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Title: A history of criticism and literary taste in Europe, Volume 1 (of 3) : From the earliest texts to the present day
Author: Saintsbury, George
Language: English
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*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "A history of criticism and literary taste in Europe, Volume 1 (of 3) : From the earliest texts to the present day" ***
LITERARY TASTE IN EUROPE, VOLUME 1 (OF 3) ***
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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_Ignorantium temeraria plerumque sunt judicia._
—POLYCARP LEYSER.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
A HISTORY OF CRITICISM
AND
LITERARY TASTE IN EUROPE
_FROM THE EARLIEST TEXTS TO THE PRESENT DAY_
BY
GEORGE SAINTSBURY
M.A. OXON.; HON. LL.D. ABERD.
PROFESSOR OF RHETORIC AND ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE
UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH
IN THREE VOLUMES
VOL. I.
CLASSICAL AND MEDIÆVAL CRITICISM
SECOND EDITION
WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS
EDINBURGH AND LONDON
MCMII
PREFACE.
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 never
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.
Footnote 1:
Delia Critica, Libri Tre. B. Mazzarella, Geneva, 1866. The book to
which I owe my knowledge of this, Professors Gayley and Scott’s
_Introduction to the Methods and Materials of Literary Criticism_,
Boston, U.S.A., 1899, is invaluable as a bibliography, and has much
more than merely bibliographical interest.
Footnote 2:
Ed. 2, Paris, 1849. The first edition may have appeared between 1830
and 1840. Vapereau says 1844, which would strengthen my point in the
text; but this does not seem to agree with the Preface of the second.
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, partly 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 [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!
GEORGE SAINTSBURY.
EDINBURGH, _Lammastide 1900_.
NOTE TO SECOND EDITION.
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.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTENTS.
----------
BOOK I.
GREEK CRITICISM.
CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTORY.
PAGE
Delimitation of frontier 3
Classes of Criticism excluded 4
Class retained 4
Method 4
Texts the chief object 5
_Hypotheses non fingo_ 6
Illustration from M. Egger 6
The Documents 7
Greek 7
Roman 7
Mediæval 7
Renaissance and Modern 8
CHAPTER II.
GREEK CRITICISM BEFORE ARISTOTLE.
Earliest criticism of the Greeks 9
Probably Homeric in subject 9
Probably allegoric in method 10
Xenophanes 12
Parmenides 13
Empedocles 13
Democritus 15
The Sophists—earlier 15
The Sophists—later 17
Plato 17
His crotchets 18
His compensations 19
Aristophanes 21
The _Frogs_ 22
Other criticism in Comedy 23
Simylus (?) 25
Isocrates 26
CHAPTER III.
ARISTOTLE.
Authorship of the criticism attributed to Aristotle 29
Its subject-matter 30
Abstract of the _Poetics_ 32
Characteristics, general 35
Limitations of range 36
Ethical twist 37
Drawbacks resulting 37
Overbalance of merit 38
The doctrine of ἁμαρτία 39
The _Rhetoric_ 39
Meaning and range of “Rhetoric” 40
The contents of the book 41
Attitude to _lexis_ 42
Vocabulary—“Figures” 43
A difficulty 44
“Frigidity” 44
Archaism 45
Stock epithet and periphrasis 45
False metaphor 46
Simile 46
“Purity” 46
“Elevation” 46
Propriety 46
Prose rhythm 47
Loose and periodic style, &c. 48
General effect of the _Rhetoric_ 48
The _Homeric Problems_ 49
Value of the two main treatises 51
Defects and drawbacks in the _Poetics_ 51
And in the _Rhetoric_ 52
Merits of both 53
The end of art: the οἰκεῖα ἡδονή 55
Theory of Action 55
And of ἁμαρτία 56
Of Poetic Diction 56
CHAPTER IV.
GREEK CRITICISM AFTER ARISTOTLE. SCHOLASTIC AND MISCELLANEOUS.
Development of Criticism 60
Theophrastus and others 61
Criticism of the later Philosophical Schools: The Stoics 62
The Epicureans: Philodemus 63
The Pyrrhonists: Sextus Empiricus 64
The Academics 66
The Neo-Platonists 67
Plotinus 67
Porphyry 68
Rhetoricians and Grammarians 70
Rhetoric early stereotyped 72
Grammatical and Scholiastic criticism 73
The Pergamene and Alexandrian Schools 74
Their Four Masters 75
The Scholiasts on Aristophanes 76
On Sophocles 77
On Homer 78
The Literary Epigrams of the Anthology 81
The Rhetoric of the Schools 87
Its documents 88
The _Progymnasmata_ of Hermogenes 90
Remarks on them 91
Aphthonius 92
Theon 93
Nicolaus 95
Nicephorus 95
Minors 95
General remarks on the Progymnasmata 96
The Commentaries on them 96
The “Art” of Hermogenes 97
Other “Arts,” &c. 100
Treatises on Figures 102
The Demetrian _De Interpretatione_ 103
Menander on Epideictic 104
Others 105
The _Rhetoric_ or _De Inventione_ of Longinus 106
Survey of School Rhetoric 107
The Practical Rhetoricians or Masters of Epideictic 108
Dion Chrysostom 109
Aristides of Smyrna 113
Maximus Tyrius 117
Philostratus 118
Libanius 121
Themistius 124
Julian 125
CHAPTER V.
DIONYSIUS OF HALICARNASSUS, PLUTARCH, LUCIAN, LONGINUS.
Dionysius of Halicarnassus 127
His works 128
The _Rhetoric_ 129
The _Composition_ 129
Censures and Commentaries on Orators, &c. 133
The minor works 134
The judgment of Thucydides 135
General critical value 136
Plutarch 137
The _Lives_ quite barren for us 138
The _Moralia_ at first sight promising 138
Examination of this promise 139
The “Education” 139
The Papers on “Reading” 140
The _Lives of the Orators_ 142
The _Malignity of Herodotus_ 142
The “Comparison of Aristophanes and Menander” 143
The _Roman Questions_ 144
The _Symposiacs_ 144
Lucian 146
The _How to write History_ 147
The _Lexiphanes_ 148
Other pieces: The _Prometheus Es_ 149
Works touching Rhetoric 150
His critical limitations 151
Longinus: the difficulties raised 152
“Sublimity” 153
Quality and contents of the treatise 154
Preliminary Retrospect 158
Detailed Criticism: The opening 159
The stricture on the _Orithyia_ 159
Frigidity 160
The “maidens in the eyes” 160
The canon “Quod semper” 161
The sources of sublimity 161
Longinus on Homer 162
On Sappho 163
“Amplification” 164
“Images” 165
The Figures 166
“Faultlessness” 168
Hyperboles 169
“Harmony” 169
The Conclusion 170
Modernity of the treatise 172
Or rather sempiternity 173
CHAPTER VI.
BYZANTINE CRITICISM.
Photius 175
Detailed examination of the _Bibliotheca_ 177
Importance of its position as a body of critical judgment 183
Tzetzes 187
John the Siceliote 187
INTERCHAPTER I. 191
------------------------------------------------------------------------
BOOK II.
LATIN CRITICISM.
CHAPTER I.
BEFORE QUINTILIAN—CICERO, HORACE, SENECA THE ELDER, VARRO.
The conditions of Latin criticism 211
Cicero 213
His attitude to Lucretius 214
His Rhetorical works 217
His Critical Vocabulary 219
Horace 221
The _Ad Pisones_ 221
Its desultoriness 224
And arbitrary conventionality 225
Its compensations: Brilliancy 225
Typical spirit 226
And practical value 227
The _Satires_ and _Epistles_ 228
“Declamations” 230
Their subjects: epideictic 231
And forensic 231
Their influence on style 232
Seneca the Elder 234
The Suasories 234
The _Controversies_: their Introductions 236
Varro 240
CHAPTER II.
THE CONTEMPORARIES OF QUINTILIAN.
Petronius 242
Seneca the Younger 245
The satirists 248
Persius 248
The Prologue and First Satire 248
Examination of this 251
Juvenal 253
Martial 256
The style of the Epigrams 258
Précis of their critical contents 260
Statius 268
Pliny the Younger: Criticism on the Letters 270
The _Dialogue de Claris Oratoribus_ 280
Mr. Nettleship’s estimate of it 283
The general literary taste of the Silver Age 284
“Faultlessness” 285
Ornate or plain style 287
CHAPTER III.
QUINTILIAN.
The _Institutes_ 289
Preface 291
Book I.: Elementary Education 291
And Grammar 291
Books II.-VII. only relevant now and then 292
How to lecture on an author 293
Wit 294
Book VIII.: Style 295
Perspicuity 296
Elegance 297
Books VIII., IX.: Tropes and Figures 299
Composition 304
Prose rhythm 304
Book X.: Survey of Classical Literature 306
Greek: Homer and other Epic poets 307
The Lyrists 308
Drama 308
The Historians 309
The orators and philosophers 309
Latin—Virgil 310
Other epic and didactic poets 310
Elegiac and miscellaneous 311
Drama 311
History 312
Oratory—Cicero 313
Philosophy—Cicero and Seneca 313
Minor counsel of the Tenth Book 313
Books XI., XII.: The styles of oratory 314
“Atticism” 315
Literary quality of Greek and Latin 315
Quintilian’s critical _ethos_ 317
CHAPTER IV.
LATER WRITERS.
Aulus Gellius: the _Noctes Atticæ_ 323
Macrobius: the _Saturnalia_ 329
Servius on Virgil 334
Other commentators 341
Ausonius 342
The _Anthologia Latina_ 344
The Latin Rhetoricians 345
Rutilius Lupus, &c. 346
Curius Fortunatianus: his Catechism 346
Marius Victorinus on Cicero 348
Others 349
Martianus Capella 349
INTERCHAPTER II. 355
------------------------------------------------------------------------
BOOK III.
MEDIÆVAL CRITICISM.
CHAPTER I.
BEFORE DANTE.
Characteristics of mediæval literature 372
Its attitude to criticism 373
Importance of prosody 373
The early formal Rhetorics—Bede 374
Isidore 375
Alcuin(?) 375
Another track of inquiry 377
St Augustine a Professor of Rhetoric 377
His attitude to literature before and after his conversion 378
Analysis of the _Confessions_ from this point of view 378
A conclusion from this to the general patristic view of 380
literature
Sidonius Apollinaris 383
His elaborate epithet-comparison 385
And minute criticisms of style and metre 386
A deliberate critique 388
Cassiodorus 389
Boethius 390
Critical attitude of the fifth century 391
The sixth—Fulgentius 392
The Fulgentii and their books 393
The _Super Thebaiden_ and _Expositio Virgiliana_ 394
Venantius Fortunatus 396
Isidore of Seville again 400
Bede again 402
His _Ars Metrica_ 403
The Central Middle Ages to be more rapidly passed over 405
Provençal and Latin treatises 407
The _De Dictamine Rhythmico_ 407
John of Garlandia 408
The _Labyrinthus_ 408
Critical review of poets contained in it 409
Minor rhythmical treatises 411
Geoffrey de Vinsauf: his _Nova Poetria_ 412
CHAPTER II.
DANTE.
The _De Vulgari Eloquio_: Its history and authentication 417
Its importance 418
And the scanty recognition thereof 418
Abstract of its contents: The “Vulgar Tongue” and “Grammar” 419
The nature, &c., of the gift of speech 420
Division of contemporary tongues 421
And of the subdivisions of Romance 422
The _Italian Dialects_: Some rejected at once 423
Others—Sicilian, Apulian, Tuscan, and Genoese 424
Venetian: Some good in Bolognese 424
The “Illustrious” Language none of these, but their common 425
measure
Its four characteristics 425
The Second Book—Why Dante deals with poetry only 426
All good poetry should be in the Illustrious 427
The subjects of High Poetry—War, Love, Virtue 427
Its form: Canzoni 427
Definition of Poetry 428
Its styles, and the constituents of the grand style 428
_Superbia Carminum_ 428
_Constructionis elatio_ 429
_Excellentia Verborum_ 429
_Pexa et hirsuta_ 430
The Canzone 430
Importance of the book 431
Independence and novelty of its method 432
Dante’s attention to Form 433
His disregard of Oratory 433
The influence on him of Romance 434
And of comparative criticism 434
The poetical differentia according to him 435
His antidote to the Wordsworthian heresy 436
His handling of metre 436
Of diction 437
His standards of style 438
The “Chapter of the Sieve” 439
The _pexa_ 440
The _hirsuta_ 441
Other critical _loci_ in Dante 441
The Epistle to Can Grande 441
The _Convito_ 442
Dante on Translation 443
On language as shown in prose and verse 443
Final remarks on his criticism 444
CHAPTER III.
THE FOURTEENTH AND FIFTEENTH CENTURIES.
Limitations of this chapter 447
The material it offers 448
The Formal Arts of Rhetoric 448
And of Poetry 449
Examples of Indirect Criticism: Chaucer 450
_Sir Thopas_ 451
Froissart 453
Richard of Bury 455
Petrarch 456
Boccaccio 457
His work on Dante 457
The _Trattatello_ 458
The _Comento_ 459
The _De Genealogia Deorum_ 460
Gavin Douglas 464
Further examples unnecessary 466
INTERCHAPTER III.
§ I. THE CONTRIBUTION OF THE MEDIÆVAL PERIOD TO LITERARY 469
CRITICISM
§ II. THE POSITION, ACTUAL AND POSSIBLE, OF LITERARY 481
CRITICISM AT THE RENAISSANCE
——————————
INDEX 487
BOOK I
GREEK CRITICISM
----------
ἡ γὰρ τῶν λόγων κρίσις πολλῆς ἐστι πείρας
τελευταῖον ἐπιγέννημα.
—LONGINUS.
CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTORY.
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 [Sidenote: _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 side-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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: _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 [Sidenote: _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 they 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 [Sidenote: _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 of the
margent would distinctly obscure the orderly setting forth of the texts.
Yet, further, leave will be taken to neglect guesswork as [Sidenote:
"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 [Sidenote: _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?
Footnote 3:
Paris. Third Edition, #1887.
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 altogether, and to reduce even the amount of
superstructure on [Sidenote: _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 [Sidenote: _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,[Sidenote:
_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 [Sidenote: _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 in
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 [Sidenote: _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.
CHAPTER II.
GREEK CRITICISM BEFORE ARISTOTLE.
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 [Sidenote: _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.
Footnote 4:
I am not aware of any _complete_ treatment of the subject of Greek
criticism except that of M. Egger already cited, and, as part of a
still larger whole, that of M. Théry (see note on Preface). The German
handlings of the subject, as Professor Rhys Roberts (p. 259 of his ed.
of Longinus) remarks, seem all to be concerned with the philosophy of
æsthetic. If the work which Professor Roberts himself promises (ibid.,
p. ix.) had appeared, I should doubtless have had a most valuable
guide and controller in him.
If we had older and more certain testimony about the fact, and still
more about the exact character, of the [Sidenote: _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 caution 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. [Sidenote:
_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 sort 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 fuller 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 [Sidenote: _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—
οὖλος ὁρᾷ, οὖλος δὲ νοεῖ, οὖλος δέ τ᾿ ἀκούει,
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 negus,[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.
Footnote 5:
_Philosophorum Græcorum Veterum Reliquiæ. Rec. et ill. Simon Karsten_
(Amsterdam, 1830-38). Vol. i. pars 1, Xenophanes; vol. i. pars 2,
Parmenides; vol. ii. Empedocles.
Footnote 6:
_Democriti Abderitæ Operum Fragmenta. Coll., &c., F. G. A. Mullachius_
(Berlin, 1843).
Footnote 7:
Karsten, i. 1. 43. Fr. 7.
Footnote 8:
Ibid., i. 1.77. Fr. 23. Xenophanes is emphatic on the necessity of
putting the water in _first_.
Footnote 9:
Ibid., i. 1. 55. Fr. 17. The philosopher says merely ἐρεβίνθους, but
we know from Pherecrates (_ap. Athenæum_, ii. 44) that they were
parched or devilled, πεφρυγμένους.
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 [Sidenote: _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.
Footnote 10:
Parm. _de Natura_, l. 11; Karsten, I. ii. 29.
Footnote 11:
Ibid., l. 35.
Footnote 12:
Ibid., l. 144.
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 [Sidenote: _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 off 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.
Footnote 13:
Emp. _de Natura_ l. 34-40; Karsten, ii. 89, 90.
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 Poetry” (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 [Sidenote:
_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.
Footnote 14:
Diog. Laert., ix. 7, p. 239 ed. Cobet (Didot Collection).
Footnote 15:
ἐπέων. It is very difficult to be certain whether this means here
“word,” “song,” or “epic.”
Footnote 16:
ὀρθοεπείης καὶ γλωσσέων.
Footnote 17:
ῥημάτων
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 [Sidenote: _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 about 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.
Footnote 18:
And the authority for this, Themistius, is very late. The catalogue of
the works given by Diogenes Laertius (ed. cit., p. 240) includes
nothing even distantly bearing on criticism.
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
recorded 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. [Sidenote: _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]
Footnote 19:
Gorgias ap. Plutarch.
Footnote 20:
Prodicus in the “Choice of Hercules.”
Footnote 21:
V. the _Cratylus_, _passim_.
Footnote 22:
V. _Hippias Minor_.
Footnote 23:
There is not the slightest evidence for assigning the _Rhetoric_
called _ad Alexandrum_, and variously attributed to Aristotle and
Anaximenes, to any pre-Aristotelian writer, least of all for giving it
to Corax himself.
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 [Sidenote:
_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 the
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 [Sidenote: _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 on 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 [Sidenote: _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
mere 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]
Footnote 24:
Not only have we not this: we have practically nothing of Tynnichus.
His page in Bergk (iii. 379) is blank, except for the phrase which
Plato himself quotes: εὕρημά τι Μοισᾶν—“a windfall of the Muses.” Of a
very commonplace distich about Agamemnon’s ship, quoted by Procopius,
we may apparently relieve him.
Footnote 25:
534 D.
Footnote 26:
If the space and treatment here allotted to Plato seem exceeding poor
and beggarly, it can but be urged that his own criticism of literature
is so exceedingly _general_ that in this book no other treatment of it
was possible. On his own principles we should be “praising the horse
in terms of the ass” if we did otherwise. It is true that besides the
_attitude_ above extolled, there are to be found, from the glancing,
many-sided, parabolic discourse of the _Phædrus_ to the mighty theory
of the _Republic_, endless things invaluable, nay, indispensable, to
the critic. It is nearly certain that, as Professor Butcher thinks, no
one had anticipated him in the recognition of the organic unity
necessary to a work of literary, as of all, art. But even here, as in
the messages “to Lysias and all others who write orations, to Homer
and all others who write poems, to Solon, &c.,” we see the generality,
the abstraction, the evasiveness, one may almost say, of his critical
gospel. Such concrete things as the reference to Isocrates at the end
of the _Phædrus_ are very rare; and, on the other hand, his frequent
and full dealings with Homer are not literary criticism at all. In a
treatise on Æsthetics Plato cannot have too large a space; in a
History of Criticism the place allotted to him must be conspicuous,
but the space small.
There 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. [Sidenote: _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. His 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 [Sidenote:
_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 and 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 [Sidenote:
_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
that 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.
Footnote 27:
This passage, which is twenty-five lines long, is from the play
_Chiron_, and may be found at p. 110 of the Didot edition of Meineke’s
_Poet. Com. Græc. Fragmenta_. Egger (p. 40) only gives it in
translation. It is not in the least literary but wholly _musical_ in
subject, Music appearing in person and complaining of the alteration
of the lyre from seven strings to twelve.
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
between 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.
Footnote 28:
Thus we find it constantly in the Middle Ages, where pure criticism is
still almost unknown.
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 [Sidenote: _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.”
Footnote 29:
See Egger (p. 73), who as usual makes a little too much of it. The
original may be found in Athenæus (at the opening of Bk. vi. 222 _a_:
vol. i. p. 485, ed. Dindorf), where it is followed by a burlesque
encomium on tragedy from the comic poet Timocles, or in Meineke, ed.
cit., p. 397.
Footnote 30:
As the Greek is not in some editions of Meineke’s _Fragments_, and is
not given by Egger at all, while his translation is very loose, it
will be best to quote it in full from the former’s edition of Stobæus'
_Florilegium_, ii. 352:—
Οὔτε φύσις ἱκανὴ γίγνεται τέχνης ἄτερ
πρὸς οὐδὲν ἐπιτήδευμα παράπαν οὐδενί,
οὔτε πάλι τέχνη μὴ φύσιν κεκτημένη.
τούτων ὁμοίως τοῖν δυοῖν συνηγμένων
εἰς ταυτόν, ἔτι δεῖ προσλαβεῖν χορηγίαν,
ἔρωτα, μελέτην, καιρὸν εὐφυῆ, χρόνον,
κριτὴν τὸ ῥηθὲν δυνάμενον συναρπάσαι.
ἔν ᾧ γὰρ ἂν τούτων τις ἀπολειφθεὶς τύχῃ,
οὐκ ἔρχετ’ ἐπὶ τὸ τέρμα τοῦ προκειμένου.
φύσις, θέλησις, ἐπιμέλει’, εὐταξία
σοφοὺς τίθησι κἀγαθούς· ἐτῶν δέ τοι
ἄριθμος οὐδὲν ἄλλο πλὴν γῆρας ποιεῖ.
Footnote 31:
_I.e._, the official acceptance of the piece, and the supply of a
chorus to bring it out. It ought, however, perhaps to be added that
the word is often used in a more general sense, “appliances and
means,” pecuniary and otherwise.
It 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 [Sidenote:
_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 Plato 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.
Footnote 32:
εὐκαιρίαν. Ed. Benseler (Leipsic, 1877), ii. 21.
Footnote 33:
Ibid., i. 23.
Footnote 34:
Ibid., i. 24.
Footnote 35:
Section 16. Ibid., ii. 9, 10.
Footnote 36:
Section 3. Ibid., i. 207, 208.
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 more
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.
CHAPTER III.
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 [Sidenote: _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 we 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,
[Sidenote: _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 over 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.
Footnote 37:
He does, no doubt, refer to the prose mimes, _v. infra_, and in
referring at the same time to the “Socratic dialogues” he may be
specially thinking of the “Egyptian and other” stories with which
Socrates was wont, half to please, half to puzzle, his hearers. But
his whole treatment of Tragedy and Epic is really based on some such
assumption as that in the text.
Footnote 38:
I need hardly express, but could not possibly omit the expression of,
my indebtedness to my friend and colleague Professor Butcher’s
admirable edition and translation of the work in _Aristotle’s Theory
of Poetry and Fine Art_ (London, 2nd ed., 1898), a book which, as much
as any other for many years past, enables English scholarship to hold
its head up with that of other countries. Nor need I make any
apologies for occasionally differing, on the purely critical side,
with him as to the interpretation of a document which is admittedly
very obscure in parts, and on even the clearest parts of which
opinion, not demonstration, must decide in very many cases.
He first defines his scheme as dealing with poetry itself and its
various kinds, with their essential parts, with the [Sidenote: _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,
accomplishing 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, is
his game. He may invent wholly (subject to this law of probability) if
he likes. Plots with episodes are bad.
Footnote 39:
There are strong arguments for rendering τῶν τοιούτων not “such” but
“these,” and Professor Butcher actually does so.
Footnote 40:
Here one of the first very important differences of interpretation
comes in. Professor Butcher would translate ζῷον “picture,” as though
it were short for ζῷον γεγραμμένον. Scholars differ whether the word
_can_ by itself have this meaning, and on such a point I have no
pretensions to decide. But its more common sense is certainly “living
organism,” and I feel certain that this is the only meaning which
makes full critical sense here. To begin with, Aristotle has just used
it in this way, and in the second place the analogy of another _art_
would come in very ill. We want a comparison drawn from _nature_, to
give us the law for the imitation of nature.
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.
Footnote 41:
“Episode” is here defined in quite a new sense as the dialogue
_between_ choruses; “Exodus” as that which no chorus follows. The
chapter is doubtful—or something more.
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. The “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 [Sidenote:
_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 we 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 [Sidenote:
_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.
We have also to take into account the Greek fancy for generalising and
philosophising, especially with a strong ethical [Sidenote: _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 [Sidenote: _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 Aristotle’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.”
Footnote 42:
In all modern languages, though no doubt not in Greek, “Imitation”
carries with it a fatal suggestion of copying previous examples of
art, and not going direct to Nature at all. I think there is no
reasonable doubt that this suggestion is responsible by itself for
much of the mistakes of modern “Classical” criticism in the sixteenth,
seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. You must “imitate” Homer,
Virgil, Milton, not “represent” Nature.
Footnote 43:
Those who do not care to “grapple with whole libraries” will find
excellent handlings of the question in Butcher, _op. cit._, pp.
236-237, and Egger, _op. cit._, pp. 267-300.
Yet the advantages of this criticism far exceed its drawbacks. In the
first place it is, not merely so far as we positively know, [Sidenote:
_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
inevitably 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 [Sidenote: _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: [Sidenote: _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.
Before giving an analysis of this book,[44] to match that given above of
the _Poetics_, a few words may properly be said to justify [Sidenote:
_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.
Footnote 44:
No edition with commentary can here be recommended to English readers
with quite such confidence as Professor Butcher’s _Poetics_. That of
E. M. Cope (3 vols., Cambridge, 1877), with a fourth, but earlier,
volume of Introduction (London, 1867), is extremely full and useful,
though the Germans (see Römer’s edition after Spengel, Pref., p.
xxxiv) scoff at its text. Dr Welldon’s translation is well spoken of:
and the old “Oxford” version, reprinted with some corrections in
Bohn’s Library, is not contemptible, while Hobbes’s “Brief” (or
Analysis), which accompanies it, is very valuable indeed. But here, as
elsewhere, he who neglects the original neglects it at his peril.
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]
Footnote 45:
Professor Butcher rather doubts this stress of mine on the
prepositions, and points out to me that ἐπιλέγομαι (in the sense of
reading) is almost exclusively Herodotean, and never established
itself generally in Greek. But he admits that the more usual
employment of ἀναγιγνώσκω for “reading _aloud_” bears on my point.
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 be
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 [Sidenote:
_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_ quality 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, [Sidenote: _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 of 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.
Footnote 46:
Τὸ περὶ τὴν λέξιν ὀψὲ προῆλθεν· καὶ δοκεῖ φορτικὸν εἶναι, καλῶς
ὑπολαμβανόμενον. See note at end of chapter.
This same common-sense, however, seldom deserted him, and it makes
sometimes wholly for good, sometimes a little less [Sidenote:
_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
“all a rhetorician’s rules
Teach nothing but to name his tools,”
has no farther to look than to the portentous list at the end of
Puttenham’s _Art of Poetry_.
Footnote 47:
He had earlier, in the most grudging context, admitted that _lexis_
gives _character_ to a speech, that συμβάλλεται πολλὰ πρὸς τὸ φανῆναι
ποιόν τινα τὸν λόγον—a confession from which can be extracted, at
least in germ, all that a very fanatic of style need contend for.
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 [Sidenote: _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 [Sidenote: “_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 difficult 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
[Sidenote: _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 [Sidenote: _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 rebuked for calling
philosophy “the intrenchment of law,” and [Sidenote: _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 [Sidenote:
_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, [Sidenote: “_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 [Sidenote: “_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 [Sidenote: _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 unusual 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 [Sidenote: _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.
Footnote 48:
Metre being neither more nor less than definitely _recurrent_ rhythm,
first within the line, then in corresponding lines.
The distinction between loose and periodic style,[49] which the modern
composition-books have run so tiresomely to death, [Sidenote: _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.
Footnote 49:
In the Greek εἰρομένη, “strung together,” and κατεστραμμένη,
“inter-twisted.”
It will be seen from this that the _Rhetoric_, like the _Poetics_, is
invaluable to the historian of literary criticism, but that, in
[Sidenote: _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 not 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_) [Sidenote: _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?”
Footnote 50:
_Op. cit._, p. 194 _sq._
Footnote 51:
_Aristotelis Fragmenta._ Ed. Valentine Rose, Leipsic, 1886. P. 120
_sq._
Footnote 52:
See below, p. 73 _sq._
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 was 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.
Footnote 53:
I have, I think, seen protests against this statement. The protesters
either do not know Milton’s text, or are of that foolish order of
worshippers which simply shuts its eyes to disagreeable “næves” in the
idol.
Yet the value of the two main documents is so inestimable, that if the
incompleteness and the shortcomings of the _Poetics_, the unavoidable
irrelevance of much of the _Rhetoric_, [Sidenote: _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 [Sidenote: _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 though 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, [Sidenote: _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
but 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 [Sidenote: _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 how 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. [Sidenote: “_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]
Footnote 54:
It has been objected to this suggestion that the context does not
favour it. Perhaps; but there is often a good deal working in an
author’s mind which the immediate context does not fully show.
Footnote 55:
On Impressionism, see Index.
Footnote 56:
And yet the “corruption” which dogs “the best” followed on this also.
For it was on this dictum that false classicism based its doctrine
that the poet ought not to count the streaks of the tulip—that he must
conventionalise and be general.
So, 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_, [Sidenote: _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.
Footnote 57:
See for this point especially Professor Butcher’s chapter on this
subject _op. cit._, pp. 197-213.
Again, whatever we may think of the relative importance assigned to plot
and to character by Aristotle, as well as of not [Sidenote: _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 character. 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 [Sidenote: _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 [Sidenote:
_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 the _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, “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 the 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.
-----------------------
_Note to p. 42._
Attempts have been made to confine Aristotle’s slighting remarks on
_lexis_ to mere “delivery.” It is true that in the whole passage there
is a certain confusion of the different senses of “elocution.” But in
this sentence Aristotle has just said, τὸ περὶ τὴν λέξιν _not_
ὑπόκρισιν—that is to say, has covered the entire ground which he is
going to discuss. Even if φορτικὸν be violently restricted, by the
help of καὶ before τό, to ὑποκριτική (which occurs further back), the
general drift will remain.
CHAPTER IV.
GREEK CRITICISM AFTER ARISTOTLE. SCHOLASTIC AND MISCELLANEOUS.
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, [Sidenote:
_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 Rhetoric, 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. [Sidenote:
_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 critical, existed, dating from the third and later centuries.
Footnote 58:
As in other cases, Theophrastus has been criticised very largely on
rather slim vouchers. For instance, the quotation (in Cic. Orat., 39)
on the strength of which Mr. Nettleship, _Lectures and Essays_, ii.
47, speaks of him complimentarily, strikes me, I confess, as but a
commonplace remark enough. It is that by Herodotus and Thucydides,
“History was first stirred up to speak more freely and ornately.”
Footnote 59:
See for more, Egger, p. 347 _sq._
Two writers, later in time, not of much critical fertility but of some
interest, will illustrate for us the attitude of two Greek [Sidenote:
_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.
Footnote 60:
This doctrine, best known to English readers, perhaps, from Mr
Arnold’s not quite fair application of it to Théophile Gautier, is of
much more general application in the original (_Enchiridion_, cap.
52). Man being represented as a voyager to a far country, all
occupations save duty and philosophy are really mere “inns on the
journey,” pleasant perhaps for a night, but not good to stay in.
“Eloquence” is specially dwelt on as one of these “inns.”
Footnote 61:
Who thanks Heaven (i. 17) that he did not make more progress in
rhetoric and poetry.
Footnote 62:
_V. infra_, bk. ii. p. 245 _sq._
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 investigation and
the vindication of one of the greatest of all sources of _ataraxia_ and
_aponia_,[63] but that it would do [Sidenote: _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.
Footnote 63:
Freedom from trouble and pain; the former, especially, being the
technical term for the Epicurean _nonchalance_.
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 if 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.
Footnote 64:
Ed. Ludhaus. Leipsic, 1892.
If Acatalepsy[65], the doxy of the Pyrrhonists, has been somewhat more
fortunate in one way than her close connection [Sidenote: _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 or 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.
Footnote 65:
The incomprehensibleness of things; the impossibility of certain
knowledge.
Footnote 66:
Ed. Bekker. Berlin, 1842.
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.
Footnote 67:
This is proved in the usual fallacy-fashion: Time must be past,
present, or future. Admittedly, neither past nor future time _is_;
present time is either divisible or indivisible, to each of which
there is an objection.
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 of 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.
Footnote 68:
ἐμπειρία.
Footnote 69:
συγγραφεῖς. The opposition is as old as Plato, though συγγραφεὺς is
sometimes limited to “historian.”
A third school, in its various stages, has perhaps a better, if a vague,
repute for attention to literature. Perverse as was in [Sidenote: _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.
Footnote 70:
The “leading of the soul” to truths, and gifts, and pleasures.
Aristotle likewise adopts the word: and indeed it contains in itself
the soul of criticism, though in Plato himself it sometimes has an
unfavourable meaning, of “allurement,” “seduction.”
The Neo-Platonists, at least, might be looked to with some hope. Their
spirit at any rate was not negative, and they seem, [Sidenote: _The
Neo-Platonists._] as 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 [Sidenote: _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.
Footnote 71:
_Enn._, vi. 1. Separately printed with Proclus, in an edition which I
have not seen, by Creuzer, in 1814. M. Théry included a French
translation in the rather capriciously selected but interesting
appendix of _pièces justificatives_ appended to his _Histoire des
Opinions_; and I believe there is another.
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 is 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 [Sidenote:
_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 early “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.
Footnote 72:
_Op cit. plur._, p. 484.
Footnote 73:
_Sacred Latin Poetry_ (ed. 2, London, 1864), p. 30, _note_.
Footnote 74:
μάλιστα προστίθησι τῷ λόγῳ χάριν καὶ ἡδονήν.
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?
Footnote 75:
Ed. Schrader, 2 vols., Leipsic, 1890.
Footnote 76:
For this and the subsequent oddity see Schrader (_op. cit._, _Ad
Odysseam_), pp. 40-43. The subject is dealt with, from another point
of view, in a monograph by M. Carroll, _Aristotle’s Poetics in the
Light of the Homeric Scholia_, Baltimore, 1895.
The _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.
Footnote 77:
My copy of this is the separate edition of Van Goens (Trajecti ad
Rhenum, 1765). It can hardly be necessary to say that the subject is
the famous and beautiful opening of _Od._ xiii. As for the
treatment—the cave, the double entrance, the nymphs, the vases, the
bees, are all allegorised to the _n_^{th}, pressed to death, broken on
the wheel, sublimated to a non-essence in the Neo-Platonic laboratory.
But the Schools have led us far from our immediate context and subject,
the literature of the three centuries after Aristotle. [Sidenote:
_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 busied 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, to 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, [Sidenote:
_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
Rhetorical 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.
Footnote 78:
_V. infra_, p. 103.
The Scholiast, on the other hand, if of a less traceable creation, is of
almost equally old lineage, and he may conveniently [Sidenote:
_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 endless
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 [Sidenote: _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 unknown 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 [Sidenote: _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, and 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 [Sidenote: _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
huge collection; but the result will only be that, for this special
purpose, page after page will be drawn blank.
Footnote 79:
I do not pretend to have extensively consulted or “compulsed” the
learned and admirable labours of Mr Rutherford on this subject. But I
have taken care to refresh and confirm old familiarity with Dindorf’s
edition by reading that of Dübner with the additions in the Didot
collection.
But it may be said, “The scholia on Aristophanes are confessedly[80]
poor in literary annotation. Why do you take them [Sidenote: _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.”
Footnote 80:
See the useful and interesting, if rather widely titled, paper of Ad.
Trendelenburg, _Grammaticorum Græcorum De Arte Tragicâ Judiciorum
Reliquiæ_. Bonn: 1867.
Footnote 81:
Ibid., p. 1.
Footnote 82:
Ed. P. N. Papageorgius. Leipsic: 1888.
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 hero’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 [Sidenote: _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 book, 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.
Footnote 83:
Ed. Dindorf and Maass. Oxford, 6 vols., 1855-88.
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 to 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, apangeltic, 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.
Footnote 84:
See Dindorf’s collection, enlarged with variants at the beginning of
vol. v. by Maass.
Footnote 85:
_I.e._, “recapitulation.”
Footnote 86:
_I.e._, “in the nature of conversational address, regular history, or
argument.” But it is often very difficult to translate these
rhetorical terms exactly. _Hypostasis_ in particular is even more
elusive in rhetoric than in theology.
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 [Sidenote: _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 stray 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. Perhaps 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.
Footnote 87:
I use the ed. of Jacobs, Leipsic, 1794, 10 vols. (nominally 3 vols. of
Commentary, in 7 parts, 4 vols. of text, and 1 of Indices).
Footnote 88:
Ep. Adesp., 454, ed. cit., Text, iv. 214.
Footnote 89:
Ibid., Ep. 468, p. 218.
Footnote 90:
Ibid., p. 221 _sq._
Footnote 91:
_V._ Bergk, _Poet. Lyr._, iii. 143.
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.
Footnote 92:
He is generally called Simmias the _Rhodian_. But some speak of the
two as identical.
Footnote 93:
Ibid., i. 100.
Footnote 94:
Ibid., i. 101.
Footnote 95:
Ibid., i. 102.
Footnote 96:
Ibid., i. 102, 103.
Footnote 97:
Ibid., i. 111-117. There are 48 of them. Aristotle had versatility
enough to do them, but they do not _read_ like him.
If we turn to others, we shall draw some of the most flourishing coverts
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.
Footnote 98:
Ibid., iii. 12.
Footnote 99:
Ibid., iii. 117.
Footnote 100:
Ibid., iii. 124.
Footnote 101:
Ibid., iii. 137.
Footnote 102:
Ibid., iii. 146.
Footnote 103:
Ibid., iii. 160.
Footnote 104:
Ibid., iii. 161-177.
Footnote 105:
Ibid., iv. 16.
Footnote 106:
Ibid., iv. 95.
Footnote 107:
Ibid., iv. 97-100.
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 to 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—
“Thy country is great Heaven: there was to thee
No mortal mother, but Calliope”;
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.
Footnote 108:
i. 98.
Footnote 109:
i. 238.
Footnote 110:
i. 241.
Footnote 111:
i. 250-252.
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 debate, 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.
Footnote 112:
ii. 3.
Footnote 113:
ii. 18, _sq._
Footnote 114:
ii. 64.
Footnote 115:
ii. 189.
Footnote 116:
ii. 207.
Footnote 117:
ii. 101, 102.
Footnote 118:
ii. 116.
Footnote 119:
ii. 157.
Footnote 120:
ii. 194.
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.
Footnote 121:
ii. 219.
Footnote 122:
ii. 240.
Footnote 123:
ii. 244.
Footnote 124:
ii. 264.
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 praise 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 [Sidenote: _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 her 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 [Sidenote: _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] require 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.
Footnote 125:
9 vols. (really 10, vol. vii. being in two large parts), Stuttgart,
Tübingen, London and Paris, 1832-36.
Footnote 126:
Spengel’s handy collection (3 vols., 4 parts), which has now been for
some years in process of re-editing in the _Bibliotheca Teubneriana_
by Römer and Hammer, omits the scholia on Hermogenes, but includes
divers all-important, if elsewhere accessible, texts, such as
Aristotle and Longinus, and adds some minor things.
Footnote 127:
It is not, I hope, illiberal to remark that our excellent “Liddell &
Scott” is perhaps more to seek in rhetorical terminology than anywhere
else. (At least it certainly was so up to the 7th or penultimate
edition: I have not yet worked with that of 1896.) Ernesti’s _Lexicon
Technologiæ Græcorum Rhetoricæ_ (Leipsic, 1795) is, for all its 105
years, still almost indispensable to the student, more so even than
the corresponding and somewhat younger Latin volume (Leipsic, 1797).
Even these fail sometimes.
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]
Footnote 128:
He does not give, but Spengel does, the _Rhetoric to Alexander_ (v.
_sup._, p. 17 _note_), attributed to Anaximenes; and the same is the
case with a short fragment, Περὶ ἐρωτήσεως καὶ ἀποκρίσεως, which is an
excursus on Arist., _Rhet._, iii. 18. It is purely _barristerial_.
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.), the 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.
Footnote 129:
_Meletæ_ are properly “complete declamations,” not, as are the
_Progymnasmata_, exercises in _parts_ of oratory, The others are some
of these parts only.
The opening of the Progymnasmata of Hermogenes is a curious and slightly
bewildering mixture of definition, literary [Sidenote: _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
from 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.
Footnote 130:
This is an early example of the confusion and cross-division which has
infested formal Rhetoric to the present day. For the first three heads
are purely material, the last two grammatical-formal; so that, instead
of ranking side by side, _each_ of 1, 2, 3 should rank under _each_ of
4, 5. Cf. Professor Bain’s _Rhetoric_, vol. i., where similar
cross-division more than once occurs.
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.
Footnote 131:
χρεῖαι, rather “maxims” than “uses” in the theological sense.
Hermogenes exhausts his special gift in distinguishing them from the
more general maxim or γνώμη.
Footnote 132:
The ἠθοποΐια above referred to. It has a special reference to the
drawing-up of speeches suitable to such and such a character in such
and such a situation.
Footnote 133:
Description of the graphic and picturesque kind.
Footnote 134:
Subject or question in the wide sense.
The good and the evil of this kind of thing, as well as its special
bearings on literary criticism, are not difficult to discern. [Sidenote:
_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 literary 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 [Sidenote: _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
method, 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 [Sidenote: _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 favour, 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 matter. But he lacks system, and this, in
dealing with a subject which is systematic or nothing, is a drawback.
Footnote 135:
Speaking of Walz’s order: I have little doubt myself that he preceded
Aphthonius in time.
There was a rhetorical Nicolaus (indeed the name was very common) who
was a student of Proclus; but the author of the [Sidenote: _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 [Sidenote:
_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 [Sidenote: _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 are 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 [Sidenote: _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 [Sidenote: _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 stupidity.” 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. [Sidenote: _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.
Footnote 136:
δεινὸς and δεινότης are good examples of the difficulty of getting
exact English equivalents for Greek rhetorical terms. Some prefer
“vehemence” or “intensity,” but neither of these will suit
universally. The word seems to refer to the orator’s power of suiting
his method to his case, to alertness and fertility of resource.
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 indeed 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.
Footnote 137:
“Distribution of the indictment”; “preliminary statement”;
“acknowledgment with justification”; “introduction to narrative,” are
attempts at Englishings of these.
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
there is hardly a blade of pasture in the field on which centuries of
commentators browsed so greedily.
Footnote 138:
Quintilian adds _quæstio_ and _quod in quæstione appareat_ to these,
and explains στάσις itself as so called _vel ex eo quod ibi sit primus
causæ congressus vel quod in hoc causa consistat_. The kinds and
sub-kinds of στάσεις were luxuriously wallowed in: and ὁρικὴ, and
στοχαστικὴ, _negotialis_ and _comparativus_, with a dozen others, can
be investigated by those who choose.
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.
Footnote 139:
In the sense, of course, of “kind,” not of “notion.” Indeed one
Scholiast on Hermogenes defines it as ποιότης λόγου τοῖς ὑποκειμένοις
ἁρμόδιος προσώποις τε καὶ πράγμασιν.
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 things. 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.
Footnote 140:
Generally rendered “nervousness,” though Ernesti prefers “celerity.”
is “diligent exactness”; περιβολὴ κατ' ἔννοιαν, “argumentative
exaltation of the subject”; ἀφελὴς is “simple.” By this time, and
indeed long before, a regular cant of criticism had sprung up. Mr
Nettleship once made a useful list of its terms (_v. infra_, bk. ii.
p. 219).
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.
Footnote 141:
A peculiar form of enthymeme, falling short of complete demonstration.
ἐργασία is “handling” or “workmanship,” with a special connotation.
We shall still have something to say of Hermogenes when we come to the
conclusion of this Rhetorical matter; but for the [Sidenote: _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 the 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 Tzetzes 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.
Footnote 142:
An exception, for reasons to be given later, will be made in favour of
the work of John the Siceliote (see chap. vi. of this book, p. 187
_sq._)
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]
Footnote 143:
About half of the eighth volume, however, is occupied by a long
distribution of “questions” (ζητήματα) into heads, by one Sopater, who
gives many specimen declarations. And it is followed by a short
treatise, assigned to a certain Cyrus, on difference of _stasis_, and
by a collection of problems for declamatory use.
We know from a contemptuous phrase of Quintilian (see _post_) that long
before his time the facility of compounds in [Sidenote: _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 of 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_ [Sidenote: _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 of
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.
Footnote 144:
τὰ καλούμενα κώλα
The rhetor Menander, who has left us a treatise on the third division of
rhetorical speeches, Epideictic (generally subdivided [Sidenote:
_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 than
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.
Footnote 145:
_I.e._, “invocatory” and “dimissory or exorcising.”
One MS. of Menander stops here, but another gives us much more of the
same kind, dealing with the βασιλικὸς [Sidenote: _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.
“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—
‘O blessed forgetfulness of woes,’
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.”
Footnote 146:
Walz, ix. 570. Aldine, p. 717, and at p. 100 of Egger’s pocket edition
of Longinus. Dickens was not much of a lover of the classics, but he
would hardly have disdained this as a motto for _The Haunted Man_.
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
[Sidenote: _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 exasperating _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 [Sidenote:
_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 of 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 [Sidenote: _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
rhetorical 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 [Sidenote: _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 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 and 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.
Footnote 147:
_Dion Chrys. Op._, ed. Reiske (Leipsic, 1784), ii. 266. M. Egger (p.
441 _sq._) has translated the whole Oration (p. 11), but by no means
literally.
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 is, 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 original
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.
Footnote 148:
Orat. xii. Reiske, i. 370 _sq._
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 nullity 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 [Sidenote: _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]
Footnote 149:
One would not suppose that the later Greek rhetoricians were so
fascinating as to be _introuvables_; but this is very nearly the case.
Aristides himself is very scarce and very dear. Maximus Tyrius and
Themistius refuse themselves to the seeker, except after long waiting;
and as for Libanius, Messrs Parker of Oxford inform me that they have
for years been vainly searching for a complete copy of Reiske’s
edition, while an incomplete one of which they knew was snapped up
before I could get it. I can only suppose that the editions which
Reiske himself and Dindorf edited, at the end of the last century and
early in this, were printed in small numbers, and have been gradually
absorbed into public libraries. In these latter I have never myself
been able to work, except under compulsion, and then with no comfort.
Why Herr Teubner, the Providence of inopulent or leisureless students,
has been so slow to come to their help in these cases, I do not know.
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 elsewhere,[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.
Footnote 150:
P. 481, _op. cit._
Footnote 151:
The reading in Long., Frag. 1, is disputed, some suggesting
_Hyperides_. But Sopater, in commenting on Aristides, attests the
admiration of Longinus.
Footnote 152:
_V. supra_, p. 82.
Footnote 153:
3 vols., Leipsic, 1829. The collection is at iii. 772. Although
Dindorf says scornfully, _neque enim is scriptor est Aristides cui
diutius quis immoretur_, would that all editors gave editions as well
furnished!
Footnote 154:
Any one who has experienced a humiliating sense of initial bafflement
may be encouraged, as the present writer was, by the round declaration
of such a scholar as Reiske, that of all the Greek he had ever read
outside of the speeches of Thucydides, Aristides was the most
difficult. Ed. cit., iii. 788.
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] are 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.”
Footnote 155:
The excellent Canterus, who has strung these passages in his
Prolegomena (iii. 779), would fain translate οἱ λόγοι “literature”;
but it is pretty certain from the context that Aristides was thinking
of rhetorical literature only.
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 friend,”[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.
Footnote 156:
Ed. cit., i. 751.
Footnote 157:
Ibid., ii. 1.
Footnote 158:
Ibid., ii. 156-414.
Footnote 159:
Ibid., ii. 491-542.
Footnote 160:
There is enough of the spirit of Sir Fretful in Aristides here to make
the quotation irresistible.
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 [Sidenote: _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.
Footnote 161:
Ed. Reiske (after Davies and Markland), 2 vols. (or at least parts),
Leipsic, 1774.
Footnote 162:
Ed. cit., Part i. pp. 166-187.
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 mind 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]
Footnote 163:
Ibid., Part i. pp. 437-452.
Footnote 164:
Ibid., Part ii. pp. 115-136.
Footnote 165:
Literally any _heresy_—αἵρεσις.
Footnote 166:
The seeker will be even more disappointed if he follow up the quest to
Diss. 37 (Part ii. p. 196): “Whether the liberal arts (ἐγκύκλια
μαθήματα) contribute to virtue?” Only geometry and music, and mainly
the latter, receive attention, though Rhetoric and Poetics are
mentioned.
There are not many positions in literary history more apparently
covetable than that of being the first certain authority [Sidenote:
_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 rhetorician, that he had sufficient original, or at least
mimetic, skill to supply the pattern of
“Drink to me only with thine eyes,”
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.
Footnote 167:
Ed. Kayser. 2 vols., Leipsic, 1871.
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 passages 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.
Footnote 168:
Achilles Tatius is later, and very likely imitated Philostratus. The
two together perhaps give the best examples of _ecphrasis_ (see
Index).
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 the 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.
Footnote 169:
_Vit. Ap._, vi. 19, ed. cit., i. 231: “Imagination, a wiser
craftsmistress than Imitation, has done this; for Imitation will
fashion what she sees, but Imagination what she has not seen, for she
will _suppose_ it according to the analogy of the real. Moreover,
sudden disturbance (ἔκπληξις) will put Imitation’s hand out
(ἔκκρούει), but not Imagination’s, for she goes on undisturbed to what
she herself hypothetically conceived.” This _is_ Shakespeare’s
Imagination, whereof the lunatic, the lover, and the poet are all
compact; it is not Addison’s, which deals only with things furnished
by the sense of sight.
Footnote 170:
Ed. cit., ii. 128-219. The piece is sometimes cited as “Heroic_a_.”
The relatively considerable space, some six or seven pages, which is
allotted to Libanius in Egger’s book, may have encouraged [Sidenote:
_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,” that 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 we know or
with literature, except that it seems to have been the speech in which
Julian (_v. infra_, p. 126) discovered such wonderful qualities.
Footnote 171:
Besides the difficulty of obtaining Reiske’s ed., there is the further
one that it is not complete. The _Letters_ have to be sought in that
of Wolf (Amsterdam, 1738), which is neither in the Library of the
University of Edinburgh, nor in that of the Faculty of Advocates, nor
in that of the Signet, so that it had to be run to earth in the
British Museum, though I have since found a copy for sale. And even
this combination is, I think, not exhaustive. The _Progymnasmata_,
_Meletæ_, _Dissertationes_, &c., were published by Claude Morel,
Paris, 1606; and there are many other editions of parts, but none of
the whole.
Footnote 172:
See Photius on him, _infra_, p. 181.
Footnote 173:
De Quincey’s truculent attack on Greek rhetoricians generally (_Essay
on Rhetoric_: _Works_, x. 31, 32) is less unjust to Libanius than to
any one.
Footnote 174:
For mere completeness' sake I may refer here to other scholiastic
_Lives_, of which the best known perhaps is that of Thucydides by
Marcellinus. I do not think it rash to say that they all more or less
bear out the contention put above as to the _scholia_ generally.
Footnote 175:
Not to the piece mentioned above (p. 115), but to a lost oration. His
own is at iii. 334 (Reiske).
Footnote 176:
I. 1, Reiske.
Footnote 177:
I. 442, Reiske.
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 it 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 [Sidenote:
_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 the
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.
Footnote 178:
_Orationes_, ed. Dindorf (Leipsic, 1832). Reiske, in a passage quoted
at p. xii. of this, rates Themistius as, among other things, _vanus
jactator philosophiæ suæ, specie magis quam re cultæ, ineptus et
ridiculus vexator et applicator Homeri et veteris historiæ, tautologus
et sophista_, &c. On the other hand, Sigismund Pandolf Malatesta, in
1464, carried off his bones from Sparta and buried them magnificently
at Rimini as those _Philosophorum sua tempestate principis_. But it
was for the Aristotelian _Paraphrases_, apparently, that the lover of
Isotta revered Themistius. I have not neglected these (ed. Spengel, 2
vols., Leipsic, 1866), but being exclusively on the logical, physical,
and metaphysical works, they yield us little that I can discover. I
think Reiske is harsh, but not absolutely unjust.
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 [Sidenote: _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 beginning 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!”
Footnote 179:
I do not know that Julian was in strictness a “pupil” of Themistius,
but the tone of the long epistle to him, ed. cit., _inf._, i. 328, is
at least half pupillary. Himerius, another contemporary sophist to
whom Photius (_v. infra_, p. 183) devotes some attention, was
certainly Julian’s tutor. We have some of his work (ed. Wernsdorf,
Göttingen, 1790 and later), but I have found little to the present
point in this, which is mostly pure epideictic or didactic.
Footnote 180:
Ed. Hertlein, 2 vols. or parts (Leipsic, 1875-76).
Footnote 181:
Ed. cit., i. 1-327.
Footnote 182:
Ibid., ii. 487. The numbers of the epistles will sufficiently indicate
the whereabouts of the remaining citations from them.
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.
Footnote 183:
Ibid., p. 434.
Footnote 184:
πρὶν ἀναπαύσασθαι.
Footnote 185:
See next chapter.
CHAPTER V.
DIONYSIUS OF HALICARNASSUS, PLUTARCH, LUCIAN, LONGINUS.
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.
[Sidenote: _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 from 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 [Sidenote: _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 in 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.”
Footnote 186:
6 vols., Leipsic, 1775-77. The first four contain the historical, the
two last the rhetorical work. A pamphlet edition of rhetorical
fragments, by C. T. Rössler (Leipsic, 1873), may be usefully bound in
with this. But Usener’s still more recent edition of the so-called
περὶ μιμήσεως and the Epistles of Ammæus and Pompey (Bonn, 1889) is of
great importance for its remarks on Dionysius and Quintilian, and for
other animadversions.
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 [Sidenote:
_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 [Sidenote: _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, even 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 that 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]
Footnote 187:
See _infra_, bk. ii. p. 304 _sq._
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 member[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.
Footnote 188:
See also the amended text in Bergk’s _Lyrici Græci_, i. 392-395.
Footnote 189:
ἴδετ’ ἐν χορὸν Ὀλύμπιοι. Some MSS. read δεῦτ’, which appears in
Reiske. The comment requires a _verb_: but perhaps Dionysius might
have regarded δεῦτε as such.
Footnote 190:
ἀρχαικὸν δέ τι καὶ αὔθαδες κάλλος.
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, but 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 [Sidenote:
_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
Theopompus 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.
Footnote 191:
See on this point Usener (_op. cit._), who would rather suppose a
common indebtedness. The “censures” form the bulk of the fragments
which he has published as περὶ μιμήσεως. Perhaps the best examples of
really illuminative critical phrase in them are the “pugnacious
roughness,” ἀγωνιστικὴ τραχύτης, ascribed to Antimachus, and the
“combination of magnificence and terseness,” μεγαλοφυὲς καὶ βραχύ, to
Alcæus. Of the shorter fragments the summary of the requirements of
art as “a happy nature, exact study, and laborious practice” is good
if not astonishing.
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.
Footnote 192:
Petronius found that it did!
If they are somewhat disappointing, this (to borrow the convenient bull)
is not much more than we might have expected. [Sidenote: _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 no 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 [Sidenote: _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 anterior 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 [Sidenote: _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 reason 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 [Sidenote: _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.
Footnote 193:
By Vaucher and some others.
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 philosophers 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 [Sidenote: _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 [Sidenote: _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 strike 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 [Sidenote: _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.
Footnote 194:
I use the Teubner edition by Hercher and Bernardakis, 5 vols., Leipsic
(1872-1893).
Englishmen, and especially students of English literature, ought to take
no mean interest in the tractate on Education, [Sidenote: _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 being 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_.
Footnote 195:
The section “Euphues and his Ephœbus.” The three tractates
commented on in this and the next paragraph will be found in vol. i.
pp. 1-111 of the edition cited.
No one can reasonably blame its author for this, especially as he seems
likely to fill up the gap in the two following Essays. [Sidenote: _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 _fore_see 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 she 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 literary analysis and literary
comparison. In the tractate [Sidenote: _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.
Footnote 196:
V. 146-202.
Everybody hopes that Plutarch did not write the _Malignity of
Herodotus_.[197] But somebody wrote it: and while the general [Sidenote:
_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 so 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!_
Footnote 197:
V. 208-263. “Bad-bloodedness” is perhaps more equal than “malignity”
to κακοήθεια.
The _Placita Philosophorum_ are as barren as the _Oratorum Vitæ_, but
the “Comparison between Aristophanes and Menander,”[198] [Sidenote: _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.
Footnote 198:
V. 203-207.
Footnote 199:
The late Professor Nettleship, as noted already, was the first, I
think, to put together a list of these stock terms, which is not
uninteresting. It will be further referred to in the next Book.
No different conclusion will be reached wherever we look in the great
collection of the _Moralia_. Take, for instance, the [Sidenote: _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_.
Footnote 200:
II. 250-320. The Greek title αἴτια is rather “cause” than “question.”
But Philemon Holland’s translation of 1603 (recently reprinted, with
an introduction by Mr F. B. Jevons, London, 1892) has naturalised this
latter version in English.
The much larger _Symposiacs_[201] tell the same story, no longer
indirectly, but, as it were, aloud and open-mouthed. There are
[Sidenote: _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
table-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. It 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!
Footnote 201:
IV. 1-395.
Footnote 202:
We are, however, by no means so fortunate (from the point of view of
this book) in our remains of Greek Symposiacs as we are in those of
Latin. The famous _Deipnosophists_ of Athenæus, in which, about 230
A.D., its invaluable author accumulated (under the guise of a
conversation in which persons of the importance of Ulpian and Galen
took part) the most enormous miscellany of quotation, anecdote, and
_quodlibeta_, in ancient if not in all literature, is, of course, for
all its want of literary form, a priceless book. As a storehouse of
quotation it has no rival but the _Anatomy of Melancholy_: and though
it is, in spirit, unity, literary gifts, and almost everything else,
as far below the _Anatomy_ as one book can be below another, it is
from this special point of view to be preferred to it, because the
vast majority of its sources of quotation are lost. For the history of
literature, as for that of manners, it is a mine of wealth; for the
history of literary criticism almost barren. For expression Athenæus
seems to have had no care at all, though his curiosity as to matter
was insatiable, and as nearly as possible indiscriminate. His spirit
is exactly that of the scholiasts referred to in a former page; and
whether he is discussing the varieties of vegetables and wines and
oysters, or the highly spiced and salted witticisms of Athenian ladies
of pleasure, or any other subject, he hardly becomes a critic for one
moment, though no critic can neglect him. Perhaps the nearest approach
to sustained critical remark is the captious attack on Plato at the
end of the 11th book, which is as feeble as it is captious. (The
standard edition of Athenæus is still that of Schweighaüser (14 vols.,
Argentorati, 1801-7); but those who suffer from inadequate shelf-room
may have (as the present writer long ago had regretfully) to expel
this in favour of the far less handsome and useful, but compacter, one
of Dindorf (3 vols. Leipsic, 1827).)
Footnote 203:
_On Translating Homer_, §§ 1, 2 _passim_.
Footnote 204:
καλλιγραφίας ἕνεκα—ὥσπερ ἀνθηροῖς χρώμασι.
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 [Sidenote: _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 main 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_—
“Lucian wrote this, knowing old things and vain—
For vain is also that which men think wise:
No human thought is wholly clear and plain;
What thou ador’st is scorn in others' eyes.”[206]
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 [Sidenote: _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 whole 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.
Footnote 205:
I use the Tauchnitz edition, by Dindorf, 3 vols., Leipsic, 1858.
Footnote 206:
This is fairly close, I think, but the two first lines, at any rate,
are too perfect not to be quoted in their own tongue—
Λουκιανὸς τάδ´ ἔγραφε, παλαιά τε μωρά τε εἰδῶς·
μωρὰ γὰρ ἀνθρώποις καὶ τὰ δοκοῦντα σοφά,
lines which grave themselves on the memory at twenty, and at fifty are
only graven deeper.
Footnote 207:
II. 1-24.
If the “How to Write History” is chiefly concerned with matter, the
_Lexiphanes_[208] is, with at least equal thoroughness, devoted
[Sidenote: _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 greatest, 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.”
Footnote 208:
II. 144-152.
Footnote 209:
τὸν μὲν εἴρωνα πέδοι κατάβαλε.
Footnote 210:
Or “nibble at them.”
Footnote 211:
_Lex._, § 24, ii. 152, _op. cit._
The “Indictment of the Vowels”[212] is rather a grammatical and
rhetorical _jeu d’esprit_ than a criticism; but if the curious
[Sidenote: _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, and 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.
Footnote 212:
I. 26.
Footnote 213:
I. 9.
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] [Sidenote: _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.
Footnote 214:
III. 1.
Footnote 215:
II. 358.
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.
The “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 [Sidenote: _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 side 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 [Sidenote: _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 say 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.
Footnote 216:
The most elaborate discussion of the whole matter still is that of
Vaucher (Geneva, 1854). The editions I myself use are those of Toup
(Oxford, 1778); Egger (Paris, 1837), a particularly handy little
volume, _with the fragments_; and Prof. Rhys Roberts (Cambridge,
1899), with translation and full editorial apparatus. Those who do not
read the Greek lose much: but they will find a good (though somewhat
too free) translation, with an excellent introduction by Mr Andrew
Lang, in the work of Mr H. L. Havell (London, 1890).
Footnote 217:
Διονυσίου ἢ Λογγίνου of the Paris MS. 2036. (Others even have
ἀνωνύμου.) Robortello intentionally or unintentionally dropped the η,
thereby putting students off the scent.
Another of the “Academic questions” connected with the book, however, is
of more literary importance, and that is its [Sidenote: “_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 uses 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.
Footnote 218:
Blair saw this, but, with the ill-luck of his century, regarded the
work as merely “elegant.”
Few persons, however, whom the gods have made critical will care to
spend much time _in limine_ over the authorship, [Sidenote: _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 lines 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.
Footnote 219:
Longinus (? 213-273) represents the middle of the _third_ century.
Nobody puts it later than this, and nobody earlier than the _first_.
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 the
_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]
Footnote 220:
A Sicilian rhetor, probably of Calacte, said by Suidas to have been of
Greek, or at any rate non-Roman, birth, and a Jew in religion.
Dionysius knew him, and he lived in the time of Augustus. There was
another (confused by Suidas) in that of Hadrian. This _may_ be our C.
Footnote 221:
οὐ γὰρ εἰς πειθὼ ἀλλ' ἐις ἔκστασιν ἄγει τὰ ὑπερφυᾶ.
Footnote 222:
καιρίως ἐξενεχθέν.
Footnote 223:
A phrase of the rhetor Theodorus, meaning “the thyrsus poked in at the
wrong time,” “enthusiasm out of place.”
Footnote 224:
λόγων κρίσις πολλῆς ἐστι πείρας τελευταῖον ἐπιγέννημα. Dionysius (_v.
supra_, pp. 130, 131) had said as much in sense, but less
magisterially in phrase. I have translated λόγων in its narrowest
equivalent, instead of “style” or “literature,” which it doubtless
also means, in order to bring out the antithesis better. I have small
doubt that Longinus meant, here as elsewhere, to fling back the old
contempt of the opposition of “words” and “things.”
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 hereafter. 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.
Footnote 225:
This word, which has the stamp of Dryden, is often preferable to
“composition.”
Footnote 226:
τὸ μεγαλοφυές.
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.
Footnote 227:
φῶς γὰρ τῷ ὄντι ἵδιον τοῦ νοῦ τὰ καλὰ ὁνόματα.
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 some 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 [Sidenote: _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 novelty, 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 [Sidenote:
_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 [Sidenote: _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—
μίαν παρείρας πλεκτάνην χειμάρῥοον—
is a really splendid piece of metre and phrase, worthy, high-pitched as
it is, of the author of the _Oresteia_ and the _Prometheus_ at his very
best. So, too, the much-enduring Gorgias would hardly have received very
severe reprehension from any but the extremest precisians of modern
criticism, at its most starched time, for calling vultures “living
tombs.” But the horror of the Greeks on the one hand for anything
extravagant, bizarre, out of measure, on the other for the slightest
approach in serious work to the unbecoming, the unpleasantly suggestive,
makes Longinus here a very little prudish. And his general remarks are
excellent, especially in reference to τὸ παρένθυρσον, which I have
ventured to interpret, not quite in accordance with the general
rendering, “the poking in of the thyrsus at the wrong time,” the
affectation of Bacchanalian fury where no fury need be.
But we still have the same warning in the chapter on Frigidity, coupled
with another—that, perhaps, as sometimes happens, Longinus' sense of
humour was not quite [Sidenote: _Frigidity._] equal to his sense of
sublimity, and yet another—that the historic sense, so late developed
everywhere, was, perhaps, not very strong in him. We, at least, should
give Timæus the benefit of a doubt, as to the presence of a certain not
inexcusable irony in the comparison (in which, for instance, neither
Swift nor Carlyle would have hesitated to indulge) of the times taken by
Alexander to conquer Asia and by Isocrates to write the _Panegyric_. On
the other hand, he seems to forget the date of Timæus when he finds the
μικροχαρές, the paltrily funny, in the historian’s connection of the
Athenian Hermocopidæ and their punishment by Hermocrates, the son of
Hermon. There is no reason why Timæus should not have been quite
serious, though in the third century after Christ, and even in the
first, the allusion might seem either a tasteless freethinking jest or a
silly piece of superstition.
But by far the most interesting thing in this context is Longinus'
irreconcilable objection to a fanciful metaphor [Sidenote: _The “maidens
in the eyes.”_] which, as it happens most oddly, was, with a very slight
variation, an equal pet of the Greeks of the great age and of our own
Elizabethans. Every reader of the latter knows the phrase, “to look
babies in the eyes” of the beloved—that is to say, to keep the face so
close to hers that the little reflections of the gazer in the pupils of
her eyes are discernible. The Greek term for these little images, and
the pupils that mirrored them, was slightly different—it was κόραι,
maidens. And as, from the famous quarrel scene in Homer downwards, the
eyes were always, in Greek literature, the seat of modesty or of
impudence, the combination suggested, not merely to Timæus but even to
Xenophon, a play of words, “more modest than the maidens in their eyes,”
or conversely, as where Timæus, speaking of the lawless lust of
Agathocles, says that he must have had “harlots” (πόρνας), not “maidens”
(κόρας), in his eyes. And Longinus is even more angry or sad with
Xenophon than with Timæus, as expecting more propriety from him.
But whether we agree with him in detail or not, the inestimable passage,
on the mere quest and craze for novelty, which [Sidenote: _The canon
“Quod semper.”_] follows, more than reconciles us, as well as the other
great saying in cap. vi. as to the “late-born” character of the judgment
of style, and that in the next as to the canon of Sublimity being the
effect produced unaltered in altered circumstances and cases. When we
read these things we feel that literary criticism is at last fully
constituted,—that it wants nothing more save greater variety, quantity,
and continuance of literary creation, upon which to exercise itself.
No nervous check or chill need be caused by the tolerably certain fact
that more than one hole may be picked in the [Sidenote: _The sources of
sublimity._] subsequent classification of the sources[228] of ὕψος.
These attempts at an over-methodical classification (it has been said
before) are always full of snares and pitfalls to the critic. Especially
do they tempt him to the sin of arguing in a circle. It cannot be denied
that in every one of the five divisions (except, perhaps, the valuable
vindication of the quality of Passion) there is some treacherous word or
other, which is a mere synonym of “sublime.” Thus in the first we have
ἁδρεπήβολον, mastery of the ἅδρον, a curious word, the nearest
equivalent of which in English is, perhaps, “stout” or “full-bodied,” as
we apply these terms to wine; in the fourth γενναία, “noble,” which is
only “sublime” in disguise; and in the fifth εν δε φαει και ολεσσον, of
which much the same may be said.
Footnote 228:
It may, however, be plausibly argued that the circle is more apparent
than real, resulting from a kind of ambiguity in the word πηγαί. If
Longinus had slightly altered his expression, so as to make it
something of this kind, “There are five points [or ways, or aspects]
in which ὕψος may be attained, thought, feeling, ‘figure,’ diction,
and composition,” he would be much less vulnerable. And, after all,
this is probably what he meant.
Any suggestion, however, of paralogism which might arise from this and
be confirmed by the curious introduction in the third of the Figures, as
if they were machines for automatic sublime-coining, must be dispelled
by the remarks on Passion of the right kind as tending to sublimity, and
by the special stress laid on the primary necessity of μεγαλοφροσύνη,
whereof ὕψος itself is the mere ἀπήχημα or echo. Unfortunately here, as
so often, the gap comes just in the most important place.
When the cloud lifts, however, we find ourselves in one of the most
interesting passages of the whole, the selection of “sublime” passages
from Homer. A little superfluous matter about Homer’s “impiety” (the
old, the respectable, Platonic mistake) occurs; but it matters not,
especially in face of the two praises of the “Let there be light” of the
Jewish legislator, “no chance comer,” and of the great ἐν δὲ φάει καὶ
ὄλεσσον of Ajax, the mere juxtaposition of which once more shows what a
critic we have got in our hands.
Not quite such a great one perhaps have we—yet one in the circumstances
equally fascinating—in the contrasted remarks [Sidenote: _Longinus on
Homer._] on the _Odyssey_. Longinus is not himself impious; he is no
Separatist (he is indeed far too good a critic to be that). But he will
have the Romance of Ulysses to be “old age, though the old age of
Homer.” “When a great nature is a little gone under, philomythia is
characteristic of its decline.”[229] Evidently, he thinks, the _Odyssey_
was Homer’s second subject, not his first. He is “a setting sun as
mighty as ever, but less intense”: he is more unequal: he takes to the
fabulous and the incredible. The Wine of Circe, the foodless voyage of
Ulysses, the killing of the suitors—nay, the very attention paid to
Character and Manners—tell the tale of decadence.
Footnote 229:
μεγάλης φύσεως ὑποφερομένης ἤδη ἰδιόν ἐστιν ἐν γήρᾳ τὸ φιλύμυθον.
He is wrong, undoubtedly wrong—we may swear it boldly by those who fell
in Lyonnesse, and in the palace of Atli, and under the echoes of the
horn of Roland. The _Odyssey_ is not less than the _Iliad_; it is
different. But we can hardly quarrel with him for being wrong, because
his error is so instructive, so interesting. We see in it first (even
side by side with not a little innovation) that clinging to the great
doctrines of old, to the skirts of Aristotle and of Plato, which is so
often found in noble minds and so seldom in base ones. And we see,
moreover, that far as he had advanced—near as he was to an actual peep
over the verge of the old world and into the new—he was still a Greek
himself at heart, with the foibles and limitations—no despicable foibles
and limitations—of the race. Here is the instinctive unreasoning terror
of the unknown Romance; the dislike of the vague and the fabulous; even
that curious craze about Character being in some way inferior to Action,
which we have seen before. By the time of Longinus—if he lived in the
third century certainly, if he lived in the first probably—the romance
did exist. But it was looked upon askance; it had no regular literary
rank; and a sort of resentment was apparently felt at its daring to
claim equality with the epic. Now the _Odyssey_ is the first, and not
far from the greatest, of romances. It has the Romantic Unity in the
endurance and triumph of its hero. It has the Romantic Passion in the
episodes of Circe and Calypso and others: above all, it has the great
Romantic breadth, the free sweep of scene and subject, the variety, the
contrast of fact and fancy, the sparkle and hurry and throb. But these
things, to men trained in the admiration of the _other_ Unity, the
_other_ Passion, the more formal, regulated, limited, measured detail
and incident of the usual tragedy and the usual epic—were at best
unfamiliar innovations, and at worst horrible and daring impieties.
Longinus will not go this length: he cannot help seeing the beauty of
the _Odyssey_. But he must reconcile his principles to his feelings by
inventing a theory of decadence, for which, to speak frankly, there is
no critical justification at all.
One may almost equally disagree with the _special_ criticism which
serves as setting to the great jewel among the quotations [Sidenote: _On
Sappho._] of the treatise, the so-called “Ode to Anactoria.” The charm
of this wonderful piece consists, according to Longinus, in the skill
with which Sappho chooses the accompanying emotions of “erotic
mania.”[230] To which one may answer, “Hardly so,” but in the skill with
which she expresses those emotions which she selects, and in the
wonderful adaptation of the metre to the expression, in the mastery of
the picture of the most favoured lover, drawing close and closer to the
beloved to catch the sweet speech,[231] and the laughter full of desire.
In saying this we should have the support of the Longinus of other parts
of the treatise against the Longinus of this. Yet here, too, he is
illuminative; here, too, the “noble error” of the Aristotelian
conception of poetry distinguishes and acquits him.
Footnote 230:
Literal.
Footnote 231:
Fond and foolish fancy as it may be, there seems to me something
miraculous in the mere juxtaposition of πλησίον and ἁδὺ—the silent
adoring lover, jealous, as it were, of the very air robbing him of a
portion of the sweetness.
With the remarks on αὔξησις, “amplification,” as it is traditionally but
by no means satisfactorily rendered, another phase [Sidenote:
“_Amplification._”] of the critical disease of antiquity (which is no
doubt balanced by other diseases in the modern critical body) may be
thought to appear. Both in the definition of this figure and in the
description of its method we may, not too suspiciously, detect evidences
of that excessive technicality which gave to Rhetoric itself the
exclusive title of _techne_. _Auxesis_, it seems, comes in when the
business, or the point at issue, admits at its various stages of divers
fresh starts and rests, of one great phrase being wheeled upon the stage
after another, continually introduced in regular ascent.[232] This, it
seems, can be done either by means of τοπηγορία, “handling of _topoi_ or
commonplaces,” or by δείνωσις, which may perhaps be best rendered _tour
de force_, or by cunning successive disposition (ἐποικονομία) of facts
or feelings. For, says he, there are ten thousand kinds of _auxesis_.
Footnote 232:
ἕτερα ἑτέροις ἐπεισκυκλούμενα μεγέθη συνεχῶς ἐπεισάγηται κατ’
ἐπίβασιν.
The first description of the method will recall to all comparative
students of literature the manner of Burke, though it is not exactly
identical with that manner; but the instances of means, besides being
admittedly inadequate, savour, with their technicalities of terminology,
much too strongly of the cut-and-dried manual. The third article, on a
reasonable interpretation of ἐποικονομία, really includes all that need
be said. But one sees here, as later, that even Longinus had not quite
outgrown the notion that the teacher of Rhetoric was bound to present
his student with a sort of hand-list of “tips” and dodges—with the kind
of Cabbala wherewith the old-fashioned crammer used to supply his pupils
for inscription on wristband or finger-nail. Yet he hastens to give a
sign of grace by avowing his dissatisfaction with the usual Rhetorical
view, and by distinguishing _auxesis_ and the Sublime itself, in a
manner which brings the former still nearer to Burke’s “winding into a
subject like a serpent,” and which might have been more edifying still
if one of the usual gaps did not occur. Part, at least, of the lost
matter must have been occupied with a contrast or comparison between the
methods of Plato and Demosthenes, the end of which we have, and which
passes into one between Demosthenes and Cicero. “If we Greeks may be
allowed to have an opinion,” says Longinus, with demure humility,
“Demosthenes shall be compared to a flash of thunder and lightning,
Cicero to an ordinary terrestrial conflagration,” which is very handsome
to Cicero.
Then he returns to Plato, and rightly insists that much of his splendour
is derived from imitation, or at least from emulation, of that very
Homer whom he so often attacks. The great writers of the past are to be
constantly before us, and we are not to be deterred from “letting
ourselves go” by any mistaken sense of inferiority, or any dread of
posterity’s verdict.
Then comes a digression of extreme importance on the subject of
φαντασίαι or εἰδωλοποιΐαι—“images.” One of the points in which a history
of the kind here attempted may [Sidenote: “_Images._”] prove to be of
most service, lies in the opportunity it affords of keeping the changes
of certain terms, commonly used in criticism, more clearly before the
mind than has always been done. And of these, none requires more care
than “Images” and “Imagination.” At the first reading, the mere use of
such a word as φαντασίαι may seem to make all over-scrupulousness
unnecessary, though if we remember that even Fancy is not quite
Imagination, the danger may be lessened. At any rate, it is nearly
certain that no ancient writer,[233] and no modern critic before a very
recent period (Shakespeare uses it rightly, but then he was Shakespeare
and not a critic), attached our full sense to the term. To Aristotle
φαντασία is merely αἴσθησις ἀσθενὴς, a “weakened sensation,” a copy
furnished by memory from sensation itself. Even animals have it. No idea
of Invention seems to have mingled with it, or only of such invention as
the artist’s is when he faithfully represents natural objects. Of the
Imagination, which is in our minds when we call Shelley an imaginative
poet, and Pope not one, Sir Edward Burne Jones an imaginative painter,
and any contemporary whom it may be least invidious to name not one,
there does not seem to have been a trace even in the enthusiastic mind
of Longinus, though he expressly includes Enthusiasm—nay, Passion—in his
notion of it. You think you see what you say, and you make your hearers
see it. Good; but Crabbe does that constantly, and one would hardly,
save in the rarest cases, call Crabbe imaginative. In short, φαντασίαι
here are vivid illustrations drawn from nature—Orestes’ hallucination of
the Eumenides, Euripides’ picture of Phaethon, that in the _Seven_ of
the slaying of the bull over the black-bound shield, and many others. No
doubt he glances at the fabulous and incredible, the actually
“imagined”; but he seems, as in the case of the _Odyssey_, to be a
little doubtful of these even in poetry, while in oratory he bars them
altogether. You must at one and the same time reason and
illustrate—again the very method of Burke.
Footnote 233:
On the exception to be made for Philostratus, see above, p. 120.
In the rest of the illustrations of the use of Figures—for the central
part of the treatise expressly disclaims being a formal [Sidenote: _The
Figures._] discussion of these idols—the positive literary criticisms
scattered in them—the actual “reviewing”—will give most of the interest.
The great Oath of Demosthenes, “By those who fell at Marathon!” with its
possible suggestion by a passage of Eupolis, supplies a whole chapter
and part of another. And now we find the curious expression (showing how
even Longinus was juggled by terms) that Figures “fight on the side of
the Sublime, and in turn draw a wonderful reinforcement from it,”
wherein a mighty if vague reality like the Sublime, and mere shadows
(though neatly cut-out shadows) like the Figures, are most quaintly
yoked together.
Though still harassed by gaps, we find plenty of good pasture in the
remarks, the handling of Periphrasis being especially attractive. For
the eighteenth century—the time which honoured Longinus most in theory,
and went against him most in practice—undoubtedly took part of his
advice as to this figure. It had no doubt that Periphrasis contributed
to the Sublime, was ὑψηλοποιόν: unluckily it paid less attention to his
subsequent caution, that it is a risky affair, and that it smells of
triviality.[234] In fact, it is extremely noticeable that in the
examples of Periphrasis which he praises we should hardly apply that
name to it, but should call it “Allusion” or “Metaphor,” while the
examples that he condemns are actually of the character of Armstrong’s
“gelid cistern” and Delille’s “game which Palamede invented.”
Footnote 234:
ἐπίκηρον πρᾶγμα ... κουφολογίας ὄζον. ἐπίκηρος means literally
“perishable,” “apt to go off,” to get stale or flat.
At no time perhaps has the tricksy, if not (as one is almost driven to
suspect) deliberately malignant, mutilator played such a trick as in
abstracting four leaves from the MS. between caps. xxx. and xxxi. Here
Longinus has begun to speak of diction generally; here he has made that
admirable descant on “beautiful words” which, though almost all the book
deserves to be written in letters of gold, would tempt one to indulge
here in precious stones, so as to mimic, in jacinth and sapphire and
chrysoprase, the effect which it celebrates. When we are permitted
another glimpse we are back in particular criticism, interesting but
less valuable save indirectly, and in criticisms, too, of Cæcilius,
criticisms which we could do without. No great good can ever come of
inquiries, at least general inquiries, into the permissible number and
the permissible strength of Metaphors. Once more we may fall back on the
Master, though perhaps rather in opposition to some of the Master’s
dicta in this very field. “As the intelligent man shall decide” is the
decision here, and the intelligent man will never decide till the case
is before him. One bad metaphor is too much: twenty good ones are not
too many. Nor is “the multitudinous seas incarnadine” an “excess,”
though no doubt there have been bad critics who thought so.
Longinus himself, though he had not had the happiness to read _Macbeth_,
was clearly not far out of agreement with the [Sidenote:
“_Faultlessness._”] concluding sentiment of the last paragraph, and he
makes this certain by the disquisition on Faultlessness which follows.
As a general question this is probably, for the present time at any
rate, past argument, not so much because the possibility of a
“faultless” great poem is denied, as because under the leaden rule of
the best modern criticism—leaden not from dulness but from
adaptability—few things are recognised as “faults” _in se_ and _per se_.
A pun may be a gross fault in one place and a grace beyond the reach of
art in another: an aposiopesis may be either a proof of clumsy
inequality to the situation or a stroke of genius. But the declaration
of Longinus that he is not on the side of Faultlessness[235] is of
infinitely greater importance than any such declaration from an equally
great critic (“Where is he? Show him to me,” as Rabelais would say)
could possess to-day. The general Greek theory undoubtedly did make for
excessive severity to faultfulness, just as our general theory makes
perhaps for undue leniency to it. That Longinus could withstand this
tendency—could point out the faults of the faultless—was a very great
thing.
Footnote 235:
ἐγὼ δ' οἶδα μὲν ὡς αἱ ὑπερμεγέθεις φύσεις ἥκιστα καθαραί.
As always, too, his individual remarks frequently give us, not merely
the satisfaction of agreement, but that of piquant difference or
curiosity. We may agree with him about Bacchylides and Pindar—though, by
the way, the man who had the taste and the courage to admire a girl as
χλωραύχενα—as possessing that yellow ivory tint of skin which lights so
magnificently[236]—was certainly one to dare to challenge convention
with what its lilies-and-roses standard must have thought a “fault.” But
we cannot help astonishment at being told that both Pindar and Sophocles
“often have their light quenched without any obvious reason, and stumble
in the most unfortunate manner.”[237] For those of us who are less, as
well as those who are more, enthusiastic about Sophocles would probably
agree in asking, “Where does he ‘go out in snuff,’ where does he ‘fall
prostrate’ in this fashion?” Surely all the faults cannot be in the lost
plays! We want a rather fuller text of Hyperides than we possess to
enable us quite to appreciate the justice of the comparison of him with
Demosthenes, but that justice is striking even on what we have. On the
other hand, we are rather thrown out by the contrast of Plato and
Lysias—it may be owing to the same cause. Even if the comparison were
one of style only, we should think it odd to make one between Burke and
Berkeley, though the _Sublime and Beautiful_ would help us a little
here.
Footnote 236:
Simonides had used the word literally of the nightingale, and there
are those who hold that Bacchylides merely meant to compliment the
lady’s _voice_. But let us think more nobly of him.
Footnote 237:
σβέννυνται δε ἀλόγως πολλάκις, καὶ πίπτουσιν ἀτυχέστατα.
But all this is a digression,[238] and the author seems to have
[Sidenote: _Hyperboles._] returned to his Metaphors (in a gap where the
demon has interfered with less malice than usual), and to Hyperboles,
under the head of which we get a useful touch of contempt for
Isocrates.[239] We are in deeper and more living waters when we come to
the handling, alas! too brief (though nothing seems here to be lost), of
_ordonnance_, “composition,” selection and arrangement of words. Here is
yet another of those great law-making phrases which are the charter of a
new criticism. “Harmony is to men not only physically connected with
persuasion and pleasure, but a wonderful instrument of magniloquence and
passion.” It may be difficult for us, with our very slight knowledge (it
would, perhaps, be wiser to say almost absolute ignorance) of Greek
pronunciation, to appreciate his illustrations here in detail. But we
can appreciate the principle of them exactly, and apply that principle,
[Sidenote: “_Harmony._”] in any language of which we do know the
pronunciation, with perfect ease and the completest success. The silly
critics (they exist at the present day) who pooh-pooh, as niceties and
fiddle-faddle, the order of words, the application of rhythmical tests
to prose, and the like, are answered here beforehand with convincing
force by a critic whom no one can possibly charge with preferring sound
to sense.
Footnote 238:
I must be allowed to say that it contains one of the most ambitious
and successful passages of Longinus as an original writer—the
vindication of Nature’s command to man to admire the magnificent—in
cap. xxxv. It is a temptation to quote it.
Footnote 239:
οὐκ οἴδ’ ὅπως παιδὸς πρᾶγμα ἔπαθεν διὰ τὴν τοῦ πάντα αὐξητικῶς ἐθέλειν
λὲγειν φιλοτιμίαν.
This refers to prose, but the following chapter carries out the same
principle as to poetry with equal acuteness. Longinus, great as his name
is, probably is but little in the hands of those who object (sometimes
almost with foam at the mouth) to the practice of analysing the mere
harmonic effect of poetry. But it is pleasant to think of these passages
when one reads the outcries, nor is the pleasantness rendered less
pleasant by the subsequent cautions against that over-rhythmical fashion
of writing which falls to the level of mere dance-music.
The caution against over-conciseness and over-prolixity is rather more
of a matter of course, and the strictures on the μικρότης, occasionally
to be found in Herodotus, like some in the earlier parts of the
treatise, sometimes elude us, as is the case with similar verbal
criticisms even in languages with which we are colloquially familiar.
And then there is the curious Conclusion which, as we have said, is no
conclusion at all, as it would seem, and which yet has [Sidenote: _The
Conclusion._] an unmistakable air of “peroration, with [much]
circumstance,” on the everlasting question, “Why is the Sublime so rare
in our time?” In that day, as in this, we learn (the fact being, as in
King Charles II.'s fish-experiment, taken for granted), divers
explanations, chiefly political, were given for the fact. Democracy was
a good nurse of greatness: aristocracy was not. But Longinus did not
agree. It was money-getting and money-seeking, pleasure-loving and
pleasure-hunting, he thought. Plain living and high thinking must be
returned to if the Heights were to be once more scaled. A noble
conclusion, if perhaps only a generous fallacy. Had Longinus had our
illegitimate prerogative-_post_rogative of experience, he would have
known that the blowing of the wind of the spirit admits of no such
explanations as these. Ages of Liberty and Ages of Servitude, Ages of
Luxury and Ages of Simplicity, Ages of Faith and Ages of Freethought—all
give us the Sublime if the right man is there: none will give it us if
he is not. But our critic had not the full premisses before him, and we
could not expect the adequate conclusion.
Yet how great a book have we here! Of the partly otiose disputes about
its date and origin and authorship one or two things are worth
recalling, though for other purposes than those of the disputants. Let
it be remembered that it is not quoted, or even referred to, by a single
writer of antiquity.[240] There is absolutely no evidence for it, except
its own internal character, before the date of its oldest manuscript,
which is assigned to the tenth century. Even if, assuming it to be the
work of Longinus, we suppose it to have been part of one of the works
which _are_ ascribed to him (a possible assumption, see note), there is
still the absence of quotation, still the absence even of reference to
views so clearly formulated, so eloquently enforced, and in some ways so
remarkably different from those of the usual Greek and Roman
rhetorician. That the book can be of very late date—much later, that is
to say, than that of Longinus himself—is almost impossible. One of its
features, the lack of any reference to even a single writer later than
the first century, has indeed been relied upon to prove that it is not
later itself than that date. This is inconclusive for that purpose. But
it makes every succeeding century less and less probable, while the
style, though in some respects peculiar, is not in the least Byzantine.
Footnote 240:
“John of Sicily” (Walz, vi. 225), who in the thirteenth century cites
the lost φιλόλογοι ὁμιλίαι almost as if he was citing the Περὶ Ὕψους,
is certainly no exception. The undated Byzantine (Cramer, _Anecd.
Oxon._, iii. 159, quoted by Professor Roberts after Usener), who
couples Λογγίνου κρίσεις with those of Dionysius, may come nearer, as
may the anonymous scholiast on Hermogenes (Walz, vii. 963), who cites
the ὁμιλίαι on τὸ στομφῶδες, “mouthing.”
This detachment from any particular age—nay, more, this _vita fallens_,
this unrecognised existence of a book so remarkable—stands in no merely
fanciful relation to the characteristics of the book itself. It abides
alone in thought as well as in history. That it is a genuine, if a late,
production of the classical or semi-classical age we cannot reasonably
doubt, for a multitude of reasons, small in themselves but strong in a
bundle,—its style, its diction, its limitations of material, and even
occasionally of literary view, its standards, all sorts of little
touches like the remark about Cicero, and so forth. Yet it has, in the
most important points, almost more difference from than resemblance to
the views of classical critics generally. The much greater antiquity of
Aristotle may be thought to make comparison with him infructuous, if not
unfair. But we have seen already how far Longinus is from Dionysius, how
much further from Plutarch; and we shall see in the next Book how far he
is from Quintilian. Let us look where we will, to critics by profession
or to critics by chance, to the Alexandrians as far as we know them, to
the professional writers on Rhetoric, to Aristophanes earlier and Lucian
later, always we see Longinus apart—among them by dispensation and time,
but not of them by tone, by tendency, by temper.
For though he himself was almost certainly unconscious of it, and might
even have denied the fact with some warmth if it had [Sidenote:
_Modernity of the treatise,_]. been put to him, Longinus has marked out
grounds of criticism very far from those of the ancient period
generally, further still from those which were occupied by any critic
(except Dante) of the Middle Ages and the Classical revival, and close
to, if not in all cases overlapping the territory of, the modern
Romantic criticism itself. As we have seen, the ancient critic was wont
either to neglect the effect of a work of art altogether, and to judge
it by its supposed agreement with certain antecedent requirements, or
else, if effects were considered at all, to consider them from the
merely practical point of view, as in the supposed persuasive effect of
Rhetoric, or from the ethical, as in the purging, the elevating, and so
forth, assigned to Tragedy, and to Poetry generally. Longinus has
changed all this. It is the enjoyment, the transport, the carrying away
of the reader or auditor, that, whether expressedly or not, is always at
bottom the chief consideration with him. He has not lowered the ethical
standard one jot, but he has silently refused to give it precedence of
the æsthetic; he is in no way for lawlessness, but he makes it clear,
again and again, that mere compliance with law, mere fulfilment of the
requirements of the stop-watch and the hundredth-of-an-inch rule, will
not suffice. Aristotle had been forced, equally by his system and his
sense, to admit that pleasure was an end—perhaps the end—of art; but he
blenches and swerves from the consequences. Longinus faces them and
follows them out.
In his attention to rhythm, especially of prose, Longinus is much less
unique, for this point (as we have seen and shall see) was never
neglected by the best ancient critics. But there is again something
particularly distinguishing in his attempt to trace the sources of the
literary pleasure in specimen passages. The ancient tendency is, though
not universally, yet too generally, the other way, to select specimen
passages merely as illustrations of general rules.
And this brings us to his greatest claim of all—that is to say, his
attitude towards his subject as a whole. Although he nowhere [Sidenote:
_or rather sempiternity._] says as much in so many words, no one can
read his book with attention—above all, no one can read it again and
again critically—without seeing that to him literature was not a
schedule of forms, departments, kinds, with candidates presenting
themselves for the critic to admit them to one or the other, on and
during their good behaviour; but a body of matter to be examined
according to its fruits, according to its provision of the literary
pleasure. When it has been examined it is still for the critic to
explain and justify (according to those unwritten laws which govern him)
his decision that this was good, this not so good, this bad,—to point
out the reasons of success and failure, to arrange the symptoms,
classify the methods, and so forth. Where Longinus fell short it was
almost always because ancient literature had not provided him with
enough material of certain kinds, not because he ruled these kinds out
_a priori_. Longinus was no Rymer. We could submit even Shakespeare to
him with very little fear, and be perfectly certain that he would not,
with Rapin, pronounce Dantes Aligerus wanting in fire.[241] Nay, with a
sufficient body of material to set before him, we could trust him with
very much more dangerous cases than Shakespeare and Dantes Aligerus.
Footnote 241:
Sir Thomas Pope Blount, _Characters and Censures of the most
Considerable Poets_. London, 1694. P. 58. “Rapin tells us that Dantes
Aligerus wants fire, and that he has not heat enough.”
Yet, as we have said, he stands alone. We must skip fifteen hundred
years and come to Coleridge before we meet any critic entirely of his
class, yet free from some of his limitations. The hand of the author of
the Περὶ Ὕψους is not subdued, but raised to what he deals in. And his
work remains towering among all other work of the class, the work of a
critic at once Promethean and Epimethean in his kind, learning by the
mistakes of all that had gone before, and presaging, with instinctive
genius, much that was not to come for centuries after.
CHAPTER VI.
BYZANTINE CRITICISM.
PHOTIUS—DETAILED EXAMINATION OF THE ‘BIBLIOTHECA’—IMPORTANCE OF ITS
POSITION AS A BODY OF CRITICAL JUDGMENTS—TZETZES—JOHN THE SICELIOTE.
