their best time, but naturally far more noticeable when that best time was over. Herodotus spoke disrespectfully of Bœotians: Plutarch was a Bœotian; woe to Herodotus. This kind of attitude is strange to Englishmen, who generally think far too well of themselves and their country to care what any poor outside creature says of it or them. But it is not unknown in some of the less predominant partners of the associated British Empire; it is notoriously very strong in America; and it is the rule, rather than the exception, on the Continent of Europe. It is, however, perhaps the worst mood in the world for literary criticism; and Plutarch, never strong there, is never weaker than here. He lets slip indeed, at the beginning, an interesting admission that Herodotus was generally thought to combine, with other good qualities, a peculiar facility in the reading of men, and a fluent pen. This is a literary criticism, and we may expect it to be met with retort in kind. But it is the nasty underhand temper that he wishes to exhibit. Herodotus, it seems, always uses the most damaging expressions; he drags in people’s misdeeds when they have nothing to do with the story, he omits their merits, he takes the worst views when more charitable ones were possible, and 143so forth. Which general charges are supported by an ostensibly careful examination of particular passages throughout the history. Comparisons complimentary to Thucydides are often made, but of the literary differences of the two great historians there is scarcely a word. Only at the end, as at the beginning, there is a curious kind of extorted confession. The pen is graphic and the style is sweet, and there is grace and freshness and cleverness in the narrative. But you must take heed of his κακοήθεια as of a Spanish fly among roses. Habemus confitentem, O Plutarche!

The Placita Philosophorum are as barren as the Oratorum Vitæ, but the “Comparison between Aristophanes and Menander,”^[198] |The "Comparison of Aristophanes and Menander."| though only an extract or abstract, may seem as if it could not deceive us. That the result is the depreciation of the greater writer and the exaltation of the smaller one does not matter much: we must not judge a critic by our agreement with the sense of his criticism. And it may be admitted that the technicalities of the art, which in other places are always incomprehensibly absent, do put in some appearance here. But though there is even some critical jargon,^[199] there is no critical grasp. We are told with a shower of additional epithets that Aristophanes is φορτικὸς καὶ θυμελικὸς καὶ βάναυσος, the first and last of these words corresponding to different sides of our “vulgar,” while the second means “smacking of the thymele,” “theatrical,” “stagey”; that Menander’s style is “one, despite its variety,” free from puns and other naughty things. But here also the ethical side is what really engages the critic. Aristophanes is harsh, he is shocking, he degrades his subjects; Menander is graceful, full of instructive sentiment and common-sense. And the genius? Plutarch is quite frank on that point. He says, καὶ οὐκ οιδ' ὲν οἷς ἔστιν ἡ θρυλουμένη δεξιότης—"I really don’t know where the much-talked-of cleverness comes in." Alas! that “speaks” him.

No different conclusion will be reached wherever we look in 144the great collection of the Moralia. Take, for instance, the |The Roman Questions.| Roman Questions.^[200] It may be said that these are confessedly in alia materia, but the objection is hasty. We have seen that Plutarch, in the preface to his Lives of Demosthenes and Cicero, pleads his scanty acquaintance with Latin as an excuse for not attempting one of the most obvious and interesting of things, one, moreover, almost peremptorily demanded of him—that is to say, the literary comparison of the two greatest orators, of two of the greatest prose writers, of Greece and Rome respectively. Yet we see from these Roman Questions that, when the subject really interested him, he could pry into Latin matters, of the obscurest and most out-of-the-way kind, with unwearied labour and curiosity, and with a great deal of acuteness to boot. Not an eccentric rite of Latin religion, not a quaint bit of Latin folk-lore, not a puzzling social custom at Rome, can he meet with and hear of, but he hunts up the history and literature of it, turns it over and over in his mind, has traditional or conjectural explanations of it, treats it with all the affectionate diligence of the critical commentator. And yet he is afraid or indisposed to attempt a literary estimate of the authors of the two Philippics.

