We do not get much beyond this cheerful doctrine in his more directly

critical utterances. Much acuteness has been ascribed to the πῶς δεῖ

ἱστορίαν συγγράφειν.[207] But one had [Sidenote: _The_ How to Write

History.] hardly need be a Lucian to see that the historian (or anybody

else) must understand his subject, and know how to set it forth: though

it may be very freely granted that a strict application of the doctrine

would make considerable gaps on the shelves of libraries, or rather

would leave very few books on them. Indeed the whole tractate, though

very sound sense, is in more ways than one a prologue to the _True

History_. And from its opening account of the unlucky Abderites and

their epidemic of tragedy, through its application of the story of

Diogenes rolling his tub, to its demure assertion at the end that the

tub _is_ rolled, the irony is sufficiently apparent.

Footnote 205:

I use the Tauchnitz edition, by Dindorf, 3 vols., Leipsic, 1858.

Footnote 206:

This is fairly close, I think, but the two first lines, at any rate,

are too perfect not to be quoted in their own tongue—

Λουκιανὸς τάδ´ ἔγραφε, παλαιά τε μωρά τε εἰδῶς·

μωρὰ γὰρ ἀνθρώποις καὶ τὰ δοκοῦντα σοφά,

lines which grave themselves on the memory at twenty, and at fifty are

only graven deeper.

Footnote 207:

II. 1-24.

If the “How to Write History” is chiefly concerned with matter, the

_Lexiphanes_[208] is, with at least equal thoroughness, devoted

[Sidenote: _The_ Lexiphanes.] to words. The comedy here is of a

different kind, broader, but hardly less subtle. The play on αὐχμὸς

(“dry”) and νεοχμὸς (“newfangled”), the taste which Lexiphanes gives at

once of his preciousness by the use of the word κυψελόβυστα

(“wax-stuffed”), his superb contempt for irony,[209] with his

interlocutor’s audacious punning and sham reverence, “set” the piece at

once for us. The wonderful lingo which Lexiphanes proceeds to pour forth

in his “Anti-symposium” is matter for another inquiry than this; but the

subsequent criticism of it by Lycinus and Sopolis is quite within our

competence. And there is nowhere any sounder prophylactic against one of

the recurrent diseases of literature, an access of which has been on us,

as it happens, for a considerable time past. There are other diseases,

of course—affected archaism, affected purism, &c. But this particular

one of “raising language to a higher power,” as it has been called by

some of those afflicted (and pleased) with it in our days, has never

been better characterised. “Before all things,” says Lycinus, “prythee

remember me this, not to mimic the worst inventions of modern

rhetoricians, and smack your lips over them,[210] but to trample on

them, and emulate the great classical examples. Nor let the wind-flowers

of speech bewitch you, but, after the manner of men in training, stick

to solid food. Sacrifice first of all to the Goddess Clearness and to

the Graces by whom you are quite deserted. Bid avaunt! to bombast and

magniloquence, to tricks of speech. Do not turn up your nose, and strain

your voice, and jeer at others, and think that carping at everybody else

will put yourself in the front rank. Nay, you have another fault, not

small, but perhaps your greatest, that you do not first arrange the

meaning of your expressions, and then dress them up in word and phrase;

but if you can pick up anywhere some outlandish locution, or invent one

that seems pretty to you, you try to tack a meaning on to it, and are

miserable if you cannot stuff it in somewhere, though it may have no

necessary connection with what you have to say.”[211] It would be

impossible to put more forcibly or better the necessary caution, the

Devil’s Advocate’s plea, against the abuse and exaggeration of the

doctrine of the “beautiful word.”

Footnote 208:

II. 144-152.

Footnote 209:

τὸν μὲν εἴρωνα πέδοι κατάβαλε.

Footnote 210:

Or “nibble at them.”

Footnote 211:

_Lex._, § 24, ii. 152, _op. cit._

The “Indictment of the Vowels”[212] is rather a grammatical and

rhetorical _jeu d’esprit_ than a criticism; but if the curious

[Sidenote: _Other pieces: The_ Prometheus Es.] little piece, “To one who

said 'You are the Prometheus of Prose,'”[213] were a little longer and

more explicit, it would give us rather a firmer hold of Lucian’s serious

views of literature than we have actually got. At first he plays, in his

usual manner, with the notion of his real or invented flatterer. Are his

works called Promethean because they are of clay? He sorrowfully admits

the justice of the comparison. Or because they are so clever? This is

sarcastic; and besides he has no wish to deserve the Caucasus. After

all, too, it is a dubious compliment, for did not a comic writer call

Cleon “a Prometheus”? Then he drolls variously on the “potter’s art”

attributed to him, the slightness of his work, the ease with which it

can be smashed, &c. But, perhaps there _is_ a complimentary meaning—that

Lucian, like Prometheus, is an inventor—that his books are not merely to

pattern. He does not altogether reject the soft impeachment, though he

hastens (in harmony with that conclusion of the _Lexiphanes_ which has

been just quoted) to say that mere novelty is no merit in his eyes. And

this he proceeds to illustrate, in his own manner, by a story of the

black camel and the magpie-coloured man that Ptolemy brought to Egypt,

with the result that the Egyptians thought the camel frightful and the

magpie-man a rather disgusting joke. But he has, he admits, attempted to

adjust the philosophical dialogue to something like the tone of the

comic poets, to avoid the faults of both, and to adjust their

excellences. At any rate, says he, with one of his inimitable changes,

Prometheus was a thief, and he, Lucian, is not. Nobody can call him a

plagiarist, and he must stick to his art, such as it is, for otherwise

he were Epimetheus if he changed his mind. In this quaint glancing

mixture of the serious and the sarcastic, it is possible to guess a good

deal, but guessing, as I have ventured to announce pretty prominently,

is not the object of this book.