If the word Byzantine is not quite such a byword as it once was, it
still has for the most part an uncomplimentary connotation. How far that
connotation is justified in reference to our special subject can hardly
be better set forth than by exposition of three books of the middle and
later Byzantine period.[242] The first shall be the remarkable and in a
way famous _Bibliotheca_[243] of Photius in the ninth century; the
second, the _Homeric Allegories_ of Tzetzes in the twelfth; the third,
that commentary on the περὶ ἰδέων of Hermogenes by John the Siceliote in
the thirteenth, which preserves to us our earliest reference to what is
almost certainly the Περὶ Ὕψους, and assigns it to Longinus.
Footnote 242:
Of course many, perhaps most, of the commentators and scholiasts
referred to in chaps. iv. and v. are Byzantine in date.
Footnote 243:
Ed. Bekker. Berlin, 1824. 2 vols. 4to, but paged continuously.
The first is in its way unique. The author, it may be barely necessary
to say, was Patriarch of Constantinople for a period [Sidenote:
_Photius._] of nearly thirty years, though with an interval of ten,
during which he was deposed or deprived (858-867, 877-886), in the
latter half of the ninth century. He was originally a lay statesman,
and, from causes no doubt political as well as religious, was much
engaged in the disputes which led to the final separation between the
Eastern and Western Churches. His birth- and death-dates are not known;
but he was, in the year last mentioned—886—banished by Leo VI. to a
monastery in Armenia. The _Bibliotheca_ purports to be an account or
review of books read during an embassy to Assyria, written for the
benefit, and at the request, of the author’s brother Tarasius. There is
no reason for questioning the excellent Patriarch’s veracity; but if he
actually took with him the two hundred and eighty authors (some of them
very voluminous) whom he summarises, he must have had one of the largest
travelling libraries on record. The form is encyclopædic, each author
having a separate article beginning Ἀνεγνώθη, “there was read:” and to a
great extent these articles consist of summaries of the matter of the
books. This, as it happens, is fortunate. Photius seems to have had a
special fancy for giving _précis_ of narrative, whether ostensibly
historical or avowedly fictitious; and he has thus preserved for us all
or almost all that we know of things so interesting as the _Persica_ of
Ctesias, and the _Babylonica_ or _Sinonis and Rhodanes_ of the romancer
Iamblichus. Naturally enough, a good deal of his matter is theological,
and his abstracts here are seasoned with a sometimes piquant, but seldom
strictly critical, animus. But he by no means confines himself to mere
summary, and we have in his book what we have nowhere else—a sort of
critical review of a very large portion of Greek literature. Pretty full
abstract after his own manner, and some extract of this, will be the
best basis possible for considering the state of literary study and
taste at what was perhaps the only cultivated capital of Europe, if not
(putting the dimmer East out of the question) of the world, at the time
when the classical languages were almost half a millennium past their
real flourishing time, and when as yet only Anglo-Saxon to certainty,
and some other Teutonic dialects probably, had arisen to represent the
new vernaculars in any kind of literary performance.
Photius observes no order in his notices, which would appear to be
genuine notes of reading; and most of his earliest entries are short,
and devoted to writers possessing at best interest of matter. The first
that has struck me as possessing the interest of literature is Art. 26,
on Synesius. The characterisation of the good Bishop of Ptolemaïs runs
thus: “As for phrase, he [Sidenote: _Detailed examination of the_
Bibliotheca.] is lofty and has ὄγκος” (the word we encounter so often
and find so hard to translate), “but swerves off to the over-poetical.”
“His miscellaneous epistles” (the judgment just quoted is on his
philosophical treatises on Providence, on Monarchy, &c.) “drip with
grace and pleasure,[244] not without strength and substance[245] of
thought.” The rest is personal and religious, but extremely interesting.
Footnote 244:
χάριτος καὶ ἡδονῆς ἀποστάζουσαι.
Art. 44 deals with Philostratus and his famous life of Apollonius of
Tyana. The bulk of the notice, as we should expect, both from the
Patriarch’s fancy for analysis of narrative and from his religious bent,
is busied with the matter; but we have some actual criticism. He is as
to his phrase “clear, graceful, and aphoristic, and teeming with
sweetness;[246] bent on obtaining honour by archaism and the
fashionableness [or new-fangledness] of his constructions.”[247]
Josephus has Art. 47. He is “clean in phrasing, and clever at setting
forth the intention of his speech distinctly and pleasantly; persuasive
and agreeable in his speeches even if occasion compels him to speak in
different senses; fertile in enthymemes on either side, and with gnomæ
at command if ever any man had them; also most competent to infuse
passions into his discourse, and a proved hand at awaking compassion and
softening the reader.” All which (observe the strict rhetorical form of
it) is very handsome towards that Ebrew Jew. The note (49) on Cyril of
Alexandria, that he “keeps the character and idiom of the appropriate
speech,” that “his style is fashioned and, as it were, forced to express
idiosyncratic idea,”[248] and “is like loose poetry that disdains
metre,” is itself thoroughly idiosyncratic, and speaks Cyril very well.
Two others, 55 and 75, of a somewhat acrid character, on Johannes
Philoponus (“Matæoponus rather,” quoth our Patriarch), are, though
acrid, by no means uncritical. All these are late and mainly
ecclesiastical writers, though of a certain general literary interest.
The first author, at once of considerable age and of purely literary
value, to be very fully handled is the above-mentioned Ctesias, and we
have only fragments whereby to control Photius’s criticism of him. But
the paragraph which comes at the end of the abstract of the _Persica_,
and applies both to that and to the _Indica_, is itself worth
abstracting. “This historian is very clear and simple in language, so
that his style is mixed with much pleasure. He uses the Ionic dialect,
not throughout, like Herodotus, but partially. Nor does he, like that
writer, divert his story to unseasonable digressions. But from the
mythical matters with which Herodotus is reproached neither does Ctesias
abstain, especially in the book called _Indica_. Still, the pleasure of
his history consists chiefly in the arrangement of his narrative, which
is strong in the pathetic and unexpected, and in the variation of it by
dint of the mythical. His style is slipshod more than is fitting, often
falling into mere vulgarity. But the style of Herodotus, both in this
and other respects of the power and art of the Word, is the canon of the
Ionic dialect.”
Footnote 245:
πυκνότης, which some would render “shrewdness.”
Footnote 246:
βρύων γλυκύτητος.
Footnote 247:
τῷ ἀρχαϊσμῷ καὶ ταῖς καινοπρεπεστέραις τῶν συντάξεων εμφιλοτιμουμενος.
Footnote 248:
εἰς ἰδιάζουσαν ἰδέαν ἐκβεβιασμένος.
Appian’s _Roman History_ and Arrian’s _Parthica_ come in for successive
notice, but there is nothing about the latter’s literary character till
the much later and fuller notice of his Alexander-book at 91, where
Photius, as is specially his wont with historians, gives a full
appreciation. The pupil of Epictetus, he thinks, "is second to none
among those who have best drawn up histories, for he is both first-rate
at succinct narration, and he never hurts the continuousness of his
history by unseasonable divagations and parentheses.[249] He is original
[“new-fangled,” the usual translation of καινοπρεπὴς, has a too
unfavourable twist in it], rather by the arrangement of his words than
by his vocabulary; and he manages this in such a fashion that hardly
otherwise could the tale be told more clearly and luminously. He uses a
vivid, euphonious, well-turned style, and has smoothness well mixed with
grandeur.[250] His neologisms are not directed to mere innovation _à
perte de vue_,[251] but close and emphatic, so as to be real figures of
speech and not merely change for ordinary words.[252] Wherefore
clearness is his companion, not merely in this respect, but most of all
in the arrangement and order and constitution of his style, which is the
very craft-secret of clearness. For the use of merely straightforward
periods is within the power of mere uncultivated persons,[253] and, if
it be maintained without admixture, brings the style down to flatness
and meanness, whereto Arrian, clear as he is, has not approached. And he
makes use of elliptic figures not in respect of his period but of his
diction, so as never to become obscure: if any one should attempt to
supply what is wanting, it would seem to tend towards the superfluous,
and not really to complete the ellipse. The variety of his figures is
also one of his strongest points—not changing at once from simple usage,
but forming themselves gently and from the beginning, so as neither to
annoy with satiety nor to worry by overcrowding. In short, if any be set
against him in the matter of historical composition, many even of the
old classics[254] would be found his inferiors in _taxis_."
Footnote 249:
It is odd to find the hatred of the harmless necessary parenthesis,
the delight of all full minds and quick wits, and the terror of the
ignorant and slow, formulated so frequently by Photius.
Footnote 250:
τὸ λεῖον ἔχει τῷ μεγέθει συγκιρνάμενον.
Footnote 251:
εἰς τὸ πόῤῥω.
Footnote 252:
ἐναλλαγὴν συνήθους ὀνόματος. This is an acute criticism, and I do not,
at the time of writing, remember that it had been anticipated.
Undoubtedly most practitioners of ornate and unusual style do merely
“give change for ordinary words,” that is to say, they think in these,
and then just write something less usual in place of them.
Footnote 253:
ἰδιώταις
Footnote 254:
τῶν ἀρχαίων.
Appian has earlier had less elaborate praise, as being terse and plain
in phrase, as truth-loving as possible, an expounder of strategic
methods, and very good indeed at raising the depressed spirit of an
army, or soothing its excitement, and exhibiting passion by means of
speeches. It is odd enough, after the exaltation of Arrian—a good writer
but no marvel—to the skies, to come across the following brief and
grudging estimate, inserted in the shortest of summaries, of a man of
the highest genius like Herodotus. Photius here, as elsewhere, does
justice to the Halicarnassian as a canon of Ionic. “But he employs all
manner of old wives' fables and divagations, whereby an intellectual
sweetness runs through him,[255] though these things sometimes obscure
the comprehension of the history and efface its proper and corresponding
type, since truth will not have her clearness clouded by myths, nor
admit divagations (_parecbaseis_) further than is fitting.” This is
rather dispiriting for the first really great writer whom we meet; and
the long judgment upon Æschines, which follows shortly, makes little
amends, because the orators had been criticised and characterised _ad
nauseam_ for a thousand years. Later we have no ill criticism of Dion
Cassius—indeed Photius seems more at ease with post-Christian writers,
even if they be non-Christians, than with the classics proper, or
ἀρχαῖοι as he calls them. The careful and somewhat artificial style of
this historian, his imitation of Thucydides, and some other things, are
well but briefly noted.
Footnote 255:
δι’ ὧν αὐτῷ ἡ κατὰ διάνοιαν γλυκύτης διαῤῥει. The translation in the
text, which may be varied as "which gives him [or "is the source of"]
his pervading intellectual charm," and which Professor Butcher
approves, seems to suit the immediate context best. But διαῤῥέω very
frequently means “run _off_” or “_away_,” and the general attitude of
disapproval which Photius assumes towards the Herodotean fabling might
seem to warrant “whereby his attraction for the intellect disappears.”
It is evident that the good Patriarch was no sparing or infrequent
novel-reader, for, as has been said, he is copious both on some novels
that we have and on one that we have not. The somewhat monotonous form,
however, of the Lower Greek Romance gives him more room for analysis of
story than for criticism of art. He justly extols the propriety of
Heliodorus, is properly shocked by the looseness of Achilles Tatius, and
puts the lost Iamblichus between them in this respect. His criticism of
the _Æthiopica_—of many million novel reviews the interesting first—may
be given, apart, of course, from the argument of the book, which, as is
usual with him, and not uncommon with his followers to-day, forms the
bulk of the article.
“The book (_syntagma_) is of the dramatic kind [this is noteworthy], and
it uses a style suitable to the plan, for it abounds in simplicity and
sweetness, and in pathetic situations actual or expected. The narrative
is diversified and unexpected, and has strange chance salvations[256]
and bright and pure diction. If, as is reasonable, it sometimes indulges
in tropes, they, too, are brilliant, and exhibit the matter in hand. The
periods are symmetrical and, on the whole, arranged with a view to
succinctness. The plot and the rest are correspondent to the style. His
yarn[257] is of the love of a man and a woman, and he shows an anxious
and careful observance of propriety of sentiment.”
Footnote 256:
σωτηρίαις, a capital phrase for the “rescue or two [and twenty],” the
“hairbreadth 'scapes” of the Romance.
Footnote 257:
This is irresistible for ὑφαίνει.
In Art. 77, on the not very interesting subject of Eunapius, we have the
familiar phrase “New Edition” in its literal Greek form.[258] A fresh
example of the interest he takes in history appears under the head of
Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and in Art. 90 Libanius supplies him with
occasion for criticising a rhetorician pure and simple. He is, he
thinks, exhibited to the best advantage[259] in his “plasmatic”
[speeches written on imaginary topics] and gymnastic discourses rather
than in his others, for by his excessive elaboration and
busybodyness[260] in these others he has hurt the grace and charm of
the,[261] as one may say, naïf and impromptu style, and deprived it of
verisimilitude, causing frequent obscurity by insertions, and sometimes
even by abstraction of the necessary. “But in other respects he is a
canon and standard of Attic speech.”
Footnote 258:
νέα ἐκδόσις.
Footnote 259:
αὐτὸς ἑαυτοῦ χρησιμώτερός εστιν.
Footnote 260:
περιεργία.
Footnote 261:
τήν ἔμφυτον τοῦ λόγου καὶ αὐτοσχέδιον (ὡς ἄν τις εἴποι.)
Lucian and the mysterious Lucius of Patræ seem to have occupied him
together, and he discusses the authorship of the _Ass_ with some acumen,
recognising in Lucian a merely satiric intention, in Lucius a serious
belief in magic and marvels. As for Lucian himself (respecting whom he
has preserved for us the great epigram quoted above), he acknowledges
the universality of the Samosatan’s satire of all things Greek, their
god-making and their _Aselgeia_, the extravagances of their poets and
their political mistakes, the emptiness and pretentiousness of their
philosophy. In fact, says Photius, in an approach at least to the true
Higher Criticism, “his whole pains are spent on producing a prose Comedy
of Greek things. He himself seems to be one of those who worship nothing
seriously; he scoffs and mocks at other’s doxies, but lays down no creed
of his own, unless one should say that it is a creed to be creedless. In
style he is of the very best, brilliant and classical, and signally
distinguished in diction, and of all others a lover of good order and
purity, with a clear and symmetrical magnificence. His composition is
arranged so that the reader seems not to be reading prose, and as though
a very pleasant song, without distinct musical accompaniment, were
dropping into the ears of the hearers. And altogether, as we said, his
style is of the very best, and ill-matched with the subjects at which he
chose to laugh.”
Photius is not lavish of the word _aristos_, and it is only fair to say
that, for its day and way, this criticism is not far itself from
deserving the epithet.
After some shorter notices, including a good many of Lexicons (Photius
himself, it need hardly be said, was a lexicographer), we come, at Art.
159, to Isocrates, on whom the Byzantine judgment is again noteworthy.
He has more, Photius thinks, of the sophist than, like the other Nine,
of the actual advocate. “His readers can see at once that he employs a
distinct and pure style, and shows a great deal of care about the
craftsmanship of his speeches, so that his order and his care overreach
themselves a little and become excessive. In fact, this excess of
apparatus does not so much provide genuine arguments as tasteless
ineptitude.”[262]
Footnote 262:
τὸ ἀπειρόκαλον, one of the most damaging of Greek critical terms.
“Again, he is wanting in ethical character and truth and nervousness of
style (γοργότης.) Of sublimity, so far as it suits political discourses,
he mixes a very good dose, and suitably to his clearness. But his style
is more languid[263] than it ought to be. And he is not least blamed for
attention to trifles, and a balancing of clauses[264] which disgusts.
But we say this in reference to the excellence of his speeches, pointing
out what fails, and is exceptional in them, inasmuch as in comparison
with some of those who have made bold to write speeches, even his
shortcomings would appear to be excellence.”
Footnote 263:
ἄτονος.
Footnote 264:
σμικρολογία καὶ τὸ προσκορὲς τιον παρισώσεων. It is needless to say
that this προσκορὲς, this “satiated nausea” of the balanced antithetic
sentence, has recurred as regularly as the resort to the most obvious,
and, so long as it is fresh, most effective, of rhetorical devices.
Immediately before this article on Isocrates there is a very shrewd note
(and one which is “for thoughts” to any one who has ever written books)
on the _Sophistike Paraskeue_ of Phrynichus. “This writer, if any ever
was, is fullest of various knowledge, but otherwise redundant and
garrulous: _for when it was open to him to have got the matter
completely finished off, without missing a single important point, in
not a fifth part of his actual length, he, by saying things out of
season, has stretched it out to an unmanageable bulk; and while he has
collected for others' use the matter of a good and suitable treatise, he
cannot be said to have made much use of it himself_.”
It would be possible to extend these excerpts and abstracts very
considerably from my notes of reading the great mass of the
_Bibliotheca_; though the larger part of that mass is itself made up,
not of literary criticisms at all, but, as has been said, of summaries,
abstracts, and extracts. In not a few cases the longest articles deal
with commentaries or anthologies, the Platonic studies of the
rhetorician Aristides, the _meletæ_ or declamations of Himerius, the
_Bibliotheca_ of Diodorus, the fortunately still extant
Commonplace-books of Stobæus, and the like. But the foregoing pages have
probably given sufficient foundation for a study of the Photian
position, which may be taken, without rashness, as a very favourable
representative of Byzantine criticism generally.[265]
Footnote 265:
And it cannot be too often repeated that when Byzantine men of letters
were not criticising they were often doing something better _for us_.
He would be a sorry critic himself who would not give a wilderness of
all but the very greatest members of his own class for John Stobæus or
Constantine Cephalas.
In making this estimate we must first of all take note of [Sidenote:
_Importance of its position as a body of critical judgment._] certain
limitations, which may be accidental but which also may not. It is at
least curious that he never deals directly with a poet. Even his
indirect references, borrowed from his authors, to the greater Greek
verse-writers are few, and, speaking with the reserves due in the case
of so voluminous and peculiar a compilation as the _Bibliotheca_, I do
not remember any independent poetical criticism of his. On the other
hand, such criticisms as those which have been quoted above on Lucian,
on Isocrates, on Phrynichus, and others, show, in the first place, no
contemptible critical acumen, and in the second place, a critical
attitude which is worthy of a good deal of attention. For the literary
characteristics of his authors Photius distinctly “has a good eye”: he
can see a church by daylight and a little more also. We may even say
that he shows a good deal more detachment, more faculty of seeing his
man in the round, than any purely classical critic displays. Here and
there, as in his eulogy of Arrian, he is a little too technically
rhetorical, and has evidently not got rid of the notion of the Figures
as things possessing a real existence. And there is more than a trace in
him of the growth of that critical jargon which has been noticed above,
certain phrases recurring rather too often, like “gusto” with
old-fashioned critics, and divers terms, which it is not necessary to
mention, with new-fangled ones. But technicalities are, at their worst,
an evidence that the _techne_ exists. Further, it would be, as has been
seen, extremely unjust to regard Photius as a mere phrase-monger. His
criticism of Lucian is as comprehensive as it is shrewd, it is
“criticism of life” as well as criticism of literature; that of
Isocrates shows that he was not to be caught by mere scholastic
elegance; that of Phrynichus, that he had an eye for method; his notices
of the Romancers, that he could appreciate and relish kinds out of the
beaten track of classical literary classification and practice; the
remark on “merely straightforward periods” is a just and shrewd one. Not
only would Photius have made an exceedingly good reviewer, but we may
say that he is almost the patriarch of reviewers in two senses, that he
is the first of all such as have dealt practically with literature from
the reviewer’s point of view.
To say this is of course not to give unmitigated and indisputable
praise. There is no lack of advocates of the devil who will say that the
reviewer’s point of view is not easily found in a very original age, or
by a very original genius. It may be so—the age of Photius himself was
certainly not a very original age, except in countries where the point
of view of the reviewer was as certainly quite unknown. But this is not
the question for us; the question for us is, Have we met this attitude?
Have we come upon any one occupying this point of view before? And the
answer must, I think, be, “No; we have not.” Dionysius, of all our
writers, comes nearest to it, for Quintilian is too summary, and
Longinus is considering rather a single quality of literature, as shown
in divers authors, than divers authors by themselves, and as presenting
a combination of qualities in each case. What we would give almost
anything for is a collection of such reviews by Aristotle; and we have
not got them. We do not know that Aristotle ever thought of such a
thing,[266] though he might well have made it as a preparation for the
_Rhetoric_ and the _Poetics_, just as he made his collection of
“polities” as a preparation for the _Politics_.
Footnote 266:
Unless, which one would rather not think, he meant the _Problems_ (_v.
supra_ p. 49 _sq._) as such.
The absence of poetical criticism from Photius is specially to be
regretted, because it leaves us in doubt as to his power of recognising
and analysing, not merely the finer subtleties of form, but the more
complex and interesting kinds of literary matter. His own interests, it
is pretty clear, were, though he had the liking for novels which is
often found in men of science and business, chiefly scientific,
historical, and philosophical, including, of course, religion in
philosophy. There is probably no Greek writer, whose subject in any way
admitted of it, who has said so little about Homer. In dealing with
Stobæus he has the patience (though, as has been seen, he is far from
being a mere enumerator) to enumerate all the heads of the _Florilegium_
and the _Eclogæ_, and all the authors, hundreds of them as there are,
whom the anthologist has laid under contribution. But he is tempted into
no critical asides about them. He is essentially positive—frankly busied
with matter, or with the more material side of form.
Yet to the historian of criticism he has a singular interest, because of
that position of origin which has been noted. Cicero and Pliny in their
libraries were in a position to do much the same thing; had, as we shall
see, a kind of dim velleity of doing it now and then, but did it not.
Athenæus, if he had cared less for cooks and courtesans, more for
literature; Aulus Gellius and Macrobius, if mere philology on the one
hand, and mere folk-lore and mythology on the other, had not drawn them
aside, would probably have anticipated him. But no one actually has;
none has applied to the library or its prose division the process which
goes to the making of a _catalogue raisonné_ in painting. No doubt
Photius leaves a good deal to be done, independently of his silence on
poetry and drama. His comparison is so limited as to be almost
non-existent; it is much if he can compare Heliodorus, Iamblichus, and
Achilles Tatius in reference to the treatment of matters erotic; Ctesias
and Herodotus, on the score of resisting, or succumbing to,
story-telling digression. But even in this there is the germ, the
rudiment, of the great Comparative Method. So again the other great Lamp
of Criticism, the historical estimate, still has its shutter drawn for
him. A vague distinction between the ἀρχαῖοι and the moderns is indeed
not uncommon; but we have, so far as I have noticed, no distinct line
drawn between the two, and both are huddled and jumbled together.
Photius has not yet risen to that highest conception of criticism which
involves the “grasping” of each author in his complete self, and the
placing of him in the general literary map or genealogy (whichever phase
may be preferred) of the world. And lastly, the silly old etiquette of
silence about Latin still seems to weigh, if unconsciously, on him. He
does indeed allude to the birth-year of Virgil. In his notices of
historians of Rome he necessarily has to mention some Roman matters, and
he mentions that Cicero was slain while reading the _Medea_. But my
memory, assisted by Bekker’s excellent index, traces no critical remark,
comparative or independent, about any great Latin writer, and nothing
more than the barest mention of one or two by name. Yet, with all these
drawbacks, the niche we have indicated is securely his, though he has
scarcely yet been established in it.[267]
Footnote 267:
There is in Photius a later notice of Isocrates, in connection with
others of the usual set of Attic orators; and these are chiefly
interesting for some references to the literary historian Cæcilius,
referred to by Longinus, and to Longinus himself as “the critic who
flourished under Claudius” (predecessor of Aurelian), “and took great
share in the struggle of Zenobia, queen of the Osrhoeni.” But the
criticism on Demosthenes referred to can hardly be that of the Περὶ
Ὕψους.
If an example be required between Photius and John, it may be found (of
no encouraging character) in the almost contemptible [Sidenote:
_Tzetzes._] _Homeric Allegories_ of Tzetzes[268] written in that dreary
“political” verse, the only consolation of which is the remembrance
that, whether as origin or echo, it has sometimes been connected with
the charming _Meum est propositum_ metre of the Latin Middle Ages. In
Tzetzes, the allegorical method neither reaches its pinnacle of
fantasticality as in the _Romance of the Rose_,—there is often something
faintly fascinating there,—nor attains to the rather imposing mazes and
meanderings of fifteenth-century personification, but stumbles along in
pedestrian gropings of this kind[269] (on _Il._ i. 517 _sq._): “The
groaning of Zeus signifieth a puff of wind moving the eyebrows of him,
and conducting the thickness of clouds. The downcoming of Thetis
indicates that there was rain, which is also a kind of consentment of
assistance. And the coming of Zeus to his own home is the restoration of
the atmosphere to its former condition, having thinned out the thickness
of the cloud to rain. The rising up of the gods from their seats is the
confusion and disturbance of the elements,” &c., &c. The much-ridiculed
allegorical morals of the _Gesta Romanorum_ are sense, poetry, piety, to
this ineffably dull and childish attempt to substitute a cheap
pseudo-scientific Euhemerism for the criticism of literature. If
Allegory had not too profitably assisted at the cradle of Greek
literature, she certainly infested its death-bed in her most decrepit
and malignant aspect.
Footnote 268:
Ed. Boissonade, Paris, 1851.
Footnote 269:
Ed. cit., p. 81, l. 299 _sq._
At the same time, we must not be too contemptuous of Byzantine
criticism. Had the vast mass of the later rhetorical [Sidenote: _John
the Siceliote._] scholiasts yielded nothing to the sifting but the
quotation in John the Siceliote (though as from the _Philological
Homilies_, not the Περὶ Ὕψους), by name, of the Longinian censure on the
_Orithyia_, it would almost be justified in existing, not to mention
references in others, one of which shows us that in the same collection
Longinus gave a discussion (the tendency of which we can easily guess)
on the _stomphodes_ or “mouthy.”[270] But the siftings are not quite
limited to these two.
Footnote 270:
_V. supra_, p. 171 _note_.
John, who appears possibly, if not at all certainly, to have had the
surname of Doxopater, and to have been sometimes designated by it,
appears also to have been a monk. He must (on his own authority) have
observed the virtue of Poverty much better than some of his fellows, and
few of them can have more avoided the vice of laziness. His voluminous
works devoted to Rhetoric are ranged by Walz[271] under eleven titles:
to wit, Prolegomena and Homilies on the Progymnasmata of Aphthonius,
General Prolegomena to Rhetoric, Commentaries on the States, Inventions
and Ideas of Hermogenes, Epideictic speeches on the Horse and against
the Saracens, a destructive discussion of the myth of Prometheus, a
“Basileios” and a “Politikon.” These works contain some personal details
and complaints, which, if he subsequently became Patriarch of
Constantinople, were heard by Fortune in her less savage mood; and he
seems to have busied himself with theology and history, as well as
rhetoric. But it is very difficult to place either his patriarchate, or
consequently his life, chronologically. He might have been the John
Glycas who held the dignity from 1316 to 1320, when he abdicated; but
Glycas seems to have been married. So perhaps he was John Camater, an
earlier occupant (under the Latin Empire) of the see in 1204.
Footnote 271:
Vol. vi. p. 5 _sq._
All this, it will be seen, is a rather unsubstantial pageant; but John’s
works are solid enough. Even the _Prolegomena_ (taking them as his) of
Doxopater, and the _Commentaries on the Ideas_ (to which alone we have
access), fill five hundred pages. It is in the latter that we are to
look for anything touching our subject. They are rather wide-ranging, to
which character of theirs we doubtless owe the Longinian citation.
Neither did John always observe that scrupulous accuracy which is so
dear to the heart of a certain class of critic, that, like a true
altruist, he would have every one, except himself, possess it. At the
opening he writes “Themistocles” for “Miltiades.” But his erudition is
considerable, and his qualities in other respects not contemptible. It
is, however, very noticeable that he is as much inclined to the general
and disinclined from the particular as if he had lived fifteen hundred
years earlier. Although he is no slavish Platonist (he has somewhere the
happy phrase Πλάτων Πλάτωνος ἀναξίως. “Did Plato? the less Plato he”),
he is fully Platonic in his scorn of the μερικαὶ ἰδέαι, of the mere
“characterising” speeches, Lysiac and Isocratean, and so forth, and aims
at the “circumprehensive and comprehensive” idea and phrase which
transcends all these. Thus we are once more face to face with that
putting of the cart before the horse which has met us so often—with that
discussion of δεινότης and γλυκύτης which is no doubt a capital thing in
its way, but which ought to be preluded and, as military men say,
“prepared” by a long, by an almost infinite, examination of the
individual exponents and practitioners of the Vigorous and the Sweet.
It is, of course, fair to remember that he is annotating Hermogenes, and
that he can hardly be expected to follow methods different from those of
his text. But it necessarily follows that his loyalty leads him away
from the fields most likely to be fertile for us, and, when he does
approach them, directs him mainly to the Orators, and to them chiefly,
if not wholly, from the strictly rhetorical point of view. Yet he is by
no means ill to read, though a little technical and abstract, on rhythm
(opening of Bk. i. chap. i.); and if he has gone no further in reference
to φαντασία than all before him except Philostratus, that is no great
reproach to him. Undoubtedly, however, his chief—as at the same time his
most tantalising—attraction is his reference to things which, in his
comparatively modern period, must have still existed, but which seem now
to be irrecoverably lost. Such is his quotation, p. 93, of certain
remarks of Longinus on the poet Menelaus.[272] We may doubt whether
definite poetical criticism from the excellent John would have been
satisfactory, when we find him assigning “out-and-out”[273] poetical
quality to the soft inanity of Isocrates, and the want of it to the
rough fire of Thucydides. Yet in the lower and “composition-book” kind
of criticism he is not to seek—the synopsis of clearness at p. 173 being
a very workmanlike composition.[274]
Footnote 272:
Apparently this poet, “by taking pains, changed an unhappily gifted
nature into exactness and blamelessness.”
Footnote 273:
ἄντικρυς.
Footnote 274:
Besides citing the _Orithyia_ passage John also refers to Longinus as
admiring Moses (Walz, vi. 211), which, of course, strengthens the
supposition that he had the Περὶ Ὕψους before him not a little (_v.
supra_, pp. 156, 162).
And so, without further minute examination of this curiosity, we may
take some general view of it as the last words—or fairly representative
of the last words—of Greek rhetorical criticism, unaffected by mediæval
literature, unaffected even by Latin, to any considerable, or at least
avowed, extent, but turning round and round the long-guarded treasures
of its own special hoard, like the dragons of fable. To us, perhaps, the
hoard does not seem very inviting. The enormous apparatus of distinction
and terminology is set to work, almost exclusively, on matter which has
neither the attraction of the highest æsthetic problems, nor the
practical interest and profit of direct literary criticism of
particulars. There is abundance of learning, and by no means a dearth of
mother-wit. But the worst side of Scholasticism—the side which was long
unjustly taken for the whole, but which _is_ a side thereof—makes itself
almost universally felt. Sometimes one almost thinks of one of the
keenest, if not the most generally delectable, strokes of Rabelaisian
satire, the duel of signs between Panurge and Thaumast. This -_tes_ and
that -_ia_ hurtle through the air almost without conveying
understanding, though they may darken a good deal. With sufficient pains
and goodwill, you may disinter many a shrewd remark, many a really
useful definition, many a scrap of precious information, by no means
unintelligently used. But on the whole, the impression is as of the
ghost of Rhetoric struggling against being re-embodied as the soul of
Criticism.
INTERCHAPTER I.
We have endeavoured, in the foregoing Book, to survey—from the actual
texts, and admitting no conjectural or theoretical reconstruction—the
history of literary criticism in Greece and the Greek Empire till its
fall. It is our duty in this first halt to survey this survey—to see
what results it actually gives us, to classify and arrange them, to
account for them as philosophically as possible, and, without digressing
into the quicksands of theory, to lay down the solid road of logical and
historical perspective.
We have seen that criticism in Greece began from two different sources,
neither of which, perhaps, was, or could have been expected to be,
likely to supply it in an absolutely unmixed condition. There was, in
the first place, the strong Greek philosophising tendency, working upon
the earliest documents (the most important, then as now, identified with
the name of Homer), and subjecting them to processes which oftenest took
the form of a kind of rationalising allegory. The second was the
invention, for more or less practical purposes, of the art of Rhetoric
or Persuasive Composition. As, in the first place, the collection of
written literature was very small, and as the oratorical character
impressed itself more or less strongly upon nearly _all_ literature in
the process of publication, this dominance of Oratory was long
maintained, and continued, almost to the latest times, to prevent
Rhetoric from assuming its proper etymological position as
“speech-craft” in the widest sense, as the art of artificially arranged
language.
But this inconvenience, always more or less existing, was mitigated by
practice in divers ways. As actual literature, both prose and verse,
mustered and multiplied, and as it was more and more enjoyed by the keen
Greek appetite for pleasures of all kinds, it at the same time presented
more and more temptation to the equally keen Greek aptitude for
philosophical inquiry. Larger and larger treasuries were made available
for quotation and imitation; more and more kinds of literature were
presented to the student for investigation, classification, inquiry into
sources, methods, effects. And so after a century, or a century and a
half, of progress and exercise, of which little remains to us except the
brilliant, but from this point of view wayward, work of Plato, we are
confronted, in the work of Aristotle, with an Art of Poetry, incomplete
in certain ways, but singularly mature in its own way, with an Art of
Prose which, though it has not yet by any means recognised its real
nature and estate, and persists in regarding itself as an Art of
Persuasion merely, has yet accumulated many valuable observations, and
has made the paths of future investigators fairly straight and smooth.
While, however, the oratorical preoccupation prevented Rhetoric from
attaining the development which might otherwise have been expected, both
Rhetoric and Poetics were very seriously obstructed by the unequal
growth of literary kinds within Greek itself, and by the absence of any
other literature with which to compare such kinds as existed, and by
which to discern the absence of those that did not exist. The whole of
Greek Poetic was prejudicially affected—and the affection has continued
to be a source of evil in all criticism since—by the accidental lateness
of prose fiction in Greek literature; just as the whole of Greek
Rhetoric was prejudicially affected by the accidental predominance of
Greek oratory. The habit—in the main a sound one—of generalising from
the actual facts, led to very arbitrary theories of more literary kinds
than one. It was assumed that what we may call “periodic” Epic was the
only kind; and Romance, which may be very fairly called a “loose” Epic,
was barred as improper. Still more was the same distinction ignored in
drama; where a single, though in its way very perfect, form of Tragedy
was arbitrarily assumed to be the only one possible or permissible. So
the accidental and easily separable extravagances and licences of the
Ancient Comedy were allowed to obscure its merits, and depress its rank,
in the eyes of the critic. Lyric—perhaps the very highest of all
literary kinds, as it must be the oldest, and is the most
perennial—became a mere appendage to tragedy. The great kind of History,
in which Greece had already produced such magnificent examples, was in
the same way regarded as a sort of baggage-waggon to oratorical
Rhetoric; and the dialogic form which was preferred in philosophy,
partly owing to the habits of the nation, and partly owing to the
towering eminence of Plato, was in the same way, or much the same way,
allowed or forced to attach itself to the same train.
But these mischiefs, though sufficiently considerable, and assisted by
the ignorance (changed latterly in the worse days to a contemptuous
ignoring) of other languages, were by no means the equals of those
caused directly by this ignorance, while they were aggravated by it in
every way. If, while we are certainly not superior to the ancients in
most branches of literature, where comparison is possible, we may
challenge them more safely in criticism, it is due almost, if not quite
wholly, to what has been called the illegitimate advantage of our
possession of an infinitely larger stock of accumulated literature, and
of the fact that this literature is distributed over the most various
times, nations, and languages. It is the rarest thing at any time to
find a critic of the first class who is not acquainted with literatures
besides his own; and it is almost invariable to find that the mistakes
which great critics make arise out of ignorance or forgetfulness of
other literatures besides their own. But even in antiquity there is no
critic of, or approaching, this first class, except Aristotle, who
suffered the full exposure to this disability. As a “tongue of
comparison” Longinus knew Latin: Dionysius and Quintilian, who, if not
critics of the first class, are not far off it, knew, the one Latin, the
other Greek. But Aristotle (unless the legends about Alexander having
sent him Indian communications have any basis, and unless we take the
references of Plato and others to Egyptian stories as having much more
solid ground than there is any reason to accord them) had none, and
could have had none: while, even if he had been stocked with Egyptian
and Sanscrit, these would have done him but little good, though they
might have corrected his delusions as to the necessary connection of
poetry and fiction. It must always be reckoned as one of the most fatal
proofs of the literary inferiority of the Roman genius that the younger
literature, though it enjoyed the bilingual advantage to the full, made
so little advance on the older in criticism.
For the three centuries between Aristotle and Dionysius we are but ill
provided with original texts. But both from what we have, and from such
notices as are trustworthy, we can be tolerably sure that attention was
almost entirely devoted, on the one side to the verbal or material
criticism of the Alexandrian and Pergamene schools, on the other to
technical Rhetoric. Now the former, though a most necessary ancilla to
literary appreciation proper, is always to be kept in proper
subordination to her mistress; and the conditions of the latter, though
in one sense favourable to criticism (inasmuch as the stock of actual
literature was always increasing, and the temptation to turn to it from
mere declamation-making might at least be expected to be always
stronger), was in itself becoming more and more a futile technique.
Symbouleutic oratory (above vestry rank) was killed and kept dead by the
petty tyrants, the less successors of Alexander, and lastly the Roman
rule. Judicial Rhetoric tended to confine itself to minor causes. Only
Epideictic, the most dangerous of the kinds, began to flourish more and
more, and resulted by degrees, as we have seen, in the creation of a
singular profession or pseudo-profession, the members of which had about
them something of the travelling lecturer, something of the popular
preacher, something—nay, a good deal—of the hack book-maker, and not a
little of the journalist pure and simple. Their own study of literature,
unless they kept to the stock passages of the textbooks, must have been
fairly thorough; but literature was to them partly what Burton’s
_Anatomy_ was to Captain Shandon, a mere dictionary of quotations,
partly a collection of patterns. Very rarely did they take it by itself
even for the canvas of one of their show-orations, and when they did it
was seldom or never from the point of view of appreciation of strictly
literary beauty.
For about half a century before and a century after the Christian era
the record, even putting Latin criticism aside altogether, is a more
distinct one. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Plutarch, and Dion Chrysostom,
give us a good deal more material than we have yet had. But the results
of the inspection of it are not wholly satisfactory. Dionysius of
Halicarnassus is, as has been said, perhaps our typical specimen of the
literary critic of antiquity. He has far less force and method and
originality than Aristotle; but then he is a student confining himself
to Rhetoric and History, not a world-philosopher, taking up the
philosophy of literature merely as part of a whole. He has far less
genius than Longinus; but he is also far more copiously preserved. We
read him with respect; we meet just and acute observations in him, we
can even occasionally compliment him on something like (never quite) the
“grasp” of the comic fragment. But he is still partly under the
limitations of his technical rhetoric, partly under others less easy to
describe exactly; and he neglects Latin literature, by his time a very
considerable entity. He cannot wholly bring himself to regard literature
as literature. With Plutarch the case is much worse, for it is evident
that he will not do this at all. It is an educating and ethical
influence; a convenient storehouse of fact and example; a respectable
profession; but not a great, a sovereign, and an infinitely delightful
art. As for Dion (the most literary of the pure rhetoricians, and a
favourable example of them), he is only an entertainer, the showman of
another art, which is not quite coarse, but is certainly not in the
highest sense fine. Lucian, somewhat later, is a true artist, a true man
of letters, and occasionally a critic, endowed with unerring eyes and
the very Sword of Sharpness itself, but he is this only at times, and
even at those times he is too negative.
If we advance a little in point of time and turn our attention to the
strict teaching and practice of Rhetoric itself, from the second century
onward, and probably backward almost to the very time of Aristotle, the
spectacle is even less satisfactory. The work, of which Hermogenes and
Aphthonius are the coryphæi, leading an innumerable chorus of followers
and commentators, who continue for more than a thousand years, is not
exactly contemptible work. Work conducted with extreme diligence and
also, at any rate in some cases, with remarkable alertness and acuteness
of mind, can never be wholly contemptible. But it is work disappointing,
unsatisfying, and even irritating to the last degree. The technical
Rhetoric, always arbitrarily limited in subject and perversely
conventional in method, has practically lost all chance of exercising
itself in the noblest of its three divisions. Deliberative oratory is
dead, except in exercises and make-believes, and the bread-winning
chicanery of forensic, the frivolities (hollow except as also
bread-winning) of epideictic, have usurped the whole room. It might be
thought that in this bereaved condition the art would bethink itself of
that profitable, dignified and delightful application which it had
always more or less directly practised, but which had seemed less
dignified than Persuasion—the art of literary criticism proper. But it
does nothing—or but little—of the kind. The remarks of Hermogenes on
Frigidity are not bad; the doubtful Demetrius, in his study of
Interpretation, is not far from the true kingdom others approach it here
and there. The invention of that critical “lingo,” to which reference
has more than once been made, is something, though a something liable to
abuse, and capable of standing in the way of better things. But, on the
whole, the endless procession of some fifty generations, from the author
of the _Rhet. ad Alex._ to John of Sicily, busies itself either on the
one hand with endless distinctions, systematisations, and terminologies,
with everlastingly twining strands of new colour into the rope that lets
down the bucket into the empty well, and varying the staves and hoops of
the bucket itself; or on the other with the provision of cut-and-dried
patterns for the use of the brainless, with telling tongue-tied sophists
what they are to say at the funeral of a fifth cousin, and how to make
the most of a harbour which is dry for three-quarters of every tide.
Amidst all this desert and chaos of wasted industry there stands the
great rock of the Περὶ Ὕψους with its shade and refreshment in the weary
land of its own contemporaries, and with its brow catching the dawn
which was not to shine fully for more than fifteen hundred years, and is
hardly noon-day yet. In the section devoted to it we have examined, as
thoroughly as our limits permitted, the special merits and defects of
this great little book; it is only necessary here to lay a slight
additional stress on the fact that if it be not the sole book of
antiquity—the sole book, except Dante’s, of antiquity, the Middle Ages,
the Renaissance, and the earlier modern times—to set forth that critical
ideal which comprehends the formal and the material, the verbal and the
ideal merits of literature, it exhibits this comprehension as no other
book does. To confine ourselves to our present special subject—the
criticism of Greek antiquity—Plato may alternate noble flights with
curious crotchets about literature; Aristophanes may criticise from the
point of view of robust common-sense which is yet not in the least
Philistine; Aristotle may have almost a mathematical grasp of his own
notions of form, and a generous enthusiasm for certain kinds of dignity
in subject and proportion; Dionysius may show that adherence to
technique (and a rather vicious technique too) is quite compatible with
genuine literary appreciation. But all these, and much more others, have
their eyes mainly off the object. Aristotle himself at times, lesser men
like Plutarch, who have misread their Plato, continually, seem to think
it rather vain to look at that object at all. The intelligent enjoyment
of literature; the intimacy with it, at once voluptuous and
intellectual; the untiring, though it may be never fully satisfied,
quest after the secret of its charms, never neglecting the opportunity
of basking and revelling in them—these things, till we come to Longinus,
are rare indeed. And when we do meet them, the rencontre is of a sort of
accidental and shamefaced character. When we come to Longinus there is
no more false modesty. “Beautiful words are the light of thought.” These
words themselves are the lantern of criticism.
Elsewhere it gleams more faintly; though it would be as ungrateful as it
would be Philistine to ignore the debt which we owe to others, from
Aristotle himself downwards. It is characteristic of Greek criticism—and
it is the secret of its weakness as well as of its strength—that it is
more busy with kinds than with authors, with authors than with books.
And when it is busy with authors at all, it is hardly ever busy with
them as wholes, as phenomena occupying an individual place in the
literary cosmos; but almost always as examples of this or that quality,
as supplying illustrations of this or that Figure, as giving a good
pattern for such-and-such a progymnasma, a model for dealing with
such-and-such a stasis. Proceeding in this way, criticism attempts—and
fails—to be scientific; it renounces its right to be artistic, and
effects the renunciation. The individual _ethos_ of the poet, the more
solid but not less individual _ethos_ of the proseman, flies off and
melts away, when each is merely regarded as an example of “_todetes_” or
“_tallotes_” as a lecturer’s cabinet, in which you put your hand to draw
out an illustration of Anadiplosis or Palillogia. Almost may the most
idealist of metaphysical students think of turning to sheer Hobbism, of
blaspheming “_nesses_ and _tudes_ and _ties_,” when he sees them dragged
in and abused after this fatal fashion, which even Aristotle does not
wholly escape, and in which others indulge as if it were their sole and
legitimate business.
It follows that, except for the stock contrast of Herodotus and
Thucydides, in respect of the Orators (the exception being there due to
an obvious reason), and to a less extent of the Three Tragedians, we
have very few studies at once comprehensive and comparative of authors
in Greek, and that, out of Longinus, such studies as we have are
scrappy, technical, and altogether lacking in that critical συνάρπασμα
which the great _locus_ of Simylus requires. There is really no second
passage in Greek which can be put alongside of the Longinian estimate of
the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_, agree or disagree as we may with the
details of this.
Another and a very important matter (which it is fairer and more
philosophical to call rather a defect of our understanding than a defect
of the matter presented to it) lies in that impossibility of attaining
the Greek standpoint as to certain rhythmical and verbal matters, which
has been more than once glanced at, and which is instanced in the case
of Longinus himself. Few among the wiser even of those who have paid
special attention to the subjects of Greek music and Greek pronunciation
would, I think, assert, that they thoroughly understand the passages
relating to prose rhythm, and the special suitableness of the cretic and
some of the pæons as the base-feet for it. And it is practically
admitted by most sober and well-instructed critics that both Aristotle
and Longinus make strictures upon things as “frigid” and in bad taste,
that they ostracise metaphors and ban conceits which to any modern
criticism (putting aside mere assentation) seem perfectly harmless, if
not positively admirable. The same thing occurs in English and French to
this day, although in this case all the difficulties which beset us in
relation to Greek disappear, except the radical difference of national
(not now even of temporal) ear and brain. A phrase of Bossuet, which
seems to French ears even of to-day the _ne plus ultra_ of majestic
melody, will strike very well-instructed Englishmen as a rhetorical
jingle and French critics of enthusiasm and enlightenment will see no
difference between the music of Moore and that of Shelley, or rather
prefer the former. In the other sphere, what is to an Englishman a piece
of dry humour will appear to a Frenchman a _saugrenu_ monstrosity; and a
Frenchman’s ideal of manly eloquence, dignified or passionate as the
case may be, will seem to an Englishman to show nothing but the maudlin
pathos of a drunkard, or the petulant braggadocio of a child. Yet here
there are innumerable side-lights, a long course of partially identical
history, literature, and religion, the experience of persons of both
nations who have lived in and with the other, to guide us. No wonder
that, when we have none of these things, we should be puzzled. Yet the
quarrel, such as it is, with the Greek critics, is not so much that
their estimates, low or high, differ from ours, as that they have given
us so few documents from their own side to help out the contrast. Even
one essay, on both the literatures, by a Greek to set over against the
invaluable survey by Quintilian would be not merely something for which
we could gladly exchange most of the Greek writers on Rhetoric, except
Aristotle, but something in consideration of which we would gladly read
all these writers, and make no complaint of them. As it is, we have to
go to Photius, a representative of a time and thought far more alien
from those of the Greeks proper than is Quintilian himself, for full
review of even Greek writers, and he also is silent about Latin.
But “something sealed the mouths of these Evangelists.” It is perhaps
not unphilosophical to think that this silence was the price the world
had to pay for the confident and magnificent advance which it made under
the guidance of the Greek genius. If that genius had been less
confident, if it had assumed less cavalierly that no other literature
could be worth taking into account, if it had hesitated and faltered
about systematising boldly whatever had been produced by itself, and
allowing everything else (if anything else existed) to go κατ’ οὖρον,
what we have would probably not have been vouchsafed to us. And in that
case we should, as probably, never have made up the loss. The estimable
but not wise persons who try to make out that the undoubtedly rich and
great languages and literatures of Modern Europe can supply substitutes
for those of Greece and Rome overlook, ignore, or perhaps are honestly
ignorant of, the fact that the very strong points of these modern
languages and literatures, their Romantic ebb and flow, their
uncertainty, their complaisance to the vagaries of the individual, their
lack of logical system and _ordonnance_, make it impossible that they
should ever give us the principles of fixity which we find in the
Classical tongues. Those of us who, far more by chance and good fortune
than by any deliberate and virtuous _proairesis_, happen to be
acquainted pretty equally with both Ancient and Modern Literature, know
that neither will do alone, but that for the education both of the world
at large and of any epoch of it, the Ancient is even more necessary than
the Modern.
Some idea of the positive extent of our debts to Greek is necessary to
this history, though a _résumé_ of them is no easy thing to give. In the
first place has to be reckoned the laying of the foundations of mere
grammar—the preliminary to every kind of _graphica lexis_. This must
have been done pretty early, and there is no language in the literary
record with which it could be done for the first time to so much
advantage as with Greek. Some languages, as Latin and its daughter
French, have a sort of peddling tendency to purely arbitrary rule, and
to enforced observance of it. Others, the chief example of which is
English, have had too haphazard a history, and are too much of ingrained
rebels to strict convention, to admit of elaborate grammar, despite the
athletic attempts which are sometimes made to discover it in them.
Between these two, Greek presents not so much the happy mean as the
consummate union of all the best qualities. It evidently possessed, from
the remotest time at which we have any traces of literature, an innate
sense of proportion and grammatical symmetry to guide it, first into
unconscious and then into conscious symmetry of accidence and syntax,
besides a native melody at once sweet, vigorous, and disciplined, which
made it the ideal raw material for prosody. On the other hand, the
intense philosophical spirit of the Greeks, and their love of liberty,
saved them from the hard and fast irrationality of the grammars of some
languages, and from the tendency, not merely to make arbitrary rules,
but to insist on their observance with absolute rigidity. The result was
a grammar which to this day is the pattern grammar of the world—as
flexible as it is symmetrical, as intelligently free as it is
philosophically policed,—an eternal harmony of idiom and rule.
We have glanced in the above paragraph at Prosody, but something more
must be said on this head, for the debt of literary criticism to Greek
in this respect is almost the mightiest item of the total account. The
mathematical element, which distinguishes this part of Grammar, enables
a people with a suitable language, and a sufficient stock of experiments
in it, to discover something much more like a universal calculus than is
possible in Accidence and Syntax; and the Greeks discovered this.
Prosody is a science which, in its pure, though of course not in its
applied, divisions, as regards strictly metrical writing, they
practically found out once for all.
There are systems of rhythm—early Latin probably, early Teutonic
certainly—to which this prosody does not apply, except partially, if it
applies at all. But all poetries that depend upon _metre_—that is to
say, on the arrangement of equivalenced syllabic values in certain
recurring orders—are governed by the laws which the Greeks discovered,
and which the Greeks exemplified. On this side, therefore (and it is a
most important side), the literary critic owes them everything. They
have furnished him with every tool that he requires for taking to pieces
the mechanism of the _Ancient Mariner_, as well as of the choruses, of
the _Agamemnon_, of the odes of Hugo as well as of those of Pindar, of
the _Nordsee_ of Heine as of the fragments of Sappho and Alcæus. And it
is not at all improbable that if we possessed more of their work on
prose rhythm, that subject also, and the kindred one of the so-called
accentual rhythms of Latin and early Teutonic verse, would be almost as
much facilitated.
When we pass beyond these elements and come to the general subject of
Rhetoric (which, it must be remembered, in at least some places is
recognised as covering the whole of _graphica lexis_) and Poetics, the
advances in both departments, but especially in the latter, are still
very great, if not so great proportionately. We have only one poetical
kind—that of Tragedy, as understood by the Greeks themselves, and
practised by the three great tragedians—which has been subjected to a
thorough critical examination in extant text. But then this examination
is so thorough that, in reference to the particular kind, hardly
anything has been added since. We have, in reference to the capital
example of another kind, Epic (again as understood by the Greeks), a
large variety of treatments, from Aristotle to Longinus, which, if they
do not give as firm and systematic a theory of this as of the former,
yet go far towards doing so. Of the remaining divisions of poetry we
learn, it must be confessed, less from the Greeks; and even in examples
we are, except in so far as the Ode and the Idyl are concerned, very
lamentably ill supplied. But in the one case, as in the other, the
fragments are precious. And it may in such a book as the present, be
pardonable once more to point to the feather in the cap of Criticism
furnished by the fact that, but for two critics, we should be destitute
of these two great lyrics of Sappho which, outside the contents of
drama, are the crown and flower of Greek lyrical poetry.
In prose the same complete examination was only given, and, in the
special conditions so often referred to, could only have been given, to
one, and that the least important of all the divisions of prose
literature—to Oratory. Oratory is, after all, the prose literature of
the savage. It is in no degree a contradiction to this that it should
have reached its highest pitches at periods which were not at all
savage—in the palmy days of Athens, in the agony of the Republic at
Rome, in the England of the eighteenth century—for it is scarcely
necessary to take into account the one period of modern times when
savagery ruled once more supreme, the French Revolution, though Oratory
certainly did then share the shameful throne. This confirms the doctrine
just laid down _simpliciter_, the others confirm it indirectly. In the
great age of Greece savagery was passing; but the efforts of
civilisation were directed to making perfect what the savage ages had
regarded as most important. The whole condition of Roman life tended to
support oratory. And in eighteenth-century England it so happened that
poetry was in abeyance; prose fiction was making its way half in the
dark; history was but just rising and philosophy, though still much
cultivated, had not got out of the strangling grasp of Locke. Even if
these propositions be disputable, the fact of the predominance of
oratory in Greece is not, nor is the thoroughness (surpassing even that
of the treatment of tragedy) which was accorded to its study.
Inadequate, however, as was the treatment of prose kinds in general by
the Greeks, even with such examples before them as Plato and Thucydides
and Herodotus, they _did_ treat them: and their treatment of the main
critical aspects of prose was, if not always well directed, even more
searching and thorough than their treatment of verse. They did not
neglect rhythm as it was neglected, with rare exceptions, by all modern
criticism till recently. They bestowed upon prose diction much of the
sometimes to us not fully intelligible, but constantly fruitful, care
which they had also bestowed on the diction of poetry. They hit at once
on the great fundamental principle—that while ordinary language breeds
clearness, language of an unfamiliar character (from whatever source
that unfamiliarity may be derived) breeds the power of _striking_—which
again not all modern critics, nor even the majority of modern critics,
seem to have been able to grasp. And then they hit upon the Figures.
A good deal of evil—too much some may think—has here been spoken of the
Figures: it will, at any rate, dispense us from saying any more in this
place, though the occasion for doing so may recur. But the good of them
as an exercise—as, in the language of their own curious technique, a
_progymnasma_—cannot be exaggerated. Short of the merest rote-work, the
consideration of them, the realisation of what they meant, the
investigations necessary to refer to one or the other head the phrases
of the great writers, were all of them critical processes, the defect
rather than the excess of which is to be reproached upon most modern
criticism. Exclaim as we may against the practice of ticketing a
peculiarity of style as if it were an atom, scientifically isolated,
foreordained from the creation of things, and merely gathered and
applied by the writer—yet it required at least some exercise of the pure
critical spirit to separate this atom, consider it, class it.
Figure-hunting and figure-shaping may have been aberrations of the
critical spirit, but they showed that spirit: they may have led too many
to acquiesce in mere terminology, but they showed the way to something
very different from any such acquiescence.
If, finally, we turn to the results of Greek criticism as applied to
Greek authors, we come to a region necessarily of doubt, if not exactly
of dread. The preoccupations of the writers in various directions, which
have already been mentioned, and the occasional difficulty of placing
ourselves at their point of view, make the necessary adjustments
difficult, but they do not make them hopeless.
In Homeric criticism, the oldest, the largest, and in some respects at
least the most interesting department of the whole subject, we find less
difference from somewhat similarly situated bodies of criticism in other
times than might be expected by some—as little as might be expected by
others. As with Shakespeare, as with Dante, as with Cervantes, as with
Molière, we find a vast body of unintelligent, if respectable, plodding,
and of futile, if occasionally ingenious, crotchet and hypothesis. As in
those cases, we find the phenomenon, curious if it were not so familiar,
of a sort of personal partisanship or antipathy—two things the most
unfavourable to criticism, yet the most frequently found in connection
with it.[275] What we do not find, in any satisfactory measure, is
literary criticism, pure and simple. The critics are constantly drawn
away to side questions, after a fashion which is only more excusable
than similar conduct in modern times because of the very different
relations in which Homer stood to the Greeks. We have talked (Heaven
knows!) nonsense enough about Shakespeare as it is. How much more should
we have talked if he had been at once the oldest and greatest of our men
of letters, the most ancient literary repository of our history, and a
kind of Scripture, a religious document, as well? To the Greek Homer was
all this, and more than all this. To the student of language he
presented the oldest literary exponent of it, to the lover of poetry the
admittedly sovereign poet. But neither could bring himself to regard him
merely in these lights. The Greeks cared less than the Romans, and very
much less than most modern nations, for personal genealogy; the personal
grudge and jealousy which is the ugliest feature of the Greek character,
but which is probably inseparable from small democratic societies, made
too strongly against this. Very rarely do we find in Greeks any of the
feeling which made Romans cherish the notion of being descended from the
fabulous companions of Æneas, and from the perhaps not fully historical
heroes of the monarchy and the early republic—which, to this day, makes
all, save foolish fanfarons of freedom from prejudice, rejoice in the
possession, or regret the absence, of a Crusading ancestor. On the other
hand, local patriotism and local pride were as notoriously strong in the
Greek breast; and to the latest periods we find, not merely Homer but
even Herodotus, treated exclusively as if they were stores of flattering
or unflattering particulars about the critic’s birthplace and its
history. Again, most Greeks were religious, if not quite in our way, and
almost all Greeks were interested in philosophy. With religious and even
with philosophical questions Homer had been for ages (even at the
beginning of the bulk of the literature that we have) so intimately
associated that few could disentangle themselves from the associations.
If we refuse to remember that the questions discussed resemble rather
the questions of Original Sin, or of Innate Ideas, than those of Classic
and Romantic, it may astonish us that age after age should busy itself
unweariedly with the discussion of Homer’s moral or immoral purpose in
depicting the scenes between Helen, Paris, and Aphrodite, between Zeus
and Hera with the cestus, instead of dilating upon the character-force
of the first scene and the voluptuous beauty of the second. But if we
realise the motives which actuated them, we shall be less surprised to
find so little literary criticism of Homer.
Footnote 275:
Probably the very temperament, which spurs the critic on to his
business, afflicts him with this thorn in the flesh. I should not be
surprised if examples of it were found in the present volume. But it
has been kept down as far as possible.
We have far more in regard to the Tragedians, and for obvious reasons:
indeed we have more strictly literary criticism in regard to the drama
than to any other division of Greek literary art. The estimates of the
Three in general seem to have been not very different from what we
should expect, but still somewhat different. The magnificence of
Æschylus struck the scrupulous Greek taste as too often approaching
bombast, and we look with surprised disappointment for so much as a
single appreciation of his unequalled choruses (that of Dion, noted
above, is slight and little to the point). With the Greek public
generally Euripides seems, on the whole, and putting different times
together, to have been the favourite of the three, and if the critics
were less favourable to him, it was rather for extra-literary than for
literary reasons. Public and critics together seem to have felt for
Sophocles that special esteem, as distinguished, perhaps, from actual
enthusiasm, which has descended to us moderns as a sort of venerable
convention—to be acquiesced in even when we do not actively share it,
and to be transformed occasionally into vehement championship. Only from
Longinus do we learn that Sophocles was considered to be far from
impeccable, but to atone for his faults by his beauties: and Longinus
himself, unfortunately, does not tell us what the faults were.
The Orators have naturally been discussed with greater minuteness than
any other group, nor have the results of the discussion been much
interfered with by modern study. The pre-eminence of Demosthenes was as
much “matter of breviary” with Dionysius as with Longinus, with Longinus
as with Hermogenes: and if Aristotle says little about his mighty
contemporary, we know what the great ox was that trod on his tongue.
Necessarily the criticism bears largely—indeed almost entirely—on the
oratorical effect; but this effect, narrowly studied as it was, in the
hopes of, at any rate to some extent, reproducing it, was analysed into
parts which had not a little to do with literature. And, except in
Longinus himself (some of whose best remarks are on the orators), there
is no chapter of Greek literary criticism richer than the commentaries
of Dionysius on these orators generally.
In the same way, Plato seems to have early won, and easily kept, his
proper place at the head of philosophers who are men of letters, while
the more mannered graces of Isocrates seem, at least generally, to have
been put in their proper position. That so obvious, and at the same time
so complicated and tempting, a contrast as that of the historical
manners of Thucydides and Herodotus should escape quickwitted students
was of course impossible; but here those drawbacks, to which reference
has been made above, are specially apparent. The animus of Dionysius
against the one is as patent, though not quite so stupid, as that of
Plutarch or the pseudo-Plutarch against the other; and on the whole the
ancient critics seem to have stuck, with surprising want of energy and
acuteness, in the commonplace contrast of the instructive and the
amusing, instead of going on to the far more interesting contrast of
strict literary manner which the two authors offer.
Of the other kinds we have much more scattered and less satisfactory
observations. The Greeks were clearly not happy with their Comedy; they
were half ashamed of Aristophanes, who might suffice for the glory of a
whole literature; and they seem to have too often ranked the ingenious
and fertile, but distinctly thin and “pretty,” talent of Menander above
his. The same curious kind of mistaken belittling would appear to have
hung upon Lyric. Both upon these and several other kinds, from Dithyramb
to Mimiambics, they remind us of the apologetic remarks of our own
eighteenth-century censors on the work of their own time, which, from
the point of view of universal literature, will last longest and rank
highest—fiction, essay, and the like. In fact, this mistaken calculus of
appraisement of kinds is one of the main notes of the whole subject.
The punishment, as usual, has been adjusted to the crime; and the merit,
as usual also, has met with its reward from the secure judgment of the
world. The more a man knows Greek literature the more deeply will he be
impressed with the inestimable services which, in criticism as
elsewhere, the Greeks rendered to humanity. But the more he knows other
literatures, besides Greek, the more will he be convinced of the
necessity of enlarging, extending, and at the same time correcting, the
Greek point of critical view.
BOOK II
LATIN CRITICISM
----------
“_At demonstrare virtutes, vel si quando ita incidat vitia,
id ... maxime proprium est._”—QUINTILIAN.
CHAPTER 1.
BEFORE QUINTILIAN—CICERO, HORACE, SENECA THE ELDER, VARRO.
THE CONDITIONS OF LATIN CRITICISM—CICERO—HIS ATTITUDE TO LUCRETIUS—HIS
RHETORICAL WORKS—HIS CRITICAL VOCABULARY—HORACE—THE ‘AD
PISONES’—ITS DESULTORINESS—AND ARBITRARY CONVENTIONALITY—ITS
COMPENSATIONS—BRILLIANCY—TYPICAL SPIRIT—AND PRACTICAL VALUE—THE
‘SATIRES’ AND ‘EPISTLES’—"DECLAMATIONS"—THEIR SUBJECTS: EPIDEICTIC
AND FORENSIC—THEIR INFLUENCE ON STYLE—SENECA THE ELDER—THE
“SUASORIES”—THE ‘CONTROVERSIES’: THEIR INTRODUCTIONS—VARRO.
[Sidenote: _The conditions of Latin criticism._]
Those who direct their literary ideas by considerations of what they
think likely to happen, or of what they think ought to have happened,
would probably expect—neither without some reason nor without a certain
amount of confirmation from experience—a considerable development of
literary criticism under the Latin dispensation.[276] In the first
place, the Romans had what the Greeks at first lacked, and afterwards
too often disdained, that opportunity of Comparison, which, as has been
said so often, is the very life and soul and breath of the higher and
better critical exercise. In the second place, the whole literature of
their classical period was itself a kind of critical imitation—sometimes
pretty slavish, sometimes freer—of Greek: and it was practically
impossible for a Roman to write without the exercise, independent or
second-hand, of processes of study and thought which were critical or
nothing. Against this must be set the facts—first, that the Latin
literary genius was somewhat timid, that it felt itself rebuked by the
majesty of Greece; and secondly, that the tendency of the race was not,
till it was much mixed with others, very decidedly literary. Few Romans
dared to approach the masterpieces of Greek literary art in a thoroughly
critical spirit, and fewer had the sense of literature which might have
enabled them to do so usefully. Further, their own period of consummate
production was distinctly short, and not excessively fruitful, while
those authors of their own to whom they devoted most attention
stimulated only certain kinds of criticism. Virgil and Cicero are very
great writers, doubtless, but everybody does not feel much enthusiasm
for the first, and some people do not feel much enthusiasm for the
second. The curious perfection of Horace is, after all, as limited as it
is curious—there are no vistas in it; and the same may be said of the
easy flow of Livy, the artificial, and, for its range, intense
idiosyncrasy of Sallust, and the artful fancy of Ovid. These six writers
seem to have always attracted the lion’s share of Roman admiration,
though at one time there might be a taste for the tricks, precious or
slightly obscure, of Seneca in prose and Persius in verse, at another
for other things. For their two most poetical poets, Lucretius and
Catullus, the Romans never seem to have felt any deep or widespread
admiration; their proseman of greatest genius, Tacitus, came too late,
and was too unpopular in his sentiments, to attract much. Even so late
as the latter days of Quintilian, when the Silver Age itself was drawing
to a close, we find that it was customary to devote chief attention to
Greek, and that it was thought necessary to argue for Latin as for a
novice, who, if well trained and encouraged, might become a pretty
fighter in time. As for Cicero’s time, there is no reason to suppose him
an exception: yet we know how, when not in full public dress, he takes
refuge in Greek at every moment, and sometimes seems almost inclined to
echo a phrase of Ascham’s in the dawn of modern English letters, and say
it would be “more easier” for him to write in Greek, as it was for the
author of the _Toxophilus_ to have written in Latin.
Footnote 276:
I am not aware of any work, corresponding to Egger’s, in reference to
Latin Criticism. But in English there is an Essay of the first
excellence on the subject by the late Mr Henry Nettleship (reprinted
at vol. ii. p. 44 of his _Lectures and Essays_, Oxford, 1895). In my
case old personal obligations were not needed to deepen the admiration
which every one, who would even like to be a scholar, must feel for Mr
Nettleship’s work. I am here, however, to demur to his opening
division of criticism into “criticism of philosophy, which
investigates the principles of beauty,” and “isolated and spontaneous
judgments, never rising beyond personal impression.” It is one main
purpose of this book to show that a third course is possible and
desirable, by way of the wide and systematic comparison of the
manifestations of literary beauty in the accomplished work of letters.
It is, however, from Cicero that Roman literary criticism, properly so
called, begins,[277] and he, with Horace, almost exhausts [Sidenote:
_Cicero._] our supply of it from the days before the Empire. Yet he
prepares us for the disappointments which meet us in Latin criticism
even more than in Greek. That Cicero’s interest in literature was great
no one would dream of denying. His letters swarm with quotations and
literary allusion; he is constantly arranging for new bookcases and new
books; he no sooner has enforced (he never had much voluntary) leisure
than he sets to work to write, to translate, to compose, to discuss. But
the general inconveniences just noted, and some others of a particular
nature, prevent him from being of much importance as a critic. He
thought himself (as Quintilian later thought him) a philosopher, and he
devoted much time to composing agreeable but extremely diluted copies of
the Platonic dialogues. He was an orator not merely by profession but by
taste, and he has left us (even excluding the pretty certainly spurious
_Ad Herennium_) a very respectable bulk of Rhetorical work. But, as we
shall presently see more in detail, most of this belongs altogether to
the non-literary side of Rhetoric. Still, in default of some regular
treatise (which was hardly to be expected), it is to his abundant,
varied, and interesting correspondence that we should look for material,
and we find very little of it. Here is a joke on the habit of
Aristarchus (and indeed of other critics), the habit of marking as
spurious anything they do not like: there an equally jocular
introduction of rhetorical technicalities; elsewhere a rather curious
but more linguistic than literary disquisition on the way in which
innocent words and phrases acquire, half by accident, awkward double
meanings, or slip into the single bad meaning only. There is a passage
of some interest in a letter to Atticus about Cicero’s lost Greek
history of his consulship, where he describes himself as having used up
all Isocrates' perfume-shop, and the cabinets of his disciples, and even
Aristotelian pigments.[278]
Footnote 277:
The actual primacy is assigned to a verse canon of the Ten Latin Comic
Poets by a certain Volcatius Sedigitus, who may be close to 100 B.C.
This “stupid production,” as Mr Nettleship unkindly but most justly
calls it, may be found in his Essay (so often quoted) in Aulus
Gellius, xv. 24, or in Baehrens' _Poetæ Latini Minores_, vi. 279. The
six-fingered one puts Cæcilius first, Plautus second, Terence sixth,
Ennius tenth, _antiquitatis causa_. He had, of course, borrowed the
“canon” system from the Alexandrians, among whose most dubious
services to criticism the arrangement of such things must be placed.
There are touches of literary and critical reference in Ennius, in the
Prologues of Terence, &c., but nothing that need delay us.
Footnote 278:
_Ad Att._, ii. 1: _Meus autem liber totum Isocratis_ μυροθήκιον,
_atque omnes ejus discipulorum arculas, ac nonnihil etiam Aristotelia
pigmenta consumpsit_.
But the most direct and famous piece of pure literary criticism in the
letters is an unlucky one. Cicero of course came [Sidenote: _His
attitude to Lucretius._] before—or rather himself led—the most brilliant
age of Latin, and could not have so much as seen the work of Virgil, of
Horace, much less of Ovid, and others. But he could and he did know
Lucretius, whose work an absurd tradition has it that he even revised.
And what does he say of this mighty poet, who unites the poignancy of
Catullus to the sustained grasp of Virgil, and adds a sublimity unknown
to both? The manuscripts are said to read: _Lucretii poemata, ut
scribis, ita sunt: multis luminibus ingenii multæ tamen artis_.[279] The
earlier editors most naturally considered this sentence nonsense. No
doubt the opposition of _ingenium_ and _ars_ is a common thing, almost a
commonplace, in Latin. But would any one, unless he had a thesis to
prove, dream of regarding _tamen_ as admissible here? of translating it
as if it were _necnon_? There is, of course, a certain paradoxical sense
in which, at the end of the nineteenth century, a brisk young critic
might say of Mr X., “He has plenty of brains, _and yet_ he really knows
how to write.” But this is not in the least Roman; and it is Ciceronian
rather less than it is Roman generally. Some, recognising that there
must have been a _non_ somewhere, put it before _multæ_, and suppose
that Cicero, as if he had been accustomed to Virgilian smoothness,
thought Lucretius rough. But this, from his own verses, is very
unlikely. The natural emendation is to put the _non_ (as till recently
it used always to be supplied) before _multis_, which emendation, and
which alone, makes the sentence run as, without prejudice on the score
of the special meaning, we should expect it to run: “The poems of
Lucretius are, as you say, not very full of brilliancy in genius, but
show plenty of art.”
Footnote 279:
_Ep. Ad Quint._, _Frat._, ii. 11 (9 in some edd.)
Supposing this to be so, some have tried to make out that Cicero’s
well-known dislike of the Epicurean tenets accounts for the unfavourable
criticism. So much the worse for him as a literary critic if it was so.
A man who cannot taste Shelley because Shelley attacks Christianity, or
laugh at the _Twopenny Postbag_ because Moore was a Whig, may be, and
very likely is, an honour to his species as a man, but the less said
about him as a critic of literature the better. But there is no real
probability of such a plea having any foundation. We shall see what
Quintilian says about Lucretius later: we know that very few other Latin
writers say anything about him at all. Cicero, who would fain have been
a poet, and who sometimes could hammer out a tolerable hexameter,[280]
could not as a mere craftsman, as a mere student of Rhetoric, fail to
appreciate something of the “art” of Lucretius. The stately volume of
those magnificent hexameters—the _ne plus ultra_ of their kind in more
ways than one or two—could not but appeal to him as a mere connoisseur
of Latin rhythm, which (put him high or low in general literature) he
most certainly was. The difference in comparison with Ennius, as a
matter of art, was for such a man as Cicero simply unmistakable.
Footnote 280:
It has been urged upon me that my judgment of Cicero’s verse is rather
harsh, and that he at any rate made some progress towards the
Lucretian hexameter before Lucretius. It may be so; tolerably careful
and tolerably wide students of literature know that these things are
always “in the air,” and that, sometimes if not always, you find them
in the poetaster before you find them in the poet. But after reading
all Cicero’s extant verse two or three times over, seeking diligently
for mitigations of judgment, I am still afraid that “Cousin Cicero,
you will never be a poet,” would have been, and justly, the verdict of
Lucretius, had they stood to one another in the relations in which
Swift and Dryden stood.
But the qualities of the Lucretian “genius,” as distinguished from the
Lucretian art, were not suited to attract Cicero—were, we may say,
without fear of injustice, suited to attract very few Romans of the true
type.[281] That type was, as far as the defects went, distinctly
“barbarian,” in the sense in which Mr Matthew Arnold (very unjustly)
applied the word to the English aristocracy—full of vigour, instinct
with the faculty of ruling, magnanimous after a fashion, but
impenetrable to ideas, only formally religious, shutting off its keen
perception of a certain justice with huge blinkers, and, above all,
curiously insensible to the vague, the mystical, the sense of wonder.
Now, Lucretius, though he had chosen for himself a creed approaching
mere materialism, had treated it in a fashion constantly and unabashedly
ideal. It does not need the “flaming bastions of the world” or the sense
of the _néant_, splendidly as he can describe both, to awake the
poetical faculty in him. He can make poetry out of the _exiguum
clinamen_, and out of things less promising if even more abstract still.
With him it is always “the riding that does it”; the subject hardly
matters at all. Lucretius, in short, was one of the great poets—sheerly
and merely as poets—of the world. The didactics in which our
eighteenth-century versemen so dismally failed offer no more
difficulties to him than a love-poem or a flowery description. He will
do you a science, or an atomic system, as another might do an Odyssey or
a story of Lancelot. Now this was what the ancients, with all their
acuteness and originality, could seldom understand or like; and what
Cicero (a man of genius in some ways, but something of a Philistine and
nothing of a poet) could like least of all those who can in any way be
compared with him. Many of the beauties of the Lucretian imagination
would be no doubt simply lost on him; and others he would consider
wasted on the wrong subjects, if not positively applied in the wrong
manner. Let us, however, for fairness' sake, accept the MS. reading,
allow that _tamen_ may be the same or nearly the same as _necnon_, and
further allow that as Marcus is only echoing words of Quintus which we
do not possess, equity would in any case require that we should lay no
very great stress on his own. There will still remain the objection that
a poem of this character and importance, brought directly under his
notice, and already as is clear within his knowledge, does not tempt him
to do anything more than echo his correspondent’s words in a
cut-and-dried formula which would be applicable to any tolerably good
composition in verse, and which does not touch nor approach the
idiosyncrasy of the poem itself. We cannot therefore very greatly regret
that we have so little pure literary criticism from him. But still we
must, for the sake of completeness, give some account of his Rhetorical
works, which, in a manner, play the same complementary part to the _Ars
Poetica_ of Horace that the twin treatises of the Stagirite play to each
other.
Footnote 281:
It is one of Ovid’s titles (_v. infra_) to credit as a critic that he
did see the value of Lucretius, and expressed it in the well-known
couplet (_Amor._, i. 15. 25)—
“_Carmina sublimis tunc sunt peritura Lucreti,
Exitio terras quum dabit una dies._”
Virgil’s still better known quit-rent for his borrowings (_Georg._,
ii. 490) is a mere praise of the Lucretian _free-thought_, with no
reference to poetry. But the praise (no mean one) of having
appreciated Lucretius better than any other Roman is due to Statius
(_v. infra_, pp. 268-270).
There is, however, no small difference between the values of the
Rhetorical works themselves. The _Ad Herennium_, even if [Sidenote: _His
Rhetorical works._] it were as certainly Cicero’s as it is almost
certainly not his, would require very small attention, for it is a
strict _Techne_ or Art of Rhetoric, of the kind which we have thoroughly
examined in the First Book, rigidly limited to Oratory, and containing
nothing that may not be found in a dozen or a hundred other places. The
_De Inventione_—more probably, if still not certainly, Cicero’s—is
equally technical, and has hardly anything of interest for us except a
quotation from Curio, which gives the lie direct to the “saw” of our
“dead shepherd,”[282] _Nemo potest uno aspectu neque præteriens in
amorem incidere_. It is to Cicero’s credit that he cites this as a
rhetorical assumption, as saying that what happens rarely does not
happen at all. The _De Oratore_ looks more promising, especially as
there are references, in its very _exordia_, to the study of letters and
its difficulty. There is a passage of some interest in Book II., cap.
12, 13, on the connection of oratory and history, with a short review of
the Greek historians; and another of somewhat wider reference in cap. 7
of Book III., besides, it may be, others still here and there,
especially that which begins about the 37th chapter of the third book.
The _Brutus_ is the best of all, with its survey of the Latin orators
and its account of the author’s literary education. The _Orator_ deals
still more closely with oratorical style, as does the little tract, _De
Optimo Genere Oratorum_. The _Partitiones_ and the _Topica_ are again
mainly, if not even merely, technical.
Footnote 282:
_As You Like It_, iii. 5. 82.
It will be seen from this, not only that there is little purely literary
criticism in Cicero, but that it is rather unjust to expect any from
him. It was not his business; he had hardly any examples of it before
him (and Cicero, like most other Latins, was a man who could do little
without a pattern); the mere subject-matter (at least as far as Latin
was concerned) was far from very abundant or specially interesting.
Moreover, he was constantly occupied on other things. We know, from
passages cited above, and others, that he had the purely grammatical and
lexicographical interest which was so strong in the Romans; he must have
had real feeling for poetry, or he would not be so constantly quoting
it, nor would he have made his unequal attempts at writing it; he would
fain, in the same way, have been a historian. But these were mere
pastimes; and both from that vanity which was his master passion, and
from an honest conviction which, as we have seen, was widely spread in
antiquity, he seems to have thought Oratory the roof and crown of things
literary, the queen of literary kinds, to which all others were
ancillary, pedagogic, mere exercising-grounds and sources of convenient
ornament. No one so thinking could make any great proficiency in
literary criticism, and Cicero did not make any such.
This estimate of Cicero may seem audaciously unfair, if not grossly
incompetent, to those who accept the more usual one. So far as much, if
not all, very high authority goes, I must acknowledge, though I do not
recant, my heresy. Mr Nettleship, for instance, while acknowledging that
Cicero “threw his whole strength into the criticism of oratorical
prose,” still speaks of his work, especially of the _Brutus_, with
something like enthusiasm, claims “genius” and “fulness of light” for
him, and even makes what is to me, I confess, the astonishing remark
that he “follows in the same track as the Greek critics in all
probability had done before him, as undoubtedly Dionysius _and the
author of the_ Περὶ Ὕψους did after him.” I should have myself thought
that if there were two critics who might be pedantically symbolised as A
and not-A, they were Cicero and Longinus. But to give the other side, in
the case of so important a client with such an admirable advocate, I may
say that Mr Nettleship, while admitting Cicero’s tendency to the wooden
placing and comparison borrowed from the Greeks, and naturally made more
wooden by the Latins, and granting his inadequacy as to History (which
he, like so many others whom we have seen and shall see, regards as a
mere _ancilla_ of Oratory), claims for him the origination of the
principle that the general as well as the connoisseurs must stamp the
value of a work (_Brutus_, 183), approves his distaste (_De Oratore_,
iii. 96) for “precious” style, and gives a most interesting _cento_ from
the _Brutus_ (93, 125, 139, 143, 148, 201, 261, 274, 301). In these
characterisations of the great orators he finds qualities of the highest
kind, completing the panegyric by saying, “His usual prolixity is thrown
aside, and he returns to obey the true laws of expression. As a critic
he can write with all Tacitus' terseness and without any of Tacitus'
affectation.” I quote, though—and indeed because—I cannot agree.
One point of great interest, however, in which there may be general
agreement as to Cicero’s achievement, Mr Nettleship [Sidenote: _His
Critical Vocabulary._] did not treat in his Essay, though a passage
therein leads straight to it. This passage gives a very useful list[283]
(elsewhere referred to) of some of the technical terms of criticism
which appear to have accumulated in Greek literature during the
post-Aristotelian period. Some of these are either used in their
ordinary sense, or in senses easily and closely tropical; others are
more far-fetched, and, as has also been noted elsewhere, remind one of
the technicalities of wine-tasting (especially in French), or of
pictorial art. Some are very hard to render exactly in other languages.
Footnote 283:
τραχύς, αὐστηρός, αὐθαδής, αὐχμηρός, εὐπινής, στρυφνός, συνεσπασμένος,
ἀντίτυπος, ἀρχαϊκός, πυκνός, δεινός, &c. Mr Nettleship gives in all
thirty-three, to which, I daresay, one could add as many more from the
later rhetoricians, Longinus, and others down to Photius.
It has always been noticed that Cicero—a master of language, and though
far from the pedantic prejudice which then tabooed Greek words in Latin,
just as it now taboos French words in English, always anxious to enrich
his own tongue when he could—has shown special ingenuity in translating,
paraphrasing, and adding to this rhetorical and critical dictionary. It
is not, however, very many years since the interesting labour of a
French scholar[284] made it possible, without very considerable trouble
on one’s own part, to get the results of this process ready for study.
With the Ciceronian terms of mere forensic Rhetoric (though all students
of the Greek and Latin Rhetoricians will agree with M. Causeret that
these terms have been, with a very mischievous result, transferred to
other branches) we need not busy ourselves. It is under the usual head
of “Elocution” that we shall find most to interest us. The abundance of
the Ciceronian vocabulary every one will recognise; it is less certain
whether we are to admire its precision. But it is at least an innocent,
and may sometimes be a profitable, pleasure to classify the usages of
_inusitatum_ and _insolens_, to separate the _nuances_ of _obsoletum_,
_priscum_, and _vetustum_, of _grandia_ and _gravia_, of _majestas_ and
_splendor_. The Latin rather than the Teutonic languages admit the
distinctions of _juncta_, _cohærentia_, _apta_, and _coagmentata_, if
distinction there be; but it would be of real value to ascertain whether
there was any between _modus_ and _numerus_. Sometimes at least it seems
as if it might coincide with that between “rhythm” and “metre”: while
often _numerus_ itself seems to be “rhythm.”
Footnote 284:
_Etude sur la Langue de la Rhétorique et de la Critique Littéraire
dans Cicéron._ Par C. Causeret. Paris, 1886.
By no means uninteresting, again, are the numerous metaphorical
expressions from actual physiology—_lacerti_, _sanguis_, _nervi_,
_succus_, _exsanguis_, _enervatus_—which we find applied to style, and
the still more numerous but vaguer terms, most of them with modern
equivalents, which express its qualities by comparison with moral ones.
It is impossible not to see what an influence the use of such terms by
such an author must have had, and we shall find evidences much later (in
Pliny, for instance) that the language of literary criticism at Rome
yielded in nothing to that beautiful dialect which enables our own
censors to speak of a novel as “assertive and challenging,” of the
“swiftness and fusion” of its style. But whether the influence was as
beneficial as it was great is perhaps rather a different question.[285]
Footnote 285:
It has not seemed necessary to go through the literary passages of the
_Orations_, though some, the _Pro Archia_ especially, are not
infertile in them. “What _counsel_ says is not evidence,” whatever
else it is.
The contrast between the limited and partial relevance of Aristotle’s
_Rhetoric_ to literary criticism, and the complete if [Sidenote:
_Horace._] still limited relevance of his _Poetics_, is repeated far
more pointedly in that between the Rhetorical works of Cicero and the
so-called _Ars Poetica_ of Horace. It is, in fact—though the most ardent
admirers of the Venusian would fain defend it from being intentionally
and originally an Art of Poetry at all—the most complete, nay, the only
complete, example of literary criticism that we have from any
Roman.[286] As in other similar cases, before saying much about it in
the way of secondary comment, it will be well to give a fairly full
analysis of it, which can be the better done because of its extreme
shortness. The famous tags with which it abounds, to an extent almost
unmatched, may be sometimes, but need not be always, given in full.
Footnote 286:
Here, however, as elsewhere, the fatally parasitic character of the
whole literature comes in. There is little doubt (see Nettleship, _op.
cit._) that the piece was very closely modelled upon the work of a
certain Neoptolemus of Parium, an Alexandrian critic, whose date is
not known.
In form it is merely an _Epistola ad Pisones_, and plunges at [Sidenote:
_The_ Ad Pisones.] once into its subject, without any attempt at
preliminary argument or flourish.
The representations of art, like the presentations of nature, must be
characterised by appropriateness of parts; you must not simply join
anything to anything else. Perhaps, says an objector; but surely
painters and poets enjoy liberty of fancy. Certainly; but still some
propriety must be observed. Even ornament must be adjusted to the
subject; and even when correctness itself is specially attempted,
defects wait on the attempt—obscurity on brevity, bombast on flights,
tameness on simplicity. Take care that your subject suits both your
style and your powers.
Then, as to vocabulary? There is no reason why old words should not be
resuscitated and new ones coined, provided that both things are done
“with brains” and discretion. Usage is the arbiter, and what usage will
not admit must be content to perish. As for metre, the kinds appropriate
to the various subjects have been long ago settled, though by whom is
not always known—hexameters for Epic by Homer, elegiacs for less
important matter by somebody or other, iambics for satire by
Archilochus, and so on with tragedy, comedy, lyric, and the rest. It is
not wise to alter this established order.
In the same way, the established styles and characters must be
maintained: a tragic hero must not speak like a comic one, or _vice
versâ_; and you must not attempt new lights on the character of accepted
heroes and heroines like Achilles and Odysseus and Medea. At the same
time, you need not cling to the stock subjects, and if you take quite
novel ones you may handle your character as you like, provided it keep
uniformity throughout. But you may be wiser if you stick to the
old.[287] If you do, do not begin too magniloquently; bustle your reader
well along in the action; and drop the ungrateful parts of the story.
As before for traditional characters, so for the stock parts. Generalise
and conventionalise wisely; let your boys be childish; your youths fond
of sport, reckless, and fickle; your men of full age, business-like and
prudent; your old men praisers of the past, sluggish, grudging, and so
forth. In short—Keep to the Type.
Footnote 287:
Here comes in one of the most famous and often-quoted of the
“tags”—_difficile est proprie communia dicere_, a sentence which,
hackneyed as it is, is not altogether easy to translate fully even by
itself, and becomes in the context less easy still.
In play-writing be careful how you utilise the double opportunity of
representation and narrative. Do not let ugly things appear on the
actual stage. Stick to your five acts; do not be prodigal of your _deus
ex machina_; do not introduce a fourth personage. Keep your chorus to
its business—moral sentiment, religious tone, and so forth. This caution
introduces a long digression on the incursion of elaborate music into
the stage, and on the combination (while keeping them _unmixed_) of
Satiric Drama and Tragedy.
Then, with the almost shorthand abruptness of transition which
characterises the poem, we pass to an incidental consideration of
metres. An iambic is a long syllable put after a short one, and you
arrange them in batches of six with, in certain places only, spondees
for a change. Do not take too many licences: stick to the Greek. If your
ancestors were fools enough to admire Plautus you need not. They say
Thespis invented drama, or at least tragedy. Æschylus improved it and
made it magniloquent. Then came the Old Comedy—rather too licentious, so
that it had to pull in its sails and drop its chorus. We have tried all
sorts, not without success, but the labour of the file is absolutely
necessary. The idea of poetic madness and excess is all nonsense. If I
cannot write great poetry I can teach others how to write it. Be careful
of your subject, and do not attend to tuneful trifles.
You must either instruct or delight, or both; you must not write
romantic and prodigious extravagances. Mix pleasure with profit and you
are safe. You need not be absolutely faultless, but avoid faults as much
as you can. Be careful to suit the style to the subject as much as
possible, and do not “pad.” Mediocre poetry is intolerable.
Finally, do not be in a hurry to publish; invite friendly criticism; do
not force yourself; destroy a good deal. For _nescit vox missa reverti_.
The influence of poets is mythically signified by the stories of
Orpheus, who moved beasts, and Amphion, who built Thebes by song. Homer
came next, and was famous. Tyrtæus roused men to war. Many kinds of
poetry have been discovered since, and they all need hard work to
cultivate them with success. Some remarks on recitation follow, and then
the lines on which friendly criticism should proceed are drawn, and the
piece ends rather ambiguously with a reference to the fate of
Empedocles.
Now, in criticising this criticism we must of course take into
consideration the plea that Horace may not have meant to give [Sidenote:
_Its desultoriness_] a regular treatise even on Dramatic Poetry, but
merely to throw out a few observations for the benefit of a friend. It
is still more obvious that we must not saddle him with all the rubbish
of corollary and comment with which he has been loaded (sometimes
without his having in the least deserved or provoked it) by the
“Classical” critics of the 16th-18th centuries. Yet not merely equitable
but generous allowances of this kind will still leave the piece open to
pretty severe comment. In the first place, its desultoriness is
excessive, even extravagant. Much licence in this respect no doubt must
be allowed to the “mixer of the useful and the pleasant” by means of
verse-didactics. But no possible licence will cover Horace’s method, or
absence of method. He begins with a sufficiently lively diatribe against
inconsistency of design and want of harmony of parts, then slides to
methods of composition, thence to vocabulary, thence to the technical
divisions of prosody, thence to stock characters and the selection of
subject, gives cautions as to the minor and more arbitrary proprieties
of the stage, indulges in a little bit of literary history, returns to
metres, insists on the importance of self- and other criticism. Then he
shifts artfully to the contrast between Greek emulation and Roman
shopkeeping covetousness, extols Orpheus and Amphion, Homer and Tyrtæus,
excuses faults if they are not too many, but will not tolerate mere even
mediocrity, cautions against flattering hearers, and ends with a
description, half sarcastic, half rallying the sarcasm, of bad poets. If
it were not for its vividness and its constellation of glittering
phrases, nobody could see in such a thing aught but a mere congeries of
desultory observations.
Still more indisputable is the singular spirit of routine—of
red-tape—which pervades the piece. Aristotle (whom Horace follows
without direct acknowledgment, and by no means slavishly, but still on
the whole) had been sufficiently positive, and not seldom a little
arbitrary; but he had carefully abstained [Sidenote: _and arbitrary
conventionality._] from mere red-tape. Horace, in his prescription of
the five acts, and his proscription of the fourth actor, measures that
tape off in a fashion which implies one of two things, both of them
bad—either implicit belief in purely arbitrary rules, or indifference to
the mischief that such rules may do. Elsewhere, though his good sense
sometimes interferes to advantage, he is, though less meticulously, as
slavishly conventional. You must use the consecrated metres, and no
others, for the various subjects; you must keep to the accepted
lineaments of well-known characters, and you must model your new ones
strictly on types. Decency, propriety, convention—to these things you
must look throughout. If you are really a great poet you may be allowed
a “fault” or two, as a great beauty is allowed a mole, but still it is a
“fault.” And so this kind of pottering and peddling censorship goes on
through the whole. We are at such an antithesis or antipodes to the Περὶ
Ὕψους, that one sometimes feels inclined to give the _Ars Poetica_ a
third title and call it Περὶ μεσότητος, or _De Mediocritate_, so
directly does it tend to produce the quality which, in one of its own
happier moments, it denounces.
All this, I say, is undeniable, or, if it be denied, the denial is of no
consequence. But the compensatory merits are very considerable.
[Sidenote: _Its compensations: Brilliancy._] In the first place, it is
no small thing to have got once more to purely, or almost purely,
literary criticism, to have done with the sense that literature as such
is only the second thought, the _parergon_, at best the mere means, not
the end, to the critic. In the second place, it is a greater thing still
to have our literary criticism, now that we have got it, done by such a
man as Horace, one in whom the generation of the critic has not waited
for the corruption of the poet,[288] and who has the peculiar gift of
crisp rememberable felicitous phrase. The few hundred lines of the
little piece are positively “made of quotations.” Every man of letters,
at least, ought to have learnt it by heart in the original during his
youth. Yet even to those who have not been thus favoured, but who have
some tincture of Humanity, mere scraps and tags of it must often recall
the actual context, or at least the sense. The first five-and-twenty
lines contain, in the way of such “lights” of phrase, at least seven:—
“Desinat in piscem mulier formosa superne.
Risum teneatis, amici.
Velut ægri somnia....
Pictoribus atque poetis
Quidlibet audendi semper fuit æqua potestas ...
Petimusque damusque vicissim.
Purpureus ... pannus ...
Currente rota cur urceus exit?”
And the proportion is well maintained throughout.