The much larger Symposiacs^[201] tell the same story, no longer indirectly, but, as it were, aloud and open-mouthed. There are |The Symposiacs.| nine books of them; ten or a dozen questions, sometimes more, are discussed in each book, often at considerable length. Table-talk among the Greeks and Romans was notoriously inclined in a literary direction.^[202] But Plutarch’s 145table-talk is nothing so little as it is literary. The customs and etiquette of conviviality; the proceedings, proper or not proper, at and after a good dinner; the physical qualities of foods and wines, receive natural, full, and curious treatment. Sometimes the writer allows his fancy the remotest excursions, as in the famous debate whether the bird comes before the egg or the egg before the bird. He discusses philosophy, physics, physic; he inquires whether sea-water will or (like a more sophisticated product) will not wash clothes; appraises the quality of jests; considers whether meat gets high sooner in moonlight or sunlight; and whether there is more echo by day or by night. But amid all this expatiation he seems to avoid literature as if it were Scylla and Charybdis in one. If he draws anywhere near the subject, it is to treat it in the least literary way possible. We see the name of Homer in the title of a chapter, and begin to hope for something to our point. But Plutarch is only anxious to know why, when Homer mentions games, he puts boxing first, then wrestling, and running last. We find in one of the prefaces (that to Book V.) a scornful glance at φορτικοὶ καὶ ἀφιλόλογοι, who tell riddles and so forth after dinner. But, alas! the book itself practises “Philology” in a way that is of very little good to us. It does indeed open with the old and still unsettled question why the dramatic and literary treatment of painful things is pleasant; but this is a question rather of philosophy than of literature. 146It starts the inquiry whether prizes for poetry at festivals are of great antiquity; but this is mere antiquarianism. When it is for a moment actually “philological,” inquiring into epithets like ζωρότερον and ἀγλαόκαρπον and ὑπέρφλοια, it is always the bare meaning, the application, and so forth, that is attended to. When, for instance, Plutarch discusses the second word, he does not so much as touch that general question of Greek compound epithets which Mr Matthew Arnold touches (and begs) in a well-known passage.^[203] He does not even glance at the grace, the beauty, the harmony of the word itself. He only wants to know why the poet specially applies this term to apple-trees, and why Empedocles selects apples themselves for the other epithet, ὑπέρφλοια. Nay, in discussing this last he gives a kind of indirect slap at the notion of an epithet being selected for the sake of “pretty writing and blooming colour.”^[204] And so everywhere. It is not too much to say that Plutarch invariably avoids when he can, and when he accidentally approaches it, despatches in as unliterary a manner as possible, the business of the literary critic. If he does not (as there is some warrant for thinking he did) positively undervalue and almost despise this, he clearly regards it as something for which he himself has no vocation and in which he feels no interest. And then they make him the author of the Περὶ Ὕψους!

To say that Lucian^[205] is the Aristophanes of post-Christian Greek may seem a feeble and obvious attempt at epigram. But, so far as criticism is concerned, it has a propriety |Lucian.| which takes it out of the category of the forcible-feeble. Not only are the two writers alike (giving weight for age) in the purity of their respective styles; not only are they alike in the all-dissolving irony and the staunch Toryism of their satire on innovations; but their critical attitudes are (when once more due allowance has been made for circumstances and seasons) curiously similar. Neither is a literary critic first of all or by profession,—though Lucian’s date, the state of literature in his time, and his being in the 147main a prose writer, give him a sort of “false air” of being this. Both dislike innovations of phrase, at least as much because they are innovations as because they are actually in bad taste. Both hate “conceit,” and neologism, at least as vehemently because such things happen to be associated with opinions obnoxious to them as because they dislike the things themselves. And consequently (though again, for reasons easily given, less apparently in Lucian’s case than in Aristophanes), the critical work of both, though displaying astonishing acuteness, is rather a special phase, a particular function of a general attitude of satiric contemplation of life, than criticism pure and simple. In both, yet again, the combination of critical temperament and literary power makes what they have to say on the subject of extraordinary interest. Yet once more, in this case as in the former, the interest lies a little outside the path of strict criticism. What Lucian has to tell us is perhaps best, as it is certainly most memorably, summed up in the epigram attributed to him (and I am sure not unworthily) in the Anthology—

We do not get much beyond this cheerful doctrine in his more directly critical utterances. Much acuteness has been ascribed to the πῶς δεῖ ἱστορίαν συγγράφειν.^[207] But one had |The How to Write History.| hardly need be a Lucian to see that the historian (or anybody else) must understand his subject, and know how to set it forth: though it may be very freely granted that a strict application of the doctrine would make considerable gaps on the shelves of libraries, or rather would leave very few books on them. Indeed the 148whole tractate, though very sound sense, is in more ways than one a prologue to the True History. And from its opening account of the unlucky Abderites and their epidemic of tragedy, through its application of the story of Diogenes rolling his tub, to its demure assertion at the end that the tub is rolled, the irony is sufficiently apparent.