Footnote 212:

I. 26.

Footnote 213:

I. 9.

To Rhetoric, as distinguished from literary criticism proper, Lucian’s

chief (indeed his only considerable and substantive) contribution is the

so-called “Master of the Orators,”[214] [Sidenote: _Works touching

Rhetoric._] to which may be added a μελέτη or declamation on one of the

stock subjects (a case of tyrannicide) and some parts of the “Twice

Accused Man.”[215] This last is a curious _pot-pourri_ of satire on the

different schools of philosophy, on the methods of the law courts, and

on forensic eloquence. Rhetoric herself appears, besides an

impersonation of Dialogue, both in the character of public prosecutors

against “the Syrian.” Rhetoric states that he has deserted her for

Dialogue, Dialogue that he has disgraced and shamed him by burlesque.

Now Lucian, it is hardly necessary to say, was a Syrian, and had been a

professional teacher of Rhetoric himself. The piece is chiefly parody,

especially in the two speeches just mentioned, where Lucian displays

that faculty of causing his characters to make themselves ridiculous, in

which he has had no rival (except the authors of the _Satire Menippée_

and Butler), to admiration. The reasons given by the “Syrian” for

deserting Rhetoric are also very funny.

Footnote 214:

III. 1.

Footnote 215:

II. 358.

But the whole has only a partial connection with literature, and is even

more concerned with the degradation of the Rhetorical profession than

with Rhetoric herself. Incidentally, however, it shows the strong

attraction of that subject, warped and mismanaged as it was, for persons

with the literary interest in them. If Rhetoric could have seen herself

as she ought to be—even as she is in Longinus—it is pretty certain that

Lucian would not have said the hard things against her which here

appear.

The “Master of the Rhetors” or Orators is in the common form of

rhetorical treatises, the form of the Περὶ Ὕψους itself, that of an

address to a young friend. This young friend had asked how a man might

become a rhetor and a sophist, a position and title which he thought the

noblest of all. Lucian has not the least objection to tell him, so let

him listen. He shall climb the steep easily and rest on the heights,

while others are tumbling down and cracking their crowns. Let there be

no doubt about this. Poetry is a more difficult thing than rhetoric, and

did not Hesiod master it by just plucking a few leaves from Helicon? Did

not a merchant show Alexander a short cut from Persia to Egypt, only the

unbelieving Macedonian would not listen? Lucian will be that merchant.

There are two ways to Rhetoric (see Cebes on another matter). One (to

cut short the abundant and agreeable “chaff” of which, here as

elsewhere, Lucian is so prodigal) is the long, troublesome, and

ungrateful imitation of the mighty men of antiquity, of Plato and

Demosthenes and the rest. The other, dealt with more copiously and more

ironically still, is quite different. You learn a few fashionable

catchwords for ordinary use, and some precious archaisms for occasional

ornament; you must get rid of all bashfulness, dress yourself very well,

cultivate the vices which happen to be in vogue, or at any rate pretend

to them, and keep a good deal of company with women and servants, for

both are babblesome and seldom at a loss. There is nothing hard in this

and other precepts; and if you observe them, you will soon become a

famous orator. Very good fun all of it, and very shrewd “criticism of

life,” no doubt, but only distantly connected with criticism of

literature.

Yet it requires no hazardous conjecture to discern a very considerable

literary critic in Lucian, and to discover the [Sidenote: _His critical

limitations._] reason why that critic did not come out in himself or in

his contemporaries, unless we are to rank the lonely and magnificent

personality of Longinus among these. There was interesting literature in

Lucian’s time—it is enough to mention the name of Apuleius to establish

that proposition—but hardly any of it was exactly great, and the best of

it was marred, either by the negative tendency which is one side of

despair of greatness, or else by the hectic colours of decadence, or by

the dubious struggles of new tendencies not yet quite ready to be born.

Lucian himself (at any rate, after that youth of which we know so

little) inclined, it is not necessary to say, to the negative side. He

was distinctly deficient in enthusiasm (with which, perhaps, the

critical artist can dispense as little as the creative), and had small

feeling for poetry. His admiration for the great Attic prose writers,

and its result in his own delightful style, are obvious enough; while

the justice, if also the rigour, of his onslaughts on the

characteristics most opposed to theirs, the characteristics of florid,

“conceited,” neologistic prose and verse, cannot be denied. But the

unsatisfactory negation of his religious and philosophical criticism

extends also to his literary attitude. “Cannot you,” one feels inclined

to say, “find something to say _for_ as well as against luxuriance of

fancy, wealth of colour, delicate suggestiveness of thought and phrase?”

Cannot you, like Longinus, admit that Nature meant men to think and

write magnificently of the magnificent? He could not, or he would not:

his very interest in literature as literature seems to have been

lukewarm. And so the greatest writer of all the later Greeks, a writer

great enough to rank with all but the very greatest of the earlier,

gives us very little but carping criticism of literature, and not much

even of that.

It does not fall within the plan of this work to examine at any length

the recently much-debated question whether the [Sidenote: _Longinus: the

difficulties raised._] treatise Περὶ Ὕψους is, as after its first

publication by Robortello in 1554 it was for nearly three centuries

unquestioningly taken to be, the work of the rhetorician Longinus, who

was Queen Zenobia’s Prime Minister, and was put to death by Aurelian. It

has been the mania of the nineteenth century to prove that everybody’s

work was written by somebody else, and it will not be the most useless

task of the twentieth to betake itself to more profitable inquiries.