Footnote 288:
I had hoped that no reader would want explanation of this, but it has
been hinted to me that some may. For them only, I note that the
saying, the thought of which has found various and frequent
expression, is slightly altered in form from Dryden, and is one of his
happiest scholasticisms. It glances, utilising the old philosophical
opposition-connection of γένεσις and φθορά, at the theory, put later
by another person of genius more bluntly, that critics are those who
“have failed in literature and art.”
But the greatest value of the piece, beyond all doubt, is the clear and
distinct idea which it gives of one, and that [Sidenote: _Typical
spirit_] the principal, side of the critical conception of literature in
Roman times certainly, in all times more or less. Just as, and in the
same manner as, we said that Longinus plays the exception among the
critics of antiquity, so does Horace represent the rule. There is indeed
something in other critics of antiquity of the spirit which makes
Longinus pre-eminent, but it is not prominent in them. There is in the
better of them, especially in Aristotle, much that is not in Horace; but
what they have in common with him is the differentia of them all.
Of this latter spirit those worse points which we have noted in the
piece are the caricature or corruption, the others are the rational
embodiment and expression. “Observe order; do not grovel or soar too
high; stick to the usage of reasonable and well-bred persons; be
neither stupid nor shocking; above all, be like the best of your
predecessors, stick to the norm of the class, do not attempt a perhaps
impossible and certainly dangerous individuality.” In short the false
_mimesis_—imitation of previous art—is mixing herself up more and more
with the true _mimesis_, representation of nature. If it is not
exactly true that, as a modern prose Horace has it, _Tout est dit_, at
any rate the forms in which everything ought to be said have long been
found out. You cannot improve on them: try to make the best use of
them that you can.
It is needless to say with what hardly matched and certainly unsurpassed
shrewdness and neatness Horace has—not merely in the tags, the phrases,
the purple patches themselves [Sidenote: _and practical value._] noted
above, but throughout—set forth, enforced, decorated his views. Except
in a few extremest moods, when the whole world of literature seems to be
at once painted red and strangled with the tape that paints it, he is
never absurd; he is never even negligible. The most “dishevelled”
Romantic may neglect him, but the neglect will always be at his own
peril—he must be a Shakespeare, or at least a Marlowe, a Shelley, or at
least a Beddoes, if he flies in the face of the Horatian precepts. These
precepts even, in the opening, in the “mediocrity” remark, in the
peroration and elsewhere, contain not a little antidote for their own
bane. “Not worth writing” would be the Horatian verdict on many a
“Classical” poem which the judge might acknowledge to be quite
unobjectionably written; while on the other hand the evils of
extravagance, of disproportion, of tedious and silly crotchet and
caprice, at which he drives full from first to last, are real evils, and
by no means to be minimised. It is not rash to say—though perhaps one
must have read more literatures, and passed through more phases of
literary judgment than one, before saying it with conviction—that there
is no school or period of literary practice in which the precepts of
Horace, when rightly taken, have lost, or are ever likely to lose,
critical validity. To say this is to say a very great deal. But it is
not inconsistent with—and it makes especially necessary—the further
observation that the critical attitude of Horace is a wofully incomplete
one. In the first place, he has left us no really “grasping” judgment of
a single writer he has mentioned. He had not much room, but nobody could
put a paragraph in a line better than he could, when he understood and
cared for the matter. Horace on Orpheus and Amphion, on Homer, nay, on
Æschylus and Plautus, is _banal_—badly _banal_, one may add. But let us
grant that the knack of luminous summarising of the individual was not,
and could not be, yet born, was not even with Longinus, was not even
fifteen hundred years after Horace. His shortcomings do not cease here.
Here as elsewhere, except in a few passages of the graver philosophy of
life, there is no “soul” in him. He has no enthusiasm, no passion. It is
perhaps improper to bring together Horace and Mr Browning, but I never
read the _Epistola ad Pisones_ without thinking of certain lines of the
latter:—
“The fool! would he try a flight further and say,
He never saw, never, before to-day,
What was able to take his breath away—
A face to lose youth for, to occupy age
With the dream of, meet death with—why, I'll not engage
But that, half in a rapture and half in a rage,
I should toss him the thing’s self, ‘’Tis only a duplicate,
A thing of no value—take it, I supplicate.’”
Longinus, one feels, would have been in some danger of losing his
literary loves on this principle; the modern critic can “say ditto to Mr
Browning” over a thousand passages. But Horace was quite safe. He never
felt this enthusiasm for author, or book, or page; and so he never
tried, as others in their despairing way do, to render a reason for it.
To those who consider criticism as a whole and historically, the
enormous influence which the _Ars Poetica_ has exercised [Sidenote:
_The_ Satires _and_ Epistles.] must always give it the prerogative place
among its author’s critical work. But it is needless to say that he has
other claims to appear here. And the pieces which give him these claims
have by some been considered more important, as they certainly are more
original. It is unnecessary to pick out _Pindarum quisquis_ and the
other literary references in the Odes, universally known, admirably
expressed, but as criticism hardly more than a refashioning of _publica
materies_. The Fourth and Sixth _Satires_ of the First book, which are
probably a good deal earlier than the adaptation from Neoptolemus, and
the two _Epistles_ of the Second book, which may be taken as later, are
serious documents. The Satires perhaps give a better opinion of Horace’s
talent than of his taste and temper. His critics had praised Lucilius
against him; and without denying his predecessor all merit, he makes,
though less generously, the sort of comment which even Dryden made on
the rough versification and lack of art of the giant race before the
flood. This (i. 4) naturally brought fresh attacks on him, and in i. 10
he returns to the subject, lashes the _fautores ineptos Lucili_,
indulges in the too famous sneer at Catullus and Calvus, and with a
touch of something which is perhaps not quite alien from snobbishness,
boasts his intimacy and agreement not merely with Varius, Virgil,
Pollio, Messala, among men of letters, but with Mæcenas and Octavius.
His general position here is easy enough to perceive, and there are of
course defences for it. Among all our thousand fragments of
Lucilius,[289] but two or three at most are long enough to give us any
idea of his faculty of sustained composition. And fine as is the
fragment to Albinus—with its Elizabethan reiteration of _virtus_ at the
beginning of the lines, its straight-hitting sense, and the positive
nobility of its ethic—numerous as are the instances in the smaller
scraps of _Romana simplicitas_ and picturesque phrase, there is no doubt
that the whole is rough and unfinished, not with the roughness of one
who uses a rudimentary art, but of one who has not mastered—perhaps, as
Horace insinuates, has not taken the trouble to master—one ready to his
hand. But there is something of the Frenchman’s “_We_ are all princes or
poets” about the tone of Horace himself. He is, _mutatis mutandis_, too
much in the mood of a _parvenu_ who has just been admitted to an
exclusive club, and thinks very meanly of poor wretches who are not
entitled to use the club-paper.
Footnote 289:
_Poet. Lat. Min._ (Baehrens), vi. 139-266. Our greatest English
Latinists recently have been singularly unkind to this poet. Munro
made what I can only call a violent attack on him: and Mr Nettleship,
while allowing him “extraordinary vigour” and “the ring of Caius
Gracchus” (see his Essay on the Satires (second series), where Munro’s
diatribe is quoted), practically indorses this. Against such judges I
should not have a word to say on the linguistic side: but I claim full
_parrhesia_ on the literary. The Virtue passage (which Munro specially
refuses to except) is as rough as, say, Marston; but it has a far
sincerer, loftier, and more truly poetical tone than anything of the
kind in Horace, and than most things in Juvenal. And everywhere I see
quality, passion, _phrase_. Here, at least, I can agree with Cicero
(_De Orat._, ii. 6 and elsewhere), though _perurbanus_ is not exactly
the epithet that I should, from his extant writings, myself select for
Lucilius.
On the other hand, Mr Nettleship is surely justified in calling the
Epistles of the second book “the best of Horace’s critical utterances,”
though perhaps they are not the most important. Indeed, their eulogist
hastens to add that “it is the incomparable manner of the writer, the
ease and sureness of his tread,” which really interests the reader. It
is so; but there is more in criticism than manner, and you must be right
as well as felicitous. Horace is not exactly wrong, but he is
limited—the Chrysostom of Correctness has acquired better breeding than
he showed in the Satires, but he has not enlarged his view. The
_horridus Saturnius_ still strikes its own horror into him: he still
girds at the ancients; and though in the epistle to Julius Florus there
is some pleasant self-raillery, as well as an admirable picture of the
legitimate poet, yet there is perhaps no piece of Horace which brings
more clearly home to us the fact that he was after all, as he has been
called, far more a critic of life than of literature, and much more
seriously interested in the former than in the latter. So much the
better for him perhaps; so much the better for all the ancients who more
or less agreed with him. But that is a matter of argument: the fact
remains.[290]
Footnote 290:
Mr Nettleship justly and, considering his enthusiasm for Horace
generously contrasts the “comprehensive sympathy” of Ovid (_Am._, i.
15-19, _Trist._, ii. 423) with the lack of the same quality in the
Venusian.
The third representative selected for Roman criticism of the latest
Republic and earliest empire, the elder Seneca—"Seneca Rhetor"—is again
of a different class and at a different standpoint, though he is very
much nearer to Cicero than to Horace.
The declamations of antiquity had an influence on its prose style—and
consequently an effect on its critical opinions of [Sidenote:
“_Declamations._”] style both in verse and prose—which it is almost
impossible to exaggerate. The practice of them began in boyhood; it
formed almost the greater part of the higher education; and it appears
to have been continued in later life not merely by going to the Schools
to hear novices, but in actual practice, half exercise, half amusement,
by orators and statesmen of the most established fame. It was a sort of
mental fencing-school or gymnasium, to which those who wished to keep
their powers in training resorted, even to the close of life. We know
that Cicero composed, if he did not actually deliver, declamations up to
the very end of his career; and, in a very different department of
letters, we know from Seneca himself that Ovid, though not a constant,
was a by no means infrequent, attendant of the schools, and either
acquired or exercised his well-known fancy for turns and plays of words
in prose as well as in verse.
In theory, and no doubt to some extent in practice also, these _meletæ_,
or declamations, were permissible and desirable in [Sidenote: _Their
subjects: epideictic_] all the branches of Rhetoric. But the examples
which have come down to us, and the references that we possess to
others, show us that, as, indeed, we should expect, Epideictic and
Dicanic provided the chief subjects. The declamations of the former kind
were those at which the satirists chiefly laughed—Hannibal crossing the
Alps, Leonidas at Thermopylæ, Whether Cicero could decently have avoided
death by making a bargain with Antony, and the like. To this kind of
subject there could evidently be no limit, and it might sometimes pass,
as in the Orations (which are after all only declamations) of Dion
Chrysostom we know that it at least once did pass, into a regular
literary Essay. But it seems more generally to have affected the
fanciful-historic.
The purely forensic declamation had some differences. As its object was
not merely or mainly, like that of the other, to [Sidenote: _and
forensic._] display cleverness, but to assist the acquisition and
display of ability as a counsel, it fell into certain rather narrow and
not very numerous grooves. Certain “hard cases,” paradoxes of the law,
seem from very early times to have been excogitated by the ingenuity of
the rhetoricians, and the game was to treat these—on one side or the
other, or both—with as much force, but above all with as much apparent
novelty, as the speaker’s wits could manage. A very favourite one was
based on the venerable practice of allowing the victim of a rape the
choice of death for her violator or requiring him to marry her, with the
_aporia_, “Suppose a man is guilty of two such crimes, and one girl
demands death, the other marriage, what is to be done?” Or “Suppose a
girl, situated like Marina in _Pericles_, but slaying her Lysimachus,
not converting him. Released from her bondage, she presents herself as
candidate for a priestess-ship. Is she eligible or not?”[291] The
extremity of perverse fancy in this direction is perhaps reached by a
pair of the declamations attributed to Quintilian,[292] in which the
lover of a courtesan brings an action against her for administering a
counter-philtre, so that he may love her no longer, and she may accept a
wealthier suitor. But there is no limit to the almost diseased
imagination of these Cases. A city[293] is afflicted by famine, and a
commissioner is sent to buy up grain, with orders to return by a certain
day. He executes his commission successfully and quickly, but being
driven into port in a third country by bad weather, sells the grain at a
high price, buys twice as much elsewhere, and returns by the appointed
time. But, meanwhile, the famine has grown so severe that the people
have been driven to cannibalism, which his return direct with his first
bargain would have prevented. Is he guilty or not guilty?
Footnote 291:
Seneca, _Contr._, i. 2.
Footnote 292:
xiv. and xv. _Ed. cit. inf._ (p. 279 _note_), pp. 154-169.
Footnote 293:
Ibid., xii. The so-called _Pasti Cadaveribus_. _Ed. cit. inf._, p.
126.
A very little consideration will show that both these classes of
composition must have had great, permanent, and not altogether
[Sidenote: _Their influence on style._] good effects on style. Both
dealt with hackneyed subjects, and in both success was most likely to be
achieved by “peppering higher,” in various ways. The epideictic subjects
suggested various forms of bombast, conceit, trick, from the use of
poetical, archaic, or otherwise unfamiliar diction to the device of the
mouther of whom Seneca tells us,[294] and who, declaiming on Greeks and
Persians, stood a-tiptoe and cried, “I rejoice! I rejoice!” and only
after a due pause explained the cause of his rejoicing. The forensic
subjects tempted the racking of the brain for some new quibble, some
fresh refinement or hair-splitting. Especially was this the case in the
subdivision of what were called the _colores_—ingenious excuses for the
parties, whence comes the special sense of our word colourable, and
whereof Seneca makes a special heading, usually at the end of his
articles. No pitch of mental wiredrawing, no extravagance of play on
word or phrase, was too great for some declaimers, of whom a certain
Murredius is Seneca’s favourite Helot. In fact, in both classes,
epideictic and forensic, one can see that a plain, forcible, manly style
could only be commended by a combination of very unusual genius on the
part of the speaker, and still more unusual taste and receptivity on the
part of the audience. Their _sophos_, their _euge_, their _belle_,[295]
were much more likely to be evoked by ingenious and far-fetched conceit
than by solid reasoning and Attic style, which latter, indeed, on such
trite subjects were nearly impossible.
Footnote 294:
_Suas._, ii. 17. _His_ name, too, was Seneca; and the text is
curiously worded.
For illustration of what has been said, the hodge-podge of Seneca is
more valuable than the finished declamations of the Pseudo-Quintilian.
These latter,[296] despite the absurdity, or at any rate the
non-naturalness, of their subject, are sometimes rather accomplished
pieces of writing in a very artificial style. The speech, _Pro Juvene
contra Meretricem_, referred to above, is, in its whimsical way, a
decidedly remarkable example of decadent prose. The crime of making some
one cease to love is odd in itself; the complaint that you have been
injured by being made to cease to love odder still. Besides, if you
complain of this as an injury, do you not still love, and have you not,
therefore, nothing to complain of? The topsyturvyfication is, it will be
seen, complete. And the declaimer, whoever he was, treats his subject
_con amore_. The tricks of his thought are infinite, and well suited
with the artifices of his speech. In particular, every paragraph leads
up to, and winds up with, a sort of variation on one general theme or
_Leitmotiv_.
Footnote 295:
Of these equivalents of “Hear! hear!” or “Bravo!” the second is good
adopted Latin of all times. The first, well known from Martial, is
post-Augustan; the third (which Cicero did not much like) seems to
have been both lukewarm and affected.
Footnote 296:
_V. inf._, p. 279 _sq._
“To be compelled to hate is the one incurable form of disease.”
“There is some solace in being miserable in love. 'Tis a more cruel
destiny to hate a harlot.”
“He who cannot leave off hating a harlot is still her lover.”
“The victim of a counter-philtre may hate one: he can love none.”
Thinker and writer, it will be seen, are a sort of pair of bounding
brothers: they stand on their heads, fling circles, intertwine limbs,
take every non-natural posture, to the utmost possibility of
intellectual acrobatics.
The Seneca book,[297] much more fragmentary, is also of its nature
richer. It consists of one book of “Suasories” (examples [Sidenote:
_Seneca the Elder._] of the symbouleutic or epideictic kind), and ten
(by no means completely extant) of “Controversies” (Forensic subjects),
the latter sometimes including introductions of interest to the writer’s
three sons—Novatus, afterwards Gallio, Seneca the Philosopher, and Mela,
father of the poet Lucan—and usually concluding with a kind of _résumé_
(called Excerpta) of their contents. The substance is made up of short
extracts from the most celebrated declaimers of Rome, and a few Greeks,
on the various subjects.
Footnote 297:
I use the text of Kiessling. Leipsic, 1872.
They give us a really invaluable abundance, in all kinds, of rhetorical
_loci communes_, tags, _pointes_, with which, from early [Sidenote: _The
Suasories._] and late practice, the mind of every educated man at Rome
was simply saturated, and which could hardly fail to colour his style,
either directly in the way of imitation, or indirectly in that of
repulsion, and preference of extreme severity.
For instance, the first _Suasoria_ deals with the question, “Shall
Alexander cross the Ocean?” though the exact statement of question is
lost altogether, with the beginning of the piece itself. It seems to
have opened with a sort of abstract of general commonplaces, and then
come the quotations. Argentarius [perhaps Marcus the epigrammatist]
addresses the conqueror: “Halt! the world that is thine calls thee back;
we have conquered as far as it was lawful for us. There is nothing I can
seek at the risk of Alexander.” Oscus said: “It is time for Alexander to
leave off where the sun and the earth leave off likewise,” and
endeavoured to describe the sea, “immense and untried by human
experience, the bond of all the world and the keeper of its lands, the
vastness unruffled by any oar, the shores, now harried by the raging
tide, now deserted by its ebb, the horrid darkness brooding on the
waves, and the eternal night oppressing what nature has withdrawn from
human eyes.” And so many. Then there is a section (headed _Divisio_), on
the particular kind of suasion to be used in such speeches, the devices
which it is safe and proper for orators to address to kings, with
gradations as before. It will readily be perceived from this example
what sort of dealing is here on the other stock subjects—the
deliberation of the three hundred at Thermopylæ, whether they shall go
or not; of Agamemnon, whether he shall sacrifice Iphigenia; of
Alexander, whether he shall enter Babylon; of the Athenians, whether on
Xerxes’ threat of a second invasion they shall remove the Persian war
trophies; of Cicero, whether he shall ask mercy of Antony, or burn his
Philippics. The quotations are sometimes verse as well as prose, and
give us specimens of poets otherwise lost, with an occasional literary
anecdote of interest, such as the offence which Asinius Pollio[298] took
at the praise given to Cicero in the recitation by a certain poet of
Corduba, Sextilius Ena—
“Deflendus Cicero est Latiæque silentia linguæ,”
which Cornelius Severus borrowed, and improved into—
“Conticuit Latiæ tristis facundia linguæ.”
This anecdote is interesting in many ways,—first for the protest of
Pollio, almost equally piquant whether it proceeded from critical
severity, from personal jealousy, or from political feeling; and
secondly, for the evidence it gives of the straining for point and
rhetorical “hit,” in verse and prose alike.
Footnote 298:
See _Suas._, vi. Pollio, a great friend of Antony, was both an orator
of high reputation and a very severe critic. It was he, it should be
remembered, who found “Patavinity” in Livy; though it has been
ingeniously suggested that this was only an _excessive_ propriety of
speech, such as enabled the old woman to detect Theophrastus as not an
Athenian.
The Preface of the First Book of the _Controversies_—addressed to the
three sons—gives a rather interesting view of the scheme [Sidenote:
_The_ Controversies: _their Introductions_.] of these curious
compositions, which seems to have been that Seneca the father should
brush up his memory of the golden or nearly golden age of Latin Rhetoric
which immediately followed Cicero, and illustrate it from more strictly
literary sources. A good deal in the piece (as is usual in the better
class of rhetorical writing) bears directly on our subject. The old
rhetorician commends his sons for extending their view beyond their own
age, for wanting to know what Roman eloquence there was to set against
“insolent Greece”[299]—in short, for endeavouring to take that
comparative view of at least one division of literature the want of
which (as we have so fully set forth) was the crying sin and yet the
inevitable weakness of Greek criticism. He has the usual complaint of
luxury withdrawing men from literature, which was doubtless as true, and
as little peculiar, then as at all other times. He lets us know that
there were none (or no good) _commentarii_ of the best declaimers, that
he himself had heard them all except Cicero, whom, as far as chronology
went, he might have heard,[300] but for the confusions of the state: he
points out that the regular declamation was a rather late growth, and
extols the character of Porcius Latro, one of its oldest practitioners.
The Introduction to the Second Book is much shorter, and principally
celebrates the ability of Arellius Fuscus. The Third (for the text of
which we only have the Excerpts, not the full articles) has an important
preface, which starts from the fact or assertion that Cassius Severus, a
great orator on serious occasions, was not a good declaimer, though he
had good bodily advantages, a voice at once powerful and sweet, a
delivery with all the merits and none of the drawbacks of the stage, and
an extraordinary faculty of improvisation. It seems that Seneca once
asked him why these faculties failed him in set _agonismata_, and his
answer (whether to the point or not) is of the very first interest, as
illustrating that difficult point of the ancient conjunction of oratory
and literature, and also as a counterblast to the Plinian idea (_v.
infra_) of the poly-historic _littérateur_. “What great wit,” said he,
“has ever been good at more than one thing [whereby, let it be observed,
he separates declamation from oratory]? Did not Cicero’s eloquence fail
him in verse? Virgil’s genius in prose? We read the orations of Sallust
simply as a compliment to the historian: and the oration of that most
eloquent man Plato, which is written for Socrates, is worthy neither of
counsel nor of client.”
Footnote 299:
_Insolenti Græciæ_ (_op. cit._, p. 59). I hope it may be hardly
necessary to quote certain lines, “To the memory of my beloved Master,
William Shakespeare, and what he hath left us.” It is already known to
students of Ben Jonson that Ben was soaked in Latin, especially of the
silver age: and Professor Schelling of Philadelphia has done good work
by indicating sources in his edition of the _Discoveries_. But the
vein is not exhausted. Seneca and Quintilian were to Ben almost more
than Browne and Fuller were to Lamb.
Footnote 300:
Seneca was born about 60 B.C., and was thus eighteen at Cicero’s
death.
All these things invite comment—the last most of all. I put aside, as
entirely irrelevant, certain modern dubitations as to the genuineness of
the Platonic _Apology_. They rest upon no warranty of scripture, and
opinion is simply opinion, to be received politely, and to be “laid on
the table.” But it is worth dwelling on the point that the _Apology_ as
we have it, though to all competent judges of literature one of the
capital works of antiquity, arch-worthy of Plato, more than arch-worthy
of Socrates, might very well seem to a Roman lawyer unworthy of both,
and might possibly have so seemed to Aristotle himself. For of all
recorded _plaidoyers_ it is perhaps, in the temper of the jury and the
circumstances of the case, the least likely to secure an acquittal, and
the most likely to render condemnation inevitable. The other remarks do
not matter so much; but it is of weight that a man should seriously put
the difference between Declamation and practical Oratory on the same
footing as the difference between poetry and prose. It shows how
ill-adjusted, as yet, the grasp of literary criticism was, and also how
necessary it is to keep an eye on everything that is said about
Rhetoric, if we are really to master what was thought about Criticism.
The introduction to the Fourth Book, again one of Excerpts only, gives
the information that Asinius Pollio (whose works, if we had them, would
probably be of the greatest possible value to _us_) disliked declaiming
in public, but was, on the rare occasions when he could be heard thus
exercising himself, more florid than in his actual orations. We can well
believe it, and it shows that Pollio had the root of the matter in him.
In the same way a man with critical sense will allow himself, in a rough
draft, flowers which he cuts out in the most ruthless manner before he
prints.
The Fifth and Sixth books, which are in the same fragmentary
condition, have no introductions at all; but the seventh is in better
case. Like the others, it is mainly devoted to the characteristics of
a single orator—in this case Silius Albucius. Some of the things said
about him touch us nearly, as, for instance, Pollio’s—the severe
Pollio’s—description of his _sentences_ (axioms, maxims, apophthegms)
as “white”—that is to say, simple, clear, with nothing obscure or
unexpected,—but “vocal” and “splendid.” It was impossible, continues
Seneca, to complain of the poverty of the Latin tongue when you heard
him: he was never in the very least in pain for a word. Yet, on the
other hand, he was not equal. His language was at one moment
magnificent, at another he would mention the most sordid
things—"vinegar, and pennyroyal, and lanterns, and pumice, and
sponges." He thought “nothing must _not_ be named in a declamation
[and the reason is valuable or invaluable] because he feared to smack
of the Schools.” And yet further we get the important _obiter dictum_:
“Familiar phrase is, among oratorical virtues, a thing which rarely
succeeds.” And then there is a very luminous and jocund anecdote of
the real trouble into which the devotion to Figures might even then
bring men. Albucius had rhetorically proposed to administer certain
oaths. His opponent, L. Arruntius, very coolly rose and said, “We
accept the condition: he shall swear.” Albucius protested that this
would do away with Figures altogether. Quoth Arruntius (very
sensibly), “Let them go—we can do without them”: and the _centumviri_
allowed the catch. The unlucky orator was so annoyed that he renounced
actual pleading from that day, because of the insult done to his
beloved Figures.
The Eighth Book is again without its preface; but though there is a very
large lacuna in ix., we have part of the introduction. It yields little.
The last is in better case, but still not very fertile, though we have
another instance of the mania for Figures. It is said of the
above-quoted Oscus: “Dum nihil non schemate dicere cupit, oratio ejus
non figurata erat sed prava.” Certainly there are no few examples of
this “pravity” in the declamations themselves, which it would be
interesting, but in our space impossible, to examine, as we have
examined the prefaces.[301]
Footnote 301:
It has always to be remembered that they are not integral and
complete, but centos of quoted flights, conceits, &c., on the stock
hard cases.
They, however, also contain examples of that severity of taste which has
always distinguished Latin criticism, and of which Pollio is the great
example. Messala, as we learn, was _Latini utique sermonis observator
diligentissimus_, and he said of Latro (whom Seneca’s later taste
admired) “_sua_ lingua disertus est”—"He is an eloquent man in his own
lingo." Seneca himself, however, is by no means tolerant of excessive
conceit, and rebukes the class of “sentence” which, he tells us, some
charged upon Publilius as inventor. The examples given are in the case
of a disinherited son found with poison, which he spills on discovery in
the interior of his father’s house: and the sentences are, “He washed
out his disinheriting with poison, and what he spilt was my death,” both
being supposed to be spoken by the father. And in another stock case—the
curious one which has more than one historical analogue, where the
Prætor Flamininus was accused of having had a condemned man’s throat cut
at dinner, to amuse a courtesan who said she had never seen a man
die—the unlucky Murredius is said to have arranged a _tetracolon_—a
four-membered antithesis: “The courts are made subservient to the
bed-chamber; the prætor to a harlot; the prison to the banquet; day to
night”; as to which last Seneca justly asks, “What sense has it?”
On the whole, this very valuable and interesting book, which has been
spoken of with surprisingly uncritical contempt by some, and to which I
should like to devote much greater space, forms, with Pliny’s _Letters_
and Quintilian, the great trinity of documents for appreciating directly
the state of Latin opinion as to literature, and its causes, in the
first century after Christ, while with Cicero and Horace it forms a
similar trinity for that in the last century before Christ. And it is
needless to say that these two periods were, early _avant-coureurs_ and
belated decadents excepted, the flourishing time of classical Latin
literature. Of this state and these causes we shall speak generally
later.
One writer of famous memory who belongs to this period—who [Sidenote:
_Varro._] indeed was older even than Cicero—has been hitherto
unmentioned, because, as a matter of fact, we have practically no
literary criticism remaining from him, and that is Varro. I should
myself have been disposed to relegate the author of the _De Re Rustica_
and the _De Lingua Latina_ to the place of his brother (or grandson)
grammarians; but this might seem unceremonious in face of the importance
of the critical position which Professor Nettleship assigned to him. It
is, perhaps, also a convenient place to notice the exact character of
that importance. As in so many other cases, if we went by titles only,
and by guesswork from them, Varro must certainly have a high rank. “On
Poets,” “On Poems,” “On Characters” (in the technical Greek sense of
literary _differentia_?), “On Scenic Action,” “Plautine Questions,”
might seem at first sight likely to be, if we had them, a very El Dorado
of Latin criticism. But the few surviving fragments are a little
discouraging. That Varro would be fertile in grammatical, mythological,
social explanation, we may be quite certain. But the fragments seldom go
much farther. The report, quoted by Quintilian, of Ælius Stilo’s saying
that if the Muses wrote Latin they would write in the language of
Plautus, is one of those rather irritating critical catchwords which
carry with them the minimum of critical illumination. It is, in fact,
only an _ad captandum_ fashion of saying that the speaker liked Plautus,
or wanted to pay him a compliment at the moment. Most of the others seem
(as indeed Mr Nettleship saw) to be merely examples, either of the
habits of “placing” authors in this or that rank, of comparing them with
this or that other, from which criticism has suffered many things and
gained few, or else of the not much less barren classification of kinds.
It is on the first point that I wish to make a slight digression. It is
evident from the epithets that he uses in regard to them, such as
“stupid,” “trifling,” “vicious,” that these processes of placing and of
comparison were not to Mr Nettleship’s taste. I shall myself admit that
the addiction of Greek, and still more of Latin, criticism to them seems
to me to be among the very greatest weaknesses of both. But I must add a
distinction which is constantly forgotten, and which I am not sure that
Mr Nettleship himself had in mind. The “placing” of A, B, C, and D in
order of merit is “stupid” and “trifling” enough; the still further
awarding of seventh place to A for Somethingity, and of third to B for
Somethingelseness, is more stupid and more trivial still. Nor is that
comparative criticism, the _locus classicus_ of which is perhaps M.
Taine’s ejaculation, “J’aime mieux Alfred de Musset,” as a criticism on
Tennyson, any better; in fact, as being not merely sterile and jejune,
but illogical and actively misleading, it is considerably worse. But
there _is_ a placing and there _is_ a comparison, which are two very
different things—which are, in fact, the two highways of all real
literary criticism. The placing is that which sets a man, not in the
first division of the first class, or the second of the third, but in
his relations to time and country, to language and manner, to
predecessors and successors—to the whole literary map in larger or
smaller circumference. The comparison is that which does not work out a
performer’s rank, but disengages his qualities. These are the methods to
which all the great critics have perforce resorted, and which have made
them great. That there is less of them than there should be in ancient
criticism may be true enough; that the want of them (with perhaps a
little want also of sympathy with the highest poetry) is what prevents
Aristotle from being the greatest critic of all time, is true enough;
that the presence of them in Longinus is one of the main secrets of his
unmatched quality, is true enough. But they are very different things
from the enumeration of Volcatius Sedigitus, and from the _in argumentis
Cæcilius in ethesin Terentius in sermonibus Plautus_ of Varro.[302]
Footnote 302:
Varro was happier in the phrase _filo et facetia sermonis_ applied to
Plautus: and he seems to have been genuinely devoted to the dramatist
whose canon he constituted, _v._ _Noctes Atticæ_, III. iii.
CHAPTER II.
THE CONTEMPORARIES OF QUINTILIAN.
PETRONIUS—SENECA THE YOUNGER—THE SATIRISTS—PERSIUS—THE PROLOGUE AND
FIRST SATIRE—EXAMINATION OF THIS—JUVENAL—MARTIAL—THE STYLE OF THE
EPIGRAMS—PRÉCIS OF THEIR CRITICAL CONTENTS—STATIUS—PLINY THE
YOUNGER—CRITICISM IN THE ‘LETTERS’—THE ‘DIALOGUS DE CLARIS
ORATORIBUS’—MR NETTLESHIP’S ESTIMATE OF IT—THE GENERAL LITERARY
TASTE OF THE SILVER AGE—“FAULTLESSNESS”—ORNATE OR PLAIN STYLE.
From the later years of Augustus, and the earlier of his immediate
successors, we have no criticism of importance [Sidenote: _Petronius._]
except Seneca’s. But the Neronian time has left us interesting
approaches to the subject in the works of Petronius and Seneca the
younger, as well as in the poet Persius; while, somewhat later, the
satires of Juvenal and the epigrams of Martial are, the former not
destitute, the latter full, of literary allusion and opinion. These,
with a certain contribution from Pliny’s _Letters_ and the _Dialogus de
Claris Oratoribus_ (usually included among the works of Tacitus, but not
resembling him in style, and sometimes attributed to Quintilian), must
be successively dealt with. Quintilian himself is of too great
importance not to deserve a separate chapter.
We can understand, as well from the character usually given of the
_Arbiter elegantiarum_ as from the style of his curiously dismembered
and rather disreputable written work,[303] that questions of literary
criticism must have been of the first interest to him. If we had the
entire _Satires_ (supposing that they ever were more entire than
_Tristram Shandy_ or the _Moyen de Parvenir_), there can be very little
doubt that this element would show itself in very large proportion.
There must have been suppers less brutally vulgar and Philistine than
that of Trimalchio; and literary discussion was as indispensable at a
Roman supper of the better class as broiled bones at an English
one—while suppers lasted. Even the Circes, if not the Quartillas, of the
time were very frequently “blue” in the intervals of more exciting
amusements, and Agamemnon, Eumolpus,[304] and others must have
frequently spoken in character. As it is, the opening of the fragment as
we have it, and a passage farther on, deal directly with the subject.
Footnote 303:
I use the smaller edition of Bücheler, Berlin, 1862.
Footnote 304:
There is a theory that the verses put in the mouth of Eumolpus are
parodies of Lucan and Seneca.
The opening passage is occupied with that denunciation of bombastic and
“precious” language which seems to have been the favourite occupation of
the critics of the time. The attack is at first directed against the
practice of declamation, which almost inevitably tempted boys and
youthful writers to bombast, but it so quickly glides into a general
literary censure that it is worth giving in full.
“I believe that the reason why schoolboys and students become such fools
is, that they never see or hear of anything to which we are accustomed
in the actual world. They are occupied by pirates standing on the beach
with chains in their hands, by tyrants ordaining that sons shall cut
their fathers’ heads off, by oracles against a pestilence to the effect
that three or more virgins are to be sacrificed, by little bundles of
words smeared with honey, and everything, as it were, powdered with
poppy-seed and sesamum. For people bred in this fashion sense is as
impossible as a pleasant odour for those who live in the kitchen.[305]
If you will excuse my saying so, you rhetoricians were the first to ruin
literature. By exciting ridicule of [_or_ playing tricks with] your
light and empty phrases,[306] you weakened and prostrated the whole body
of oratory. Youth had not yet been enslaved to declamations when
Sophocles and Euripides devised the words in which they were to speak.
The private schoolmaster[307] had not spoilt good wits when Pindar and
the Nine Lyrists feared to sing in Homeric verse. And not to allege
poets only, I certainly find it nowhere said that Plato and Demosthenes
betook themselves to this kind of eloquence. Oratory full grown, and, if
I may say so, in her maidenhood, is not spotted and swelling [like a
toad], but shoots up in natural beauty.
Footnote 305:
Or “good taste is as impossible as good smell to those,” &c. I have
not hit on any satisfactory English equivalents for _sapere_ (with its
double sense) and _bene olere_. What is meant, of course, is that the
power of distinguishing is lost in the vicious atmosphere.
Footnote 306:
_Ludibria quædam excitando._
Footnote 307:
_Umbraticus doctor_, which Ben Jonson Englishes directly as
“umbratical doctors” in the _Discoveries_, and De Quincey rather
hardily converts to a compliment in his _Essay on Rhetoric_.
“Of late this windy and extravagant loquacity has shifted from Asia to
Athens, and has breathed upon the aspiring minds of youth like a
pestilential star, and forthwith true eloquence, its rule corrupted, has
been arrested, and put to silence. Tell me, who has since equalled the
fame of Thucydides, of Hyperides? Not so much as a lyric of wholesome
complexion has appeared, and everything, as if poisoned with the same
food, has been unable to last to a natural grey old age. Even painting
has made no better end, since the audacity of the Egyptians has cut so
great an art down to shorthand.”
The rhetorician Agamemnon defends scholastic procedure by the old plan
of throwing the blame on parents and the like; but the story quickly
turns to one of its more than “picaresque” episodes, and the subject
drops.
The other passage[308] begins with equal abruptness, and serves as
preface only to a very much longer poetical recitation by Eumolpus, who
speaks it. It is chiefly noteworthy for containing the phrase _Curiosa
felicitas_, applied to Horace, which perhaps itself gives us as good a
notion of Petronius’ critical faculty as anything could. But it conveys
some sound doctrine. Verse itself seems easy; any boy thinks he can
write it as soon as he has learnt the rules, and retired orators (a hit,
I suppose, at Cicero) compose it as a relaxation, as if it were easier
than their speeches. But it is no such light matter. You must take
choice words [we are almost at Dante’s “sifted” words], words far from
the use of the vulgar crowd,[309] and at the same time you must be
careful that individual phrases are not too fine for the rest. Nor must
you treat your subject—civil war, for instance—in the mere tone of a
chronicler, but the “free spirit must be forced through[310]
difficulties, and the ministry of the gods, and a fabulous torment of
sentences, so that it may rather appear the vaticination of a frenzied
mind than a trustworthy and scrupulous document under attestation.” Now
this advice, though much in it is sound, takes distinctly the other side
to that which Encolpius had urged in the overture.
Footnote 308:
§ 118. Ed. cit., p. 71.
Footnote 309:
_Refugiendum est ab omni verborum ut ita dicam vilitate, et sumendæ
voces a plebe summotæ._
Footnote 310:
_Præcipitandus est liber spiritus._ A characteristic Petronian phrase
which will serve (and has in part been used) as text for very
different sermons. Part of what follows is no doubt intentionally
obscure. The _ambages deorumque ministeria_ refer, of course, to the
stock revolutions and interventions of Epic as of Tragedy. But
_fabulosum sententiarum tormentum_ is not such plain sailing. I
_think_ it means (with an intentional side-glance at the fabled
torments which the heroes of Epic see in Hades) the process of racking
the brain for story-ornament and sententious conceit of phrase.
On the whole, we must regret very keenly that we have not more of the
Arbiter’s remarks on the subject. It is improbable that anything like a
coherent theory of criticism on the great scale would have emerged, and
very likely that (as in the two extant examples just quoted) we should
rather have had ingenious centos of opposing views. But all would have
been originally and brightly put, and it is by no means impossible that
what we now chiefly desiderate—_aperçus_ of particular authors, books,
or passages, done with grasp and insight—would have been forthcoming. As
it is, we have but what we have.
Nero’s other victim, the curious compound between Polonius and Mr
Pecksniff (with, it must be owned, some merits which [Sidenote: _Seneca
the Younger._] belonged to neither), whose name was L. Annæus Seneca,
has left us a great deal more work than Petronius, and was certainly a
man of letters. He was even a considerable man of letters, and if he
wrote the _Tragedies_, a very considerable man of letters indeed.[311]
He had, moreover, though scarcely a good, a distinct and by no means
commonplace style, and while Quintilian attacks him _nominatim_ in a
passage which will occupy us later, it is by no means improbable that
Petronius (who must have known him well, and was probably bored by him)
had Seneca himself in his mind when he talked of the _ventosa et enormis
loquacitas_.
Footnote 311:
_Works_, 3 vols., ed. Haase, Leipsic, 1886-87. This does not contain
the _Tragedies_, as to which, however, I have never wished to go
beyond a nearly forty years’ possession, the pretty little “Regent’s
Classics” edition of 1823. But I have never, as a critic, been able to
believe that Seneca wrote them.
Seneca, however, was by profession a Stoic, and these classical
Pharisees, though their sect was not exactly unliterary, pushed to an
extreme the partly superfine, partly puritanic, contempt with which, as
we have seen, the philosophy of antiquity generally chose to regard the
minutiæ of literary criticism and literary craft. The “wise man of the
Stoics” might be a perfect man of letters, as he was a perfect
everything else; but it was entirely beneath him to take seriously such
things as metre, or style, or the pleasure of literary art. In the Tenth
Dialogue, _de Brevitate Vitæ_,[312] after the philosopher has been
talking in his high-sniffing way of collecting brasses, singing, giving
long and _recherché_ dinners (but not, so far as I remember, of putting
out money at usury), he begins a new chapter with things to be treated
more contemptuously still.
Footnote 312:
Ed. cit., i. 209. If Seneca be suspected of possible insincerity,
Marcus Aurelius cannot be. Yet the estimable Emperor, who had earlier
(i. 7), in the true Pharisaic spirit, congratulated himself on
abstaining from “rhetoric and poetry,” concludes his reference to the
drama (xi. 6) (a reference interesting as including one of the
explanations of κάθαρσις), by asking, “To what end does the whole plan
of poetry and drama look?” As for Epictetus, _v. supra_, p. 62.
“’Twould be long,” he says, “to track them all out—those whose life
draughts, or ball-playing, or the practice of carefully cooking their
flesh in the sun, has caused to waste away. They are not exactly lazy
people, since their pleasures give them a great deal of trouble. For
nobody can doubt that they make much ado about nothing, who are detained
by the study of useless letters—there is a considerable company of them
among us Romans. It has been a mania of the Greeks to inquire how many
rowers Ulysses had, whether the _Iliad_ was written earlier than the
_Odyssey_, further, whether the two are by the same author, and other
matters of the same stamp, which, if you keep to yourself, they will not
help your silent conscience, while, if you talk about them, you will
seem not more learned but only more of a bore.”
The rest of the chapter draws up a long list of similar enormities of
curiosity—historical and literary. “Who had the first naval triumph?”
&c. Seneca even ironically supplies questions of the kind, and
information about them, to those who like such things. Elsewhere in the
88th (the third of the thirteenth book)[313] of those not disagreeable
epistles which he composed for the edification of a man of straw called
Lucilius, and for the display of his own ability, he supposes the
definite question to be put to him, “What do you think of liberal
studies?” and he goes off at score in the true style of the Stoic
pulpit. He respects none, counts none as good. They are all very well as
exercises, as preparations; you may stick to them as long as you can do
nothing better. They are called “liberal,” as worthy of a free man: but
there is only one study worthy of a freeman (does one not hear the very
drone of the ancestor of Mr Chadband?), and that is the study of WISDOM.
All else is petty and puerile: it has nothing to do with making a GOOD
man. Will the grammarian, who, if he does not stick to mere philology,
goes to history or, at farthest, to poetry, be a road-maker for us to
VIRTUE, my brethren? Will syntax and prosody banish fear, quench
cupidity, bridle lust? And so forth. He makes, indeed, not bad fun of
the attempts to make out Homer now a Stoic, now an Epicurean, now a
Peripatetic. But he soon relapses into the “chaff and draff” of the
conventional moralists at all times. What are the tempests that impelled
Ulysses to the storms of the mind? What does it matter whether Penelope
was chaste? Teach me what Chastity _is_. _Et patati et patata._ From a
man in this frame of mind comes no good critical thing; though we
certainly should like to have heard from the Tragedian, whoever he was,
what put into his head the idea of that remarkable compromise between
Classic and Romantic Tragedy which gave us the Latin _Hippolytus_ and
the _Octavia_.
Footnote 313:
Ed. cit., iii. 246 _sq._
The three satiric poets give us both directly and indirectly a great
deal of matter; in fact, they may almost be said to provide the
illustrative commentary to their contemporary and friend[314]
Quintilian’s precepts. It is possible that [Sidenote: _The satirists._]
the example of Horace may have had something to do with this; but such
an example need not have been required. As we know, not merely from
themselves, the first century at Rome, if not one of the very greatest
times of literary production, was one of very great and very widespread
literary interest. As Persius tells us—
“Ecce inter pocula quærunt
Romulidæ saturi, quid dia poemata narrent;”
while Seneca’s remarks, take them with what grains of salt we will, are
sound corroborative evidence. Further, it appears on all hands, not
merely that there was a distinct fashion of literature, but that this
fashion had its own distinct characteristics, that it was one of the
times of ornate as opposed to plain style in verse and prose alike, a
time of “preciousness,” of “raising the language to a higher power,” a
time when men openly called Cicero a commonplace and obvious writer,
and, if they did not fail to pay a kind of conventional reverence to
Virgil, wrote in a way as far as possible from being Virgilian. This
always gives plenty of handles to the poetical satirist, and, as we
shall see, all the three availed themselves of these handles to the
full.
Footnote 314:
In two cases at least. And Quintilian might have known Persius, as he
was in Rome before 59 A.D., while Persius did not die till 62.
The scanty and notable work of Persius—work which, in the junction of
these two qualities, has hardly a parallel in literary [Sidenote:
_Persius._] history, except that of Collins in English—is soaked in
criticism of literature as well as of life. The poet’s turbid rush of
thought and style, forcing its way through self-created obstacles but
still forcing it, thick with suspended matter, but all the richer
therefor, allows him not merely to deal directly with this subject, but
in dealing with others to make constant allusion and by-blow. The famous
[Sidenote: _The Prologue and First Satire._] scazontic prologue, with
its affected language, satirising affectation, and its conceits, giving
an object-lesson of conceited style, is all literary except the moral,
_quoad_ “Master Gaster, first Master of Arts,” as Rabelais refashioned
it fifteen hundred years later. The “horsy fountain” and the sleep on
“two-headed” Parnassus, the relinquishment of the Muses to those whom
such ladies concern, and the final fling about the crow-poets and
poetess-magpies, may be gibes at dabblers in literature: but they show
that the giber is steeped in literature himself, and has taken a
critical as well as a delighted bath therein. And the first satire (the
longest but one) is wholly and directly devoted to the subject. With the
old device of a cool objecting friend, Persius takes occasion, while
declaring (also an old trick) his own honest desire to keep to better
matters, to draw a lively picture of the professional poet, or
declamation-writer, scribbling in his locked study, arraying himself in
his best clothes, and even with such jewelry as he can muster, carefully
gargling his throat, and then tickling the ears of his audience, and
comforting himself, when anybody objects the worthlessness of such
applause, by the plea—
“At pulchrum digito monstrari et dicier ‘Hic est!’”[315]
A still livelier picture follows of the symposium referred to in the
lines above quoted as to _Romulidæ saturi_; of the literary dandy in
hyacinthine garment mincing and twanging through his nose some morbid
stuff (_rancidulum quiddam_) about Phyllis and Hypsipyle, and being
cheered in a fashion fit to make the poet’s ashes happy, his slab lie
lighter on his tomb, and violets spring therefrom.
Footnote 315:
Not a few other phrases, such as—
“Cum carmina lumbum
Intrant, et tremulo scalpuntur ubi intima versu”—
show what a formidable, and what an accurate and capable, reviewer, of
the slashing order, Persius would have made.
Then he draws in his horns a little. Verse, of course, is not
necessarily bad because it is popular only. But _Euge!_ and _Belle!_ are
not the be-all and end-all of literature. What wretched stuff has not
received them? How often have they not been consideration for a good
dinner, and a cloak just a little torn! And what is even genuine popular
judgment worth? Why do not poets adopt honest Roman subjects, instead of
chattering about unreal Hellenics? And why do they affect such
antiquated and unnatural style? What is the good of borrowing such stuff
as
“Ærumnis cor luctificabile fulta,”
of ranging everything _in doctis figuris_, and of writing passages, such
as two famous ones which he quotes, and which are traditionally asserted
to be the work of Nero himself. He exhausts his images of scorn on these
unlucky lines, and holds up _Arma virum_ against them as an example of
natural knotty strength against effeminate drivel. And to a fresh
protest of his friends about the danger of this kind of criticism, he
replies by an ironical consent to declare it all very good, and a _coda_
of regret for the time when Lucilius used what freedom of speech he
chose, when Horace laughed at everybody without giving offence, more
seriously declaring that, whether he can publish or not, he will _write_
as the giants of the Old Comedy wrote.
In this lively crabbed production there are two distinct strains or
bents to note. All the best critics have for some time admitted that in
professed satire generally, and in Roman satire more than in any other,
there is, if not a touch of cant, at any rate a distinct convention of
moral indignation—a sort of stock-part of bluff, honestly old-fashioned,
censuring of modern corruption—which the satirist takes up as a matter
of business. Even Martial, upon whom, Heaven knows! it sits oddly
enough, though his consummate dexterity carries it off not ill, affects
this now and then; it sometimes suggests itself even through the gloomy
intensity of Juvenal; and though such a line as Persius’ famous
“Virtutem videant intabescantque relicta”
carries us far out of the dissenting-pulpiteer region where Seneca too
often gesticulates, there is in this First Satire, at any rate, some
suspicion of forced wrath, of the righteous overmuch.
But the other strand in the twist, the other glance of the view, is in a
very different state. There is nothing unreal, to all appearance, in the
poet’s condemnation of the preciousness [Sidenote: _Examination of
this._] and conceit of poetic and prose style in his day. That his own
is very far from simple or Attic does not matter; the satire had a
prescriptive right to be crabbed, archaic, irregular, bizarre. Whether
political dislike of the tyrant did not sharpen literary objection to
the poetaster (if the lines really are Nero’s) may be a debatable
question for those who care to debate it; but, in any case, the
objection was there, and seems to have been quite genuine. Now, as has
been often pointed out, these definite passages, definitely objected to
or praised, are precisely what we want most, and have least of, in
ancient criticism. A short examination of them, therefore, will serve
our turn very well.
The first passage appears to be cited chiefly as an objectionable
example of archaism. We shall see that Quintilian (perhaps in obedience
to this very passage, for he knew his Persius, and admired him) repeats
the objection to the word _ærumna_[316]—to us a word not in the least
objectionable, but the contrary. And if it be said that foreigners, and
especially foreigners who acknowledge themselves entirely uncertain
about the probable pronunciation of Latin, have no business to give an
opinion about the euphony of words, the retort is obvious and pretty
triumphant. To _some_ Romans, at any rate, if not to Persius and
Quintilian, the word must have sounded agreeable, or as poets they would
not have used, and as hearers or readers would not have applauded, it.
The conceit of “cor _fulta_ ærumnis”—with heart stretched on pillows of
woes—was no doubt another crime, and it is not improbable that
_luctificabile_ was a third. The Romans had a rather pedantic horror of
long words, which is again formulated by Quintilian, just as it is
implied and exemplified here.
Footnote 316:
It has been questioned whether Persius did object to _ærumna_, or to
any of these words, _as words_. I should say that the coincidence in
Quintilian settles the first point: even if the context did not, to my
thinking, settle it, with the others. But he _may_ have been thinking
merely or mainly of the confusion of tragic and epic style.
Of the same type and colour is the objection to _rasa antitheta_ and
_doctæ figuræ_ which follows, as well as that to the vowel harmony, the
soft cadence, the mouth-watering[317] tenderness of the Neronian
fragments. We may, without rashness, point to the soft sound of
“Berecynthius Attin,” the alliteration of “_di_rimebat” and “_Del_phin”
with the internal half-rhyme of “_cær_uleum” and “_Ner_ea,” the leonine
effect of “long_o_” and “Apennin_o_” and the two tetrasyllables, with
the sudden pull up of the spondaic ending, as what irritated Persius.
This same accompaniment of sound, and cunning contrast or echo of
vowels, recurs in the second and more coherent extract: “_Tor_va,
_cor_nua”; “Mimal_lon_eis _bom_bis,” “_rap_tum _cap_ut”; “vitul_o_
superb_o_”; “_lyn_cem co_rym_bis”; the long words “reparabilis” and
“Mimalloneis,” with the foreign effect of the latter and others. These,
no doubt, were the things which annoyed our poet here.
Footnote 317:
_Tenerum et laxa cervice legendum ... delumbe ... natat in labris ...
in udo est._
A little reflection will make this annoyance exceedingly interesting.
Not merely is the general effect of these lines very similar to that of
hundreds and thousands of lines, in the earlier English Romantic school
from Marlowe to Chamberlayne, in the later from Keats to Mr Swinburne;
but the indignation of Persius is exactly similar, if not to the almost
incredulous and disgusted disdain with which the critics and poets of
the “school of good sense” looked back on the vagaries of their
predecessors, to the alarmed and furious attempt made by critics of the
present century to extinguish contemporaries who indulged in such
things. Persius on Nero, if Nero it was, no doubt gave hints to, and,
with hardly less doubt, was himself quite in sympathy with, the
_Quarterly_ Reviewers of Keats and Tennyson. There is the same protest
against the effeminate, the luscious, the unrestrained, the same
indignant demand for manliness, order, sanity.
But we may go even further. These same processes, which we have ventured
to point out as certainly illustrated by the gibbeted verses, and as
probably accounting for the wrath of their executioner, are the very
processes by which all our great nineteenth-century poets in English
have produced their characteristic effects—alliteration, internal rhyme
or assonance, complete or muffled, and, above all, the modulation of
vowel and consonant so as to produce a sort of song without music,
accompanying the actual words. And it may be noted that while some of
our modern critics have objected to these things in themselves, many
more, oddly enough, object to the process of pointing them out, and seem
to think that there is something almost indecent in it.
It would be unreasonable to expect that in the narrow compass of some
six hundred lines this passage—_locus uberrimus fructuosissimusque_, to
borrow the Ciceronian superlatives—should repeat itself. But the
literary interest of Persius, as regards criticism, is by no means
exhausted. The next three satires are indeed wholly occupied by the
exposition of that practical, honest, upright, rather hard, rather
limited morality which it is the pride of Rome to have carried as far as
mere morality of the sort can travel. But the beginnings of the
fifth[318] and sixth[319] have a literary and critical turn in them, and
though the course of the satire is afterwards deflected, these
beginnings show the same man, the same tastes, the same standards that
we have seen in the first. Don’t potter over fantastic subjects and sham
Greek epics, but attack something Roman and serious. Whatever you write,
write it in a manly fashion, with no æsthetic trifling. That is the
critical gospel of Persius, and he sets it forth with a vigour which we
shall seldom find equalled, and with (in the instance we have dwelt
upon) a most fortunate fertility of illustration.
Footnote 318:
_Vatibus hic mos est_, κ.τ.λ.
Footnote 319:
With its compliment to Cæsius Bassus and his _marem strepitum fidis
Latinæ_.
The far bulkier work of Juvenal—work also of far higher genius in parts,
but more unequal and uncertain—contains less [Sidenote: _Juvenal._] that
concerns our subject. It is impossible to mistake in Persius, young as
he died, and scanty as are his remains, a very direct interest in
literary form, such as did not always or often accompany Stoic
philosophy. Juvenal, with a less definite philosophical creed, and
perhaps a rather lower moral standard, had a higher “Pisgah-sight” and a
stronger grasp of life as a whole. However long Persius had lived, it is
improbable that he would ever have given us anything equal to the
magnificent Tenth Satire. But Juvenal, much more of a pessimist than
Persius, was less capable of enthusiasm. His general critical standpoint
does not seem to have been very different from that of his predecessor,
or indeed (allowing for the vastly greater difference of temperament)
from that which we shall find in Martial. But to Juvenal literature as
literature had no special pre-eminence among the contents of his famous
_farrago_. It would even appear that, although practising it greatly
himself, he had a rather special contempt for it.[320] The well-known
opening of the First Satire[321] agrees with Persius and with Martial in
its scorn of artificial Greek epics, of sham heroic subjects and forms
generally. But there pierces through it something of a special contempt
for “Grub Street”—for the unlucky “Codrus”—who reappears, not always to
be abused, but always to be dismissed with a sort of kick of contempt.
There is something more than the stock superciliousness of the satirist
in the thousand times quoted
“Stulta est clementia, cum tot ubique
Vatibus occurras, perituræ parcere chartæ.”
Footnote 320:
It has been held that Juvenal shows his “freedman” extraction by aping
and overdoing patrician prejudice in this and other matters. But I had
rather not think this.
Footnote 321:
_Semper ego auditor tantum_, &c.
The same tone is maintained throughout, and when poetry and literature
appear (which is not extremely often), poets and men of letters are
treated as practitioners of a rather troublesome, nearly superfluous,
and slightly disreputable, profession, not as bad or good artists as the
case may be. The stage-fright of the rhetorician who is going to make a
speech at Lyons (the gird at the provincial is obvious), the book-chest
of Codrus, with the mice gnawing the divine poems, the Greek mania which
alternates with others in wives, and the learned lady who talks for
hours on the comparative merits of Homer and Virgil, are introduced with
the poet’s usual spirit and vigour, but very distinctly _not_ from the
literary point of view. They are ludicrous things and persons, good
satiric matter: but the book-chest is in the same class with the _lectus
Procula minor_, the fancy for Greek with the fancy for gladiators, the
critical lady with her sister who enamels her face. It is by no means
un-noteworthy that, in the Tenth itself, the vanity of literary study
and success—an admirably suggestive subject—is hardly touched at all;
that the careers of Demosthenes and Cicero are held up as a moral
because of their political ill-success, and the sanguinary fate of
each—which might have happened to the most illiterate of men. But this
is most noticeable of all in the Seventh, which may be said to have a
definitely literary frame and scheme, or which at least certainly would
have had these in the hands of a man really inclined to literary
criticism. It opens with a characteristic picture of what the Americans
would call a “slump” in poetry—the most celebrated bards giving up the
profession in sheer despair, becoming bath-keepers, or stokers, or
auctioneers’ criers, selling their tragedies at rummage sales, or at the
very best getting empty praise and no pudding from their stingy though
wealthy patrons. Then Juvenal becomes a little graver, and contrasts the
victim of _cacoethes scribendi_ with the really exceptional poet (whom
he cannot point out, and only imagines), who will put forth no
hack-work, and writes not even for fame, but to please himself and the
Muses. Such a poet must be in independent circumstances—if Virgil had
had no boy to wait on him, and no tolerable lodging, all the snakes
would have dropped from the hair of his Erinyes, says he in one of his
most characteristic Juvenalisms. Lucan happened to be well off: but
Statius, for all the popularity of his _Thebais_, would have gone
dinnerless if he had not sold his _Agave_ to the actor Paris (apparently
to pass off as his own).[322] Nor is the historian’s labour more
profitable. Indeed it is less so, for it consumes more paper, more time,
and more oil for the lamp, as Juvenal points out in what some modern
reviewers would call “his flippant manner.” Even the much-praised trade
of the orator brings in wretched fees as a rule—a ham, a jar of
sardines, a bunch of onions, half-a-dozen of common wine. If you wish to
soar higher in the matter of receipts, you must spend greatly, have
handsome horses, furniture, rings. Merely teaching to declaim may be
rather more profitable, but think of the intolerable boredom of the
business! the same patter of stock declamations and exercises, the
unreality and folly of it all! True, there are exceptions—and here comes
a curious passage, half satirical, half complimentary, on Quintilian
himself, but treating him not in the least from the literary standpoint.
And so to the end.
Footnote 322:
I think _intactam_ insinuates this. But it may only mean that the play
was produced “for the first time on any stage,” though this seems
feebler. Some would have it that Paris, as being a pantomime, was to
travesty the thing.
This abstract, though brief, should be sufficient to establish our
point—that Juvenal, while he rarely cared to touch strictly literary
subjects, hardly ever treated them in a strictly literary manner. He
shared the opinion of the best Roman literary judges at all times—and
especially in his own times, when the popular current was setting in the
opposite direction—that literary style ought to be plain, nervous,
manly; and he could express this with even better right than Persius,
inasmuch as his own, though extremely allusive and of the most original
character, is quite clear from involution or conceit. But he did not
care in the least to investigate literary processes: nor did he trouble
himself very much to contrast styles and differentiate their values. One
may even, without any rashness of guess, be certain that he would have
regarded criticism of form with nearly as much disfavour in a man as he
expressly does in a woman. In fact, he would have considered it the
occupation of a fribble.
When we pass to the graceful graceless crowd of motes, or rather midges
(for they have a very distinct bite), which composes [Sidenote:
_Martial._] the works of Martial, we find, as has been said, very much
the same general attitude towards styles in literature. But the
expression is differentiated, not merely by the existence in the writer
of a different moral complexion, but by the necessary conditions of his
form. _They_ could discuss; _he_ can only glance. Further, the avowed
purpose of amusement, of composing the verses of a very peculiar
society, which animates the epigrams practically throughout, affects the
result very considerably. Their author resembles both Persius and
Juvenal in paying very elaborate attention to the outside of things, to
the accidents of the literary business. We hear in him continually the
echo of the _sophos_, the “bravo!” which the reciter and the rhetorician
sought for, and which they sometimes, if not often, procured by the
agency of a regular _claque_. We learn (not in the least to our
surprise) that then, as now, there existed the kind literary friend who
was quite eager to receive presentation copies, but who was by no means
ready to go to the publishers and exchange even an extremely moderate
number of his own denarii for a nice clean book, on polished vellum and
neatly rubricated.[323] There were also then, as now, readers or
reviewers who would take copyists’ (_lege_ “printers’”) errors very
seriously, and upbraid the poet for them[324]—which he did not bear
patiently.
Footnote 323:
i. 117.
Footnote 324:
ii. 8.
Here we have the certainly pointed, if not very polite, excuse for not
submitting to the same tax of presentation copies, that he fears his
friend may reply with a present of _his_ works:[325] elsewhere (in those
triumphs of ingenious trifling the _apophoreta_, or gift-tickets) the
neat suggestion, with a blank album, that a poet can offer no more
acceptable present than paper _not_ written upon.[326] In one place
there is, to carry off a piece of sheer begging, an irresistibly comic
anecdote of a “curious impertinent,” who after asking whether the poet
is not the Martial whom everybody not a fool admires, and receiving a
confession of the soft impeachment, abruptly demands why such a poet has
such a shocking bad great-coat, and receives the meek reply, _quia sum
malus poeta_.[327] But these, and a good many others, which an easy
reading, and a not very troublesome classification, of the _Epigrams_
will enable any one to produce, are examples parallel rather to our
citations from Juvenal than to the capital one from Persius. That is to
say, they are examples rather of the selection of a particular subject,
as one of a hundred suitable to the special mode of treatment, than of
the assertion or the display of any particular interest in that subject,
or any special theories upon it. So, too, in some cases of more special
reference, Martial’s habits of flattery, and the unblushing way in which
(not for the first or the last time) men of letters in his generation
were wont to fish for presents, make it not always quite easy to know
how much seriousness to attach to his expressions of opinion on
particular writers. Did he, for instance, really think Silius Italicus
such a great poet?[328] One cannot say: it is certain that Silius was
rich, and a person who seems to have been able to keep his head above
water, and on his shoulders, during all the stormy changes of his
lifetime. And if such a man wrote poetry, if he was not his enemy—still
more if, as was the case here, he was his friend—we know but too well
that Marcus Valerius Martialis was never likely to _publish_ any
unflattering opinion of it.
Footnote 325:
vii. 3.
Footnote 326:
xiv. 10.
Footnote 327:
vi. 82.
But, in a very large number of cases, there was no possibility of
hoodwinking, nor any object in attempting the operation. In [Sidenote:
_The style of the Epigrams._] the very numerous references to his own
books, Martial shows us that he wrote, not at haphazard but with the
keenest critical knowledge of the requirements of the form. That he
recognises, in more places than one,[329] Catullus as his own master,
model, and superior, is itself a critical document and testimonial of
the first value. For it is notorious that the Romans, as a rule, by no
means rated the great poet of Verona at his due; and though the sneer of
Horace[330] may have been dictated by a sufficiently ignoble but very
intelligible jealousy, the slight and passing note of Quintilian[331]
admits of no such explanation. But it was the Catullus of the epigrams
that Martial endeavoured to rival. In doing so he shows that he had a
very definite, and a very just, notion of the versification and diction
necessary to his purpose. His praise of the _Romana simplicitas_ shown
in the style of the lampoon of Augustus on Fulvia, in respect to which
one can only refer modern readers to the original,[332] is capable of
being mistaken for a mere laudation of coarse language—for an
anticipation of that curious fallacy which has more than once made men
regret the withdrawal of the licence to “talk greasily.” But this is
unfair both to the poet and to the Emperor. Martial certainly does talk
greasily with a vengeance; but the last line of this Imperial
fescenninity depends for its point by no means merely on the obscene,
and is an excellent example of clear-cut, straight-hitting phrase.
Footnote 328:
iv. 14; vii. 63.
Footnote 329:
_E.g._, x. 78.
Footnote 330:
_V. supra_, p. 229.
Footnote 331:
_V. infra_, p. 311.
Footnote 332:
xi. 20.
This phrase Martial himself almost always achieved, though in a few
cases his points are still dark to us, and though he had not the
slightest objection to using Greek words, vulgar words, and so forth
when it suited his purpose. The misty magniloquence which attracted so
many men of his time had no charms for him. When he rises, as he
sometimes does, from sheer naughtiness or playful trifling to pathos, to
seriousness, to graceful description of landscape—in the well-known
Pætus and Arria piece, in the epitaphs on Erotion, and the still finer
one on Paris, in his country poems and elsewhere—he is purely Attic. No
style can have a simpler and a less affectedly simple grace. And that he
did this deliberately—that it was his theory as well as his practice—we
may see very well from a sort of cento of passages bearing on the
subject. He differs not merely from Catullus but from Prior (who is
perhaps his nearest analogue in almost all ways) by having obviously no
velleities towards the grand style. We can imagine Prior writing, and
writing quite as well, the piece which tells how pretty Phyllis, when
her lover was racking his brains for some elegant present to reward her
kindness past, exerted fresh coaxing before asking him for—a jar of
wine,[333] or describing the singular history of Galla on the stock- and
share-lists of Love.[334] But we cannot imagine Martial writing _Alma_
or _Solomon_. And all his critical observations, direct or indirect,
testify to a conception of literature perfectly clear and not really
deserving the term narrow, if only because the poet quite frankly limits
it to the kind in which he wishes to, and knows that he can, excel, the
kind indicated in his own famous quatrain:—
“Ille ego sum nulli nugarum laude secundus
Quem non ignoras, sed puto lector amas:
Majores majora sonent, mihi parva locuto
Sufficit in vestras sæpe redire manus.”
Let us see what morsels of criticism such handling furnishes.
Footnote 333:
xii. 65.
Footnote 334:
x. 75.
The prose preface and the opening epigrams of the first book contain
humorous statements of his own fame, excuses (not quite valid) for his
licence of speech, and jocose exaggerations of the critical temper of
the times; but there is not much doctrine in them. There is more in ii.
77, where, not in the best temper [Sidenote: _Précis of their critical
contents._] (for Martial, like some other persons, though he loved to
criticise, was not excessively fond of being criticised), he points out
to a certain Cusconius what the French wit afterwards borrowed from him
in the phrase “ce n’est pas long, mais il y a des longueurs.” Verses, he
says, like his own, though there may be many of them, are not long
because they can spare nothing, because there is nothing otiose in them.
Cusconius, on the other hand, can write distichs which are long. There
is a not uninteresting glance at the fashionable literary subjects and
kinds—History of the times of Claudius, criticism of the myths about
Nero (these could be safely done under the Flavian emperors), fables in
the style of Phædrus, tender elegiacs and stern hexameters, Sophoclean
tragedy or Attic salt—in iii. 20. Another French jest—one of the very
best of Piron on La Chaussée—is anticipated with variation in the 25th
of the same book, by the suggestion to a friend whose baths have been
overheated, that he should ask Sabinæus the rhetor to bathe. _He_ can
reduce the temperature of the Thermæ of Nero themselves. IV. 49 gives us
another critical laudation of the epigram. Flaccus is quite wrong to
think it child’s play. The poet is much more guilty of that who busies
himself with Tereus and Thyestes and Dædalus and Polyphemus. There is no
mere bombast in _his_ book: _his_ Muse is not frounced with senseless
tragic train.[335] “But,” says Flaccus, “the others are the things that
people praise.” “Perhaps,” says Martial, “they praise _them_: but they
read _me_,” with of course the implied and very sound criticism that it
is not so easy to write what shall be easy to read. V. 10 ends with a
jest, the poet saying that if his fame is to come after his death he
hopes it will come late. But it treats rather seriously the other “touch
of nature” (opposite to that of which Shakespeare speaks and
complementary to it), that in literature, and at times [not always, O
Martial!] men do _not_ “praise new-born gauds.” They read Ennius in the
lifetime of Virgil, laughed at Homer [the evidence for this?] in his own
days, preferred Philemon to Menander, and left Ovid to the appreciation
of Corinna.[336] But he shows his less critical mood in setting this
down to envy rather than to the undoubted fact that, in at least many
cases, poets anticipate, if they do not exactly create, the taste for
them—that, as it has been said, a poet’s chief admirers are born at
about the time when he writes. The necessity of some “bite”[337] in
epigrams, vii. 25, is counsel at least as much of common-sense as of
literature. In the 85th of the same, the poet objects to Sabellus that
he can write a few quatrains rather well, but not a book—by which he
probably glances at the necessity, in a book, of varying and sorting the
kinds, as well as of providing a mere quantity of monotonous stuff. And
in the 90th again of the same book he is still more explicitly
argumentative. A certain Matho, it seems, went about saying that
Martial’s books were unequal. If this be so, retorts our bard, it is
because Calvinus (? or Cluvienus, as in Juvenal) and Umber write “equal”
verses, and a bad book is always an “equal” one.
Footnote 335:
_Insano syrmate tumet._
Footnote 336:
Another and severer side of the same epigram is that, viii. 69, to
Vacerra, who only praises dead poets. To die in order to please
Vacerra, says the bard, is not quite _tanti_.
Footnote 337:
_Sapit quæ novit pungere._
Now, what exactly did he mean by “equal”? When we say that a book is
unequal, we generally mean that it has faults as well as beauties, that
it is not equally good, and in this sense Martial would merely be
vindicating himself from the charge of a tame faultlessness, from that
_æqualis mediocritas_ which Quintilian smites in passing. But, if we
take it in conjunction with the Sabellus epigram just quoted, I think it
will not be unfair to allow to _æqualis_ also its other sense of
“unvarying,” “monotonous,” and give the prominence to this in the
equivalence with _malus_ of the last line.[338] Martial specially and
critically prided himself on the variety of his books, on their
containing something for every taste, and something (almost) about every
subject. And the book, he says therefore, that has not this quality is a
bad book. The same doctrine pierces through the laudation of the prose
preface of the Eighth to Domitian, and points the hope that the
celestial _verecundia_ of the “bald Nero” will not be offended by the
naughtier epigrams.
Footnote 338:
There is yet another sense of _æqualis_, “like something else,” which
might be brought in.
The third of this eighth book contains an interesting dialogue between
the Poet and his Muse. Were it not, says he, better to stop? Are not six
or seven books enough and too much? Their fame is far and widely spread,
and when the monuments of the great are dust they will be, and strangers
will take them to their own country. It is never quite easy to know
whether Martial is laughing in his sleeve or not in these boastings. But
the ninth of the sisters, her hair and garments dripping with perfume
(probably Thalia, certainly not one of the _Musæ severiores_), upbraids
him with ingratitude and folly. Why drop these pleasantries? What better
pastime will he find? Will he change his sock for the buskin, or arrange
hexameters to tell of wars, that pedants may spout him, and that good
boys and fair girls may loathe his name? Let the grave and precise write
such things by their midnight lamp. But for him, let an elegant saltness
dash his Roman books, let real living people recognise and read their
own actions and characters; and if the oat be thin, remember that it
conquers the trumpets of many. The Epigram here, it will be seen,
arrogates to itself something like the place of the full Satire.
This, one of the best and most spirited of Martial’s literary
pronouncements, is followed up in a lower key by the 56th epigram of the
same book, addressed to that Flaccus who is elsewhere the recipient of
the poet’s literary confidences. It contains the famous line—
“Sint[339] Mæcenates, non deerunt, Flacce, Marones”—
and elaborates the doctrine that the patron makes the poet, comfort, if
not luxury, the poetry, in an ingenious but impudent manner, carrying
off the impudence, however, by the close. What, he supposes Flaccus to
say, will you be a Virgil if I give you what Mæcenas gave him? Well, no,
perhaps: but I may be a Marsus—a poet who wrote many things, but chiefly
in the occasional kind, whom Martial greatly admired, and whose epilogue
on Tibullus—
“Te quoque Virgilio comitem non æqua Tibulle”—
with two or three other fragments, we possess.[340] And the same
doctrine, that love and luxury are needful to the bard, reappears in 73.
Footnote 339:
Some MSS. and edd. read _sunt_: but _sint_ is so clearly required that
this seems mere perversity.
Footnote 340:
Baehrens, _Poet. Lat. Min._, vi. 346-348.
Martial does not often come down to the minutiæ of criticism, but he
sometimes does, and once in a very noteworthy passage, ix. 11. Here, in
some of his most gracefully fluttering verses, he celebrates the charm
of the name[341] Eiarinos or Earinos, notes that unless he takes the
epic licence of the first form it will not come into verse, and then
adds—
“Dicunt Eiarinon tamen poetæ,
Sed Græci, quibus est nihil negatum
Et quos Ἄρες ἄρες decet sonare:
Nobis non licet esse tam disertis,
Qui Musas colimus severiores.”
Footnote 341:
_Nomen cum violis rosisque natum._ Wherefore Ben Jonson took it for
the heroine of this most beautiful thing, _The Sad Shepherd_.
There are two things noticeable here—first, Martial’s truly poetical
sensitiveness to the beauty of a name, for certainly there is none
prettier than Earine (let him keep the masculine to himself!) which also
appears elsewhere; and secondly his equally poetical yearning for that
licence of “common” quantification, which has made Greek and English the
two great poetical languages of the world.[342] If he would have
developed these views a little oftener, and at a little greater length,
we really could have spared a considerable number of epigrams imputing
unmentionable offences to the persons he did not like. It was his cue,
however, to profess (though half his charm comes from his sense of them)
disdain for such niceties, as in the 81st epigram of the same book,
which is one of his neatest turns. Readers, he says, and hearers like
his books, but a certain poet denies that they are correctly finished
(_exactos_). It does not trouble him much, for he would rather that the
courses of the feast he offers pleased the guests than that they pleased
the cooks. In this, light as it is, there lurks the germ of a weighty
criticism, and one which would, had it been worked out, have carried
Martial far from the ordinary critical standpoint of his time. That, in
homely phrase analogous to his own, the proof of the pudding is in the
eating—that the production of the poetical satisfaction afterwards, not
the satisfaction of the examiners beforehand as to the observation of
the rules, is the thing—that Martial doubtless saw, and that he, by
implication, says. But he does not say it quite openly, and it might
have shocked Quintilian (though it would not have shocked Longinus) if
he had.
Footnote 342:
My friend Professor Hardie rather demurs to the idea of “common”
syllables being commoner in Greek than in Latin, save possibly in
proper names. But I had certainly thought they were, and, even if we
allow for some poetic and humorous exaggeration in _nihil negatum_, it
seems to show that Martial thought so too.
The Tenth book is particularly rich in literary epigrams. It opens with
a batch of them,—one of his pleasant excuses for yet another
reappearance (the pieces are so short that if you don’t like the book
you can lay it down as finished at any moment), an honest indication of
the fact that some of the epigrams are only new editions, so to speak,
of old ones, smoothed with a recent file, one of the not disagreeably
boasting reminders that letters outlive brass and marble (a boast
justified in his own case, but not so, alas! in those of Marsus and
others whom he admitted as his masters), a strongly worded protest
against some clandestine poet who has been forging bad epigrams in his
name, a repetition of the old contemptuous pooh-poohing of stock Greek
subjects, and the old exhortation to study the life. The 19th, in a
pleasant _envoy_ of the book to Pliny, bids the Muse who carries it
observe her time, and not disturb the grave man at his graver hours. The
21st is an expostulation with a certain Sextus, who seems to have prided
himself on the eccentric vocabulary of his poems. What is the use of
writing so that Modestus and Claranus themselves (known men of learning)
can scarcely understand you, and so that your books demand not an
ordinary reader but the Delphic Apollo? You would prefer to Virgil
Cinna—Helvius Cinna, whose fancy for out-of-the-way words we can see,
even in the petty wreckage of his work that time has fated to us.[343]
Perhaps, Martial admits, such poems may be praised; but he would rather
have grammarians like his work, and not be necessary to its liking.[344]
The 35th is a specially graceful compliment to the poetess Sulpicia, who
wrote her love poems (apparently rather warm ones[345]) to her husband
only, and with whom, says Martial, for schoolmate or schoolmistress,
Sappho herself would have been _doctior et pudica_—a right happy
blending of comparative and positive. 70 is a quaint apology, not for
writing so much but for writing so little, the satire of which is so
ingeniously airy that it is possible to interpret its irony in more ways
than one. Potitus calls him lazy because he does not bring out more than
one book a-year. What time has a man to write poetry? Calls and
congratulations (which, somehow, he does not find returned), attendances
at religious and official functions, listening the whole day long to
other poets, to advocates, to declaimers, to very grammarians, the bath,
the _sportula_—why, the whole day slips away sometimes without one’s
being able to settle to work at all!
The 78th, addressed to Macer, contains the graceful request—
“Nec multos mihi præferas poetas,
Uno sed tibi sim minor Catullo”—
which shows Martial’s faithfulness to his exquisite master.
Footnote 343:
Cf. the technical words _carchesia_, _anquina_ in the fragment of his
_Propempticon Pollionis_, Baehrens, _Poetæ Latini Minores_, vi. 323.
Footnote 344:
_Grammaticis placeant, et sine grammaticis._
Footnote 345:
_V._ the only remaining fragment in Baehrens, _Poet. Lat. Min._, vi.
370. The satirical piece, usually printed with Juvenal and assigned to
a Sulpicia, _may_ be hers: but at any rate Martial was not thinking of
anything of the kind. He varies his own conceit in vii. 69 on a
certain Theophila.
The Eleventh and Twelfth, the last of the epigrams proper (for the
_Xenia_ and _Apophoreta_[346] have been dealt with so far as the little
that they have concerns us, and the _Liber de Specta culis_ is out of
the question), are also fruitful. The common habit of addressing the
book itself at its beginning frequently has a literary turn given to it
by Martial, and as in the Tenth so in the Eleventh, not one but a batch
appears as overture, chiefly dedicatory; while another batch farther on
is opened by the promise, certainly not falsified, that the book is
going to be the naughtiest of all. The 90th, however, is important for
us, though by no means immaculate, because the sudden fling of a handful
of mud, in which Martial too often delights, is led up to by satire on
that same preference for uncouth and archaic language, which, as we have
seen, so often defrays the satiric criticism of the time. Chrestillus,
the victim, it seems, approves no smooth verses; they must roll over
rocks and jolt on half-made roads to please him. A verse like
“Luceili columella heic situ’ Metrophanes”
is better to him than all Homer, and he worships _terrai frugiferai_ and
all the jargon of Attius and Pacuvius.
Footnote 346:
It ought, however, perhaps to be added that these include a
considerable batch of inscription-distichs for presents of books from
Homer and Virgil downwards. Most of these are decorative but
conventional: that on Lucan (194), “There are those who say that I am
not a poet; but my bookseller thinks me one,” is keen with a double
edge.
The prose preface of the Twelfth book starts with an excuse for a three
years’ silence (it would appear that for a considerable time Martial had
produced a book yearly), due to the poet’s return to Spain. He had been,
as the epigram above quoted pleads, too busy or too lazy to write in
town; in the country he found himself deprived of the material for
writing. The stimulating, teasing occupations of Rome had given place to
mere clownish vacancy. However, to please Priscus, he has busied himself
again, and he only hopes that his friend will not find his work “not
merely Spanish of the Roman Pale, but Spanish pure and simple.”[347] In
the third epigram there is a half-rueful recommendation (which Thackeray
would have translated impeccably) to his book to revisit the dear old
places, ending with a distich revindicating, in no wise foolishly, the
crown of style—
“Quid titulum poscis? Versus duo tresve legantur,
Clamabunt omnes te, liber, esse meum.”
He was right. Nobody but Martial could have written Martial except
Catullus himself in his less noble moods; and the boast is in itself a
criticism and a just one. Yet Martial had his dignity, and an odd
epigram, the 61st of this book, disclaims the mere coarse language in
which he seems to us too often to have indulged. And the tale of
literary epigrams ceases (I apologise for omissions in the bright and
shifting bevy) with another odd piece, which may be either gross
flattery, irony of a rather sanguinary kind, or mere playfulness, and in
which he remonstrates with his friend Tucca for touching and executing,
so as to make competition impossible, every kind of poetry. Epic,
tragedy, lyric, satire, epigram itself—Martial has tried them all and
dropped them, because he feels himself beaten by Tucca. This is not
fair; let Tucca leave him at least one kind, the kind that he doesn’t
care for. It is not fanciful, surely, to find a critique of poetical
polypragmatism here also.
Footnote 347:
_Non Hispaniensem sed Hispanum._
It may well seem to some that too much space has been accorded to
Martial; but it has been allotted on the principle which, be it mistaken
or not, is the principle that underlies this book. We have, in this
good-for-nothing trifler, a very considerable number of pronouncements
on critical points, or points connected with criticism, and, what is
more, we have in him a writer who has a very clear notion of literary
criticism in and for his own work. A great poet Martial is not: he has
no fine madness, or only the remotest touches of it. He does not look
back to the way in which Lucretius had infused that quality into the
language; I do not think, speaking under correction, that he ever so
much as names him. He does not anticipate (and if he had anticipated, he
would not, I think, have welcomed with any pleasure) the tide which,
welling in upon the severer Muses of classical Latin style, gave them
once more the Siren quality in the Low Latin of the Middle Ages.
Farther, he can hardly be said to have any “wood-notes wild”; even his
country descriptions, charming as they are, are distinctly artificial.
Much as he adores Catullus, it is not for the flashes of pure poetry
which we see in that poet. But, on the other hand, Martial sees, not
merely with instinctive but with critical certainty, that gift of
precision, clearness, felicity, _venustas_, which the Greek-Latin blend
of the Golden and Silver Ages had. He practises and he preaches the
cultivation of this. He preaches it at no tedious length: his chosen
form as well as his common-sense would have prevented that. But he
directly extols the cultivation of style—of that quality which will make
any decent judge identify a poet when he has heard three lines of his
poem. And he practises what he preaches. Even what the grave and precise
(quite truly one must confess) call his moral degradation saves him from
confusing the moral with the literary quality of literature—the noble
error of most ancient criticism. He has, as scarcely any other ancient
writer has, formulated the great critical question, “L’ouvrage est-il
bon ou est-il mauvais?” And if he had chosen to write a _De Arte
Poetica_, I am bound, shocking as the confession may seem, to say that I
think it would have been superior to that of Horace, while he has
provided no unimportant _progymnasmata_ towards one as it is.
From “the mixed and subtle Martial,” as Gavin Douglas excellently
[Sidenote: _Statius._] calls him, we may pass to the poet, perhaps the
rival, whom he never mentions[348]—the author of that only adequate
Roman description of Lucretius which has been referred to above.[349]
The precise sources of the popularity of Statius in the Middle Ages have
never yet, I think, been thoroughly investigated. It is, however, not
difficult to discern them afar off, and to include among them a certain
touch of that uncritical quality which, as we shall see, was one of the
main notes of the Middle Ages themselves. Yet the author of the words
_furor arduus Lucreti_[350] must have been able at least to appreciate.
And the poem which contains that phrase, as well as the prose prefaces
of the _Sylvæ_ where it occurs, will yield something more bearing on our
subject. The first of these prefaces is a curious if not particularly
felicitous plea for the legitimacy—indeed, for the necessity—of a poet’s
indulging in lighter work in the intervals of _Thebaids_ and
_Achilleids_. This is something like the view of Pliny: the poet must be
a Jack-of-all-poetical-trades. Martial knew better. But it is a
noteworthy thing (and Martial himself would have been pungent on it)
that Statius cannot make his trifles brief. Domitian’s horse has nearly
three hundred lines. I do not think that there is a single poem in the
five books of the _Sylvæ_ which falls short of several scores, whatever
its metre. In the preface of the second he apologises to his friend
Melior for some of the pieces, as _libellos quasi epigrammatic loco
scriptos_, and here again Martial might have had something to say about
epigrams seventy-seven lines long. That Statius had not cleared up his
own mind about criticism appears from the touching and attractive,
though not quite consummate, _Ad Claudiam Uxorem_, where the poet,
beaten in the public competitions where he had long triumphed, proposes
that Naples, and his wife’s caresses, shall console him for the loss of
tasteless and thankless Rome. But the _Genethliacon Lucani_, a
commemorative birth-day poem on Lucan (which would have been a little
more effective if we could forget that this tribute to the victim of
Nero was written by a flatterer of Domitian), contains the central
utterance of Statius about other poets. It is, as nearly everything of
Statius has been said to be, too long and too much improvised, though
also, like most things, if not everything, of his, it contains fine
touches, especially that of Lucan in the shades:—
“Seu magna sacer et superbus umbra
Nescis Tartaron, et procul nocentum
Audis verbera, pallidumque visa
Matris lampade respicis Neronem.”
But its interest for us, besides the Lucretian description, which is
itself not improved by _docti_, consists in the long eulogy of Lucan
himself, and the repeated, and therefore not probably conventional,
advice to him not to be afraid of Virgil—
“Bætin Mantua provocare noli;”
and after some time—
“Quin majus loquor; ipsa te Latinis
Æneis venerabitur canentem.”
It would be clear from this, if we did not know it from the evidence of
his original work, that Statius was not on the side of the satirists,
that he had no objection to the Spanish _ampulla_.
Footnote 348:
No one of his contemporaries, except Juvenal (_v. supra_, p. 255),
ever does mention Statius. It is indeed usually said that no classical
author does so, with the same exception.
Footnote 349:
P. 216.
Footnote 350:
_Et docti furor arduus Lucreti._ _Genethliacon Lucani, Sylv._, ii. 7.
76.
The, in all ways very delightful, Epistles[351] of the younger Pliny are
not least delightful in the line of literary criticism. [Sidenote:
_Pliny the Younger: Criticism on the Letters._] Pliny was a confirmed
man of letters. In no member of the most interesting group of late
Flavian and early Antonine writers do we see more clearly the “bookish”
tone which so largely pervaded Roman society. He even, on the celebrated
occasion[352] when he tells Tacitus with modest pride that he had bagged
three wild boars, _et quidem pulcherrimos_, admits that he sat at the
nets with a pencil and a notebook, thus anticipating the action of
Kingsley’s Lancelot Smith when he took St Francis de Sales to a meet. He
takes an intelligent pride in his uncle’s literary work, and if he is a
little wrong in doubting Martial’s power of “lasting” in the letter
which he writes after his death,[353] let us remember that Martial had
paid him a very pretty compliment (which he quotes and which we have
quoted[354]), and that it would not have done to be too certain of the
fact of this coming to Prince Posterity. The very first letter[355]
admits a particular critical care in composition, and the second gives
further particulars thereof. He had never taken such care as with the
book that he sends to Arrian. He had tried to follow Demosthenes and
Calvus, but few, _quos æquus amavit_ (this allusiveness would have been
reprehended by some of our modern critics), can really catch up such
masters. The matter was good, and he had sometimes ventured to extract
special ornaments from the “perfume-bottles”[356] of Cicero. But Arrian
must give him a careful revision, for the booksellers tell him that the
thing is already popular. He has many of the technical phrases which
half attract and half repel modern readers, because they are so
difficult to adjust. There is something like a miniature review in his
description of the works of Pompeius Saturninus to Erucius in i. 16.
This Pompey has something so _varium_, so _flexibile_, so _multiplex_,
that he holds Pliny’s entire attention. He had heard him pleading both
with and without preparation, _acriter et ardenter, nec minus polite et
ornate_. There were in these speeches _acutæ, crebræque sententiæ_, a
grave and decorous construction, sonorous and archaic terms (Martial and
Persius would have shaken heads). “All these things,” he says, “please
strangely when they are rolled forth in a rushing flood, and they please
even if they are read over again. You will think as I do when you have
his orations in your hands, orations comparable to those of any of the
ancients whom he rivals. Yet he is still more satisfactory in History,
whether you take his brevity, or his light, or his sweetness, or his
splendour, or his sublimity. In popular addresses he is the same as in
Oratory, though more compressed and circumscript, and wound together.
His verses are as good as Catullus or Calvus, and full of elegance,
sweetness, bitterness, love! and his Letters (which he calls his wife’s)
are like Plautus or Terence without the metre.” Truly an Admirable
Crichton of a Pompeius Saturninus! and great pity it is that he has not
come down to us, this “Cambridge the everything”[357]—of _circa_ 100
A.D.
Footnote 351:
It did not seem necessary to specify editions of Persius, Juvenal, and
Martial. For Pliny I use that of Keil, Leipsic, 1886.
Footnote 352:
I. vi. Ed. cit., p. 5.
Footnote 353:
III. 21, p. 65.
Footnote 354:
_V. supra_, p. 264.
Footnote 355:
_Hortatus es ut epistolas si quas paulo accuratius scripsissem
colligerem ... Collegi._
Footnote 356:
ληκύθους. The word, whether from the use of its diminutive in the
_Frogs_ or not, seems to have become a stock metaphor for rhetorical
tropes. It has even been compared to _ampulla_, though I fancy it was
not quite so uncomplimentary, and meant “prettiness,” “conceit,”
rather than “bombast.” Both, however, illustrate the view, put
frequently in Book I. and here, as to the ancient conception of style.
Footnote 357:
If the reader is in ignorance of this worthy, he can cure his disease
by any one of three pleasant medicines—Boswell, Horace Walpole, and Mr
Austin Dobson’s _Eighteenth Century Vignettes_.
But the most famous of Pliny’s letters in connection with this subject
is the twentieth of the first book,[358] to Tacitus, in which he deals
with a set question of literary criticism. “A certain learned and
skilful man” maintains that in oratory brevity is everything. In certain
cases, Pliny admits, but only in certain cases. The adversary objects
Lysias among the Greeks, the Gracchi and Cato among the Romans. Pliny
retorts with Demosthenes, Æschines, Hyperides, Pollio, Cæsar, Cælius,
Cicero. Indeed he does not fear to lay it down as a general principle,
“the bigger the better.”[359] The adversary says that the orators spoke
less than they published. Pliny dissents. And then he discusses the
matter generally—from the point of view of oratory in the main, but
partly also from that of literature. And his general view, like that of
his generation (I hardly know whether to include his master Quintilian
or not), may be taken as put in the phrase, _Non enim amputata oratio et
abscissa, sed lata et magnifica et excelsa tonat, fulgurat, omnia
denique perturbat ac miscet_.[360]
Footnote 358:
P. 16.
Footnote 359:
_Ut aliæ bonæ res, ita bonus liber melior est quisque, quo major._
Footnote 360:
This letter contains an interesting _mot_ of Aquilius Regulus, the
brilliant and questionable orator-informer, of whom Pliny frequently
speaks with a sort of mixture of admiration and dislike, reminding one
of the way in which men used to speak of Lord Chancellor Westbury.
“You,” said Regulus to him, “hunt out everything in your brief. I see
the throat at once, and go for it”—_ego jugulum statim video, hunc
premo_. There is some point in Pliny’s retort that people who do this
not infrequently hit knee or ankle instead.
The third letter of the second book is a set panegyric of Isæus,[361]
which would be of more interest if criticisms of orators were not so
common; the fifth of the third is the notice of the life, literary and
other, of Pliny the Elder. The obituary criticism of Martial, to which
reference has been made, occurs in the 21st of this third book, and is a
little patronising. But the contemner of brevity, even if he were a
private friend and a flattered one, and if he had (as most Romans would
have had) no objection to Martial’s freedom of subject and language,
could hardly be expected to do full justice to the epigrammatist.
Footnote 361:
_Not_ the great Attic; but an Assyrian rhetor of Pliny’s own time,
supposed to be also referred to by Juvenal in the well-known phrase,
_Isæo torrentior_ (iii. 74).
We are less able to judge the literary part of the flattering epistle
(iv. 3) to Antoninus, afterwards Emperor, which is so much in the
extravagant style of Roman compliment that, in the absence of the work
referred to, it gives us no critical information whatever. The literary
characteristic of the future Pius appeared to Pliny to be the mixture of
the severe with the agreeable—of the grave with the gay, which made his
style extraordinary sweet, as the eighteenth century would have said.
The usual honey and its maker-bees put in the usual appearance to
express Pliny’s sensations when he reads his correspondent’s Greek
epigrams and iambics. He thinks of Callimachus or Herodes (doubtless our
just recovered Herondas). Only neither has done anything so humane, so
venust, so sweet, so loving, so keen, so correct. How could a Roman
write such Greek? It is more Attic than Athens, and Pliny grudges such a
writer to the Greeks, though there is no doubt that if Antoninus would
only write in his mother tongue he would do better still.
IV. 14, enclosing some hendecasyllabics which have not come down (from
other specimens they are a tolerable loss), contains some interesting
and curious remarks on the always burning and never yet settled question
of morality in literature. Pliny adopts to the full, as a matter of
principle, the doctrine which his friend Martial had both practised and
preached, that naughty things, and even the naughtiest words, may figure
in poetry,—that, as Pliny himself puts it, with the still higher
authority of Catullus—
“Nam castum esse decet pium poetam
Ipsum—versiculos nihil necesse est.”
Only he himself declines to use the naughty words,[362] not out of
prudery, but out of timidity. He follows this up with the sounder
doctrine that everything must be judged in its own kind.