If the “How to Write History” is chiefly concerned with matter, the Lexiphanes^[208] is, with at least equal thoroughness, devoted |The Lexiphanes.| to words. The comedy here is of a different kind, broader, but hardly less subtle. The play on αὐχμὸς (“dry”) and νεοχμὸς (“newfangled”), the taste which Lexiphanes gives at once of his preciousness by the use of the word κυψελόβυστα (“wax-stuffed”), his superb contempt for irony,^[209] with his interlocutor’s audacious punning and sham reverence, “set” the piece at once for us. The wonderful lingo which Lexiphanes proceeds to pour forth in his “Anti-symposium” is matter for another inquiry than this; but the subsequent criticism of it by Lycinus and Sopolis is quite within our competence. And there is nowhere any sounder prophylactic against one of the recurrent diseases of literature, an access of which has been on us, as it happens, for a considerable time past. There are other diseases, of course—affected archaism, affected purism, &c. But this particular one of “raising language to a higher power,” as it has been called by some of those afflicted (and pleased) with it in our days, has never been better characterised. “Before all things,” says Lycinus, “prythee remember me this, not to mimic the worst inventions of modern rhetoricians, and smack your lips over them,^[210] but to trample on them, and emulate the great classical examples. Nor let the wind-flowers of speech bewitch you, but, after the manner of men in training, stick to solid food. Sacrifice first of all to the Goddess Clearness and to the Graces by whom you are quite deserted. Bid avaunt! to bombast and magniloquence, to tricks of speech. Do not turn up your nose, and strain your voice, and jeer at others, and think that carping at everybody else will put yourself in the front rank. Nay, you have another fault, not small, but perhaps your 149greatest, that you do not first arrange the meaning of your expressions, and then dress them up in word and phrase; but if you can pick up anywhere some outlandish locution, or invent one that seems pretty to you, you try to tack a meaning on to it, and are miserable if you cannot stuff it in somewhere, though it may have no necessary connection with what you have to say.”^[211] It would be impossible to put more forcibly or better the necessary caution, the Devil’s Advocate’s plea, against the abuse and exaggeration of the doctrine of the “beautiful word.”

The “Indictment of the Vowels”^[212] is rather a grammatical and rhetorical jeu d’esprit than a criticism; but if the curious |Other pieces: The Prometheus Es.| little piece, “To one who said 'You are the Prometheus of Prose,'”^[213] were a little longer and more explicit, it would give us rather a firmer hold of Lucian’s serious views of literature than we have actually got. At first he plays, in his usual manner, with the notion of his real or invented flatterer. Are his works called Promethean because they are of clay? He sorrowfully admits the justice of the comparison. Or because they are so clever? This is sarcastic; and besides he has no wish to deserve the Caucasus. After all, too, it is a dubious compliment, for did not a comic writer call Cleon “a Prometheus”? Then he drolls variously on the “potter’s art” attributed to him, the slightness of his work, the ease with which it can be smashed, &c. But, perhaps there is a complimentary meaning—that Lucian, like Prometheus, is an inventor—that his books are not merely to pattern. He does not altogether reject the soft impeachment, though he hastens (in harmony with that conclusion of the Lexiphanes which has been just quoted) to say that mere novelty is no merit in his eyes. And this he proceeds to illustrate, in his own manner, by a story of the black camel and the magpie-coloured man that Ptolemy brought to Egypt, with the result that the Egyptians thought the camel frightful and the magpie-man a rather disgusting joke. But he has, he admits, attempted to adjust the philosophical dialogue to something like the tone of the comic poets, to avoid the faults of both, 150and to adjust their excellences. At any rate, says he, with one of his inimitable changes, Prometheus was a thief, and he, Lucian, is not. Nobody can call him a plagiarist, and he must stick to his art, such as it is, for otherwise he were Epimetheus if he changed his mind. In this quaint glancing mixture of the serious and the sarcastic, it is possible to guess a good deal, but guessing, as I have ventured to announce pretty prominently, is not the object of this book.