References which will enable any one who cares to investigate the matter

are given in a note.[216] Here it may be sufficient to say two things.

The first is, that these questions appertain for settlement, less to the

technical expert than to the intelligent _judex_, the half-juryman,

half-judge, who is generally acquainted with the rules of logic and the

laws of evidence. The second is, that the verdict of the majority of

such _judices_ on this particular question is, until some entirely new

documents turn up, likely to be couched in something like the following

form:—

1. The positive evidence for the authorship of Longinus is very weak,

consisting in MS. attributions, the oldest of which[217] is irresolute

in form, while it certainly does not date earlier than the tenth

century.

2. There is absolutely no _evidence_ against the authorship of Longinus,

only a set of presumptions, most of which are sheer opinion, and carry

no weight except as such. Moreover, no plausible competitor has even

been hinted at. I hope it is not illiberal to say that the suggestion of

Plutarch, which was made by Vaucher, and has met with some favour,

carries with it irresistible evidence that the persons who make it know

little about criticism. No two things could possibly be more different

than the amiable ethical knack of the author of the _Moralia_, and the

intense literary gift of the author of the Περὶ Ὕψους.

Footnote 216:

The most elaborate discussion of the whole matter still is that of

Vaucher (Geneva, 1854). The editions I myself use are those of Toup

(Oxford, 1778); Egger (Paris, 1837), a particularly handy little

volume, _with the fragments_; and Prof. Rhys Roberts (Cambridge,

1899), with translation and full editorial apparatus. Those who do not

read the Greek lose much: but they will find a good (though somewhat

too free) translation, with an excellent introduction by Mr Andrew

Lang, in the work of Mr H. L. Havell (London, 1890).

Footnote 217:

Διονυσίου ἢ Λογγίνου of the Paris MS. 2036. (Others even have

ἀνωνύμου.) Robortello intentionally or unintentionally dropped the η,

thereby putting students off the scent.

Another of the “Academic questions” connected with the book, however, is

of more literary importance, and that is its [Sidenote: “_Sublimity_.”]

proper designation in the modern languages. There has been a consensus

of the best authorities of late years, even though they may not agree on

other points, that “The Sublime” is a far from happy translation of

ὕψος. Not only has “Sublime” in the modern languages, and especially in

English, a signification too much specialised, but the specialisation is

partly in the wrong direction. No one, for instance, who uses English

correctly, however great his enthusiasm for the magnificent Sapphic ode

which Longinus has had the well-deserved good fortune to preserve to us,

would call it exactly sublime,[218] there being, in the English

connotation of that word, an element of calmness, or at any rate (for a

storm may be sublime) of mastery, which is absent here. And so in other

cases; “Sublime” being more especially unfortunate in bringing out (what

no doubt remains to some extent in any case) the inadequateness and

tautology of the attempts to define the _sources_ of ὕψος. Hall, the

seventeenth-century translator, avoided these difficulties by a simple

rendering, “the height of eloquence,” which is more than literally

exact, though it is neither elegant nor handy. Nor is there perhaps any

single word that is not open to almost as many objections as Sublime

itself. So that (and again this is the common conclusion) it is well to

keep it, with a very careful preliminary explanation that the Longinian

Sublime is not sublimity in its narrower sense, but all that quality, or

combination of qualities, which creates _enthusiasm_ in literature, all

that gives _consummateness_ to it, all that deserves the highest

critical encomium either in prose or poetry.

Footnote 218:

Blair saw this, but, with the ill-luck of his century, regarded the

work as merely “elegant.”

Few persons, however, whom the gods have made critical will care to

spend much time _in limine_ over the authorship, [Sidenote: _Quality and

contents of the treatise._] the date,[219] the title, and the other

beggarly elements in respect to this astonishing treatise. Incomplete as

it is—and its incompleteness is as evident as that of the _Poetics_, and

probably not much less substantial—difficult as are some of its terms,

deprived as we are in some cases of the power of appreciating its

citations fully, through our ignorance of their context, puzzled as we

may even be now and then by that radical difference in taste and

view-point, that “great gulf fixed,” which sometimes, though only

sometimes, does interpose itself between modern and ancient,—no student

of criticism, hardly one would think any fairly educated and intelligent

man, can read a dozen lines of the book without finding himself in a new

world, as he compares it with even the best of his earlier critical

masters. He is in the presence of a man who has accidentally far greater

advantages of field than Aristotle, essentially far more powerful

genius, and an intenser appreciation of literature, than Dionysius or

Quintilian. And probably the first thought—not of the student, who will

be prepared for it, but of the fairly educated man who knows something

of Pope and Boileau and the rest of them—will be, “How on earth did this

book come to be quoted as an authority by a school like that of the

‘classical’ critics of the seventeenth-eighteenth century, whose every

principle almost, whose general opinions certainly, it seems to have

been designedly written to crush, conclude, and quell?” Of this more

hereafter. Let us begin, as in former important cases, by a short

abstract of the actual contents of the book.

Footnote 219:

Longinus (? 213-273) represents the middle of the _third_ century.

Nobody puts it later than this, and nobody earlier than the _first_.