Footnote 362:
_Verba nuda._
Another short letter to Antoninus (iv. 18) not merely repeats the praise
of his Greek epigrams, but informs us that Pliny himself has put some of
these in Latin. A longer one, which follows, to Calpurnia Hispulla,
contains an elaborate eulogy of the lady’s niece, Pliny’s second wife,
who shows her good taste and virtue by learning her husband’s books by
heart, instructing herself in literature generally for love of him, and
singing his verses. And later, with something of the same innocence or
lack of humour which was a Roman—in fact, has generally been a
Latin—characteristic, he tells us that he has been for three days
listening _cum summa voluptate_ to a certain Sentius Augurinus, reciting
his poems or poemkins (_poematia_). Sentius, it seems, performed many
things with lightness, many with sublimity, many with beauty, many with
tenderness, many with sweetness, many _with bile_. It is not quite clear
under which head comes the specimen he produces, which is a rather
feeble compliment to Pliny himself. “Vides,” says Pliny, after quoting
it, “quam acuta omnia, quam apta, quam expressa.” Besides, he is the
friend of Spurinna and Antoninus. What an _emendatus adolescens_!
V. 8[363] is a not uninteresting paper on History. Tutinius Capito
wishes him, as he tells us others had done, to write this. Pliny is not
ill-disposed to do so, not because he thinks he shall do it very well,
but (the sentiment is a fine one, though a little bombastically
expressed) because “it seems to him one of the best of actions to rescue
from perishing that which ought to be eternal.”[364] His idea of
history, however, is not very lofty. Oratory and Poetry, he says, must
have style; History pleases howsoever it be written, because of the
natural curiosity of man—a doctrine which, in slightly changed matter,
has been joyfully accepted by the usual novelist. Besides, his uncle had
been a diligent historian. Then why does he delay? Because he wants to
execute a careful recension of his speeches in important cases, and he
hardly feels equal to both tasks, while, though there is much in common
between Oratory and History, they are also different. The contrast is
curious, and shows the overweening position which Oratory had with the
ancients. To History, says Pliny, things humble and sordid, or at least
mediocre, belong: to Oratory, all that is exquisite, splendid, and
lofty.[365] The bare bones, muscles, and nerves suit history: Oratory
must have the swelling bulk of flesh and the waving plumes of hair.
History pleases by rough, bitter energy:[366] Oratory by long-drawn
sweetness. Diction, style, construction—all are different. After which
he gives a somewhat unexpected turn to the famous Thucydidean saying, by
admitting that history is the _ktema_, and the _agonisma_ oratory. And,
therefore, he thinks that he had better not attempt at once two things
so different. A letter to Suetonius about the books of both (v. 10),
another to Spurinna (v. 17) about a recitation by Calpurnius Piso, a
third (vi. 15) on a thin jest by Javolenus Priscus at another recitation
by a descendant of Propertius (who began “Prisce jubes,” and was
interrupted by Javolenus, _Ego vero non jubeo_), may be glanced at
rather than discussed.
Footnote 363:
There is another interesting critical remark at the end of the famous
description of the villa (v.6): “I think it the first duty of a writer
to _read his own title_, and constantly ask himself what he sat down
to write, and to be sure that if he sticks to his subject he will
never be too long, but will be hopelessly so if he drags other matters
in.”
Footnote 364:
_Non pati occidere, quibus æternitas debeatur._
Footnote 365:
This, of course, is the old invidious distinction between tragedy and
comedy revived in other material. Cf. the curious passage in Tacitus
(_Ann._, xiii. 31) in which he, for his part, glances disdainfully at
those who think “beams and foundation-stones” (Nero’s amphitheatre)
worth mentioning. such things should be kept for journals (_diurnis
urbis actis_): it is for the dignity of the Roman people that only
illustrious matters should find place in Annals. The two thoughts are
characteristic of the two men.
Footnote 366:
_Vi, amaritudine, instantia._
Perhaps there is no better document of Pliny’s literary criticism, both
in its strength and in its weakness, than vi. 17. He writes in a state
of _indignatiuncula_ (let us translate “mild wrath”), which he can only
relieve by working it off in a letter to his friend Restitutus. He has
been at one of the eternal recitations, where the book recited was not
so usual; indeed, it was _absolutissimus_—quite “A per se,” as our
ancestors would have said. But one or two of the audience (clever[367]
fellows, as they and a few others thought) listened to it as if they
were deaf mutes. They did not open their lips: they did not clap: they
did not even rise from their seats save when they were tired of sitting.
What is the good of such gravity, such wisdom, nay, such laziness,
arrogance, _sinisterity_ (a good word!), or, to cut things short,
madness, which leads men to spend a whole day [the terrors of recitation
were obviously not exaggerated by the satirists] in offending and making
an enemy of a man whom you have visited as a friend? Are you clever? Do
not show envy: the envier is the lesser. Nay, whether you can yourself
do as well, or less well, all the same praise him, whether he be
inferior or superior or equal. Your superior, because, if he is not
praiseworthy, still less are you; your equal or inferior, because the
better he is, in that case, the better you are. Pliny, for his part, is
wont to venerate and admire anybody who does anything in literature. It
is a difficult thing, sir, an arduous, a fastidious, and it has a knack
of bringing scorn on those who scorn it.[368] Restitutus will surely
agree: he is the most amiable and considerate of judges. We may mark
this passage as, of many interesting ones, that which gives us Pliny’s
measure as a literary critic best.
Footnote 367:
_Diserti_, used here, as _disertior_ is lower, with the slightly
invidious sense which often attaches to the word, just as it does to
the English equivalent here used for it.
Footnote 368:
_Est enim res difficilis, ardua, fastidiosa, et quæ eos, a quibus
contemnitur, invicem contemnat._
But the list of his noteworthy “places” is by no means closed. VI. 21
gives us his standpoint in another famous quarrel—that of Ancients and
Moderns. He admires the former, but by no means so as to despise the
latter. He does not hold with the doctrine of the senescence of nature.
He recently heard Vergilius Romanus recite a comedy in the Old Comedy
kind, which was as good as it could be. The same man has written
mimiambics with perfect grace, comedies in another kind as good as
Menander’s; he has force, grandeur, subtlety, bitterness, sweetness,
neatness, he glorifies virtue, attacks vice, invents his
personages,[369] and uses real ones, with equal appropriateness. And (as
by this time we begin to expect in such cases) “In writing about _me_ he
has only gone wrong by excessive kindness; and, after all, poets may
feign.” One sees that the excellent Pliny’s geese were swans in every
quill.
Footnote 369:
So I translate _nominibus_.
VII. 4 deals at some length with his own poems, and gives some
hexameters about Tiro and Cicero, which are in style quite worthy of the
subject. There are some elegiacs (rather better) in vii. 8, which is an
elaborate recommendation of literary study—the turning of Greek into
Latin, and _vice versa_, the refashioning and rearrangement of work
already done, the alternation of oratorical practice with history,
letter-writing, and verse of the lighter kind, which receives an
elaborate and not unhappy encomium. As for reading, read all the best
models in all the styles in which you write. VII. 17 is on recitation;
20 of the same book is one of several interesting, though slightly
amusing, letters to Tacitus, in which Pliny implies it to be his own
opinion, and quotes it as that of others, that he and Tacitus were the
two greatest literary men of Rome, and that it was quite wonderful that
they were such friends. What Tacitus thought of the conjunction we do
not know; he was probably too well bred a man to put his thought in
words, though a Tacitean expression of it would indeed be a treasure. In
vii. 25 we meet another “swan,” Terentius Junior, who writes things
_quam tersa omnia! quam Latina! quam Græca!_ Later, in the 30th, a
friend having compared his work, in vindication of Helvidius Priscus, to
that of Demosthenes against Midias, he confesses that he had had the
piece in view, though he thinks it would have been _improbum et pæne
furiosum_ to have imagined rivalry possible. In viii. 4 he encourages
the friend to write an epic poem in Greek on the Dacian war, thereby
incurring a considerable responsibility. The descendant of Propertius,
on whom Javolenus Priscus made that surpassing joke, recurs in ix. 22
with fresh praise; and the last literary letter of importance (the 26th
of the same) is on what may be called the grand style in oratory.
Here, as elsewhere, there may no doubt be room for difference of opinion
as to the space and importance allowed to our witnesses. From the point
of view of this book, however, Pliny’s testimony is of the utmost
importance. We may regret—I certainly do—that an equal abundance of
documents of the same character has not come to us from some one of
greater literary competence—from Aristotle, or even from Dionysius, from
Longinus, or even from Quintilian. But this is distinctly a case where
the better is enemy to the good. For the purpose of ascertaining what
was the actual state of critical opinion and literary taste at a given
time, it is of more value to possess such a collection as this of
Pliny’s than to have fifty _Arts of Poetry_.
Let us “write off” liberally at the outset for the drawbacks of the
document. Pliny’s Letters, pleasant as they are, are not free from a
suspicion, and, considering some statements of their own, something more
than a suspicion, of being not entirely spontaneous: they were, at any
rate in some cases, evidently written for publication. The author
himself, though a man of excellent learning, of the completest
cultivation of his day, of wide and ardent literary interests, and of no
little common-sense, was, as some of his quoted judgments will have
shown, not quite sufficiently possessed of the finest or most
discriminating literary judgment. Moreover, he had a somewhat omnivorous
and disproportionate opinion of the value of literary work, merely as
such, even merely as something that looked such—compilation,
translation, copying verse and prose, what not. Further, in these
characteristics he to a great extent reflected those of his time—a time
of great and active attention to literature, but rather one of talent
than of genius, a period of decadence in many respects, and hardly of
resurrection in any, and lastly, a period of doubtful literary taste,
inclining, when it was sincere, to the florid and Asiatic, when it
affected superiority, to a forced Pseudo-Atticism and concinnity.
Yet it will readily be perceived that none of these allowances is
damning to the individual, while most of them even increase his value as
a representative of the period itself. That he was, and was regarded by
the time itself as, one of the most eminent of contemporary men of
letters, cannot reasonably be doubted, though he certainly yokes himself
rather unequally with Tacitus. And he is none the worse witness that,
though a generous admirer of antiquity, he avowedly was by no means so
out of conceit with his own time as men of letters often are. That this
age was no decrepit one need hardly be said—with Persius “dead ere his
prime,” and Martial, Juvenal, Quintilian, Tacitus, Statius, and Pliny
himself, in full flourishing, with Marcus Aurelius and Arrian coming,
with Lucian and Apuleius not far off—to mention no others—it had
something considerable to show and say for itself. If we can obtain
anything like a clear view of its opinions on literary criticism (to
which it was naturally inclined, as being itself not of the very first,
and having pasts of the very first behind it), we shall not do ill. And
Pliny gives us help of a very special kind, and in very abundant degree,
for the attainment of such a view, which we may proceed to take, after
noticing briefly the only other documents of the time which require
notice for our purpose.
These are the Apocrypha[370] of Quintilian, which are, for more reasons
than one, best regarded apart from the _Institutes_. There are, in the
first place, the _Declamations_, already referred to[371]—nineteen
complete, with sketches, fragments, and skeletons of a much larger
number, which even thus falls short of the huge total of nearly four
hundred assigned to him after a fashion. If the whole were written on
the scale of the score that we possess, they would fill some four
thousand closely printed pages. Interesting, in a fashion, they are; as
pointed out above, they supply, with the works of the elder Seneca, our
only considerable bodies in Latin of that work of the schools which for
centuries occupied the growing intellects of the two great ancient
literary nations, and which supplied the never-blunted point of the
satirist’s
“Ut pueris placeas et declamatio fias.”
Footnote 370:
The _Declamations_ were last edited, I think, by Ritter in the Teubner
Library. That invaluable collection puts (as indeed is usual) the
_Dialogus_ with the other minor works of Tacitus, ed. Halm. It may
also be found, with the same company, in the new Oxford _Bibliotheca
Classicorum_, ed. Furneaux. I use a pretty and convenient joint
edition of the nineteen complete Declamations and the Dialogue, which
appeared at Oxford, without editor’s name, in 1692.
Footnote 371:
_V. supra_, p. 230 _sq._
Seneca has been treated already in his proper place. The
Pseudo-Quintilian (for there is hardly a page of the _Declamations_
which does not fly in the face of the _Institutes_) gives us speeches,
adjusted to the strict canons of _status_ and the rest, written in the
well-known style of the Ciceronian superlative (one wonders that, simply
to save breath and time, the bar of Rome did not agree that any one who
said _-issimus_ should be sconced an amphora, or, if that seem
excessive, at least a _congius_), extremely ingenious now and then, but
of the most fantastic and arbitrary quality. The chief interest of them,
at least from our point of view, is, that in the mere reading one
understands how impossible it was that attention to such things should
consist with attention to true literary criticism.
The _Dialogus de Claris Oratoribus_, traditionally ascribed to Tacitus,
though some will have it to be nothing less than the [Sidenote: _The_
Dialogus de Claris Oratoribus.] otherwise lost _De Causis corruptæ
Eloquentiæ_ which Quintilian, as we know from himself, certainly wrote,
is a much more meritorious performance. The style is very unlike[372]
that of the surely unmistakable author of the _Germania_ and the
_Annals_, the method does not seem, to me at least, after a good deal of
study of Quintilian, to be his. But it is very likely about their date,
and by no contemptible author. The opening certainly chimes in not ill
with the title of Quintilian’s missing treatise. A certain Justus
Falinus had asked why, after the magnificent crops of oratory which
former ages had yielded, the very name of _orator_ had almost died out,
and had been supplanted by “counsel”[373] and “advocate” and “patron.”
The author replies, with a due Ciceronianism, that he had better rub up
his memory of a remarkable conversation on the subject heard in his
youth. Curiatius Maternus, both poet and orator, had recited a tragedy
on Cato which excited the town nearly as much as another piece of the
same name sixteen hundred years later; and Marcus Aper, a man of Gaulish
origin, consular rank, and great fame, and Julius Secundus, met (with
the writer) at Maternus’ house to talk over it. The first of these
rather despised literature, relying on mother-wit; the second was said
to be indebted more to art than to nature: but both were among the
leading counsel of their day. Secundus gently suggests that Cato is a
dangerous subject, and Maternus says that he has another tragedy in hand
(_Thyestes_) with which to follow it. Then Aper opens fire upon him:
first, for deserting oratory and the bar for idle play-writing;
secondly, for choosing foolish fancy subjects like Thyestes. Maternus
appeals to Secundus. He is accustomed to Aper’s denunciations of poetry.
Will not Secundus act as judge? Secundus says that he is not quite
impartial because of his friendship for Saleius Bassus (a contemporary
epic poet of whom we hear in Quintilian as a particular friend of his).
Oh, says Aper, let Bassus and others, who cannot compass oratory,
cultivate poetry if they like. Here is Maternus who can: so he is
wasting his time. And he embarks on a warm and by no means ineloquent
eulogy of eloquence from its practical side, urging not merely its great
political importance but other points. Eloquence opens positions of
opulence and power, makes you valuable to your friends and the State, is
a safeguard to yourself, gives fame, wealth, dignity. As for poetry, it
brings none of these things. It is of no use, and the pleasure it gives
is short, idle, and unprofitable. What is the good of it? Who thinks
much even of Bassus himself? And if he or his friends are in any
difficulty, to whom will they go? Why, to an orator. The poet spends an
infinity of labour on his poem, compasses heaven and earth to whip an
audience together, and gets nothing from it. Certainly Vespasian did
give Bassus five hundred sestertia, and very noble it was of him; but
this was mere alms. An orator _earns_ his money. Besides, your poets
have to skulk in the country, and even if they stay in town, who cares
about them, or goes to see them? Of course, as before said, if a man
cannot be an orator, why, let him be a poet. But eloquence is as great a
thing from the merely literary point of view, and far more useful.
Footnote 372:
I say this in some fear and trembling, with such an authority as the
late Mr Nettleship against me. But I have been accustomed for a good
many years to compare styles in more languages than one or two, and I
think these most unlike. Even the argument that a man may suit his
style to his work is not conclusive, for here it is the _general_
unlikeness of tone and flavour, which cannot be wholly disguised, that
decides me.
Footnote 373:
_Causidici._
Maternus takes this diatribe quite coolly, and replies readily enough.
He has had some little experience, he says, and some little fame in both
oratory and poetry: he does not care for the publicity (so precious to
Aper) which the former brings, and, holding the contrary opinion to his
friend’s, he thinks the country life far higher and better than that of
the town. The great poets of old, if you reckon mere fame, are at least
the equals of the orators, and (here we come to another point of contact
with Quintilian) there are more nowadays who run down Cicero than
Virgil. The unquiet and anxious life of the orator has no charms for
him. He wants neither more money nor more power: and he would have
himself figured on his tomb, not serious and frowning, but merry and
crowned. At the peroration of Maternus comes in Vipsanius[374] Messalla,
who, being informed by Secundus of the nature of the dispute, expresses
his approval of it, but hints a strong preference for the _older_
orators. Aper catches this up rather hotly, after his manner: and after
a little general conversation puts the obvious _aporia_, Who _are_ the
old orators? running over the history of Roman oratory, with some not
uninteresting criticisms, and a strong contention in favour of his own
contemporaries. Maternus and Messalla take up the same matter from other
sides, and the dialogue ends.
Footnote 374:
Or Vipstanus, as they read now.
This piece at first promises considerably, and it cannot be said to
perform badly in any place; but its conclusion and middle part are of
less importance to us than seemed likely at the beginning. The
panegyrics of Oratory and Poetry respectively, in which Aper and
Maternus indulge, might well have led to a fuller and more searching
analysis of the respective literary merits of the two—instead of which
we have from Aper only a rather Philistine exaltation of the superior
use and profit of oratory, from Maternus a generous, but slightly vague
and rhetorical, exaltation of the qualities of poetry and the delights
of the poet. From the entrance of Messalla the piece becomes little more
than a contribution to the everlasting ancient-and-modern quarrel on the
one hand, and to the history of Roman oratory on the other. Yet in Aper,
at least, we have a vigorous projection of the positive Roman spirit,
combined with a fancy for pregnant and precious style; in Maternus, an
indication of that mainly dilettante and bookish temper which the
satirists blame in their literary, and especially their poetical,
contemporaries; and in Messalla (who is taken by the partisans of the
Tacitean authorship to represent Tacitus himself), an instance of that
looking back to better times which is, at any rate sometimes, if not
invariably, a token of literary decadence.
Here again, as in the case of Cicero, it is necessary to break the rule
of not entering upon controversy, lest by silence one [Sidenote: _Mr
Nettleship’s estimate of it._] incur the blame of neglecting more than
competent authority. As in that other case, Mr Nettleship’s estimate of
the critical value of the _Dialogus_ (which he unhesitatingly attributes
to Tacitus) is higher, though not so much higher, than mine. He ranks it
with, but above, the _Brutus_, as “the two great documents of Latin
criticism”: I should put both as such (though Cicero and Tacitus were
both of them far cleverer than Quintilian) below the _Institutes_, and
also below other things.
The reason of the difference somewhat consoles me for the fact. Mr
Nettleship was evidently bitten with that noble error, the belief that
criticism of literature must be criticism of something that is _not_
literature. Tacitus seems to him to ask “under what social conditions
great writing and great speaking arise,”—a most interesting question,
but an excursus from criticism proper. “He sees clearly, and this is the
important point which characterises the treatise, that literature must
be taken and judged as the expression of national life, not as a matter
of form and of scholastic teaching.”
For “scholastic teaching” so be it: that also is extraneous to the
central matter. But on the other point one must throw away the scabbard.
Never will literature be judged adequately—seldom will it be, even
within limits, judged accurately—as “an expression of national life.”
From this and kindred fallacies come, and always have come, a brood of
monsters, the folly, almost as great as its opposite, that “a poet must
be a good man,” the folly that you can judge literature by remembering
that there is much water-meadow in England[375]—hundreds of others. That
literature is an expression of national life nobody need deny—that
national life can never be estimated without an estimate of literature
is, if anything, still more true. But literature is first of all
literature, and it must be judged, like all other things, by the laws of
its essence, and not by the laws of even its inseparable accidents.
Footnote 375:
Those who have an accurate memory of M. Taine’s _English Literature_
and of his _English Notes_ will not object to this apparent
impossibility.
How different was Mr Nettleship’s point of view may be judged from the
mere fact that he actually passes over the first fifteen chapters, which
to me seem to contain most of the literary criticism of the piece. Nor
can I (though he himself fully admits the oratorical preoccupation both
here and still more in Cicero) help thinking that the substitution of
the English “style” for “eloquentia” and “oratio” amounts to a certain
begging of the question. Much that is true of the orator is no doubt
also true of the writer, but not all: and the connection with life, with
public national life, on which such stress is here laid, undoubtedly
applies to oratory, whether of the pulpit, the senate-house, or the bar,
far more than it applies to books. The most _literary_ side of oratory
(I am not ashamed to make the concession) is the lowest—that of pure
epideictic. But then, that is because oratory is, after all, only
applied, not pure literature.
We see, then, from this interesting piece, almost as much as from the
poets and Pliny, that the age was, so to say, poly-historic [Sidenote:
_The general literary taste of the Silver Age._] rather than original,
and that, while it was no stranger to the very sound opinion that the
goodness of a thing must be measured in its own kind, it still had not
cleared up its mind about the relative value of different kinds.
Although oratory had, with the rarest exceptions, become the mere art of
the advocate, or the mere business of the travelling or resident
rhetorician, it still had a most disproportionate position. Although the
satirist laughed at the custom of writing artificial Greek epics and
tragedies, it is clear that these still held the highest place in the
general opinion. The bilingual practice, not merely in these but in
other kinds, of itself inferred a certain lack of “race,” vernacularity,
genuineness, in either literature. Some kinds of letters were still
hardly known; Pliny’s own indulgent reference to _fabellæ_ is all the
more interesting that we are not so very far from the _Lucius_ and the
_Golden Ass_. In almost all departments odd conventions and assumptions
prevailed, such as the necessity of loose subjects, and even of coarse
language, in _vers de société_. And it was probably the working of this,
and of the strict ideas as to certain forms and their laws, that caused
the jack-of-all-trade tendency to which we have more than once referred.
If the rules are pretty clearly laid down, and if you are a man of
reasonable learning and intelligence, attention to such rules will
secure success. There is no reason why as Pliny himself seems to have
thought in his own case and the cases of many of his friends, you should
not be at once an orator and a historian, an epic poet and a comic, a
dramatist and an epigram-writer. And the age still believed devoutly in
the rules, though free-lances like Martial might kick at them in verse,
and though Quintilian, with his unfailing good sense, might hint that
there were far too many Figures, and that the subdivisions of Greek
rhetoric were in many cases idle.
In nothing, perhaps, is this tendency of ancient criticism better shown
than in its attitude to the question of Faultlessness. [Sidenote:
“_Faultlessness._”] Of course, on this question there were two parties,
with many subdivisions in each. There were the extreme classics of that
classic time, the wooden persons of whom Martial tells us, for whom it
was enough if a thing was not “correct,” to whom a fault was a
fault—indelible, incompensable, to be judged off-hand and Draconically.
And at the other side there were the sensible persons, like Quintilian,
like Pliny, like Martial himself (not to mention Longinus, whom some
would have to be their contemporary), who contended that faults might be
made up by beauties, who sneered at _mere_ “faultlessness.” But no one,
not Longinus himself, seems to have taken up the position which the
boldest and most consistent (it would be question-begging to say the
best) modern critics take, that the whole calculus is wrong—that this
notion of “faults” made up by “beauties,” of a balance-sheet, debtor and
creditor, with the result struck one way or the other, is wholly a
misconception. Two, I suppose, of the most representative passages in
English poetry touching this subject are Lear’s apostrophe to the
elements, and Milton’s episode of Sin and Death. The extreme stop-watch
and foot-rule critics of the first century, like those of the
eighteenth, and, perhaps, some (though they are not a prevailing party)
even at the present day would call these undoubted faults, both of them
sinning against the law or conception of measure in language, and the
second offending still more gravely against that or those of decency,
propriety, the becoming, in imagery, subject, language. The defenders,
or those who might have been the defenders, of Shakespeare and Milton,
from the other point of view, would admit in varying degrees that the
things were faulty; but would urge the pathos of the first, the gloomy
magnificence of the second, the force and power and grandeur of both, as
_redeeming_ them—in a degree and to an extent again varying with the
individual critic.
Now, a thoroughgoing “Romantic” and comparative critic of the modern
type, while he would, of course, scout the first party, would be loath
to adopt either the method or the exact conclusions of the second. “Let
us clear our minds of cant,” he would say. “These things are not
‘faults’ at all. They do not leave the court pardoned on consideration
of the previous or subsequent good behaviour of the culprit, but simply
because there is no stain on his or their character. There is no need to
plead extenuating circumstances: we stand for acquittal _sans phrase_.
These things might be faults elsewhere, in other poems: they are not so
here. They are the absolutely right things in the right place, producing
the right effect, driven home by the right power to the right mark.
Shakespeare and Milton _have_ faults—the somewhat excessive tendency of
the first to play on words out of season as well as in, and the
deplorable propensity of the second to joke when joking was absolutely
impossible to him. But these are not of the character of the Longinian
or Quintilianian ‘fault’ at all. They do not endear the poets; they make
them less good; we wish they _were_ faultless in this sense. Your
‘faultlessness’ simply means that the man has that most hopeless of all
faults—mediocrity: and your ‘fault’ is simply derived from the existence
in your mind of a more or less complicated set of rules which have no
real existence. Nay,” he might proceed, “the extremest classical men are
sounder in a way than you are. They are right in thinking that a fault
_is_ a fault, and can never be ‘redeemed,’ much less purged, by a
beauty. They are only wrong in not knowing what beauties or what faults
really are.”
Now, I do not say whether the criticism of antiquity was right or wrong
in not taking this view. But I think there is absolutely no evidence
that it was ever taken at this time.
In some other agreements and differences we find ourselves more at home.
The everlasting questions of archaic or modern [Sidenote: _Ornate or
plain style._] language, of conceited or direct thought, of ornate or
plain style, occupied the critics of the end of the first and the
beginning of the second century, just as they have occupied those of
more recent pasts, are occupying those of the present, and will occupy
those of the future. As has been indicated in detail, there was not here
quite the critical unanimity which some periods have shown on these and
similar questions. Among the general there was something like an
agreement; it seems undeniable that the popular taste of Roman audiences
at recitations ran towards elaborate and slightly archaic phraseology,
to Greek literary subjects, and (both in verse-epics and tragedies and
in prose declamations) to topsy-turvy conceit. This was evidently
frequent in verse, though time has carried away most traces of it; and
in prose it is not entirely alien from the magnificent phrase-making of
Tacitus, it shows itself amply in the rhetoric of Seneca the son, as in
the earlier rhetorical examples of Seneca the father, is almost openly
defended by Pliny, and seems to receive a certain amount of “colour” (as
the rhetoricians themselves would have said) even from some passages of
Quintilian. It is very noteworthy that all these prose-writers incline
more or less to the artificial side, while the verse-satirists argue and
sally for terseness, elegance, concinnity. And the cause may not
improbably be sought in those very declamations of which mention has
been so often made. We have no enormous stock of them, which is not to
be regretted; but in the surviving examples we have material which is
welcome in its way, and which amply proves what has been said.[376]
Footnote 376:
I am not sure that I should have given any place here to Cornelius
Fronto, if his ticket of admission had not been (rather
contumeliously) countersigned by Mr Nettleship. The low opinion which
Marcus Aurelius seems to have had of literature may possibly have been
in part excused by his preceptor’s utterances on the subject. He
appears to have been an eminent representative of the “labelling”
school of critics. Lucilius is “gracile” (this is not quite Horace’s
view), Albucius and Pacuvius mediocre, Accius unequal, Ennius
multiform. Sallust writes history _structe_, Pictor _incondite_,
Claudius _lepide_, Antias _invenuste_, Sisenna _longinque_, Cato
_verbis multijugis_, Cœlius _singulis_. One cannot help “nodding
approval and saying, ‘This is very satisfactory to know,’” as Lady Kew
did when she was informed that “Alfred was a trump, and Ethel a brick,
and Barnes a snob.” But if Mr Nettleship thought that æsthetic, as
opposed to philosophical, criticism could not get beyond this system
of tickets-of-leave, he was surely mistaken.
CHAPTER III.
QUINTILIAN.
THE ‘INSTITUTES’—PREFACE—BOOK I.: ELEMENTARY EDUCATION AND
GRAMMAR—BOOKS II.-VII. ONLY RELEVANT NOW AND THEN—HOW TO LECTURE
ON AN AUTHOR—WIT—BOOK VIII.: STYLE; PERSPICUITY; ELEGANCE—BOOKS
VIII., IX.: TROPES AND FIGURES—COMPOSITION—PROSE RHYTHM—BOOK X.:
SURVEY OF CLASSICAL LITERATURE—GREEK: HOMER AND OTHER EPIC
POETS—THE LYRISTS—DRAMA—THE HISTORIANS—THE ORATORS AND
PHILOSOPHERS—LATIN: VIRGIL—OTHER EPIC AND DIDACTIC POETS—ELEGIAC
AND MISCELLANEOUS—DRAMA—HISTORY—ORATORY: CICERO—PHILOSOPHY: CICERO
AND SENECA—MINOR COUNSEL OF THE TENTH BOOK—BOOKS XI. AND XII.—THE
STYLES OF ORATORY—"ATTICISM"—LITERARY QUALITY OF GREEK AND
LATIN—QUINTILIAN’S CRITICAL “ETHOS.”
In passing, say, from Cicero, the chief prose Latin critic of
præ-Augustan times, to Quintilian, the chief of post-Augustan, and
[Sidenote: _The_ Institutes.] indeed of Latin critics of all dates, we
come to a man of much less genius no doubt, and, in particular, of far
less creative literary power, but still to one who, for our special
purpose, has some very considerable advantages. It is not merely that
the Spanish-Roman is a professional critic, as well as a
rhetorician—that he is as much _the_ professional critic of Latin as
Dionysius of Halicarnassus (whom he much resembles, and to whom, as has
been said, he possibly owes not a little) is of Greek. He has over the
greater writer (whom he admires so generously) the further advantage of
complete freedom from that touch of dilettantism (one is sometimes
almost tempted to use a harsher word and call it quackery) which besets
Cicero whenever he is not actually pleading or debating, and which is
not invariably lost even then. Further, Quintilian is the only critic of
antiquity (for even Longinus, as we saw, merely glances at the subject)
who seriously takes the two languages, seriously compares them, and, by
the help of the comparison, acquires a view-point over literature as
such—not merely as Greek or Latin literature—which was shut to all his
predecessors and most of his followers. If the _Rhetoric_ and the
_Poetics_ of Aristotle form the great book of critical method for
ancient times, if the Περὶ Ὕψους is the great book of their critical
inspiration; the _Institutes of Oratory_ contain the fullest, the most
intelligent, the most satisfactory applications of criticism to
literature, as it presented itself to an intelligent and thoroughly
educated person, whose eyes were sharpened by long expert use, at the
end of the first century, when, except for a few belated authors, mostly
of curiosities, the list of the great writers of antiquity was all but
closed. The book[377] is extremely well written; it is, with a few
_cruces_, remarkably clear, and its range and thoroughness leave
practically nothing to desire.
Footnote 377:
Whether its correct title be _Institutiones Oratoriæ_, or _De
Institutione Oratoria_, and whether this be better translated
_Principles of Oratory_, or _Of the Education of an Orator_, are
questions not very important _to us_. The sense of “Institutes” may be
illustrated by the old division of academical chairs in, for instance,
Medicine into “Institutes” (_i.e._, “Theory”) and “Practice.” But
Quintilian includes a good deal of the practical side. All the
editions of Quintilian are either antiquated by, or more or less based
upon, that of Spalding and Zumpt, with Lexicon, &c., by Bonnell,
Leipsic, 1798-1834. I find the little Tauchnitz print of the text
(ibid., 1829) very useful. The Bohn translation, by the ill-starred J.
S. Watson, though not impeccable, will serve English readers well
enough.
This wide range of it (which, according to different, but, in each case,
defensible interpretations of its title, busies itself with the whole
education of an orator, or with the whole theory and practice of
oratory) naturally makes it include much which does not fall strictly
within our subject. But nearly the whole of three books, the eighth,
ninth, and tenth, and a large and important section of the twelfth, are
devoted directly to that subject; while there are references to it
almost throughout. We shall therefore, as we did in the case of
Aristotle and Longinus, give a kind of running abstract of the whole,
dwelling very briefly on the irrelevant, somewhat more fully on the
partly relevant, fully on the rest, and returning to the consideration
of special points later.
In a sort of Advertisement, to and for the use of his publisher Trypho,
and in a prefatory dedication to his friend Marcellus [Sidenote:
_Preface._] Victorius, Quintilian gives some information about the
origin and object of the work. From this we learn, among other things,
that part-cause at least of its actual appearance was the fact, not
unknown in more modern times, of unauthorised publication of his
lectures by note-taking pupils.
The first book is devoted to the subject of the education of boys from
the earliest age, a subject on which Quintilian speaks [Sidenote: _Book
I. Elementary Education_] with much knowledge and good sense, as well as
kindliness. But from this he soon passes to Grammar, and his importance
for us begins. For his treatment of the subject is quite in the larger
and humaner sense, insisting from the first on critical reading, though
he seems, as indeed we should expect, to regard the “desperate hook” of
the extremer kind of verbal critic with little favour. It is noteworthy
that he alleges music to be necessary, because the grammarian has to
speak of metre and rhythm. And passing rapidly from considerations of
orthography, right pronunciation, and audience, he arrives at the
all-important subject of “correctness,” and of its attainment,
negatively by the avoidance of barbarisms and solecisms, positively by
the selection of the best words in the best arrangement. Observations of
special importance in this context may be cited: That the word in itself
(_i.e._, out of connection) has no merit except its inherent euphony;
that (a most pregnant remark) it is often difficult to distinguish
Faults from Figures of speech; and some exceedingly [Sidenote: _and
Grammar._] interesting, but also more than ordinarily difficult, remarks
on tone and accent-variation. In all these grammatical notes, which are
pretty full and numerous, and often very curious—showing that, as he
himself says pleasantly, though he is not writing a treatise on Grammar,
yet as it lay in his way he did not like not to be polite to it—there is
a pervading quality of not at all Philistine common-sense which shows
the best side of the Roman temperament. Although Quintilian acknowledges
the convenience of Greek for terminology, and makes fairly free use of
the terms, it is quite evident that he has (long before he formulates it
later) a profound and very wholesome distrust of the Greek rhetorical
practice of splitting a thing up, naming the splinters, and then passing
on, as if a real, solid, and final examination had been attained. And
the same quality appears eminently in the summing up of his discourse on
words, “Custom in speaking I shall call the agreement of the educated,
as custom in living is the agreement of the good.”
Remarks on orthography follow, and some on reading, valuable, though not
so valuable, as those on the same [Sidenote: _Books II.-VII. only
relevant now and then._] subject which come later. And then he passes to
certain of the _progymnasmata_ of the Greek rhetoricians, fables, uses,
sentences, and “ethologies,” which, though they have puzzled some, are
clearly the same as the _ethopœiæ_ of Hermogenes and his
fellows.[378] All these are, in fact, exercises in composition. The rest
of the book is occupied with the discussion of other subjects of the
school curriculum, subsidiary to rhetoric. The second book continues the
subject of Composition, but with more special reference to Oratory
proper—a tendency which naturally increases; and for some five or six
books the technicalities of the rhetoric-school and the courts have the
better of literature. There are, however, two exceptions, which require
notice—the first a remarkable passage[379] on reading or lecturing on
authors.
Footnote 378:
For these technical terms _v. ante_, bk. i. chap. iv., or the Index.
Footnote 379:
II. v. 5-9.
“But”—he has just ruled out the explanation of the mere meaning of
uncommon words as below the duties of a Professor of Rhetoric—"to point
out the merits, and if it so happen, the faults, is the properest of all
things for the profession and for the promise by which he holds himself
out as a master of eloquence...." (He should make the students read in
turn, and then), "after setting forth the case on which the oration was
composed (for thus it will be more clearly understood), he should leave
nothing unnoticed which may be noteworthy in the invention or the
elocution, pointing out the manner of conciliating the jury in the
proem, the clearness, conciseness, persuasive force of the narration,
the occasional design and hidden artifice (for that alone is true art
here, which can only be understood by an artist), what foresight there
is in division, what subtle and thronging[380] argumentation, the
strength of the inspiration, the attraction of the winning passages, the
roughness[381] of the objurgation, and the humour of the jokes; how,
finally, the man [Sidenote: _How to lecture on an author._] shows
mastery of feeling, makes his way into the very heart, and adjusts the
minds of the jury to his own contention. Then, as for style, we must
point out what words are proper, ornate, sublime, where the
amplification is to be praised, what excellence there is in the contrary
direction,[382] what is ingeniously transferred; what the figurativeness
of the words is, how smooth and squared, yet manly, the composition."
And then he proceeds to recommend the occasional selection of passages
which are not to be praised—the exhibition, in short, of a rhetorical
helotry.
Footnote 380:
_Crebra_, as it were “attacking on all sides,” “redoubling blows.”
Footnote 381:
_Asperitas_, which some would rather translate “trenchancy.” But there
was an idea in ancient times (not quite unknown in modern) that in
hostile argument politeness (“treating your adversary with respect,”
as Johnson said) was out of place.
Footnote 382:
_Quæ virtus ei contraria_, that is to say, I suppose, brevity and
pregnancy. “Transferred” just below, in the sense of _translatio_,
“metaphor,” “what ingenuity of metaphor.”
No reader, I hope, will need to have it pointed out to him, at any great
length, how exactly this corresponds to the practice of the critical
lecturer or reviewer, as it ought to be, in regard to all kinds of
literature, and not oratory merely. Such a lecturer, or such a reviewer,
can do no better than grave these words of Quintilian on his mind, and
follow their directions as best he can, whensoever an author is to be
expounded on the platform or reviewed in the column. It scarcely
requires more than the easiest and most obvious substitutions and
amplifications to make the passage a manual in miniature of all
criticism, be it of prose or poetry.
The other passage is the very curious and interesting section in the
third chapter of the Sixth book, on Wit.[383] As is well known, this is
one of the points on which ancient (especially Latin) and modern taste
are most out of harmony. Except [Sidenote: _Wit._] Aristophanes at one
end, with his alternations of outrageous farce and keen poetry, and
Lucian at the other, with the innocent-seeming flow of his white-hot
irony, there are perhaps not even any Greek authors whose command of our
risibility is absolutely sure; and the average Greek joke, as reported
by the anecdote-mongers, is to us but a vapid thing. In Latin it is even
worse. Plautus pretty generally, but in a limited way; Catullus, when he
exchanges passion for humour; sometimes Horace, for a pleasant Augustan
“wit of the town”; Martial for a too often naughty _persiflage_,—these
we have little doubt about. But Terence, even if we shut our eyes to his
borrowed capital, is but comedy-and-water; Cicero jokes without indeed
much difficulty on his part, but with surprisingly little effect on
ours; and the _average_ Latin jest is far worse than the average Greek.
Of course this is all natural enough; the jest always, save in certain
transcendences, lies more in the ear of the hearer than the charm or
quality of any other kind of literature. But it is all the more
interesting and valuable to have a set discussion on the comic by a man
of immense reading, excellent taste, and great acuteness. Besides,
Quintilian’s Spanish blood or birth may very likely have given him a
somewhat wider and more flexible appreciation of humour than the “firm
Roman” wit itself allowed, or at least encouraged.
Footnote 383:
_Virtus quæ risum judicis movet_, VI. iii.
After mentioning, as a generally accepted thing, the deficiency of the
comic element in Demosthenes, and the superabundant quantity and
inferior quality of it in Cicero (it must be remembered that Quintilian
had the Tullian _Three Books of Jests_, which time has mercifully hidden
from us), he passes to the general question, and accepts the almost
universal classical opinion that laughter has always something low about
it.[384] In this, we know, Plato and Aristotle both agreed; it was a
sort of postulate of all Greek philosophy, and though almost certainly
false, was excused, partly by the extreme licence of the Comic Muse in
ancient times, and partly by the rarity of humour in the best sense, and
the almost non-existence of Romantic Comedy. He observes, however,
acutely enough, on the insufficiency of the general explanations of the
origin of laughter (an insufficiency which has certainly not been filled
up to the present day), and shows that urbane shrewdness, which is one
of his best points, by questioning whether deliberate cultivation of
jesting as an art is an altogether satisfactory thing. But it is in his
subsequent remarks on the kind of jesting admissible in oratory (we
might here at least substitute, with hardly any wrong, “in literature”)
that his chief merit lies. On the dangerous business of verbal
distinction between _venustum_, _salsum_, _facetum_ he is luminous and
useful; while his remarks, in two different places, on _urbanitas_ are
not far from a _locus classicus_, and those[385] on the special treatise
of Domitius Marsus on that topic have the best qualities of a
review—that is to say, of the kind of review that one sees too seldom.
Footnote 384:
_Hoc semper humile._
It is not, however, till the eighth book is reached (for the seventh,
except in some remarks on arrangement, is almost [Sidenote: _Book VIII.:
Style._] purely legal) that we find Quintilian, for a considerable time,
at close quarters with our special subject. After summarising with
remarkable clearness (so that there is nowhere any better conspectus, in
little, of the matter) the earlier and technically rhetorical part of
the _Institutes_, he comes to the third part, which he calls
“elocution.”[386] This is no other than the _lexis_, which Aristotle
treats not indeed perfunctorily (it was not in Aristotle to be guilty of
that crime), but with a sort of apologetic impatience, as one turning
back to the Court of the Gentiles after visiting the Holy of Holies. The
point of view, with some four hundred years of great work, not merely in
oratory, but in general literature, behind the critic, and with the new
requirement of comparison between Greek and Latin brought in, has
changed remarkably. Instead of a popular and slightly vulgar appendix,
it is (Quintilian tells us that all orators agreed with him) the most
difficult part of the subject. At the same time, he has not attained to
the almost perfect _parrhesia_ of Longinus; he dares not tell us (though
we can see that he was sometimes half minded to do so) that “beautiful
words are the light of thought.” He has the stereotyped caution—very
wholesome in its way—to those who neglect things and attend to words.
But he will not allow words to be neglected in their turn, and as a
matter of fact perhaps the greater, certainly the most interesting and
original, part of the five books which follow is occupied with what,
disguise itself as it may under the term of “elocution,” is really
“style.” Not, be it added, the mere fritter and foppery which sometimes
receives that name, but literary manner and art in the great and wide
sense—the proper subject, that is to say, of literary criticism.
Footnote 385:
§§ 101-112.
Footnote 386:
Some moderns (notably Campbell in his _Philosophy of Rhetoric_) have
followed Quintilian in this use of the word for “style.” But the
accepted sense in English is too well settled for this to be
permissible.
After this proem, Quintilian begins regularly on the subject—φράσις in
Greek, _elocutio_ in Latin—referring to his remarks [Sidenote:
_Perspicuity._] in the first book (_vide supra_) on the avoidance of
Barbarism and Solecism, and glancing at Livy’s Patavinity, and at the
alleged over-Atticism of Theophrastus. He has, however, a good deal more
to say on the actual lexicon; and in the course of it sharply
perstringes that sort of affected periphrasis which the eighteenth
century (though it thought it knew its Quintilian) so dearly loved. “The
Iberian shrub” for “broom,” the “fishes solidified by brine” which he
laughs at, are Thomson in his worst mood, Armstrong, Mason, even
Wordsworth at times, to the very life, and Delille to more than the
life—of which there is not much in that famous Abbé. The necessity of
making the epithet fit the noun is excellently inculcated; the use of
archaic technical terms not excessively denounced. But I grieve that
Quintilian joins the herd in condemning Parenthesis, a heavenly maid
whom there have been many and great ones, from Herodotus to De Quincey,
to love, but whom few have dared to praise as she deserves. It is true
that she speaks chiefly to the sapient; and the insipient accordingly do
not love her.
Passing from perspicuity to “elegance,” as our own eighteenth-century
rhetoricians would have said, Quintilian is equally admirable; but, as
before, a certain amount of “hedging” is perceptible in him. True
beauty, he thinks, is never separable [Sidenote: _Elegance._] from
utility. It is a noble sentiment, and to a very large extent a true one;
but it may be questioned whether the greatest part of its truth is not
esoteric—whether it does not arise from the suppressed rider, “because
true beauty, in merely being beautiful, _is_ of the highest utility.”
He himself, however, perhaps did not care to penetrate so far with his
analysis; at any rate he does not, and so he rather beats about the
bush. Grace of style will captivate; all the great men, Aristotle no
less than Cicero, say that we ought to excite admiration. Only we must
be “manly, sir, manly”; our embellishment must not be effeminate—it must
be in good taste. The three kinds of oratory, too, will admit of
different degrees—even different kinds of embellishment. Epideictic
almost demands ostentation of ornament; debating sometimes permits it;
it must be far more cautiously used in forensic speech. Even words must
be most cautiously chosen—harshness, a touch of the ludicrous, and other
effects, unless they are deliberately invited, must be carefully
shunned. The archaic (from this point of view there is no real
contradiction with the former, _v. supra_) will add picturesqueness, but
we must walk warily with it, we must not say _antigerio_ for _valde_.
Here, perhaps, one may presume to differ with Quintilian, who extends
his condemnation to the beautiful word _ærumna_. He may have been led to
dislike it by that sensitiveness of his ear to the grunt of the “um,”
which we shall notice later, but which ought here to have been appeased
by the musical syllables on either side.
Proceeding from individual words to connected speech, he has some
capital cautions on unlucky conjunctions of words, suggesting double
meaning—with, however, the still wiser reflection that if you are always
looking out for this, you had better hold your tongue altogether. A
handful of the rhetorical tickets—_tapeinosis_,[387] _meiosis_,[388]
Homœology, Macrology, pleonasm, _cacozelon_,[389] and so forth—is
taken up, and they are shaken out and shown to be at least susceptible
of useful application, while in the passages that follow (the conclusion
of the third chapter) some celebrated _loci_[390] are severally
examined, with an admirable combination of verbal acuteness and general
grasp. The shorter fourth chapter deals in the same way with the
favourite figure of Amplification and its opposite Diminution, as
exemplified in chosen illustrations. Then he turns (and we must remember
that the turn is not arbitrary nor desultory, but follows the divisions
of the older Rhetoric) to those sentences or _gnomæ_, as the Greeks
termed them, which had such an effect on ancient audiences, and which,
_mutatis mutandis_, are not without effect on modern readers. We have
seen very recently how the mere trick of what may be called
“topsy-turvyfying” accepted maxims has, not once or twice, but again and
again, managed to secure an audience.
Footnote 387:
The use of undignified expression, as “a _wart_ of stone” on a
mountain.
Footnote 388:
Not in its usual equivalence with _litotes_, but in the sense of
cursory and elliptic reference.
Footnote 389:
Affected excess in _any_ direction, whether ornate or plain.
Footnote 390:
Chiefly from Virgil and Cicero.
This section ends with a passage of such weight and importance as
general criticism that we must give it nearly _in extenso_:—
“But there will be no end to it if I follow out individual forms of
corrupt taste. It is better to turn to what is more necessary. There are
two opposite opinions on this subject; some hardly pay attention to
anything but ‘sentences’—some utterly condemn them; and with neither do
I entirely agree. If sentences are too crowded they get in each other’s
way, just as, with all crops and trees, nothing can grow to a proper
size if it lacks room. Nor does anything stand out in a picture where
there is no shading; so that artists, when they deal with many things in
one canvas, leave spaces between them lest shade and object fall
together. Moreover, this same profusion cuts the style too short; for
each sentence stands by itself,[391] and there is, as it were, a fresh
beginning after it. Whence the composition becomes too disjointed,
consisting not of integral members, but of separate scraps, inasmuch as
these things, each rounded and cut off from the rest, refuse
conjunction.[392] Besides, the colour of the speech becomes, as it were,
spotty with blotches, bright indeed, but too many and too different. For
though a selvage and fringes of purple, in their proper place, light up
the gown, a garment speckled with patches of colour is certainly
unbecoming. Wherefore, though these sentences may seem to flash and to
strike in some sense, yet they are lights which may be likened, not to
flame but to sparks amid smoke: they are not even seen when the whole
speech is luminous, as the stars themselves cease to be visible in
sunshine. And, rising only with fitful and feeble effort, they are but
unequal, and, as it were, broken, so as to attain neither the admiration
due to things eminent nor the grace of a close uniformity” (VIII. v.
25-29).
Footnote 391:
_Subsistit_: or perhaps “comes to a halt,” “stops dead.”
Footnote 392:
_Insistere invicem nequeant_: or perhaps “are unable to lean upon each
other,” “to come close to each other,” “to stand in each other’s
shoes.”
The end of the Eighth book, and the beginning of the Ninth, deal with
the subject—the all too famous and long-studied [Sidenote: _Books VIII.,
IX.: Tropes and Figures._] subject—of Tropes and Figures, which
Quintilian distinguishes from one another a little artificially, and
with a kind of confession that the distinction is sometimes
correspondent to no real difference. It is not till rather late in his
handling (IX. i. 22) that he makes that scornful reference to the Greek
abundance in this kind which has been itself more than once referred to
here. He is bound to say that figures are by no means so numerous as
some would make them out. Nor have the names, which the Greeks can botch
up at any occasion, the least influence with him.[393] And he is
particularly earnest in condemning the practice of allotting a Figure to
every affection of the mind—a practice certainly absurd enough, though
no very unnatural consequence of the constitution of “figures” as real
things.[394]
Footnote 393:
_Neque enim me movent nomina illa, quæ fingere utique Græcis
promptissimum est._
Footnote 394:
And, it may be added, pretty closely connected with the mania for
insisting that literary criticism shall perpetually mix itself up with
ethics and psychology.
He himself, however, is by no means stingy of accepted Tropes and
Figures, though he treats them, with his usual common-sense, as names,
not things. The first place, in his discussion and enumeration of the
matter, is occupied as usual by Metaphor, a mode of speech so prevailing
in both senses that, here at least, no objection can be made to its
constitution into a quasi-entity. He calls it “the most frequent and by
far the most beautiful,” points out, of course, that it is only Simile
in another and shorter form, and illustrates its kinds by examples in
the best critical style. He specifies these kinds; but once more _not_
to distinguish for the mere sake o£ distinguishing. In fact, here as
elsewhere, we may notice that Quintilian, half unconsciously, stops
short at the points where Rhetoric parts company with literary
criticism, and becomes mere pseudo-science. From Metaphor he goes,
treating them in the same way, as with all the tropes and figures that
he mentions, to Synecdoche, Metonymy, Hypallage; and has some good
remarks on the fine but real distinctions between the indulgences in
these flights and sleights which are, and those which are not,
permissible to the orator, whom he practically identifies with the
prose-writer by contrasting him with the poet. Antonomasia, which is of
the same family, follows, and then a rather disappointing treatment of
Onomatopœia. One sees here the Roman, and the late Roman, but also
the yearner after better things, in the observation that “this, which
the Greeks thought one of the greatest excellences, is scarcely allowed
_us_.” “We do not dare to form a new word,” he says, and tells us that
even the formation of such words, on strict analogy of others, was
scarcely ventured on,[395] and that the inability to compound, which has
so notoriously manifested itself later in her greatest daughter, was
beginning to appear in Latin. In short, Latin had reached a stationary
state—the state of the nation _qui cesse de prendre_, if not quite of
that _qui commence à rendre_. It had to become the picturesque and
delightful, if perhaps too much crossed and blended, Low Latin of the
Dark and Middle Ages before it could recover itself.
Footnote 395:
This famous horror of the _insolens_, the _inusitatum verbum_, is the
very dominant note of all Latin criticism, and will recur constantly.
Catachresis, Metalepsis, the ornamental and “perpetual” epithet follow;
and then we come to the fruitful subject of Allegory.
Quintilian is perhaps not exactly the writer from whom we should expect
a thoroughly satisfactory treatment of this great subject—a subject
which, far more than metaphor, escapes the state of a mere rhetorical
ticket, and challenges that of a real literary quality or kind. Although
it is unjust to represent him as merely conversant in details and afraid
to rise, a certain timidity serves as the Nemesis of his common-sense.
Besides, his materials were not favourable: the great allegorical style
of Plato had long passed, not to be revived; the magnificent exuberance
of mediæval fancy in this kind was far in the future; the exercises
which Quintilian had before him were either mere phrases in the poets,
tedious didactic things in the philosophers, or such easy examples as
Horace’s “O navis,” which he quotes. We have therefore no such handling
of the matter as we might have had from Longinus. And when we are told
that the most ornamental kind of writing by far is that in which the
three figures—simile, metaphor, and allegory—are mixed, we seem to see
the worst side of Rhetoric as we seldom do in Quintilian. Once more
there arises the picture of a dismal sort of library-laboratory, with
bottles and drawers full of ready cold-drawn or ready short-cut
figures—of the literary dispenser, with his apron on and his balance
adjusted, taking a handful of this, two ounces of that, three drachms of
the other, and compounding a draught or a pill to be exhibited in the
forum, or the lecture-room, or the courts of justice, as the case may
be. But he recovers himself soon, if only by the dry fashion in which he
observes that, if anybody does not know it, the Greeks call certain
kinds of allegory sarcasm, asteism, antiphrasis, and parœmia, to
which it may be well to add mycterism,[396] a kind of derision which is
dissembled, but not altogether concealed—as very neatly by M. Fabius
Quintilianus in the passage before us.
Footnote 396:
_I.e._, suppressed sneering.
Periphrasis, Hyperbaton, Hyperbole close the chapter, and the book, and
Quintilian shines on the latter, while at the end he refers to his lost
dialogue _On the Causes of the Corruption of Eloquence_, one of the
things of its kind which we must regret most.
The Ninth book opens with the distinction between Trope and Figure,[397]
and with some general remarks on the latter word which illustrate rather
amusingly the Delilah-effect of it on those who use it. We should not
have been sorry to have had that treatise of Apollodorus which
Quintilian seems only to have known through Cæcilius (the writer on the
Sublime), and in which the author by no means frivolously argued that,
in the common sense of Figure, everything is a figure, and the
enumeration of figures is impossible and useless. We should have thanked
Time for sparing that other of the Homeromastix, in which Zoilus, with
better sense apparently than when he talked of matters too high for him,
limited the word Figure to a phrase, in which the apparent or first
meaning is different from the second or real. And Quintilian himself,
when he comes to the distinction between Figures of Thought and Figures
of Speech, illustrates (whether purposely or not it is difficult to say)
the purely childish side of the matter, by remarking that in one of the
Verrines, _jamjam_ and _liberum_ are figures of speech. For, as the
commentators have gravely worked it out, _jamjam_ is a Palillogia or
repetition, and _liberum_, contracted from _libeirum_, is an instance of
Syncope. Verily, one exclaims, there is much to be said for Apollodorus!
And when he further observes that the greatest power of Figures is to
render oratory attractive, one feels inclined to say, “The figure is
nothing, and the power of making figures is less; but there _are_
attractive qualities in oratory, and you may ticket them as figures,
within moderation, as you like.”
Footnote 397:
_Trope_ = an expression altered from its natural and obvious _sense_.
_Figure_ = an expression differing in _form_ from the ordinary mode.
But it would be a delusion to suppose Quintilian himself deluded.
Immediately after the passage just quoted comes his Declaration of
Independence in regard to the Greek nomenclature, a fresh observation in
the same key “to exhibit anger or grief, or any other passion in
literature, is not of itself to be figurative, though one may use
figures in the expression,” and—after two quotations from Cicero, in
which crowds of figures are introduced and named—a distinct, though
gentle, hint that, much as he admires Cicero, he thinks him too prodigal
here.
Two long chapters, the second and third of the Ninth Book, contain
Quintilian’s own survey of figures as distinguished from tropes, and as
divided into figures of thought and speech respectively. He opens the
first division with Interrogation—the rhetorical interrogation, of
course; he goes on to Anticipation (_prolepsis_ in a sense different
from the usual one); Feigned Doubt, Communication,[398] Feigned Passion,
Prosopopeia, Apostrophe, Hypotyposis, and then regains more open and
higher ground for a time with the great figure of Irony, of which,
however, he makes relatively as little as of Allegory. Aposiopesis,
Ethopœia, and Emphasis follow, with something to which he gives no
definite name, but which approaches Parable. After this he becomes
rather technically forensic, and winds up with a shower of names of the
verbal hair-splitting kind.
Footnote 398:
In the technical sense of “taking the audience into confidence,” of
asking the jury what _they_ would do in such a case, &c.
Verbal figures—"Figures of Speech" proper—begin, after some general
remarks, by examples which seem to bring us back to the old conclusion
that “everything is a figure,” and which are sometimes barely
intelligible, as where _Sthenelus sciens pugnæ_, which seems to us a
most ordinary expression, is said to show two figures combined.[399] The
Figures themselves, where named distinctly, range from such familiar
things as Parenthesis and Climax to more technical ones in Epanodos[400]
and Paradiastole.[401] Others, familiar and less familiar, follow, but
at last Quintilian grows impatient, and after plumply denying that
Paromologia[402] and Parasiopesis[403] are figures at all, declares
roundly that he shall pay no attention to authors who have made no end
of mere term-seeking, and have classed arguments among Figures. And he
winds up the whole with a weighty caution against abusing even those
Figures which he has admitted. Of such abuse, almost all times, whether
they have been devoted to nominated Figures or not, leave more than
sufficient record: but it can never have been more tempting or more
frequent than when the process of peppering style with the contents of a
certified chemist’s shop of Figures was almost prescribed by the
orthodox curriculum of literary education.
Footnote 399:
_Sciens_ being used for _scitus_ and _pugnæ_ for _pugnandi_, and each
use of one word for another being reckoned as one figure.
Footnote 400:
Deliberate repetition.
Footnote 401:
Antithetic distinction.
Footnote 402:
Concession in order to strengthen argument.
Footnote 403:
Pretended reticence, implying what is meant.
The connection, however, with strictly literary criticism becomes closer
still in the following (fourth) chapter of the Ninth [Sidenote:
_Composition._] Book, which, together with the surveys of literature in
the Tenth and Twelfth, is _the_ “place” of Quintilian for our subject.
For it deals directly with Composition, in the higher sense of attention
to style, and before very long we see that what is immediately uppermost
in Quintilian’s mind at the moment is the order of the words, and the
consequent rhythmical effect. He spends, after a fashion pardonable to
the professional declaimer and teacher of rhetoric, some time on general
remarks, rebutting the silly talk, common then as now, about the
superiority of natural to artificial eloquence, the frippery of style,
and the like. And then he mounts the battle-horse of all true critics,
the argument from alteration of arrangement of words, adding, truly
enough, that the more beautiful the sentence which is thus distorted,
the worse will the distortion seem. He turns to an interesting and quite
relevant historical digression on the lateness of deliberate style, and
on its differences, narrowing these for the present to two, “loose” and
“firm,” by which it would appear that he does not mean the usual
contrast of “loose” and “periodic,” but merely that between irregular
conversational style and set speech. Then, noting the technical
divisions of phrases, clauses, and sentences, he considers the order of
words, and (being a Latin) of course urges the conclusion of the
sentence with a verb, where possible, and perstringes certain sentences
of Mæcenas, a notedly “precious” writer, in which we can only dimly
perceive the offence.
Remarks on emphasis, hiatus, cacophonous conjunction of consonants,
jingle, plethora of monosyllables, and the like, [Sidenote: _Prose
rhythm._] follow, and then the great and difficult subject of rhythm is
tackled directly. Distinguishing it from metre, correctly if not quite
sufficiently, by the necessity that the latter should show a certain
order, he proceeds to deal with the proper rhythm of prose in the most
difficult, but not least important, passage of his book, rightly
insisting in sum on the presence of _numbers_, which are not to be
monotonous. Some of his minor directions are, indeed, dark to us,
especially his objection, not merely in prose, but even in verse, to
polysyllables at the end. And though we are in full light again when he
denounces complete verses in prose (the chief formal fault of Mr
Ruskin), he, here also, goes too far for us. The most delicate English
ear would not object to the equivalent of Sallust’s “Falso queritur de
natura sua,”[404] to the commencement of a hexameter in the
_Timæus_,[405] or to the muffled Galliambic of Thucydides.[406]
Footnote 404:
Said to be an iambic decasyllable—hobbling enough!
Footnote 405:
Εἷς δύο τρεῖσ· ὁ δὲ δὴ τέταρτος ἡμῶν ὧ φίλε. The first words to δὴ
make the beginning of a hexameter or a penthemimer elegiac, the whole,
omitting Εἷς, a very “lolloping” iambic trimeter, while ὁ to ἡμῶν is
an Anacreontic. Plato would certainly have retorted that where so many
metres are possible no one can arise distinctly, and therefore
disagreeably, to the ear.
Footnote 406:
ὑπὲρ ἥμισυ Κᾶρες ἐφάνησαν. Spalding, I think, detected Galliambic
cadence here, regarding the first foot as an anapæst and the rest as
two third pæons. You may also begin with a third pæon (ὑπὲρ ἥμι), as
do many of the lines of the _Atys_ itself. Therefore I call it
“muffled,” and have dwelt on the pæon, though the Galliambic is more
commonly thought of as Ionic _a minore_. Professor Hardie, however,
suggests to me that Quintilian was actually thinking of the Sotadean
metre of which he himself, lower in the chapter, quotes an example
beginning rather like this.
But this in the last case is, perhaps, due to the fact that the pæon is
hardly an English poetic foot at all, and in the first to the fact that
we have nothing corresponding to the strangely broken rhythm of the
Latin comic senarius and tetrameter. It is, however, in dealing with the
feet of prose that Quintilian, like Aristotle, gets most out of our
depth, and for the same reason, that we really do not know enough—if we
know anything—about the pronunciation, or intonation, of Greek and
Latin. Yet the general drift, if here and there we do not quite “feel
our feet,” is unmistakable and unmistakably correct, and the whole is an
excellent sample of a kind of criticism most necessary, much neglected
in modern times till very recently, and entirely independent of any mere
rhetorical technicality. And it is followed—at section 116 onward—by
some general remarks of capital importance, laying down among other
things that the chief touchstone of composition is the ear, and
admitting that in many cases, both of selection of single words and
_ordonnance_ of phrases, it is impossible to render an exact reason why
one thing is right and another wrong. It is so: and there’s an end on’t!
In the peroration of the Book, first the orator receives some special,
and then (at 138 onward) the author, in verse as well as in prose, some
general, cautions and admonitions as to musical effect.
But all this, good as it is, could be easily spared, if the choice lay
between it and the Tenth book. For here, and here only, do [Sidenote:
_Book X.: Survey of Classical Literature._] we get, from an eminent
critic of the first rank, a critical survey of the joint literatures of
Greece and Rome, during the main classical course of both. Interesting
as this would be from any one of tolerable ability, seeing that it is
precisely what we lack—doubly interesting as it is from a man of
Quintilian’s learning, long practice in teaching, and interest in the
subject—it becomes trebly so from certain characteristics of his which
have been more than once glanced at, and which make him an almost
perfect, certainly a typical, exponent in rational form of what may be
regarded as the standard orthodoxy—the _textus receptus_ of the critical
creed—of the ancients. Aristotle came too early to give this opinion
with full knowledge, and would, perhaps, always have been disinclined to
give it in the same way. Longinus, we feel, is an exception of genius.
But what Quintilian says the enormous majority of cultivated Greeks and
Romans (allowing in the former case for particularist and parochial
contempt of the latter) are likely to have thought. He prefaces the
survey by an interesting, and perhaps not really equivocal, explanation
of the reasons for its insertion. I say “perhaps not really equivocal,”
because Quintilian, a very genuine person, would not have hesitated to
give it the form of an apology if he had meant it apologetically. The
orator on his probation must, he says, study and imitate for himself all
the best authors, not merely the orators themselves, but, as no less an
authority than Theophrastus recommended, poets, and historians, and
philosophers. But this must be done with care and judgment; for the
methods of history are not the same as those of oratory, and it is no
use addressing one kind of juryman with the pregnant terseness of
Sallust, or another kind with the _lactea ubertas_ of Livy, while the
philosophers require the same caution, put in a different way. And some
remarks of his on at least the more celebrated authors will be expected
by his friends—to which friends we owe more thanks than is always the
case.
He “begins with Zeus,” that is to say, Homer, and delivers a very neat
set criticism on him from that oratorical point of view which was so
common in regard to both Homer and Virgil.
“For he, as,” in his own words, "the violence of rivers and the courses
of the springs take their beginning from the ocean, [Sidenote: _Greek:
Homer and other Epic poets._] has given an example and a starting-point
to all parts of eloquence. Him none has excelled, for great things in
sublimity as for small ones in propriety of speech. At once abundant and
compressed, agreeable and serious, wonderful now in volume, now in
terseness, is he; and not only in poetical, but also in oratorical,
virtue most eminent. For, not to say anything of his panegyrics, his
hortatives, his consolations, do not the Ninth Book, with the embassy
sent to Achilles, and the quarrel between the generals in the First, and
the sentences expressed in the Second, set forth every device of
advocacy and debate?" &c., &c.
Others he treats more briefly. Hesiod is in the middle style only, but
easy and sententious in that. Antimachus[407] (one of our losses) is
second to Homer, has force, energy, originality, but is deficient in
attractiveness and in _ordonnance_. Panyasis (another) excels Hesiod in
subject and Antimachus in treatment. Apollonius has an evenly sustained
mediocrity. Aratus is “equal to the work to which he thought himself
equal”—an ingeniously double-edged compliment. Theocritus (one must
quote the whole of this, and waive the discussion of it) “is admirable
in his peculiar style, but his rustic and pastoral muse shrinks not only
from appearing in the forum, but even from approaching the city.” And
then Pisander, Nicander, Euphorion, Tyrtæus, Callimachus, Philetas are
slid over rapidly, while, though Aristarchus had sanctioned three
_iambographi_, Simonides and Hipponax are passed in silence, Archilochus
only receiving very high praise for vigour and all similar qualities.
Footnote 407:
_V. supra_, pp. 20, 85. Perhaps no single “windfall of the Muses”
would be so great a gain to literary criticism, in respect of Greek,
as the recovery of a substantial portion of Antimachus.
So, too, of the nine canonical lyrists, Bacchylides, Ibycus, Anacreon,
Alcman, and even Sappho, are overlooked. Pindar [Sidenote: _The
Lyrists._] has a brilliant testimonial, to which, however, the authority
of Horace seems to be thought necessary as an indorsement. Stesichorus
is “equal to a great subject, strong, dignified, but exuberant.” Alcæus
is magnificent, but descends to sportive and amorous subjects (_ecce
idola scholæ!_); and Simonides, though of no very lofty genius, is
correct and pleasing.
The Old Comedy, with the usual three selected, but not characterised
separately, is better adapted for the orator’s use [Sidenote: _Drama._]
than anything save Homer: it is the cream of Attic; it is graceful,
elegant (and one may wonder for a moment, but it is a useful warning as
to the connotation of the word), “sublime.” The judgment of the three
tragedians is scarcely worthy of Quintilian. He speaks of Æschylus very
much as a Frenchman, not in the times of utter ignorance, used to speak
of Shakespeare. He is half silent, half enigmatic, on Sophocles; but he
gives Euripides obviously heartfelt praise, and thinks him the most
serviceable study of all for the orator. To which observations
Aristophanes would pretty certainly have retorted (clothing the retort
in language perhaps sadly lacking in decorum) that it was not very
wonderful that the sophist should be useful to the rhetorician.
Very high, too, is the praise of Menander. Indeed, as we have seen
before, Menander held a much higher position with the ancients than, if
we had more than fragments of him, he would, from those fragments, be
likely to hold with the moderns. He is praised (almost in the very
words) for his “criticism of life,”[408] and a tradition is mentioned
that he was an orator as well as a poet. But whether this be the case or
not, passages in his plays are cited as possessing all the charms of
eloquence, and he is especially extolled for that presentation of
character—_ethopœia_—which the ancients exacted from the orator even
more than from the poet. Philemon is the other late comic mentioned, and
though the taste of the age that preferred him is denounced as bad, he
is admitted as a fair second.
Footnote 408:
_Ita omnem vitæ imaginem expressit._
Herodotus and Thucydides are of course put in front of the historians,
and are contrasted fairly, though not with a great [Sidenote: _The
Historians._] deal of penetration. Theopompus, Philistus, Ephorus,
Clitarchus, and Timagenes are slightly mentioned: but Xenophon, somewhat
to our surprise, is put off to the philosophers. Yet this is of itself a
useful _datum_ for our inquiry, when we think how low _we_ should put
Xenophon’s contributions to philosophy (as distinguished of course from
philosophical biography), how much higher even the rather dry annals of
the _Hellenics_, how much higher still the agreeable miscellanies, and
the pleasant didactic romance of the _Cyropædia_, and how far highest of
all, the _Anabasis_, with its vivid realisation of action and scenery,
and the narrative power which gives a romantic interest to the rather
undeserved escape of a gang of mercenary filibusters.
Conscious, probably, that the comparison of them must be hackneyed,
Quintilian does not dwell long on the Greek orators, [Sidenote: _The
orators and philosophers._] even on that half of The Ten which he
selects, and of the later speakers mentions only Demetrius Phalereus. He
is much more enthusiastic about the philosophers, discerning
“agreeableness” of style[409] in Aristotle, a judgment in which few of
us who have groaned over the not indeed obscure, but hard and juiceless,
language of the _Ethics_ and the _Organon_, will quite acquiesce, while
we might think it rather kind even for that which clothes the more
popular matter of the _Politics_, _Poetics_, and _Rhetoric_. But it
would not be easy better to recognise the mastery of Plato, “whether in
acumen of argument, or in a certain divine and Homeric faculty of
style.” He rises far above mere prose, and seems instinct, not with
human reason, but with a sort of Delphic inspiration. Xenophon at last
receives due meed for his “unaffected delightfulness beyond the reach of
affectation,” and the “persuasive goddess that sits on his lips.”[410]
Perhaps Theophrastus may be a “little overparted” with “divine
brilliance,”[411] though of course the epithet is a mere translation of
the name Aristotle gave him.
Footnote 409:
_Eloquendi suavitas._ Cicero is equally complimentary, however, in
speaking of his _flumen aureum_: and the charitable have thought that
these qualities were discoverable in the lost _Dialogues_.
Footnote 410:
Eupolis on Pericles.
Footnote 411:
_Nitor divinus._
When the critic approaches his own countrymen his words have, perhaps,
an even greater interest. He begins of course [Sidenote:
_Latin—Virgil._] with Virgil, and, as in duty bound, ranks him next to
Homer, and nearer Homer than any one is near himself. Yet a suspicion
crosses one’s mind whether Quintilian was exactly enthusiastic about the
elegant Mantuan, for he talks about his being “obliged to take more
care,”[412] about his losing in the higher qualities, but finding
compensations, &c.
Footnote 412:
_Ei fuit magis laborandum._
So far so good. But what shall we say of this: “All others must follow
afar off. For Macer and Lucretius are indeed to [Sidenote: _Other epic
and didactic poets._] be read, but not for supplying phrase—that is to
say, the body of style. Each is elegant in his own subject, but the one
is tame and the other difficult.” Now, as to Macer we know little or
nothing; he seems to have been a sort of Roman Armstrong or Darwin, who
wrote about herbs, drugs, &c.[413] But Lucretius—a greater master of
phrase than Landor himself, nay, a greater, perhaps, than Milton—"not
good for supplying" it, and merely “difficult”? One wants, again, some
Aristophanic interjection. Varro is damned with faint praise as not
indeed despicable (_non spernendus quidem_), but _parum locuples_.
Ennius is spoken of as some of our own critics used to speak of
Chaucer—as a gigantic and aged oak, venerable but not beautiful. Ovid is
“wanton,” and too fond of his own conceits. Valerius Flaccus is a great
loss. Others—Severus, Bassus, Rabirius, Pedo[414]—names to us mostly,
though we have fragments of at least three, are dismissed, the two first
with high praise, the two last with the scarcely enthusiastic remark
that the orator may read them, if _he has time_. Lucan is ardent, eager,
and of noble sententiousness, but rather an orator than a poet. Domitian
would have been the greatest of poets, _if_ the gods had pleased. But,
unluckily, they did not please!
Footnote 413:
His fragments in Baehrens’s _Poetæ Minores_, vol. vi. pp. 344, 345,
run to seventeen, none exceeding two lines, and only two so long. The
most complete is this—
“Cygnus in auspiciis semper lætissimus ales:
Hunc optant nautæ, quia se non mergit in undis.”
This is certainly not much better than _humilis_, “tame” in phrase.
Footnote 414:
Of Cornelius Severus, a friend of Ovid, who wrote on the Sicilian war,
and of whom Quintilian thinks that, had he lived, he might have been
second to Virgil, we have some dozen odd lines, and a more solid
fragment of twenty-five, enshrining that plagiarism from Sextilius Ena
which has been noticed above (p. 235). It has some merit. For Saleius
Bassus see above (p. 281). The five scraps which we possess of
Rabirius warrant no judgment. But Seneca the Rhetorician in a context
noticed above (p. 234), has preserved a block of twenty-three lines of
Albinovanus Pedo on the voyage of Germanicus, which have a certain
declamatory vigour. See Baehrens, vi. 351-356. (Some elegies have also
been attributed to Pedo.)
In elegy Tibullus is Quintilian’s choice, but he admits that others
prefer Propertius. Ovid is more luxuriant than either; [Sidenote:
_Elegiac and miscellaneous._] Gallus harsher. Horace receives praise
thrice over as terse, pure and just in satire, bitter in iambics
(lampoons), and almost the only Roman deserving to be read[415] in
lyric—where he sometimes soars. He is full of pleasant grace, and is
agreeably audacious. After this, or rather before it, it is not
surprising that Catullus is only mentioned for “bitter” iambics. As
older satirists (“Satire is _ours_!” says Quintilian with a pleasant
patriotic exaltation), Lucilius and Varro have praise.
The remarks on Tragedy we are unfortunately unable to check; but it is
interesting that Quintilian apparently thought [Sidenote: _Drama._]
Latin better off here than in Comedy, which we certainly should not have
expected. He quotes the traditional praise of the language of Plautus
without expressing any opinion on it, but in a fashion pretty clearly
intimating that he was unable to agree.[416] “The ancients extol
Cæcilius,”—another phrase which can only be pointed in one way; and
Terence, though extremely elegant in his kind, scarcely attains to a
faint image of Greek. It seems, however, as if he would have thought
better of Afranius had it not been for that foulness of subject which,
from the frequency of mention of it in connection with the author, seems
to have turned the by no means squeamish stomach even of less moral
Romans.
Footnote 415:
_At Lyricorum idem Horatius fere solus legi dignus._
Footnote 416:
_In comœdia maxime claudicamus: licet Varro, Musas (Ælii Stilonis
sententia), Plautino dicat sermone locuturas fuisse, si Latine loqui
vellent._
He is much more patriotic in regard to History—in fact, his patriotism
rather outruns his discretion. One may have the [Sidenote: _History._]
highest admiration of Sallust’s masterly sweep (“immortal velocity”
Quintilian himself calls it), of his pregnant thought and vivid
representation, yet hesitate to match the two miniatures or Kit-cats of
the _Jugurtha_ and the _Catiline_ against the mighty grasp and volume,
alike in whole and in detail, of the _Peloponnesian War_. It must,
however, be remembered that Sallust wrote a larger _History_ in four
books, which is lost except in fragments. Livy with Herodotus, though
Quintilian thinks the latter ought not to feel indignant at the match,
is only not so _impar congressus_, because there is here no unequality
in scale and range. But, once more, the expression of opinion is a
valuable one, and we must come back to it. Of Servilius Nonianus and
Aufidius Bassus we know nothing; but the section ends with a high and
most interesting panegyric on a certain unnamed living historian, whom
we must all hope, though some would identify him with Pliny, to be
Tacitus. If _he_ had been equalled with even the greatest of the Greeks,
Thucydides might have made room for him with hardly condescending
good-humour.
Having thus put himself in the mood of “our country right or wrong” by
this time, Quintilian is emboldened to match [Sidenote:
_Oratory—Cicero._] Cicero against any Greek orator, though he proceeds
to explain that this is not meant to depress Demosthenes. Thus minded,
he certainly does not go to work “with a dead hand,” as the French say,
and endows his favourite not merely with the energy of Demosthenes, but
with the flow of Plato and the sweetness of Isocrates. (One may invoke
the aid of Echo—courteous nymph—and assent at least to Isocrates.) And
then he passes to other Latin orators, praising Pollio for pains, and
Messala for an aristocratic elegance. Cæsar (it is noticeable that he
says nothing of the _Commentaries_) has qualities in his speeches which
might have made him a rival to Cicero, especially the elegance of his
diction. Cælius for wit; Calvus for severe correctness; others for other
things, receive homage.
In Latin philosophy he again, with some rashness, advances Cicero as a
rival to Plato, and ends with a curious and interesting [Sidenote:
_Philosophy—Cicero and Seneca._] passage on Seneca, whom he had been
supposed to condemn and even hate, whose vitiated taste he still
reprehends, but to whose real merits he now makes handsome concessions.
This is quite one of Quintilian’s best “diploma-pieces” as a literary
critic, in the division of decided but not illiberal censure, qualified
by just and not grudging allowance for merits. It is a pity that it is
too long to quote.
With the rest of the book, interesting as it is and germane to our
subject, we must deal more succinctly. It first handles [Sidenote:
_Minor counsel of the Tenth Book._] Imitation of the styles just run
through, and contains some of the best advice available anywhere on that
head. The danger of imitating one style is especially dwelt upon, and
Quintilian draws nearer to Greece or England than to Rome, in the simple
observation that he has known Ciceronians think themselves quite
accomplished when they ended a sentence with _esse videatur_. _Habemus
criticum!_ Another most excellent chapter is devoted to Writing—that is
to say, to “exercises in composition,” which, under the dispensation of
Rhetoric, were much in use. We know that Cicero wrote theses at the
moment, and on the subject, of his sorest trouble. Quintilian’s advice
here again is excellent; and if it were worse, it would be saved by the
delightful story he tells of Julius Florus, a Gaulish provincial (for
literary talent was beginning to be centrifugal), who, to his nephew and
Quintilian’s friend Julius Secundus, when he was troubled about his
style, observed, “Do you want to write better than you can?” Nor should
the subsequent observations on rough copies be passed over. The rough
copy is the superstition of those who wish to write better than they
can. In some respects, and especially for the urbane, intimate,
un-Philistine common-sense of it, this is one of Quintilian’s best
chapters. He follows it up by a short one on Correction, wisely
observing that we may indulge in that too much; by another on
Translation, dedication-writing, and so forth; by yet another on
premeditation, and by a last on speaking extempore, which he says
(irrefutably from his oratorical point of view, and perhaps not much
less so from the point of general literature) is all but a _sine qua
non_. In these later chapters he is, as we may say, pursuing the art of
the critic the reverse way—that is to say, he is counselling the author
how to anticipate the critic. But it ought to be needless to add that
they are not the less important as chapters of a manual of criticism
itself.
The Eleventh book is wholly professional, dealing with the manner and
general conduct appropriate to the orator, the [Sidenote: _Books XI.,
XII.: The styles of oratory._] cultivation of the memory, delivery,
gesture, and so forth. It therefore yields us nothing, while the
beginning of the Twelfth, with its respectable paradox that a good
orator must be a good man, may not look more promising, nor the
subsequent demonstration that he ought to be acquainted with the civil
law, and with examples and precedents, that he must have firmness and
presence of mind, years of discretion, and also reasonable fees and
retainers, that he must study his brief, not lay himself out too much
for mere applause, and while preparing carefully, be ready with
impromptus and extempore speech when necessary. But when we are
beginning to get a little weary of this good-man-of-the-Stoics, called
to the bar, an abrupt turn to the style of oratory refreshes us. The
sketch of literature in the Tenth Book had been made, it is to be
remembered, from a somewhat different point of view; it had been
occupied with the authors whom an orator should read, and the qualities
which were to be discovered in them. Here the standpoint changes, and
the literary quality of what the orator himself is to produce is the
question. After a distinctly interesting parallel from painting and
sculpture, to illustrate differences of style, Quintilian takes up these
differences, in some cases repeating the descriptions of Book X., in
reference to Latin orators, and especially renewing his eulogy of Cicero
as excellent in every oratorical quality. This, however, he admits, was
by no means the universal opinion, either of Cicero’s contemporaries or
of succeeding critics. And he hits a distinct blot in too much literary
criticism by pointing out that while these earlier critics usually
censured the great Arpinate as too flowery, too Asiatic, too fond of
jests, his, Quintilian’s, [Sidenote: “_Atticism._”] own contemporaries
were apt to speak of him as dry and wanting in succulence. Next he turns
to the three famous divisions of oratorical style—Attic, Asiatic, and
Rhodian: the first chastened, energetic, correct; the second redundant
and flowery; the third a mixture of the other two. And then, with his
usual unpretending shrewdness, he proceeds to point out that although
there certainly _is_ an Attic style, and this style is far the best, yet
that there are many, nay, infinite varieties and subdivisions of it—that
Lysias is not in the least like Andocides, Isocrates different from
either, Hyperides apart from all three. And so, with perfect good sense,
he objects to the limitation of the “odour of thyme,” the Attic charm,
to those who “flow as a slender stream making its way through
pebbles”—that is to say, to those who write in a studiously correct and
elegant style, with no magniloquence or turbid rush.
More interesting still, because it is the first and by far the best
thing of the kind that we have, is the passage which follows on the
oratorical—we may excusably read the [Sidenote: _Literary quality of
Greek and Latin._] “literary”—qualities of the Latin language as
compared with the Greek. There are, it is true, phonetic difficulties
here, and probably no wise man will pretend to understand Quintilian’s
praise of the “sweetness” of the Greek _phi_, as compared with the harsh
repulsiveness of the Latin _f_ and _v_. No one but a student of
phonetics themselves (that is to say, of a science as arbitrary as the
most technical part of the Hermogenean rhetoric) can perceive any
difference between _phi_ and _f_, or the repulsiveness of the latter and
of _v_, or the extra harshness of _fr_ as in _frangit_. _Fr_, to a
modern English ear, gives a very harmonious sound indeed. He
incidentally, however, as far as _v_ is concerned, gives us a “light” by
saying that the sound of the digamma was preserved in _Servus_ and
_Cervus_, so that the Romans adopted the Wellerian form in these words;
and has a specially interesting observation (because it applies equally
to Anglo-Saxon) on the ugliness of terminations in _m_, “like the lowing
of an ox,” as opposed to the clear ringing Greek _n_. The intonation of
Latin he also thinks inferior to Greek, and still more the vocabulary.
But _sursum corda_! after all:—
“Wherefore, if any demand from Latins the grace of Attic speech, let him
give us the same sweetness of utterance, and an equal abundance of
words. If this be denied, we must match our meaning to the words we
have, nor mix a too great subtlety of matter with words too strong, not
to say too stout, for it, lest the combination lose either excellence.
The less the mere language helps us, the more we must reinforce
ourselves by invention of matter. Let us extract sublime and varied
meanings. Let us stir all the passions, and illuminate our addresses
with gleaming metaphor. We cannot be so graceful; let us be more
vigorous. We are conquered in subtlety; let us prevail in weight. _They_
are surer of propriety, let _us_ overcome by numbers. The genius of the
Greeks, even in their lesser men, has its own ports; let us spread more
ample sail and fill it with a mightier breeze. Nor let us always seek
the deep; we must sometimes follow the windings of the shore. _They_ may
slip over any shallows; let _me_ find a deeper sea in which my bark may
not sink.”
A very little farther[417] and we find Wordsworth’s paradox in the
Preface to the _Lyrical Ballads_—that there is no natural eloquence but
in the speech of ordinary folk—anticipated, stated, and very happily and
thoroughly answered, though in reference to prose, not verse; and after
this, some interesting further observations on _sententiæ_—deliberate
and ostentatious sententiousnesses.
Footnote 417:
XII. x. 40.
Later still he returns upon himself, and adopts a fresh threefold
division into ἰσχνὸν or plain; ἁδρὸν or grand; and ἀνθηρὸν or florid,
examples of each of which, with oratorical adaptations, he proceeds to
give, perorating on plain and florid style, in a manner not unworthy of
his precepts. He concludes with a sort of postscript on the necessity of
the orator’s withdrawing before his natural force is abated, and thus
leads, by a not ungraceful parable, to his own _Finis_.
It may be hoped that the above analysis, however jejune and imperfect,
of this remarkable book will at least serve as a basis for some
intelligible, if brief, remarks on its position [Sidenote: _Quintilian’s
critical ethos._] and value in the history of literary criticism. Its
_status_ as a document of this is, like that of all other ancient
documents without exception (even the Περὶ Ὕψους cannot rank as
completely exceptional), an indirect one, one of but partial relevance
to the gospel of criticism. The Law of Rhetoric was but a schoolmaster,
teaching, like all good schoolmasters, many things which had no absolute
bearing on the future life of its pupils. And it is all the more curious
that Quintilian should nevertheless give us so much that is of direct
importance, because he is not merely a literary critic at intervals, but
almost a literary critic _malgré lui_. Except in the case of Cicero,
where his professional feeling comes in, he displays no very great
enthusiasm for literature. He is never tempted, as not merely Longinus,
but even Dionysius, is, to take a particular author, book, piece, and
thoroughly analyse him and it, to grasp it, turn it lovingly inside out,
hold it up to the admiration of others, deck it with the ornament, and
adore it with the incense, of his own. His interest, though liberal, is
just a trifle utilitarian. He holds, like Scott’s counsellor, that “a
lawyer without history or literature is a mere mechanic,” and he studies
both accordingly; but his study is mainly a means to an end. He may not
be exactly insensible to the pure beauty of literature in and by itself;
but it may be suspected that, if he spoke of it freely, he would speak
in much the same tone that he uses in an odd passage[418] about working
in the country, where he thinks the beauty of tree and flower, the song
of birds, the sound of streams, likely to distract rather than to
inspire. The prose of the Roman nature, its businesslike character, its
matter-of-factness, all betray themselves a little in him.
Footnote 418:
X. iii. 22-24. It is natural to compare this with the remarks of Aper
and Maternus in the _Dialogus_.
It is therefore not wonderful that he embodies for us, in a vary
edifying fashion, that distrust of the Romantic which appears so often,
if not so constantly, in the post-Homeric classical ages, up to his own
time, though soon after it was to break down in writers like Apuleius.
We saw that if he did not absolutely dislike or despise, he ignored the
romantic element in Xenophon, that the “seizing” situation of the Ten
Thousand, leaderless though victorious, a handful isolated in the heart
of a hostile country, the moving accidents of their journey across the
mountain walls and through the warlike clans of Kurdistan, and all the
rest, till the sight of the sea, and the rush to the hill-brow to behold
it, and the shout of welcome—even though the incident be as rhetorical a
thing as history and literature contain—pass entirely unnoticed by him.
His astonishing dismissals of Lucretius (though he may have been
prejudiced by Cicero[419] there) as merely “difficult,” of Catullus as
merely “bitter,” group themselves with this very well. The grim force of
the Lucretian despair, which would so fain persuade itself to be
scientific acquiescence in contemplation from the temples of the wise,
the throb of the Catullian passion, are not his business. Indeed, what
_contio_, what _judices_, would pay any attention to the drift of the
atoms in the void? what respectable paterfamilias but must highly
deprecate verses, not merely immoral but extravagant, to Ipsithilla and
Lesbia, attempts to reproduce, in sober Latin, the Greek ravings of a
Sappho or about an Attis? Apollonius Rhodius, too, who to us seems a
Romantic before Romanticism, touches no chord in Quintilian’s breast.
And we may be tolerably certain that the chords which were not
responsive in the breast of Quintilian were at least equally mute in
other breasts of his time.
Footnote 419:
This remark is, of course, made subject to the uncertainties referred
to above (p. 214 _sq._).
But these shortcomings are not only inevitable, they are, for the
purpose of the historian, almost welcome. We may protest as lovers, but
we register and interpret as students. Moreover, Quintilian, like all
the greater men in all periods, and some even of the smaller in some,
supplies us with a great deal of matter for registration and
interpretation, without any protest at all. In the first place, we see
in him the gradual deflection or development (whichever word may be
preferred) of Rhetoric into pure Literary Criticism, assisted by the
practical disappearance of symbouleutic oratory, by the degradation of
epideictic, and by the practical Roman contempt for mere technicalities,
unless, as in the case of law, they are intimately and almost
inextricably connected with some practical end. It would be possible, as
we have seen, by a process of mere “lifting out,” with hardly any
important garbling of phrase, to extract from the _Institutions_ a
“Treatise on Composition and Critical Reading” which would be of no mean
bulk, of no narrow range, and would contain a very large proportion of
strictly relevant and valuable detail. And this treatise would be
illuminated—for practically the only time, in the range of ancient
literature on the subject, to any considerable extent—by that
searchlight of criticism, the comparative method; while it would also
display, throughout, the other illuminative powers of wide reading,
sound judgment, and an excellent and by no means merely pedestrian
common-sense.
We may regret, indeed, as we have regretted already, that these good
gifts were not turned to the business of direct literary examination of
particular books and authors, after the fashion of Dionysius; but it is
quite evident why they were not. And their actual use has resulted in
passage on passage, in chapter on chapter, of the most precious
material. Quintilian can only be despised by those who consider
themselves defrauded if critics do not attempt the _meteorosophia_ of
the highest æsthetic generalisations. It is, on the other hand, certain
that these airy flights, in this particular matter, have too often had
the ultimate Icarian fate, and have not often met even with the
temporary Icarian success. The “high priori way” has never led to any
permanent conquest in literary criticism; and it is never likely to do
so, because of the blessed infinity and incalculableness of human
genius. It has constantly led that genius into deserts and _impasses_.
Even things that look like generalisations firmly based on actual
experience have to be cautiously guarded, and put forth merely as
working hypotheses. You make, with the almost superhuman compound of
learning and reason belonging to an Aristotle, a general theory of
Poetry, and a special one of Tragedy, which require, and command, almost
universal agreement. In a few hundred years there drops in a graceless
sort of prose tale-tellers, who by establishing, slowly and uncertainly
at first, but after a couple of thousand years unmistakably, the kind of
prose fiction, sap the very foundations of your theory of poetry. Later
still arises a more graceless sort of strolling actors, ne’er-do-weel
university men in England, cavaliers or shavelings in Spain, who in the
same way bring it about that your theory of tragedy has to acknowledge
itself to be only a theory of one kind of tragedy.
The other way is the way of safety; and if it be objected that it is the
way of plodders only, one could undertake to make a very striking
company of plodders from Longinus to Mr Arnold, who, sometimes not quite
wittingly or willingly, have done all their best work in it. It would be
but re-summarising our summary to point out once more, in any fulness,
what work Quintilian has done. He has given us a history in little of
the choicest Greek and Latin literature; he has drawn and placed for us
the contrasted styles, not merely of oratorical, but of all prose
composition; he has handled the literary side of grammar with singular
fairness and sense; and has dealt more satisfactorily—to us at
least—than any other ancient writer with the all-important and most
difficult question of euphony in written speech. No one among ancient
writers has treated the important but delusive subject of the Figures
with more sense and skill; no one has contrived to get, out of some of
the merest technicalities of the Rhetoric of the Schools, such a solid
extract of critical power. The technical observations in Book X., which
for want of space we passed over rapidly, form the most invaluable
_Introduction to Composition_ to be found in any language; they put our
modern books of the kind to shame, at once by the practical character of
their suggestions, and by their freedom from mere mechanical
arbitrariness of prescription on points where idiom, good usage, and
individual ability are really the only arbiters. And lastly, on the
all-important and ever-recurring battle of the styles, Plain and Ornate,
Attic and Asiatic, or whatever antithesis be preferred, it would be
almost impossible to find a more intelligent pronouncement than
Quintilian’s.
He can therefore afford to smile at those who say that he _chancelle sur
le terrain des principes_,[420] and to reply that _terrain_ is exactly
the word which does not apply to the principles with which he is
reproached for not dealing. The only reproach to which he _is_ perhaps
open is one which all antiquity, from Aristotle to Longinus, and
including both these great men, shares with him. This is the reproach of
never completely clearing up the mind about Rhetoric, and of perpetually
confusing it with the Art of Prose Literature, or else leaving prose
literature without any “art” at all. We have seen, long ago, how this
confusion arose, and how it was maintained by conditions which, though
working more feebly in Quintilian’s days, were still working. The matter
came to a head (though, oddly enough, the person chiefly concerned seems
not quite to have understood it) when Lucian formally renounced Rhetoric
and took to essay-writing in dialogue, when Apuleius in the _Golden Ass_
mingled declamation, dialogue, philosophy, and romance in one _olla
podrida_, with a daring sauce of new prose style to make it go down. But
the barbarians were then at the gates; and the real recognition and
reconstruction was not to take place for ages later, if it has
completely taken place even yet.