To Rhetoric, as distinguished from literary criticism proper, Lucian’s chief (indeed his only considerable and substantive) contribution is the so-called “Master of the Orators,”^[214] |Works touching Rhetoric.| to which may be added a μελέτη or declamation on one of the stock subjects (a case of tyrannicide) and some parts of the “Twice Accused Man.”^[215] This last is a curious pot-pourri of satire on the different schools of philosophy, on the methods of the law courts, and on forensic eloquence. Rhetoric herself appears, besides an impersonation of Dialogue, both in the character of public prosecutors against “the Syrian.” Rhetoric states that he has deserted her for Dialogue, Dialogue that he has disgraced and shamed him by burlesque. Now Lucian, it is hardly necessary to say, was a Syrian, and had been a professional teacher of Rhetoric himself. The piece is chiefly parody, especially in the two speeches just mentioned, where Lucian displays that faculty of causing his characters to make themselves ridiculous, in which he has had no rival (except the authors of the Satire Menippée and Butler), to admiration. The reasons given by the “Syrian” for deserting Rhetoric are also very funny.

But the whole has only a partial connection with literature, and is even more concerned with the degradation of the Rhetorical profession than with Rhetoric herself. Incidentally, however, it shows the strong attraction of that subject, warped and mismanaged as it was, for persons with the literary interest in them. If Rhetoric could have seen herself as she ought to be—even as she is in Longinus—it is pretty certain that Lucian would not have said the hard things against her which here appear.

151The “Master of the Rhetors” or Orators is in the common form of rhetorical treatises, the form of the Περὶ Ὕψους itself, that of an address to a young friend. This young friend had asked how a man might become a rhetor and a sophist, a position and title which he thought the noblest of all. Lucian has not the least objection to tell him, so let him listen. He shall climb the steep easily and rest on the heights, while others are tumbling down and cracking their crowns. Let there be no doubt about this. Poetry is a more difficult thing than rhetoric, and did not Hesiod master it by just plucking a few leaves from Helicon? Did not a merchant show Alexander a short cut from Persia to Egypt, only the unbelieving Macedonian would not listen? Lucian will be that merchant.

There are two ways to Rhetoric (see Cebes on another matter). One (to cut short the abundant and agreeable “chaff” of which, here as elsewhere, Lucian is so prodigal) is the long, troublesome, and ungrateful imitation of the mighty men of antiquity, of Plato and Demosthenes and the rest. The other, dealt with more copiously and more ironically still, is quite different. You learn a few fashionable catchwords for ordinary use, and some precious archaisms for occasional ornament; you must get rid of all bashfulness, dress yourself very well, cultivate the vices which happen to be in vogue, or at any rate pretend to them, and keep a good deal of company with women and servants, for both are babblesome and seldom at a loss. There is nothing hard in this and other precepts; and if you observe them, you will soon become a famous orator. Very good fun all of it, and very shrewd “criticism of life,” no doubt, but only distantly connected with criticism of literature.

Yet it requires no hazardous conjecture to discern a very considerable literary critic in Lucian, and to discover the |His critical limitations.| reason why that critic did not come out in himself or in his contemporaries, unless we are to rank the lonely and magnificent personality of Longinus among these. There was interesting literature in Lucian’s time—it is enough to mention the name of Apuleius to establish that proposition—but hardly any of it was exactly great, and the best of it was marred, either by the negative tendency which is one 152side of despair of greatness, or else by the hectic colours of decadence, or by the dubious struggles of new tendencies not yet quite ready to be born. Lucian himself (at any rate, after that youth of which we know so little) inclined, it is not necessary to say, to the negative side. He was distinctly deficient in enthusiasm (with which, perhaps, the critical artist can dispense as little as the creative), and had small feeling for poetry. His admiration for the great Attic prose writers, and its result in his own delightful style, are obvious enough; while the justice, if also the rigour, of his onslaughts on the characteristics most opposed to theirs, the characteristics of florid, “conceited,” neologistic prose and verse, cannot be denied. But the unsatisfactory negation of his religious and philosophical criticism extends also to his literary attitude. “Cannot you,” one feels inclined to say, “find something to say for as well as against luxuriance of fancy, wealth of colour, delicate suggestiveness of thought and phrase?” Cannot you, like Longinus, admit that Nature meant men to think and write magnificently of the magnificent? He could not, or he would not: his very interest in literature as literature seems to have been lukewarm. And so the greatest writer of all the later Greeks, a writer great enough to rank with all but the very greatest of the earlier, gives us very little but carping criticism of literature, and not much even of that.