The author commences by addressing a young friend or pupil, a certain

Postumius (Terentianus or Florentianus?), on the inefficiency of the

Treatise on the Sublime by a certain Cæcilius.[220] In endeavouring to

provide something more satisfactory, especially as to the sources of

Sublimity, he premises little more in the shape of definition than that

it is “a certain consummateness and eminence” of words, completing this

with the remark (the first epoch-making one of the treatise) that the

effect of such things is “not persuasion but transport,”[221] not the

result of skill, pains, and arrangement, but something which,

“opportunely out-flung,”[222] carries everything before it. But can it

be taught? Is it not innate? The doubt implies a fallacy. Nature is

necessary, but it must be guided and helped by art. Then comes a gap, a

specially annoying one, since the farther shore lands us in the midst of

an unfavourable criticism of a passage supposed to come from the lost

_Orithyia_ of Æschylus, which is succeeded by, or grouped with, other

specimens of the false sublime, bombast, tumidity, and the

_parenthurson_.[223] Next we pass to “frigidity,” a term which Longinus

uses with a slightly different connotation from Aristotle’s, applying it

chiefly to what he thinks undue flings and quips and conceits. These

particular strictures are, in Chapter V., generalised off into a brief

but admirable censure of the quest for mere novelty, of that “horror of

the obvious” which bad taste at all times has taken for a virtue. To

cure this and other faults, there is nothing for it but to make for the

true Sublime, hard as it may be. For (again a memorable and epoch-making

saying) “the judgment of words is the latest begotten fruit of many an

attempt.”[224]

Footnote 220:

A Sicilian rhetor, probably of Calacte, said by Suidas to have been of

Greek, or at any rate non-Roman, birth, and a Jew in religion.

Dionysius knew him, and he lived in the time of Augustus. There was

another (confused by Suidas) in that of Hadrian. This _may_ be our C.

Footnote 221:

οὐ γὰρ εἰς πειθὼ ἀλλ' ἐις ἔκστασιν ἄγει τὰ ὑπερφυᾶ.

Footnote 222:

καιρίως ἐξενεχθέν.

Footnote 223:

A phrase of the rhetor Theodorus, meaning “the thyrsus poked in at the

wrong time,” “enthusiasm out of place.”

Footnote 224:

λόγων κρίσις πολλῆς ἐστι πείρας τελευταῖον ἐπιγέννημα. Dionysius (_v.

supra_, pp. 130, 131) had said as much in sense, but less

magisterially in phrase. I have translated λόγων in its narrowest

equivalent, instead of “style” or “literature,” which it doubtless

also means, in order to bring out the antithesis better. I have small

doubt that Longinus meant, here as elsewhere, to fling back the old

contempt of the opposition of “words” and “things.”

The first canon of sublimity is not unlike the famous _Quod Semper_, &c.

If a thing does not transport _at all_, it is certainly not Sublime. If

its transporting power fails with repetition, with submission to

different but still competent judges, it is not sublime. When men

different in habits, lives, aims, ages, speech, agree about it, then no

mistake is possible.

The sources of Sublimity are next defined as five in number: Command of

strong and manly thought; Vehement and enthusiastic passion—these are

congenital; Skilfulness with Figures; Nobility of phrase; Dignified and

elevated _ordonnance_.[225] These, after a rebuke of some length to

Cæcilius for omitting Passion, he proceeds to discuss seriatim. The

ἁδρεπήβολον, which he now calls “great-naturedness,”[226] holds the

first place in value as in order, and examples of it, and of the failure

to reach it, are given from many writers, Homer and “the Legislator of

the Jews” being specially praised. This laudation leads to one of the

best known and most interesting passages of the whole book, a short

criticism and comparison of the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_, whereon, as

on other things in this abstract, more hereafter. The interest certainly

does not sink with the quotation from Sappho, whether we agree or not

(again _vide post_) that the source of its charm is “the selection and

composition of her details.” Other typical passages are then cited and

criticised.

Footnote 225:

This word, which has the stamp of Dryden, is often preferable to

“composition.”

Footnote 226:

τὸ μεγαλοφυές.

We next come to Amplification,—almost the first evidence in the

treatise, and not a fatal one, of the numbing power of “Figures.”

Longinus takes occasion by it for many illuminative animadversions, not

merely on Homer, but on Plato, Herodotus, Demosthenes, and Thucydides,

whom (it is very satisfactory to observe) he includes among those who

have “sublimity.” This handling of Figures, professedly eclectic, is

fertile in such animadversions in regard to others besides

Amplification—Hyperbata, Polyptota, Antimetathesis, and others

still—with especial attention to Periphrasis, to his praise of which the

eighteenth century perhaps attended without due attention to his

cautions.

Then comes another of the flashes of light. Dismissing the figures, he

turns to diction in itself, and has a wonderful passage on it,

culminating in the dictum, “For beautiful words are in deed and in fact

the very light of the spirit,”[227]—the Declaration of Independence and

the “Let there be light” at once of Literary Criticism.

Footnote 227:

φῶς γὰρ τῷ ὄντι ἵδιον τοῦ νοῦ τὰ καλὰ ὁνόματα.