Footnote 420:
Théry, _op. cit._, i. 207. I venture to think that Mr Nettleship also
is not quite just to Quintilian.
CHAPTER IV.
LATER WRITERS.
AULUS GELLIUS: THE ‘NOCTES ATTICÆ’—MACROBIUS: THE ‘SATURNALIA’—SERVIUS
ON VIRGIL—OTHER COMMENTATORS—AUSONIUS—THE ‘ANTHOLOGIA LATINA’—THE
LATIN RHETORICIANS—RUTILIUS LUPUS, ETC.—CURIUS FORTUNATIANUS, HIS
CATECHISM—MARIUS VICTORINUS ON CICERO—OTHERS—MARTIANUS CAPELLA.
The period from Nero to Hadrian is not merely the central and most
important period of Latin criticism, but it contains a proportion
altogether disproportionate of the bulk as of the value of Latin
contributions to the subject. We must, however, complete our view of
that subject, before summing up its general characteristics, with
another chapter surveying the yield of the second, third, and
fourth—perhaps, in view of the uncertainty of date of Martianus, we
should add the fifth—centuries. The crop, if not very abundant, or of
the very greatest value, is neither very scanty nor very uninteresting.
It shall consist, in the specimens of it which we can afford to examine,
first of the two famous and by no means unamusing miscellanists, the
authors of the _Noctes Atticæ_ and the _Saturnalia_; then, by an easy
transition, of the commentators and scholiasts represented by their
prior Servius, himself an interlocutor in the Macrobian symposium; in
the third place, of a poetical contingent, much less important indeed
than that furnished by the satirists from Horace to Martial, but not
quite insignificant; and lastly, of the technical rhetoricians, ending
with one of their latest representatives, but perhaps the most
interesting of all, Martianus Capella. The chapter will thus, at least,
not lack variety.
It would be difficult to have a better example of the indisposition of
the Latin mind towards literary criticism proper, [Sidenote: _Aulus
Gellius: the_ Noctes Atticæ.] than that which is afforded by the famous
_Noctes Atticæ_ of Aulus Gellius.[421] We know nothing of this good
person except that he was probably of more or less pure Roman descent,
that he probably lived for the most part of his life at Rome and at
Athens in the early second century, that he was a friend of Herodes
Atticus, probably knew Plutarch, and was extremely intimate with, and a
great admirer of, the rhetorician Favorinus. The well-known miscellany
which he has left us, and which, in purporting to give the results of
study or conversation in an Attic country-house, has been for seventeen
hundred years so fruitful in imitations—mother, indeed, of a family
sometimes a great deal fairer than herself—is an amusing book and a
valuable, because it preserves for us a great number of quotations from
lost authors or books, because its farrago of matter is good pastime,
and not least because of a certain Pepysian or Boswellian quality in its
author. But though, amid its jumble of things ethical, physical,
logical, legal, and, above all, philological, perhaps the larger part is
occupied with literature or at least with books, it is quite astonishing
how small is the proportion that can be called literary criticism, and
how rudimentary and infantine even that small proportion is. Gellius had
nearly all the qualities and acquirements of the dictionary-maker; he
was interested in etymology, was a most exact and careful purist in the
definition and usage of words, and evidently prided himself on his
collections of illustrative phrases and passages.[422] But almost
invariably it must be said of him that _hæret in litera_, or, if he
escapes that adhesion, that he gives himself over to the substance and
meaning, not to the literary form and art, of what he quotes and
studies. In all the nineteen or twenty books of his work there are
probably not nineteen or twenty pages of real literary criticism; and
where he does give us any it is of the “strawiest” character. Take, for
instance, his comparison (ii. 23) of the Greek and Latin comic writers,
and especially of some passages of Cæcilius with their originals in
Menander. In preferring the Greek he is, of course, quite right; but it
is noteworthy that he can hardly render any specific reason for his
preference. He says, vaguely if truly, that the Latins seem low and
sordid beside the wit and brilliancy of the Greeks, that Cæcilius
appears stupid and frigid by Menander. But as to detail he prudently
adds, _nihil dicam ego quantum differat_; and, less prudently
transgressing this rule later, confines himself wholly to the matter,
accusing the Roman of leaving out a _simplex et verum et delectabile_
remark of the Greek. And if he comes a little nearer in praising (or
making his favourite Favorinus praise) the _flavum marmor_ of Ennius, it
is still pretty clear that he does this merely or mainly from the side
of the dictionary-maker, pleased at getting a light on the exact meaning
of _flavus_. Although to our ears his preference (vi. 20) of “Ora” to
“Nola” (in the passage which Virgil is said to have altered from a
rather petty spite to the Nolans), “because it makes a sweet hiatus”
with _Vesevo_ at the end of the preceding line, may seem all wrong, the
principle is æsthetic if the application is not. But, as a rule, we
shall find that his critical opinions, where they are not concerned with
purely verbal matters, are always decided by moral, philosophical, or in
some other way extra-literary considerations. Even in an extremely
interesting passage towards the end (xix. 9) where he makes _Græci
plusculi_ attack the Spanish-Latin rhetor Antonius Julianus[423] on the
score of the inferiority of Roman to Greek erotic poets, and gives the
passages with which Julianus retorted, the chief interest for us is that
even the Greeks except Catullus to some extent, and Calvus, from their
censure. For there is little or nothing but logomachy to be got out of
the condemnation of Hortensius as _invenustus_ and Cinna as _illepidus_.
Footnote 421:
Ed. Hertz, 2 vols., Leipsic, 1886.
Footnote 422:
Cf. the amusing chapter (vi. 17) in which he tells with innocent pride
how he overwhelmed _quempiam græculum_ with apt citations on the word
_obnoxius_. Gellius is not the only critic who has allowed parallel
passages to choke his critical faculties, or has endeavoured to make
up by the former for the absence of the latter.
Footnote 423:
This Antonius Julianus, from another notice (xx. 9), seems to have
been a person of slightly florid but by no means bad taste. For
Gellius tells us that he used to say his ears were delighted and
caressed by the coined words in the first mimiambic of C. Matius,[a]
such as _Columbulatim_, which is certainly not a little charming and
very Caroline. After all, the famous advice to regard and avoid an
unusual word, _tanquam scopulum_ (which, by the way, Gellius gives
us), is fatal to poetry.
Footnote a:
The fragments of this author may be found either in the sixth volume
of Baehrens’s _Poetæ Latini Minores_, or in the appendix to Otto
Crusius’s edition of Herondas (Leipsic, 1898). He has another word
which Herrick might have Englished, _albicascit_.
This same imputation of logomachy is hard to clear from the dispute in
x. 3, whether, though Caius Gracchus is undoubtedly _fortis et
vehemens_, it is or is not intolerable that he should be deemed
_severior_, _amplior_, _acrior_, than Cicero. If Gellius had kept to the
same words, and had said _fortior_ and _vehementior_, the observation
just made might seem unkind; but as it is, one seems to be dropping into
the well-known jargon of our own times, and of all times, to be hearing
one reviewer asserting that Johnson is “alert” and another replying that
Thompson is “nimble,” or opposing the “poignancy” of Smith to the
“swiftness” of Brown. But the attention to words certainly comes in
better when the critic objects to the use, in an otherwise _non sane
incommode_ adapted version from Euripides by Ennius, of _ignobiles_ and
_opulenti_ for ἀδοξοῦντες and δοκοῦντες. XII. 2, however, is a good
_locus_ for us in more ways than one. It opens with a sketch of the
difference of opinion about Seneca in the age succeeding his own, a
difference of which Quintilian had, a little earlier, given us an
inkling. “Some,” says Gellius, “think of him as of a most unprofitable
writer, one not worth reading, because they hold his style vulgar and
hackneyed, his matter and opinions distinguished either by inept and
empty haste (_impetu_) or by frivolous and Old-Bailey (_causidicali_)
wire-drawing, his erudition vernacular and plebeian, and possessing
nothing either of the dignity or the grace of the classics. Others,
while not denying that he has little grace of phrase, maintain that his
matter lacks neither information nor teaching power, and that he has no
unhappy gravity and severity in castigating vice.” He himself will give
no general censure, but consider Seneca’s opinion of Cicero and Ennius
and Virgil. This “consideration,” according to his wont, is rather a
string of quotations with objurgatory epithets than a regular criticism.
One may not agree with Seneca or one may (there are certainly some who
would indorse his confession and avoidance of Cicero’s faults in the
words _non ejus sed temporis vitium_). But the words which Gellius
himself uses—_insulsissime, homo nugator, inepti et insubidi[424]
hominis joca_—surely require some little argument to justify them, and
this argument is what Gellius never gives. We may thank him, however,
for the criticism as well as for the anecdote preserved (xiii. 2) in the
story of the meeting of the tragic poets Pacuvius and Accius at
Tarentum, in the extreme old age of the former. Pacuvius had asked his
young guest and craftsfellow to read his tragedy of _Atreus_, and, after
the reading, praised it as sonorous and grand, but perhaps a little
harsh and austere. “It is so,” said the junior, “but I am not very
sorry, for I hope to improve. It is the same in wits as in fruits: the
hard and harsh mellow and sweeten, but those that are at first flabby,
and soft, and moist, do not ripen but rot. I thought it best to have
something in my genius for time and age to mitigate.” A sound principle,
though not quite a universal one, as one may see in studying a certain
life-work which ranges from “Claribel” to “Crossing the Bar.”
Footnote 424:
A Gellian synonym or variant for _ineptus_, not found in Augustan
Latin.
He is in his more meticulous moods when (xiii. 18) he accuses Plato of
misquotation and Euripides of plagiarism; but a couple of chapters later
a set discourse on euphony, starting from a saying of Valerius Probus,
seems to promise well. Some one had asked Probus whether it was better
to use the terminations _em_ or _im_, _es_ or _is_, for the accusative,
where both occur. _Aurem tuam interroga_, said Probus, which is no doubt
the conclusion of the whole matter. But his questioner, either foolish
or dogged, asked how he was to do this, and Probus replied, “As Virgil
did when he wrote _Urbisne invisere Cæsar_ but _Urbes habitant magnas_.”
Nor are we sorry to hear that when the questioner still bored on, saying
that he could not understand why one should be better in one place and
another in another, Probus retorted, “_You_ need not trouble yourself;
it will do _you_ no harm whatever you use.” _Prope inclementer_, says
Gellius (“Served him right,” most of us will say). But he goes on to
accumulate some other instances of this application of the rule of
euphony, and perhaps here draws as near to true criticism as he ever
does. Nor is he wrong, though he may be fanciful, in deciding in regard
to certain almost literal Virgilian imitations of Homer, that the Greek
is _simplicior et sincerior_, Virgil νεωτερικώτερος _et quodam quasi
ferrumine immisso fucatior_.[425]
He may strain the word again too much, when he bestows a page on the
difference of _multis hominibus_ and _multis mortalibus_ (xii. 28), but
he recovers esteem when in xiv. 6 we find him rejecting, not without
contumely, contributions to his _Noctes_ on the questions “Who was the
first grammarian?” and “Why Telemachus did not nudge his bedfellow
Pisistratus but kicked him?” &c., &c. _Properans reddidi_, says he, with
the shudder one can fancy, though, to tell the truth, he does himself
“something grow to” this kind of disease.
Footnote 425:
“Hobbledehoyish, and got up with inserted expletives.” _Ferrumen_, a
post-classical word, is almost exactly the French _cheville_.
We may close this anthology of the Gellian criticisms with some account
of one of the most elaborate—a discourse of Favorinus on Pindar and
Virgil.[426] After quoting the Roman poet’s traditional saying about
himself—that he brought forth his verses as a bear does her cubs,
licking them slowly and busily into shape—he points out that the facts
exactly bear out the description, and that certain verses, not having
undergone the process of licking, are very inferior to the others. Among
these unlicked cubs, it seems, Favorinus would place the Etna passage.
Even Pindar himself, whom Virgil followed, is, the critic thinks, _ipso
insolentior tumidiorque_ in the place; but Virgil’s verse is such that
Favorinus calls it “begun, not made.” And, the two passages having been
cited in full, he indulges in the following drastic verbal censure: “At
the very beginning, Pindar, paying more attention to the truth, said
what was the fact, and a matter of ocular demonstration, that Etna
smoked by day and flamed by night. But Virgil, laboriously seeking
noisy-sounding words, confuses the two. The Greek says plainly that
fountains of fire are belched forth, and rivers of smoke flow, and
yellow, curling volumes of flame are borne down to the shores of the sea
like fiery snakes; but this fellow of ours, choosing to interpret ῥόον
καπνοῦ αἴθωνα by _atram nubem turbine piceo et favilla fumantem_, makes
a crass and clumsy mixture, and translates the κρουνοὺς of flames, both
harshly and inexactly, into ‘globes.’ Again, when he talks of ‘licking
the stars,’ he makes an idle and empty exaggeration. Nay, the phrase,
‘emitting a black cloud of smoke full of pitchy whirlwinds and glowing
ashes,’ is bad style and almost nonsense.[427] For glowing things, quoth
he, neither smoke nor are black; unless by an improper vulgarism he
applies _candente_, not to glowing but to merely ‘hot’ ash. But when he
talks of ‘rocks and cliffs being belched and flung up,’ adding
immediately that they are ‘melted, and groan, and are flung in handfuls
into the air,’ neither did Pindar write this, nor would anybody else
think of saying it, and the thing is the most monstrous of all
monstrosities.”
Footnote 426:
xvii. 10.
Footnote 427:
_Inenarrabile et propemodum insensibile._
The classical hatred of bombast and the classical propensity to “stick
at the word” in criticism are both very well illustrated here; but we
should hardly guess, from the sample, that there existed in classical
times much power of grasping the literary and poetical merit of a
passage as a whole. Virgil, if he had cared to defend himself, would, no
doubt, have called attention to the Pindaric words, τέρας and θαῦμα, as
justifying even “monstrosity” in his own expanded description, and have
urged that this description was at least partly intended to indicate the
terror and confusion of mind caused by so portentous a phenomenon.
But this absence of the synoptic grasp of æsthetic means, as applied to
produce literary effect, is precisely what we notice most in the ancient
criticism which has come down to us. And it may be added that it is also
precisely what we should expect to follow from the limitations of the
ancient Rhetoric. Grammar provided rules for the arrangement of words,
and lexicography provided lists of them, with their authority and their
use carefully ticketed; so here criticism was at home. Rhetoric provided
lists of Figures with which a man could compare the passage before him.
But there was no training in the process of simply “submitting to” this
passage, interrogating oneself whether it exercised a charm or not, and
then interrogating oneself further whether that charm was genuine, and
what was its cause. After all, Gellius has, as we have seen, sometimes
come near to the discovery of the true method, and that he loved
literature there can be no doubt.[428]
Footnote 428:
It may perhaps seem to those who know him well that he might have been
allowed more space here; and certainly he gives plentiful material.
But the individual importance of his items hardly requires more than
representative treatment.
Nor, much later, shall we find things different with that favourite of
the Middle Ages and of Dr Johnson’s youth, [Sidenote: _Macrobius: The_
Saturnalia.] Macrobius,[429] who, about the beginning of the fifth
century, undertook a pendant to the work of Gellius. It is not
surprising that the author, _qui ot nom Macrobes_,[430] should have been
a favourite (for his commentary on the _Somnium Scipionis_ principally,
no doubt) with the period between Darkness and Renaissance. He has
precisely the “fine confused feeding” in the way of matter and manner
that these ages loved; and they would not be likely to quarrel with him
for his lack of the criticism which, as we shall see, they themselves
hardly, in more than a single instance, relished or understood. But he
certainly illustrates, even in a greater degree than Gellius, the small
propulsion of the Romans and their vassals towards the proper subjects
of this book. Once more we find that etymology, mythology, grammar, the
_farrago_ of the antiquary as distinguished from that of the literary
enthusiast, of the philologist as opposed to the critic, receive ample
attention. And, once more, what we are specially in quest of remains
practically, if not entirely, unhandled.
Footnote 429:
Ed. Eyssenhardt, Leipsic, 1883.
Footnote 430:
_Roman de la Rose_, l. 7.
There are few more striking _loci_ in connection with this subject than
the end of the first book of the _Saturnalia_. The guests have been
talking mythology and etymology for some stricken hours, till at last a
break occurs. Vettius Prætextatus, the host, has just ended a long
mythological dissertation, to the admiration of everybody, when
Euangelus (the irreverent humourist of the party) breaks in, with some
amusement at the practice of citing Virgil as an authority. He supposes
that the notion of making Latin poets into philosophers is an imitation
of the Greeks, and hints that the process is dangerous, since even Tully
himself, who was as formal a professor of philosophising as of oratory,
so often as he talks of the nature of the gods, or of fate, or of
divination, injures the glory which he has got together through his
eloquence, by his desultory handling of things. Symmachus, the
scholar-statesman, rebukes this blasphemer gravely, observing that, as
for Cicero, he is _conviciis impenetrabilis_, and may be left aside for
the moment, but that he fears Euangelus has learnt his Virgil only as
boys do, and thinks him only good for boys, with nothing higher in him.
Euangelus is by no means abashed, and takes the offensive. It was all
very well, he says, for us as boys to take Virgil at our master’s
valuation, but did not he himself pronounce himself far from faultless,
inasmuch as he wished them to burn the _Æneid_? No doubt he was afraid,
not merely of ethical blame for such scenes as the request of Venus to
her lawful husband in favour of her illegitimate son, but of critical
blame for his now Greek, now barbarous, diction, and for the awkward
_ordonnance_ of his work. To this, _cum omnes exhorruissent_, Symmachus,
still calm and sententious, makes answer by putting Virgil beside
Cicero, and saying of his glory, that as it can grow by no one’s praise,
so it is diminished by no one’s abuse. Any grammarian, he continues, can
refute these calumnies; and it would be a shame to ask Servius (the
famous Virgilian scholiast, who is present) to take the trouble. But he
should like to know whether, as Euangelus is dissatisfied with Virgil’s
Poetic, he likes his Rhetoric better. “Oh!” says Euangelus, “you have
made him a philosopher, and now you are going to make him an orator, are
you?”
A conversation of this kind gives us no bad reason to expect something
like literary criticism proper, something such as Coleridge has given us
in the _Biographia Literaria_ in reference to Wordsworth. But Symmachus
for the time contents himself with undertaking to defend the Mantuan’s
rhetoric, while the others overwhelm the impenitent Euangelus with a
string of affirmations as to the poet’s proficiency in politics, law,
augury, astrological and other philosophy, fidelity to the traditions of
the Latin language, &c. But the justifications of these praises are
deferred by the announcement of dinner, and for a time the conversation
turns to lighter subjects—the famous string of stories for which
Macrobius is most commonly quoted, including scandal about Princess
Julia. Only in the third book, and then, it would seem, after a lacuna,
is the detailed criticism of Virgil resumed.
There is no occasion to find fault with the quantity of it, for it
fills, with a digression or two of the lighter kind, such as that on the
dessert when it appears, four whole books, and some two hundred and
forty pages in Eyssenhardt’s text. But the quality is, at any rate from
our point of view, not quite so satisfactory. Much simply consists in
citation of passages illustrating different “Figures.” A very large
part, probably the largest, is mere and sheer quotation from Virgil
himself, from Homer, and from other poets, Latin and Greek, with whom he
is compared. And the comparison is carried on almost, if not quite
entirely, on that most unsatisfying parallel-passage system which, in
its abuse, has ever since been the delight of the pedantic
criticaster—and the abomination of the true critic.
Of course the parallel passage, rightly handled, is invaluable—is
practically indispensable to true literary criticism. The “Truth”
passages of the _Areopagitica_ and Halifax’s _Character of a Trimmer_,
the “Death” passages of Raleigh, Marston, and Lee, the different
harmonies which the motive “Ask me no more” has suggested to Carew and
Tennyson, the accounts of the passing of Arthur or the parting of
Lancelot and Guinevere in Malory, and in his probable verse original,
are the constant, the inexhaustible, texts and exercises of the critical
faculty. But I do not think it unfair to Macrobius to say that hardly in
a single occasion does he make any such use of his parallels. And in
literary criticism, properly so called, such parallels as
οὐδέ τις ἄλλη
φαίνετο γαιάων ἀλλ’ οὐρανὸς ἠδε θάλασσα,
and
“Nec jam amplius ulla
apparet tellus, cælum undique et undique pontus,”
are all but valueless. They merely show what might be demonstrated once
for all in a page—what does not need demonstrating to any intelligent
person who has read fifty lines of the two poets—that Virgil was an
excellent translator, and was, rather more frequently than becomes a
great poet, content simply to translate.
The rest of the matter lies, for the most part if not wholly, as much as
this or more in the uttermost precincts of literary criticism proper.
The illustrations of Virgil’s attention to that religious ritual and
liturgical language which was so important at Rome are very curious,
very interesting, very valuable but they scarcely touch the fringe of
literature: a Roman Blackmore could be as prolific of them as the Roman
Dryden.
The contents of Book IV. may, perhaps, be urged against me; and I shall
confess that they come nearer to a certain conception of literary
criticism. But I should reply that this conception itself is an argument
on the side I am taking. One of the gaps, common at the opening of the
books of the _Saturnalia_, plunges us into the midst of a demonstration
of Virgil’s pathos, that word being sometimes used in the Greek plural
_pathe_, and referring to the Rhetorical “passions” appealed to. We
find, however, almost directly, that the citations are only applied to
illustrate and enforce Virgil’s technical command of rhetoric, as
Symmachus had foreshadowed. The parts are accordingly dealt out in the
orthodox way between accuser and defendant, and the passages quoted are
distributed once more under figures—Irony, Hyperbole, and the rest.
This, of course, is literary criticism after a fashion, though a fashion
which Quintilian had already treated with some disdain (abandoning it
almost entirely in the best parts of his own critical work), and which
Longinus, though he too was not quite bold enough to discard it
entirely, avoids, either cunningly or instinctively, in all his best
passages. Macrobius and his distinguished company seem to wish for
nothing better, and after they have complacently ticked off the sorts
and sources of the pathos—time, place, circumstance, age, mood, manner,
and so forth—they decide triumphantly, at the beginning of the Fifth
Book, that Virgil must be held no less of an orator than of a poet.
Indeed, Eusebius, who has conducted the rhetorical inquiry, draws a neat
parallel between Virgil and Cicero himself. The eloquence, he says, of
the Mantuan is multiplex and multiform, and comprehends every kind of
speech. In your Cicero [Eusebius of course is a Greek] there is one
tenor of eloquence, the abundant, and torrential, and copious. For the
nature of orators is not uniform, but one flows and overflows, another
affects a brief and concise manner. The thin and dry and sober speaker
loves, as it were, a parsimony of words, his rival revels in full and
florid and amply illustrated rhetoric. Virgil is the only man who, while
others are so dissimilar, blends his own eloquence of every kind. And he
subsequently distributes these kinds more specially to Cicero, Sallust,
Fronto, and the younger Pliny. The passage which follows, for three or
four pages, till the scoffer Euangelus brings on the Homeric parallels
by asking whether they think a Venetian farmer’s boy is likely to have
known Greek literature, is one of the most literary in the book. But it
is (as a devil’s advocate must point out) curious and a little
unfortunate that once more we find the subject drawn, as it were,
irresistibly to the oratorical side. In no other branch of literature,
it seems, could a Roman or a late Greek (which Macrobius probably was)
taste the _minutiæ_ of difference, the savours and qualities which
concern criticism proper. Elsewhere he “stuck in letters,” or in
Figures, or in the merest schematic construction of prosody, or in the
matter, as opposed to the form and spirit, of the literature.
Another piece of criticism, proper if not consummate, will be found in
the seventeenth chapter of the Fifth Book, in the shape of a fresh
comparison, to be itself compared with that cited above from Gellius,
between Pindar’s Ætna, in the First Pythian and Virgil’s in the third
_Æneid_. It is an even weaker piece. For the critic, a Greek, cavils at
Virgil quite in the Rymer-and-Dennis style, not merely because he speaks
of an _atram nubem_ as _fumantem candente favilla_, but (exactly as if
he were an eighteenth-century French critic speaking of Shakespeare)
because the poet actually indulges in such shocking words as _eructans_.
The Sixth Book deals with Virgil’s borrowing of diction and phrase from
the older Latin poets, and has, of course, great linguistic, and a
certain portion of literary, interest. But it is again remarkable how
little this latter is improved or worked out. As in the Homeric case,
the literary interest of the fact that Virgil was content simply to
“lift” Ennian phrases, like _stellis fulgentibus_ or _tollitur in cælum
clamor_, is limited to the demonstration that Virgil “stole his brooms
ready made,” as the Berkshire broom-squire did. And no attempt is made
(as might easily have been done, and in fairness to Virgil should have
been done) to show the taste with which the poet selected beautiful
words and happy phrases. Servius, later in the book, has some not
uninteresting verbal criticism, but attempts nothing more. In fact, in
all this bulk of work there is not as much literary criticism in the
proper sense as Longinus has often given us in a paragraph, and hardly
an attempt at even that general characterisation which we find sometimes
in Gellius and still more in Quintilian. The place and power of Virgil
remain untouched, or are referred to only in the vaguest
conventionalisms.
[Sidenote: _Servius on Virgil._]
One of the contributors, as has been said, to the Macrobian symposium is
no less a person than Maurus (or Marius) Servius Honoratus, the greatest
commentator on the greatest Latin poet in general repute, and obviously,
from the figure he makes in the _Saturnalia_, a man held in very high
esteem for erudition and ability. We have his commentary,[431] together
with those of other ancient commentators of less repute. They are
extremely voluminous;[432] they are, and always have been, justly
respected for their value in the interpretation of the poet. Servius had
before him, and undoubtedly used, a very large bulk of precedent
annotation, and represents, almost fully, the “Variorum” editor of
modern times. We might therefore expect to find in him, if not something
like the proceedings and results of Mr Furness in his _Shakespeare_, at
any rate something like those of the Johnson-Malone time. Let us see
what we actually do find. He gives us, at the very first, a definition
of the duties of a critical editor, in which, on the face of it, there
is very little to blame. The life of the poet; the titles of his work;
the quality of the poem; the intention of the writer; the number of the
books, the order of them, the explanation of them. Looking at this
off-hand, one may wonder a little at the elevation to co-ordinate
honours of the number and order of the books, and of course perceive
that _qualitas carminis_, the critical point, is susceptible of rather
widely differing interpretations as a promise. In the vague modern sense
of “quality”—a sense, too, not absolutely unknown in ancient times—it
covers by itself almost all that the most accomplished and wide-ranging
criticism—the criticism of Coleridge or of Arnold, of Hazlitt or of
Sainte-Beuve—can extend unto. In the narrow technical sense of the Greek
ποιότης, it comes to very little more than the mere technical
classification of the piece as epic or what not, and offers us food as
little sappy with critical juice as the most arid distinctions of
Rhetoric.
Footnote 431:
Ed. Lion, 2 vols., Göttingen, 1826.
Footnote 432:
The edition just quoted contains, without its indices, all but 1000
pages of very close and small print.
But we have barely turned a page when the sense in which Servius
understands the comparative extent of the duties he has so lucidly
mapped out breaks upon us. The “life,” brief and business-like, leaves
no special room for complaint except to anecdote-mongers. But all the
rest, except the “explanation,” is huddled up in less than a page, and
in forms as succinct as the answers to a catechism. Title? “Æneis,”
derived from Æneas, cf. Juvenal’s “Theseis.” Quality? Quite clear: the
metre is heroic, the action “mixed” (_i.e._, the poet sometimes speaks
himself, sometimes introduces others speaking). It is also Heroic,
because it contains a mixture of divine and human things, of truth and
fiction. For Æneas really did come to Italy, but clearly the poet made
it up[433] when he represented Venus speaking to Jupiter, or the mission
of Mercury. The style is grandiloquent—that is to say, the phrase is
lofty and the sentiments noble. Besides, are there not three kinds of
speaking, the low, the middle, the grand? This is the grand style.
Virgil intended first to imitate Homer, then to magnify the ancestry of
Augustus (proofs of this latter given). Here there is no dispute about
the number of the author’s books, though in other cases (such as that of
Plautus) there is. And there is not much doubt about the order, though a
mere crotcheteer might put them in the order 2, 3, 1, in his ignorance
that the art of the poet consists in beginning at the middle and
anticipating the future (see Horace). This shows that Virgil was a
skilful bard. That is all. _Sola superest explanatio quæ in sequenti
expositione probabitur._
Footnote 433:
_Constat esse compositum._
_Sola superest explanatio!_ All, except the mere verbal part, is swept
aside, as settled and done for, in these thirty or forty lines. Of the
_quality_, in the fuller and higher sense, of the Virgilian art nothing;
nothing of its comparative value even with that of Homer himself, still
less of other Greeks, or with that of Ennius, of Lucretius, of Statius,
of the scores of Roman epic or “heroic” poets whom and whose books
Servius had before him, while their names only are before us. Nothing of
his way of managing his metre, his diction, his prosopopœia, his
scenery, his dialogue. And in the settlement of the questions that are
attacked, the most schoolboy-like abstinence from anything but reference
to stock authorities, stock classifications. Nothing, for instance, one
would think, would be easier and more attractive, for a man who thinks
that Virgil’s is the grand style, than to prove it to be so, nothing
more curious and fascinating than to reply to the objections of those
who think it is not, if there be such heretics (and, as we know from the
Euangelus of the _Saturnalia_, there were such, even in those days). But
no glimpse or glimmer of any such thing enters the mind of our
scholiast. There are, everybody allows, three styles: Low, Middle, and
Grand. Nobody calls Virgil low; you surely would not call him middle;
therefore he must be grand. Q.E.D.; and demonstrated it is most
mathematically. Then what kind of poem is it? You run your finger down
the official list of kinds and find “Heroic; written in hexameters and
dealing with mixed kinds.” Virgil is in hexameters, but _is_ he mixed?
Let us run the careful finger down yet another table, “Mixed: that which
is partly divine and partly human, partly false, partly true.” Let us
see whether this will apply to Virgil. It does. Then Virgil is Heroic.
Next, about order and so forth. Ought not Books II. and III., which tell
the voyage of Æneas up to the events recorded in the opening of Book I.,
to come before it? This gives a moment’s pause, but let us look at our
Horace—_Ut jam nunc dicat_, and so forth. Once more, we need not trouble
ourselves: the order is all right.
To some readers this account may savour of flippancy; and to them it is
impossible to offer any excuse. To others, who may not be likely to take
the trouble to read Servius for themselves, it will be enough to say
that practically nothing is put in his mouth which he does not say, that
his method is hardly caricatured even in form. It is one of the best
illustrations we have, or could reasonably expect to have, of the whole
system of ancient criticism, save in its very greatest examples, and to
some extent even in these. You construct, or accept from tradition as
already constructed, a vast classification of terms and kinds,
hierarchically arranged; and when a subject presents itself you simply
refer it to the classification. Practically no intellectual labour is
required, and still less—a mere minus quantity indeed—of cultivation of
the æsthetic sentiment. The necessary cards, with the necessary
descriptions on them, are in cell B or A, compartment _x_ or _y_, case 3
or 5, room I. or VI. You take them out and you tie them on, and there’s
an end of the matter. Nay, some fifteen hundred years after Servius,
there are other authorities who conduct criticism—and are indignant when
it is not conducted—in the very self-same way.
But, it may be said, _superest explanatio_; the explanation does remain,
and there may be much in that. In point of bulk there is very much; in
point of value there is a great deal; but in point of strict criticism
there is simply nothing, though the same reference to card, and cell,
and compartment, and case abounds, as thus:—
_Arma virumque._ _Arma_ means “war”: it is the trope called Metonymy. So
_toga_, for “peace,” see Cic. As for _Arma virumque_, it is another
figure—that by which we change the order: some call it Hyperbaton. The
whole phrase is a professive poetic beginning; _Musa_, &c., an
invocative, and _urbs antiqua_ a narrative. As for _virum_, he does not
mention the name, but indicates the person circumstantially. And now, as
Thackeray says somewhere, “we know all about it, and can proceed” to
write the exordium of an Æneid.
Far, very far, be it from me to speak with any ignorant or vulgar
contempt of Servius. His erudition is very great; his verbal expositions
are almost always very sound and grammatical; but for him we should lack
a whole world of traditional information, without which the meaning of
Virgil would either be entirely dark to us, or attainable only by the
rashest of guesswork. And it must be admitted that according to the
“figure” system of criticising he is, as the Roman orators say,
_accuratissimus_. When Virgil, as he so often does, borrows a phrase
from Ennius with a slight alteration, Servius points out that it is an
_acyrologia_, and no doubt feels much comforted by the fact. Something
else is an _amblysia_ (a “blunting,” lessening, _litotes_). There are
derivations, anticipating the modern philologist, of the most scientific
kind, as that of _consilia_ for _considia_, because people’s minds
become quieter when they sit down. There is, indeed, a very great deal
of miscellaneous information of all kinds.
But of criticism nothing, or less than nothing. Occasionally, at the
beginning of the books, it does seem to occur to the excellent
commentator that something more may be expected of him. Especially, and
indeed most naturally, is this the case with the Fourth. He tells us,
quite properly, that Apollonius had written an _Argonautica_, and that
the whole book is borrowed from it.[434] It is; a fact of which those
persons who (having better knowledge than Dante had) still take Virgil
for a supreme poet might perhaps take more notice than they have usually
taken. But to Servius, and persons of Servius’ way of thinking, there
would not have been much in this. He goes on. It is almost entirely in
affection, though it has pathos in the end, where the departure of Æneas
begets sorrow. It consists entirely in counsels and subtleties. The
style is very nearly comic—which is not surprising, considering that it
treats of love. But there is a proper junction with the former book,
which is a proof of art, as we have often said. An abrupt transition is
a bad transition, though some people foolishly say that this junction is
not well managed, &c., &c.
Footnote 434:
The enthusiastic Maronite usually
One may be, I hope without affectation, a little aghast at this. urges
that not the whole is conveyed, and that Virgil combines his
conveyances. Let it be so.
Grant that Virgil shows his want of originality by his relying on
Apollonius. Grant that in the delineation of Dido’s tragic “All for Love
and the World well Lost” for such a tame scoundrel as Æneas, he has none
of the lightning strokes of Lucretius or Catullus. Yet most of us think
that the Fourth book is a great thing, some that it is a much greater
thing than the _Æneid_ of which it forms part. Servius might think, was
entitled to think, and has the consent of many respectable moderns in
thinking, differently. But it does not appear that he thought about it
at all. He found in his books a distinction between “affection” and
“pathos,” and applied it. He had learnt from the same books that Love
was an inferior subject, Comedy an inferior style, and the former a
proper theme of the latter. So the Fourth book, with its steady rise
towards the hopeless, the hapless, the inevitable end, is _pæne
comicus_. Certainly the criticism is, from our point of view.
But the very value of Servius, as of so many other writers, is precisely
this, that he is _not_ writing from our point of view, that he is
writing from a point of view entirely different. When he annotates _Est
in secessu_ “_Topothesia_ est—_i.e._, fictus secundum poeticam licentiam
locus.... Nam _topographia_ est rei veræ descriptio,” it may be
difficult to repress a smile. So also when he points out, in respect to
one of Anna’s speeches to Dido, not that it is touching, or eloquent, or
indicative of a wonderful knowledge of the human heart, and an equally
wonderful grasp of pathetic expression, but that it is regular
Rhetoric—_suasione omni parte plena; nam purgat objecta, et ostendit
utilitatem, et a timore persuadet_. But, after all, he is only playing
his own game, not ours. It is impossible, or at any rate very difficult,
to be sure whether it is in innocent unconsciousness or dry humour that
he quotes, without comment, the objection to the phrase _nepos Veneris_
that it is unbecoming to represent Venus as a grandmother. Again, in one
of his short prefaces to the Seventh book—at the point when, to modern
readers, the interest of the _Æneid_ is all but over, and the romantic
wanderings of Æneas, the passion of the Fourth book, the majesty and
magnificence of the Sixth, are exchanged for the kite-and-crow battles
of Trojans and Rutulians, the doll-like figure of Lavinia, and the
unjust fate of the hero Turnus at the hands of a divinely helped
invader—he tells us that the earlier books have been like the _Odyssey_
(as indeed they are), not because of the romantic interest, which of
course he did not see, but as being _graviores varietate personarum et
allocutionum_, while the last books are like the _Iliad_, as being
_negotiis validiores_!
So, again, the relatively long preface to the _Bucolics_ tells us that
the word comes from the Greek for oxen, which are the principal rustical
animals; that these poems were invented in the time of Xerxes, when the
Laconians (one does not quite see why, as Xerxes never landed in the
Peloponnese) were kept to their walls or the mountains; that the
_qualitas_ is a _humilis character_, thus, with the _medius_ of the
_Georgics_, vindicating all the three styles for Virgil. For we must not
require lofty speaking from humble rustics. He then gives us a curious
specimen of the critical punctiliousness in matters of mint, anise, and
cumin which accompanied blindness to weightier things. In bucolic verse
there ought, it seems, to be a pause at the fourth foot; and if that
foot is a dactyl so much the better; and it is better also that the
first foot should be a dactyl and included in the word, and so forth.
For a final specimen he tells us, in the corresponding introduction to
the _Georgics_ themselves, that as Virgil had followed Homer, and had
not come near him in the _Æneid_, as he had followed Theocritus and run
a good second in the _Eclogues_, so he followed Hesiod, and “simply left
him” (_penitus reliquit_) in the _Georgics_. It required enormous skill
to do what he has done. (So far so good, but before very long we come
again to the parting of the ways.) The book is didactic, and therefore
it should be written to somebody, for teaching presupposes two
personages—the teacher and the taught. Again, one does not know whether
to smile or not, to take the matter gravely and urge that any _lector
benevolus_ will occupy quite sufficiently the _personam discipuli_, or
to pass the matter, _olli subridens_, and reflecting that our legs also
are not unexposed to the arrows.
It can scarcely be necessary to take special examples from the minor
commentators on Virgil or on other Latin poets: for their
characteristics are, so far as I know, exactly uniform with [Sidenote:
_Other commentators._] those of Servius and with those of the Greek
scholiasts. In explanation of words and things diligent to admiration,
and extremely serviceable, if not always (according to modern standards,
which are very likely temporary) scientific. In matters of prosody
excellently minute and regular, though occasionally a little arbitrary.
Not very seldom careful, to an almost touching extent, of referring
phrases to the accepted categories of Figure, and applying the stock
Rhetorical divisions and classifications. But not merely in the higher,
but even in the middle regions of criticism proper, so meagre that they
may almost be called entirely to seek. Quite rudimentary in Comparison;
in indicating character, content to accept stock divisions, and not even
attempting individual _signalement_. Abstaining with such uniformity
that one can easily perceive the entire absence of any demand for it,
from, any attempt to deal with the literary beauty of phrase or of
passage, to bring out its effect on the reader, to estimate it as a work
of art, like a picture or a statue. And now and then, as we have seen,
not merely not applying the right, but applying totally wrong, tests to
literature and especially to poetry, demanding from this latter
compliance with the arbitrary requirements of traditional Rhetoric, and
praising it for such compliance. Are they to be blamed for all this?
Certainly not; no one is to be blamed for not doing what he never
intended to do and what nobody wanted him to do, for doing what was his
commission and his business. But they are to be cited, and examined, and
recorded as witnesses to prove that, for the most part at any rate,
criticism, in the best and highest sense, was what no critic thought of
giving, and no reader thought of demanding, under the Latin
dispensation.
It may not be uninteresting to accompany (as we did in the case of
Greek) this view of the later criticism, more or less formal, with some
account of the poets where they touch the subject. These touches are not
frequent or important, but we find some in Ausonius for the end of the
fourth century, and in the curious collection bearing (with what
imparity of suggested contrast!) the title of the Latin Anthology, and
supposed to have been put together at Carthage, at the end of the fifth,
or a little later.
The unequal and decadent, but sometimes fascinating, author[435] of the
_Mosella_ and the _Cupido cruci affixus_, of the two charming epigrams
to wife and mistress—
“Uxor vivamus,”
and
“Deformem quidam te dicunt, Crispa”—
has, in his epigrams themselves, followed Martial in directions where he
is a less blameless guide than in his literary criticism. [Sidenote:
_Ausonius._] But he has not followed him here; and though much of the
collection is simply a translation of the Greek Anthology, I do not
remember any literary following thereof. But the curious verse
celebration of what we may call the University of Bordeaux, with its
“commemoration,” in separate pieces of varying length and metre, of a
couple of dozen of Professors; the Fourth Idyll, to his namesake and
grandson on his studies; and the Epistles, especially those to Paullus
the Rhetor and to Tetradius, all have more or less to do with the
subject.
Footnote 435:
Ausonius received little attention from scholars till very recently;
and I know him only, as I have long known him, in the Delphin edition
and the _Corpus Poetarum_. There are now, however, I believe, editions
by Peiper, Leipsic, 1886, and Schenkl, Berlin, 1883, besides
monographs.
We find, and are not surprised to find, that of the Professors at
Bordeaux the majority are Professors of Rhetoric. Compliment has
naturally rather the better of criticism in the addresses to them, but
certain things emerge. Tib. Victor Minervius is “another Quintilian,”
especially for fluency and for the _Demosthenicum_ (I suppose δεινότης);
but it is a little suspicious that the fullest praise is given to his
_memory_. Latinus Alcimus Alethius seems to have been himself a careful
critic, and appears to have written specially on Sallust and on the
Emperor Julian—perhaps the books are somewhere? Attius Patera was “a
descendant of the Druids,” and we should have been glad to know whether
he displayed that “Celtic spirit” in literature of which we have heard
more than enough in these days. But Ausonius is vague as the Celtic
vague itself. Attius Tiro Delphinius was a poet as well as an orator.
Others—the dead Luciolus, Alethius Minervius the Younger, the Grammarian
Lentulus, “_cognomine Lascivus_” (quite innocent, Ausonius tells us),
his brother Jucundus, are more generally commended. Pieces, two grouped
and some single, to the Greek and the Latin grammarians of Bordeaux—show
that the languages, as well as the literatures, received plentiful
attention. The compliment to Exuperius of Toulouse goes closer, and is
decidedly double-edged.[436] Erudition is specially attributed to
Staphylius, who knew not only Livy and Herodotus, but “all that is
stored in the thousand volumes of Varro” (_sexcentis_, of course). It is
observable that the grammarians[437] appear to have chiefly lectured on
poetry, the Rhetors on prose, and the whole, with touches numerous, if
not very definite, suggests to us a study liberal enough, but perhaps
not very wide, rather undiscriminating. The Idyll to his nephew enters
naturally into a few more particulars. A generous but general incitement
to the study of the tongues is followed by detail. The, as it seems to
us, very odd conjunction of Homer and Menander is an additional
testimony to the popularity of the great New Comic. It can hardly be
accidental, for it is separated by some lines from any other mention. In
fact, Ausonius is not prodigal of names, only those of Horace, Virgil,
and Terence being mentioned for Latin poetry, and the work, though not
the name, of Sallust, with some other histories of the last Republican
period. Lastly, the Epistles, besides supplying fresh instances of
Ausonius’ _rococo_ fancy for the cento—even the Macaronic cento—supply a
perhaps humorous prose criticism in form of his own work, which is worth
subjoining.[438]
Footnote 436:
He has praised him (Prof. xvii.) his stately walk, his _verba
ingentia_, his handsome dress, and adds—
“Copia cui fandi longe pulcherrima: _quam si
Auditu tenus acciperes deflata placeret.
Discussam scires solidi nihil edere sensus_.”
Footnote 437:
It may be barely necessary to append the caution that _grammaticus_ is
a good deal more than “grammarian” in the most limited sense,
including “philologist,” “critic,” &c. Some preferred _literatus_, as
the Latin word.
Footnote 438:
_In verbis rudem; in eloquendo hiulcum; a propositis discrepantem; in
versibus concinnationis expertum, in cavillando natura invenustum nec
arte conditum; diluti salis et fellis ignavi; nec de mimo planipedem
nec de comœdis histrionem._.
The _Anthologia Latina_,[439] which a certain noble youth of the name of
Octavian composed at the bidding of some Vandal [Sidenote: _The_
Anthologia Latina.] chieftain, perhaps as late as 532, at the extreme
verge of the twilight of the West, is not entirely deserving of the
transferred sense attached to its patron’s nationality. It has preserved
one or two pretty things for us, and more curious ones. And, in our
particular relation, it shows that literary society and occupation had
by no means gone wholly out of fashion. Both with individuals and
coteries Virgil was a perversely favourite subject; and the deplorable
persons who called themselves the Twelve Wise Men wrote distichs, and
pentastichs, and polystichs, _à dormir debout_, on the contents of the
books of the _Æneid_ and other subjects. The epigrams attributed to
Seneca are probably, whether they belong to any of the known Senecas or
not, of an older and better time; and the pair (Nos. 27 and 28) on the
theme of _Ære perennius_, though the sentiment is of course a
commonplace, have a grip and ring of style which, at any rate after the
flaccid barbarisms of the sixth century, shows well. But for the
literary taste of this time itself, the works of a certain Luxorius (a
contemporary it would seem, and, from the word _spectabilis_, probably
of official rank) are most valuable. They are of some bulk, consisting
of not much less than a hundred pieces, filling some forty pages in
Baehrens’s edition. The body of the work, according to the usual _prava
docilitas_ of the epigrammatist, consists of things licentious or
trivial enough; but Luxorius had read his Martial in this respect more
closely than Ausonius, that he begins with three or four pieces of a
critical or semi-critical kind. He is thoroughly convinced of the danger
of writing after the ancients; but, as he says with some force to the
Reader, “If you think them of better quality, why don’t you read them
and not me?” He consoles his book, should it meet with contempt at Rome
and Carthage, with the observation that things must be content with
their proper places; and in a fourth piece pleads that if his epigrams
are short, why, the reading will be the sooner finished. The tone, with
a good deal less disguised conceit, is very much that of a literary
_abbé_ or President of the eighteenth century—a kind of person with
whose general tastes, literary and other, Luxorius would probably have
sympathised well enough.
Footnote 439:
_Poetæ Latini Minores_, ed. Baehrens, vol. iv. Sidonius Apollinaris,
who comes between Ausonius and the Anthology, and has much concern for
us, is deliberately postponed to the next Book.
We may now complete our survey of the actual documents by dealing with
such remnants as we have of the technical [Sidenote: _The Latin
Rhetoricians._] treatises on Rhetoric in Latin. These are neither
numerous nor bulky, nor, with one exception at the very end of the
classical, and gate of the mediæval, period (to which latter some of
them even belong), of much interest or importance. The fact may seem a
little surprising, in face of the immense interest in the practice of
the subject, which not merely Seneca, and Quintilian, and Pliny, but all
others, show. But the surprise will vanish at a little consideration.
Before the Romans attempted it, the technical part of Rhetoric had been
reduced, as we saw, to a settled scheme of extreme intricacy by the
Greeks, and these claimed to be as much the masters of the subject as
Jews were of Medicine in the Middle Ages. Probably every Roman, though
he might attend his own countrymen’s declamations, learnt the art of
Rhetoric from a Greek professor at one time or another, and was familiar
with the Greek _technæ_. It was only after the separation of the
Empires, and not even immediately then, that Greek ceased to be the
language of education. Moreover, the Romans, though of orderly and
business-like habits of thought, had neither the liking nor the language
suited for the intenser and minuter technicalities of the Art.
It may be almost sufficient justification of the last paragraph to
mention that the whole body of Latin Rhetoricians, as given in the
standard edition of Capperonnier,[440] fills but a volume of some 400
not very large quarto pages; and that this is made up by the insertion
not merely of the Rhetorical part of Martianus Capella, but of such
purely mediæval or “Dark Age” work as that of Bede, Isidore, and
possibly Alcuin. These latter will find better place in the next Book.
Martianus shall be noticed by himself presently; we may meanwhile run
over the rest.
Footnote 440:
_Rhetores Latini_ (Argentorati, 1756). It is, however, worth while to
substitute, or add, the newer edition of Halm (2 vols., Leipsic,
1863), which gives not only critical apparatus and very useful
indices, but some more texts from MSS. Ernesti’s _Lexicon Technologiæ
Latinorum Rhetoricæ_ (Lips., 1795) is only less necessary than its
Greek companion, inasmuch as Latin-English lexicographers have been
less neglectful of rhetorical vocabulary than Greek-English—but still
necessary.
The first in order, and perhaps the oldest, is the Treatise on the
Figures of P. Rutilius Lupus, a rhetorician often quoted [Sidenote:
_Rutilius Lupus, &c._] by Quintilian. It is in the dictionary form, but
not alphabetically arranged. The definitions are technical, meagre, and
chiefly limited to that jejune splitting of kinds which has been noticed
under the head of Greek. The illustrative quotations, which are numerous
and not useless, are wholly from Greek authors, many of them indicating
by their time that the Gorgias, whose four books Quintilian tells us
that Rutilius abstracted into one, was not the sophist of Leontini, but
a later Athenian rhetorician. Except for the close connection
which—until quite recently if not still—has existed between the Figures
and criticism, this has little interest for us.
The next treatise, that of Aquila Romanus, is in the same way only a
Latin accommodation of the work of Alexander (_v. supra_, p. 102). It is
of the same class, a non-alphabetical dictionary in miniature, and
devoted to the same subject. Of the same class again, exactly, is the
tractate of Julius Rufinianus, who, since he keeps, as Rutilius and
Aquila had not done, the Greek words _schema_ for _figura_, and _lexis_
for _elocutio_, was probably a closer adapter, paraphrast, or translator
of his original even than they. He has added a short parallel treatment
of the other division of _schemata_, the intellectual or dianoetic.
Curius or Chirius Fortunatianus (a writer at any rate senior to
Cassiodorus, who epitomised him) was more ambitious, [Sidenote: _Curius
Fortunatianus: his Catechism._] and instead of confining himself to the
Figures, composed a regular art of the Rhetoric of the Schools in three
books. It supplies an interesting and early example of the catechetical
form which was so popular during the middle ages, which continued to
flourish till within the memory of the present generation, and the
disuse of which has certainly been accompanied by a loss in exactness of
actual knowledge, compensated, or not, by a gain in the philosophical
character of such as is acquired.
“Q. What is Rhetoric? A. The science of speaking well. Q. What is an
orator? A. A good man skilled in speaking. Q. What is the duty of an
orator? A. To speak well in civil cases. Q. What is his end? A. To
persuade so far as the condition of things and persons allows.”
And so forth—the writer proceeding by the simple method of throwing into
catechism-form the same kind of dictionary matter which we have just
noticed, sometimes with very odd effect, as in _Quæ est anæschyntos?_—a
question which, if Mrs. Quickly had heard it and had understood Greek,
would doubtless have made her adjust to the occasion her objection to
“Jenny’s case.” The thing, though curious, drags Rhetoric farther out of
its proper course than ever, and one perhaps at no time feels more
inclined to join in the contempt of scholastic methods, mistaken as one
knows it to be, than when reading such questions as—_Assumpta qualitas
facit statum?_ and the rest of this liturgy of abracadabra in
catechetical form. In no rhetorical treatise, indeed, is the question of
style so unceremoniously ignored. A long handling of the _staseis_ is
followed by shorter ones of other technical divisions, “Elocution”
receiving the most perfunctory treatment possible (though with a certain
practicality). How are you to acquire diction? By reading, speaking,
hearing others speak, and inventing new words (which must not be done
too often). Put your long words last; but begin a sentence if you can
with a long syllable, and do not keep too many short ones, or too many
monosyllables, together; avoid archaisms; and attend to such minute, but
in at least some cases arbitrary, rules as the following[441]:—
“Let your construction be more frequently round than flat; let it not
gape with too frequent collision of vowels, especially long ones; nor be
rough with the conflict of two consonants; let not many monosyllables be
joined together; let there be no great stretch of short syllables nor
many long ones; let not the first syllable of a word be the same as the
last of the word before, nor let the two together make any awkward
compound; let not the oration be deformed by many thin[442] words or
vast syllables; and let not many genitive plurals come together.”[443]
Footnote 441:
_Op. cit._, p. 93.
Footnote 442:
_Exilibus._
Footnote 443:
To avoid the _um-um_ sound, the “lowing” to which Quintilian objects,
and which is undoubtedly one of the great defects of Latin as of
Anglo-Saxon.
Cautions, it will be observed, sometimes judicious, sometimes
capricious, but never reasoned.
The commentary of Marius Victorinus on Cicero’s _Rhetoric_ is the
longest of all these treatises. It contains a great deal of [Sidenote:
_Marius Victorinus on Cicero._] matter, and there is no discoverable
reason why it should not have contained a great deal more. For the very
first note on Cicero’s words, “I have thought to myself of this often
and very much,” is as follows: “If there be only one of these, it does
not indicate a sufficiently lengthy cogitation. For we may frequently
think of a thing, but immediately desist from the thinking. We may also
think long upon a thing, but do it only on a single day. He therefore
has properly joined the two, and said: ‘_Often_ and much have I thought
to myself on this.’ And because a thing ought not to be published unless
it be certain and the result of deliberation, he rightly says: ‘I
thought of this _to myself_.’”
All this is exceedingly true; but it is also exceedingly trivial. And
the second is like unto it. _Bonine an mali plus attulerit hominibus et
civitatibus sc. eloquentia_: “The cause of his deliberation is not
whether eloquence be good or bad, but whether it have more of good or of
bad in it. The order of the words, however, is not unimportant, for he
might have said, ‘of bad or of good.’ But Cicero stuck to the nature of
eloquence, which, when it first began, did good to men, for it brought
them together. But later, when it was depraved by the ingenuity of bad
men, it hurt the republic very much. So he arranged the words in the
proper order in saying _Bonine_, &c. The republic consists of two parts,
private and public—that is to say, of men and states. We may notice this
also in the Verrines, how Cicero always defends either men or cities.”
A man who is content to write like this need never stop while paper,
pen, and ink hold out, or till the kindness of nature, or the impatience
of men, puts an end to his life. Sometimes the comment is not quite so
nugatory, especially when Victorinus illustrates the differences between
Cicero and Hermagoras. But he seldom even approaches literary criticism.
The rest, save one, may be almost silence. The ambitiously entitled
_Institutiones Oratoriæ_ of Sulpicius Victor is incomplete. [Sidenote:
_Others._] What we have of it follows the usual order of “states”
narration, &c., with some, but only a few, peculiarities. Most of the
other articles are both meagre and late. Emporius deals with
_ethopœia_, the Commonplace, and one or two other matters. There is a
Latin version of the _Progymnasmata_ of Hermogenes. The probably
spurious _Principia Rhetorices_, attributed to St Augustine, are at
least commended by his name, yet hardly by anything else; and the same
may be said in lesser degree of the _Compendium_ of Cassiodorus.[444]
The verses of Rufinus, on the rhythms suitable to oratory, have more
interest. And so we may come to Martianus.
Footnote 444:
We shall return to these in the next Book.
Inferior as Latin criticism, on the Rhetorical side, is in comparison
with Greek, it is not fanciful to say that it ends with a better note,
though a quaint and fantastic one. The later stages in Greek, as we have
seen, were mere arid technicalities or idle epideictic—ghosts of things
no longer alive, and never perhaps alive with the best kind of life.
What followed in the Byzantine age had at best the character of literary
research. Such a book as that of Photius, invaluable as it is to us, has
no life-promise in it, either as regards its own generation or for the
future.
On the contrary, there is much of both, as we look back on it, in the
eccentric treatise on the _Marriage of Philology and [Sidenote:
_Martianus Capella._] Mercury_, by Martianus Capella.[445] Of the author
and date of the book we know, with accuracy, hardly anything at all. His
full name appears to have been Martianus Minneius Felix Capella, and he
is described as a Carthaginian. His date is much contested, as well as
his religion, his occupations, and other things which no mortal need
trouble himself about; while this date, which _is_ of some importance,
cannot be adjusted very exactly. There is, however, not very much
dispute that it must have been somewhere in the fifth century. “Before
439” is all that his latest editor, Eyssenhardt, will say.
Footnote 445:
Ed. Eyssenhardt. Leipsic, 1866.
What is certain is that the treatise is written in a very late and not a
little barbarous Latin style, and that it was popular in the Middle
Ages, with that peculiar popularity which seems to have settled itself
upon Boethius, Orosius, and other writers of the last age before
chaos—the age to which those who kept up education in chaos itself would
be most likely to look back, as connecting them with the greater past
yet not too far off.
Further, while we find in Martianus a firm outline of the exact scheme
of Humaner Letters which prevailed from 500 to 1500, we find in his
frame and setting, slightly preposterous and more than slightly
fantastic as it is, just that touch of romance—of youth, with its
promise as well as its foolishness—which is wanting in Byzantine work,
and which has Future in it. On both these characteristics of the whole
book we must say something, before coming to its rhetorical part.
The title of the book (to observe Servian formality) has been already
given. Its form is that of the Varronian _satura_, or mingle-mangle of
prose and verse; and it is divided into nine books. The first two of
these serve as an introduction, containing a wonderful rigmarole, in
more wonderful jargon,[446] about things in general, divine and human,
the old mythology and physics, with abstract philosophical
personifications, _Sophia_, _Phronesis_, and so forth, coming in. At
last it settles down to the real plan of the treatise, which is that the
Seven Liberal Arts, as adopted (very mainly from this book) by the
Middle Ages, being estated as bridesmaids (or something like it) to
Philology, each Art has a book to herself, and, in the flowery fantastic
fashion of the Introduction, gives a summary of her teaching to the
assembled gods. This summary is of the most precise and business-like
character, despite its “trimmings,” so that Grammar is not ashamed to
inform the gods that “Ulcus makes ulc_e_ris, but pecus pec_o_ris,” and
Logic rattles off things like _Primæ formæ primus modus est in quo
conficitur ex duobus universalibus_, and so forth, after a fashion which
suggests that the marriage itself might have been celebrated by Dean
Aldrich with great propriety. The beginnings and ends of the books are
generally decorated with verse, and with fancy _prosopopœiæ_ of
different kinds: but the stuff of the text is exactly what it was
intended to be—solid schoolbook matter.
Footnote 446:
There is, however, a certain barbaric charm—of the nose-ring and
feather belt and head-dress kind—about this furthest development of
the “African style” which Apuleius had started. The gay bombastic
ornament of Anglo-Saxon prose-writing, both in Latin and vernacular,
has sometimes been credited to Martianus.
The book devoted to Rhetoric is the fifth, being preceded by those of
Grammar and Logic, in the usual and indeed natural order of the
Trivium:—
“_Gram._ loquitur, _Dia._ vera docet, _Rhet._ verba colorat,”
though Martianus does not arrange the Quadrivium exactly according to
the second line of the mnemonic—
“_Mus._ canit, _Ar._ numerat, _Geo._ ponderat, _Ast._ colit Astra,”
his order being Geometry, or rather Geography, Arithmetic, Astronomy,
Music.
The book on Rhetoric opens literally with a flourish of trumpets,—
“Interea sonuere tubæ,”—
which, as some sixteen rather bombastic hexameters full of _gradus_-tags
inform us, quite alarms the gods, major and minor. In the midst of it
there steps forth “a stately woman of lofty stature, and confidence
greater than common, but radiantly handsome, helmed and crowned,
weaponed both for defence and with flashing arms wherewith she could
smite her enemies with a thundering coruscation. Under her armpits, and
thrown over her shoulder in Latian fashion, was a vest, exhibiting
embroidery of all possible _figures_ in varied hue, while her breast was
baldricked with gems of the most exquisite colour. As she walked her
arms clashed, so that you would have thought the broken levin to
rattle—with explosive handclaps, like the collision of clouds, so that
you might even believe her capable of wielding the thunderbolts of Jove.
For she it is who, like a mighty queen of all things, can direct them
whither she will and call them back whence she chooses, and unbend men
to tears or incite them to rage, and sway the minds of civic crowds as
of warring armies. She brought beneath her sway the senate, the rostra,
the courts at Rome,” &c., &c., the innocent and transparent allegory of
the earlier part changing into a half-historical, half-philosophical
account of the functions of Rhetoric generally. She is followed by a
great crowd of men, some Greek, some Roman, among whom (it is worth
mentioning, as a proof of the taste of the age) Æschines, Isocrates, and
Lysias are specially mentioned for the one tongue, and, with some
uncertain names, Pliny and Fronto in the other. Cicero is later put, by
Rhetoric herself, as beyond competition in either. She displays her
declamatory skill in a formal exordium, and then plunges into the usual
matter of Rhetorical treatises. The treatment is technical, but by no
means ill-arranged, clear enough even in the bewildering labyrinths of
the _status_, not excessive in the Figures, and altogether one of the
best of the Latin _Rhetorics_. When she finishes, Mercury beckons to her
to join the group of those who had played their part, and to salute the
bride. So she walks with much confidence up to Philology, gives her “a
sounding kiss—for she can do nothing silently even if she would—on the
top of her head,”[447] and joins the society of her sisters.
Footnote 447:
Martianus is curious in philematology. In the second book of the
Introduction, when the Muses have described themselves in elaborate
verse, one of the Graces kisses Philology “on that part of the
forehead where a smooth middle space intervenes between the pubescence
of the eye-brows.”
Recurring to the speech of one of these sisters, Grammar, and combining
it with this, we shall have no ill notion of the helps to literary
criticism with which the next thousand years of the world’s history were
provided in the west of Europe. They were rudimentary enough, and those
who were furnished with them had in most cases no thought—indeed for
long centuries hardly any opportunity—of using them for any critical
purpose. But they lay ready for the hand of others, and at the
Renaissance, as well as in one brilliant and some minor instances
earlier, they were turned with only a little delay to their proper
purpose.
Grammar, with the quaintness that suffuses the whole book, says, “My
parts are four—_litteræ_, _litteratura_, _litteratus_, _litterate_.
‘Letters’ are what I teach; ‘Literature’ am I who teach them; ‘the man
of letters’ is he whom I shall have taught; ‘_literate_’ the manner in
which my pupil shall skilfully handle things.” But the expectation thus
raised is a little falsified, for “letters” are taken at their own foot,
though Pallas pulls up Grammar and maintains that she has omitted the
“historic part,” which does not mean our historic in the very least, any
more than _litteratura_ means our Literature.
There is, however, both in these places and throughout the book, a great
deal of “fine confused feeding,” both on matters really literary and on
those more or less subsidiary to literature, from Phonetics upwards. The
citations, though not extremely frequent or copious, show pretty wide
reading, especially in Latin. In the book on Rhetoric we find very
particular and minute attention paid to these considerations of euphony
to which attention has already been drawn, Martianus (who, whether we
allow him poetry or not, was evidently a very careful and deft
versifier[448]) applying his practice in the other harmony with his
usual quaint conceit here. Nowhere, perhaps, do we better perceive,
though nowhere may we find it more difficult exactly to follow, the
niceties of the ancient ear, than in the caution that while it is well
to end a clause with a molossus (three longs), if the final word is a
trisyllable you must be careful to put a trochee before it, and by no
means a spondee or pyrrhic. Thus “Littus ejectis,” with which Tully
finishes a clause, is all right, but “rupes ejectis” would be _pessima
clausula_, and “apex ejectis” (where _apex_ is described as a pyrrhic,
according to its natural quantity in the oblique cases) almost worse.
Footnote 448:
His Anacreontics in particular are sometimes by no means inelegant.
His use of metrical terms is, however, sometimes odd, and tells tales
of the inroads and havoc of the accent. Thus below he speaks of a
molossus with a short first syllable!
Further than this, however, Low Latin was not encouraged by its tutor
Martianus to advance. Nor is it surprising that with such teaching we
find no such advance in the first lisping of the modern literatures
themselves, till the strangely articulate speech of their greatest
critic, as he was their greatest creator—Dante the Wingbearer.
INTERCHAPTER II.
In considering and summing up the contribution of ancient Latin
literature to the history and achievements of Criticism, we may
conveniently adopt a threefold division and arrangement, so as to see,
first, what was the general character of Latin criticism as contrasted
with Greek, and with that comparative study of literature which has only
recently become possible; secondly, its actual and positive achievement;
thirdly, the state in which it left the chances of the future.
The first point under the first head is obvious at once, and has been
repeatedly glanced at and referred to already. The Romans had what the
Greeks had not and could not have—the advantage of literary comparison
in two tongues. This—it may be said a thousand times over, and not be
said too often—is an advantage so enormous that nothing else is required
to show the wonderful faculty of the nation which could effect so much
without it. Without comparison, not merely is the diagnosis of qualities
mostly guesswork, but even the discovery of them becomes extremely
difficult. With comparison, the qualities almost “leap to the eyes,” and
the difference of their results goes far to help in the differentiation
of their natures.
At the same time, this advantage, huge as it still was, was conditioned
and hampered by the fact that Latin, as a language, was an extremely
close connection of Greek, and, as a literature, was daughter and pupil
in one. It would be stepping out of the safe and solid, if not often
trodden, path which has been prescribed for this book, to inquire
whether, if more scope had been given to the Italian and less to the
Italiote[449] element, this need have been the case; it is sufficient
for our strictly historical inquiry that it was the case as a matter of
fact. With rare exceptions, of which the Satire itself is a doubtful
chief, with few and more doubtful followers, the Romans invented no form
of literature whatsoever. Nor did they, as more literary races have so
often done, re-create and make their own the forms that they borrowed.
The earlier lost Roman tragedy was, it is clear, simply _calqué_ upon
Greek, as was the Roman comedy (though the mother-wit of Plautus, one of
the most original of Latin writers not of the decadence, gives it an
original air) absolutely _calqué_ upon the later forms of the Attic. The
Epic was even more slavishly imitative—those who rate Virgil highest
must admit that, delicately as he walks, and elegant as is his footgear,
he simply steps in the footprints, now of Homer, now of Apollonius, now,
in all probability, of writers who happen to be lost. The Latin Lyric
poets dare invent no fresh scheme; the historians, even those of genius,
have the fear, or at any rate the following, of the Greeks always before
them. And so they deprive themselves, from the critical point of view,
of the very advantage with which they start—they lose their chance of
finding out the real forms of literature, transcending those of any
particular tongue, by assimilating the forms of their own as exactly as
possible to another’s.
Footnote 449:
Of course I do not mean to imply that the Italiote cities were the
direct source of the Greek element in classical Latin literature.
And this lack of independence continues to betray itself throughout, and
at once to lessen their opportunities for criticism, and dilute the
quality of such criticism as they do venture upon. The Roman—it has been
observed, and truly observed, a thousand times—is a man of letters
almost always by accident, and on the way to being something else. When
he is not, he is generally of the second class. Virgil, Horace, and
Cicero perhaps are the chief exceptions, and the two first at any rate,
if not the third, were among the most artificial, if also of the most
artful, imitators of the Greeks. To Catullus, his exquisite and hardly
surpassed poetical faculty was evidently little more than a toy or a
pastime—helpful to express his moods of love or of laughter, and that
was all. So the magnificent singing robes of Lucretius cover a man who
has hardly a thought of being a poet, who aims mainly at being a
philosopher; and the scarcely inferior Muse of Juvenal positively turns
her back on her sisters, and busies herself with a sardonic “criticism
of life,” in which indignant disdain is oddly blended with a strange
interest in all trifles, and all serious things, that are _not_
literary. The men with whom literature is, if not exactly a passion, a
really serious interest, are, on the other hand, “polyhistoric” persons
of talent, in strengths varying from Cicero himself to Pliny, or else
men like Martial, admirable practitioners, and something more, in a
limited and not very high kind.
Yet, again, though the Roman talent was extremely businesslike, it was
by no means subtle. It could, at any rate to some extent, borrow the
fanciful Greek refinements; but it found a necessity of changing them
into hard and fast rules.
To all this we must add another thing of the first importance. Great as
were the accidental advantages of oratory in Greece, they were almost
greater at Rome. During every age of the Republic a good speaker had a
great weight in his favour; but in its last age, unless the luck was
strangely against him, honours and wealth were to be had by him simply
for the asking. Under the Empire his position as to the honours of the
state was a little more precarious, and his talents (if he was a very
honest man and not a very discreet one) were not unlikely to bring him
into trouble. But if he were not too scrupulous—as in the case of Eprius
Marcellus, of that Regulus whom Pliny evidently admired almost as much
as he loathed him, of Fabricius Veiento, and others—these talents could
be dishonestly made subservient to fortune. Even in the worst times of
the worst emperors their exercise in the law courts was fairly safe, and
extremely profitable; while the rage for declamations also gave the art
of speaking a factitious but very great popularity.
Hence there was no fear, or hope, of Oratory being brought to its proper
place among the departments of literature. On the contrary, the
practical prosaic character of the people tended to exalt it higher than
ever over such kickshaws as poetry. Probably nine out of ten Romans
would have agreed with Aper in the _Dialogus_.
All this was not particularly favourable to any practice of criticism,
and particularly unfavourable to a fresher and wider interpretation of
it. Yet, as we have seen, there was something of a set towards literary
criticism of a kind in Rome. There, fashion was at once very powerful
and very conservative: and the fashion of literary conversations,
especially after dinner, set by the Scipios and others when they came
into contact on their foreign campaigns with lettered Greeks, seems
never to have died out till the very incoming of the Dark Ages, if then.
It may have been—it was—more philological, antiquarian, “folklorish,”
and what not, than strictly literary, but it was sometimes this. The
other fashion of recitation and declamation, closely connected with
this, provided also material for it. Sometimes, no doubt, these literary
conversations were a terrible bore, as the satirists not obscurely tell
us, and as Pliny, in a letter[450] full of good sense and pleasantness,
points out to a friend of his who had been bored at another kind of
dinner, where the fun was provided by _scurræ_, _moriones_, and other
professional persons not to be mentioned in English.
Footnote 450:
Ep., ix. 17.
From all this we find, and are not surprised to find, that literary
critical talk, and literary critical writing, in Rome, turned much more
upon oratory than upon any other department, and that, when they did
turn on others, these were often merely or mainly regarded as
storehouses of quotation and patterns of imitation for the orator. There
was, indeed, one additional reason for this which has not yet been
mentioned, but which was not unnaturally among the most powerful of all.
Oratory was about the only division of literature in which even a very
patriotic Roman could, with any show of reason, consider his countrymen
the equals of the Greeks. Here the flattering unction was often laid;
and though as regards Cicero and Demosthenes, the inevitably selected
champions, we may hardly think the match an equal one, it must be
remembered that the extraordinary, and not quite comprehensible, loss of
nearly all other Roman orators puts Latin at a very great disadvantage.
We have Æschines, Lysias, Isæus, something, if not much, of Hyperides, a
good deal of Isocrates, on the literary side of oratory. But we have
nothing by which fairly to judge Hortensius or Catulus, Calvus or Pollio
or Messala. What is certain is that men of cool judgment, who did not
venture to set up even Virgil against Homer, and who practically let all
Roman minor poetry go by the board, did think they could make a fight
for Rome in symbouleutic and dikanic, if not in epideictic, oratory.
It follows from all these things that, strong as is the oratorical
preoccupation in Greek, it is stronger still in Roman Rhetoric and
criticism. Even the men who take the widest view of literature, and are
most familiar with it—Cicero, Pliny, nay, Quintilian himself—fall, as
has been said, unconsciously, or in the way of bland assumption as of a
matter not worth arguing about, into the habit of regarding it either
primarily as an exercising-ground, a magazine, a source of supply and
training for the orator, or as a means of sport and pastime to him in
the intervals of his more serious business. The utterly preposterous
notion (as it seems to us) of trying a poet like Virgil by the rules of
the rhetorician, classifying his speeches, pointing out his deft use of
“means of persuasion,” laying stress on the proprieties and felicities
of his use of language according to the rhetorical laws, taking examples
of Figures from him and the like, could arise from nothing but this
preliminary assumption or confusion, and could only be excused by it. It
is in fact all-pervading—forget or lose sight of it, and there is hardly
a Roman utterance about literature which will not be either quite
unmeaning, or very seriously misleading.
The consequence is that very seldom do we get literary criticism of
anything like the best kind—of any kind that deserves the name in
meaning at once full and strict—from a Roman. There is no Latin
Longinus—Quintilian himself is but at best a rather less technical
Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and it is even very uncertain whether he
does not owe a good deal directly to Dionysius himself. At any rate,
much as we owe him, we owe it rather to his ineradicable and inevitable
good sense, his thorough grasp of the educational values of things, and
his unfeigned love of literature, than to any full conception on his
part of the art of criticism as an art of appreciation—as a reasoned
valuing and analysing of the sources of literary charm.
Another consequence (of the illustrative kind chiefly) is that the spell
of the Figures is even more heavy on the Roman than on the Greek. That
horrified cry[451] of the unlucky Albucius, _schemata tollis ex rerum
natura_, is as much the note of the average Roman critic as the
quotation given above from Simylus[452] is above the note both of Roman
and even of Greek as a rule. It could hardly out of the head of a critic
of this stamp, that if you took the proper number of scruples of
hyperbole, so many drams of antiphrasis, and so on, you would make a
fine sentence—that so many sentences thus formed and arranged, with
proper regard to _inventio_, _narratio_, and the rest, would make a fine
chapter, so many chapters a fine book. The whole process, once more, is
topsy-turvy, and can come to no good end.
Footnote 451:
_V. supra_, p. 238.
Footnote 452:
_V. supra_, p. 25.
In Poetic of the limited kind we have, of course, from Rome one
document, the historical importance of which it is impossible to
exaggerate. But the intrinsic importance, even of this, is singularly
out of proportion to its reputation and its influence. As has been
explained in detail above, it may be unjust to regard the _Epistola ad
Pisones_ as a designed and complete tract _De Arte Poetica_. But make as
much allowance as we may and can for scheme and purpose, the intrinsic
quality of such criticism as it does give will remain clear and
unaltered. Neither of the real nature, requirements, capabilities of any
one literary form, nor of the character of any one source of literary
beauty, does Horace show himself in the very least degree conscious. His
precepts are now precepts of excellent commonsense, not less—perhaps
rather more—applicable to life than to literature: now purely arbitrary
rules derived from the practice—sometimes the quite accidental
practice—of great preceding writers.
Yet, all the same, Horace unconsciously and almost indirectly does take
up a very decided critical side, and expresses, with the neatness and in
the rememberable fashion to be expected from so consummate a master, one
of the two great critical creeds. Nor is there any doubt that this
creed, so far as literary criticism appealed to the Roman mind at all,
was that of by far the larger number of persons. This is—not necessarily
in a _ne varietur_ shape, but put very clearly in a certain form—the
creed of what is known as “Classicism,” the creed which recommends,
first of all, as the probable, if not the certain, road to literary
success, adherence to the approved traditions, the elaboration of types
and generalisations rather than indulgence in the eccentric and efforts
to create the individual, the preference of the regular to the vague,
&c., &c.
This, it may be repeated without much rashness, was even more the
critical orthodoxy of Rome than it was the critical orthodoxy of Greece.
We see it in the stock preference of the Attic to the Asiatic style in
oratory; it simply defrays the whole of the just-mentioned criticism of
Horace; it animates the campaign of the satirists against archaic and
euphuist phraseology; it is clearly the proper thing to think in the
literary miscellanies of Gellius, and even of Macrobius. The precepts of
the formal treatises, so far as they touch on style at all, never fail
to express this general tendency; and the even more deliberate and
canonical “correctness” of the modern Latin races and literatures, if
not directly and unavoidably inherited, is a very legitimate attempt to
recover and improve the lost heritage of their ancestor.
Nor will any other conclusion, I think, be drawn from the study of those
grammarians in the strict sense, of whom little or nothing has been said
in the main body of this Book, for the simple reason that there was
little or nothing to say. From Varro to Festus the symptoms which we
have noted elsewhere recur with unmistakable fidelity. The etymology and
signification of words; the explanation of customs, rites, myths; the
arrangements of accidence and syntax—all these things awake evident
interest, and receive careful and often most intelligent pains. These
grammarians (and, of course, still more professedly metrical writers
like Terentianus Maurus) are diligent on metre, and even behind metre,
on that most difficult of subjects, in all times and languages, the
metrical quality and quantity as distinguished from the metrical
arrangement of words. But where all these things begin to group and
crystallise themselves into higher criticism of literary form and charm,
there our authors, I think it will be found with hardly an exception,
stop dead. I shall be surprised (to stick to the example formerly given)
to have pointed out to me a single passage in which the _poetical_
quality of the Ennian, the Lucretian, and the Virgilian hexameter is
discussed.
At the same time, it would be uncritical not to perceive, and
unhistorical not to note, the existence in the history of Latin
literature of a current running strongly in the opposite direction,
making itself distinctly felt at more than one period, and, finally, in
creative literature at least, going near to triumph. We have seen, both
directly and indirectly, that in the first century of our era there
_was_ a very strong set towards archaism and euphuism, that it had the
patronage of Seneca the father, certainly, if not also that of his more
famous and more influential son; that it was not by any means wholly
disapproved by Pliny; and that though what we may call literary
orthodoxy was against it, a very large bulk (perhaps the great majority)
of the prose declamations and the verse exercises of the time must have
exhibited its influence. What is more, it is certain that in more than
one of the Roman colonial or provincial districts, which furnished
fresher and more vigorous blood than the Eternal City herself, or her
Italian precinct, could now supply, this tendency received very strong
accessions from various local peculiarities. It seems to have been least
prevalent in Gaul, though by no means unknown there; the Senecas, and
Quintilian himself, show at what an early date Spanish blood or birth
inclined those who had it to what was long afterwards to take names from
Guevara and Gongora. But the great home of Roman Euphuism was Africa. To
say nothing of ecclesiastical writers like Tertullian (who might be
supposed to have their style affected by Eastern influences), Apuleius
earlier, and Martianus later, are more than sufficient, and luckily
pretty fully extant, witnesses to the fact.
Yet this tendency is not represented in criticism at all. Apuleius, who
was a very pretty pleader as well as an accomplished Euphuist in
original composition, might well have left us a parallel to De Quincey’s
own vindications of the ornate style, if he had chosen; but it did not
apparently occur to him though the _Florida_ would have given a quite
convenient and proper home to such a dissertation.[453] _Con amore_ as
Martianus describes (in the passage above translated) the gorgeousness
of Rhetoric, it is strictly in reference to her _oratorical_ practice.
If the satires of the later Cæsars’ time take the other side, and so do
give us some criticism on that, it is pretty certainly because all the
greatest satirists, from Aristophanes downwards, have always been
Tories, and have selected the absurdities of innovation more gladly than
those of tradition for their target. Nay, it is a question whether
Petronius, in one direction, and Persius in another, do not, so far as
their own compositions are concerned, somewhat incur the blame of which
they are so lavish, though Martial and Juvenal certainly do not. On all
sides the conviction comes in that for strictly literary criticism the
time was not ripe, or that the country, the nation, was indisposed and
unprepared for it.
Footnote 453:
The fact that the subject not seldom seems to be coming (_e.g._, at i.
9 and iv. 20) in this curious patchwork, and does not come, is not
without significance.
In no point, perhaps, is this so noteworthy and so surprising as in
regard to what we may call the literary criticism of metre. For this
Latin offered, at both ends of the history of Latin proper, temptations
and opportunities which, so far as we know, were unknown to the Greeks.
At the one end there were the remains, scanty, but significant even now,
then probably abundant, of “Saturnian” prosody. Of this, of course,
Roman writers, technical and other, do take notice: they even, with the
antiquarian and mythological patriotism so common at Rome, take a fairly
lively interest in it. But of the remarkable _literary_ difference
between it and the accepted literary metres—a point almost exactly on a
par with that of the difference between our ballad metre and the
accepted literary poetic forms of the eighteenth century—they do not, so
far as I remember, seem to have taken any notice at all. There must have
been—in fact we know perfectly well that there were—Roman literary
antiquaries as diligent, as enthusiastic, and, no doubt, at least as
intelligent as any of our own, from Percy and Hurd to Tyrwhitt and
Ritson. There is no reason in the nature of things (indeed, Varro is a
very fair analogue to the historian of English poetry) why there should
not have been Romans of the calibre at least of Warton, if not even of
Gray. But hardly a vestige of the combined antiquarian, philological,
and literary interest, which animates all these men of ours, appears in
the extant fragments of any Roman writer.
The facts at the other end point to the same conclusion. From no Roman
critic, so far as I know, have we any notice whatsoever of that
insurrection or resurrection (whichever word may be preferred) of
accentual against quantitative rhythm which is one of the most
interesting, and certainly one of the most mysterious, phenomena of the
literary history of the world. Grant that early in the third century (if
that be the right date) no cultivated student was likely to pay much
attention to the barbarous rhythms of a Commodian,[454] to be prepared
even to consider
“Audite quoniam propheta de illo prædixit”
as a hexameter. But a hundred and fifty years later things were
different. Before Macrobius wrote, before Servius commented, the verse
of Prudentius had been given to the world. Now, the mere classical
scholar has no doubt been usually unkind to Prudentius,[455] but few
people who have read him without a fixed idea that anybody who writes in
Latin is bound to confirm to the prosody of the Augustan age, can have
read him without frequent satisfaction. At any rate, he is a literary
_person_; and his personality is emphasised by the fact that at one time
he tries to write, and not infrequently succeeds in writing, very fair
orthodox hexameters and trimeters; at others (and in the best work of
the _Cathemerinon_ and _Peristephanon_) his verse, whether answering to
the test of the finger or not in metre, is clearly accentual in rhythm,
and seems to be yearning for rhyme to complete and dress it. Now, if
literary criticism in the full sense had been common, such a phenomenon
must have attracted attention. The orthodox critics would have attacked
it as furiously as the orthodox critics in England attacked Coleridge’s
system of metrical equivalence, or the orthodox critics in France
attacked Victor Hugo’s _enjambements_. The unorthodox critics, the
revolutionary and romantic party, would, as in each case, have welcomed
it with pæans. But, so far as we know, not the slightest notice was
taken of Prudentius by the literary wits of the _Saturnalia_, or by any
one else.
Footnote 454:
The edition of the _Instructiones_ and the _Carmen Apologeticum_ which
I use is the most accessible, and I think the most recent, that of E.
Ludwig (two parts, Leipsic, 1877-78). But I must own that a certain
compunction invades me at finding any fault with the shortcomings of
ancient critics, when I find in this edition, at the end of the
nineteenth century, great care about the text, but not a single word
about the date, the person, or the circumstances of Commodianus, and
an utter ignoring of the literary position and interest of the matter
edited. Commodian’s form may be barbarous, and his matter may be
respectably ordinary; but he is, at any rate, on a not yet disturbed
hypothesis, the ancestor—or the earliest example—of the prosody of
every modern language which combines (as some at least of us hold that
all modern languages do) quantitative scansion with a partly or wholly
non-quantitative syllabic value. And one might at least have expected
a few facts, if not a little discussion, to butter the bread of the
bare text in such a case. But the fetish of the letter has been too
much for this editor also.
Footnote 455:
I use the Delphin edition, but I believe the standards are those of
Obbarius (Tubingen, 1845) or Dressel (Leipsic, 1860). A good deal of
work which has not yet come in my way seems to have been recently
spent on this most interesting writer, resulting in such things as the
first part of a _Lexicon Prudentianum_ (Bermann, Upsala, 1891), a book
on illustrated MSS. of him (Stettener, Berlin, 1895), while in England
Mr Bridges has translated some of his charming hymns.
In part, no doubt, this silence may be set down to accidental and
extra-literary causes. The very growth of provincial literatures would
at once have rendered the productions of these literatures less likely
to reach Rome, and have disinclined the literary critics of the capital
to listen to provincial productions. Even the debate of Christian and
Pagan,[456] as it became more and more of a conflict between triumphant
youth and declining eld, less and less of the resurrection of a
desperate and despised minority against established order, may have had
something to do with the matter. But, however this may be, the facts are
the facts.
We shall do well to accept them as they are, and to recognise that Latin
had the criticism which it deserved, the criticism which was made
necessary by the conditions of its own classical literature, and,
lastly, the criticism which was really most useful both for itself and
for its posterity—that is to say, in greater or less degree, not merely
the so-called Romance tongues, but all the literary languages of modern
Europe. The first two points must be tolerably clear to any tolerable
Latinist, but they may be freshly put. A literature like classical
Latin, which is from first to last _in statu pupillari_, which, with
whatever strength, deftness, elegance, even originality at times,
follows in the footsteps of another literature, must for the very life
of it have a critical creed of order, discipline, moderation. Otherwise
it runs the risk of being a mere hybrid, even a mere monstrosity.
Footnote 456:
Symmachus, the great defender of Virgil in the _Saturnalia_, was an
obstinate and audacious champion of Paganism against Christianity: and
Prudentius wrote directly against him.
Still more certainly, nothing could have been better for the future of
the world than the exact legacy which Latin left, not merely in its
great examples of literature, but in the forms of the scholastic Grammar
and Rhetoric, to that millennium of reconstruction and recreation which
is called the Middle Age. For that wonderful period—which even yet has
never been put in its right place in the history of the world—a higher
lesson would have been thrown away, or positively injurious. No
instruction in Romanticism was wanted by the ages of Romance: for full
literary knowledge of the ancient literatures they were in no wise
suited or prepared. Their business was, after a long period of mere
foundation-work in the elaboration of the modern speeches, to get
together the materials of the modern literatures, and to build up the
structure of these as well as they could. So strongly did they feel the
_nisus_ towards this, that they even travestied into their own likeness
such of the old literature as remained.
But still Grammar and Rhetoric abode—to be a perpetual grounding and
tutelage, a “fool-guard” and guide-post in these ages of exploration and
childhood. That the Rhetoric was meagre and arbitrary, that a great deal
of it had nothing to do with literature at all, but was a sort of
fossilised skeleton of a bygone philosophy, or else a mere business
training, mattered nothing. The Trivium and Quadrivium, the legacies of
the classics, especially of Latin, gave in every one of their divisions,
and not least in Rhetoric, precisely the formal stays, the fixed norms
and forms of method, which were required in the general welter.
Had the appreciative criticism of Latin been stronger and wider, had it
left any tradition in its own last age, and so been able to throw that
tradition as a bridge over the dark time to come, it would have been no
advantage, but a loss and a mischief. Not only would it have been waste
of time for the Middle Ages to appreciate Greek and Latin literature
critically, if they could have done so, but it would have hampered them
in the doing of their own great day’s, or rather night’s, work—their
work of assimilation, of recuperation, and, not least, of dream.
BOOK III
MEDIÆVAL CRITICISM
----------
“_Sola vocabula nobilissima in cribro tuo residere curabis._”
—DANTE.
CHAPTER I.
BEFORE DANTE.
CHARACTERISTICS OF MEDIÆVAL LITERATURE—ITS ATTITUDE TO
CRITICISM—IMPORTANCE OF PROSODY—THE EARLY FORMAL RHETORICS:
BEDE—ISIDORE—ALCUIN (?)—ANOTHER TRACK OF INQUIRY—ST AUGUSTINE A
PROFESSOR OF RHETORIC—HIS ATTITUDE TO LITERATURE BEFORE AND AFTER
HIS CONVERSION—ANALYSIS OF THE ‘CONFESSIONS’ FROM THIS POINT OF
VIEW—A CONCLUSION FROM THIS TO THE GENERAL PATRISTIC VIEW OF
LITERATURE—SIDONIUS APOLLINARIS—HIS ELABORATE EPITHET-COMPARISON
AND MINUTE CRITICISMS OF STYLE AND METRE—A DELIBERATE
CRITIQUE—CASSIODORUS—BOETHIUS—CRITICAL ATTITUDE OF THE FIFTH
CENTURY—THE SIXTH: FULGENTIUS—THE FULGENTII AND THEIR BOOKS—THE
‘SUPER THEBAIDEN’ AND ‘EXPOSITIO VIRGILIANA’—VENANTIUS
FORTUNATUS—ISIDORE OF SEVILLE AGAIN—BEDE AGAIN—HIS ‘ARS
METRICA’—THE CENTRAL MIDDLE AGES TO BE MORE RAPIDLY PASSED
OVER—PROVENÇAL AND LATIN TREATISES—THE ‘DE DICTAMINE
RHYTHMICO’—JOHN OF GARLANDIA—THE ‘LABYRINTHUS’—CRITICAL REVIEW OF
POETS CONTAINED IN IT—MINOR RHYTHMICAL TRACTATES—GEOFFREY DE
VINSAUF: HIS ‘NOVA POETRIA.’
It may seem a platitude, but it really has much more of the altitudinous
than of the platitudinous about it, to say that, before entering on the
consideration of mediæval criticism,[457] it is above all things
necessary to clear the mind of cant about mediæval literature. For in no
division of this work is such a caution a more appropriate writing on
the door. On the classical [Sidenote: _Characteristics of mediæval
literature._] and on the modern sections it would be a gratuitous
impertinence. In both or them, as here, there is the distinction between
linguistic and literary criticism, and the further distinction between
literary criticism of different kinds. But in both there are, as there
always have been in relation to the classics, and as there sometimes
have been in relation to modern literature, a very large number of
persons who are aware of the _crevasses_, and who can cross them.
Footnote 457:
As at the beginning of Bk. ii. I had less obligation to acknowledge
than at that of Bk. i., so here also the diminution continues. On the
general subject it approaches zero. Théry himself is more sketchy than
himself here; and has practically nothing in detail to say of any one
save Raymond Lully, who does not supply _us_ with anything, though he
brought Rhetoric, like other sciences, into his philosophic scheme.
Even in regard to individuals, it is only on Dante that I know of much
precedent treatment, and for that _v. infra_.
In mediæval literature such persons are, and for the strongest reasons,
much more to seek. Until recently—it is the greatest “refusal” and the
greatest misfortune in the literary history of the world—mediæval
literature, which some, at least, believe to hold the keys of both
ancient and modern, was utterly neglected and contemned. Then, for a
time, it was praised without full knowledge, or by divination only. It
is now possible to know much if not most of it; but few are they who are
content to know it as literature. Not only has it had to go through, all
at once, the usual diseases to which literary childhood is obnoxious,
the petty grammarianisms which Latin and Greek got over in their own
time, the squabbles as to interpretation from which the Renaissance, to
a great extent, delivered us in their case, and the criticastry of the
seventeenth-eighteenth centuries, but new ailments, diphtherias and
influenzas of its own, have arisen in “phonology,” and Heaven knows what
else. Even this does not exhaust the list of ills that wait upon its
most unhappy state. It has been thought necessary, for political and
ecclesiastical reasons, to praise the Middle Ages a little unwisely for
a time, and then (more recently) to abuse them with an unwisdom so much
greater, that one feels inclined to relapse upon the mood of the real Mr
Kenelm Digby of _The Broad Stone of Honour_, and the imaginary Mr
Chainmail of _Crotchet Castle_. Abused and extolled as “Ages of Faith,”
they were really ages of a mixture of logical argument and playful
half-scepticism. Regarded with scorn as “Ages of Ignorance,” they knew
what they did know thoroughly, which is more than can be said of some
others. Commiserated as Ages of Misery, they were probably the happiest
times of the world, putting Arcadia and Fairyland out of sight.
Patronised as Ages of mere preparation, they accomplished things that we
have toiled after in vain for some five hundred years. They have in the
rarest cases been really understood, even historically. And the
understanding which has, in these rare cases, reached their history, has
almost always merely scrabbled on the doors of their literature. There
are exceptions, of course, some of whom have taught me all I know, and
whom I honour only short of the great originals. But they are still
exceptions.
Lest any one should accuse me of passing from criticism into
dithyrambic, let me acknowledge at once that whatsoever the [Sidenote:
_Its attitude to criticism._] Middle Ages were or were not, they were
certainly not Ages of Criticism. They could not—it has already been
hinted—have been anything of the kind; it would have ruined their
business and choked their vocation if they had attempted to be so. One
mighty figure does indeed show himself in their midst, to pass on the
torch from Aristotle and Longinus, through unknowing ages, to Coleridge
and Sainte-Beuve. But their very essence was opposed to criticism in any
prevalence. The incorrigible and triumphant (though or because wholly
unconscious) originality which, in practice, created the Romance,
revolutionised the Drama, altered History, devised a fresh Lyric, would
have been constrained and paralysed in the face of theory. At no time
can we be so thankful for the shortcomings of the School Rhetoric which,
if it had been better, might have done frightful harm. Had the Italian
critics, with their warpings of Plato and of Aristotle, appeared in the
thirteenth century instead of the sixteenth, it might have been all over
with us. For the thirteenth century was docile: the sixteenth,
fortunately, was not.
