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]