Here the Enemy seems to have thought that he was getting too good, for

another and greater gap occurs, and when we are allowed to read again,

we are back among the Figures and dealing with Metaphor—the criticism of

examples, however, being still illuminative. It leads him, moreover, to

another of his nugget-grounds, the discussion on “Faultlessness,” which

introduces some especially valuable parallels—Apollonius and Homer,

Bacchylides and Pindar, Ion and Sophocles, Hyperides and Demosthenes,

Lysias and Plato. Then we pass to the figure Hyperbole after a gap, and

then to _ordonnance_ and arrangement, with a passage, valuable but, like

all similar passages in the ancient critics, difficult, on rhythm. After

this a section on μικρότης—“littleness,” “triviality”—leads abruptly to

the close, which is not the close, and which, after some extremely

interesting remarks on the ethical and other conditions of the time,

ends with an unfulfilled promise of treating the subject of the

Passions. The loss of this is perhaps more to be regretted than the loss

of any other single tractate of the kind in antiquity. It might have

been, and possibly was, only a freshening up of the usual rhetorical

commonplaces about the “colours of good and evil,” and the probable

disposition of the hearer or reader. But it might also, and from

Longinus’s handling of the other stock subject of the Figures it is much

more likely to, have been something mainly, if not wholly, new: in fact,

something that to this day we have not got—an analysis of the direct

appeals of literature to the primary emotions of the soul.

In considering this inestimable book, it is hardly possible to

exaggerate the importance of these early words of it to which attention

has been drawn above. The yoke of “persuasion” has at last been broken

from the neck of the critic. He does not consider literature as

something which will help a man to carry an assembly with him, to

persuade a jury, to gain a declamation prize. He does indeed still

mention the listener rather than the reader; but that is partly

tradition, partly a consequence of the still existing prevalence of

recitation or reading aloud. Further, it is sufficiently evident that

the critic [Sidenote: _Preliminary Retrospect._] has come to regard

literature as a whole, and is not distracted by supposed requirements of

“invention” on the part of the poet, of “persuasion” on the part of the

orator, and so forth. He looks at the true and only test of literary

greatness—the “transport,” the absorption of the reader. And he sees as

no one, so far as we know, saw before him (except Dionysius for a moment

and “in a glass darkly”), as Dante was the only man after him to see for

a millennium and much more, that the beautiful words, the “mots

rayonnants,” are at least a main means whereby this effect is produced.

Instead of style and its criticism being dismissed, or admitted at best

with impatience as something φορτικόν, we have that gravest and truest

judgment of the latter as the latest-born offspring of many a painful

endeavour. Far is it indeed from him to stick to the word only: his

remarks on novelty, his peroration (not intended as such, but so coming

to us), and many other things, are proof of that. But in the main his

criticism is of the pure æsthetic kind, and of the best of that kind. It

will not delay us too much to examine it a little more in detail.

The opening passage as to Cæcilius, though it has tempted some into

perilous hypothetic reconstructions of that critic’s [Sidenote:

_Detailed Criticism: The opening._] possible teaching, really comes to

little more than this—that Longinus, like most of us, was not exactly

satisfied with another man’s handling of his favourite subject. And,

curiously enough, the only specific fault that he here finds—namely,

that his predecessor, while illustrating the nature of the Sublime

amply, neglected to discuss the means of reaching it—rather recoils on

himself. For there can be little doubt that the weakest part of the Περὶ

Ὕψους is its discussion of “sources.” But the great phrase, already more

than once referred to, as to transport or ecstasy, not persuasion, lifts

us at once—itself transports us—into a region entirely different from

that of all preceding Rhetorics, without at the same time giving any

reason to fear loss of touch with the common ground and common-sense.

For nothing can be saner than the handling, in the second chapter, of

that _aporia_ concerning nature and art, genius and painstaking, which

has not infrequently been the cause of anything but sane writing.

After the gap, however, we come to one of the passages recently glanced

at, and mentioned or to be mentioned so [Sidenote: _The stricture on

the_ Orithyia.] often elsewhere, which warn us as to difference of view.

The passage, supposed to be, as we said, Æschylean and from the

_Orithyia_, is no doubt at rather more than “concert-pitch.” It is

Marlowe rather than Shakespeare; yet Shakespeare himself has come near

to it in _Lear_ and elsewhere, and one line at least—

μίαν παρείρας πλεκτάνην χειμάρῥοον—

is a really splendid piece of metre and phrase, worthy, high-pitched as

it is, of the author of the _Oresteia_ and the _Prometheus_ at his very

best. So, too, the much-enduring Gorgias would hardly have received very

severe reprehension from any but the extremest precisians of modern

criticism, at its most starched time, for calling vultures “living

tombs.” But the horror of the Greeks on the one hand for anything

extravagant, bizarre, out of measure, on the other for the slightest

approach in serious work to the unbecoming, the unpleasantly suggestive,

makes Longinus here a very little prudish. And his general remarks are

excellent, especially in reference to τὸ παρένθυρσον, which I have

ventured to interpret, not quite in accordance with the general

rendering, “the poking in of the thyrsus at the wrong time,” the

affectation of Bacchanalian fury where no fury need be.

But we still have the same warning in the chapter on Frigidity, coupled

with another—that, perhaps, as sometimes happens, Longinus' sense of

humour was not quite [Sidenote: _Frigidity._] equal to his sense of

sublimity, and yet another—that the historic sense, so late developed

everywhere, was, perhaps, not very strong in him. We, at least, should

give Timæus the benefit of a doubt, as to the presence of a certain not

inexcusable irony in the comparison (in which, for instance, neither

Swift nor Carlyle would have hesitated to indulge) of the times taken by

Alexander to conquer Asia and by Isocrates to write the _Panegyric_. On

the other hand, he seems to forget the date of Timæus when he finds the

μικροχαρές, the paltrily funny, in the historian’s connection of the

Athenian Hermocopidæ and their punishment by Hermocrates, the son of

Hermon. There is no reason why Timæus should not have been quite

serious, though in the third century after Christ, and even in the

first, the allusion might seem either a tasteless freethinking jest or a

silly piece of superstition.