In one particular, however, the comparatively scanty criticism of the
thousand years from the sack of Rome by Alaric to the [Sidenote:
_Importance of prosody._] fall of Constantinople before Mahomet,
acquires a new significance. We have hitherto said little about the
formal criticism of prosody, and for good reasons. The Greek, and in a
less degree the Latin, writers on Metric, are interesting, but their
interest is hardly literary at all, though it has so much to do with
literature. Before we have any finished classical literature from them,
Greek had by its own _euphuia_ acquired, and Latin had forced on itself
by a stern process of gymnastic, systems of prosody which, though in the
former case at least easy as nature, were in both cases simply a branch
of mathematics. The decay of Greek, the bursting by the strong Italian
wine of the earthen or leathern vessel of artificial prosody which had
so long contained it, and the rise of the new vernaculars, introduced a
perfectly different situation; and the criticism, the tentative
unscientific rule-of-thumb criticism, of prosody assumed an importance,
at about the beginning of the fifth century of our era, which it has not
lost on the eve of the twentieth. But these general questions will be
further treated at the close of this Book (see Interchapter iii.) We
must now turn to the details of the actual history.
The standard collection[458] of Latin Rhetorics contains four of very
early date, speaking from our present point of view. The [Sidenote: _The
early formal Rhetorics—Bede._] oldest, and, if it were genuine, the most
interesting, of all in point of authorship, that attributed to S.
Augustine, we shall—for reasons—take last. The others, still of great
interest in this respect, are by, or attributed to, the three greatest
men of “regular” letters in the whole period (500-1000), except Scotus
Erigena—to wit, Bede, Isidore of Seville, and Alcuin.
Footnote 458:
Ed. Capperonnier, pp. 318-328; pp. 375-409. Ed. Halm, i. 137-151; ii.
505-550, 607-618. The _Rhetoric_ (forming part of his _Institutiones_)
of Cassiodorus is also in both collections. It has been glanced at,
_supra_ (pp. 346, 349), and will be noticed again, _infra_ (p. 390).
Bede, who has also left us work of interest on metre,[459] has included
in his works a tractate on the Tropes and Figures of the Holy Scriptures
which gives us, at least, a glimmer in darkness. His argument is
characteristic of his time; but nobody except a churl, and an ignorant
and foolish churl, will smile at it. The Figures are the most important
things in style; the Scriptures are the most important of books;
therefore there must be as good Figures in the Scriptures as in any
other book, and better. He uses, to prove his point, seventeen figures
with examples. In what follows, the chief point of interest is that he
first quotes classical examples (chiefly from Virgil) and then
Scriptural analogues. But he does not by any means confine himself to
the chosen seventeen.
Footnote 459:
_V. infra_, p. 403.
The critical importance of this, for its time especially, can be shown
with little labour. The great danger, the great curse, so to say, of
uncritical reading, is the taking of things as a matter of course, and
the neglect to analyse and ascertain the exact causes and sources of
literary excellence. Now, in itself, the comparison of the Bible and the
classics, from the hard-and-fast point of view of a scholastic
classification of Figures, is a very small matter—and not perhaps even a
very good matter. But when these two so different things are compared,
from any point of view no matter what, the curiosity is aroused; the
mind begins to consider what it really _does_ think fine in this and
that; and in happy circumstances and cases a real—in any perhaps some
approach to a real—appreciation of the goodness of literature will
result. Bede did not intend this—he might have left no pepper to any one
who suggested it to him, as a consequence of his work. But such a
consequence at least might follow.
The references of that great authority of the early Middle Ages, Isidore
of Seville, to Rhetoric are not copious, and are [Sidenote: _Isodore._]
chiefly made up of the already consecrated tags, while the subject is
somewhat mixed with Logic. The orator is the _vir bonus dicendi
peritus_; the parts of Rhetoric are as usual, its kinds likewise. The
forensic side is almost exclusively prominent, and style has hardly any
attention at all.[460]
Footnote 460:
But see below (p. 400) for other contributions of Isidore to our
subject.
Very much more curious is the dialogue with Charlemagne, attributed to
Alcuin or Albinus. The emperor-king, in a [Sidenote: _Alcuin (?)._]
rather precious but not inelegant style, beseeches instruction on the
point; and his teacher, with grandiosity suitable (at least on the
estimate of Martianus) to the subject, protests that the spark of his
little intellect can add nothing to the flame-vomiting light of the
emperor’s genius,[461] but will obey his commands, _juxta auctoritatem
veterum_. In fact, he follows the usual lines, with occasional
indulgence in the curiously, and rather barbarically, but sometimes not
unpleasantly, ornate style which seems to have pleased the youthful
nations of modern Europe. The hard cases of the old Declamations make a
considerable appearance—in fact, very much more of the dialogue (which
is neither very long nor very short) is devoted to this side of the
matter than is the case with Bede and Isidore; and there is even a
slight glance into the subject of Fallacies. The passage on Elocution
may be scrutinised, not perhaps with very great results, but with some
interest and profit, not merely because it directly concerns us, but
also because one may at least hope to have the _auctoritas veterum_
qualified by a little personal and temporal colour. From attention to
style comes _venustas_ to the cause, and _dignitas_ to the orator. It
must be _facunda et aperta_—that is to say, grammatically correct and
clearly arranged. The best authors must be read, and their example
followed. In choosing single words (here the characteristic
above-mentioned may be thought to appear, while the sentiment, and even
the phrase, though of course not new, leads us interestingly on to the
great work of Dante) we ought to choose _electa et illustria_. Metaphor
(_translatio_) brings ornament; as the first object of clothing is to
keep the cold out, and then we make it ornamental, so, &c. In fact,
metaphor is now quite common—the very vulgar speak of the vines
“gemming,” the harvest being “luxuriant,” the crops “waving”: for what
can hardly be described by a “proper” word is illustrated by a metaphor.
Metaphors make things clearer, as “the sea _shivers_”; and sometimes
save a periphrasis, as “the dart _flies_ from the hand.” But you must be
careful only to use honest metaphors; and here the old illustrations
recur. Special figures are slightly touched, though Metonymy and
Synecdoche occur. The remarks on Composition are very meagre, chiefly
deprecating hiatus, the juxtaposition of similar syllables, &c. It is
not unnoteworthy that much more time is spent on actual delivery, that
no illustrations from the poets appear, and that the piece finishes with
remarks on religious and moral virtue, of great excellence in
themselves, but having very little to do with Rhetoric, save indirectly
in the epideictic kind.
Footnote 461:
_Licet flammivomo tuæ sapientiæ lumini scintilla ingenioli mei nil
addere possit._ This was the kind of style wherewith the Dark Ages
liked to lighten their darkness.
But it is unnecessary to hunt further through the formal Rhetorics which
appeared during the Dark and earlier [Sidenote: _Another track of
inquiry._] Middle Ages, though it may be proper to return to the subject
in the chapter dealing with Criticism after Dante. Conservative in all
their ways, though with a conservatism compatible with limitless
expatiation and rehandling, these Ages were nowhere more conservative
than in regard to Rhetoric; and Martianus by himself almost represents
their manual thereof. The influence of the _Marriage of Philology_,
which is prominent at the middle in the _Contention of Phyllis and
Flora_,[462] appears again at the very close, when Hawes “rang to
even-song,” and it will dispense all but specialists from investigation
under this head. We have seen how small is its contribution to
criticism. We must therefore look elsewhere, and, throwing back a little
to St Augustine, himself a Professor of Rhetoric, may endeavour to trace
and pick up, often in bypaths, such windfalls of expression about
literature as may enable us to compose something like a history, if not
of definite and expressed Criticism, at any rate of Literary Taste,
century by century, from the fourth to the thirteenth, through a chain
of now almost wholly Christian writers.
Footnote 462:
This very agreeable Latin verse debate on the merits of knights and
clerks as lovers, which had so long a popularity that it was
paraphrased by Chapman on the eve of the seventeenth century, dates
originally, it would seem, from the twelfth. It may be found in
Wright’s _Poems of Walter Mapes_, p. 258 (London, 1841), or in
_Carmina Burana_, p. 155 (3rd ed., Breslau, 1894).
It is probable, if not certain, that the _Principia Rhetorices_, which
has been already referred to, and which we have [Sidenote: _St Augustine
a Professor of Rhetoric._] under the name of Aurelius Augustinus, was
never written or delivered by the chief of the Latin Fathers, at Tagaste
or at Carthage, at Milan or at Rome. The loss to him is certainly not
great. The treatise, which is short (some ten quarto pages in
Capperonnier), is based upon, and apparently to a large extent quoted or
stolen from, Hermagoras, Cicero’s Rhodian master. It busies itself first
with the nature of Rhetoric, and the calumnies brought against it, and
proceeds to the examination of technicalities, not dictionary-fashion,
as had lately become usual, but continuously. Perhaps the sole argument
(a worthless one enough, for there were probably ten thousand professors
of Rhetoric doing the same thing in his time) for the Saint’s authorship
is, that no book could better answer to his own bitter description of
his worldly profession as “selling words to boys.”
But he _was_ a Professor of Rhetoric, and therefore, in a way, of
literature; and the decisive, because in most cases unintentional,
evidence of the _Confessions_[463] touches [Sidenote: _His attitude to
literature before and after his conversion._] our subject closely and
frequently. We can not only see what was Augustine’s attitude to
literature even before his conversion, but from his attitude to it after
that event we can, without rashness or unfairness, discern the causes
which make one huge and important division of late ancient and early
mediæval literature—the works of the Fathers of the Church—almost a
blank for our special purpose.
Footnote 463:
The editions of the _Confessions_, Latin and English, are so numerous
that I refer to none in particular, but quote book and chapter
throughout.
That Augustine as a little boy (_Conf._, I. 13) hated Greek and loved
Latin, especially the Latin poets,[464] has nothing in [Sidenote:
_Analysis of the_ Confessions _from this point of view_.] it more
marvellous than that any healthy English boy should hate Latin and love
(it is to be hoped that he still does love) _Robinson Crusoe_, and
_Gulliver_, and the _Morte d’Arthur_, and the _Faerie Queene_. And there
is, no doubt, some allowance to be made for that “megalomania” of
repentance which besets the strongly religious, in his regrets for the
tears he shed over dead Dido, neglectful of his own death in life as far
as the soul was concerned.[465] But his attitude to literature, as
expressed in this chapter and onwards, is suggestive not merely of
religiosity, but of a certain antiquarian priggishness. Will not even
the “sellers of grammar” confess that nobody knows when Æneas came to
Carthage, while the more learned know that he never did? Which is the
more useful, reading and writing _per se_, or the figments of poetry?
Homer, though full of “sweetly idle fiction,” was bitter to him, because
he was difficult. And then he returns to the other line, wherein, it
must be confessed, he had strong pagan as well as Christian support.
Footnote 464:
For poor little Roman boys had no _prose_ Defoes or Marryats.
Footnote 465:
Virgil was of course popular everywhere. But, as we have seen, he was
specially popular in Roman Africa, because of the local patriotism
(the strongest sentiment of ancient times) which laid hold of the
story of the hapless Queen of Carthage. I have sometimes thought that
much of the origin of Romance may be traced to this. For Africa, till
the Mahometan Deluge, was the most literary quarter of the late Roman
world.
Do not the poets assign vices to the gods, or rather give the divine
title to wicked men? (cap. 16.) Does not Terence actually make one of
his characters shelter his own sin under Jove’s example? How absurd it
was, if not worse, to have to learn by heart the wrath of Juno at her
ill-success in thwarting Æneas! Nay, he proceeds to further altitudes.
Grammar is more carefully observed than the Law of God. Rhetoric helps
you to do harm to human beings. His own father spent more money than he
could afford on sending him to Madaura and Carthage for education, but
was wholly indifferent to his spiritual welfare (Book II. cap. iii.) His
success in the Rhetoric school (III. 2) filled him with wicked pride. He
even liked stage plays; was so wretchedly mad as to grieve at their
falsehoods and shadows, and so wicked as to sympathise with the
imaginary but immoral enjoyments of lovers. He read Cicero’s
_Hortensius_ with admiration, but for its wisdom, not its form. His own
professorship of Rhetoric was a “covetous selling of tricks to conquer,”
though he himself would not fee a wizard to gain a dramatic prize. He
wrote a treatise, _De Apto et Proprio_, which we (like him) have not,
but which was evidently, if criticism at all, criticism in the abstract.
Although he refers often (_e.g._, V. 7) to his lectures on literature,
he gives us hardly a notion of his literary preferences, estimates,
views; and his Manichæan difficulties, his agonies about the origin of
evil, seem to have drawn him further and further from anything but a
mere professional connection with the subject. In his high eulogium of
Victorinus (VIII. 2) it can hardly be said that he says a word about his
literature. In all his allusions to his Chair he constantly refers to
the oratorical, or rather the debating and advocating, not the literary
side. And what to me seems the most conclusive and remarkable point of
all, the long discourse of sinful, or at least worldly, pleasures with
which Book Ten closes, contains not a reference to the pleasures of
literature, which, as we know from the beginning, he did think ungodly.
They have apparently not importance enough to be taken into
consideration, not merely in connection with the pleasures of sense
(where there might be a reason for their omission), but along with
curiosity, love of praise, fear of blame, vainglory, self-conceit, and
other purely intellectual temptations. The boy had been charmed by
Virgil and Terence—wicked charms he acknowledges—but the man, though he
certainly does not mean to deny their wickedness, has simply put them
away as childish things.
I have thought it well to be somewhat particular in regard to this
appearance of what we may call the Puritan attitude to [Sidenote: _A
conclusion from this to the general patristic view of literature._]
literature, in its earliest and perhaps almost its greatest exponent. It
is of course not entirely new—nothing indeed is ever that; and it is not
merely foreshadowed, but to a certain extent fathered, by the Platonic
views of poetry, and the Academic and Pyrrhonist views of literature
generally. But these older things here acquire an entirely new character
and importance—a character and an importance which can hardly be said to
be merely matters of history yet. Moreover, as I have hinted above, the
attitude is that—varied only by the personal factor—of all the Fathers,
more or less, until, and for some time after, the complete downfall of
Paganism, and of the great majority of ecclesiastical writers for a
thousand years later still.
Its justifications, or at least its excuses, have been often put, and
must in great measure be allowed. Not merely had it, as has been said, a
most respectable pedigree in purely Pagan philosophy, but, as a fighting
creed, it was almost indispensable to the Church Militant. Literature,
and Heathen religion, and the Seven Deadly Sins, were, it might even
seem, inextricably connected. If you wrote an epic you had to begin with
Jove or some other false god; if you wrote a parcel of epigrams it was
practically _de rigueur_ to accuse somebody of unnatural vices, or
affect a partiality for them yourself. But even if things had been
better—if there had been no danger of relapses in faith, and none of the
worst kind in practice—it was inevitable that the poor Fine Arts should
seem vain and trifling exercises to that intense “otherworldliness”
which had come (as no doubt it will at some time or other have to come
again) as an alternative to secular absorption in things secular. To
Augustine, as to monk and homilist long afterwards, not merely was the
theology of literature false, and its morals detestable, but it
was—merely as occupation—frivolous and puerile, a thing unworthy not
only of a Christian but even of a reasonable being. We shall have to
count with so much of this in the present book (and not there only) that
it seemed worth while to take note of it at the outset. It probably did
no great harm, for, as has been repeated more than once, what was wanted
was a new development of literature, as fresh and as spontaneous as
possible: and this might have been more hindered than helped by too
great a devotion to the old. Meanwhile the Seven Liberal Arts were not
much interfered with, either by the Seven Deadly Sins or by their
opponent Virtues, and the mere necessities of preaching and
homily-writing, of controversy with heretics, and of historical
summaries, obliged to practise in the more scholastic branches of
literature itself. As for the less scholastic, they came soon enough,
and more than well enough, as the rains of heaven descended and the wind
of the Spirit blew—the Northern wind.
In such a state of mind literary criticism, though the fact is not even
yet universally recognised, is practically impossible. It is the
furthest stage, and to some extent the converse, of the famous
fallacy—stated once by a critic[466] of great though one-sided ability,
and probably accepted, tacitly or implicitly, by the majority of critics
still—that a man “must take pleasure in the thing represented before he
can take pleasure in the representation.” Here the assumption is that,
if you take pleasure in the representation, you take pleasure in the
thing represented. And there is more also. Not only are the subjects of
literature in part men or devils masquerading as gods, in part men
committing more or less shameful acts; but, even when they are in
themselves unobjectionable, they are idle fiction, there is no truth or
usefulness in them. Men with immortal souls to be saved or lost should
at the worst be horrified at touching such pitch, at the best be ashamed
of burdening themselves with such trumpery. Great as is St Augustine’s
genius for producing literature, one doubts whether he had much taste
for estimating it. The story of the famous pears, which he stole, comes
in rather fatally pat. He stole them, he says, not because he wanted
them or liked them, but because it was naughty to do it. This, though no
uncommon mood, is the worst possible for the critic. It leads him, in
the same way, to praise a book or an author, not because he really likes
them, but because they are naughty—the reverse of the other fallacy and
its punishment.
Footnote 466:
Peacock, in _Gryll Grange_. The utterance is of course dramatic, not
direct, but the character in whose mouth it is put obviously expresses
the author’s sentiments.
Taking this fact into consideration, and adding to it the facts already
glanced at,—the sickness incidental to the moulting of language, the
want of helpfulness in such ancient critics as were likely to fall in
the writer’s way, the increasing scarcity, for hundreds of years, of
books, and other things of the same kind,—it will be seen to have been
not nearly but wholly impossible that the Dark and the Early Middle Ages
could produce much criticism—or any, strictly speaking. The importance
of what they did produce, with the much greater importance of the wholly
new material they offered (to be long slighted by the critical world),
will be considered at length in the Interchapter succeeding this Book.
In the course of the Book itself we shall have to consider a few
rhetorical and art-poetical treatises, entirely in Latin, between the
sixth century and the thirteenth, the solitary document of the _De
vulgari Eloquio_ at the central point of the history, and perhaps some
more _Rhetorics_ and _Poetics_, now dealing in increasing measure for
moderns with the modern tongues, between 1300 and 1500. But we shall
derive most of our material, and almost all the more interesting part of
it, from incidental expressions on literary matters in books not
professedly rhetorical or critical. And, taking century by century and
beginning with the Fifth, we are lucky in finding at once, in the latter
part of this, an interesting and half-famous writer who stands at the
gate of the Dark Ages, but is something of a Janus, avowedly looking
back on classical times, and, Christian as he is, admiring classical
writers.
The literary references in the works of Sidonius Apollinaris[467] are
pretty numerous, and no small proportion of them possesses [Sidenote:
_Sidonius Apollinaris._] direct or indirect critical bearing. On the
rather numerous occasions when the good count-bishop puts a little thing
of his, in easy or flebile verse, into his letters, he by no means
seldom prefaces or follows it with a little modest depreciation; he has
not a few references to books and reading, and now and then he
criticises in form. We could therefore hardly have a fairer chance of
knowing what, at the very eleventh hour and fiftieth minute of the
classical period, was the general state of literary taste in the West.
That Sidonius was a very well-read man, not merely for his time, and
that he had access not merely to most of the things that we have but to
many that we have not, is sufficiently established by this evidence. And
that he did not merely read but marked—that he endeavoured to shape a
style for himself from his reading—is equally certain. Nor would it be
any argument against his critical competence that this style is, if not
exactly harsh, or even very barbarous, marked by the affectation and
involution which seem to beset alike periods of immaturity and periods
of decadence, and which were specially likely to affect a period of both
at once.
Footnote 467:
Ed. Paulus Mohr, Leipsic, 1895.
But it is not easy to rank him very high. His critical utterances have a
besetting tendency to run off into those epithet-tickets which have been
referred to more than once, and which were the curse of the routine
criticism of antiquity. Still, he is very interesting both for his
position and for his intrinsic characteristics: and a selection from the
passages bearing on the subject which I have noted in my reading may, as
in former cases, be of service.
The very dedication of the Epistles to Constantius shows him to us as
modestly endeavouring to follow, if without presumptuous footsteps, “the
roundness of Symmachus, the discipline and maturity of Pliny,” for he
will not say a word of Cicero, referring only to an odd criticism of
that master[468] by Julius Titianus, and to an expression of the school
of Fronto, “the ape of the orators,” applied to Titianus himself. The
description[469] of the villa at Nîmes which, from Gibbon’s[470]
introduction of it, is perhaps better known than anything else of
Sidonius, includes that of a library containing religious works arranged
in cases among the armchairs of the ladies, and a collection of profane
authors near the men’s seats. Thus not merely Augustine, Prudentius, and
the Latin translation of Origen by Rufinus, but Varro and Horace,
received attention; while the excellence of Rufinus’ work is brought out
by a critical allusion to the translations by Apuleius of the _Phædo_,
and by Cicero of the _De Corona_.
Footnote 468:
_Quem in stilo epistulari nec Julius Titianus sub nominibus illustrium
feminarum dignum similitudine expressit._ Ep. i. 1, p. 1, ed. cit.
Footnote 469:
Ep. ii. 9, p. 42.
Footnote 470:
In a note to his account (ch. xxxvi.) of the Emperor Avitus, the
father-in-law of our poet and epistoler.
The metrical questions which were becoming of such immense critical
importance, in consequence of the impingence of vernacular accent and
rhythm on Latin, are frequently touched upon by Sidonius, not, of
course, with a full (that was impossible), but with a fair, sense of
their magnitude. He thinks, justly enough (Ep. ii. 10),[471] that
“unless a remnant, at any rate,[472] vindicates the purity of the Latin
tongue from the rust of barbarism, we shall soon have to bewail it as
utterly abolished and made away with.” And then he justifies himself for
writing a “tumultuous poem” on the church of “Pope”[473] Patiens at
Lyons in hendecasyllabics (which he seems oddly to call “trochaic
triplets” here, as looking at the end only), because he wished not to
vie with the hexameters of the eminent poets Constantius and Secundinus.
Footnote 471:
P. 44 _sq._
Footnote 472:
_Vel paucissimi._
Footnote 473:
Sidonius of course uses _papa_ for “bishop” generally.
There is a glance in iii. 3,[474] which may excite indignation in the
apostles of the “Celtic Renascence,” at the nobility of [Sidenote: _His
elaborate epithet-comparison_] his correspondent “dropping its Celtic
slough” and “imbuing itself, now with the style of oratory, now with
Camenal measures.” This was his brother-in-law Ecdicius, son of the
Emperor Avitus. The epithets come now in single spies, now in
battalions. In a very interesting letter (iv. 3), addressed _Claudiano
suo_ (not, of course, the poet, who was dead before Sidonius was born),
he says that if the “prerogative of antiquity” does not overwhelm him he
will refuse, as equals, the gravity of Fronto and the thunder of the
Apuleian weight; nay, both the Varros, both the Plinys. Then, after an
equally hyperbolical praise in detail, he addresses Claudian’s work as
“O book, multifariously pollent! O language, not of a thin, but of a
subtle mind! which neither bombasts itself out with hyperbolical
effusion, nor is thinned to tameness by _tapeinosis_!” And later:—
Footnote 474:
P. 55.
“Finally, no one in my time has had such a faculty of expressing what he
wished to express. When he[475] launches out against his adversary he
claims, of right, the _symbola_ of the characters and studies of either
tongue. He feels like Pythagoras, he divides like Socrates, he
explains[476] like Plato, he is pregnant like Aristotle; he coaxes like
Æschines, and like Demosthenes is wroth; he has the Hortensian bloom of
spring, and the fruitful summer[477] of Cethegus; he is a Curio in
encouragement, and a Fabius in delay; a Crassus in simulation, and in
dissimulation a Cæsar. He ‘suades’ like Cato, _dis_suades like Appius,
_per_suades like Tully. Yea, if we are to bring the holy fathers into
comparison, he is instructive like Jerome, destructive like Lactantius,
constructive like Augustine; he soars like Hilary, and abases himself
like John; reproves like Basil, consoles like Gregory; has the fluency
of Orosius, and the compression of Rufinus; can relate like Eusebius,
implore like Eucherius; challenges like Paulinus, and like Ambrose
perseveres.”
Footnote 475:
“He” appears to be better than “it,” as partly a personification of
the book, partly a polite _deflection_ of the flattery from the
author.
Footnote 476:
Or perhaps “expatiates” is better for “_explicat_” as a contrast to
_implicat_ for Aristotle.
Footnote 477:
_Vernat ... æstivat_, a favourite antithesis of conceit with Sidonius.
An alternative equivalent for it would be, of course, the _freshness_
of spring and the _glow_ of summer. Nor does this exhaust the
suggested pairs.
As for hymns "your commatic is copious,[478] sweet, lofty, and overtops
all lyrical dithyrambs in poetical pleasantness and historical
[Sidenote: _and minute criticisms of style and metre._] truth. And you
have this special peculiarity, that while keeping the feet or your
metres, the syllables of your feet, and the natures of your syllables,
you can, in a scanty verse, include rich words within its limits, and
the shortness of a restricted poem does not banish the length of a fully
equipped prose phrase: so easily do you manage, with tiny trochees and
tinier pyrrhics, to surpass, not merely the ternaries of the molossus
and the anapæst, but even the fourfold combination of the epitrite and
the pæon."
Footnote 478:
_Commaticus._ This word, originally employed of the alternate
_threnos_ of personage and chorus in Tragedy, passed, in rhetorical
use, to the signification of “short-cut” clauses of prose, and later
received a special application to poems (especially hymns) in very
short lines.
In this extravagant, but really interesting and important, passage, we
may probably see the critical taste of the meeting of the fifth and
sixth centuries—of the late classical and the Dark ages, at its best and
most characteristic. Although the mere taste has lost the power of
distinction, it retains distinguishing formulas. It has learnt, only too
much by heart, certain stock ticket-epithets for distinguished writers,
and it applies them fearlessly and, as far as rote goes, well. Secondly,
we see that a not unimportant habit of comparison had grown up between
the old Pagan and the new Christian literature. Thirdly, that Sidonius
was well aware that all poets of his time by no means kept “the feet of
their metres, and the syllables of their feet, and the natures of their
syllables.” And fourthly, that a lively sense of metrical _quality_—of
the effects that a poet can get out of metre—existed in him.
Fortunately, this sense survived and flourished: and it had almost
everything to do with the formation of the prosody of the new languages.
The promise of the twelfth epistle of the same book,[479] which opens
with a picture of the poet-bishop’s son reading Terence (the _Hecyra_),
while his father expounded the parallel passages in Menander’s Ἐπιτρέπων
is not maintained. But the words, _Gaius Tacitus unus ex majoribus
tuis_, opening another letter[480] to a certain Polemius, bring us once
more close to literary matters, though only to hear that (in a
characteristically Sidonian calculus) Polemius might vanquish, not only
Tacitus in oratory but Ausonius (another, and perhaps more authentic,
ancestor) in verse. If we had a few more details, the letter to Syagrius
(v. 5) on his acquired skill in German speech[481] would be priceless;
as it is, it is rather tantalising. But yet another list[482] of
flattering comparative tickets is valuable because it refers in the main
to lost authors. The diction of Sapaudus is _tam clara tam spectabilis_,
that “the division of Palæmon,[483] the gravity of Gallio, the
copiousness of Delphidius, the discipline of Agroecius, the strength of
Alcimus and the tenderness of Adelphius, the rigour of Magnus and the
sweetness of Victorius, are not only not superior but scarcely equal.”
And then, with a sort of apology for this hyperbolical catalogue, he
cites the “acrimony” of Quintilian and the “pomp” of Palladius as
perhaps comparable. The sixth and seventh books are, the first wholly,
the second mainly, occupied with letters to bishops, of whose interest
in literature Sidonius might not be sure, or to whom he might not care
to parade his own. But the eighth[484] opens with one of those
references to the nasty critics, the envious rivals and derogators, who
play the part of Demades to Demosthenes and Antony to Cicero, and of
whose likes we have perhaps heard from writers later than the Bishop of
Clermont. Their “malice is clear while their diction is obscure,” a
play, of course, on the double meanings of _clarus_ as “clear” and
“illustrious,” and of “obscure” as still observed. And the third letter
of the same has reference to an accompanying translation of the _Life of
Apollonius_, not straight from Philostratus, but as Taxius Victorianus
did it from a recension by one Nicomachus—which the author depreciates
as, by reason of haste, a confused and headlong and “Opic” translation,
thrown out in a rough-and-ready draft.
Footnote 479:
P. 87.
Footnote 480:
P. 89.
Footnote 481:
_Immane narratu est quantum stupeam sermonis te Germanici notitiam
tanta facilitate rapuisse_, pp. 108, 109.
Footnote 482:
Ep. x. p. 114.
Footnote 483:
No doubt Q. Remmius Palæmon, a very famous, very arrogant, and very
immoral grammarian and schoolmaster, who flourished from Tiberius to
Claudius, taught Quintilian, and is mentioned by Juvenal (vi. 451,
vii. 215-219).
Footnote 484:
P. 172.
The eleventh[485] contains a much longer critical passage, of something
the same character as that quoted and analysed [Sidenote: _A deliberate
critique._] above. The death of a certain Lampridius gives Sidonius an
opportunity of copying one of the little things above noted, which had
been composed in the lifetime of its subject, instead of an elegy, and
of praising the Ciceronian, Virgilian, Horatian, and other
accomplishments of that subject as usual. A prose eulogy follows—a
passage among the best of its author’s for the real feeling and force of
its descant on the _necessitas abjecta nascendi, vivendi misera, dura
moriendi_, in which we hear approaching the true Mediæval tone. The
praise is by no means unmixed as far as character goes; it only
approaches panegyric when it comes to the literary part. In orations, it
seems, the defunct was “keen, round, well composed and well struck
off,”[486] in poems “tender, good at various metres, and a cunning
craftsman.” His verses were “very exact but singularly varied both in
foot and measure,” his hendecasyllables were “smooth and knotless,” his
hexameters “detonating[487] and cothurned (fitted for the buskin)”; his
elegiacs “now echoing, now recurrent, now joined at end and beginning by
anadiplosis” (the “turn of words” in which the decadence bettered Ovid).
In his “ethica dictio” (probably equal to “ethopoeia”) he did not use
words as they came, but selected “grand, beautiful, carefully polished”
ones.[488] In controversy he was strong and nervous, in satire
careful[489] and biting, in tragic passions fierce or plaintive, in
comic urbane and multiform, in his fescennines showing the bloom of
spring (we know this Euphuism) in his words, the warmth of summer in his
wishes; watchful, economical, and “carminabund”[490] in bucolics, and in
Georgics so rustical as to have nothing clownish about him. His epigrams
aimed not at abundance but point; they were not shorter than a distich
or longer than a quatrain; they were not seldom peppered, often honeyed,
always salt. He followed Horace in swift iambics, weighty choriambics,
supple Alcaics, inspired Sapphics. In short, into whatever form of
expression his mind carried him, he was subtle, apt, instructed, most
eloquent, a swan like to soar, with wings only inferior to those of
Horace himself and Pindar. And envious fate has left us not a note of
this swan’s song![491]
Footnote 485:
P. 188 _sq_.
Footnote 486:
_Acer, rotundus, compositus, excussus._ I am never quite certain
whether these Sidonian collocations (see above, p. 385 _note_) ought
not to be taken in pairs as antithetic double epithets, “round in the
keenness, and well struck off in its composition.”
Footnote 487:
_Crepantes._
Footnote 488:
Here does Sidonius (though all unknowing, in the one case certainly,
in the other all but certainly) repeat Longinus and anticipate Dante—a
cry of the child in the night.
Footnote 489:
_Sollicitus_, perhaps “actively harassing” his enemy.
Footnote 490:
This is a word so delightful in itself that I have no heart to attempt
translation. “Carolling,” I suppose, would come nearest.
Footnote 491:
The passage contains many curious details about this not wholly
Admirable Crichton, who was at last strangled by his slaves. The
description of the dead body and its silent testimony to the
crime—_protinus argumento fuere livida cutis, oculi protuberantes, et
in obruto vultu non minora iræ vestigia quam doloris_—is vivid, and
does not compare too badly even with the great picture of
Glouceester’s corpse in _Henry VI._
We may close the account of the Sidonian criticism in prose with a mere
reference to the curious list of symbolic gestures and features of the
philosophers in ix. 9. His poems need not detain us; but reference
should also be made to the verse enclosure in Epist. ix. 13, containing
glosses on different metres[492] and poetic forms; to the exposition of
“recurrent” verses in the succeeding letter, as well as, in the
_Carmina_, to the long list, with critical remarks, of authors in ix.;
to the very interesting, and to this day sound, justification of the
introduction of exotic words and neologisms when necessary, in the prose
preface to xiv.; and to a crowd of literary references in xxiii.
Footnote 492:
P. 223.
I have been somewhat copious in dwelling on the bishop-count-poet,
because he is infinitely the most valuable document [Sidenote:
_Cassiodorus._] that we have as to the highwater-mark of the state of
critical knowledge and opinion with which the Dark or Earlier Middle
Ages started.[493] We have in the last book examined the chief text-book
of formal grammar and Rhetoric, that of Martianus, with which they were
already provided, and we need only glance at two other standards of
theirs, Boethius and Cassiodorus, who come close in time to Sidonius,
and probably to Martianus likewise. Cassiodorus wrote, like Capella, on
the Liberal arts, though in a manner at once informal and less
fantastic, and his influence in encouraging the frequenters of the
mediæval _scriptorium_ to copy ancient manuscripts deserves eternal
gratitude. But I have not yet discovered in him much material for our
special inquiry.
Footnote 493:
Indeed, such a passage as the elaborate criticism of the literary work
of Lampridius, however exaggerated and out of focus, is of quite
priceless value to us. It is the kind of thing of which we have only
too little from classical antiquity, and if it were not for the
Halicarnassian and Longinus, should have quite wofully little. It is
the kind of thing of which we have as nearly as possible nothing from
the Middle Ages, and hardly anything, of equal directness to the
individual, from the Renaissance; while, though it has been plentiful
enough for the last two hundred and fifty years, and especially for
the last hundred, the very abundance of it diminishes the individual
significance of the expressions.
Nor is the great name of Boethius here as great as elsewhere. He wrote,
indeed, on rhetorical _loci_, and the author of the [Sidenote:
_Boethius._] metres in the _Consolatio_[494] deserves no mean place in
creative literature. But if he had taken any really keen critical
interest in books, for their form as distinguished from their matter, it
must have appeared in the _Consolatio_ itself. On the contrary, as
everybody knows who has ever looked at the book, it begins with
Philosophy packing the Muses off as “strumpets and mermaidens” in a tone
half-suggestive of Plato a little the worse for Augustine. And though
the “suasion of sweetness rhetorien” is afterwards patronisingly spoken
of (Book II., Prose i.), and Homer with the honey-mouth, Lucan, and
others are quoted, yet Rhetoric is expressly warned that “she goeth the
right way only when she forsaketh not _my_ statutes.” Moreover, the
beautiful metre _Vela Neritii ducis_ is a merely moral, and almost
merely allegorical, playing on the story of Circe.
Footnote 494:
I use the agreeable Variorum edition, Leyden, 1671. No apology, I
think, is needed in this instance for not making my own translations,
but partly conveying Chaucer’s.
We can, however, see from the comparison some useful things. The stock
of actual erudition possessed by at any rate some persons was
considerable; but the number of these persons was not very large, and
both the [Sidenote: _Critical attitude of the fifth century._] “remnant”
itself[495] and its accomplishments were likely to decline and dwindle.
The new vernaculars were already assuming importance; men were
likely[496] to be chosen for positions of ecclesiastical eminence
(almost the only ones in which study of literature was becoming
possible), because of their bilingual skill, or to be driven by such
positions to study of the vernacular. And this bilingualism was likely
not merely to barbarise even their Latin style, but to draw them away
from the study of classical Latin, and still more Greek. In regard to
the latter, we see further, from two passages of Sidonius quoted above,
that persons of very considerable education were apt to use translations
of the Greek fathers, as well as of Pagan writings, in preference to the
original. Yet again we see that even the most accomplished scholars of
the time (and Sidonius himself may certainly claim that distinction)
were, on the one hand, more and more acquiescing in what, to borrow
Covenanting phraseology, we may call the “benumbing, deadening, and
soul-destroying” list of ticket-epithets: and, on the other, were
gradually losing a sense of the relative proportions of things—of the
literary ratio of patristic to classical literature, and of the
productions of their own day to those of the great masters, whether
classical or patristic. And thirdly, we see that even so careful a
metrical student as the Bishop of Clermont was succumbing to the charm
of “recurrent” verses, acrostics, telestics, and all the rest of it.
Footnote 495:
_V. supra_, p. 384, and note.
Footnote 496:
As in the well-known cases, somewhat later, of St Faron and of
Mummolenus.
On the other hand, this process of “losing grip” is very far from the
state in which we find it by the time that we are in full Middle Age:
and, for good as well as for evil, the glorious hotch-potch of that
period is still distant. Virgil is not yet an enchanter or anything like
it: he and his works are perfectly well placed in their proper literary
and historical connections. If, on the side of form, there is perhaps
already a rather perilous tendency to see no very great difference
between Orosius and Livy, there is none to put Dares (who probably did
not exist) on a level as an authority with Homer, or above him, in point
of matter. And while the fables about Alexander probably _did_ exist,
men of education did not think of mixing them up with the facts.
The most favourable sign of all, however, is that metrical solicitude
which has been already more than once referred to. The anxiety which
Sidonius shows to suit his metres to his subject would do credit to a
much better poet in a much more “enlightened” age; and it is surely not
fantastic to see in his constant reference to success or failure in
adjusting “syllables to feet, and feet to measures,” that the difference
of the classical prosody from the newer, half-accentual quantification
even in Latin, and from the vernacular rhythms sounding all over Europe,
was forcing itself, consciously or unconsciously, on his mind. And it
cannot be repeated too often that to construct and perfect new
prosodies, in Latin and in the vernaculars alike, was perhaps the
greatest critical-practical problem that the Middle Age had before it.
The sixth century has even fewer lights among its gathering gloom; in
the beginning and at the end of the seventh a kind of rally of torches
is made by Isidore and Bede. [Sidenote: _The sixth—Fulgentius._] There
are, however, two authors at least in the sixth who are full of
significance, even if that significance be too much of a negative kind.
These are the African grammarian Fulgentius, with his _Expositio
Virgiliana_, probably in the earlier half, and the poet-priest Venantius
Fortunatus, certainly in the later.
Fulgentius[497] holds something like a position in the history of
Allegory, being not infrequently breveted with the rank of go-between,
or the place of fresh starting-point, between the last development of
the purely classical allegory in Claudian, and the thick-coming
allegoric fancies of the early Christian homilists and commentators,
which were to thicken ever and spread till the full blossoming of
Allegory in the _Romance of the Rose_, and its busy decadence
thenceforward. Unluckily, Allegory was, as we have seen, no novelty in
criticism; but rather a congenital or endemic disease—and Fulgentius
only marks a fresh and furious outburst of it. Virgil, a favourite
everywhere in the late Roman world, was, it has been said, an especial
favourite in Africa: and Fulgentius would appear to have given the
reins, not exactly to the steed, but to the ass, of his fancy, in
reference to the Mantuan.
Footnote 497:
Fabius Planciades Fulgentius (to describe whom in appropriate epithet
would require the pen and ink of Ritson, though his recent editor says
that the _injucundum opus_, as Reifferscheid had called it, had become
to him _jucundissimum_ in performance) used to be buried in the
_Mythographi Latini_. The benevolence of Herr Teubner has however made
him accessible separately, or rather with a dim little brace of
satellite Fulgentii (ed. Helm, Leipsic, 1898).
The writings of the Fulgentian clan (none of which, fortunately, is
long) consist of (1) three books of _Mitologiæ_ (_Mythologiæ_), of (2)
the _Expositio Virgilianæ Continentiæ [Sidenote: _The Fulgentii and
their books._] secundum Philosophos Morales_ which is our principal
text, and of (3) a shorter _Expositio Sermonum Antiquorum_, attributed
to Fabius Planciades Fulgentius, who was probably of African birth, and
probably lived in the early sixth century; of (4) a tractate, _De
Ætatibus Mundi et Hominis_, attributed to Fabius Claudius Gordianus
Fulgentius; and (5) of a note on the _Thebaid_ of Statius, attributed to
Fulgentius, Saint and Bishop. The personalities of these persons are to
the last degree unknown; and it is very uncertain whether they were in
reality one or two or three. The books we may best cite as 1, 2, 3, 4,
5.
4 is far better written and more sensible than the others; but it has
nothing to do with our subject. 3 is a short list (sixteen pages and
sixty-two articles) of notes on out-of-the-way words (_abstrusi
sermones_), where it is curious to find among really unusual
locutions—_friguttire_, _suggrundaria_, _tittivilitium_, and the
like—such to us everyday ones as _problema_ and _auctio_. 2 and 5
concern our business, equally in substance, unequally in importance and
extent, and to understand them both, it is desirable to read 1 at least
cursorily, although it, like them, is a tissue of appallingly barbarous
Latin—enshrining allegorical interpretations as ridiculous as the most
absurd in the _Gesta Romanorum_,[498] and derivations which in their
sheer serious insanity surpass the most promising efforts of the clever
and sportive schoolboy in the same kind. As no one, I think, who reads
this book will regard me as a detractor of the Dark and Middle Ages, I
may speak here without fear and without favour.
Footnote 498:
Some of the morals of the _Gesta_ are of course not in the least
ridiculous: but others “bear the bell” in that respect.
Having surveyed Mythology from the point of view of the most grovelling
allegory, etymologically assisted by such fancies as that Teiresias
(T_e_resias in his spelling) is derived [Sidenote: _The_ Super Thebaiden
_and_ Expositio Virgiliana.] from _theros_ and _æon_, meaning “eternal
summer,” and that Ulixes _Græce_ (it will go near to be thought shortly
that Fulgentius knew less Greek than Shakespeare) is “quasi-_olon xenos_
id est omnium peregrinus,” Fulgentius seems to have turned to
literature. If he also wrote the note on the _Thebaid_ attributed to the
Sainted Bishop (and it is very much in the same style), he confined
himself to a brief argument of the story, with a few etymologies, such
as “_Creon quasi cremens omnia_,” and a short preface. In this he tells
us that he “can never without grand ammiration[499] retract the
ininvestigable prudence of the poets, and the immarcescible vein of
their genius”: and having thus prepared rejoicing for the heart of the
Limousin scholar nine hundred years ahead, he sets the fashion to Lyly
by observing “Diligit puer nucem ad ludum integram: sapiens autem et
adultus frangit ad gustum.” But this, though not insignificant, is a
slight thing.
Footnote 499:
The forms _ammiratio_, _nimfa_, &c. are interesting as showing Latin
in its transformation to Romance.
The _Expositio Virgiliana_ or _Virgiliana Continentia_ (this word being
late Latin for “contents”) is itself not long: it fills, with _apparatus
criticus_, some five-and-twenty pages. If it were not written in a most
detestable style, combining the presence of more than the affectation
and barbarism of Martianus with a complete absence of his quaintness and
full-blooded savour, it would be rather agreeable to read: even as it
is, it is full of interest. We catch Virgil in mid-flight through the
void, from that position of universal exponent of sober literary art
which we have seen him occupy with Macrobius, to his rank as beneficent
enchanter a few centuries later. The Bucolics and Georgics are full of
such _Phisica secreta_, such _misticæ rationes_, that they are actually
dangerous to touch. He has passed over the _interna viscera nullius pæne
artis_ in these books. In the first Eclogue he has physically summed up
the three lives (active, contemplative, and enjoying); in the fourth, he
is a prophet; in the fifth, a priest; in the sixth, partly a musician,
partly a physiologist; in the seventh, _botanicen dinamin tetigit_, he
has touched the power of botany;[500] in the eighth he has pointed out
magic and the apotelesmatic of the musician; combining this with
_euphemesis_,[501] in the ninth.
Footnote 500:
It is very agreeable to see how the poor copyist of one MS., utterly
nonplussed by the learning of Fulgentius, has excogitated the blessed
words “totakicendi namin.”
Footnote 501:
This, disentangled from various _voces nihili_ in the MS., is probably
used in one of the senses which εὐφημία more properly bears in
classical Greek, “liturgical writing,” “prayer and praise.”
In the first Georgic he is throughout an astrologer and then a
“eufemetic”; in the second, a physiologist and medical man; in the
third, wholly an aruspex; and in the fourth, is to the fullest musical.
But Fulgentius will not meddle further with the details of these books;
and, after a breathless and intricate prologue, attacks the _Æneid_ in a
manner easily to be conjectured from what has been said. Every word,
every syllable almost, of the first line, is tortured to yield an
allegory; the account being thrown into the form, first of a dialogue
between poet and interpreter, and then of a long speech from the former.
Achates is “Græce quasi _aconetos_ id est tristitiæ consuetudo.” Iopas
is “quasi _siopas_ id est taciturnitas puerilis.” The progress of the
story is the growth of human life. The wanderings of the first three
books are the tales that amuse youth; the fourth shows how love
distracts early manhood; the fifth displays it turning to generous
exercises; the sixth is deep study of nature and things; the rest active
life. And if anybody wishes to know why Turnus’ charioteer was called
Metiscus, “Metiscos enim Græce est ebriosus.”
It cannot be necessary to say much of this, which speaks for itself; it
is, as we said at first, the _intellectus_ (or rather the want of
intellect) _sibi permissus_ and expatiating unchecked. _Qui l’aime le
suive!_
Venantius Honorius Clementianus Fortunatus[502] (for a plethora of names
was as characteristic of the Latin as of other decadences) is a much
more interesting figure, and his [Sidenote: _Venantius Fortunatus._]
critical importance, if less direct, is not really inferior. He goes in
the general literary memory with Sidonius, as the twin-light of not yet
wholly barbaric Gaul; and he had probably more original poetic gift than
his predecessor. At least, I can find nowhere in Sidonius anything
approaching the throb and thrill of his two great and universally known
hymns, _Pange Lingua_ and _Vexilla Regis_—the earliest, perhaps, to
attain that ineffable word-music of hymn-Latin, which is entirely
independent of mere tune, mere setting, and which is not only equal to,
but independent of, the choicest sound-music of either ancient or modern
verse. He was also a livelier writer; and though he has made even
further progress in the direction of affectation and bombast, these
things rather add a piquancy, if not to his painful official praises of
Queen Brunehault, at any rate to his expression of his half-pious,
half-human affection for Radegund the Queen and Agnes the Abbess, his
account of the sad results when the hospitable Mummolenus[503] would
make him eat too many peaches, and his admirable description of his sail
on the Moselle.
Footnote 502:
Ed. in two parts—the prose by F. Leo and the verse by B. Krusch—among
the _Monumenta Germaniæ Historica_ (Berlin, 1881-85).
Footnote 503:
Not the Bishop afterwards famous as first known to preach in French.
Moreover, he was certainly accomplished in all the learning of his time.
He could even write very fair, if not delightful, sapphics. And he is
not to be treated with the scornful contempt which some have heaped upon
him, merely because he composed (with an amount of labour which makes
one’s brain and eyes ache to think of) acrostics and cross-poems of
various degrees of artificiality. He has one marvellous structure of the
latter kind,[504] in which not only do the frame-letters of the scheme
make sense, but correspondences, interwoven in the text trace out, also
in sense, a sort of cross _patée_, as thus:—
[Illustration]
Here the dots represent (though they are fewer) letters doing double
duty, as part of sentences straight across, and in the lines of the
figure itself. “The grace and liberty of the composition,” as some one
says, may indeed be lost in such intricacies, yet are they not in
themselves unliterary as a pastime.
Footnote 504:
Part i. p. 30. Another design of only minor intricacy, but not fully
filled in, appears a little later.
It must, however, be most frankly confessed that the literary
expressions and references which we find in Fortunatus are (in the sense
in which the word has so often to be used in this part of our work)
“tell-tales.”
The Preface of his Poems,[505] addressed to Pope Gregory, opens with a
somewhat emphatic and inflated laudation of the great men of letters of
old, who were, we learn, "provident in invention, serious in partition,
balanced in distribution, pleasant with the heel of epilogues, fluent
with the fount of bile, beautiful with succise terseness, adorned from
head to foot [literally "alike crowned and buskined"] with tropes,
paradigms, periods, epicheiremes," which gives us a pretty clear idea of
what seemed to Fortunatus to be literature. It contains also some
touches of the “Italic”[506] writer’s contempt of those who “make no
distinction between the shriek of the goose and the song of the swan,”
who love “the harp buzzing barbarous _leods_.” But far fewer direct
references to literature occur in these poems than in those of Sidonius.
In II. ix.,[507] to the Parisian clergy who bade him resume his
long-abandoned lyre, he takes it up purely as the hymn-writer, not the
man of letters. There is more of the attitude of the latter in the prose
epistle (III. iv.)[508] to Bishop Felix, but it does not come to very
much. In the tenth of the same book,[509] the same bishop (who had, it
seems, turned a river from its course) receives a complimentary
reference to Homer, but none to Herodotus. Yet another bishop (of the
undeniably Frankish name of Bertechramnus) is complimented, in the
eighteenth, on his epigrams.[510] But Fortunatus, after much applause,
does not fear (let us hope that the Frank was more placable than his
brother prelate of Granada later) to add—
“Sed tamen in vestro quædam sermone notavi
Carmine de veteri furta novella loqui,
Ex quibus in paucis superedita syllaba fregit
Et pede læsa suo musica clauda gemit.”
Let us congratulate Venantius on not yielding to the heresy of the
“extra-metrical syllable,” which has deceived some of the very elect in
more illuminated days. Some slight glimmers are given by the
flattery,[511] more elaborate than anything yet noticed, of still
another bishop, Martin of Gallicia: and in V. iii.[512] we get a
ticket-list of the same kind (though shorter and slighter) as those of
which Sidonius is so prodigal. In this, after Athanasius has been
designated _fortis_, Hilary _clarus_, Martin _dives_, and Ambrose
_gravis_, he adds the distich—
“Gregorius _radiat_, sacer Augustinus _inundat_,
Basilius _rutilat_, Cæsariusque _micat_.”
Footnote 505:
Part i. p. 1.
Footnote 506:
Fortunatus seems to have been carefully styled Presbyter _Italicus_.
Cf. “Romanos” below. He was born at, or near, Treviso.
Footnote 507:
P. 37.
Footnote 508:
P. 52.
Footnote 509:
P. 62.
Footnote 510:
P. 72.
Footnote 511:
In the prose overture of Bk. V., p. 101 _sq._
Footnote 512:
Ll. 37-40 (p. 107).
The epistle to Syagrius of Autun (V. vi.)[513], which introduces another
elaborate cross-poem, contains a vindication of it, by a twist of the
Horatian tag to the effect that as painting and poetics are so like, why
should you not combine them in such a fashion? After which the
intricacies of the poem itself are carefully explained. The reference to
“us Romans” in the poem to Sigebert (V. ii. 98)[514] (where he
compliments the king on his skill, Sicambrian as he is, in the Latin
tongue) suggests that the writer would have been scantly grateful for
the inclusion of his work among “Monumenta _Germaniæ_.”
Footnote 513:
P. 112.
Footnote 514:
P. 133.
The genuine prose works of Fortunatus, consisting only of a few Saints’
Lives, do not promise much; but there is at least one remarkable passage
in them. It is the opening of the Life of Saint Marcellus[515] in which
his customary deprecation takes this form. “Illustrious orators of the
most eloquent genius, whose speeches are distinguished by varied
flowers, and shadowed by the vernal tendrils of eloquence, are wont
deliberately to seek common causes and sterile matter, that they may
show themselves as possessing an inexhaustible flow of speech on the
smallest subjects, and as able to inundate the dryest themes with their
internal founts of rhetoric. Men not so clever cannot even treat great
subjects,” &c.
Footnote 515:
Part ii. p. 49.
And this, falling in with the other glimpses we have obtained, gives no
misty view of the critical standpoint of this agreeable writer. The
literary _nisus_, the literary tone, are fairly well maintained; there
is no glaring lack of positive knowledge; and neither style nor sense
shows anything like the degradation of Fulgentius. But Fortunatus, far
more than Sidonius, is, in the good old phrase, “to seek” in the general
field of matters literary, and especially in its critical quarters.
Glitter and clatter, tinsel and crackers, are in prose, if not in verse
(he is far more sober there), too much his ideals. The curse of the
ancient formal Rhetoric has so far outlasted its blessings, that the
expression of opinion last quoted would suit, and almost exaggerate, the
position of the worst of the old declamation-makers. As to prosody, he
has to some extent, if not wholly, “kept the bird in his bosom,” and his
affection for subtleties in arrangement is, as has been said, not so
wholly to his discredit as Mr Addison and Mr Pope thought. But it is
rather a dangerous support; and he has very few others.
As Fulgentius and Venantius have stood for the sixth, so Isidore and
Bede[516] may stand for the seventh century, while Bede’s flourishing
time stretches into the eighth.
Footnote 516:
Aldhelm, between the two, wrote on metre, and is a considerable and
characteristic writer for his time, but needs no detailed treatment
here.
Isidore’s treatment of Grammar[517] is much fuller than his handling of
her showier sister Rhetoric.[518] It fills the whole of [Sidenote:
_Isidore of Seville again_.] the First Book of the curious Encyclopædia
called the _Origines_, and is much more liberally arranged than the
usual grammatical treatise, including a great deal of applied matter of
various kinds, visibly filching Tropes and Figures from Rhetoric
herself, and, besides dealing with Prosody, even devoting sections to
the Fable and to History under more than one head. There is much
interesting (if not for us strictly relevant) matter in the earlier
chapters, where we read that _literæ_ are _quasi legiteræ_, and that
Greek and Latin appear to have arisen out of Hebrew. The _vitia_, from
barbarism and solœcism downwards, are pure Rhetoric, containing, as
they do, things like _tapeinosis_ and amphibology, with which Grammar,
as such, has certainly nothing to do; and they are near the rhetorical
side of Criticism herself. The Metaplasms which follow, as purely
verbal, may be claimed by the elder sister, but the _schemata_ and the
_tropi_ are unquestioned usurpations. And thereafter, with Chapter
Thirty-Seven _De Prosa_, we are almost on our own ground.
Footnote 517:
The _Origines_ or _Etymologiæ_, as a whole, form vol. iii. of
Lindemann’s _Corpus Grammaticorum_ (Leipsic, 1833), but this can
usually be obtained separate, and is worth having. It, of course,
repeats the _Rhetoric_, which is merely one section of it.
Footnote 518:
See above, p. 374 _sq._
Isidore, if not (save in his title) very original, is judicious in his
selections from the public stock, and puts them together in a much more
useful fashion than some authors of “composition-books” a good deal his
juniors. Prose is “a straightforward form of speech freed from metre.”
Metres (he has given “feet” a good deal earlier) are the fixed
arrangements of feet which constitute verse. Their names are classified
and accounted for, as are, subsequently, the chief forms of poetry in
which they appear. The origination of these is claimed for various
sacred persons—of the Hymn for David, “who was long before Ennius,” of
the Epithalamium for Solomon. Not a few of the definitions, though
desultory and oddly selected, are noteworthy, and the considerable space
given to that of the Cento is characteristic of the age.
Fable, as has been said, has a section to itself, an honour which is
prophetic of—and considering Isidore’s influence may, to some extent,
have caused—the great attention paid in the Middle Ages to that kind.
The History sections, though four in number, are much shorter—indeed,
scarcely so long together as the single one allotted to Fable, which
fact also is true, as the needle is, to the pole of the time. It is much
better, Isidore thinks, that a man should only write of what he has
actually seen. But History is not useless reading. Strictly, it is of
our own time; “Annals” of the past; while Ephemeris is a diurnal and
Kalendarium a monthly history. Finally the book ends with a contrast of
_historia_, _argumentum_, and _fabula_. The first is of true things
really done; the second of things which, though they have not been done,
might be; the third of things which neither have been done nor can be,
because they are contrary to nature. Here _argumentum_ clearly looks
towards oratory: with regard to the difference between _historia_ and
_fabula_, it must be admitted that the ages which followed very
scrupulously forgot their teacher’s warning.
But even this does not exhaust our indebtedness to a very agreeable
work, full of good sense and sound learning. The Sixth Book, which
begins with an account of the Old and New Testament, diverges to the
consideration of books generally. A note on famous libraries leads
Isidore to record the chief authorities on Biblical Exegesis, from whom
he passes to Latin libraries, to others (those of the Martyr Pamphilus
and of Jerome), and thence to authors. Much writing attracts him first:
and Varro, the Greek Chalcenterus, Origen, and St Augustine are picked
out, the not entirely single-edged compliment being paid to the last,
that not only could nobody write his books by working day and night, but
nobody could read them completely by a similar expenditure of time and
labour. An odd division of works follows, into _excerpta_ or _scholia_,
“homilies,” and “tomes” or books,[519] or volumes: and this is followed
by a string of remarks, as before rather desultory, on different kinds
of books and writings, commentaries, prefaces, and what not. Then
Isidore passes to the material side, and discusses waxen and wooden
tablets, parchment, paper, with something about _format_. The staff and
the plant of libraries follow; and then, returning from things profane
to things divine, the book finishes with an account of the Calendar and
the Offices of the Church.
Footnote 519:
Perhaps this is not so odd as it looks. _Excerpta_ or _scholia_ are,
_individually_, scraps; “homilies,” or essays, are only parts of a
book: _tomi_ are books substantive.
Those to whose taste and intellect this kind of thing appears despicable
must, of course, be permitted to despise it. Others will prefer to
recognise, with interest and sympathy, the combination of an extremely
strong desire for knowledge, and the possession of no small quantity
thereof, not merely with great disadvantages of resource and supply, but
with a most curious and (if it were not so healthy and so promising)
pathetic inability to distinguish, to know exactly where to plant the
grip, what to discard, what simply to neglect. And they, once more, will
see in this whole attitude, in this childhood crying for the light,
something more encouraging than the complacent illumination of certain
other ages, with which, perhaps, they may be more fully acquainted.
Bede,[520] a century later than Isidore, presents a changed but not a
lesser interest. It is utterly improbable that the Bishop [Sidenote:
_Bede again._] of Seville found himself in face of any vernacular
writing that could be called in the least literary—if any vernacular
except Latin and Old Basque can be supposed to have existed in Spain at
all. Bede’s circumstances were quite different. The most famous passage
in his writings—the story of Cædmon—is sufficient to tell us, even if we
did not know it from other testimony, and from his extant death-bed
verses, that he was well acquainted with vernacular poetry.
Footnote 520:
Bede’s treatises on Metric and Orthography, besides being accessible
in the various collected editions of his works, are to be found in
vol. vii. part ii. of Keil’s _Grammatici Latini_ (Leipsic, 1878).
But he seems to have thought it either unnecessary or undesirable to
give any critical attention to it. His _Ars Metrica_[521], like his
_Orthography_[522] and his _Rhetoric_,[523] concerns [Sidenote: _His_
Ars Metrica.] itself strictly with Latin. That this was on the whole
better for the time, and so indirectly for us, who are the offspring of
that time; that it was better for the vernaculars to be left to grow and
seed themselves, and be transformed naturally without any attempt to
train and so to cramp them; that it was, on the other hand, all
important that the hand of discipline should be kept on the only
“regular” writing, that of Latin—we may not only admit with frankness,
but most eagerly and spontaneously advance and maintain. But the carnal
man cannot help sighing for a tractate—a tractatule even of the
tiniest—on English verse, from the Venerable One. There are, however, in
the _Ars Metrica_ one large and several small crumbs of comfort. It is a
pity that the learned and accurate Keil should have spoken so
scornfully[524] of the undoubted truth that, while Bede supplements the
precepts of the old grammarians in no whit, his whole usefulness lies in
regard to the examination of more recent poets, and, as he calls them,
“modern versifiers”; and should, a little further, have still more
scornfully declined[525] to trouble himself with verifying unnamed
references to such persons as Prudentius, Sedulius, Venantius
Fortunatus, and others. To despise any age of literature is not
literary: and to ignore it (as the motto which I have ventured to borrow
from the excellent Leyser hath it in other words) is not safe. I think
we may ask Herr Keil this question, “Is it not exactly of the _moderni
versificatores_ that Bede can speak to us with advantage?” Do we, except
by a supererogation of curiosity, want remarks from him on Virgil and
Ovid?
Footnote 521:
Ed. cit. (with Introd.), pp. 219-260.
Footnote 522:
Ibid., pp. 261-294.
Footnote 523:
See p. 374.
Footnote 524:
Ed. cit., p. 221.
Footnote 525:
_Ut longum et molestum erat, ita in hoc genere scriptorum parum utile
esse videbatur._
Bede (who addresses the tract to the same Cuthbert whom we have to thank
for the charming account of his death) begins with the letter, goes on
to the syllable, and then has a chapter of peculiar interest on _common_
syllables—those stumbling-blocks to so many modern students of English
prosody. The quantity of syllables in various positions is then dealt
with successively, and next the metres, cæsura, elision, &c. One may
note as specially interesting the section _Quæ sit optima Carminis
forma_ (p. 243), both as showing long before, in reference to the
hexameter, the same “striving after the best” which appears in Dante’s
extrication of the _canzone_ and the hendecasyllable from meaner forms
and lines, and as indicating something like a sense of that
“verse-paragraph” which was to be the method of Shakespeare and of
Milton. In dealing with these things he sometimes quotes, and still more
frequently relies upon, Mallius Theodorus. But the passage which, if it
existed alone, would make the book valuable (though in that case, as no
doubt in many others, we should be prone to think that we had lost
something more precious than it actually is), comes under the head _De
Rhythmo_. After saying that the “Common books of a hundred metres”[526]
will give many of these which he has omitted, he goes on thus: “But
rhythm seems to be like metres, in that it is a modulated arrangement of
words, governed not by metrical rule, but _by the number of syllables_,
according to the judgment of the ear. And there can be rhythm without
metre, though there can be no metre without rhythm: or, as it may be
more clearly defined, metre is rhythm with modulation, rhythm modulation
without proportion. But for the most part you will find, by a certain
chance, proportion likewise in rhythm: not that any artificial
discipline is used, but from the conduct of the sound and the modulation
itself; and such as the poets of the people naturally produce in a
rustic, learned poets in a learned manner.”[527] And then he quotes, as
examples of iambic and trochaic rhythms respectively, the well-known
hymns, _Rex æterne Domine_ and _Apparebit repentina_.
Footnote 526:
_Libris centimetrorum simplicibus examinata._ “Centimeter” is “the
poet who employs a hundred metres,” or the critic who discusses them.
Sidonius (Carm. ix. 264), in a passage referred to above (p. 389),
applies it to Terentianus Maurus, who certainly deserves it both in
theory and practice (_v._ his book, ed. Lachmann, Berlin, 1836).
Footnote 527:
_Vulgares poetæ._
Now this, which, though partly a result of, is quite different from, the
classical opposition of rhythm and metre, is a thing of the first
importance, and could not have been said by any one who had neglected
the _moderni versificatores_: while it would perhaps not have been said
so clearly and well by any one who had not known, and paid some
attention to, the rising vernaculars. Even if, as Keil thinks, Bede
followed such writers as Victorinus and Audax, he confirmed and
strengthened this following by his study of recent verse.
I do not perceive any great crux in this passage: but Guest[528] was
puzzled by the phrase _numero syllabarum_, which he seems to have taken
as meaning that rhythm was more, not less, strict than metre in syllabic
regularity. I am not sure that the words bear this interpretation: but,
even if they did, we must remember that the rhythms _of which Bede was
speaking_ are very strict syllabically, and admit little or no
equivalence. The more prudish hymn-writers even dislike elision, and
give every syllable its value.
Footnote 528:
_History of English Rhythms_, Bk. iii. chap. vi. (p. 472, ed. Skeat).
He also speaks of “discrepancies” in the different copies: but Keil’s
_apparatus_ gives no important variants in the MSS.
It is not from caprice or idleness that the somewhat minute examination
thus given to the opening centuries of the Dark [Sidenote: _The Central
Middle Ages to be more rapidly passed over._] or early Middle Ages will
now be exchanged for a more rapid flight over the central portion of the
same division of history. There are two very good reasons for this
course. The first is, that there is a very great absence, probably of
all material, certainly of material that is accessible. The second is,
that even if such material existed and could be got at, it would
probably be of little if of any service. When conditions of rhythmical
composition in Latin were once settled, that composition was pursued
with delightful results,[529] but with half traditional, half
instinctive, absence of critical inquiry as to form. It was impossible
that any such inquiry should take place, in the case of the vernaculars,
until they had reached a state of actual creative development, which
none of them enjoyed till the twelfth century, and hardly any of them
till the thirteenth. As for appreciation, other than traditional, of
authors classical, patristic, or contemporary, this was rendered a rare
thing by that very mental constitution of the Middle Ages which has
already been often referred to, and which will be more fully discussed
in the Interchapter following this book. This constitution, rich in many
priceless qualities, almost entirely lacked self-detachment on the one
hand, and egotistic introspection on the other. It can very seldom have
occurred to any Mediæval to isolate himself from the usual estimate of
writers—to separate his opinion of their formal excellence from the
interest, or the use, of their contents. And even if it had so occurred
to any one, he would probably not have thought that opinion worth
communicating. From which things, much more than from the assumed
shallowness or puerility, a thousand years saw an almost astoundingly
small change in regard to the matters with which we deal. Boethius and
Martianus are text-books to the early sixteenth century as to the early
sixth: the satirical lampoons of the religious wars in France burlesque
the form, and use the language, of the hymns of Venantius
Fortunatus:[530] Hawes and Douglas look at literature and science with
the eyes of Isidore, if not even of Cassiodorus. Whether this
conservatism did not invite, disastrously, the reaction of the
Renaissance-criticism, we shall have to consider later; it is certain
that it limits, very notably, the material of the present book, and
especially of this portion of the present chapter. On two very
remarkable books of the earliest thirteenth century, the _Labyrinthus_
attributed to Eberhard, and the _Nova Poetria_ of Geoffrey de Vinsauf,
we may dwell with the utmost advantage. Otherwise a few notes, chiefly
on the formal _Arts Poetic_ of the mid-Middle Age, are not only all that
need, but almost all that can, be given before we turn to the great
mediæval document of our subject, the _De Vulgari Eloquio_ of Dante.
Footnote 529:
For the understanding reader there is perhaps no subdivision of
literature more constantly delectable and refreshing than the Latin
hymns of the sixth-thirteenth centuries on the one hand, and on the
other the lighter work contained in such collections as the _Carmina
Burana_, Edélestand du Méril’s _three_ issues of _Poésies Populaires
Latines_, Wright’s _Poems of Walter Mapes_, _&c._
Footnote 530:
Cf. the ferocious, but vigorous, lampoon on Catherine of Montpensier
and Jacques Clément, entitled _Prosa Cleri Parisiensis ad ducem de
Mena_ (_Anciennes Poésies Françaises_, vol. ii. _Bibl. Elzévirienne_:
Paris, 1855).
In the vernacular languages it is hardly necessary to do more than refer
to the instructions for accomplishing the intricacies [Sidenote:
_Provençal and Latin treatises._] of Provençal verse found in that
tongue;[531] the Latin rhythmics are rather more interesting. Until
quite recently, access to them, save in the case of those students who
unite palæographical accomplishment with leisure and means to travel all
over Europe, was almost confined to two precious collections, the
_Reliquiæ Antiquæ_ of Wright and Halliwell, and the plump and pleasing
volume of Polycarp Leyser, which, among its varied treasures, gives the
entire _Labyrinthus_ of Eberhard, the most important of them all. Now,
however, the really admirable industry of Signor Giovanni Mari has
collected, not merely the metrical part of the _Labyrinthus_, and the
work (also rather famous) of John de Garlandia, but no less than six
others, all of the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries.[532] It is indeed
not impossible that the first of these, the _De Rhythmico Dictamine_,
may in its original have been as old as the twelfth, to which the
_Labyrinthus_ itself used also to be assigned.
Footnote 531:
_V._ Bartsch, _Grundriss zur Gesch. der Prov. Lit._, p. 65 _sq._, on
Faidit’s _Donat_, Ramon Vidal’s _Rasos de Trobar_, &c.
Footnote 532:
_Reliquiæ Antiquæ_, by T. Wright & J. O. Halliwell, 2 vols., London,
1845.
P. Leyser, _Historia Poetarum et Poematum Medii Ævi_, Halle, 1721.
G. Mari, _I Trattate Medievali di Ritmica Latina_, Milan, 1899.
The _Dictamen_,[533] the MSS. of which are found all over Europe, is
very short. It lays down firmly the principle, which was [Sidenote:
_The_ De Dictamine Rhythmico.] later to differentiate Romance from
Teutonic, especially English, prosody, that _rhythmus est consonans
paritas syllabarum sub certo numere comprehensarum_; it sets the limits
of the line at a minimum of four syllables and a maximum of fourteen; it
designs rhyme throughout as _consonance_; it gives examples from
well-known hymns, from the poems attributed to Mapes and some not
elsewhere known; and it supplies minute distinctions of kind as
“transformed,” “equicomous,” “orbiculate,” “serpentine” rhythms. The
tractatule is strictly limited to rhythm proper: classical metres do not
appear in it. A rehandling by a certain “Master Sion” differs in its
examples, and is rather more minute in its subdivisions: and there is
yet a third version or pair of versions showing the authority and
general influence of the treatise, while the _Regulæ de Rhythmis_ hardly
differ essentially, and lead to the same conclusion.
Footnote 533:
First given in _Reliquiæ Antiquæ_, i. 30-32. The others (except the
_Labyrinthus_) are in Mari only.
The _Ars Rhythmica_ of John de Garlandia is a much more elaborate
composition, which originally followed upon similar [Sidenote: _John of
Garlandia._] treatments of “prose” and “metre.” It is remarkable on the
one hand for giving, not mere verses, but whole poems as examples, and
on the other for varying the same theme in different rhythmical
dispositions. The terms of ancient metric are also borrowed rather more
freely than in the _Dictamen_; and great attention is paid to
“rhetorical colours” of verse—homœoteleuton and the like. It is much
longer than any form of the _Dictamen_, and has a supplement dealing
with the strictly metrical forms usual in hymns. This does not exhibit
the learned John Garland (he may have been an Englishman) as an expert
in literary history, since he writes: “Saphicum, a Sapho _muliere
quadam_ quæ fuit inventrix hujus metri: adonicum ab Adone inventore.”
But in his liberal contribution of probably original examples he
includes an _Oda de Archidiacono_, which might have been useful in a
famous investigation. In fact, probably a major part of the treatise
consists of not very excellent verse.
Signor Mari, conformably to his plan, has given of the
_Labyrinthus_[534] only the short section dealing actually with
[Sidenote: _The_ Labyrinthus.] rhythm: but the whole poem is of very
great interest and importance for us—indeed of more than any work known
to me between Isidore and Dante. The work, which is otherwise called _De
Miseriis Rectorum Scholarum_, is an elaborate treatise on pædagogics. In
the progress and details of this, the writer seems to forget the
lugubrious estimate of his profession with which he starts, and which
goes so far as to lay down that the future schoolmaster is cursed in his
mother’s womb. Very sound rules are however given for guiding the moral
nature and conduct of this unfortunate functionary; and then his various
businesses are systematically attacked in elegiacs, not at all
contemptible with due allowance. The second part deals with “themes,”
grammar, and, to some extent, composition in general, though the
examples, like the lecture, are in verse; the third with versification.
And here we get a really precious estimate of various authors,
ostensibly for their educational value, but, as in Quintilian’s case,
going a good deal further. Indeed, hardly since Quintilian’s own time
have we had such a critical summary. Cato, a special darling of the
Middle Age, is “a path of virtue and a rule of Morals,” [Sidenote:
_Critical review of poets contained in it._] “though the brevity of his
metre forbids him to polish his words.” Theodolus,[535] a tenth-century
writer of _Eclogæ_, who “champions” (is this the sense of _arcet_?) the
cause of truth against falsehood, “and in whose verse theology plays,”
comes next; and then the far better known Avianus, the instructive and
moral virtue of whose fables is acknowledged, though he is debited
_pauperiore stylo_. In one of the puns so dear to the sensible Middle
Ages, _Æsopus metrum non sopit_—_i.e._, writes no dull or sleepy
verse—and is otherwise highly praised. Maximianus[536] and Pamphilus
(the original of the _Celestina_) follow, and “Geta,”[537] and a punning
reference[538] to Claudian’s _Rape of Proserpine_. Statius, of course,
is praised, indeed twice over. The “pleasing” work of Ovid, the “satire
of the Venusian,” the “not juvenile but mature” ditto of Juvenal, which
“lays bare and never cloaks vice”; Persius of the lofty soul, who spares
no subtlety of mind though he is a lover of brevity, come next, while to
these great satirists of old, the _Architrenius_[539] of John of
Hauteville is yoked, with less injustice than may seem likely to
devotees of classic and scorners of mediæval literature. The inevitable
eccentricity (to _us_) of the mediæval estimate, and probably also the
perseverance of the wooden censorship of Servius, is shown by the fact
that only Virgil’s “themes,” not his treatment, are noticed, except
obliquely. The second notice of Statius for the _Thebaid_, as the first
had been for the _Achilleid_, is less reticent, praising him as _eloquii
jucundus melle_; and Lucan is said to sing _metro lucidiore_, while an
_Alexandreid_ (no doubt that of Gautier of Châtillon), though described
as “shining by Lucan’s light,” is extolled as a historical poem.
Claudian, again by allusion, receives praise for his praise of Stilicho,
and Dares (as we expect with resignation) for his “veracity”; indeed the
clerestories toward that south-north are quite as lustrous as ebony.
Still Homer is placed beside him without depreciation, unless the
mention of _Argolicum dolum_ is intended as a stigma. The couplet
following—
“Sidonii regis qui pingit prælia morem
Egregium calamus Sidonianus habet”—
is annotated by Leyser “Apollonius,” but there seems some difficulty in
this Apollonius. _Rhodius_ has nothing to do with Tyre or Sidon; and
Apollonius _of Tyre_ has very little to do with _prælia_. The poet
alluded to, whoever he is, possesses a pen with a noble manner. A
Salimarius or Solinarius, who sang of the crusades, may be any versifier
of William of Tyre: unless, indeed, the phrase _plenus amore crucis_
refers to one of the numerous poems on the Invention of the Cross.
Macer’s matter is praised, but not his verse, _non sapit ille metro_—a
true Quintilianian judgment. Petrus Riga (_petra cujus rigat Cristus_)
escapes better. Sedulius is noted for “sedulity” of metre, and Arator
“ploughs” the apostolic facts well, while Prudentius, of course, is
prudent.
Footnote 534:
Or _Laborintus_. The adoption of an “Eberhard of Bethune” as the
author is not universally granted, nor the dating at 1212. But the
exact authorship is not of the slightest importance to us, and the
exact date not of much. The whole poem is printed by Leyser, p. 795
_sq._
Footnote 535:
Or Theodulus: _v._ Leyser, _op. cit._, p. 825 _sq._
Footnote 536:
This barbarous, and to Mrs Grundy shocking, but by no means
uninteresting versifier, was a great favourite with the Middle Ages.
He may be found conveniently in Baehrens, _Poetæ Latini Minores_, v.
313 _sq._
Footnote 537:
Leyser oddly annotated _Geta gemens_ “titulus tragediæ,” but the
words—
“Quia captus Mercuriali
Arte Jovem lectus Amphitrionis habet”—
can only refer to an _Amphitryon_.
Footnote 538:
“Thesiphones raptum qui comptus carmine claudit
Arte nec ingenio claudicat ille suo.”
To abduct Tisiphone would be a feather in the cap of any Don Juan, for
audacity if not for taste; but the text is corrupt enough to make it
(as it is elsewhere) an easy _f.l._ for Persephone. The puns in
_claudit_ and _claudicat_, moreover, are practically decisive.
Footnote 539:
This remarkable twelfth-century poem—_v. infra_, note, p. 414, an
allegorical world-pilgrimage with special reference to student sojourn
at Paris—was first abstracted by Wright in his _Biographia Britannica
Literaria_, vol. ii., London, 1846, and afterwards published in full
by him (_Anglo-Latin Satirical Poets of the Twelfth Century_, London,
1872). John of Hauteville or Anville is also credited with a MS.
treatise, _De Epistolarum Compositione_. I wish I had seen it.
Alanus (de Insulis: “Alanus who was very sage,” as Pierre de la Sippade,
the translator of _Paris and Vienne_ from Provençal into French says) is
cited for his dealing with the Seven Arts in the _Anti-Claudianus_; and
half-a-dozen lines of rather obscure allusiveness are devoted to
Matthias Vindocinensis on Tobit, Geoffrey of Vinsauf (_v. infra_), and
Alexander of Villedieu. Prosper _doctrinæ prosperitate sapit_; and the
list is closed by fresh praises of the above Matthias or Matthew, of
Martianus Capella and his “happy style,” of Boethius, Bernardus, the
_Physiologus_, Paraclitus (?), and Sidonius Apollinaris.[540]
Footnote 540:
_Physiologus_ is of course the famous piece of Thetbaldus, the
original—mediate or immediate—of all the vernacular _Bestiaries_.
“Paraclitus” Leyser prints in capitals, like the other titles of books
or authors:—
“Hortatur propria per scripta PARACLITUS omnes
Peccantes. Veniam gratia donat iis.”
I should myself have taken this for a reference to the Holy Spirit as
speaking through the moralities of the _Physiologus_. The false
quantity is, of course, no objection to this: the 3rd syllable is
short at pleasure from Prudentius onwards. For poems of Matthias
Vindocinensis see _Reliquiæ Antiquæ_, ii. 257 _sq._ There is some
merit in them.
This catalogue, partly reasoned, is precious, as showing what the
“Thirty best books” of the age of Dante’s birth were. It is succeeded by
metrical and rhythmical directions, characterised by a good deal of
punning as above, but also by acuteness and knowledge.
The extract from the _Labyrinthus_ given by Signor Mari is followed in
his book by two other rhythmical tractates of [Sidenote: _Minor
rhythmical tractates._] small importance, one very short, from a MS. in
the Monaco library, and a longer one, but much later (it is probably as
late as 1400), by a certain Nicolo Tibino. This last is chiefly
noteworthy as giving fewer examples, but much exposition and discussion:
it is indeed, after the custom of these ancestors, a kind of commentary
on the _Labyrinthus_.
But, as it happens, the next piece to the _Labyrinthus_ in Leyser is a
treatise of interest as great as its own, if not greater, the _Poetria
Nova_ of Geoffrey de Vinsauf. Geoffrey, who, despite his French-sounding
name, was certainly a [Sidenote: _Geoffrey de Vinsauf: his_ Nova
Poetria.] countryman of ours, has been rather unkindly treated by us.
Chaucer bestowed upon him one of his most ingeniously humorous
gibes,[541] and Mr Wright (the most faithful and enthusiastic guardian
and restorer of our Latin poets, and usually as tolerant as any, this
side of mere critical omnivorousness) uses hard language of him in the
_Biographia Britannica Literaria_.[542] But he is too valuable to us to
be here abused: rather shall we be grateful to him exceedingly for
revealing the literary tastes and ideals of the age as they lived. The
_New Poetic_[543] begins by one of those mediæval gambades which,
themselves sometimes partaking of the not unamiably nonsensical, seem at
the present day to have a special gift of maddening those persons whose
imbecility is of a different complexion from theirs. Geoffrey dedicates
his poem to Pope Innocent III. (“stupor mundi”), and is at once in a
difficulty. It would not do to call the Pope _Nocens_; _Innocens_ is
simply impossible in a hexameter. So he plays about the subject for a
score or so of lines, adding eulogistic jocular remarks on other
Christian names, especially in relation to the Papacy. “Augustine may
hold his tongue: Leo be quiet: John leave off: Gregory halt,”[544] while
Innocent is comparable with Bartlemy in nobility, with Andrew in
mildness, with St John himself in precious youth, in faith with Peter,
in consummate scholarship with Paul. Then Rome is praised in comparison
with England, and the poet-professor-of-poetry plunges into his subject.
Footnote 541:
_Nun’s Priest’s Tale_, 527 _sq._
Footnote 542:
_Anglo-Norman Period_, vol. ii. p. 398 _sq._
Footnote 543:
Leyser, _op. cit._, pp. 855-986.
Footnote 544:
“Augustine tace. Leo papa quiesce. Johannes
Desine. Gregori subsiste.”
His value, even if it were more flawed and alloyed than it is, will
appear at once from the simple statement of the fact that, unlike the
great majority of mediæval writers (such as they are) on literature, he
does not confine himself to form on the one hand, and on the other does
not adopt, in handling his subject, the extreme cut-and-dried rhetorical
restrictions, though his own conception of the matter is more or less
regulated by them. I do not remember that he ever quotes Horace; but it
is pretty certain that he had the _Ars Poetica_ before him. He opens
with the most solemn and elaborate commands to the poet not to rush upon
his subject, to leave nothing to chance, but to form the conception of
the work carefully and completely beforehand. “A little gall embitters a
whole mass of honey, and one spot makes a whole face ugly.” In his
second chapter he becomes more closely rhetorical. The poet must first
choose and arrange his subject; then elaborate and amplify it; then
clothe it in “civil, not rustic” words; and lastly, study its proper
recitation or delivery. Under the first head the _mot d’ordre_ is order:
the very word _ordo_ occurs over and over again in the first dozen or
sixteen lines. The exordium must look straight to the end: and all the
other parts must follow according to the regular drill of a “theme.”
Special attention is given to the employment of Examples and Proverbs.
Under the head of treatment, Brevity, Amplification, and all the
scholastic tricks of style are inculcated again with plentiful examples,
these including that unlucky passage against Friday which tempted the
wicked wit of another Geoffrey. It is, however, fair to say that He of
the Sound Wine does not himself seem to have been by any means destitute
of a certain sense of humour, and demands ridicule of the ridiculous. If
by his precept, and still more by his examples, Geoffrey seems too much
to encourage word-play as a lighter, and bombast as a graver, ornament
of composition, it is well to remember that the fashions of every time
are not only liable to exaggeration, but nearly always exhibit it.
Professional students of literature have no difficulty in putting a name
to such exaggerations in the thirteenth, the sixteenth, or the
eighteenth century; nor will such students in the future have any more
in performing the same office for the literary fashions of the late
nineteenth. Nor are some of the prescriptions for figure, and fanciful
colour and conceit, by any means infelicitous—always supposing that such
things can be made the subject of regular prescription at all. On the
other hand, it must be admitted that Geoffrey is sometimes painfully
rudimentary. The budding poet who requires to be told that
“Aptantur bene dentes nix; labra flammæ;
Gustus mel; vultus rosa; frons lac; crines et aurum;”
and who then obediently “goes and does it,” is a person with whose works
reviewers (for their sins) are indeed still well acquainted, but to whom
no philanthropist would willingly give encouragement.
This descent to even the lowest ranges of the particular is, however,
one of the most interesting points of the book. There are some two
thousand lines in all, and the whole, except the dedication and three
not very long epilogue-addresses to Pope, Emperor, and a certain
Archbishop William (who has not, I think, been identified), is strictly
devoted to business.
This poem is, on fair authority, assigned to the year 1216, the
_Labyrinthus_ being dated some four years earlier. And, without pinning
our faith to these dates and so running the danger of its unsettlement
should they be attacked, we may say quite boldly that the _Labyrinthus_
and the _Nova Poetria_[545] together give us a remarkable and nearly
complete conspectus of what the late twelfth and early thirteenth
century thought about literature, in what was still its almost
all-embracing form—poetry, in both its rhythmical and metrical
shapes—and in the only thoroughly acknowledged literary language of the
time. For although the vernaculars were already knocking at the door,
they were doing so as yet timidly and half consciously, while in so far
as they were deliberately practised, the principles of composition and
of taste which guided the practice cannot have been different. We find,
if not always with exactly the same _nuance_, terms of Dante’s critical
vocabulary (_e.g._, “pexa”) in the _Poetria Nova_. And though neither
Eberhard nor Geoffrey would in all probability have had anything but
scorn for the suggestion that “vulgar” could possibly equal “regular”
composition; though they were at best men of respectable talent; their
general critical estimate was probably not very different from that of
their great successor on the bridge of the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries. Of his eagle glance into the future of literature they were
entirely destitute, but he shared at least some of their confused vision
in reference to the past.[546]
Footnote 545:
Three other poems of the twelfth or early thirteenth century (referred
to above) are more original, two of them at least are more amusing,
and all have obtained more notice from general literary historians.
These are the _Speculum Stultorum_ or _Brunellus_ of Nigel Wireker,
the _Architrenius_ (see p. 410) of John of Hauteville, and the
_Anti-Claudianus_ of Alanus de Insulis. All three may be found most
conveniently in Wright’s above-cited work, _Anglo-Latin Satirical
Poets of the Twelfth Century_ (2 vols., Rolls Series, London, 1872).
They are by no means to be neglected by us, though their testimony is
mostly negative, and a slight reference to its nature will cover,
indirectly, the absence of reference in the text to such still more
generally famous authors as John of Salisbury and Walter Mapes
himself. It is probable that all five writers, as well as Godfrey of
Winchester (also in Wright, _op. cit._), who could write fair epigrams
in the more decent style of Martial, and others, were well acquainted
with no inconsiderable part of the classics. Upon satirists, moreover,
like Wireker and John of Hauteville, who were attacking the vanity of
monkish and clerical life, hopes, and ambitions, the labour-in-vain of
Universities, and the like, some such indirect but substantive
literary criticism as we find in their Roman originals would seem
almost imperative. But there is nothing of the kind, either in the
_Speculum_ or in the _Architrenius_. In the much duller
_Anti-Claudianus_, Rhetoric, like the other arts, appears, and she is
employed, consistently with her presentation in Martianus (though the
Rhetoric of Capella would perhaps have been too proud to do this
directly) to “paint and gild the pole” of the allegorical Chariot of
Prudence. But of criticism there is nothing, or so little as to be
nothing. Nor will much be found in the interesting notice of mediæval
notices of books and book collections which occurs in M. Cocheris’ ed.
of the _Philobiblon_ (_v. infra_, p. 455), pp. xxxiv-xlvii.
Footnote 546:
If to this peculiarity I seem to refer too often, let me close this
chapter with a sentence from one who loved the Middle Ages as well as
any man, and knew them far better than almost any. To them, says M.
Paulin Paris, “Les siècles passés ne semblaient former qu’une seule et
grande époque, où se réunissaient toutes les célébrités de
l’histoire.”—_Les Romans de la Table Ronde_, i. 169 (Paris: 1868-77).
CHAPTER II.
DANTE.
THE ‘DE VULGARI ELOQUIO’: ITS HISTORY AND AUTHENTICATION—ITS IMPORTANCE,
AND THE SCANTY RECOGNITION THEREOF—ABSTRACT OF ITS CONTENTS: THE
“VULGAR TONGUE” AND “GRAMMAR”—THE NATURE, ETC., OF THE GIFT OF
SPEECH—DIVISION OF CONTEMPORARY TONGUES, AND OF THE SUBDIVISIONS OF
ROMANCE—THE ‘ITALIAN DIALECTS’: SOME REJECTED AT ONCE—OTHERS:
SICILIAN, APULIAN, TUSCAN, AND GENOESE—VENETIAN: SOME GOOD IN
BOLOGNESE—THE “ILLUSTRIOUS” LANGUAGE NONE OF THESE, BUT THEIR COMMON
MEASURE—ITS FOUR CHARACTERISTICS—THE SECOND BOOK: WHY DANTE DEALS
WITH POETRY ONLY—ALL GOOD POETRY SHOULD BE IN THE “ILLUSTRIOUS”—THE
SUBJECTS OF HIGH POETRY: WAR, LOVE, VIRTUE—ITS FORM:
CANZONI—DEFINITION OF POETRY—ITS STYLES, AND THE CONSTITUENTS OF THE
GRAND STYLE—“SUPERBIA CARMINUM”—“CONSTRUCTIONIS ELATIO”—“EXCELLENTIA
VERBORUM”—“PEXA ET HIRSUTA”—THE CANZONE—IMPORTANCE OF THIS
BOOK—INDEPENDENCE AND NOVELTY OF ITS METHOD—DANTE’S ATTENTION TO
FORM—HIS DISREGARD OF ORATORY—THE INFLUENCE ON HIM OF ROMANCE, AND
OF COMPARATIVE CRITICISM—THE POETICAL DIFFERENTIA ACCORDING TO
HIM—HIS ANTIDOTE TO THE WORDSWORTHIAN HERESY—HIS HANDLING OF
METRE—OF DICTION—HIS STANDARDS OF STYLE—THE “CHAPTER OF THE
SIEVE”—THE “PEXA”—THE “HIRSUTA”—OTHER CRITICAL “LOCI” IN DANTE: THE
EPISTLE TO CAN GRANDE—THE “CONVITO”—DANTE ON TRANSLATION—ON LANGUAGE
AS SHOWN IN PROSE AND VERSE—FINAL REMARKS ON HIS CRITICISM.
Many are the fortunes of books and the curiosities of them: but there
are few which exceed, in curiosity of many kinds, the history,
character, and fate of the treatise variously entitled _De Vulgari
Eloquentia_ and _De Vulgari Eloquio_, and attributed generally, if not
universally, to Dante Alighieri.[547] Its mere history is unusual. In
the fifth chapter of the first book of [Sidenote: _The_ De Vulgari
Eloquio. _Its history and authentication._] the _Convito_, Dante says
that he shall speak elsewhere more fully, on the subject of Latin and
the Vernacular, in a book which, D.V., he intends to write on _Volgare
Eloquenza_. Boccaccio further says that very near his death he did write
it, and the statement is confirmed by Villani. These mentions give it us
as written in Latin prose and in two books, but after them we hear
nothing about it. In 1529 the poet and dramatist Trissino printed at
Vicenza an Italian translation of it, not under his own name, but under
that of Giovan Battista Doria. No indication was given that this was not
the original, and for a time it was taken as such. But in 1577 Jacopo
Corbinelli published, at Paris, the Latin Text. The MS. which he used,
and which for centuries was supposed to be unique, appears to be that
rediscovered at Grenoble in 1840, and published in facsimile by MM.
Maignien and Prompt in 1892; but there are two other early MSS. One of
these, belonging to the Trivulzi, is taken to be as old, perhaps, as the
Grenoble, both not improbably being older than 1400. A third, at the
Vatican, is a century younger, but still some twenty years older than
the first printed (and translated) edition. The usual difficulties have
been started over these facts, and over some supposed contradictions
between the treatise and Dante’s more certain work. But these concern us
little, and may be sought, by those who want them, in the editions of
the book. It is sufficient to say that few books have a better external
testimony, and that the internal difficulties (some of which will be
referred to later) are quite insignificant.
Footnote 547:
The choice between _Eloquentia_ and _Eloquium_ lies with the taste and
fancy of the chooser. The first word occurs first in the treatise
itself. The second is in the title of the Grenoble MS. The texts which
I use are, for the Latin, Dr Prompt’s facsimile of this MS., Venice,
Olschki, 1892, and Dr Moore’s edition of the _Opere_ (Oxford, 1897),
with Mr Ferrers-Howell’s annotated English translation (London, 1890).
This latter is very good as a whole, though of course one may differ
as to the rendering of individual terms. The edition of the Società
Dantesca by Signor P. Rajna (Florence, 1896) is elaborated with all
the minute care by which scholarship in the looser modern vernaculars
endeavours to put itself on a level with that in the older and exacter
tongues. Unfortunately the emulation, here as elsewhere, is carried as
far as the old unworthy tricks of depreciation and abuse of
predecessors and rivals. The elaborate commentary is limited, with an
almost ferocious scrupulosity, to the barest letter of the text; but
another volume containing literary annotation is promised.
We may take it then on its own showing; and, without haggling about
dates, be reasonably confident that it was written [Sidenote: _Its
importance._] after Dante’s banishment, and of course before his
death—that is to say, in the opening years of the fourteenth century.
Forgery is practically out of the question, for, as has been said, the
oldest manuscripts are some century and a quarter older than Trissino’s
version, and there could be no conceivable reason why any one late in
the fourteenth century—even if he had the wits to forge such a thing,
which is begging a huge question—should have abstained from reaping the
sole advantage derivable from such a forgery by making it known as
Dante’s. We take it, then—and may take it with confidence very nearly if
not completely absolute—as in two different ways a document of the very
highest value, even before its intrinsic worth is considered at all. In
the first place, there is the importance of date, which gives us in it
the first critical treatise on the literary use of the vernacular, at
exactly the point when the various vernaculars of Europe had finished,
more or less, their first stage. Secondly, there is the importance of
authorship, in that we have, as is hardly anywhere else the case, the
greatest creative writer, not merely of one literature but of a whole
period of the European world, betaking himself to criticism. If
Shakespeare had written the _Discoveries_ instead of Ben Jonson, the
only possible analogue would have been supplied. Even Homer could not
have given us a third, for he could hardly have had the literature to
work upon.