It does not fall within the plan of this work to examine at any length the recently much-debated question whether the |Longinus: the difficulties raised.| treatise Περὶ Ὕψους is, as after its first publication by Robortello in 1554 it was for nearly three centuries unquestioningly taken to be, the work of the rhetorician Longinus, who was Queen Zenobia’s Prime Minister, and was put to death by Aurelian. It has been the mania of the nineteenth century to prove that everybody’s work was written by somebody else, and it will not be the most useless task of the twentieth to betake itself to more profitable inquiries. References which will enable any one who cares to investigate the matter are given in a note.^[216] Here it may be sufficient to 153say two things. The first is, that these questions appertain for settlement, less to the technical expert than to the intelligent judex, the half-juryman, half-judge, who is generally acquainted with the rules of logic and the laws of evidence. The second is, that the verdict of the majority of such judices on this particular question is, until some entirely new documents turn up, likely to be couched in something like the following form:—

1. The positive evidence for the authorship of Longinus is very weak, consisting in MS. attributions, the oldest of which^[217] is irresolute in form, while it certainly does not date earlier than the tenth century.

2. There is absolutely no evidence against the authorship of Longinus, only a set of presumptions, most of which are sheer opinion, and carry no weight except as such. Moreover, no plausible competitor has even been hinted at. I hope it is not illiberal to say that the suggestion of Plutarch, which was made by Vaucher, and has met with some favour, carries with it irresistible evidence that the persons who make it know little about criticism. No two things could possibly be more different than the amiable ethical knack of the author of the Moralia, and the intense literary gift of the author of the Περὶ Ὕψους.

Another of the “Academic questions” connected with the book, however, is of more literary importance, and that is its |“Sublimity.”| proper designation in the modern languages. There has been a consensus of the best authorities of late years, even though they may not agree on other points, that “The Sublime” is a far from happy translation of ὕψος. Not only has “Sublime” in the modern languages, and especially in English, a signification too much specialised, but the specialisation is partly in the wrong direction. No one, for instance, who 154uses English correctly, however great his enthusiasm for the magnificent Sapphic ode which Longinus has had the well-deserved good fortune to preserve to us, would call it exactly sublime,^[218] there being, in the English connotation of that word, an element of calmness, or at any rate (for a storm may be sublime) of mastery, which is absent here. And so in other cases; “Sublime” being more especially unfortunate in bringing out (what no doubt remains to some extent in any case) the inadequateness and tautology of the attempts to define the sources of ὕψος. Hall, the seventeenth-century translator, avoided these difficulties by a simple rendering, “the height of eloquence,” which is more than literally exact, though it is neither elegant nor handy. Nor is there perhaps any single word that is not open to almost as many objections as Sublime itself. So that (and again this is the common conclusion) it is well to keep it, with a very careful preliminary explanation that the Longinian Sublime is not sublimity in its narrower sense, but all that quality, or combination of qualities, which creates enthusiasm in literature, all that gives consummateness to it, all that deserves the highest critical encomium either in prose or poetry.