But by far the most interesting thing in this context is Longinus'

irreconcilable objection to a fanciful metaphor [Sidenote: _The “maidens

in the eyes.”_] which, as it happens most oddly, was, with a very slight

variation, an equal pet of the Greeks of the great age and of our own

Elizabethans. Every reader of the latter knows the phrase, “to look

babies in the eyes” of the beloved—that is to say, to keep the face so

close to hers that the little reflections of the gazer in the pupils of

her eyes are discernible. The Greek term for these little images, and

the pupils that mirrored them, was slightly different—it was κόραι,

maidens. And as, from the famous quarrel scene in Homer downwards, the

eyes were always, in Greek literature, the seat of modesty or of

impudence, the combination suggested, not merely to Timæus but even to

Xenophon, a play of words, “more modest than the maidens in their eyes,”

or conversely, as where Timæus, speaking of the lawless lust of

Agathocles, says that he must have had “harlots” (πόρνας), not “maidens”

(κόρας), in his eyes. And Longinus is even more angry or sad with

Xenophon than with Timæus, as expecting more propriety from him.

But whether we agree with him in detail or not, the inestimable passage,

on the mere quest and craze for novelty, which [Sidenote: _The canon

“Quod semper.”_] follows, more than reconciles us, as well as the other

great saying in cap. vi. as to the “late-born” character of the judgment

of style, and that in the next as to the canon of Sublimity being the

effect produced unaltered in altered circumstances and cases. When we

read these things we feel that literary criticism is at last fully

constituted,—that it wants nothing more save greater variety, quantity,

and continuance of literary creation, upon which to exercise itself.

No nervous check or chill need be caused by the tolerably certain fact

that more than one hole may be picked in the [Sidenote: _The sources of

sublimity._] subsequent classification of the sources[228] of ὕψος.

These attempts at an over-methodical classification (it has been said

before) are always full of snares and pitfalls to the critic. Especially

do they tempt him to the sin of arguing in a circle. It cannot be denied

that in every one of the five divisions (except, perhaps, the valuable

vindication of the quality of Passion) there is some treacherous word or

other, which is a mere synonym of “sublime.” Thus in the first we have

ἁδρεπήβολον, mastery of the ἅδρον, a curious word, the nearest

equivalent of which in English is, perhaps, “stout” or “full-bodied,” as

we apply these terms to wine; in the fourth γενναία, “noble,” which is

only “sublime” in disguise; and in the fifth εν δε φαει και ολεσσον, of

which much the same may be said.

Footnote 228:

It may, however, be plausibly argued that the circle is more apparent

than real, resulting from a kind of ambiguity in the word πηγαί. If

Longinus had slightly altered his expression, so as to make it

something of this kind, “There are five points [or ways, or aspects]

in which ὕψος may be attained, thought, feeling, ‘figure,’ diction,

and composition,” he would be much less vulnerable. And, after all,

this is probably what he meant.

Any suggestion, however, of paralogism which might arise from this and

be confirmed by the curious introduction in the third of the Figures, as

if they were machines for automatic sublime-coining, must be dispelled

by the remarks on Passion of the right kind as tending to sublimity, and

by the special stress laid on the primary necessity of μεγαλοφροσύνη,

whereof ὕψος itself is the mere ἀπήχημα or echo. Unfortunately here, as

so often, the gap comes just in the most important place.

When the cloud lifts, however, we find ourselves in one of the most

interesting passages of the whole, the selection of “sublime” passages

from Homer. A little superfluous matter about Homer’s “impiety” (the

old, the respectable, Platonic mistake) occurs; but it matters not,

especially in face of the two praises of the “Let there be light” of the

Jewish legislator, “no chance comer,” and of the great ἐν δὲ φάει καὶ

ὄλεσσον of Ajax, the mere juxtaposition of which once more shows what a

critic we have got in our hands.

Not quite such a great one perhaps have we—yet one in the circumstances

equally fascinating—in the contrasted remarks [Sidenote: _Longinus on

Homer._] on the _Odyssey_. Longinus is not himself impious; he is no

Separatist (he is indeed far too good a critic to be that). But he will

have the Romance of Ulysses to be “old age, though the old age of

Homer.” “When a great nature is a little gone under, philomythia is

characteristic of its decline.”[229] Evidently, he thinks, the _Odyssey_

was Homer’s second subject, not his first. He is “a setting sun as

mighty as ever, but less intense”: he is more unequal: he takes to the

fabulous and the incredible. The Wine of Circe, the foodless voyage of

Ulysses, the killing of the suitors—nay, the very attention paid to

Character and Manners—tell the tale of decadence.

Footnote 229:

μεγάλης φύσεως ὑποφερομένης ἤδη ἰδιόν ἐστιν ἐν γήρᾳ τὸ φιλύμυθον.