As a matter of fact, however, the book, as I shall hope to show, would
be of almost the highest interest if it were anonymous. [Sidenote: _And
the scanty recognition thereof._] Its intrinsic value has been by no
means universally recognised: indeed I hardly know any editor or critic
of Dante who has put it in quite its right place. This is, I venture in
all humility to think, due mainly to the fact that the historic estimate
of criticism in general has hitherto been so rarely taken, and so
scantily based. But there are minor reasons. In the first place, the
book, except by professed Dantists, has been very little studied.[548]
And in the second, what I shall endeavour to prove to be its greatest
value may, in the curious critical prejudices which still prevail so
largely, have told positively against it. It has shocked people to find
the author of the _Commedia_ indulging in grammatical and prosodic
scholasticism; and the shocked ones either do not pause to ask, or
refuse to answer, the question whether the said scholasticism had not a
good deal to do with the quality of the _Commedia_.
Footnote 548:
Coleridge, I think, refers to it; but with no adequate recognition.
As in the case of other books of importance, we may give a pretty full
abstract of the book, which will be all the more desirable in that it
is, as has been said, far from well known. The Latin, though not very
crabbed, is sometimes peculiar, and some of the terms require careful
elucidation.
Dante begins by stating in due form his reasons for writing; the absence
of any treatise of the kind, the importance of the [Sidenote: _Abstract
of its contents: The “Vulgar Tongue” and “Grammar.”_] subject, and so
forth. He is going to write about the Vulgar Tongue, and this Vulgar
Tongue is that which we acquire, without any rule, by imitating our
nurses. But, he says, we also have another and secondary speech, which
the Romans called Grammar. The Greeks also have it, and other nations,
but not all, while comparatively few individuals possess it, because its
acquisition means time and trouble. And the Vulgar Tongue is nobler,
because it is more natural: so we shall treat of it.
Here a slight _crux_ arises as to what Dante meant by “Grammar”: at
least (for the first part of his observations is clear enough) what he
meant by saying that “the Greeks have it, and others but not all.”[549]
Are _Grammatica_ and “Latin” interchangeable terms? or does he mean that
there was a literary as well as a vernacular form of Greek, and literary
as well as vernacular forms of Hebrew, Arabic, &c.? The latter seems to
suit the argument best up to a certain point; but it is exposed to the
difficulty that, if so, Dante would be trying to make, out of the
Vulgars, a _Grammatica_ for Italian, which nowhere seems to have been
his intention. But it is no great matter.
Footnote 549:
_Hanc quidem secundariam Græci habent et alii sed non omnes._
He has so far cleared his ground very well; but, to his own orderly and
scholastically educated mind, he does not seem to [Sidenote: _The
nature, &c., of the gift of speech._] have done enough. He lays down in
chap. ii. that man alone has intercourse by speech. Angels and animals
do not want it, for angels communicate intuitively; devils have no need
of it;[550] to animals[551] it were useless: and if anybody urges the
serpent in Paradise, Balaam’s ass, Ovid in the _Metamorphoses_ about
magpies, these objections can be met in various ways. The real power of
speech has been given to man alone. He needed it (chap. iii.) because he
has both reason and senses, and therefore must have some medium which
will convey the discourse of the former in a manner acceptable to the
latter. It is probable (chap. v.) that man spoke before woman, though
the earliest recorded speech is assigned to Eve: for man is more
excellent. And it is probable that the first word he spoke was “El,”
“God,” and was addressed to God Himself in Paradise. No doubt (vi.) the
language was Hebrew. Foolish people may be driven (had Dante heard of
the Gaelic claim?) to believe that their own vernacular was that of
Adam. But he knows better. Though he drank of Arno before his teeth
appeared, and loves Florence so dearly that for the love he bore her is
he wrongfully suffering exile—though for the pleasure of his own senses
there exists no pleasanter place than Florence, yet he thinks that there
are places in the world nobler and more delightful than Tuscany and
Florence, and that many nations and races may use a pleasanter and
handier speech. The consideration of the Flood, Babel, and the
consequent division of speech (chap, vii.) saddens him very much; but
the facts are indisputable.
Footnote 550:
For the delightfully scholastic (and, like most scholastic things, by
no means inept) reasons, first, that as they set God at nought we need
take no count of them; secondly, that all they want to know of each
other, for their fiendish purposes, is their diabolic quality and
rank.
Footnote 551:
As being solely guided by instinct.
It is probable that these chapters, coming as they do at the very
outset, have, with hasty readers and thinkers, brought some discredit on
the book. They exhibit what it used to be, and still is to some extent,
the fashion to call the childish side of mediævalism and scholasticism.
Every age no doubt has its own childishnesses, and is profoundly
convinced that in holding them it has thoroughly put away childish
things. I do not myself know that, if it were possible to take a
simultaneous horizontal view of the ages, the nineteenth century would
be found so very much in advance of the thirteenth in this respect. But
putting this aside as matter of separable controversy, we may observe
that, in the main body of his argument, Dante is merely arguing, and
arguing very sensibly and closely, from premisses which no one educated
man in a thousand of his contemporaries would have disputed, and that at
the beginning and end there are very notable things. The notable thing
at the beginning is the separation of “Grammar” and the “Vulgar Tongue,”
and the, at that time, exceedingly bold ascription of greater “nobility”
to the latter.[552] The notable thing at the end is the unexpectedly
cosmopolitan character of Dante’s sentiments about the excellence of
various countries and their vernaculars. It is true that, for good as
well as for evil, there was about Europe then a certain solidarity which
has entirely disappeared; but local, as distinct from national,
patriotism was as strong, and occasionally as silly, as at any other
time. Dante’s own attitude puts us at once into a position for literary
criticism which neither Greek nor Roman had enjoyed—the Greek losing it
by his arrogant assumption of a solitary literary position for his own
tongue, and the Roman partly by his imitation of Greek, partly by the
lurking desire to make out that Latin was not so very inferior after
all.
Footnote 552:
As to the apparent contradiction with the _Convito_, _v. infra_.
At any rate, in the chapter (viii.) which follows, there is no
deficiency in what we are pleased to call the scientific spirit;
[Sidenote: _Division of contemporary tongues_.] on the contrary, any one
who knows the historical circumstances of the time can only be amazed at
the precision, the general justice, and, on the whole, the particular
exactness with which Dante, in full Middle Age, surveys the languages of
Europe. He is well aware of the threefold general division of
language—Teutonic-Slavonic, Turanian or Tartar, and Romance—and assigns
the boundaries quite correctly. He is further aware of the divisions of
Romance speech itself, and as he had adopted as his criterion of
Teutonic speech different forms of “yea” (“jo”) for the word of
affirmation, so he uses the same criterion in this case. Of
Romance-speaking nations he says, some say “oc,” some “oil,” and some
“si.” The first are “Spaniards,” the second Frenchmen, the third
Italians. The connection of “Spaniards” and “oc” need excite no
surprise. Castilian, though in existence, and already provided with the
noble _Poema del Cid_ and other documents, was as yet by no means the
dominant language of Spain. In particular, Aragon and Catalonia, which
spoke a Provençal dialect, had far more to do with Italy than Castile:
Galicia, which all Europe visited in pilgrimage to the shrine of
Santiago, also favoured the “oc,” and Provençal was actually later than
this the dialect of Portugal, if not of all Spain, for certain literary
purposes. And the Spanish kingdom of Aragon was infinitely the most
important country that spoke “oc.”
Proceeding, Dante illustrates the relationship of the three tongues by
observing that all call most important things (God, [Sidenote: _And of
the subdivisions of Romance._] heaven, earth, living, dying, loving—the
selection is not negligible) by forms of the same Latin originals. In
the next chapter he continues the stress on this point, producing
literary and poetical quotations, from Provençal (Giraut de Borneil),
French (Thibaut of Navarre), and Italian (Guido Guinicelli), of the word
_Amor_; and points out—thus ever drawing nearer, in true methodic way,
to his special subject—that the variations between the three great
Romance speeches are produced, in each language, by dialectic
differences. And he has, on the fact and on the consequent necessity of
establishing some common centrical form by Grammar[553], observations
which lack neither truth nor sense. Then, Which is the best of the three
Romance forms? He will not say, only timidly advancing for Italian that
_si_ is nearest _sic_. Otherwise, each has strong claims. _Oil_ is not
only easier and pleasanter,[554] but whatever has been composed or
translated in vernacular _prose_ belongs to it, the “most fair
intricacies of Arthur,”[555] those of Trojans and Romans, &c. _Oc_ was
first employed for poetry, being more finished and sweeter. Italian has
the sweetest and most refined poets[556] of all, and seems to be the
closest to “grammar.”[557]
Footnote 553:
It is desirable to note that the original confusion, or, to speak more
correctly, ambiguity of “Grammar” is curiously illustrated in this
close context. Here the first “grammar” seems to denote literary as
opposed to vernacular tongue: the second can only mean Latin.
Footnote 554:
_Facilior et delectabilior._
Footnote 555:
_Arturi regis ambages pulcerrimæ._ This observation is not quite
negligible in the endless debate about the priority of verse or prose
in these legends.
Footnote 556:
_Qui dulcius subtiliusque poetati vulgariter sunt._
Footnote 557:
Cf. note opposite.
He will not, however, attempt _componere lites_[558], but consider the
variations, &c., of the Vulgar Tongue itself—_i.e._, Italian—though,
[Sidenote: _The_ Italian Dialects: _Some rejected at once_.] as we shall
see, he does not hesitate to draw illustrations from the others. He
first takes the Apennines as his language-watershed, and allowing
fifteen main dialects, not a few of which are sub-divided, he proceeds
to examine their claims, clearing away the bad ones. As the Romans think
they ought to have precedence[559] (note the crisp touch of life in
this), let us give it them—by kicking their claims out of the way at
once.[560] The _alma sdegnosa_ gives something more than a hint of
itself in the description of Roman dialect as a “tristiloquy,” the
ugliest of all the vernacular dialects; which is no wonder, since they
stink worst of all in the deformity of their customs and morals. The
Marchers of Ancona and the Spoletans go next, each of the rejected ones
having a scornful tag of his own barbarism tied to his tail, as Dante
ejects him from the competition. And he tells us, as if it settled the
matter (for, as we shall see, the Canzone is rather a fetish with
Dante), “many Canzoni have been written in contempt of them.” The
Milanese, the Bergamasks, the Aquileans and Istrians follow, with all
the mountainous and country _patois_[561], and the Sardinians, who are
not Latins, though “to be joined with them,” and who only imitate Latin
as apes do men. After this rapid sifting (he uses the metaphor) a new
chapter is necessary.
Footnote 558:
_Judicium relinquentes_ is his own phrase.
Footnote 559:
_Se cunctis præponendos existimant._
Footnote 560:
_In hac eradicatione, sive discerptione non immerito eos aliis
præponamus._
Footnote 561:
_Montaninas et rusticanas loquelas._
Of those “kept in the sieve” Sicilian claims the first place. Indeed
Dante acknowledges that “whatsoever the Italians poetise is called
Sicilian.” He admits this, but says it is merely [Sidenote:
_Others—Sicilian, Apulian, Tuscan, and Genoese._] due to the fact that
Sicilian princes, or princes resident in Sicily, Frederick the Emperor
and his son Manfred, have been patrons of literature, and have thus
attached the best Italian genius to the Sicilian court. But he says
(after an indignant digressory denunciation of contemporary sovereigns)
that there is no special value in the common Sicilian dialect, which
indeed is seldom used for poetry at all, while of that which _is_ used,
more to follow. As for the Apulians, there have been some good writers
among them, but their ordinary speech is spoilt with barbarisms.[562]
But what of the Tuscans? Dante can only repeat that cosmopolitan
criticism, which, though it would be very illiberal to impute it wholly
to his exile, was no doubt assisted thereby. They may madly assert their
title to the possession of the Illustrious Vulgar Tongue, and even some
distinguished men may have condescended to the Tuscan vernacular. But
let us examine them town by town. Florence, Pisa, Lucca, Siena, Arezzo
are hit off each in a sentence expressing its boast, and, we may
suppose, expressing it with some provincialism. But Dante says, when men
really to be admired, Guido, Lapo, and “another”[563] of Florence, and
Cino da Pistoia, have written, it is in “curial,” not in the vulgar
Tuscan tongue.
Footnote 562:
_Turpiter barbarizant._
Footnote 563:
_Guidonem, Lapum et unum alium Florentinos._ It is needless to say who
is _unus alius_.
As for the Genoese, the annihilation of the letter Z would strike them
dumb, for they can say nothing without it.
Then he crosses the Apennines[564] and decides successively that
Romagnese, in its various divisions, and Venetian, are full of
[Sidenote: _Venetian: Some good in Bolognese._] drawbacks and
vulgarities.[565] After which a whole chapter (xv.) is given to the
dialect of Bologna. It is perhaps better than any other and why? Because
it borrows the best things _from_ the others, as, for instance, Sordello
the Mantuan borrowed from Cremona, Brescia, and Verona. On the other
hand, Ferrara, Modena, and Reggio are too Lombardic, and though they
have lent a touch of piquancy to Bolognese, cannot create a good
literary dialect for themselves. Still Bolognese, though better than
other individual dialects, because more composite, is not the
Illustrious Vulgar Tongue, for otherwise Guido Guinicelli and other
great Bolognese poets would not have departed from it. So down with the
sieve for, as for places like Trent and Turin, they are too near the
frontier, and if they were _pulcherrima_ as they are _turpissima_ they
would not be _vere Latinum_.
Footnote 564:
_Frondiferos humeros Apennini_—a more affectionate if less picturesque
touch than Mr Ruskin’s “angry Apennine” and Mr Browning’s “wind-swept
gash” thereof.
Footnote 565:
Hildebrand of Padua is excepted, as _Nitentem divertere a materno et
ad curiale vulgare intendere_. Two sonnets of his are said to be now
extant.
Having thus for fifteen chapters pursued a sort of “Rule of False” in
order to catch that panther[566], the Illustrious Vulgar [Sidenote: _The
“Illustrious” Language none of these, but their common measure._]
Tongue, by the _a posteriori_ method, Dante determines to track her _a
priori_. He calls Logic to his aid, and observes that every individual,
species, genus is subject to a common measure. The measure of individual
conduct is Virtue; of conduct between man and man, Law; in public
behaviour, national manners and customs. So too there must be some norm,
some common measure of all Italian tongues and dialects, and this,
perceptible in all, abiding in none, will be what is sought for. This is
the—
1. Illustre.
2. Cardinale.
3. Aulicum; et
4. Curiale vulgare in Latio.
Each of these epithets has then to be discussed.
Footnote 566:
This beast is of course not here referred to, as in the well-known
passage at the beginning of the _Inferno_, as a type of vice, but, as
in _Inf._, xvi. 106, as a desirable prey. The beauty of the panther’s
skin, the sweet breath fabulously attributed to it, and so forth,
sometimes gave it a wholly favourable place in mediæval fantasy, as in
one of the prettiest fragments of Anglo-Saxon verse, the “Panther” of
the Exeter Book, where it is a type of Christ.
So we have the substance, the underlying and fashioning unity, of
Italian defined as a tongue possessing a quadripartite [Sidenote: _Its
four characteristics._] differentia, and so it becomes necessary to
explain the four parts. _Illustrious_, as the seventeenth chapter,
devoted to it, explains, is something that “shines forth,” _illuminans
et illuminatum_. Men are so called who, having been well trained, are
great trainers, like Numa Pompilius and Seneca. This is what the
Illustrious Vulgar Tongue of Italy is. It has cleared off much rubbish,
as in Cino da Pistoia. It attracts even the unwilling. It exalts those
who practise it. They surpass kings, marquises, counts. It gives a glory
which even we, exiles as we are, acknowledge as sweetening the
bitterness of our exile. Therefore it is Illustrious.
The three other epithets enjoy but a chapter between them. It is
_Cardinal_, for as a door turns on a hinge, so all the throng of
dialects turns on it. It is _Aulic_, because, if we Italians had a
Court, it would be spoken there, and because, as a matter of fact, all
those who enjoy courtly frequentation speak it. It is _Curial_ because,
though as in the Aulic case the conditions are wanting, it would be
spoken in the great Law Courts of Italy if they existed, and it presents
the action of a great Court of Law in trying and sifting cases. This is
the proper Italian language, common to all, aimed at (if unconsciously)
by all, giving the real key to all.
And so the first book ends, with the establishment on logical bases
(none the weaker because the struts and props of them are sometimes
decorated with a bygone ornamentation) at once of the necessity and the
fact of a literary language for Italy, a language combining the merits,
and purified from the defects, of the various local kinds of speech.
The First Book of the _De Vulgari Eloquio_ has been chiefly concerned
with language, though—as it is of the very highest [Sidenote: _The
Second Book—Why Dante deals with poetry only._] importance to
observe—always with a side-glance at literature. The Second passes to
literature itself, at least to that part of literature which was almost
the only serious part to the earlier Middle Ages—namely, poetry. If we
wanted anything to show us what a man of letters Dante was, it would be
found in the apology which he makes at the beginning of this book for
not dealing with Rhetoric at large, but only with Poetic. It is simply
that “prosaicants” usually get their language from “inventors,” and
“invention” remains a solid example to them, not _vice versa_. This,
perhaps, with some exceptions (the chief among them he has himself
referred to in citing the French Arthurian legend), was true in his
time, though it was ceasing to be true; and a certain amount of truth
remains still, greatly as the circumstances have changed. There is, he
goes on to say, a kind of primacy about verse; so let us deal with it
_secundum quod metricum est_.
Now, ought writers in verse to write _vulgariter_? Yes, he thought. The
best things require the best language, and that, [Sidenote: _All good
poetry should be in the Illustrious._] as we have seen, is the
Illustrious Vernacular. Things not so good will be improved by the best
expression. So all verse-writers should use it, at least at first sight,
though we must alter this conception on further thought. The Illustrious
language demands illustrious writers (_alma sdegnosa_ again!), and not
only that, but the best thoughts or subjects. Very inferior persons
writing on very inferior subjects had better _not_ use the Illustrious,
for an ugly woman never looks uglier than when dressed in gold and silk.
Now what subjects are good enough for the Illustrious Vernacular? Only
Three: _Salus_, _Venus_, _Virtus_—in other words, [Sidenote: _The
subjects of High Poetry—War, Love, Virtue._] War, Love, and Moral
Beauty, which means philosophy _plus_ religion. Dante reaches this
conclusion in the queer-looking but perhaps not easily improvable manner
usual with him, by the _prior_ and the _posterior_ roads alike. These
subjects are, first, the three things of most importance to a
Vegetable-Animal-Rational-creature like man, and they are also those
discussed by the best writers in the Vulgar Tongue, Bertran de Born,
Arnaut Daniel, Cino da Pistoia, &c. But he does not find that any
Italian has written on the subject of _Salus_ or Arms. (An ominous
fact!)
So much for subject; now for form. What forms are there of Illustrious
Vulgar Verse? Some have written Canzoni, some [Sidenote: _Its form:
Canzoni._] Ballades, some Sonnets, some other and irregular forms. The
best of these are Canzoni, for a wilderness of reasons, good, not very
good, indifferent, and bad, the strongest of which, though not
expressed, evidently is that Dante likes Canzoni best and knows he
writes them well. They unite, he says, all the best points of art; the
works of the best poets are found in them. So let us write of Canzoni,
putting off Ballades, &c., to the Fourth Book—which, alas! we have not.
What is Poetry? It is _fictio rhetorica in musica posita_. [Sidenote:
_Definition of Poetry._] This is so important that no passing criticism
of it will do, and we must postpone the discussion.
But here comes in the curious mediæval humility which made a poet like
Dante regard himself as inferior to Ovid, and [Sidenote: _Its styles and
the constituents of the grand style._] Lucan, and Statius. Our poets
differ from the “great” poets, the “regular” ones; but they ought to
approach them as nearly as possible, and, as _Magister noster Horatius_
teaches, take a suitable subject. And then they must decide what style
to write in. If in the Tragic or Higher style, the Illustrious
Vernacular will be suitable; if in the comic, a mixed or intermediate
style; if in Elegy, the lower. But these two latter are again relegated
to the lost, or never written, Fourth Book. Canzoni must be written in
the Tragic style, and the Illustrious Vulgar Tongue. This is to be
attained when, with the gravity of the meaning, not merely the pride of
the verse, but the loftiness of the phrasing and the excellence of the
words, agrees. It is no light matter to compose in this way; the most
strenuous efforts are necessary. And, therefore, let the folly of those
be confessed who, guiltless of art and science, and trusting to their
wits alone, break out into the highest song on the highest subjects.
So the considerations are marked out, the Gravitas Sententiæ having been
already distributed between War, Love, and Virtue.
1. Superbia Carminum.
2. Constructionis elatio.
3. Excellentia vocabulorum.
Beginning with metric, Dante, like a sensible man, confines himself here
to the teachings of experience, eschewing all [Sidenote: Superbia
Carminum.] argument in the vague. What lines have actually given the
best results in the Illustrious Vernacular? He looks them over, and
finds that lines have varied from three syllables to eleven, that those
of five, seven, and eleven are best of all, and that that of eleven (in
which he rightly includes the French decasyllable with its weak ending)
is the best of these best. Seven comes next; then five, then three. Nine
is not good, because divisible into three threes. Even lines are “rude,”
by which he means (as is undoubtedly true) that they do not suit the
structure of Italian. The hendecasyllable is that _superbissimum carmen_
that we sought.
Next for the phrase or construction. Here Dante becomes a little
difficult, chiefly because he uses peculiar words, which have [Sidenote:
Constructionis elatio.] not been always judiciously translated. He says
that there is first the “insipid” style, that without flavour (_sapor_)
or individual character, which merely states a fact, his example being
_Petrus amat multum dominam Bertam_.
Next there is the purely “sapid” or tasteful, described oddly as that of
“rigid scholars or masters”; the _sapidus et venustus_, which is of
those who have drunk superficial draughts of rhetoric; and the sapid,
venust, and also lofty, which is the best of all. The examples of these
shall be given below[567], but they are hard to follow in detail, though
the classes are clear enough, corresponding to (1) sheer prose, (2)
efforts at style, (3) ornate prose without much distinction, (4) style
achieved.
Footnote 567:
Sapid pure: _Piget me cunctis, sed pietatem majorem illorum habeo,
quicunque in exilio tabescentes, patriam tantum somniando revisunt_.
Sapid and venust: _Laudabilis discretio Marchionis Estensis et sua
magnificentia præparata cunctis illum facit esse dilectum_.
Sapid, venust, and excelse: _Ejecta maxima parte florum de sinu tuo,
Florentia, nequicquam Trinacriam Totila serus adivit_.
This last, of course, is what the poet must aim at, and again examples
of hitting it are given. But the chapter ends with a valuable catalogue
of the “great,” the “regular” poets: Virgil, Ovid in the
_Metamorphoses_, Statius, and Lucan, with, in prose, Cicero, Livy,
Pliny, Frontinus, and (O ye groves of Blarney!) Paulus Orosius. Let
people read these, and not talk about Guido of Arezzo.
Lastly the words.
[Sidenote: Excellentia Verborum.]
Here the subdivision is again of great importance and some difficulty.
Dante distinguishes a sort of tree—
Puerilia ── Muliebria ── Virilia.
│
┌───────────┴───────────┐
│ │
Silvestria. Urbana.
│
┌───────────────────────────────┤
│ │
Pexa et hirsuta. Lubrica et reburra.
All these words (save perhaps _reburra_, which, however, a remembrance
of the French _à rebours_ will clear up at once) are easy to understand,
if sometimes rather hard of application.
Now, according to Dante, _Pexa et Hirsuta_ are _grandiosa_, while
_lubrica et reburra in superfluum sonant_. And it will be most specially
important to use the “sieve,” for, looking to the poets who have
succeeded in the Illustrious Vernacular, _sola vocabula nobilissima_ are
to be left therein. “Childish”[568] words must be left out altogether:
“feminine”[569] words are too soft, “silvan”[570] words too rough, nor
will _lubrica_ nor _reburra_[571], though _urbana_, do. So _pexa_[572]
_et hirsuta_[573] alone are left.
Footnote 568:
As _mamma_ and _babbo_.
Footnote 569:
As _dolciada_ and _piacevole_.
Footnote 570:
As _gregia_.
Footnote 571:
As _femina_ and _corpo_.
Footnote 572:
As _amore_, _donna_, _virtute_.
Footnote 573:
As _terra_, _onore_, _speranza_, _gravitate_, and on to
_sovramagnificentissimamente_.
All this terminology is, of course, more than a little obscure, and the
explanation of the obscurities rather concerns a commentator [Sidenote:
Pexa et hirsuta.] on Dante than a historian of literary criticism. But
the explanation, given by the critic-poet himself, of _pexa et hirsuta_
does concern us, and is interesting. The former, it seems, are words
which are trisyllabic, or “neighbours to trisyllabity,” without an
aspirate, without an acute or circumflexed accent, without double _x_’s
or _z_’s, without the conjunction of two liquids, or the placing of them
after a mute, which freedoms give a certain sweetness. _Hirsuta_, on the
other hand, are all others which, like the monosyllabic pronouns and
articles, cannot be dispensed with, or which, though the above
uglinesses have not been “combed out” of them, still, when mixed with
combed-out words, are ornamental. He includes in this last class
_sovramagnificentissimamente_, a hendecasyllabic in itself. He would not
even mind _onorificabilitudinitate_, which has thirteen syllables in two
of its Latin cases, if it were not by its length excluded from Italian
verse.
So having got the sticks of words for our faggot the canzone, and the
cords of construction and classification to bind them [Sidenote: _The
Canzone._] up[574], let us set to work to the actual binding and
faggoting, before which something more must be said about the faggot
itself, the Canzone. The Canzone (_cantio_) is the action or passion of
singing, just as a “reading” or book (_lectio_) is the action or passion
of reading. A little metaphysic follows on _actio_ and _passio_, and the
fact that the _cantio_ is _actio_ when composed, _passio_ when sung or
acted. But is the _cantio_ the words or the tune? Surely the words;
nobody calls the tune _canzone_. In fact, all words written for music
may in a sense be called _canzoni_, even ballads, even sonnets, even
poems in Latin (_regulariter_). But _we_ are speaking of the supreme
canzone, like Dante’s _Donne ch’ avete_. It is “a tragic composition” of
equal stanzas, without _responsorium_ (dialogue or antiphon). The last
six chapters concern us less, because they are wholly occupied with the
particular rhyming, lining, and stanza-fashion of the canzone itself,
and, interesting as they are, overflow our limits, except as a
particular example of the general kind of criticism which has been so
laboriously built up.
Footnote 574:
_Fustibus et torquibus ad fascem._
With the conclusion of this the tractate stops abruptly, nor have we any
indication of what the Third Book was to consist of, though the Fourth,
as we have seen above, is more than once referred to. The loss of both
must be regarded as one of the most serious that the history of
criticism has suffered.
Yet the possession of what we have is no mean consolation, and I must be
excused for repeating an expression of the [Sidenote: _Importance of the
book._] extremest surprise at the comparatively small attention which
the book has received, and at the slighting fashion in which it has been
treated by some of those who have paid attention to it. For myself, I am
prepared to claim for it, not merely the position of the most important
critical document between Longinus and the seventeenth century at least,
but one of intrinsic importance on a line with that of the very greatest
critical documents of all history. There is no need at all to lay much
stress on the mere external attractiveness, unusual as that may be, of
the combination in one person of the greatest poet and the first, if not
the sole, great critic of the Middle Ages. The tub can stand on its own
bottom.
In the first place, it only requires acquaintance with that previous
history of the subject, which we have here endeavoured to unfold, to see
that we have the inestimable advantage of a quite new and independent
treatment of that subject. There is [Sidenote: _Independence and novelty
of its method._] no direct evidence that Dante knew the _Poetics_[575]:
we see that he cites Horace and cites him _magnificentissime_. But the
Epistle to the Pisos might never have been written, for any sign there
is of direct influence from it on Dante’s method. So, too, singular as
is the resemblance between the spirit of him and the spirit of Longinus;
remarkable as is the coincidence between the words of both about words;
and possible as the John of Sicily[576] reference makes it that Dante
might have known the Great Unknown of Criticism—yet there is not the
faintest evidence that he _did_ know him, and an almost overwhelming
probability that he did not. To the method of no classical predecessor
in pure criticism does his method bear the smallest resemblance, even if
faint resemblances might be pointed out in phrase.
But it is still more remarkable that, steeped to the lips as he is in
scholastic lore—though _trivium_ and _quadrivium_ must have been at his
fingers’ ends—the _De Vulgari Eloquio_, even in mentioning Rhetoric
itself, shows not the faintest tincture of that scholastic rhetoric
which we have noticed. There is not so much as an allusion to the
Figures: they have been, for Dante on this occasion, as completely
banished from _rerum natura_ as poor Albucius feared they would be, if
his judges disallowed his pleading.[577] The familiar Arts of
Composition make no appearance: Beginning, Middle, and End are with the
Figures. If we did not know that these things must have been as familiar
to Dante as the alphabet or the multiplication-table to any modern
child, we might think, from this treatise, that he had never heard of
them.
Footnote 575:
It is thought that Petrarch may have known the German
thirteenth-century version in Latin.
Footnote 576:
_V. supra_, p. 187.
Footnote 577:
_V. supra_, p. 238.
It would seem, indeed, without too much guess-work, that, despite his
attempts to assimilate writing _vulgariter et regulariter_, Dante had an
unconscious and an infinitely salutary instinct, telling him that
_regulariter_ and _vulgariter_ were _not_ the same thing. He may have
sometimes thought that the former was the nobler; even in his disdainful
soul, the touching humility of the Middle Ages existed, as we know, to
such an extent that he could put Virgil, who may be worthy to unloose
his shoe-latchet, in a position above himself. But something must have
warned him to keep the two apart, to approach the criticism of the
illustrious Vernacular literature by a path _nullius ante trita solo_.
That path, as has been pointed out, is in fact a double approach: we
might almost say that the restless manymindedness [Sidenote: _Dante’s
attention to Form._] of Dante attacks the hill on half-a-dozen different
sides at once. We have a chain of mainly _a priori_ argument, reaching
from the origin and nature of language to the completely built and
fitted-out _canzone_. We have careful surveys of existing language and
literature, with the keenest observation bent upon what is the actual
state of each, on what each has actually achieved. But besides these two
ways of approach, neither of which is at all like those of the ancient
critics, there is a third difference which is more striking still: and
that is that the critic’s attention is evidently from the first fixed,
not exclusively, but, from the point of view of his business, mainly, on
questions of form, expression, result, rather than on questions of
matter, conception, plan. Not exclusively—let that be emphatically
repeated: but still mainly.
Again we see, incidentally, but none the less to an important effect,
that he has, no doubt by the mere operation of the lapse [Sidenote: _His
disregard of Oratory._] of ages in part, in part by the activity of his
own intellect, and the character of the matter presented to it, got rid
of divers prejudices which weighed upon the ancients. It is not a just
retort, when it is said that he has completely got rid of the oratorical
preoccupation, to say that he is only dealing with Poetics. For the
ancients themselves this preoccupation was constant, even when they
dealt with Poetics; and Dante does, as a matter of fact, make references
to prose which show that he did not dream (as how indeed should he?) of
oratory having any pre-eminence. And at the same time that the fruitful
modern literatures helped him to get rid of this, the greatest drawback
or interfering flaw of ancient criticism, they helped him to get rid of
another, the ignorance of prose fiction. True, he may in his quaint low
Latin use _inventor_ for _poeta_; but the simple reference to the prose
Arthurian, Trojan, and Roman legends shows that the gap, which led
Aristotle and all the rest astray, had been filled up.
Yet again, the character of the Romance poetry which he chiefly had
before him, as well as (if he knew anything of them, [Sidenote: _The
influence on him of Romance._] which is quite possible) that of the
German _minnesingers_, was such as to require positively, from any
vigorous and subtle intellect, a quite different treatment from that
appropriate to most ancient poetry. The war-songs might stand on no very
different footing; but, as he admits, there were no war-songs in
Italian. The mystical passion and the mystical religion of the other two
divisions are like nothing in ancient poetry, except scraps and flashes
of things which must have been mostly unknown to Dante,—the choruses of
the Greek Poets, Catullus, Lucretius, and some things in the Greek
Anthology. There was in most cases no action at all; the subject, though
varying and twisting in facet and form, like a mountain mist, was always
more or less the same; the expression of the poet’s passionate intense
individual feeling and thought was all, and of this no _general_
criticism was possible. The forms, on the other hand, the language, the
arrangements, these were matters of intense, novel, and pressing
interest. The ancient critic, at the very earliest date at which we have
any utterances of his _in extenso_, had a sort of catholic faith already
provided for him on these points. Tragedy, Comedy, Oratory, History,
Lyric, &c., were established forms. Rhetoric, though interesting, was
almost as scientific as arithmetic or geometry. As for language, you
imitated the best models, and did not play personal tricks. Besides, it
was quite a minor matter.
Lastly, we see that (again half, or more than half, unconsciously and
instinctively) Dante has been brought by the "forward [Sidenote: _And of
comparative criticism._] flowing tide of time" to a more advanced
position in respect of comparative criticism. No ancient critic could
have made such a survey as he makes of the different languages of
Europe; no ancient critic did make such a survey of the dialects of
Greek as he makes of the dialects of Italian. That curious spirit of
routine which (valuable as it was in the time and in the circumstances)
mars ancient literature to some extent, shows itself nowhere more oddly
than here. You used Æolic dialect for lyric poetry, because Sappho and
Alcæus were Æolians; Doric for pastorals, because Theocritus and the
others were Dorians. You might use Ionic in history because Herodotus
was a Halicarnassian; and Homer preserved a special dialect for you in
epic likewise. But otherwise you wrote in Attic, not because Attic was
the Illustrious Vulgar Tongue of Greece (as it very nearly if not quite
was), but because an enormous proportion of the best writers in most
departments were Athenians. So in Latin you might—almost must—use loose
verse, and familiar or abstruse phrase, in satire, but not elsewhere.
Of this there is no trace in Dante, though he may allot his Illustrious
tongue to one kind, his Intermediate and Lower to others. He may indeed
cite, as a subsidiary argument, the fact that such and such a one has
used such and such a dialect or form, but it is only subsidiary. He is,
in effect, looking about to see, partly how the reason of things will
go, partly what has actually had the best effect. He, groping dimly in
the benighted, the shackled Middle Ages, actually attains to a freer and
more enlightened kind of criticism than the Greeks, with all their “play
of mind,” all their “lucidity,” had reached.
And his bent towards formal criticism—towards those considerations of
prosody, of harmony, of vocabulary, of structure, which, when they are
considered to-day, even now send some critics into (as the poet says)
“A beastly froth of rage”
against those who so consider them—is all the more important, because
not the most impudent accuser of the brethren can [Sidenote: _The
poetical differentia according to him._] bring against Dante the charge
of being a mere formalist, of being indifferent to meaning, of having no
“criticism of life” in him, of lacking “high seriousness,” attention to
conduct, care for meaning and substance. On the contrary, there is not a
poet in the whole vast range of poetry, not the Greek tragedians at
their gravest and highest chorus-pitch, not Lucretius in his fervour of
Idealist Materialism, not Shakespeare in the profoundest moments of
Macbeth, or Prospero, or Hamlet, not Milton, not Wordsworth, who is more
passionately ideal, “thoughtful,” penetrated and intoxicated with the
“subject,” than Dante is. But he, thanks very mainly to the logical
training of the despised scholasticism, thanks partly to the mere
progress of time, the refreshing of the human mind after its season of
sleep—most of all no doubt to his own intense and magnificent poetical
genius—had completely separated and recognised the differentia of
poetry, its presentation of the subject in metrical form with musical
accompaniment, whether of word or of actual music.[578] He knows—he
actually says in effect—that prosemen may have the treatment of the same
subjects; but he knows that the poet’s treatment is different, and he
goes straight for the difference.
Footnote 578:
Some have assumed that Dante thinks all high poetry must be “set” in
the common sense. He does not say so, and every consideration is
against it. The “rhetorical fiction set in music” is obviously the
opposition of poetry to _prose_, and nothing more.
And where does he find it? Exactly where Wordsworth five hundred years
later refused to find it, in Poetic Diction and [Sidenote: _His antidote
to the Wordsworthian heresy._] in Metre. The contrast of the _De Vulgari
Eloquio_ and of the _Preface_ to _Lyrical Ballads_ is so remarkable that
it may be doubted whether there is any more remarkable thing of the kind
in literature. Whether Wordsworth was acquainted with the treatise it is
impossible to say. (Coleridge certainly knew of it, though it is not
quite clear whether he had read it.) But it is improbable, for
Wordsworth was not a wide reader. And, moreover, though in tendency the
two tractates are diametrically opposed, he nowhere answers Dante; but,
on the contrary, is answered by Dante, with an almost uncanny
anticipation of the privilege of the last word, in a word five hundred
years earlier.
We shall have to return to this matter in dealing with Wordsworth
himself. But for the present let us confine ourselves to Dante.
The details of his metrical part need the lesser notice because they are
of the more limited and particular application. [Sidenote: _His handling
of metre._] Had Dante completed his book, it would still have had the
limitation of dealing solely with Romance, if not exclusively with
Italian, poetry. And with particular episodes we shall only meddle when
they are closely connected with general critical quarrels. But his
method is worth a word or two, because it is again, precisely, that
apparently loose but really unerring mixture of general reasoning and
particular observation which the critic requires, which prevents him
from being ever exactly scientific, but which gives to his craft the
dignity, the difficulty, the versatile charm of art. His recognition of
the hendecasyllable, not merely as the line preferred by the best
writers in Italian, but as the longest line really manageable in
Italian, would be sufficient proof of this.
But he is considerably more interesting on diction, because here his
observations (_mutatis mutandis_, and that in extremely [Sidenote: _Of
diction._] few cases and unimportant measure) are of universal
application. The theory of Poetic Diction, the twin pillar of the temple
of Poetry, had been put by Longinus in one flashing axiom, true, sound,
illuminative for ever and ever. But he had not elaborated this; he had
even, in some cases, as in his remarks on the Εἰς ἐρωμέναν, given
occasion to those who blaspheme the doctrine. Dante, with no such single
phrase (which indeed the odd mongrel speech he uses denied him),
expresses the doctrine far more fully, elaborates it, establishes it
soundly, and, moreover, is never in the very least inconsistent with
himself about it. Even Aristotle himself would have joined no direct
issue with the quadripartite division of the necessities of serious
poetry as _gravitas sententiæ_ and _superbia carminum_, _constructionis
elatio_ and _excellentia verborum_; but he would have given the first
preponderance over all the others, and would have laid descending stress
on the rest. It may almost be said that Dante exactly reverses the
order. The _gravitas sententiæ_ is not denied, but assumed as a thing of
course, common to all good matter in verse and prose alike. The
_superbia carminum_ is a matter of investigation; but when you have got
your form of _cantio_, &c., settled, that _is_ settled. It is upon the
third and the fourth, which are, briefly, Style and Diction, that he
bends his whole strength, and that he exhibits his most novel, most
important, most eternally valid criticism.
It has been said that the examples, both Latin and Italian, produced in
the chapter on Style (that is to say, the construction [Sidenote: _His
standards of style._] or arrangement of selected phrase as opposed to
selection of the component words) are not free from difficulty. But if
we examine them all carefully together, something will emerge from the
comparison. In the four Latin sentences[579] (for translations here are
totally useless) we observe that the first[580] is a mere statement of
fact, possessing, indeed, that complete expression of the meaning which
Coleridge so oddly postulates as the differentia of style, but
possessing nothing more—nourishing, in short, but not “sapid.” The
next[581] is carefully (“tastefully”) arranged according to the
scholastic rules—verb at the end, important words at end or beginning of
clause, &c., but nothing more. The charm (_venustas_) of the third[582]
is more difficult to identify; but it would seem to consist in a sort of
superficially rhetorical declamation. But there is no difficulty in
discovering in what the fourth sentence[583] differs from the rest.
There is the conceit of the “casting out of the flowers” with the
interwoven play of _florum_ and _Florentia_, the apostrophe to the town,
the double alliteration of _florum_, _Florentia_, _Trinacriam_,
_Totila_, with the reverse order of length in the words, and their vowel
arrangement. And in almost all the verse vernacular examples, though it
may not always be easy to discern their exact attraction for Dante, we
shall find the same alliteration—
“Sols sui qui sai lo sobrafan, que me sortz;”
the same vowel-music—
“Dreit Amor qu’ en mon cor repaire;”
or a combination of this music with careful mounting and falling rhythm,
as in
“Si com l’ arbres, que per sobrecarcar.”
In other words, we shall find, in all, devices for making the common
uncommon, for giving the poetic strangeness, unexpectedness, charm,—by
mere arrangement, by arrangement _plus_ music, and so forth.
Footnote 579:
_V. supra_, p. 429, and note.
Footnote 580:
_Petrus amat_, &c.
Footnote 581:
_Piget me cunctis_, &c.
Footnote 582:
_Laudabilis discretio_, &c.
Footnote 583:
_Ejecta maxima_, &c.
The contempt of style as something “vulgar,” which had beset all
antiquity (save always Longinus), would have alone prevented the
ancients from criticising in this way, even if the lack of various
language had not done so.
And so we find, on the threshold, or hardly even on the threshold, of
what is commonly called modern literature, an anticipation, and more
than an anticipation, of what is really modern criticism. Of course this
is a disputable even more than a disputed statement. Of course there are
many respectable authorities who will not hear of it, who will accuse
those who make it of mere will-worship, perhaps even of gross error, for
assuming any such thing. Yet it may be said in all humility, but after a
very considerable number of years of study of a subject to which little
general attention has been given, that there _is_ this difference
between ancient and modern criticism, and that it appears in the _De
Vulgari Eloquio_. I shall be content, I shall even be much obliged, if
any one will point out to me, in the authors who have been hitherto
considered, or in any who may have been overlooked, a passage like this.
I can only say that, in my reading, I have found none.
But the chapter of words—the Chapter of the Sieve, as we may call it—is
that which contains the real heart and kernel [Sidenote: _The "Chapter
of the Sieve."_] of Dante’s criticism. For, dwell as much as he may on
the importance of arrangement and phrase, it is impossible that these
should be beautiful without beautiful words to make them of. And his
system of “sifting,” quaint as its phraseology may seem at first sight,
arbitrary as some of its divisions may appear, and here and there
difficult as it may be exactly to follow him, is a perfectly sound
scheme, and only requires working out at greater length. The objection
to _puerilia_, though it may be too sweepingly expressed, is absolutely
just, and cuts away Wordsworth’s childishnesses by anticipation. That to
“effeminate” words, “silvan” words, words too “slippery” and too much
“brushed the wrong way,” is, in its actual form, perhaps somewhat too
closely connected with the peculiarities of the Italian language. We can
understand that the snarling sound of the _r_ in _gregia_ and
_corpo_—the _silvestre_ and the _reburrum_—may have offended the
delicate Italian musical ear; and it is perfectly easy for a pretty
well-educated English one to perceive that _donna_, with the ring of the
_n_’s and the sudden descent—the falcon drop—to _a_, is a far more
poetical word than _femina_, where, except the termination, there is no
hold for the voice at all; it merely “slips over” the “lubric” syllables
_fe_ and _mi_. But it is much more difficult to understand the objection
to _dolciada_ and _piacevole_ as too effeminate. Not only is _dolciada_
itself a very charming word to _us_, but it is impossible to see
anything more effeminate in it than in many of those which Dante admits
and admires. These things, however, will always happen.
The metaphor of the _pexa_ and _hirsuta_, odd as it seems, is not
difficult to work out when we have once accepted the [Sidenote: _The_
pexa.] analogy of hair, for which in itself it would not be difficult to
find a more or less fanciful justification. The merely “glossy”—smooth,
soft, insufficient—will not do, and those “brushed the wrong way” still
less. What is wanted is _natural_ curl and wave—with light and colour in
them, of course, though not mere gloss. This may be either the result of
careful “combing out” of all tangle and disorder, or it may be wilder
grace, the _hirsutum_, the “floating hair” of _our_ poet. Dante’s rigid
orthodoxy makes him assign very strict qualification to the _pexa_. They
are to be trisyllabic or _vicinissima_ to this—that is to say, they are
either to be amphibrachs complete—_amore_, _difesa_, _salute_—or words
like _donna_, on the one hand, or _letizia_[584] on the other, which, by
a slight rest of the voice or a little slur of it, can be made
amphibrachic in character. And why? Because these amphibrachic words
help, as no others can do, to give that trochaic swing, with little
intervals between, which supplies the favourite rhythm of Italian
poetry, as in the very instance given a little later by Dante from his
own poetry—
“Donne _ch_‘ _a_vete _inte_lletto _d_’ _a_more”—
where the rhythm (as opposed to the actual scansion) of the line is
represented by almost sinking the italicised syllables, and leaving the
four main trochees to carry the rock of the verse on their backs. The
dislike to aspirates, to double _x_’s and _z_’s, to certain collocations
of consonants, &c., is again purely Italian, though it would not be
difficult to assign somewhat similar qualifications to the _pexa_ of
other languages.
Footnote 584:
This word is most unluckily misprinted “l_i_ti_r_ia” in Mr
Ferrers-Howell’s version.
But Dante is far too free and far too opulent a poet to confine himself,
or recommend others to confine themselves, to a mere [Sidenote: _The_
hirsuta.] “prunes and prism”—to simple prettiness of precious words. The
_hirsuta_, the more careless ordered vocabulary, must be had too
sometimes, because you cannot do without them, as in the case of the
monosyllabic particles, copulatives, and what not, sometimes as
dissyllables, and polysyllables, which will make an ornamental effect by
combination and contrast with the _pexa_. Here, yet once more, there may
be difficulties with the individual cases; it is indeed hard to see the
possibility of beauty, even in the most combed-out company, of such a
word as _disavventuratissimamente_: but the principle is clear and
sound. What that principle is we may [Sidenote: _Other critical_ loci
_in Dante_.] shortly state when we have given a glance at Dante’s other
and much less important critical utterances, contained in the
undoubtedly genuine _Convito_, and in the sometimes, but perhaps
captiously, disputed _Letter to Can Grande_.
This last[585], which, as is well known, sets itself forth as a
dedication of the _Paradiso_ to the Lord of Verona, contains a kind of
[Sidenote: _The Epistle to Can Grande._] expository criticism by the
author of the _Commedia_ itself. There is nothing in it inconsistent
with the _De Vulgari_, but the method is very much more scholastic and
jejune. There are six things to be inquired about in any serious
matter—the subject, the agent, the form, the end, the title, the kind of
philosophy.
Footnote 585:
Original, tenth and last of Latin _Epistles_, ed. Moore, p. 414. Those
who wish for an English translation will find one in the Appendix to
Miss Katharine Hillard’s translation of the _Convito_ (p. 390, London
1889).
The _Paradiso_ is different from the other two _cantiche_ in subject,
form, and title, not in author, end, and philosophic tone. The meaning
or subject is partly literary, partly allegorical; the form is
duplex—the external by _cantiche_, cantos, verses; while the method or
internal form is poetic, figurative, &c. The title is, “Here beginneth
the Comedy of D. A., Florentine by birth not disposition.” Comedy comes
from, &c., tragedy from, &c. As Comedy begins ill and ends well, we call
this a comedy. It is in the vulgar tongue: its end is evangelic, its
philosophy ethical and practical.
There is little to notice here except the poet’s comparative
depreciation of the Vulgar Tongue as “humble and weak,”[586] but this of
course is only said rhetorically.
Footnote 586:
§ 10. _Remissus est modus et humilis quia loquutio vulgaris in qua et
mulierculæ communicant._
The curious First Book of the _Convito_[587] not merely contains the
promise of the _De Vulgari_[588], but is a sort of pendent [Sidenote:
_The_ Convito.] to it, being an elaborate excuse for writing the book in
the Vulgar tongue itself. Its expressions are not always in literal
agreement with those of the other treatise; but these differences, even
the exaltation of Latin as “nobler,”[589] in an apparent contradiction
to the argument of the later book, are sufficiently accounted for by the
difference of purpose and subject. But the elaborate apology for writing
in the vernacular, and the elaborate arguments by which it is supported,
have no small critical interest of their own; and the later chapters
contain eager championship of Italian, if not against Latin, yet against
Provençal, which it was the fashion to compare to it. It is scarcely
necessary to go through this book in detail; but it contains some very
interesting glimpses, and, as it were, _vistas_ of critical truth. The
two most noteworthy of these are the remarks about translation, and
those about the respective advantages for showing a language of prose
and verse.
Footnote 587:
Italian, ed. Moore, p. 235 _sq._ English, Miss Hillard, as above.
There is the usual fighting about its date.
Footnote 588:
I. v. 3, at end.
Footnote 589:
Ibid., at beginning. The ground of exaltation is that same notion of
the greater _stability_ of Latin, of its being unlikely to “play the
bankrupt with books,” which subsisted till the time of Bacon and
Hobbes, if not of Johnson, though without the apparent justification
it had in the Middle Ages.
Translation Dante condemns utterly. Nothing harmonised by the laws of
the Muses can be changed from one tongue to [Sidenote: _Dante on
Translation._] another without destroying all its sweetness and harmony.
This (which is arch-true) connects itself directly with Dante’s unerring
direction towards the criticism of form. If “all depends on the
subject,” translation can do no harm, for the subject can be maintained
in exactly the same condition through more languages than Mezzofanti or
Prince Lucien Bonaparte ever meddled with. But the form, the language,
the charm of the verse, the music of the composition, _they_ go utterly
and inevitably; and even if the translator succeeds in putting something
in their place, it is another, and not themselves.
Again, in the eloquent and admirable defence[590] of the tongue of _Si_
against the _Lingua d’Oco_, he has this remarkable saying, [Sidenote:
_On language as shown in prose and verse._] that you cannot see its real
excellence in rhymed pieces, for the accidental accompaniments
(“accidental,” _quoad_ language). So do the clothes and jewels of a
beautiful woman distract the attention from her real beauty, as much as
this is set forth by them. In prose the ease, propriety, and sweetness
of the language itself can best be shown. Now, let it be observed that
this is no exaltation of prose above poetry as such—Dante was far too
good a critic, as well as far too great a poet, to make a blunder which
has been made since, though hardly before. His argument is the perfectly
sound, and, unless I mistake, almost wholly novel one—that the
_intrinsic_ powers (if they be doubted) of a language are best shown in
prose. If it can do well there, _a fortiori_ it can do better in poetry;
but the “added sweetness” of rhythm, metre, rhyme, poetic diction, and
the like may distract the attention from the mere and sheer merits of
the language itself. And so once more we find Dante, in opposition to
the Master, in opposition to all ancient critics except Longinus, and
partly even to him, recognising the ultimate and real test of literary
excellence as lying in the expression, not in the meaning.
Footnote 590:
I. x. 5.
This would in itself be a thing so great that no greater has met or will
meet us throughout this history. Even yet the truth, which Longinus
caught but as in a Pisgah-sight, which [Sidenote: _Final remarks on his
criticism._]Dante himself rather felt and illustrated throughout than
consciously or deliberately championed in any particular place—the truth
that the criticism of literature is first of all the criticism of
expression as regards the writer, of impression as regards the reader—is
far from being universally recognised, is far even from being a
prevailing or a popular doctrine. By many it is regarded as an
unquestionable heresy, by others as a questionable half-truth. But that
Dante did feel, if he hardly saw, it, that he was penetrated by it, that
his criticism in the _De Vulgari Eloquio_ turns on it—for these things I
hope to have shown some cause.
Not of course (it may, though it should not, be necessary to repeat
this) that he was himself by any means indifferent to the “subject.” On
the contrary, the great threefold division of the subjects of high
poetry into _Salus_, _Venus_, _Virtus_—Arms, Love, and religiously
guided Philosophy—is to this day the best that exists. And here too
Dante has made a notable advance on the ancients, in admitting Love to
equality in principle, to the primacy (I had almost said), in practice.
We saw how the good Servius found it necessary to apologise for the
fourth book of the Æneid, as dealing with the trifling subject of Love;
we know how Greek criticism slighted Euripides, not, as it might have
done, for his literary shortcomings, but because of his reliance on the
tender passion; we know further how, except in mystical philosophisings
of the Platonic kind, there is nothing satisfactory on the matter
anywhere—that not merely Dionysius but Longinus, in the very act of
preserving for us the two chief love-poems of the ancient world, can
find nothing adequate to say about them, and that Aristotle leaves the
subject severely alone.
Here also Dante knew better; here also he expressed consummately all the
enormous gain of dream which the sleep of the Dark Ages had poured into
the heart and the soul of the world. But here his service, though
critical in category, was hardly critical in method; and, besides, he
was only one of a myriad. From Brittany to Transylvania, and from
Iceland to Provence, the whole thirteenth century, if not the whole
twelfth also, had been “full of loves”—there had been no fear of “Venus”
being forgotten. But all these thousand singers had simply sung because
they must or would. They had had no critical thought of the manner of
their singing. If they had written in Latin, it was because of custom,
because they wanted learned appreciation, because they had been taught
to write in Latin. If they had written in the vernacular, it was because
it came naturally to them, and there was guerdon for it.
But this, as we have seen, was not possible to Dante. Ever a fighter, he
was not content to serve the Illustrious Vernacular, to write in it, to
advance its powers, without arguing for it as well, without giving it a
critical title to place and eminence. Ever a thinker, too, he was not
satisfied to write the best poetry, but must know how and in what the
best poetry consisted, what made it best, what were its resources and
stores of attack and of charm. Most fortunately, his conviction that
_vulgare_ and _regulare_ were two very different things, and that the
methods of treating them must be different also, led him, as it would
seem, to abandon the devices of the regular Rhetoric, and to construct,
half-consciously no doubt, a new and really Higher Rhetoric of the
vulgar tongue itself.
This is what we have systematically, if incompletely, for Poetics in the
_De Vulgari Eloquio_, while we have hints towards a prose Rhetoric in
the first book of the _Banquet_[591]. And it cannot be too much insisted
on that, in the former case definitely and systematically, in the latter
by sample and suggestion rather than directly, a kind of criticism is
disclosed of which we hardly find any trace in the ancients (Longinus
partly excepted), though if Aristotle had worked out one side of his own
doctrines, and had been less afraid of Art and its pleasure, we might
have had it from him.
Footnote 591:
It is not quite trivial that, as in the other case there is the
dispute between _Eloquium_ and _Eloquentia_, so there is here between
_Convito_ and _Convivio_.
That the book itself remained so long unknown, and that even after its
belated publication it attracted little attention, and has for the most
part been misunderstood, or not understood at all, is no doubt in part
connected with the fact of its extraordinary precocity. On the very
threshold of modern literature, Dante anticipates and follows out
methods which have not been reached by all, or by many, who have had the
advantage of access to the mighty chambers whereof the house has since
been built and is still a-building.
We shall see nothing like this in the rest of the present Book. Some
useful work on Prosody, a little contribution of the usual Rhetoric,
some interesting if indirect critical expression, will meet us. But no,
or next to no, such criticism properly so called, no such exploration
and exposition of the secrets of the literary craft, no such revelation
of the character of the literary bewitchment.[592]
Footnote 592:
I have not thought it necessary to devote any space to the
consideration of the relations of Scholastic Philosophy to Criticism.
To search the whole literature of Scholasticism for these would be an
enormous labour; and some slight knowledge of the subject (to which I
once hoped to devote much of the time and energy actually, but
involuntarily, spent on things less worthy and less interesting) leads
me to believe that it would be an almost wholly fruitless one. In
Dante and in Boccaccio (_v. infra_) we have interesting examples of
the bent which scholastic education gave to critics. Lully, or “Lull,”
as they call him now (though he by no means rhymes to “dull”), shows
(_v._ note, p. 371) how criticism afar off might strike a schoolman.
But all the men of the schools abode in mere Rhetoric, and even that
they mostly despised.
CHAPTER III.
THE FOURTEENTH AND FIFTEENTH CENTURIES.
LIMITATIONS OF THIS CHAPTER—THE MATERIAL IT OFFERS—THE FORMAL ARTS OF
RHETORIC AND OF POETRY—EXAMPLES OF INDIRECT CRITICISM: CHAUCER—‘SIR
THOPAS’—FROISSART—RICHARD OF BURY—PETRARCH—BOCCACCIO—HIS WORK ON
DANTE—THE ‘TRATTATELLO’—THE ‘COMENTO’—THE ‘DE GENEALOGIA
DEORUM’—GAVIN DOUGLAS—FURTHER EXAMPLES UNNECESSARY.
The contents of the two foregoing chapters should have in some sort
prepared the reader for the character and limitations of the [Sidenote:
_Limitations of this chapter._] third. If it were not part of the scheme
of this work to leave no period of literary history unnoticed in
relation to criticism, a straight stride might almost be taken from the
_De Vulgari Eloquio_ to the earliest of the momentous and (from some
points of view) rather unfortunate attempts which the Italian critics of
the Renaissance made to bring about an _eirenicon_ between Plato and
Aristotle, by sacrificing the whole direct product, and the whole
indirect lesson, of the Middle Ages. Between Dante and this group of his
compatriots two hundred years later, it is scarcely too much to say that
there is not a single critic or criticism, either in Italy or in any
other European language, possessing substantive importance. But this
book endeavours to be a history, not merely of explicit literary
criticism, but of implicit literary taste; and no period—not the dimmest
gloom of the Dark Ages nor the most glaring blaze of the _Aufklärung_—is
profitless as a subject for inquiry in that respect, even if the result
be little more than the old stage-direction—_même jeu_.
In _Arts of Rhetoric_, with or without special or partial reference to
Poetry, the two centuries, especially the fifteenth, are [Sidenote: _The
material it offers._] indeed fairly prolific. Nothing could be more
significant for the subjective side of Critical History than that
gradual and at last undisguised identification of “Rhetoric” with
“Poetry” itself, which is notorious alike in the hackneyed title of
_grands rhétoriqueurs_ for the French poets of the fifteenth century,
and the continual praise of Chaucer’s “rhetoric” by the English and
Scottish writers of the same time. The _sacra fames_[593] of the whole
two hundred years for Allegory—a hunger which was not in the least
checked by the Renaissance, though the sauce of what it glutted itself
on was somewhat altered—is another capital fact of the same kind; the
renewed passion for changed kinds of Romance another; the
ever-increasing interest in drama yet another still. These are the real
materials for the student of criticism and taste at this time, and they
are identical with the materials, for this period, of the student of
literary history generally. In the strictly proper matter of our
particular province we not merely may, but had best, confine ourselves
to some short notice of the formal writings of the period, and some,
rather fuller, of the literary opinions expressed by characteristic
exponents of it, whether their claim to represent be derived from
eminence, or from merely average, and therefore tell-tale, quality.
Footnote 593:
The “cursed appreciation,” as a modern wit has translated the phrase
in its most famous context.
Into the first it will not be necessary to enter at any length. The
formal Latin Arts of Rhetoric of the fourteenth and fifteenth [Sidenote:
_The Formal Arts of Rhetoric._]centuries exhibit nothing new, but
observe with a touching fidelity the lines of Martianus, or Aphthonius,
or Hermogenes, as the case may be. Moreover, such notice of them as is
at all necessary will be better given in the next Book and volume, in
connection with their immediate successors of the undoubted Renaissance.
The chain of merely formal Rhetoric is unbroken till much later; as it
had been little affected by the change from “Classical” to “Mediæval,”
so it was not sensibly changed till “Renaissance” had definitely given
way to “Modern.” The vernacular _Arts of Poetry_ are, in English of this
period, non-existent; and, considering all things, they are heartily to
be congratulated on their wisdom and foresight in not existing. In Italy
they are of little moment, since Italian poetry had to a great extent
taken its line once for all. In French and in German they both exist,
and exhibit considerable individual quality. But that quality is
emphatically for an age, and not of all time. The growth of the
exquisitely graceful but dangerously artificial French poetry of
_Ballade_ and _Chant Royal_, of _rondeau_ and _triolet_; the growth of
the artificial, but rarely in the very least graceful, form-torturing of
the _meister-singers_ were both accompanied and followed, as was natural
and indeed inevitable, by abundance of formal directions for executing
the fashionable intricacies. Some of the more noteworthy of these may be
indicated in a note but—as has not always been, and will not always be
the case with similar things—they require little or no discussion in the
text. For the developments to which they related were not merely a
little artificial in the bad sense, but they were also purely episodic
and of the nature of curiosities. They had not, as even the most
apparently preposterous acrobatics of the Latin rhythmic had, the
priceless [Sidenote: _And of Poetry._] merit of serving as gymnastic to
the new vernaculars—at best they only continued this gymnastic in the
case of languages that were “grown up.” That they—at least the French
division of them—furnished some exquisite moulds, into which the purest
poetry could be thrown, is perfectly true. But Jehannot de Lescurel, and
Charles d’Orléans, and Villon most of all, could have, and doubtless
would have, produced that poetry in any form that happened to be popular
at their time. Nay, as has been abundantly shown in France and England
during the last quarter of the nineteenth century and a little earlier,
the forms themselves will fit any poetry of any time. The ancient names,
and the mediæval trimmings, and the modern sentiment of the _Dames du
Temps Jadis_, are all equally at home in its consummate but artificial
form; and that form is equally suitable to the _Voyage à Cythère_ and
the aspiration for a grave on the breast of the Windburg. Defect there
is none in this accommodating character: rather there is a great
quality. But, in the special kind of merit, there is a differentiation
from such things as the Greek chorus, the Latin elegiac, the Mediæval
rhythmus, the mono-rhymed or single-assonanced _tirade_, the Spenserian,
even the eighteenth-century, couplet, which carry their atmosphere and
their time inseparably with them. And so we may turn to our testings of
writers in whom the criticism “is not so expressed,” but who are not the
less valuable to us for that.
Are we to regret, or not, that Chaucer did not leave us an _Art of
Rhetoric_ instead of a _Treatise on the Astrolabe_? Probably not.
[Sidenote: _Examples of Indirect Criticism: Chaucer._] He would hardly
have felt what is called in religious slang “freedom” to say what he
undoubtedly might have said on Applied Rhetoric and on Pure Rhetoric,
though it would have been very agreeable to hear him. He would probably
not have told us anything new. In any kind of formal writing he would
probably have displayed that not in the least irrational orthodoxy which
he displays on most subjects. But there is perhaps no writer—at least no
writer of anything approaching his greatness—who, abstaining from
deliberate and expressed critical work, has left us such acute and
unmistakable critical byplay, such escapes of the critical spirit. If
the sly hit at his namesake of Vinsauf, which has been already glanced
at[594], stood alone, it would show us “what a _critic_ was in Chaucer
lost”—at least to the extent of lying _perdu_ for the most part. But
this is not the only example of the kind by any means, even in apparent
chance-medleys: while in the _Rhyme of Sir Thopas_[595] we have what is
almost a criticism in form, and what certainly displays more critical
power than ninety-nine out of a hundred criticisms in fact.
Footnote 594:
_V. supra_, p. 412.
Footnote 595:
I must apologise to those who hold that Chaucer never rhymed -_y_ and
-_ye_ for ascribing _Sir Thopas_ to him. But I really cannot give it
up as Chaucerian.
That this celebrated and agreeable fantasy-piece is in any sense an
onslaught on Romance, as Romance, is so fond a thing that it is
sufficient to discredit the imaginations, or the intelligence, of those
who entertain it. Dulness never will understand, either that those who
are not dull can laugh at what they love, or that it is possible for a
man to see faults, and even serious faults, in writers and writings on
whom and on which, as wholes, he bestows the heartiest admiration. From
the outset of his career the critic has to make up his mind to be
charged with “ungenerous,” or “grudging,” or “not cordial” treatment of
those whom he loves with a love that twenty thousand of his accusers
could not by clubbing together equal, and understands with an
understanding of which—not of course by their own fault but by that of
Providence—they are simply incapable.
Of this touch of foolish nature the inference from _Sir Thopas_ that
Chaucer disliked, or despised, or failed to sympathise with, [Sidenote:
Sir Thopas.] Romance, is one of the capital instances. To remember that
the author of the _Rhyme_ was also the author of the _Knight’s Tale_,
and the _Squire’s Tale_, and _Troilus_, that he was the translator of
the _Romance of the Rose_, might of itself suffice to keep the wayfaring
man straight in this matter; but those who can understand what they read
have not the slightest need of such a memory. There have been
parodies[596] of Romance which incurred the curse of blasphemy: there is
one in particular, not very many years old, which, in the energetic and
accurate language of Mr Philip Pirrip, “must excite Loathing in every
respectable mind.” But _Sir Thopas_, even to those who have not read
many of its originals and victims, much more to those who are well
acquainted with them, and who rejoice in them exceedingly and
unceasingly, can never put on any such complexion. The intense
good-humour and the absolutely unruffled play of intelligence, the
complete freedom from (what appears for instance capitally in the
example just glanced at) political, national, social _animus_, and the
almost miraculous fashion in which the caricature strikes at the
corruptions, but never at the essential character, of the thing
caricatured, settle this once for all.
Footnote 596:
Not _Rebecca and Rowena_. I think it barely desirable to insert this
note because quite recently a person, not demonstrably insane, called
that exquisite piece of Romantic humour “distressing,” or some such
word.
If we knew (as unluckily we do _not_ know) whether the Host and the
company stopped _Sir Thopas_ because they disliked the type, or because
the example was a parody, it would be a great help to us; but it is
scarcely a less help to perceive clearly that its critical character
would have been enough to put them out of conceit with it. Few people
really do like criticism; fewer still like real criticism. And the
criticism of _Sir Thopas_, though disguised, is very real. Everybody,
whether he knows the metrical romances of the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries or not, can see the joke of the seemly nose; the far country
of Flanders; the rebuke to the maidens, who had much better have been
sleeping quietly than fussing about the beautiful knight; the calm
decision of that knight that an elf-queen—nobody less—must be the object
of his affections; the terrible wilderness, where buck and hare ramp and
roar, and seek whom they may devour; the extraordinarily heroic
exertions, which consist merely in pumping the unhappy steed; the fair
bearing, which consists in running away with celerity and success. But
nobody who does not know the romances themselves in their weakest
examples, such as _Sir Eglamour_ or _Torrent of Portugal_, can fully
appreciate the manner in which the parody is adjusted to the original.
Not the deftest and most disinterested critic of any day could single
out, by explicit criticism, the faults “before the Eternal” of the
feebler and more cut-and-dried romance, more clearly or more accurately
than Chaucer has, by example, in this tale. The stock epithet and
phrase; the stock comparison; the catalogue (he had himself indulged
pretty freely in the catalogue); the pound of description to an ounce of
incident; the mixture of the hackneyed and the ineffective in the
incident itself,—all these things this mercilessly candid friend, this
maliciously expert practitioner, exposes with the precision of an
Aristotle and the zest of a Lucian.
Yet the whole is done by implication and unexpounded example, not in the
very least by direct criticism. Had it occurred to him, or pleased him,
he could no doubt have censured all these faults in as businesslike and
direct a manner as his Parson (or rather his Parson’s original) censures
the moral, social, and fashionable shortcomings of the age. But he
certainly did not do this, and probably he never thought of doing it.
Cross the Channel (though indeed it was not always necessary to do this)
and take Chaucer’s greatest contemporary among French [Sidenote:
_Froissart._] writing men. It has been said, by that very agreeable
biographer of Froissart whom England (mindful of his early loyalty, and
characteristically neglectful of his later infidelity) lent to France,
that he “was not a man of letters.”[597] It may be so: but if it be, he
was certainly one of the most literary not-men-of-letters that the world
has ever seen. Not only is he admittedly one of that world’s most
charming prose-writers, but it has long been known that the notion of
him (if it ever existed among the intelligent) as of a good garrulous
old person who wrote as the birds sing, is utterly erroneous. At one
time he could make a mosaic of borrowed and original writing—the
borrowings often in the very words of the original, the original
adjusted to them with an art that nobody but Malory has ever approached,
and that even Malory shows rather in general management than in style.
At another, and at another again, he could, whether with or against the
grain, laboriously recast this mosaic into the most widely different
forms. His very desultoriness is calculated; he is criticising the
romances by imitation when he makes a _chassé-croisé_ to the story of
Orthon from the victory of Aljubarrota, from the battle of Otterburn to
the evil receipt for a green wound adopted by Geoffrey Tête-Noire, and
the remarkably sensible, just, kindly, and gentlemanly remarks of that
dying brigand to his fellow-outlaws.
Footnote 597:
_Froissart._ Par Mary Darmesteter (Paris, 1894), p. 19.
But he is not a man of prose letters only. He is a poet, to the tune of
some thirty thousand verses in the long-lost and late-won _Méliador_
alone, to the tune of, I suppose, about as many more in his familiar, or
at least long accessible, minor poems. He is deft at all the intricate
popular forms of the day—at _pastourelles_ as at _chansons royaux_, at
_virelais_ as at _rondelets_. He possesses its learning; and can not
only appeal to the common tales of Troy and Thebes and Alexander, not
only refer to ancient mythology with the semi-pagan docility which long
puzzled students, and seems to puzzle some still, but be even at home
with Enclimpostair, and Pynoteus, and Neptisphelè. In a certain sense he
is a man of letters, a man of books, all his life, and very much more
than Chaucer is. With all his patronisings by great people and his
sojourns among them, he is nothing like the man of affairs that Master
Geoffrey was.
And yet, in a sense also, Madame Darmesteter’s phrase is intelligible
and almost justifiable. It is indeed hardly fair to base this
construction on his scanty and not in the least literary reference to
Chaucer, whom he does not even, like Eustache Deschamps[598], call a
great translator. In Froissart’s happy early English time Chaucer had
done probably little work, and certainly none of his best: in that
melancholy revisiting, no more of the blaze of the sun of Cressy and
Poitiers, but of the glimpses of the moon that was to set in blood at
Pontefract, he was probably too old and too disgusted to make inquiries
about such matters. But the absence of the strictly literary interest in
one who not merely had so much literary genius, but was so constantly
reading and writing, is pervading and incessant. This interest is absent
not merely where it might well have been present, but where its presence
seems almost indispensable. Froissart’s style of poetry invites the
widest, and (except that it is rather too methodical, not to say
mechanical) the wildest, liberty of divagation, of dragging in anything
that really interested him. In the most recondite allegorising of the
_Prison Amoureuse_ he expostulates[599] with Desire for not coming to
his aid, and giving him the victory, by the same sort of clever
outflanking attack as that which Chandos executed at the Battle of
Auray, and of which he kindly gives some details. He names books in the
usual manner of Romance; he will go so far as to praise them; but he
never discusses them. In the well-known passage[600] of the _Espinette
Amoureuse_, when he asks his beloved the name of the romance she is
reading, she does indeed tell him that it is _Cléomadès_ (Did he mention
the same to Chaucer?), with the commendation that it is “well made and
dittied amorously,” and she asks him to lend her another (it is the
_Bailiff of Love_[601] that he hits upon),
“Car lire est un douls mestiers.”
But, though the comparing of critical opinions on literature has been
not unknown as one of the primrose paths of the garden of Flirtation,
they seem to have trodden it no farther.
Footnote 598:
Deschamps, a far more _exclusively_ bookish person than Froissart, and
one who has even left us, in his elaborate _Art de Dittier_, not the
least remarkable of the formal “Poetics” referred to above, is no more
of a critic in any true sense than Froissart himself—not nearly so
much as Sidonius or Eberhard.
Footnote 599:
_Œuvres de Froissart (Poésies)_, par A. Scheler, 3 vols. (Bruxelles,
1870), i. 303.
Footnote 600:
Ibid., p. 107 _sq._
Footnote 601:
_Cléomadès_ (which is possibly not unconnected with Chaucer’s
_Squire’s Tale_) whoso will may know and (if he be of my mind) rejoice
in (ed. Van Hasselt, Bruxelles, 1865). But, alas! we have not the
_Bailiff of Love_.
So in his prose. The _satura_ of the _Chroniques_ admits anything that
interested either Froissart or the men of his time. In those strange
midnight sessions of the Italianate Gascon Count of Foix—the lettered
tyrant-sorcerer who would have been even more at home in Ferrara or
Rimini than in Béarn—books were in great request; but nobody seems to
have talked criticism. “So much the better for the Bearnese,” the reader
may say; and he is welcome to an opinion which, at times, if not always,
most people must have shared. But that is not the question. The question
is, “Was this a critical age?” and the answer is, “If it had been, a man
could not have been so bookish as Froissart was and yet be not critical
in the least.” Nor could he, even if some private idiosyncrasy had
accounted for his own attitude, have failed to reveal the presence of a
different one in the time which he has drawn for us, more poetically no
doubt than Boswell or Pepys, but with not a little of their
unpremeditated, their even unconscious, fidelity.
The lesson taught by the two men, who occupy the summits of European
literature at the very midmost of the period of this [Sidenote: _Richard
of Bury._] chapter, will be confirmed whether we look earlier or later.
It might seem almost impossible that the somewhat famous
_Philobiblon_[602] of Richard of Bury (or Aungervyle), who made one of
the greatest collections of books in the early part of the fourteenth
century, and celebrated it in this little tract just before his own
death and shortly after Chaucer’s probable birth, should not contribute
something—improbable that it should not contribute very much—to our
subject. As a matter of fact it contributes nothing at all. Almost the
oldest Sacred Book (as distinguished from “sacred passages” in Cicero
and others) of Bibliophily, it remains entirely outside of literary
criticism. The good Bishop of Durham, indeed, does not devour all books
with indiscriminating voracity. He is true to his order in candidly
avowing no high opinion of law-books; but his reason—that they belong
rather to Will than to Wit—shows us his point of view. From that point
of view one book may be preferable to another, as being more useful, as
dealing with a nobler subject, as boasting a more venerable authorship,
as being perhaps rarer, more beautifully written or bound, older, newer,
in better condition, but not, I think, at all as being better
literature. The pleasant garrulity of the tractate; its agreeable
onslaught upon woman, the natural enemy of books; its anecdotage; its
keen sympathy with the Book as almost a living thing, and certainly one
exposed to almost all the dangers of life, have made it, and will long
make it, a favourite. It is sweet and pleasant: but it is not criticism.
Footnote 602:
Often printed: the best edition of the original Latin is, I believe,
that (with French version) of M. Cocheris (Paris, 1856). The late
Professor H. Morley gave one of the wide biographical excursus of his
_English Writers_ (iv. 38-58) to Bishop Richard, and included in it a
pretty full abstract of the _Philobiblon_ (or “Philobibl_i_on”).
The author of the _Philobiblon_ was a friend of Petrarch’s, and it may
at first sight seem strange that Petrarch himself should [Sidenote:
_Petrarch._] not be—should not indeed have been at the very beginning or
this chapter—summoned to give evidence likewise. But the fact is that
Petrarch has nothing to tell us in our context. He has indeed, as has
been pretty universally recognised, nothing to do with the Middle Ages.
Not only in his heart and desires, but in his nature, he is a man of the
early—if of the earliest—Renaissance. Even in the vernacular he rings
false as an exponent of anything mediæval. Timotheus, not St Cecily, has
taught his strains. And in his “regular” writing he is severely, almost
ludicrously, a classicaster. We may return to him as the earliest
distinguished example of the Renaissance attitude; here he cannot even,
as others have done, help us by his silence.
It is otherwise with his great contemporary, and at the last friend,
Boccaccio. Boccaccio likewise has been claimed as a prophet of the
Renaissance, as one of the first of the [Sidenote: _Boccaccio._] moderns
and the like; nor would it skill to deny that there is much both of the
Renaissance and of the modern spirit in him. But he has not broken with
the immediate past; he is only tinging it, and blending it a little,
with the farther past and the future. If something of the magical charm
of the mediæval prose story is gone from the _Decameron_, the learned
voluptuousness of the Renaissance _conte_ is not yet there. The
_Filostrato_, and the _Filocopo_[603], and the _Teseide_, are still
romances. And in the _De Genealogia Deorum_, if there is much of that
non-mediæval spirit which was always in Italy, and not a little of the
Renaissance proper, there is enough of the Middle Age itself to give it
a _locus standi_ here.
Footnote 603:
Without prejudice to _Filocolo_. We attempt not to decide such
quarrels.
Indeed, by a recent authority of great eminence[604] Boccaccio has been
treated as a coryphæus and representative of “the [Sidenote: _His work
on Dante._] critics of the middle ages.” I have endeavoured, in these
chapters, to show that the critics of the middle ages are, except in the
most remote and shadowy function, almost a non-existent body. And it
seems to me that Boccaccio’s views on criticism, though most worthy of
remark, are the very head and front of that Renaissance side of him
which is so undeniable. In the passage which Mr Courthope cites from the
_Life of Dante_, where Boccaccio says that Theology and poetry are
almost one, that “Theology is God’s poetry,” that it is a kind of poetic
invention when Christ is spoken of at one time as a lion, at the other
as a lamb, that the words of the Saviour in the Gospel are merely or
mainly allegory, that “Poetry is Theology and Theology poetry,” and that
Aristotle said nearly as much[605]—when he writes in this way he is
speaking very much less the mind of the Middle Ages than the mind which
agitated the mass of his countrymen, the Italian critics, from Daniello
onwards in the sixteenth century. But it is quite certain that in
writing this he is writing with a conception of criticism quite alien
from that which we are now handling. He may quote Aristotle, but he is
speaking in the manner of Plato. It is poetry in the abstract with which
he is dealing, not the literary value of poetry according to its
expression in form, of no matter what ideal in essence. And it will be
found, I think, that a careful study of his commentary on Dante, the
most important thing of the kind that we possess by one considerable man
of letters in the Middle Ages upon another, entirely bears this out.
Footnote 604:
My friend, Mr W. J. Courthope, in the third chapter of his _Life of
Pope_ (Pope’s _Works_, ed. Elwin and Courthope, v. 50: London, 1889.)
Footnote 605:
Had he known Maximus Tyrius (_v. supra_, p. 117), he might almost have
borrowed the very words of that writer. But in the astonishingly long
list of Boccaccio’s classical authorities Maximus does not, I think,
occur.
As for the _Life_ (or, as he himself seems to call it in the first
lecture of the _Commentary_, the “Little Treatise”[606]) on Dante, it is
couched in so extremely rhetorical a style, with constant bursts of
apostrophe and _epiphonema_, that there may seem to be a sort [Sidenote:
_The_ Trattatello.] of warning on it from the first: “Criticism not to
be expected.” As a matter of fact, however, Boccaccio does give us some
of what, as we shall see more fully in a moment, he thought to be
criticism, and of what not a few persons seem still to think the best
criticism. For he has an elaborate digression on Poetry and Poets in the
abstract, with a particular parallel distinction (referred to above)
between poetry and theology. But he goes no farther, and the heading
“Qualità e diffetti di Dante” is entirely occupied with moral
characteristics. In the _Comento_ itself, however, it might well seem to
be a case of Now or Never. Here was a literary lectureship expressly
instituted for the treatment of the greatest man of letters of the city,
the country, and (as it happened) the world, at the time and for long
before and after. Here was an exceedingly learned lecturer, with plenty
of mother-wit to keep his learning alive, with a distinct fellow-feeling
of creation further to animate both, and with the sincerest and
heartiest goodwill to complete his competence. He spares no trouble, but
goes to his work with scholastic minuteness, expending some three score
lectures and some nine hundred pages on seventeen cantos only out of the
hundred of the _Commedia_. Unfortunately neither his models nor his
tastes seem to incline [Sidenote: _The_ Comento.] him in the way where
we would so fain see him go. He has read Servius and all (or at least
many of) the rhetoricians and scholastic philosophers, and he tells us
with gusto what are the causes, formal, efficient, material, and final,
of the book, how its form is “poetic, fictive, descriptive, digressive,
and transitive,” and how the efficient cause is “that very same author,
Dante Alighieri, of whom we will speak more extensively by-and-by.” He
has also read Fulgentius:[607] and before very long he gives us a
capital specimen of derivation, in the manner of that ingenious author,
by telling us that “Avernus” is from _a_, which is without, and
_vernus_, which is joy. He has at his command all that extraordinary
supply of mythological and miscellaneous classical learning which, as we
shall see immediately, enabled him to write his _Genealogy_: and he
never comes to the name of an ancient writer or of a mythological
personage without giving a full and particular account thereof. No
details are too obvious or too minute for him, even apart from the
allegorical interpretation, in which, as any scholar of Fabius
Planciades, and indeed any mediæval writer of the fourteenth century,
was bound to do, he expatiates delightedly. He vouches the information
that Dante called the forest _selvaggia_ “because he wished to denote
that there was not in it any human habitation, and that as a consequence
it was horrible;” _aspera_, “in order to demonstrate the quality of the
trees and shrubs of the same, which would be old, with long straggling
branches en woven and interpleached among themselves, and likewise full
of blackthorns, and brambles, and dry stubs, growing without any order,
and stretching hither and thither—whereby it was a rough thing and a
dangerous to go through,” &c. He is copious in moral _excursus_ on the
impropriety of Florentine dress, on the sin of Luxury, on the obvious
inconvenience and hardship of the fact that while men are allowed to try
horses, asses, oxen, dogs, clothing, casks, pitchers before they buy
them, they have to take their wives on trust and without trial. But on
literary criticism we come not seldom, but never, beyond the beggarly
elements of verbal interpretation, where Boccaccio is just as happy with
_Pape Satan_ as with _Galeotto fu il libro_, or rather more so, while he
is much happier with Penthesilea or Pasiphae than with either. It is no
doubt unfair to try Master John Bochas with the things that make us
“nearly wild” (as Cowper made Miss Marianne Dashwood,[608] and does
_not_ often make us), but still the Galeotto passage is very tempting.
Lancelot, we learn, was one of whom the French romances tell many
beautiful and laudable things (things which he tells us, in confidence,
he himself believes to be set forth rather to please than according to
the truth), and the said Lancelot was _ferventissimamente_ enamoured of
Guinevere. Then he points out that the line which follows (_Soli
eravamo_, &c.), and the previous mention of the book, indicate three
things—reading about love, solitude, and freedom from suspicion—which
are very powerful to induce a man and a woman to adoperate dishonestly.
And so he proceeds, expounding or construing the whole ineffable
passage, word for word, with a solemn and indiscriminate enjoyment—the
trembling at the kiss, the fact that Galehault was a kind of giant,
great and big, down to _Quel giorno_, his remark on which, though not
scientifically inaccurate, savours rather of the _Decameron_ than of the
_Commedia_ itself. But in the whole comment there is nothing (or, what
is worse than nothing, a single banal _ottimamente descrive_) for any
part whatsoever of the passion, the poetry, the mysterious magnificence
of the expression. The passage is to Boccaccio a good _ecphrasis_, a
capital _compte rendu_ of an interesting situation—that is all.
Footnote 606:
_Trattatello._ I use the cheap and convenient ed. of the two books
published by Le Monnier. (Florence, 1863; latest ed. 1895, 2 vols.)
Footnote 607:
He quotes him early, ed. cit., i. 94 (see note opposite).
Footnote 608:
“To hear those beautiful lines, which have frequently almost driven me
wild, pronounced with such impenetrable calmness, such dreadful
indifference!”
“... but you _would_ give him Cowper.”
“Nay, mamma, if he is not to be animated by Cowper!”—_Sense and
Sensibility_, chap. iii.
[Sidenote: The _De Genealogia Deorum_.]
Nor will this be less borne out by an examination of Boccaccio’s
principal “place” of criticism, which will be, perhaps somewhat
unexpectedly, found in the two last books, the fourteenth and fifteenth,
of that singular monument of learning, the _De Genealogia Deorum_.[609]
After laboriously searching out all the mythological stories of
antiquity within his reach, and co-ordinating them into a regular family
history, from Demogorgon, through Erebus and his twenty-one sons and
daughters by Night, to Alexander and Scipio (whom, however, he declines,
as a strict genealogist, to admit as sons of Jove), Boccaccio, at the
beginning of his fourteenth book, takes up the cudgels for Poetry
against her enemies. The style is decidedly rhetorical, and faint
remembrances of Clodius as an accuser (or, to be less pedantic and less
hackneyed, of Steenie lecturing on the turpitude of incontinence) may
possibly occur, as we find the author of the _Decameron_ indignantly
denouncing those who sneer at poets and learned men, _meretriculis
gannientes_, and holding cups of foaming wine in their hands. But he is
perfectly serious: if a man has not proved his seriousness by writing a
Latin genealogy of the gods in four hundred large and closely printed
folio pages, what is Proof? There was always, he says, a quarrel between
Learning and Licentiousness. Even some graver folk sneer at, or find
fault with, poetry. Lawyers do so: and the lawyers are properly rebuked
and bid to look at the example of Cicero. Monks do: and there is
expostulation likewise with them. But he will attack the question in
form. Poetry is a noble and useful thing. Its meaning, its antiquity,
its origin are discussed. There is nothing wrong or harmful in a “fable”
as such; but in all its kinds it can be made of positive utility. Poets
do not retire into solitude out of any misanthropy or wrong motive, but
simply for the sake of meditation: and they have often been the friends
of most respectable people—Ennius of the Scipios, Virgil of Augustus,
Dante of King Frederick and Can de la Scala, Francis Petrarch of the
Emperor Charles, of King John of France, of King Robert of Jerusalem and
Sicily, and of any number of Popes.
Footnote 609:
There is said, to the discredit of modernity, to be no modern edition
of this most remarkable and interesting book. Of the three folio
issues (1494 and later) which are in the library of the University of
Edinburgh, I have used that of Hervagius (Basle, 1532.)
But, some say, poetry is obscure. It is certainly written for the
learned and people of wit, not for the common herd; but it is none the
worse for that. It is entirely false that poets are liars: poetry and
lying are two quite different things (Virgil is here particularly
cleared in the matter of Dido). It is foolish to condemn what you do not
understand: and this is generally done by those who abuse poetry. And it
is intolerable that men should speak against Homer, Hesiod, Virgil,
Horace, Juvenal, when they have hardly read them. The “seduction” of
Poetry is all nonsense: and the accusation that poetry is the ape of
philosophy, greater nonsense still. It would be better to call poets the
apes of Nature.[610]
Footnote 610:
Mr Courthope must, I should think, have overlooked this passage when
he denied (_loc. cit._) that Boccaccio and other mediæval writers held
the doctrine that poetry should follow Nature.
He does not fear to contest the authority of Jerome when he said that
verses were _Dæmonum cibus_, of Plato himself, and of Boethius when he
called the Muses “scenic meretricules.” He grapples with the two first
at great length, and points out that Boethius was thinking chiefly of
the naughty theatre. An allocution to the King (Hugh of Cyprus and
Jerusalem), to whom the whole treatise is dedicated, and a milder
deprecation to the enemies of poetry, conclude this book.
The Fifteenth at first seems to launch out into still deeper waters. You
must not insist too much on _use_. What is the use of the beard? Yet men
of a certain age are ashamed to be beardless. And as for the duration of
work, that is in the hand of God. But this turns to a mere excuse of his
own actual book. His work has been done as well as he can do it, both
for matter and for style. He refers to divers living or recent authors,
Dante and Petrarch among them, of whom he gives little descriptions that
raise, but hardly satisfy, our curiosity to see whether he will really
criticise. Dante was _peritissimus circa poeticam_, and what he was is
shown by his _inclytum opus_, “which he wrote with wonderful art, under
the title of a Comedy, in rhyme of the Florentine idiom, and in which he
certainly showed himself not a mythologer but rather a catholic and
divine Theologian. And while he is known to almost all the world, I know
not whether the fame of his name has come to your latitude.” Petrarch is
dealt with much more fully. “Even that remote corner of the earth
England knows him as a principal poet,”[611] and here Boccaccio no
longer _nescit utrum_, but _haud dubitat quin_, his fame has reached
Cyprus. His “divine” _Africa_, his Bucolics, his Epistles in verse and
prose, and a good many other things, are noticed.
Footnote 611:
By favour of one Geoffrey Chaucer?
Next he recurs to antiquity, mentioning Homer especially, and defending
his own practice of mixing Greek words with Latin by the examples of
Cicero, Macrobius, Apuleius, and Ausonius. He has a good deal to say
(entirely in a Renaissance spirit) on the importance of the Greeks and
of Greek; defends, against clerical prejudice, his description of the
heathen poets as the theologians of mythology, argues once more that
Dante may be called a theologian proper, contends at great length that
there is no harm in the study of heathen matters by Christians, and,
after purging himself of other objections, concludes.
A most interesting document; indeed a document upon which, with
reference both to its general tenor and to individual expressions (of
which it has been possible to mention but one or two here), it would be
pleasant to spend much more time. But a document which, for our present
purpose and plan, seems to establish in the main two things, both of
them rather negative than positive. The first is that Boccaccio can
hardly be appealed to either as helping Dantes Aligerus to remove the
reproach from mediæval criticism, in the sense in which we here
understand it, or even as a representative proper of mediæval criticism
at all—that his criticism, such as it is, is of a purely Renaissance
type, and results, not from the application of mediæval ideas to ancient
matter, but from the application of resuscitated ancient ideas to matter
which, though not wholly, is preferably chosen from ancient material. It
is not to be forgotten that even in that creative work which has been
referred to above, Boccaccio has always preferred the _matière de Rome_,
the classical side of the mediæval storehouse. From this he has drawn
the _Teseide_, from this the _Filostrato_, and if in the _Filocopo_ he
has made a more purely mediæval choice, let it be remembered that
_Floire et Blanche-fleur_, his original, is of all Romances the most
like a Byzantine novel, and has even been thought to have been directly
inspired by one.
Secondly, when we examine the character of this criticism of his in
detail, we find it differing from Dante’s in this, that while Dante
undoubtedly does consider the general and abstract points of poetry and
of literature, Boccaccio practically considers nothing else. His
descriptions of Dante himself and of Petrarch would suffice to prove
this: but, in fact, it is proved by every page, every paragraph, every
sentence, almost every word. Throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth
books of the _Genealogy_ Boccaccio is really pleading _pro domo sua_—for
the _status_ and craft of the story-teller generally, not of the poet as
such. And further, he is pleading for free trade in the story, not for
any special process of art or craft in its manufacture. He had possibly,
if not certainly, read the _De Vulgari_, but, as he read it, it must
have been in the first part of the first book only that he found much
that was germane to his own tastes and principles. If we could but have
had from himself such an _examen_ of the _Decameron_ as Corneille and,
still more, Dryden have given of their work! But the time simply did not
admit of any such thing: and though Boccaccio was very much in advance
of his time in some ways, these ways were not of the some.
Nor does the Fifteenth Century proper necessitate any revision of the
general doctrine of this chapter. There are here and there blind
stirrings of the Renaissance spirit; but, once more, they do not concern
us. There is everywhere the dogged or unconscious adherence to the
uncritical promiscuousness of the past; and that has been sufficiently
commented upon. If it be, as perhaps it is, desirable to take a single
example, and deal with it as we have dealt with others, there can hardly
be a better than Gavin Douglas, who at the very end of the period shows,
side by side with Renaissance tendency (which certainly exists, though
to me it does not seem so great as it has seemed to some), the strongest
symptoms of persistent mediævalism.
Nobody can deny that the good Bishop of Dunkeld (uneasiest to him of
bishop-stools!) not only would have liked to be a [Sidenote: _Gavin
Douglas._] critic, but shows both his critical and his Renaissance sides
in the well-known and violent onslaught on poor Caxton in the first of
the very agreeable Prologues to his own translation of the _Æneid_. In
fact, those to whom the woman who killed Abimelech with a stone or slate
is the patron saint of criticism, must regard him as a very considerable
critic. How Caxton’s work and Virgil’s are “no more like than the Devil
and Saint Austin”; how the author “shamefully perverted” the story; how
the critic read it “with harms at his heart” that such a book “without
sentence or engine” should be entitled after so divine a bard; how such
a wight never knew three words of what Virgil meant; how he, Gavin, is
“constrained to flyte,”—all this is extremely familiar. We seem to hear
the very voice of the modern “jacket-duster,” of the man who finds his
pet task anticipated, his pet subject trespassed upon, and is determined
to make the varlet pay for it. Douglas, to be sure, is not quite in the
worst case of this class of critic. He can render some reasons, neither
garbled nor forged, for his censure. He has (and this is a sign that
criticism was stirring) lost taste for, lost even comprehension of, the
full, guileless, innocent, mediæval licence of suppression, suggestion,
and digression. He protests (quite truly) that Neptune did not join with
Æolus in causing the storm that endangered Æneas, but on the contrary
stilled that storm. He is indignant at the extension given to the true
romantic part of the poem, the Tragedy of Carthage in the Fourth Book,
and only less indignant at the suppression of the “lusty games” and
plays palustral in the Fifth. Most of all does he tell us of that
aggravation of the critical misuse of allegory which was to be one of
the main Renaissance notes. The “hidden meaning” of poetry is the great
thing for Douglas, and he has much to say about it before he “turns
again” on Caxton. Will it be believed that Caxton wrote "Touyr for
Tiber"! Alas! alas!
“For Touyr divides Greece from Hungarie,
And Tiber is chief fluide of Italy.”