Few persons, however, whom the gods have made critical will care to spend much time in limine over the authorship, |Quality and contents of the treatise.| the date,^[219] the title, and the other beggarly elements in respect to this astonishing treatise. Incomplete as it is—and its incompleteness is as evident as that of the Poetics, and probably not much less substantial—difficult as are some of its terms, deprived as we are in some cases of the power of appreciating its citations fully, through our ignorance of their context, puzzled as we may even be now and then by that radical difference in taste and view-point, that “great gulf fixed,” which sometimes, though only sometimes, does interpose itself between modern and ancient,—no student of criticism, hardly one would think any fairly educated and intelligent man, can read a dozen 155lines of the book without finding himself in a new world, as he compares it with even the best of his earlier critical masters. He is in the presence of a man who has accidentally far greater advantages of field than Aristotle, essentially far more powerful genius, and an intenser appreciation of literature, than Dionysius or Quintilian. And probably the first thought—not of the student, who will be prepared for it, but of the fairly educated man who knows something of Pope and Boileau and the rest of them—will be, “How on earth did this book come to be quoted as an authority by a school like that of the ‘classical’ critics of the seventeenth-eighteenth century, whose every principle almost, whose general opinions certainly, it seems to have been designedly written to crush, conclude, and quell?” Of this more hereafter. Let us begin, as in former important cases, by a short abstract of the actual contents of the book.

The author commences by addressing a young friend or pupil, a certain Postumius (Terentianus or Florentianus?), on the inefficiency of the Treatise on the Sublime by a certain Cæcilius.^[220] In endeavouring to provide something more satisfactory, especially as to the sources of Sublimity, he premises little more in the shape of definition than that it is “a certain consummateness and eminence” of words, completing this with the remark (the first epoch-making one of the treatise) that the effect of such things is “not persuasion but transport,”^[221] not the result of skill, pains, and arrangement, but something which, “opportunely out-flung,”^[222] carries everything before it. But can it be taught? Is it not innate? The doubt implies a fallacy. Nature is necessary, but it must be guided and helped by art. Then comes a gap, a specially annoying one, since the farther shore lands us in the midst of an unfavourable criticism of a passage supposed to come from the lost Orithyia of Æschylus, which is succeeded by, or grouped with, other specimens of the false sublime, bombast, tumidity, and 156the parenthurson.^[223] Next we pass to “frigidity,” a term which Longinus uses with a slightly different connotation from Aristotle’s, applying it chiefly to what he thinks undue flings and quips and conceits. These particular strictures are, in Chapter V., generalised off into a brief but admirable censure of the quest for mere novelty, of that “horror of the obvious” which bad taste at all times has taken for a virtue. To cure this and other faults, there is nothing for it but to make for the true Sublime, hard as it may be. For (again a memorable and epoch-making saying) “the judgment of words is the latest begotten fruit of many an attempt.”^[224]

The first canon of sublimity is not unlike the famous Quod Semper, &c. If a thing does not transport at all, it is certainly not Sublime. If its transporting power fails with repetition, with submission to different but still competent judges, it is not sublime. When men different in habits, lives, aims, ages, speech, agree about it, then no mistake is possible.

The sources of Sublimity are next defined as five in number: Command of strong and manly thought; Vehement and enthusiastic passion—these are congenital; Skilfulness with Figures; Nobility of phrase; Dignified and elevated ordonnance.^[225] These, after a rebuke of some length to Cæcilius for omitting Passion, he proceeds to discuss seriatim. The ἁδρεπήβολον, which he now calls “great-naturedness,”^[226] holds the first place in value as in order, and examples of it, and of the failure to reach it, are given from many writers, Homer and “the Legislator of the Jews” being specially praised. This laudation leads to one of the best known and most interesting passages of the whole book, a short criticism and comparison of the Iliad and the Odyssey, whereon, as on other things in this abstract, more 157hereafter. The interest certainly does not sink with the quotation from Sappho, whether we agree or not (again vide post) that the source of its charm is “the selection and composition of her details.” Other typical passages are then cited and criticised.

We next come to Amplification,—almost the first evidence in the treatise, and not a fatal one, of the numbing power of “Figures.” Longinus takes occasion by it for many illuminative animadversions, not merely on Homer, but on Plato, Herodotus, Demosthenes, and Thucydides, whom (it is very satisfactory to observe) he includes among those who have “sublimity.” This handling of Figures, professedly eclectic, is fertile in such animadversions in regard to others besides Amplification—Hyperbata, Polyptota, Antimetathesis, and others still—with especial attention to Periphrasis, to his praise of which the eighteenth century perhaps attended without due attention to his cautions.

Then comes another of the flashes of light. Dismissing the figures, he turns to diction in itself, and has a wonderful passage on it, culminating in the dictum, “For beautiful words are in deed and in fact the very light of the spirit,”^[227]—the Declaration of Independence and the “Let there be light” at once of Literary Criticism.