He is wrong, undoubtedly wrong—we may swear it boldly by those who fell

in Lyonnesse, and in the palace of Atli, and under the echoes of the

horn of Roland. The _Odyssey_ is not less than the _Iliad_; it is

different. But we can hardly quarrel with him for being wrong, because

his error is so instructive, so interesting. We see in it first (even

side by side with not a little innovation) that clinging to the great

doctrines of old, to the skirts of Aristotle and of Plato, which is so

often found in noble minds and so seldom in base ones. And we see,

moreover, that far as he had advanced—near as he was to an actual peep

over the verge of the old world and into the new—he was still a Greek

himself at heart, with the foibles and limitations—no despicable foibles

and limitations—of the race. Here is the instinctive unreasoning terror

of the unknown Romance; the dislike of the vague and the fabulous; even

that curious craze about Character being in some way inferior to Action,

which we have seen before. By the time of Longinus—if he lived in the

third century certainly, if he lived in the first probably—the romance

did exist. But it was looked upon askance; it had no regular literary

rank; and a sort of resentment was apparently felt at its daring to

claim equality with the epic. Now the _Odyssey_ is the first, and not

far from the greatest, of romances. It has the Romantic Unity in the

endurance and triumph of its hero. It has the Romantic Passion in the

episodes of Circe and Calypso and others: above all, it has the great

Romantic breadth, the free sweep of scene and subject, the variety, the

contrast of fact and fancy, the sparkle and hurry and throb. But these

things, to men trained in the admiration of the _other_ Unity, the

_other_ Passion, the more formal, regulated, limited, measured detail

and incident of the usual tragedy and the usual epic—were at best

unfamiliar innovations, and at worst horrible and daring impieties.

Longinus will not go this length: he cannot help seeing the beauty of

the _Odyssey_. But he must reconcile his principles to his feelings by

inventing a theory of decadence, for which, to speak frankly, there is

no critical justification at all.

One may almost equally disagree with the _special_ criticism which

serves as setting to the great jewel among the quotations [Sidenote: _On

Sappho._] of the treatise, the so-called “Ode to Anactoria.” The charm

of this wonderful piece consists, according to Longinus, in the skill

with which Sappho chooses the accompanying emotions of “erotic

mania.”[230] To which one may answer, “Hardly so,” but in the skill with

which she expresses those emotions which she selects, and in the

wonderful adaptation of the metre to the expression, in the mastery of

the picture of the most favoured lover, drawing close and closer to the

beloved to catch the sweet speech,[231] and the laughter full of desire.

In saying this we should have the support of the Longinus of other parts

of the treatise against the Longinus of this. Yet here, too, he is

illuminative; here, too, the “noble error” of the Aristotelian

conception of poetry distinguishes and acquits him.

Footnote 230:

Literal.

Footnote 231:

Fond and foolish fancy as it may be, there seems to me something

miraculous in the mere juxtaposition of πλησίον and ἁδὺ—the silent

adoring lover, jealous, as it were, of the very air robbing him of a

portion of the sweetness.

With the remarks on αὔξησις, “amplification,” as it is traditionally but

by no means satisfactorily rendered, another phase [Sidenote:

“_Amplification._”] of the critical disease of antiquity (which is no

doubt balanced by other diseases in the modern critical body) may be

thought to appear. Both in the definition of this figure and in the

description of its method we may, not too suspiciously, detect evidences

of that excessive technicality which gave to Rhetoric itself the

exclusive title of _techne_. _Auxesis_, it seems, comes in when the

business, or the point at issue, admits at its various stages of divers

fresh starts and rests, of one great phrase being wheeled upon the stage

after another, continually introduced in regular ascent.[232] This, it

seems, can be done either by means of τοπηγορία, “handling of _topoi_ or

commonplaces,” or by δείνωσις, which may perhaps be best rendered _tour

de force_, or by cunning successive disposition (ἐποικονομία) of facts

or feelings. For, says he, there are ten thousand kinds of _auxesis_.

Footnote 232:

ἕτερα ἑτέροις ἐπεισκυκλούμενα μεγέθη συνεχῶς ἐπεισάγηται κατ’

ἐπίβασιν.

The first description of the method will recall to all comparative

students of literature the manner of Burke, though it is not exactly

identical with that manner; but the instances of means, besides being

admittedly inadequate, savour, with their technicalities of terminology,

much too strongly of the cut-and-dried manual. The third article, on a

reasonable interpretation of ἐποικονομία, really includes all that need

be said. But one sees here, as later, that even Longinus had not quite

outgrown the notion that the teacher of Rhetoric was bound to present

his student with a sort of hand-list of “tips” and dodges—with the kind

of Cabbala wherewith the old-fashioned crammer used to supply his pupils

for inscription on wristband or finger-nail. Yet he hastens to give a

sign of grace by avowing his dissatisfaction with the usual Rhetorical

view, and by distinguishing _auxesis_ and the Sublime itself, in a

manner which brings the former still nearer to Burke’s “winding into a

subject like a serpent,” and which might have been more edifying still

if one of the usual gaps did not occur. Part, at least, of the lost

matter must have been occupied with a contrast or comparison between the

methods of Plato and Demosthenes, the end of which we have, and which

passes into one between Demosthenes and Cicero. “If we Greeks may be

allowed to have an opinion,” says Longinus, with demure humility,

“Demosthenes shall be compared to a flash of thunder and lightning,

Cicero to an ordinary terrestrial conflagration,” which is very handsome

to Cicero.

Then he returns to Plato, and rightly insists that much of his splendour

is derived from imitation, or at least from emulation, of that very

Homer whom he so often attacks. The great writers of the past are to be

constantly before us, and we are not to be deterred from “letting

ourselves go” by any mistaken sense of inferiority, or any dread of

posterity’s verdict.