But all this, and a great deal more like it, as the setting up of the
old Rhetoric-Poetic theory of a poem as the story of a perfectly noble
character, and the rebuke even to Chaucer not merely for being too
literal, just as Caxton was too loose, but for actually saying (the more
Chaucer he!) that Æneas was _not_ a perfectly noble character but a
forsworn traitor,—all this argues no real relinquishment of the mediæval
ideal except in a special case. Douglas shows in his own work that he is
after all a chip of the old block, and not fresh hewn from a virgin
quarry.
In the Prologue to the Sixth Book he returns to the
allegorical-philosophical interpretation of Virgil, and shows himself a
hundred leagues to leeward of the critical port by urging, in Virgil’s
favour, that St Augustine is always quoting him against Paganism. Not in
the whole range of mediæval literature is that pell-mell cataloguing,
which, with more truth than reverence, has been assimilated to that of
the “Groves of Blarney,” better shown than in the _Palice of Honour_.
Solomon, “the well of sapience,” Aristotle, “fulfillit of prudence,”
“Salust, Seneca, and Titus Livius” jostle Pythagoras and Porphyry,
Parmenides and “Melysses,” “Sidrach, Secundus, and Solenius,”
“Empedocles, _Neptanabus_, and Hermes,” “wise Josephus and facund
Cicero,” with other miraculous couples and trinities. The procession of
the Court of Venus huddles classical, Biblical, and mediæval in the
same, but a more pardonable, fashion; and when the Muses intervene to
save the peccant poet, Dictys and Dares still march unblushingly with
Homer and Virgil. “Plautus, Poggius, and Persius” must have looked only
less oddly, the first and last at the second, than “Esop, Cato, and
Allane” (Alanus de Insulis of the _Anti-Claudianus_ and the _De planetu
Naturæ_) each at other. Such a capital phrase as “the mixt and subtle
Martial,” the valuable naming of contemporary poets that follows, and
other things, may much more than atone for, but cannot hide, the
higgledy-piggledy character of the cataloguing, or the odd repetition of
the same thing with a difference at the end of the Second Part, and the
yet further development in the Third. The note of criticism is
discrimination—the note of the Middle Age, as of this, almost its latest
exponent, save in the few places where he has chipped his shell, is the
indiscriminate.
It can scarcely be necessary, though it might not be uninteresting, to
take any more examples. We need not [Sidenote: _Further examples
unnecessary._] wander in Hercynian forests with those rules of latest
Middle High German poetry, which have all the formality of the French
“Arts” and none of the charm of their products. The Marquis of
Santillana and his comrades, in castle or convent of Spain, concern
national rather than general history, history of literature rather than
history of criticism; and they, like others, will best be glanced at
retrospectively in the Renaissance section. From the French
_rhétoriqueur_ period we might pick out much that would illustrate, over
and over again, what has been sufficiently illustrated already, little
that would give us anything new, nothing or next to nothing that would
be at once new and important.[612] As will be shown, a little more in
detail, in the Interchapter which follows, the service which the Middle
Ages rendered to Criticism was indeed inestimable; but it was by way of
provision of fresh material, not by way of examination, either of that
material or of anything older.
Footnote 612:
Considerations of something the same kind may partly excuse a further
omission—which I know will be deplored by some, and which I daresay
will be denounced by others—that of any notice of rhetorical and
metrical writings in the Celtic and Scandinavian languages. I shall
very frankly acknowledge that there is another reason for this
omission. I have the greatest dislike to writing about anything at
second-hand; and while I have as yet had time to acquire only a slight
knowledge of Icelandic, I do not know anything at all of the Celtic
languages. With the help of Fors Fortuna, I may be yet able to make
these defects in some measure good; but I do not think it necessary to
delay the present volume indefinitely in order to do so. “There is no
staying,” as Johnson says, “for the concurrence of all conveniences.
We will do as well as we can.” So far as I have been able to inform
myself, the rhetorical writing of Icelandic is not extensive or
important, even though some may have come from the interesting hand of
Snorri Sturluson. The early Irish metrical treatises are, no doubt, of
great importance for the history of metre. But being purely
particularist, and out of the general current of European literature,
their critical importance can hardly be regarded as of the highest
kind. And Welsh, while anything of the sort in it must be much later,
is necessarily in the same position.
INTERCHAPTER III.
§ I. THE CONTRIBUTION OF THE MEDIÆVAL PERIOD TO LITERARY CRITICISM.
§ II. THE POSITION, ACTUAL AND POSSIBLE, OF LITERARY CRITICISM AT THE
RENAISSANCE.
I.
In perhaps no part of a work of the present kind is it more important
than it is here to distinguish between the different kinds of value, for
the special purpose, of the period in question. If you judge this by its
positive contributions to the standard literature of literary criticism,
it has absolutely nothing of consequence to advance but the _De Vulgari
Eloquio_. There is not very much else at all; and what there is consists
mainly of agreeable babblings, of schoolbooks, and of incidental
utterances, which at best can be taken as a kind of _semeiotic_.
Yet, in the _De Vulgari_ itself, the Middle Ages lodged such a
diploma-piece as has been scarcely half-a-dozen times elsewhere seen in
the history of the world. And, what is still more important, their
contributions to productive literature were such that they take, from
the catholic point of view, equal rank as a whole with those of
classical and those of modern times, while, for the special critical
purpose, they are almost more valuable than either. Enforced and
necessary ignorance of what the Middle Ages had to teach accounts in
almost every case for whatever shortcomings we find in the Classics;
wilful or careless ignoring of this accounts for most of the
shortcomings of the moderns; recourse to it accounts for most of the
merits, such as they are, of the criticism of the nineteenth century.
The critic who knows his Middle Ages, knowing also ancient and modern
literature, and he alone, has the keys of the criticism of the world.
Of the excellent and astonishing accomplishment of the _De Vulgari
Eloquio_ enough has been said already, and it will not require extensive
surveys to show the small accomplishment in criticism of the Middle Ages
elsewhere. It is almost enough to consider, as we have done, the work of
Chaucer, their next man to Dante in genius[613] as a known personality.
Chaucer had all or almost all the necessary qualifications of a critic—a
real knowledge of literature, a distinctly satirical humour, a large
tolerance, a touch, decided but not too frequent, of enthusiasm, an
interest in a very wide range of different subjects and forms. And he is
actually a critic in embryo, and more, throughout his work. The
_Boethius_ and the _Astrolabe_, the _Rose_ and the _Troilus_, half the
_Canterbury Tales_, more than half the minor works, are saturated with
literature—could have come from no author but one who was saturated with
literature. There is uncrystallised criticism on every page; there is
even some crystallised criticism in the _Sir Thopas_, and perhaps
elsewhere. But almost always “it is not so expressed,” and for once
Shylock is justified of his refusal to find it. In Chaucer, the strange
mediæval levelling of authors, not merely in respect of trustworthiness,
but in respect of positive value, continues. Macrobius is as Cicero;
Dares is much more than Homer. If he gives an opinion, it is a moral
one. He puts the rejection of alliteration on a mere local ground; and
they will not even let us believe that he laughed at French of
Stratford-atte-Bowe from any literary point of view.
Footnote 613:
If, as is still possible, and most probably can never be disproved,
Walter Map fashioned the perfect Arthur stories, by dint of combining
the Lancelot-Guinevere romance and the Graal Legend, composed the _De
Nugis_, and wrote an appreciable quantity of the Goliardic poems, he
will run Chaucer hard in all but the claims impossible to his time.
But the “if” is a great if.
Yet while the persistent study of Rhetoric is of great importance, as
exhibiting the keeping up of a critical treatment—such as it is—of
literature, the growth of the vernacular Poetics is of much more, as
developing a side of formal criticism which was destined to become of
more and more importance as time went on, and to have a connection with,
and an influence upon, criticism not merely formal, to which there is no
parallel in ancient times. So far as we have any trustworthy evidence,
Greek prosody was born like Pallas—full-grown and fully armed. It has no
known period of infancy or pupilage: the poets may devise—may even give
their names to—ingenious combinations, but all these combinations obey
one prearranged system. If the case of Latin is not quite the same, the
periods where it is most significantly different happen to be periods
when criticism had either not come into being or had abdicated its
functions. A _De Prosodia Latina_, by Nævius must have been as
interesting as Gascoigne’s _Notes of Instruction_, and might have been
as interesting as the _De Vulgari Eloquio_. A treatise on _Latin
Rhythms_ by Prudentius might, in its different way, have had an interest
which is difficult to parallel by anything modern in actual existence.
The Middle Ages, however, were constrained to grapple with their problem
as it arose. They had, as we have seen, been constant to _Artes Poeticæ_
dealing with Latin: at last they had begun to face the more difficult
question, how to construct and regulate their own growing vernacular
prosody. No doubt, in these latter attempts, the mechanical
prescriptions of the Provençal and French _Arts_ appear more frequently
than the philosophical-scientific consideration of poetical capacities
visible in the _De Vulgari_; but there is no reasonable fault to find
with this. Nor can it be reasonably contested that the extreme variety,
licence, and (if any one likes the word) irregularity of the greater
modern prosodies have given wider range to individual poetical
development than was allowed by the prosodies of the ancients. Here, as
elsewhere, uniformity rather than variety was probably the aim, and is
certainly the achievement, of the Classics. For one individual and all
but inimitable thing, like the Æschylean modulation of the chorus (so
different from the grave but less throbbing music of Sophocles, and from
the Euripidean tune) or like the Lucretian Hexameter, we find a dozen
resemblances; and, with elaborate combinations like the Alcaic or
Sapphic, the result is, as in the parallel case of our Spenserian, or
the Jonson-Herbert-_In Memoriam_ quatrain with enclosed rhyme, mainly
uniform. But the greater or less licence of equivalent substitution in
the staple English lines—the octosyllable and decasyllable, for
instance—admits of the impression of a singular personal stamp, and,
unless rejected by the mistake of the individual or the moment, has
rarely failed to produce it.
Still one returns, and must necessarily return, to the admission that,
to justify the claims here put forward as to the critical importance of
the Middle Ages, one cannot go to their own explicit and deliberate
exercises in criticism. To apply Johnson’s not quite inspired remark on
Fielding and Richardson, they neither did, nor in all probability could,
explain the mechanism of the timepiece. But they told the time of day
with unerring accuracy; and their records of it have been neglected, and
will be neglected by succeeding ages, only at the peril—which has
already sometimes led to actual shipwreck—of miscalculating the whole
literary reckoning. When the critics of the Renaissance, followed more
or less blindly by those of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
either contumeliously or in the sheer generous mistake of desire for
improvement, turned their backs, as far as they could, on the products
of Mediæval literature, they not merely shut themselves out from a vast
volume of delight, they not only mistook disastrously the value of many
individuals, but they recklessly deprived themselves once more—and with
far less excuse and greater loss than had resulted from the similar
refusal of the later Greeks—of an inestimable opportunity for
Comparison. And so they once more barred for themselves the one gate and
highway to really universal criticism of literature.
For the great, the immense, value of the literature of the Middle Ages
consists in its freshness and independence, and the consequent fashion
in which new literary bents and faculties of the human mind were
manifested. The Greeks had, at any rate so far as we know, neither the
advantage nor the disadvantage of any precedent literature before them;
but their spirit of theory and of philosophising, while it helped to
concentrate and intensify the peculiar virtue of their product, tended
also to narrow and stereotype their range. Latin suffered from the
double drawback of system and model. And modern literature itself has
not, with all its achievements, been able to free itself from the
inevitable consequences of ancestry. It is a great deal too literary; it
has, in almost all cases, the obsession of the library, and the printed
book, upon it. It is deliberate, preoccupied, interested; it has all
sorts of cants, prejudices of education or emancipation, purposes,
reminiscences, unacknowledged and often unconscious trammels and
twitches. Its fountains are very rarely of living water; they are fed
from carefully constructed and collected reservoirs, if not by positive
distillation from the great sea of older literature.
Now, with all their slavish docility, all their writing in schools and
groups and batches, all their adoption of tags and texts, the Middle
Ages and their literature present a spectacle which is exactly the
reverse of this. The authors have the appearance of following; they are
really straying, each at the dictation of his own tastes and instincts
only. You may as well try to teach a cat to do anything in any but her
own way as a mediæval writer. When he copies a Romance, he will change
the names if he does nothing else: but probably he will do much else,
writing it in sixains if his model is in couplets, in decasyllabics if
his original is octosyllabic, and so forth. Nothing shall induce him to
keep historical distinctions or philosophical differences. His hero[614]
shall be as beautiful as “Paris of Troy, _or_ Absalom, _or_ Partenopex”;
his story of Alexander shall blend sober history and the wildest
fiction, with a coolness which is only not reckless because it does not
see anything to reck. Formal restrictions of the minor kind, prosodic
and other, he will observe devoutly, because they come naturally to him
and are of his own devising; but any restrictions of literary theory he
utterly ignores. His Muse will wear no stays, though she does not
disdain ornaments.
Footnote 614:
As is actually the case with Floire or Florice, the lover of
Blanchefleur.
The reward of this obedience to Nature was signal. In the first place
the Middle Ages created, or practically created, the STORY. Of course
there were stories before; of course the _Odyssey_ would be the best
story in the world if, of the main elements of Romance—Passion and
Mystery—one were a little more developed, and is almost the best story
in the world as it is. Of course there are capital _fabliaux_ in
Herodotus, fine apologues in Plato, good things of other kinds
elsewhere. But the ancients not only hampered themselves by almost
always telling their longer stories in verse, but seldom knew how to
manage them in verse or prose. The _Iliad_ is such a bad story that it
has tempted the profanity of those who would make it not one but a dozen
stories; the _Æneid_ is a story, dull _à dormir debout_ as such, with
some good rambling and fighting, a great descent to Hades, a capital
boxing-match, not a bad regatta, and a famous but borrowed episode of
passion. Out of Herodotus, till we come to the very verge of the
classical period with Apuleius and Lucian, it is almost impossible to
find a Greek, quite impossible to find a Roman, who knows how to tell a
story at all. The exquisite substance of mythology receives no due
honour from the story-teller as such. Read Ovid (who had as much of the
story-telling spirit in him as any ancient except Herodotus), and then
turn to what is often the mere doggerel and jargon of the mediæval Latin
story-tellers in prose and verse. The gift, no matter whether it came
from the East or from the West, from the North or from the South, from
the Heaven above or the earth beneath, or rose a new Aphrodite from the
Atlantic sea, is here and is not there.
Without this gift of story-telling there could not have appeared—though
it would not by itself have been enough to produce—the greater gift of
the Romance. It would be as unnecessary as it would be foolish to enter
here into the secular and truceless war as to the origin, the nature,
and so forth of this famous thing. It is sufficient to observe, once
more, that the thing is here and is not there, except almost by
accident. And the gift of the Romance—in that wide historical sense in
which it could be, and was, in the Middle Ages applied to almost every
manner of subject—was a gift to literature so inestimable that perhaps
no other has ever quite equalled it. At once, with that nonchalance
(they called it _nonchaloir_) in which no time has ever equalled these
Ages, they swept away the Doctrine of the Subject, with all the cants
and heresies which pullulate round its undoubtedly noble articles of
original faith. Romance was perfectly prepared to deal with any subject,
from religion to stag-hunting, from chronology to love. It depended no
doubt on the individual craftsman whether the result was good or bad;
but the method has, in the right hands, triumphed over the most
intractable materials, added charm to the most commonplace, made the
most grotesque acceptable. Could anything be thinner and more ordinary
than the subject of _Floire et Blanchefleur_? Can anything be more
charming, not merely than its most perfect outcome in _Aucassin et
Nicolette_, but even than the diffuser and less happily phrased
verse-forms? In the Arthurian Legend the success is greater still.
Romance takes a dim personality, and a handful of cacophonous
place-names, out of a suspicious compilation of pseudo-history, and
spins it, in a single lifetime, into a story the most elaborate, the
most artful, the most variedly interesting, the fullest of meaning (if
men _must_ have meaning) in the whole literary world.
Even to Dante it did not occur to subject the methods and the results of
this new and potent kind to such an examination as that which Aristotle
had partly given to the older literature. Nor, at that time and in those
circumstances, was even Dante likely to have led such an inquiry to a
good end. The Middle Ages, while consciously abandoning, almost or
altogether, the old aim at Action, had not arrived at the modern command
of Character. They worked at and by mediate things—Incident, Atmosphere,
Description, Manners, Passion—and they made all these and others
subserve a Romantic Unity of plot which, instead of being circular like
the Classical Unity, was calculated for indefinite prolongation, not
merely in straight line, but after the manner of a tree, with branches
and inarchings skyward, earthward, and horizontal. The scheme admitted
adornments of various kinds, which must have been difficult if not
impossible to reconcile with the more sober and exacting classical
model. It permitted a much greater indulgence of the resort to the
methods of other arts, especially painting, than classical literature
had, until its latest days, thought proper. It paid very little
attention to mere probability. All these points invited the comparative
critic, but they did not find him. In three respects, however, the
difference between classical and mediæval Imitation or Representation
was almost more striking than in any other, and all of these presented
the most tempting opportunities for criticism. These were the attitude
of the new literature to Religion, its attitude to the passion of Love,
and its use of an implement which, though by no means unknown to
Classical literature, had been more sparingly used therein, the method
of Allegory.
On the first point it would be very easy to enlarge beyond the widest
toleration of this treatise; it is here only necessary to point out how
delicate, and how important, are the new duties prescribed to the critic
of mediæval literature in regard to it. The “blinded Papist” view (which
makes itself felt even in some observations of such a man as Scott now
and then) may not be so common as it once was, but it is not entirely
obsolete. And it may be doubted whether that to which it has given
place—a philosophical pity, contemptuous or sympathising, for
“superstition” generally—is not even more hampering, while there can be
no doubt of the hamper imposed on the yet earlier Renaissance by the
superior contempt which it felt for mediæval childishness and ignorance.
In this literature, and in the romantic branch of it more particularly,
allowance has to be made at every moment, in every respect and
condition, for the omnipresence of an elaborate creed which nobody
doubted, with which everybody indeed was so saturated and familiar that
he could jest with it and at it, as one jests with and at a best-beloved
and best-known person and friend. It supplies subject, it affects
treatment, it colours phrase and image. Although it is very easy to
underrate the amount of actual religious feeling in antiquity, yet this
feeling, at its noblest and sincerest, was unquestionably of an entirely
different character from that of the “Ages of Faith.” Take, at their
best and strongest, the sincere fetichism of the ancient equivalent of
the “charcoal-burner,” the beautiful mythology of the poet, the sublime
mysticism of the Platonist, and the exalted if slightly Pharisaical
morality of the better Stoic—combine them with all the art of the
student of development. But you will not succeed in making anything in
the least like the creed of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, with
Christ, or rather with the Virgin and the Devil, fighting perpetually
for Mansoul, with Angels and Deadly Sins under their command, with a
miracle possible at every moment, Death and Fortune ruling affairs
subject to, but not always interfered with by, the higher influences,
the Sacraments to be resorted to at will or neglected at peril,
Purgatory to be faced or anticipated and won through, Hell or Heaven for
final goal. It is almost impossible to allow too much in degree (though
it is extremely possible to allow wrongly in kind) for the influence
which this ever-present set of thoughts, beliefs, feelings, which was
absent from antiquity and present in the Middle Ages, had upon the
literary utterance of the latter. The unnatural gloom and the
half-inarticulate gaiety which have been discovered in this literature
(the latter at least as truly as the former), its occasional
irrationality, as we are pleased to call it (perhaps “irrationalism”
would be a better word), its shuddering attraction for the horrible and
loathsome, its delight in dream, its quaint and almost flighty
revulsions and contrasts—all are due to this.
Equally a commonplace, and yet still more important to, and still more
neglected by, criticism, is the attitude of the Middle Ages to
Love—which is very mainly conditioned by their attitude to Religion. The
not infrequent, though very idle, debate as to whether the Venus of
chivalry was Urania or Pandemos is, of course, best avoided by the frank
acknowledgment that she was (as indeed Her Divinity always has been)
both. The distinction from antiquity, and its influence upon literature,
do not lie in the least in this direction, or in the fact of the
mixture, but in its nature and character. With exceptions, of course,
the tone of antiquity in literature, as to love and to its objects, is
either the tone of slightly unreal philosophising, or the tone of the
naughty story, or that of half-paraded, half-confessing contempt. The
two former require no treatment here; the latter is important. Love and
its objects are, to an average serious man of letters of the Classics
when not a subject for conventional escapades, a rather regrettable
incident attached to humanity, something not in the least _spoudaion_,
something only not among the _parerga_ of life because it is almost
impossible to avoid them, something useful, not unpleasant, rather
better than a constitutional or a bath, but affording a much less worthy
employment than talking in a porch, or declaiming in a school. This is
undeniably the average attitude of the average man of letters of old.
That of his mediæval brother need hardly be described; but its causes
come within our view. You have to reckon, not merely with the cult of
the Virgin, as has often been done, but with the whole Christian
(especially mediæval-Christian) theory of morals and of sin. Why excite
yourself about actions indifferent at best, always rather below the
attention of a serious man, and at worst leading to unpleasant and
dubious consequences? Excitement becomes easy when the consequence of a
moment’s guilty indulgence may be the Inferno for eternity. Nay, from a
less purely selfish point of view there are reasons enough.
Imagination—the real Imagination of Apollonius or Philostratus, not the
mere image-furnishing faculty of the ancients generally—had “come to
town,” and brought a transformed Love with her. The sense of mystery, of
miracle, of the invisible, grafted itself upon the strongest of the
merely physical instincts, and the result pervaded literature. The
trumpery subject, proper for comedy, for epic episodes, for a carefully
kept-under seasoning to tragedy, for light trifles, became, with
Religion, the subject of nearly all poetry, and of not a little prose,
and made its influence felt in all manner of ways. It even, although the
Middle Age was confessedly not strong in character, paved the way to
that last grace, thanks to the fancy of the time for rehandling the same
subjects and persons. Trace Briseis-Briseida, a fashion-plate in Dares,
a slave-girl in Benoist, to the Cressida of Chaucer and of Henryson;
trace Guanhumara, a handsome Roman damsel of good family and nothing
more, down to the complex woman and Queen of the complete _Lancelot_,
and you will see how character-drawing arose.
But undoubtedly one of the greatest, and perhaps the most
characteristic, of the influences of the love-motive on literature, and
the development of literary methods through this and other motives, is
the mediæval use of Allegory. The thing, of course, is not new—nothing
ever is in the strict sense. It may actually have dwelt upon the banks
of Nile: it certainly did on those of Ilissus and Tiber. But the very
strong prominence of it in the Scriptures, and in ecclesiastical
writings generally, could not fail to develop it in the younger
vernaculars; and its alliance (a dangerous one no doubt, but a real and
natural) with Imagination could not long be missed. Many ingenious and
industrious hands have traced its origin from Homer to Claudian, and
from Claudian to the _Romance of the Rose_. How it thence coloured all
literature is sufficiently known. But no critic has even yet exhausted,
nor are a hundred critics likely to exhaust, the subtle and innumerable
ramifications of its literary influence and manifestations.
These things and others showed themselves no doubt mainly in the
Romance—the chief, the most characteristic, and, so far as anything is
original, the most original of the literary products of the Middle Ages.
But the Romance was far indeed from being the only new development in
literary morphology that the period had to offer. Until nearly its
closing time, no great change or advance was made in History, though the
artificial speech, which ancient exaggerations of oratory had imposed on
the historian, was to a great extent dropped, and the purview of the
writer was insensibly widened in other directions. But the immense
cultivation of the short tale—first in verse, then in prose—was a matter
closely connected, but by no means identical, with the progress of
Romance itself. And, as in another matter glanced at above, the restless
character of the time, and its constant tendency to reproduce with
slight alteration, had, here also, a great influence. In all these
alterations the arts and crafts of the future novelist and dramatist
were insensibly exercising themselves. But the drama itself demands at
least a glance. That the modern play owes nothing to the mediæval is the
foolishest of critical delusions; but it would hardly be rash to say
that the mediæval drama owes nothing to the ancient. When the horror
with which (for not such very bad reasons) the Church regarded stage
plays altogether had been a little relaxed, the natural and the
artificial dramas followed entirely different lines. Hroswitha’s work,
and _Christus Patiens_, and the rest, have absolutely nothing to do with
Miracle or Mystery or Farce, which are the romance and the short story
thrown, according to the natural histrionic bent of man, into
presentation by personages instead of by continuous narration. And the
laws which they developed, and by which they helped the greater and more
genuine modern drama to be what it was, were natural likewise, and had
nothing to do with Aristotle or with Horace, with Plato or with
Aristophanes.
This would by itself have sufficed to give the new drama a very
different nature, and therefore a most important comparative critical
influence, when contrasted with the old. The Greek drama (which the
Roman more or less slavishly copied) may have had its infancies; but we
possess it only in its riper age. Nor is it even possible that these
infancies, granting their existence, could have shown anything like the
multiform influences which betray themselves in the mediæval drama. Both
may have been originally liturgic; but there is such an infinite
difference in the complexity of the liturgies! Both may have been
preceded by epic and perhaps lyric; but in other respects the Greek
drama was certainly among the first—as the mediæval drama was nearly the
last—to take rank among literary kinds. And these differences, putting
others aside, would have accounted, in great part, for the singularly
undulating and diverse character which (in company, no doubt, with an
imperfection as great as the diversity) distinguished the new drama from
the splendid, but somewhat narrow, perfection of the old. Even in the
stock types, in the Vices and Fools of the new form, there was little or
nothing of the fixed character of the Roman—we can say little of the
Greek—"comedy of art."
And so, not merely in more kinds of literature than one, but in every
kind of literature, with hardly a single exception, the Middle Ages
provided their successors with the material for an entirely new Calculus
of Critical Variations—for a complete redressing of whatever positive
errors or mere relative gaps had existed in the older criticism, by
reason of the absence of opportunities for observation.
II
Nor can it be regarded as any great drawback to the critical position of
the Renaissance to which we are coming—and the grounds and data of which
it is desirable to survey in advance, by way of retrospect over the
contents of the present volume—that this immense provision of new
critical material was not accompanied by many, or indeed (with the one
great exception, soon to be known, but to be hardly in the least heeded)
any, accomplished exercises in critical method. For these, as has been
pointed out, were not likely to have been very good; and, good or bad,
they were nearly sure to have been neglected, or to have done positive
harm by way of mere reaction. Moreover, it was easily and perfectly open
to the Renaissance to create for itself in this department. By its
recovery—no longer in half-measure, and less than half-light, but in
full—of the literature of antiquity, it had been put in possession, not
merely of the other great masses of literary material, but of quite
admirable examples of critical method itself. Quintilian, Horace,
Cicero, the Greek and Latin Rhetoricians, were among its inherited
possessions, and it had certainly had the _Poetics_, though little
attention had for a long time been paid to them. But they were soon put
before it afresh: and, what is more, the discovery of Longinus also was
soon made. Horace, with his arbitrary rules, and his enforced, but
probably not at all unwelcome, abstinence from any dry exhibition of
material and examples, was no doubt, with all his merits, a very
dangerous mentor. But with Aristotle, Quintilian, and Longinus at hand
as preceptors of method, and practically all then existing literature,
classical and mediæval, at hand as storehouse of matter, a man of the
mid-sixteenth century had only himself to blame if he did not hit upon
at least the main and general articles of the critical Catholic Faith.
He might not anticipate the magnificent and almost unbelievable new
developments of literature which were actually to take place, in the
three western countries of Europe, within a very few years; but he would
have been none the worse critic for that. The critic is, by his
profession, not in the least bound to be a prophet. But he had every
document necessary to correct the chief shortcomings of the ancients, to
enlarge the classification of literary kinds, to rearrange the nature,
degrees, and methods of the literary assault on the senses and the soul.
It would be undue anticipation to discuss what he did instead of this;
or to give in detail the positive influences which worked upon him in
preferring his actual alternative. But it is matter of undoubted history
that he did not do what he might have done, and it is matter of
relevance here to give the reasons, as far as they are retrospective,
why he did not do it.
To a considerable extent the explanation, and if not the justification,
the excuse, of his failure lie in a well-known and constantly repeated
phenomenon which, on this particular occasion, showed itself with
unusual, indeed with elsewhere unexampled, distinctness and power. Every
age and every individual (it has been said often, but can never be said
too often), unless it or he is a mere continuation of predecessors, is
unjust to these predecessors. Examples are not necessary; the merest
moment’s thought will supply them in profusion. But there were numerous
and powerful conditions and forces which made this injustice certain to
be more violent and more lasting here than in almost any other case. No
known “dispensation” exists historically of anything like the same
length, the same intensity, the same uniformity as that which
characterises in all things, and certainly not least in matters
literary, the thousand years of the Middle Age at its widest stretch.
And this would of itself be sufficient to bring about a reaction of
corresponding violence and duration. But to this general aspect of the
whole period must be added the particular aspect of its final stage.
Except in Italy (which had never been intensely or characteristically
mediæval, and which had practically ceased to be so, in any sense not
external, soon after Dante’s time) the fifteenth century had been a
period of decadence, or of transition, or of stagnation, in almost every
European country. It is possible, though it is not probable, that minds
in which the critical spirit was reawakening might have taken a juster
view of things if the fresh examples then before them, to be compared
with Homer, Lucretius, Thucydides, had been Dante, Chaucer, Froissart.
But there was some excuse for an indignant pooh-poohing of the mere
possibility of comparison, when the persons, to be compared immediately
with the great writers of antiquity, were the dreary and bombastic
_rhétoriqueurs_ of the French, or the shambling versifiers of the
English, fifteenth century.
The Renaissance, moreover, was likely to be led wrong by that constant
delusion of matter, that fatal attraction towards the subject, which, as
this _History_ endeavours to show, has led Criticism wrong a dozen times
for once that it has led her right. The mediæval forms of literature
were identified, allied, in fact saturated, with certain beliefs and
modes of thought—scholastic philosophy, Catholic religion, aristocratic
politics. To the pure Platonist on the one hand and the thorough-going
Aristotelian on the other, to the reformer on the one hand and the
freethinker on the other, to the democrat on the one hand and the
believer in Machiavellian statecraft on the other, all these things were
partly horrible, partly idiotic, altogether to be shaken off and
refused. The natural, but in the main irrational and frivolous,
weariness of an old fashion was supplemented, inspirited, made far more
vehement and dangerous, by the deliberate and reasoned, if not
reasonable, antipathy to, and revolt against, an old faith. It has been
acknowledged already that the _Morte d’Arthur_ would have fared as badly
with Augustine as it did with Ascham; but the moral provocation would
not have been aggravated to Augustine, as it was perhaps to Ascham,
certainly to more thorough-going Protestants than he, by the distinct
connection between the Graal Legend and the doctrine of
Transubstantiation.
Accordingly, the Renaissance indulged itself, and left to its
successors, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (different as they
were from itself in many ways), an amount of “unintelligent scorn” of
the past which, if it does credit to nothing else, does credit at least
to the vigour and intensity of the time. Sometimes this scorn was vocal
and argumentative, as in Ascham himself, in Du Bellay, in others. More
often, and with a subtler mischief still, it was silent, implicit,
apparently exchanged for mere negligence. The childish things were
simply put away, despatched to the lumber-room, and left there. And it
was this negligence, rather than the scorn, which did harm to the
criticism of the periods that followed. It does not do the critic
unmitigated harm to take the wrong side now and then; he exercises
himself at his weapons, he can acquire dexterity in them, and very often
(Dryden is a notable example) he teaches himself orthodoxy in the very
act of fighting for the heterodox. But when he allows himself to ignore,
great gulfs or smaller pits open for him at once. That is what he can
never afford to do; that is the cause of all the errors which have beset
his kind, from the beginning of critical things until the present day.
One of the most excellent and admirable of librarians once replied to a
childish question of the present writer, “What do you do with the
rubbish?” “It is rather difficult, you see, to know what is rubbish
to-day; and quite impossible to know what will be rubbish to-morrow.”
And while this is more especially true of the critic, who can with
safety pass nothing, at least unexamined, as rubbish, his case is more
dangerous still than that of the librarian, who has but to arrange what
he has got in orderly fashion, and prepare plentiful shelves for what is
coming.
With the critic, as we have seen, it is different. He must always
generalise at his peril, and subject to the upset of his generalisations
by fresh discoveries. But he can at least be careful of the “without
prejudice,” and he can at least neglect nothing that is within his
reach, in his processes of observation and comparison. The earlier Greek
critics erred, as we have seen, partly because of a necessary and
guiltless deprivation. But their venial sin became more of a mortal one,
when they not only assumed that there was nothing save what they knew in
Greek, but deliberately ignored the opportunities, not of sovereign but
of considerable efficacy, which were offered them by Latin. The Latin
critics erred, partly by the same assumption, and partly by converting
the despite of Latin into a slavish and unintelligent adoration of
Greek, and not always the best Greek. The Middle Age was innocent, as
hardly indulging in criticism at all. But the Renaissance critics at
first committed, and to far too great an extent handed on, a combination
of the sins of their classical teachers. They assumed the stationary
state of literary kinds and qualities, as both Greeks and Romans had
done; they adulated classical literature, like the Romans in regard to
Greek; they despised mediæval literature, like the Greeks in relation to
Latin. And, as we shall see, they had their reward.
But I should be sorry to end not merely a chapter but a Book, not merely
a Book but a volume, without a _caveat_ against possible misconstruction
of the words “fault,” “error,” “sin,” “mischief,” “misfortune,” and the
like, which have just been used, not merely in this context, but
throughout the volume itself. There have been, I believe, persons
unfortunate enough to be dissatisfied with the moral and physical
government of the universe—persons who have sadly pronounced it “a crank
machine” in many ways. These things are not my trade. But, in matters
literary, I must plead guilty to being something of an optimist. Not
that I think all literature good—that is not precisely the conclusion to
which a thirty years’ practice of criticism brings one. In the critical
land, as in the _pays des amours_, the shore where one always loves is a
shore of which it must be said that _on ne la connaît guère_. There is,
indeed, a certain critical delight in reading even the worst books, so
long as they are positively and not merely negatively bad—but that is
another matter.
The point on which I am contented to be called a critical Pangloss is
this, that I have hardly the slightest desire to alter—if I could do so
by the greatest of all miracles, that of retro-active change—the
literary course of the world. No doubt things might have been better
still—one may there agree with the pious divine on his strawberry. But
one may also be perfectly contented with the actual result. I have
endeavoured to show that, however we may feel bound to pronounce Greek
literature incomplete in this or that department, and still more Greek
criticism imperfect in its assumptions and of questionable adequacy in
its methods, yet Greek criticism was the criticism which was wanted, to
register and to preserve the qualities which have made Greek literature
perhaps the most indispensable possession among the now goodly list of
the literatures of the world. I have endeavoured further to show that
the two conflicting strains or streams in Latin criticism correspond, in
a manner “necessary and voluptuous and right,” on the one hand, to the
ordered correctness and _venustas_ which are the notes of the Latin
spirit on its Academic side; on the other, to the under-current of
half-barbaric gorgeousness which there, as elsewhere, now and again
asserted itself—with no small benefit to the world’s letters.
And so, also, in this chapter and the Book which precedes it, I have
tried to show that the immense provision of new kinds of literature by
the Middle Age, side by side with its almost total abstinence from
criticism, was the best thing that could have happened. Nor is it
impossible that, if we are able to pursue the inquiry, we shall find
that the new differentia of the Renaissance period and that which
followed to the Romantic revival—the curious fact that almost all its
criticism went one way, while almost all its best creation went dead in
the teeth of that criticism—has again worked mainly if not wholly for
good. But this is for the future. _Si laisse ore à tant li contes à
parler!_
INDEX.
Academics, the, 66.
Acatalepsy (the Pyrrhonist doctrine of agnosticism), 64.
Accius or Attius, L. (_b._ 170 A.C., _d._ (?)), tragic poet, 326.
_Achilleid_, the, 269, 410.
Achilles Tatius (_fl. c._ 500 A.D. (?)), novelist, 119 _note_, 180.
_Acyrologia_ = “improper or inexact expression,” 338.
Addison, 83, 118.
_Ad Herennium_, 213, 217.
Adrianus (_d. c._ 192 A.D.), rhetorician, 95.
_Æneid_, the, see Virgil.
_Ærumna_, objections to, 251 and _note_, 297.
Æschylus (_b._ 525 A.C., _d._ 456), tragic poet, 22, 39, 112, 133, 155,
206, 308.
Æsopus, (? ?), fabulist, 409.
_Æthiopica_, the, 180, 181.
Afranius, L. (_fl. c._ 100 A.C.), Roman comic poet, 311.
_Africa_, Petrarch’s, 462.
African euphuism, 362.
_Against the Dogmatists_, 64-66.
_Agave_, the, of Statius, 255 and _note_.
_Agon_, the contentious or argumentative part of a speech, 101.
C (12th cent.), moralist, &c., in verse, 411, 414 _note_, 466.
Albinovanus Pedo (_fl. c._ 1 A.D.), poet, 310, 311.
Albinus, _see_ Alcuin.
Albucius, Silius (_fl._ 1st cent. A.C.), declaimer, &c., 238, 360, 432.
Alcæus (_fl. c._ 600), poet, 133 _note_.
Alcidamas (_fl._ end of 5th cent. A.C.), rhetorician, 45.
Alcuin? (or Albinus?) (_b. c._ 735, _d._ 804), theologian and
rhetorician, 375-377.
Aldhelm (_b. c._ 650 A.D., _d._ 709), poet and divine, 400 _note_.
Alexander (2nd cent. P.C.?), rhetorician, 102, 105.
Allegory, its appearances in, and influences on, Criticism, 10-12,
67-70, 300, 301, 392 _sq._
ἁμαρτία.
(1) The peculiar tragic “sin” on which Aristotle’s idea of tragedy
partly hinges, 34 _sq._
(2) “Fault” generally in the critical sense; but in this ἁμαρτία is
perhaps commoner, 44 _sq._, 168, 285, Bk. II. chap. iii. _passim_.
_Amblysia_, “blunting” or “toning down,” 338.
Ammæus (correspondent of Dion. Hal.), 129 _sq._
Amplification (_auxesis_), rhetorical term, sometimes for “raising,”
sometimes for “varying,” the subject, 164.
_Ampulla_, 271 and _note_.
_Anabasis_, the, 309, 318.
Anacreon (_c._ 560 A.C.–480), poet. Criticism of him in the Anthology,
82.
ἀναίσχυντος (“anæschyntos”), “the shameless one.” One of the artificial
distinctions of case in which the plaintiff seems impudent, 347.
ἀνασκευή, refutation, one of the subject divisions of the
Progymnasmata, 92 _sq._
_Anatomy of Melancholy, the_, 144 _note_, 194.
Anaxagoras (_fl._ 5th cent. A.C.), philosopher, criticised Homer? 11.
Anaximenes of Lampsacus (_fl._ 4th cent. A.C., with Alexander, 334),
historian and rhetorician, 17 _note_.
ἀντέγκλημα. Acceptance and vindication: “justification,” 98.
Anthology, the Greek, literary epigrams of, 81-86, 147.
—— the Latin, 344, 345.
_Anti-Claudianus_, 410, 414 _note_.
Antimachus of Colophon (or Claros) (_fl. c._ 400 A.C.), poet, 20
_note_, 85 _note_, 133, 307 _note_.
_Antimetathesis_ = “putting the reader in the place of an actor or
spectator by vivid narrative,” 157.
Antiphanes (_fl._ 4th cent. A.C.), middle comic poet, 25 and _note_.
Antoninus Pius (Emperor, 138-161 A.D.), 272, 273.
Aper, M. (character in _Dial. de Clar. Orat._), 280 _sq._
ἀφελής, simple, plain, 99 _sq._
Aphthonius (_fl. c._ 315 A.D.), rhetorician, 90, 92, 93.
Apollinaris, see Sidonius.
Apollodorus of Pergamus (_fl._ 1st cent. A.C.), rhetorician, 302.
_Apollonius, Life of_, 119-121, 388.
Apollonius Rhodius (_fl. c._ 200 A.C.), 307, 318, 338.
_Apology_, the Platonic, 237.
_Apparebit repentina_ (hymn), 404.
Appian (_fl._ 2nd cent. P.C.), historian, 178.
Apsines (_fl. c._ 235? or _c._ 300?), rhetorician, 105.
Apuleius (_fl._ 2nd cent. P.C., _b. c._ 130), novelist, &c., 151, 321,
352, 353, and _note_.
Aquila Romanus, rhetorician, 346.
Aquilius Regulus, M. (_fl. c._ 100), orator, 272 _note_, 357.
ἀρχαῖοι, οἱ. In Arist., &c., “the early philosophers”; in Photius, &c.,
“the classics” generally. Uncertain when this latter use came in.
MSS. of Dion. Halicarn. have in the same pass, some this word and
some παλαιοί, 186.
Archaism, 45.
_Architrenius_, 410 and _note_, 414.
Arellius Fuscus (_fl._ just before C.), rhetorician, 236.
Argentarius, Marcus (?), epigrammatist and declaimer, 86, 234.
Aristarchus (_fl. c._ 150 A.C.), critic and grammarian, 74-76, 85, 214.
Aristides of Smyrna (P. Aelius A. Theodorus) (_b._ 117 A.D., _d. c._
180), rhetorician, 82(?), 105(?), 109, 113-116, 183.
—— the _Rhetoric_ of, 105.
Aristophanes (_b. c._ 444 A.C., _d. c._ 380; Plays, 425-388; _Frogs_,
405),
comic poet, 9, 17, 21-23, 30, 82, 146, 147, 294.
—— and Menander, Plutarch’s comparison of, 143.
—— of Byzantium (_fl. c._ 264), critic, 74-76.
—— (4th cent. A.C.) (client of Libanius), 122.
—— the Scholiasts on, 76.
Aristotle (_b._ 384 A.C., _d._ 322), philosopher, Bk. I. chap. iii.
(for headings see Contents), 5, 83 _note_, 130, 136, 155, 166, 173,
185, 192, 193, 224, 226, 241, 290, 294, 295, 306, 309, 444.
Armstrong, 167, 296.
Arnold, Matthew (_b._ 1822, _d._ 1888), poet and critic, 23, 55, 62
_note_, 146, 320.
Arrian (_fl._ 2nd cent. P.C.), historian, 178, 179, 270.
Arruntius, L., name of two persons, father and son, one consul 22 A.C.,
the other 6 A.D. Either might be the person referred to by Seneca,
238.
_Ars Poetica_ of Horace, 221 _sq._
Arthur and Arthurian Legend, 423 _note_ and _sq._, 475, 483.
Ascham, Roger, 213, 483.
_Ataraxia_ (the Epicurean calm), 63, 64.
Athenæus (_fl. c._ 230 A.D.), 144, 145 _note_, 186.
_Athetesis_ = “marking as spurious,” 80.
Atticism, 315.
Atticus, Herodes (Tib. Claudius) (_b. c._ 104 A.D., _d._ 180),
rhetorician, 323.
—— T. Pomponius (_b._ 109 A.C., _d._ 32), friend of Cicero, 214.
Attius, see Accius.
_Atys_ or _Attis_, the, 305.
_Aucassin et Nicolette_, 475.
Augustinus, Aurelius (St Augustine) (_b._ 354 A.D., _d._ 430),
rhetorician, theologian, and bishop, 349, 377-380, 401, 483.
Augustus, the Emperor (_b._ 63 A.C., _d._ 14 A.D.), his epigram on
Fulvia and Martial’s praise of it, 258.
Aulic, the, in language, 425 _sq._
Aungervyle, see Bury.
Aurelius, Marcus (M. A. Antoninus) (_b._ 121 A.D., Roman Emperor, 161,
_d._ 180), 62 and _note_, 246 _note_.
Ausonius, D. Magnus (_b. c._ 310 A.D., consul 379, _d. c._ 390), poet,
professor, and prefect, 342, 343, 387.
Avienus or Avianus (_fl. c._ 300 A.D. ?), fabulist, 409.
Bacchylides (_fl. c._ 470 A.C.), poet, 168.
_Bailiff of Love_, the (_Le Bailli d’Amour_), 455 and _note_.
Bassus, see Cæsius Bassus and Saleius Bassus.
Bede, the Venerable (_b. c._ 673, _d._ 735), presbyter, historian, &c.,
374, 375, 402-405.
Bentley (?) on Philostratus, 119.
Blair, Dr Hugh, vi, 154 _note_.
“Blunder,” Aristides’ defence of his, 115, 116.
Boccaccio, Giovanni (_b._ 1313, _d._ 1375), poet, tale-teller, and
scholar, 417, 457-464.
Boethius, Anicius Manlius Severinus (_b. c._ 470 A.D., _d. c._ 524),
statesman and philosopher, 390, 406, 462.
Bolognese dialect, 424, 425.
Bossuet, 199.
Boswell, 271 _note_.
_Broad Stone of Honour_, the, 372.
Browne, Sir T., quoted, 118.
rowning, Mr, 226, 424 _note_.
_Brunellus_, 414 _note_.
_Brutus_, the, 218, 219.
Burke, his “Amplification,” 164, 165.
Burton, R., 119;
the _Anatomy_, 144 _note_.
Bury, Richard of, 455, 456 and _note_.
Butcher, Prof. S. H., his _Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Art_,
31 _note_ and Bk. I. ch. iii. notes, _passim_.
Butler, S., on Rhetoric, 43.
_Cacozelon_ = “affected excess,” 297 and _note_.
Cæcilius Statius (_d._ 168 A.C.), comic poet, 213 _note_, 324.
Cæcilius (_fl. c._ 1 A.D. ?), rhetorician, 73, 138, 153 _sq._, 186
_note_, 302.
Cælius, M. C. Rufus (_d._ 48 A.C.), orator, 312.
Cæsar, C. Julius (_b._ 100 A.C., _d._ 44), 312.
Cæsius Bassus (_d._ 78 A.D.), poet, 253 _note_.
Callimachus (_fl._ 240-260 A.C.), poet, 273.
Calvus, C. Licinius Macco (_b._ 82 A.C., _d. c._ 46), poet and orator,
312.
“Cambridge the Everything,” 271 and _note_.
Campbell, George (18th cent. divine and rhetorical writer), Preface, p.
vi; 295 _note_.
_Can Grande, Letter to_, 441, 442.
“Canons” of writers, 213 _note_.
_Canzone_, the, Bk. III. ch. ii. _passim_.
Capella, see Martianus C.
Cardinal, the, in language, 425 _sq._
_Carmina Burana_, 377 _note_, 405 _note_.
Cassiodorus, Magnus Aurelius (_b. c._ 468 A.D., _d. c._ 568), statesman
and polyhistor, 349, 391, 406.
Cassius Severus (_b. c._ 50 A.C., _d._ 33 A.D.), orator and lampooner,
236.
Castor (_fl. c._ 150 A.C.), rhetorician, 102.
Cato, Dionysius (_fl._ 2nd cent. P.C. ?), moralist, 409.
Catullus, Valerius (_b. c._ 87 A.C., _d. c._ 47), poet, 212, 258, 265,
267, 273, 294, 311, 317, 356.
Causeret, M. C., 220.
Caxton, 464, 465.
Celtic Rhetoric, Early, 467 _note_.
“Centimeters,” 404 and _note_.
Cento, the, 343, 401.
Châtillon, Gautier of (12th cent.), poet, 410.
Chaucer, Geoffrey (_b._ 1340 ?, _d._ 1400), poet, 5, 55, 390 _note_,
450-452, 470.
Chirius Fortuniatianus, see Curius F.
Chœrilus of Samos (_fl._ 5th cent. A.C.), epic poet, 20.
_Choragia_, 25 _note_.
Chorus, the, Dion Chrysostom, 112-113.
_Chreia_ (χρεία), the Rhetorical “use” or maxim, often of a figurative
character, 91 _sq._
Chrysostom, Dion, see Dion Chrysostom.
Cicero, M. Tullius (_b._ 106 A.C., _d._ 43 A.C.), orator, 5, 165, 186,
212, 213-221, 229 _note_, 270, 289, 294, 302, 312, 314, 333, 384.
Cinna, C. Helvius (_d._ 44 A.C.), poet, 264, 265.
Claudian—Claudius Claudianus (_fl. c._ 400 A.D.), poet, 83, 383, 393,
409 _sq._
—— (friend of Sidonius), 383.
_Cléomadès_, 455 and _note_.
Cocheris, M., 414 _note_, 455 _note_.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772-1834), “logician, metaphysician, bard,”
and critic, 5, 23, 118, 174, 419 _note_, 436, 438.
Comedy, Greek, Criticism of Literature in, 21-26;
Aristotle on, 32;
Aristides on, 115, 116;
general ancient views of, 294.
_Comento_, Boccaccio’s, on Dante, 458 _sq._
“Commatic,” 386 and _note_.
_Commedia, Divina, La_, Bk. III. ch. ii., _passim_.
Commodianus (3rd cent. P.C.?), bishop and versifier, 364 and
_#note:f454_.
“Common” syllables, Martial on, 263 and _note_.
Comparison in relation to criticism, 241.
Composition in relation to Rhetoric and Criticism, 129 _sq._, 304.
_Confessions_, the, of St Augustine, 378-380.
_Consolatio Philosophiæ_, 390.
_Constructionis Elatio_, 428 _sq._
_Contention of Phyllis and Flora_, the, 377 and _note_.
_Controversies_, the, of Seneca the Elder, 334 _sq._
_Convito_, Dante’s, 417, 441-443.
Cope, E.M., his ed. of the _Rhetoric_, 40 _note_, 46.
Corax (_fl._ 5th cent. A.C.), traditional founder of rhetorical
teaching, 16, 17 _note_.
Corbinelli, Jacopo, 417.
Corneille, Pierre (_b._ 1606, _d._ 1684), 5.
Cornelius Severus (_fl. c._ 1 A.D.), poet, 235, 310 and _note_.
Courthope, Mr W. J., 457 _note_, 462 _note_.
Cowper, 460.
Crabbe, 166.
Crates of Mallos (_fl._ 2nd cent. A.C.), grammarian and critic, 74, 85.
Critic, Quintilian’s sketch of the duty of the, 292, 293.
“Cross-poems,” 396 _sq._
_Crotchet Castle_, 372.
Ctesias (_fl. c._ 480 A.C.), physician and historian, 178.
Cumberland on Philostratus, 119.
Curial, the, in language, 425 _sq._
Curiatius Maternus (_fl. c._ 100?), 280 _sq._
Curius (or Chirius) Fortunatianus (_fl. c._ 450 A.D.), rhetorician and
lawyer, 346, 347.
Cynics, the, 62.
Cyril of Alexandria (bishop 412-444 A.D.), 177.
Cyrus (date?), rhetorician, 102 _note_.
Dante, Alighieri (Dantes Aligerus) (_b._ 1265, _d._ 1321), poet. The
_De Vulgari Eloquio_, Bk. III. chap. ii. See Contents. Also 5, 133,
172, 173, 354, 404, 406, 416-446, 462.
Dares Phrygius (probably no such person, book written _c._ 11th-12th
cent. P.C. (?)), fabulous historian of Troy, 392, 410.
Darmesteter, Madame, 453, 454.
_De Admiranda Vi Demosthenis_, 129 _sq._
_De Antro Nympharum_, 68-70.
_De Causis corruptæ Eloquentiæ_, 280 _sq._
Declamations, 230 _sq._, 279 _sq._
_De Compositione_, 129 _sq._
_De Dictamine Rhythmico_, see _Dictamen_.
_De Genealogia Deorum_, 457 _sq._
_De Herodote Malignitate_, 142, 143.
_De Interpretatione_, 89, 103, 104.
_De Inventione_ (Longinus), 105-107.
—— (Cicero), 217.
Deinarchus (_b. c._ 361 A.C., _d. c._ 280), Attic orator, 129 _sq._
δεινὸς and δεινὸτης, how used, 97, 129.
_Deipnosophistæ_, 144, 145 _note_.
Delille, 167, 296.
Demetrius Phalereus (_b. c._ 345 A.C., _d._ (?)), statesman and orator,
71, 89, 103, 104, 196.
Democritus of Abdera (_b. c._ 460 A.C., _d._ 361), philosopher and
humourist, 14, 15.
Demosthenes (_b. c._ 385 A.C., _d._ 322), orator, 129, 165, 166 _sq._,
187 _note_, 277, 294, 312.
_De Nuptiis Philologiæ et Mercurii_, 349-354, 377.
_De Optimo Genere Oratorum_, 218.
_De Oratore_, 217, 218.
De Quincey, 121 _note_, 244 _note_, 296.
Deschamps, Eustache (_b._ 1328, _d._ 1415), poet, &c., 454.
_De Vulgari Eloquio_, 406, 416-446.
_Dialogus de Claris Oratoribus_, 279 _sq._, 317 _note_, 357.
_Dictamen_, the, 407 _sq._
Diction, see under Aristotle, Dionysius, Longinus, Quintilian, Dante.
—— Poetic, see Aristotle, Dante, Wordsworth.
Diderot, 119.
διήγημα, a story of a real event introduced into a speech, 90 _sq._
(διήγησις is the setting forth of the circumstances of the case).
Diogenes Laertius (_fl._ 2nd cent. P.C.), historian of philosophy, 14,
15 and _notes_, 89.
Dion Cassius (_b._ 155 A.D.), historian, 180.
Dion Chrysostom (_b. c._ 50 A.D., _d. c._ 117), rhetorician, 108-113,
195, 231.
Dionysius of Halicarnassus (_b._ (?) came to Rome _c._ 29 A.C., _d._ 7
A.C.), rhetorician, historian, and critic, 5, 23, 70, 72, 96, 108,
127-137, 155 and _note_, 156 _note_, 185, 195, 219, 289, 444.
—— of Thrace (_fl. c._ 80 A.C.), grammarian, 65.
_Disertus_, 274 _note_.
Dobson, Mr Austin, 271 _note_.
Domitian—Martial on his modesty, 261, 262;
Statius on his horse, 269;
Quintilian on the poetry he would have written if he had written any,
311.
Douglas, Gavin (_b. c._ 1474, _d._ 1522), bishop, poet, and translator,
268, 406, 464-466.
Doxopater (11th cent. (?)), rhetorician, 97;
(13th cent. (?)), 188.
“Drink to me only with thine eyes,” 119.
Dryden, John (_b._ 1631, _d._ 1700), poet and critic, 5, 23, 48, 56,
156 _note_.
“Earinos,” 263.
Eberhard of Bethune (_fl. c._ 1200?), author of _Labyrinthus_ (?), 406.
Education, Plutarch on, 139 _seq._
Egger, Émile, his _Essai sur l’Histoire de la Critique chez les Grecs_
(1st ed., 1850), 6, Bk. I., _notes_, _passim_.
_Eikones_, the, of Philostratus, 119.
εἰσφορὰ νόμου, the “introduction” and discussion of law. One of the
Progymnasmata, 91 _sq._
ἔκφρασις, a set description intended to bring person, place, picture,
&c., vividly before the mind’s eye. It is found largely in the
Epideictic rhetoricians, and still more largely in the Greek
Romances, 119 _note_.
Elevation, 46.
Empedocles (_fl. c._ 444 A.C.), philosopher, his fragments, 13, 14,
156.
Empiricus, see Sextus Empiricus.
Ennius, Q. (_b._ 239 A.C., _d._ 169), poet, 213 _note_, 310, 324, 401.
_Epanodos_ = “deliberate repetition,” 303.
Epicheireme (form of rhet. argument), 100 and _note_.
Epictetus (_fl. c._ 100 A.D.), philosopher, 62.
Epicurean, the, 62 _sq._
Epicurus (_b. c._ 342 A.C., _d._ 270), philosopher, 63.
Epideictic (the third kind of oratory—the rhetoric of display), Bk. I.,
chap, iv., _passim_.
ἐπιμέλεια, rhetorically and critically = “exactness,” 99 and _note_.
_Epistle to Can Grande_, 441, 442.
_Epistola ad Pisones_, 221 _sq._
Erinna (_fl. c._ 612 A.C.), poetess, criticisms on her “Distaff,”
82-85.
ἑρμηνεία (_interpretatio_), used in Rhet. rather ambiguously.
Generally, as in the treatise of Dem. Phal. (103 _sq._), it is
nearly equivalent to “Theory of Prose Style.” _Interpretatio_ in
Latin is also used of a particular Fig. = _conduplicatio_,
“explaining the thing over again, in different words.”
_Espinette Amoureuse, L’_, 454.
_Ethopœia_, “character-drawing.” This, which was one of the subjects
of the Progymnasmata, is sometimes used generally, sometimes for a
special technical exercise in making speeches suited to characters
and situations (Aphth. distinguishes it from _eidolopœia_, and
includes both in _prosopopœia_), 90 _sq._ = Quintilian’s
“ethology,” 292.
_Etymologiæ_ of Isidore, 400 _sq._
Eunapius (_b._ 347 A.D.), sophist, 181.
“Euphemesis,” a Fulgentian word = “ritual” (?), 395.
_Euphues_ and Euphuism, 139, 389, 394.
Eupolis (_b. c._ 446 A.C., _d. c._ 411), comic poet, 166.
εὕρεσις = _inventio_, the _devising_ of topics, arguments, &c.,
suitable to the case; what the orator adds of his own to the facts
and the law, 99 _sq._
Euripides (_b._ 480 A.C., _d._ 406), dramatist, 22, 24, 112, 133, 211,
308.
_Excellentia vocabulorum_, 428 _sq._
_Expositio Virgiliana_, 392-396.
Fable, the, 90, 401.
Faultlessness, 168 _sq._, 285 _sq._
Favorinus (_fl. c._ 120 A.D.), rhetorician, 323, 327, 328.
Ferrers-Howell, Mr, 417 _note_ and _sq._
“Figures,” 43, 53, 102, 103 (and Bk. I. ch. iv. _passim_), 156 _sq._,
166 _sq._, 291 (Bk. II. ch. iii. _passim_), 360 _sq._, 374 _sq._,
432.
_Filocopo_, the, 457, 463.
_Filostrato_, the, 457, 463.
Flaccus (a critical friend of Martial), 260, 262.
—— poets, see Horace and Valerius.
_Floire et Blanchefleur_, 463, 475.
Florentine Dialect, 421 _sq._
_Florida_, the, 363 and _note_.
Foix, Gaston de, 455.
Forms, the artificial, of French poetry, 449.
Fortunatianus, see Curius.
Fortunatus, see Venantius.
“Four, the,” Aristides’ speech for, 115, 116.
“Frigidity,” 43, 156.
_Frogs_, The, 6, 21-23, 270 _note_.
Froissart, 453-455.
Fronto, M. Cornelius (consul, 146 A.D.), rhetorician, 288 _note_.
Fulgentius, Fabius Planciades (6th cent. P.C.), 392-396, 459.
Galliambic metre, 305 and _note_.
Garland, or de Garlandia, John, see John of G.
Gascoigne, George (_b._ 1525 (?), _d._ 1577), 86, 471.
Gautier, Théophile, 62 _note_
Gellius, Aulus (_fl. c._ 150 A.D.), grammarian and man of letters, 186,
322-329.
Geoffrey of Vinsauf, see Vinsauf.
Georgius Choeroboscus (4th and 5th cent. P.C.), rhetorician, 103.
Georgius Pachymeres (_b. c._ 1242, _d. c._ 1310), Byzantine historian
and rhetorician, 95.
_Gesta Romanorum_, the, 187, 394.
Gibbon, 384 and _note_.
Gifford on Philostratus, &c., 116.
_Gnomæ_, “sentences,” “maxims,” 91 and _note_, 298.
Gorgias of Athens (_fl._ 1st cent. A.C.), rhetorician, 346.
Gorgias of Leontini (_fl._ 5th cent. A.C. at Athens, 427), rhetorician
and sophist, 16, 45, 159, 160.
γοργότης, rhetorical and critical term = “nervousness,” “poignancy,”
&c., 99.
Gracchus, Sempronius (_b. c._ 160 A.C., _d._ 121), demagogue, his
style, 229 _note_, 325.
Grammar, Quintilian on, 291, 292;
in Martianus, 353.
Grammarians, the Greek, the Roman, 361, 362.
_Grammatica_ (and “grammar”), Dante’s meaning of, 419 _sq._
_Grammaticus_ = more than mere “grammarian,” 343.
Grand Style, the, 336.
_Graphica lexis_, written as opposed to spoken style (_v._ Aristotle,
_Rhetoric_, iii. 12. 1), 201, 202.
_Gryll Grange_, 381 _note_.
Guest’s _English Rhythms_, 405.
Hall (17th cent. translator of Longinus), 154.
Halliwell, J. O., 407.
Hardie, Professor, Preface, 263 _note_, 305 _note_.
Havell, Mr H. L., 153 _note_.
Hawes, Stephen (_fl. c._ 1500), poet, 406.
Heine, H., 202.
Heliodorus (_fl. c._ 400 A.D.), bishop and novelist, 180, 181.
Hermagoras (_fl_. 1st cent. A.C.), rhetorician and teacher of Cicero,
349, 377.
Hermogenes (_fl. c._ 170), rhetorician, 89-92, 97-100, and Bk. I. ch.
iv. _passim_, 196.
Herodian (Aelius Herodianus) (2nd cent. P.C.), rhetorician and
grammarian, 103.
Herodotus (_b._ 484 A.C., _d. c._ 406), historian, 130 _sq._, 142, 143,
178-180, 296, 312.
_Heroica_, or _Heroic Dialogue_ of Philostratus, 120.
Herondas (?) (“Herodes”) (? 3rd cent. A.C.), mimiambic poet, 273.
Herrick, 324 _note_.
Hildebrand of Padua, 424 _note_.
Hillard, Miss K., 441 _note_ and _sq._
Himerius (_fl._ 4th cent. P.C.), sophist and rhetorician, 125 _note_,
183.
Hippolytus, the Latin, 247.
_Hirsuta_ = “shaggy words,” Dante on, 429 _sq._
_History, How to Write_, 147, 148.
Homer, Criticism of, 10-12, 27, 49, 50, 79-81, 82-87, 100, 130 _sq._,
156 _sq._, 206, 307, 343, 410, 463.
—— and Plato, Max. Tyrius on, 117, 118.
—— scholia on, 78-81.
_Homeric Allegories_, 187.
_Homeric Problems_ (Aristotle’s), 49, 50, 185 _note_.
_Homeric Questions_ (Porphyry’s), 68-70.
“Homilies” of Doxopater, 97;
of Longinus, 187;
Isidore’s use of the word, 402 _note_.
Horace (Q. Horatius Flaccus) (_b_. 65 A.C., _d._ 8 A.C.), poet, 212,
221-230, 258, 294, 301, 311, 356, 360 _sq._, 432.
Hugo, Victor, 202, 365.
_Hyperbaton_ = “alteration of order for rhetorical purposes,” 137.
Hyperides (_b. c._ 390? A.C., _d._ 322), orator, 169.
_Hypodiæresis_ = “distribution of indictment,” 98.
Hypotheses, not admitted, 6.
Iamblichus the romancer (_fl. c._ 100 A.D.), 176, 180;
_not_ Iamblichus the philosopher (_fl. c._ 300 A.D.)
Ideas, the Platonic, their bearing on criticism, 18 _sq._, 67 _sq._;
rhetorical sense of, 99 _sq._
_Iliad_, the scholia on, 80, 81, 474 (see also Homer and _Odyssey_).
“Illustrious Vulgar Tongue,” the, Bk. III. ch. ii. _passim_.
Impressionism, 54. This term has as yet been very loosely defined. As
used, for instance, by the late Mr R. A. M. Stevenson in his
_Velasquez_, it carries an almost Aristotelian sense of
generalisation from _mere_ impression. But this is certainly not the
general theory, and even less the usual practice, of the
“Impressionist.”
_In Memoriam_, 93, 94.
_Institutiones Oratoriæ_, 289-321.
_Ion_, the, of Plato, 19, 20
Isæus of Chalcis (_fl. c._ 420, 348 A.C.), one of the Ten Orators, 49,
129 _sq._
—— the Assyrian (_fl. c._ 100 A.D.), orator and rhetorical teacher,
272.
Isidore of Seville (bishop from 600 A.D. to 636), 375, 400.
Isocrates (_b._ 436 A.C., _d._ 338), orator or rhetorician, 17, 6-28,
129 _sq._, 160, 169, 182, 190, 214, 312.
Italian Dialects, the, 423 _sq._
Jerome, St, 462.
Jevons, Mr F. B., 144 _note_.
John of Garlandia (12th cent.), metrical writer, 407 _sq._
John of Hauteville (12th cent.), poet, 410 _sq._
John of Salisbury (12th cent.), philosopher, &c., 414 _note_.
John of Sicily (13th cent.), scholiast on Hermogenes, &c., 102 _note_,
106, 171 _note_, 175, 187-190, 432.
John Philoponos (_fl. c._ 600 A.D.), grammarian, 177.
John Tzetzes (12th cent.), grammarian, &c., 102.
Johnson, Dr, 467 _note_, 472.
Jonson, Ben (1573-1637), poet and critic, 86, 119, 120, 236 _note_, 244
_note_, 263 _note_.
Josephus, Flavius (_b._ 37 A.D., _d. c._ 100), soldier and historian,
177.
Josephus Rhacendyta (13th cent.), rhetorician, 101.
Julian (the Apostate) (_b._ 331 A.D.; Emperor, 361-363, _d._ 363), 109,
125, 126.
Juvenal (Dec. Junius Juvenalis) (_fl._ late 1st cent. P.C.), satiric
poet, 252-250, 409.
κάθαρσις, purgation or purification, 38.
κατεστραμμένη (= periodic), 48 _note_.
Keats, 252.
Keil, Herr, 403.
Kingsley, C., 270.
_Labyrinthus_, 406 _sq._
Lampridius (friend of Sidonius), 388, 389.
Lang, Mr Andrew, 153 _note_.
Language, European, Dante on, 421 _sq._
Latro, M. Porcius (_d._ 4 A.C.), rhetorician, 236 _sq._
_Laws_, the, of Plato, 19, 20.
λήκυθος and ληκύθιον, 270 _note_.
_Letters_, the, of Philostratus, 119.
—— of Libanius, 121 _note_, 123, 124.
—— of Pliny, 270-279.
—— of Seneca, 247.
_Lexiphanes_, 148, 149.
_Lexis_ (meaning varies from “diction” to “style”), see Diction.
Leyser, Polycarp (1690-1728), motto on reverse of half-title, 403, 407
_sq._
Libanius (_b. c._ 314 A.D., _d. c._ 395), rhetorician, 109, 121-124,
181.
_Lives_, Plutarch’s, 137, 138;
of Orators, 141, 142.
Livy (T. Livius) (_b._ 59 A.C., _d._ 17 A.D.), historian, 212, 306,
312.
Longinus, Cassius (assumed as the author of the Περὶ Ὕψους) (_b. c._
213 A.D., _d._ 273), statesman, rhetorician, and critic. Bk. I. ch.
v. (for headings see Contents), 5, 23, 25, 61, 72, 73, 96, 105-107,
113, 120, 131, 136, 138, 150, 151, 152-174, 185, 187 _note_, 190
_note_, 197, 219, 226, 241, 285, 290, 296, 301, 306, 320, 431, 432,
438, 444.
_Lubrica_ = “slippery” words, 429 _sq._, 439 _sq._
Lucan (M. Annæus Lucanus) (_b._ 39 A.D., _d._ 65), poet, 265 _note_,
269, 311, 410.
Lucian (_b. c._ 120 A.D., _d. c._ 200), satirist, 105, 108, 146-152,
181, 182, 195, 294, 321.
—— (4th cent. P.C.), subject of a speech of Libanius, 123.
Lucilius, C. (_b._ 148 A.C., _d._ 103), satiric poet, 229 and _note_,
230.
Lucius of Patræ (?), romancer, 181.
Lucretius (T. L. Carus) (_b._ 95 (?) A.C., _d._ 51 (?) 52 (?)), poet,
13, 212, 214-217, 267, 268, 269, 310, 318, 356.
Lullius, Lully, or Lull, Raymond (_b._ 1235, _d._ 1315), scholastic
philosopher, 371 _note_, 446 _note_.
Lupus, see Rutilius.
Luxorius (6th cent. P.C.), African epigrammatist, 344.
Lycophron (rhetorician of 5th cent. B.C., _not_ Alexandrian poet of
3rd), 45.
Lyly, 139.
_Lyrical Ballads_, preface to, _Pref._, vii, 436.
Lysias (_b._ 458 A.C., _d._ 378), 21 _note_, 99, 129 _sq._
Macer, Æmilius (_d._ 16 A.C.), didactic poet, 310, 410.
Macrobius, Ambrosius Aurelius Theodorius (_fl. c._ 400 A.D.),
grammarian, 329-334.
“Maidens in the Eyes,” the, 160, 161.
Malatesta, Sig. Pand., 123 _note_.
Mallius Theodorus, F. (_fl. c._ 400 A.D.), metrical writer, 404. His
definition of rhythm is that it appears in those places of the lyric
and tragic poets where _certa pedum conlatione neglecta, sola
temporum ratio considerata sit_.
Malory, Sir T., 453.
Map or Mapes, Walter (12th cent.), poet, &c., 405, 407 _sq._, 470.
Mari, Signor G., 407 _sq._
Marius Victorinus, C. (_fl. c._ 350 A.D.), grammarian and rhetorician,
348, 380.
Marlowe, 252.
Marsus, Domitius (_fl. c._ 1 A.D.), poet, &c., 262, 264, 295.
Martialis, M. Valerius (_b._ 43 A.D., _d._ 104(?)), poet, 256-268, 269,
272, 273, 285, 294, 356.
Martianus Capella (M. Minneius Felix C.) (_fl. c._ 450 (?)),
grammarian, &c., 349-354, 377, 406.
_Master of the Orators_, Lucian’s, 150, 151.
Maternus, see Curiatius Maternus.
Matius or Mattius, C., mimiambic poet, 324 _note_.
Matthias, Vindocinensis (12th cent.?), poet, 411 and _note_.
Maximianus (_fl._ 5th or 6th cent. P.C.), elegiac poet and
epigrammatist, 409.
Maximus Tyrius (_fl. c._ 170 A.D.), rhetorician and philosopher, 109,
117, 118, 457 _note_.
_Meiosis_, “passing reference,” 297 and _note_.
Meleager (_fl._ 1st cent. A.C.), poet, 83.
_Méliador_, 453.
Menander the dramatist (_b._ 342 A.C., _d._ 291), 82;
Plutarch’s comparison of him with Aristophanes, 143, 206, 308, 324,
343, 387.
Menander the rhetorician (_fl._ end of 5th cent. P.C.), his book on
Epideictic, 104, 105.
Menelaus (mentioned by Longinus, therefore _before_ 3rd cent. (?)),
poet, 189.
Messal(l)a (M. Valerius M. Corvinus) (_b. c._ 70 A.C., _d. c._ 1 A.D.),
soldier, statesman, poet, and orator, 239.
—— L. Vipstanus, 282 _sq._
_Metalepsis_ = “exchange of words,” one of the most difficult of these
figure-terms. Sometimes it is mere _metonymy_, as “Hephæstus” for
“fire”: sometimes it expresses a much more complicated and arbitrary
process, 300.
_Metaplasm_ = “change of letters or syllables,” 400.
Metaphor, Aristotle on, 43 _sq._;
Longinus on, 167 _sq._;
Quintilian on, 299 _sq._, 376.
Metre, definition of, 47 _note_.
Metrodorus (_b. c._ 330 A.C., _d._ 277), Epicurean philosopher, 63.
“Milesian Tales,” the, 21.
Milton, 50, 286, 404.
Mimes, the prose Greek, 21 _note_, 22.
_Mimesis_, “Imitation,” Bk. I. ch. iii., _passim_.
Mimiambic poetry, 208, 276, 324.
Minucianus (date?), rhetorician, 105.
Moore, Dr, 417 _note_ and _sq._
Moore, T., 199, 315.
_Moralia_, Plutarch’s, 63, 137 _sq._
Morley, Prof. H., 455 _note_.
_Moyen de Parvenir_, the, 243.
Munro, Mr H. A. J., 229 _note_.
Murredius, a foolish declaimer in Seneca the Elder, 233 _sq._
Mycterism = “suppressed sneering,” 301 and #_note_:f396.
Nævius, Cn. (_b. c._ 270 A.C., _d. c._ 200), poet, 471.
Neo-Platonists, the, 66-70.
Neoptolemus of Parium (?), 221 _note_.
Nero’s poetry, 250 _sq._
Nettleship, Mr Henry, 61 _note_, 211 _note_, 213 _note_, 218, 219, 221
_note_, 229 _note_, 230 and _note_, 240, 283 _sq._, 288 _note_, 320.
Nicephorus (11th cent.), rhetorician, 95.
Nicolaus or Nicolas (_fl. c._ 900 A.D.?), rhetorician, 95.
_Noctes Atticæ_, 241 _note_, 322-329.
_Nova Poetria_, 406, 412 _sq._
_Oc_, _oil_, and _si_, Dante on, 422, 423.
_Octavia_, the Senecan, 247.
_Odyssey_, the, scholia on, 69, 70;
Longinus on, 156, 162, 163 (see also Homer), 340, 473, 474.
οἰκεῖα ἡδονή, Aristotle’s doctrine of, 55.
_Oil_, _oc_, and _si_, Dante on, 422, 423.
“Olympic,” Dion Chrysostom’s, 112.
_Orator_, Cicero’s, 218.
_Origines_ of Isidore, 400 _sq._
_Orithyia_, the, of Æschylus, 155, 159, 187, 190.
Orosius, Paulus (_fl. c._ 413 A.D.), historian, 386, 391, 429.
Oscus (?), declaimer, 234, 235.
Ovid, P. Ovidius Naso (_b._ 43 A.C., _d._ 18 A.D.), poet, 212, 216
_note_, 230 _note_, 310.
Pacuvius, M. (_b. c._ 220 A.C., _d._ 130), tragic poet, 326.
Pæan or pæon (foot, 3 short 1 long), 47, 305.
Palæmon, Q. Remmius (_fl._ 1st cent. P.C.), schoolmaster and
rhetorician, 387 and _note_.
Pamphilus (_d._ 307 A.D.), scholar, book collector, and martyr, 401,
409.
_Pange Lingua_ (hymn), 396.
Panther, note on the, 425.
_Paradiastole_ = “antithetic distinction,” 303.
“Parallel Passage,” the, 322 _note_, 331 _sq._
_Parasiopesis_ = “affected reticence,” 303.
Parenthesis, 178 _note_, 296.
παρένθυρσον, τὸ, 156, 160.
Paris, M. Paulin, 415 _note_.
Parmenides (_fl._ 5th cent. A.C.), Eleatic philosopher, his fragments,
13.
_Paromologia_ = “insidious concession,” 303.
“Passions,” Longinus’s lost treatise on, 150.
_Pasti Cadaveribus_, 232.
“Patavinity,” 235 _note_, 296.
Patristic view of Criticism, 380-382.
_Phantasia_, 119.
Phidias, Dion Chrysostom’s discourse for, 112.
Philippus of Thessalonica (_fl. c._ 100 A.D.), epigrammatist, 85, 86.
Peacock, T. L., 381 _note_.
Periodic Style, 48.
Periphrasis, 167.
περὶ μιμησέως, 133 _note_.
Περὶ Ὕψους, the, 106, 146, 151, 152-174, 197.
Persius (A. P. Flaccus) (_b._ 34 A.D., _d._ 62), satiric poet, 247-253,
409.
Perspicuity, 296.
Petrarch, Francis (_b._ 1304, _d._ 1374), poet, &c., 432 _note_, 456,
462.
Petronius Arbiter, C. or T. (?) (_b._ (?), _d._ 66 A.D.), 242-245, 246.
_Pexa_ = “combed-out words,” 429 _sq._, 439 _sq._
_Phædrus_, the, 18-21.
Pherecrates (1st prize 438 A.C.), comic poet, 13 _note_.
_Philobiblion_ or _Philobiblon_, the, 414 _note_, 455, 456 and _note_.
_Philoctetes_, Dion Chrysostom on plays about, 109, 110.
Philodemus of Gadara (_fl._ 1st cent. A.C.), epicure and philosopher
and poet (?), 63, 64.
_Philological Homilies_, the, of Longinus, 171 _note_, 187.
_Philosophy of Rhetoric_, Campbell’s, 295 _note_.
Philostratus, Flavius (son of a Lemnian professor of the same name in
the 2nd century, and grandfather of a third Philostratus, who, like
him, wrote _Imagines_ in the late 3rd cent.) (_b. c._ 182 A.D., _d.
c._ 250), rhetorician and miscellanist, 109, 118-121, 147.
Phœbammon (_fl. c._ 400 A.D.?), rhetorician, 103.
Photius (_fl._ 9th cent. P.C., Patriarch of Constantinople, 858-886,
with interval), lexicographer and literary historian, 121 _note_,
175-186.
Phrynichus (_fl._ 2nd cent. P.C.), sophist and grammarian, 183.
_Physiologus_, the, 411 and _note_.
Pindar (_b. c._ 522 A.C., _d. c._ 442), poet, 131, 132, 308, 327, 333.
Piron, 260.
Pisistratean redaction of Homer, the, 6, 9.
_Pistis_, 41, 58.
“Placing” in Criticism, 291.
Plato (_b. c._ 429 A.C., _d._ 347), philosopher, 5, 7, 13, 17-21 and
_note_, 51, 66, 83, 108, 112, 145 _note_, 188, 192, 299, 305, 309,
462.
—— and Homer, Max. Tyrius on, 117, 118.
Plautus, T. Maccius (_b. c._ 254 A.C., _d._ 184), 213 _note_, 240, 294,
311, 356.
Pliny the Elder (C. Plinius Secundus) (_b._ 23 A.D., _d._ 79),
encyclopædist.
Pliny the Younger (C. Plinius Cæcilius Secundus) (_b._ 61 A.D. _d._
(?)), advocate, statesman, and letter-writer, 264, 270-279, 357,
358.
Plotinus (_b. c._ 203 A.D., _d._ 262), philosopher, 67, 68.
Plutarch (_fl. c._ 90 A.D.), biographer and moral philosopher, 63, 66,
108, 137-146, 153, 195.
_Poema del Cid_, 422.
Poetic Diction, 436.
_Poetics_, the, 32-39, and Bk. I. ch. iii. _passim_, 432.
Poetry and Philosophy, Max. Tyrius on, 117, 118;
Boccaccio on, 457.
Pollio, C. Asinius (_b._ 76 A.C., _d._ 4 A.D.), orator, poet, &c., 235
and _note_, 237, 238, 239.
Polus (_fl._ 5th cent. A.C.), rhetorician and sophist, 16.
Polybius of Sardis (date?), rhetorician, 103.
_Polyptoton_ = “variation of rhetorical effect by using different
_cases_,” 157.
Porphyry (-ius) (_b._ 233 A.D., _d. c._ 306), philosopher and
commentator, 68-70, 80.
Prior, Mat., 259.
_Prison Amoureuse, La_, 454.
_Pro Archia_, 221 _note_.
_Procatastasis_ = “introduction to narrative,” 98.
Proclus (_b._ 412 A.D., _d._ 485), philosopher, 67.
_Prodiegesis_ = “preliminary statement,” 98.
_Progymnasmata_, partial declamations: preliminary exercises in the
chief parts of a speech, 89 _sq._
_Pro Juvene contra Meretricem_, 232, 233.
_Prometheus Es_, the, of Lucian, 149.
Prompt, Dr, 417 and _note_.
Propriety, 46.
Prose Rhythm, see Rhythm.
Prosody, Greek, 201, 202.
Protagoras (_fl._ 5th cent. A.C., at Athens), 430, rhetorician and
sophist, 14, 15.
Provençal arts of Poetry, 407 _note_.
——, Dante on, 422 _sq._
Prudentius, Aurelius Clemens (_b. c._ 350 A.D., _d. c._ 420), 364, 365
and _note_, 471.
Psellus (one in 9th, another in 11th cent.), rhetorician, 102.
_Psychagogia_, 66 and _note_.
Puritanism and Literature, 380 _sq._
“Purity,” 46.
Puttenham, G., List of Figures in his _Art of Poetry_, 44.
Pyrrhonists, the, 62 _sq._
_Quadrivium_, the, 351, 366, 367, 432.
_Questions, Roman_, Plutarch’s, 144.
Quintilian (M. Fabius Quintilianus) (_b._ 40 A.D., _d. c._ 118),
advocate and Professor of Oratory.
His _Institutes_ thereof, Bk. II. chap. iii.
For headings see Contents.
Also, 5, 61, 72, 73, 96, 131, 133, 136, 155, 185, 212, 232-234, 242,
246, 248 and _note_, 251 and _note_, 256, 258, 279, 288, 289-321,
359, 409.
Rabelais, 168, 190, 249, 394.
Rabirius (_fl._ 1st cent. A.C.), 310.
Rajna, Signor P., 417 _note_.
Rapin, 173 and _note_.
Reading, Plutarch on, 139 _sq._
_Rebecca and Rowena_, 451 _note_.
_Reburra_ ( = “words with hair the wrong way”), 429 _sq._, 439 _sq._
_Reliquiæ Antiquæ_, 407 and _note_, 411 _note_.
_Republic_, the, of Plato, 18-21 and _note_.
_Rex æterne domine_, hymn, 404.
Rhetoric, Aristides’ defence of, 115, 116;
Martianus Capella’s personification of, 351, 352.
_Rhetoric_, the, of Aristotle, Bk. I. chap. iii. _passim_.
—— of Dionysius, 129 _sq._
—— of Hermogenes, 90 _sq._
_Rhetorica ad Alexandrum_, 17 _note_.
_Rhétoriqueurs_, the French, 467, 483.
Rhythm, prose, Aristotle on, 47;
Dionysius on, 131;
Quintilian on, 304 _sq._
Richard of Bury (Aungervyle), 455, 456.
Roberts, Prof. Rhys, 9 _note_, 153 _note_, 171 _note_.
Roman dialect, the, 423.
_Roman Questions, The_, 144.
Romance, 379 _note_, 474 _sq._
—— languages, Dante on, 422 _sq._
_Romance of the Rose_, the, 187, 393.
Romantic Criticism, 172, 286.
Ruskin, Mr, 305, 424 _note_.
Rutherford, Mr, 74 _note_.
Rutilius (P. R. Lupus) (_fl. c._ 1 A.D.), rhetorician, 346.
Rymer, 173.
Saint Augustine, see Augustine.
Saleius Bassus (_fl. c._ 80 A.D.), poet, 281.
Salimarius _or_ Solinarius (date ?), poet, 410.
Sallust (C. Sallustius Crispus) (_b._ 86 A.C., _d._ 34), historian,
212, 305, 306, 312.
Sappho (_fl. c._ 600 A.C.), poetess: the _Anthology_ on her, 81-87;
her _Hymn to Aphrodite_, 132;
her _Ode to Anactoria_, 154, 163, 164.
Satirists, Roman, and Criticism, 247-268.
_Saturnalia_, the, 329-334.
_Satyricon_, the, 242-245.
Scandinavian Rhetoric, Early, 467 _note_.
Scholastic Philosophy and Criticism, 446 _note_.
Scholiasts, the Greek, 73-81.
Scott, Sir Walter, 121.
Seneca, the Father (M. Annæus S.) (_b. c._ 61 A.C., _d. c._ 35 A.D.
(?)), rhetorician, 230-240.
Seneca, the Son (L. Annæus S.) (_b. c._ 10 A.C., _d._ 65 A.D.),
statesman and philosophical writer, 62, 245-247;
Quintilian on, 313;
A. Gellius on, 325, 326, 347 (?).
Seneca, the Tragedian (?), 245 _sq._
“Sentences,” Quintilian on, 298, 299.
Servius, Marius or Maurus Honoratus (_fl. c._ 400 A.D.), grammarian and
Virgilian commentator, 334-340, 459.
Severus (_fl._ 5th cent. P.C.), rhetorician, 95.
—— Cassius, see Cassius Severus.
—— Cornelius, see Cornelius Severus.
Sextilius Ena (_fl._ just A.C.), poet, 235.
Sextus Empiricus (_fl. c._ 225 A.D.), physician and Pyrrhonist, 64-66.
Shakespeare, 39, 118, 120 _note_, 173, 286, #389 _note_;f491#, 404.
Shelley, 199, 215.
_Si_, _oil_, and _oc_, Dante on, 422, 423.
Sicilian School of Greek rhetoric, 16, 41;
of Italian poetry, 423 _sq._
Sidonius Apollinaris (C. Sollius S.A.) (_b. c._ 431 A.D., bishop 472,
_d._ 482 (?), 484 (?)), 344 _note_, 383-389, 404 _note_.
“Sieve, the Chapter of the,” 439 _sq._
Silius Italicus, C. (_b. c._ 25, consul, 68 A.D., _d._ 100), poet, 258.
Simonides (_fl. c._ 664 A.C.), poet, 308.
Simylus (_fl. c._ 355 A.C.), middle comic poet, 25 and _note_, 51, 54,
198.
_Sinonis and Rhodanes_, 176.
_Sir Thopas_, 450-452.
Snorri Sturluson, 467 _note_.
_Somnium Scipionis_, 329.
Sopater (6th cent. P.C. ?), rhetorician, 102 _note_.
Sophocles, (_b._ 495 A.C., _d._ 406), tragic poet, 112, 133, 169, 200,
308.
——, scholia on, 77, 78.
_Speculum Stultorum_, 414 _note_.
_Stasis_ and _staseis_ = “states of case,” 72, 97 _sq._
Statius (P. Papinius) (_b. c._ 61 A.D., _d. c._ 96), 216 _note_, 255,
268-270;
poet, 409, 410.
Stesichorus (_fl. c._ 600), 308.
Stilo, L. Ælius Præconinus (_fl. c._ 100 A.C.), 240.
Stohæus, John (_fl. c._ 500 A.D.), compiler, &c., 183, 185.
Stoics, the, 62, 246.
Style, Aristotle on, 42 _sq._
_Suasoria_, 234 _sq._
“Sublimity” and the Sublime, 153 _sq._;
sources of, 161 _sq._
Sulpicia (_fl. c._ 100 A.D.), poetess, 265 and _note_.
_Super Thebaiden_, 394.
_Superbia Carminum_, 428 _sq._
_Sylvæ_ of Statius, 268, 269.
Symmachus, Q. Aurelius (_præf. urb._, 384 A.D.), 330 _sq._
_Symposiacs_, Plutarch’s, 144-146.
Synesius (_fl. c._ 400), bishop, poet, and philosopher, 176, 177.
Tacitus, C. Cornelius (_b._ (?), consul, 97 A.D., _d. c._ 120 (?)),
historian, 212, 219, 270, 271, 274 _note_:, 277, 280-284 (?), 312,
387.
Taine, M., 241, 283 _note_.
_Tapeinosis_ = “mean language,” 297 and _note_.
Tennyson, 241, 252, 326.
Terence (P. Terentius Afer), (_b._ 195 A.C., _d._ 159), comic poet, 213
_note_, 311, 387.
Terentianus Maurus (_fl. c._ 100 A.D.), metrical writer, 404 _note_.
Thackeray, 266, 338.
_Thebaid_, the, 269, 394, 410.
Themistius (_fl._. 4th cent. P.C., prefect of Constantinople, 384),
rhetorician, philosopher, and statesman, 109, 123.
Theocritus (_fl._ 3rd cent. A.C.), poet, 307.
Theodolus (12th cent.), writer, 409.
Theodorus (author of phrase _parenthyrson_) = _probably_ Th. of Gadara,
very famous as rhetorician just before and about the Christian era
(there was another Th. of Byzantium in Plato’s time), 156 _note_.
Theon, Aelius (3rd cent. A.D. (?)), rhetorician, 93-95.
Theophrastus (_b._ (?) _d._ in very old age, 287 A.C.), philosopher, 61
and _note_, 235 _note_, 296, 309.
Théry, Augustin François (_b._ 1796, _d._ 1878), _Histoire des opinions
Littéraires_, vi _note_, 9 _note_, 320 _note_.
Thomson, James, 296.
Thucydides, son of Olorus (_b._ 471 A.C., _d. c._ 401), 111, 129 _sq._,
190, 305, 312.
Tiberius (date ?), rhetorician, 103.
Timæus (_fl. c._ 350-250 A.C.), historian, 160.
Tisias (_fl._ 5th cent. A.C.), rhetorician, 16.
Translation, Dante on, 442, 443.
“Transport,” Longinus on, 155 _sq._
_Trattatello_, Boccaccio’s, on Dante, 457 _sq._
Trench, Archbishop, 68, 69.
Trissino, 417.
_Tristram Shandy_, 243.
_Trivium_, the, 351, 366, 367, 432.
“Trojan Oration,” Dion Chrysostom’s, 111.
Trope, distinction of, from Figure, 301 _note_.
Troy, the Tale of, 120.
Tuscan Dialect, 420 _sq._
Twelve Wise Men, the, 344.
_Twice Accused Man_, Lucian’s, 150, 151.
Tynnichus of Chalcis (_fl._ 5th cent. A.C. (?)), poet, 20 and _note_.
Tzetzes, John (12th cent.), grammarian, 175.
_Umbraticus doctor_, 244 _note_.
Unity of Action the only true Aristotelian “Unity,” 37.
Valerius Flaccus (_fl._ 1st cent. P.C.), poet, 310.
Varro, Terentius (_b._ 116 A.C., _d._ 28), grammarian and miscellaneous
writer, 240, 241.
—— P. V. Atacinus (_b._ 82 A.C.), poet, 310.
Venantius Fortunatus (V. Honorius Clementianus F.) (_b._ 530 A.D., _d.
c._ 610), presbyter and poet, 396-399, 406.
Vergilius Romanus (_fl. c._ 100), comic and mimiambic poet, 276.
_Vexilla Regis_, hymn, 396.
Victor, Sulpicius (?), rhetorician, 349.
Victorinus (Marius) (_fl._ 4th cent. P.C.), rhetorician, 348, 349, 380,
405.
Vinsauf, Geoffrey of (_fl. c._ 1200), poet, 406.
Virgil (P. Virgilius or Vergilius Maro) (_b._ 70 A.C., _d._ 19), 212,
214, 216 _note_, 248, 269, 310, 324-340 _passim_, 344, 377, #378
_note_:f465:, 465, 466.
Volcatius Sedigitus (_fl. c._ 100 A.C.), poet (?), 213 _note_, 241.
Walpole, Horace, 271 _note_.
Wireker, Nigel (_d._ 1188), monk and poet, 414 _note_.
Wit, Quintilian on, 293-295.
Wordsworth, W., 39, 296, 436.
Wright, Thomas, 377 _note_, 405 _note_, 410 _note_.
Xenophanes of Colophon (_fl._ 6th cent. A.C.), philosopher, 11;
his fragments, 12, 13.
Xenophon (_b. c._ 444 A.C., _d. c._ 354), historian, historical
novelist, and miscellaneous writer, 161, 309.
Youthfulness, mediæval, 470 _sq._
Zenodotus (_fl. c._ 208), grammarian and critic, 74, 75.
Zoilus (_fl._ 4th cent. A.C.), 75, 79, 302.
Zonæus (date?), rhetorician, 103.
ζῷον, meaning of, in the _Poetics_, 33 _note_.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Transcriber’s Note
There was no opening half-title in the source used to prepare this text.
No attempt was made to check the validity of each index entry’s
references, however several of them seem spurious:
“Antimachus” is referred to a note on p. 20, but it is unclear which
note that may be. He is mentioned by name on the page itself.
“Mimes, the prose Greek”, is not mentioned either in a note on p.
21, nor on p. 22 itself.
“Plato” is not mentioned in any note on p. 145.
Notes
49.20: The word ‘curial’ on p. 49 (“a =curial= instance of that
commentatorial _lues_...”) seems odd. ‘Crucial’ may have been
intended, but seems more likely to have been ‘curious’.
Corrections
Errors deemed most likely to be the printer’s have been corrected, and
are noted here. The references are to the page and line in the original.
109.24 He travelled over[ a] great part Added.
158.note Longi[un/nu]s Transposed.
195.32 Sword of Sharpness itself[,] but he is Added.
201.6 to so much advantage as with Greek[.] Added.
203.26 oratory in Greece is not[,] nor is Restored.
205.25 for personal genealogy[;] Added.
209.3 Quintil[l]ian Removed.
212.note in reference to Latin Criticism[.] Added.
215.3 is very unlikely[.] Added.
229.note Satires (second series[)], Added.
234.11 “Suasories[’/”] Replaced.
237.22 seemed to Aristotle himself himself[.] Added.
251.note the confusion of tragic and epic style[.] Added.
266.8 by no means i[n/m]maculate Replaced.
267.11 every kind of poetry[.] Added.
307.note a substantial portion of Antimachus[.] Added.
406.28 of the present chapter[.] Added.
457.11 is not yet there[.] Added.
462.note when he [(denied /denied (] (_loc. cit._) Moved
parenthesis.
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