Here the Enemy seems to have thought that he was getting too good, for another and greater gap occurs, and when we are allowed to read again, we are back among the Figures and dealing with Metaphor—the criticism of examples, however, being still illuminative. It leads him, moreover, to another of his nugget-grounds, the discussion on “Faultlessness,” which introduces some especially valuable parallels—Apollonius and Homer, Bacchylides and Pindar, Ion and Sophocles, Hyperides and Demosthenes, Lysias and Plato. Then we pass to the figure Hyperbole after a gap, and then to ordonnance and arrangement, with a passage, valuable but, like all similar passages in the ancient critics, difficult, on rhythm. After this a section on μικρότης—“littleness,” “triviality”—leads abruptly to the close, which is not the close, and which, after 158some extremely interesting remarks on the ethical and other conditions of the time, ends with an unfulfilled promise of treating the subject of the Passions. The loss of this is perhaps more to be regretted than the loss of any other single tractate of the kind in antiquity. It might have been, and possibly was, only a freshening up of the usual rhetorical commonplaces about the “colours of good and evil,” and the probable disposition of the hearer or reader. But it might also, and from Longinus’s handling of the other stock subject of the Figures it is much more likely to, have been something mainly, if not wholly, new: in fact, something that to this day we have not got—an analysis of the direct appeals of literature to the primary emotions of the soul.

In considering this inestimable book, it is hardly possible to exaggerate the importance of these early words of it to which attention has been drawn above. The yoke of “persuasion” has at last been broken from the neck of the critic. He does not consider literature as something which will help a man to carry an assembly with him, to persuade a jury, to gain a declamation prize. He does indeed still mention the listener rather than the reader; but that is partly tradition, partly a consequence of the still existing prevalence of recitation or reading aloud. Further, it is sufficiently evident that the critic |Preliminary Retrospect.| has come to regard literature as a whole, and is not distracted by supposed requirements of “invention” on the part of the poet, of “persuasion” on the part of the orator, and so forth. He looks at the true and only test of literary greatness—the “transport,” the absorption of the reader. And he sees as no one, so far as we know, saw before him (except Dionysius for a moment and “in a glass darkly”), as Dante was the only man after him to see for a millennium and much more, that the beautiful words, the “mots rayonnants,” are at least a main means whereby this effect is produced. Instead of style and its criticism being dismissed, or admitted at best with impatience as something φορτικόν, we have that gravest and truest judgment of the latter as the latest-born offspring of many a painful endeavour. Far is it indeed from him to stick to the word only: his remarks on 159novelty, his peroration (not intended as such, but so coming to us), and many other things, are proof of that. But in the main his criticism is of the pure æsthetic kind, and of the best of that kind. It will not delay us too much to examine it a little more in detail.

The opening passage as to Cæcilius, though it has tempted some into perilous hypothetic reconstructions of that critic’s |Detailed Criticism: The opening.| possible teaching, really comes to little more than this—that Longinus, like most of us, was not exactly satisfied with another man’s handling of his favourite subject. And, curiously enough, the only specific fault that he here finds—namely, that his predecessor, while illustrating the nature of the Sublime amply, neglected to discuss the means of reaching it—rather recoils on himself. For there can be little doubt that the weakest part of the Περὶ Ὕψους is its discussion of “sources.” But the great phrase, already more than once referred to, as to transport or ecstasy, not persuasion, lifts us at once—itself transports us—into a region entirely different from that of all preceding Rhetorics, without at the same time giving any reason to fear loss of touch with the common ground and common-sense. For nothing can be saner than the handling, in the second chapter, of that aporia concerning nature and art, genius and painstaking, which has not infrequently been the cause of anything but sane writing.

After the gap, however, we come to one of the passages recently glanced at, and mentioned or to be mentioned so |The stricture on the Orithyia.| often elsewhere, which warn us as to difference of view. The passage, supposed to be, as we said, Æschylean and from the Orithyia, is no doubt at rather more than “concert-pitch.” It is Marlowe rather than Shakespeare; yet Shakespeare himself has come near to it in Lear and elsewhere, and one line at least—