Then comes a digression of extreme importance on the subject of

φαντασίαι or εἰδωλοποιΐαι—“images.” One of the points in which a history

of the kind here attempted may [Sidenote: “_Images._”] prove to be of

most service, lies in the opportunity it affords of keeping the changes

of certain terms, commonly used in criticism, more clearly before the

mind than has always been done. And of these, none requires more care

than “Images” and “Imagination.” At the first reading, the mere use of

such a word as φαντασίαι may seem to make all over-scrupulousness

unnecessary, though if we remember that even Fancy is not quite

Imagination, the danger may be lessened. At any rate, it is nearly

certain that no ancient writer,[233] and no modern critic before a very

recent period (Shakespeare uses it rightly, but then he was Shakespeare

and not a critic), attached our full sense to the term. To Aristotle

φαντασία is merely αἴσθησις ἀσθενὴς, a “weakened sensation,” a copy

furnished by memory from sensation itself. Even animals have it. No idea

of Invention seems to have mingled with it, or only of such invention as

the artist’s is when he faithfully represents natural objects. Of the

Imagination, which is in our minds when we call Shelley an imaginative

poet, and Pope not one, Sir Edward Burne Jones an imaginative painter,

and any contemporary whom it may be least invidious to name not one,

there does not seem to have been a trace even in the enthusiastic mind

of Longinus, though he expressly includes Enthusiasm—nay, Passion—in his

notion of it. You think you see what you say, and you make your hearers

see it. Good; but Crabbe does that constantly, and one would hardly,

save in the rarest cases, call Crabbe imaginative. In short, φαντασίαι

here are vivid illustrations drawn from nature—Orestes’ hallucination of

the Eumenides, Euripides’ picture of Phaethon, that in the _Seven_ of

the slaying of the bull over the black-bound shield, and many others. No

doubt he glances at the fabulous and incredible, the actually

“imagined”; but he seems, as in the case of the _Odyssey_, to be a

little doubtful of these even in poetry, while in oratory he bars them

altogether. You must at one and the same time reason and

illustrate—again the very method of Burke.

Footnote 233:

On the exception to be made for Philostratus, see above, p. 120.

In the rest of the illustrations of the use of Figures—for the central

part of the treatise expressly disclaims being a formal [Sidenote: _The

Figures._] discussion of these idols—the positive literary criticisms

scattered in them—the actual “reviewing”—will give most of the interest.

The great Oath of Demosthenes, “By those who fell at Marathon!” with its

possible suggestion by a passage of Eupolis, supplies a whole chapter

and part of another. And now we find the curious expression (showing how

even Longinus was juggled by terms) that Figures “fight on the side of

the Sublime, and in turn draw a wonderful reinforcement from it,”

wherein a mighty if vague reality like the Sublime, and mere shadows

(though neatly cut-out shadows) like the Figures, are most quaintly

yoked together.

Though still harassed by gaps, we find plenty of good pasture in the

remarks, the handling of Periphrasis being especially attractive. For

the eighteenth century—the time which honoured Longinus most in theory,

and went against him most in practice—undoubtedly took part of his

advice as to this figure. It had no doubt that Periphrasis contributed

to the Sublime, was ὑψηλοποιόν: unluckily it paid less attention to his

subsequent caution, that it is a risky affair, and that it smells of

triviality.[234] In fact, it is extremely noticeable that in the

examples of Periphrasis which he praises we should hardly apply that

name to it, but should call it “Allusion” or “Metaphor,” while the

examples that he condemns are actually of the character of Armstrong’s

“gelid cistern” and Delille’s “game which Palamede invented.”

Footnote 234:

ἐπίκηρον πρᾶγμα ... κουφολογίας ὄζον. ἐπίκηρος means literally

“perishable,” “apt to go off,” to get stale or flat.

At no time perhaps has the tricksy, if not (as one is almost driven to

suspect) deliberately malignant, mutilator played such a trick as in

abstracting four leaves from the MS. between caps. xxx. and xxxi. Here

Longinus has begun to speak of diction generally; here he has made that

admirable descant on “beautiful words” which, though almost all the book

deserves to be written in letters of gold, would tempt one to indulge

here in precious stones, so as to mimic, in jacinth and sapphire and

chrysoprase, the effect which it celebrates. When we are permitted

another glimpse we are back in particular criticism, interesting but

less valuable save indirectly, and in criticisms, too, of Cæcilius,

criticisms which we could do without. No great good can ever come of

inquiries, at least general inquiries, into the permissible number and

the permissible strength of Metaphors. Once more we may fall back on the

Master, though perhaps rather in opposition to some of the Master’s

dicta in this very field. “As the intelligent man shall decide” is the

decision here, and the intelligent man will never decide till the case

is before him. One bad metaphor is too much: twenty good ones are not

too many. Nor is “the multitudinous seas incarnadine” an “excess,”

though no doubt there have been bad critics who thought so.

Longinus himself, though he had not had the happiness to read _Macbeth_,

was clearly not far out of agreement with the [Sidenote:

“_Faultlessness._”] concluding sentiment of the last paragraph, and he

makes this certain by the disquisition on Faultlessness which follows.

As a general question this is probably, for the present time at any

rate, past argument, not so much because the possibility of a

“faultless” great poem is denied, as because under the leaden rule of

the best modern criticism—leaden not from dulness but from

adaptability—few things are recognised as “faults” _in se_ and _per se_.

A pun may be a gross fault in one place and a grace beyond the reach of

art in another: an aposiopesis may be either a proof of clumsy

inequality to the situation or a stroke of genius. But the declaration

of Longinus that he is not on the side of Faultlessness[235] is of

infinitely greater importance than any such declaration from an equally

great critic (“Where is he? Show him to me,” as Rabelais would say)

could possess to-day. The general Greek theory undoubtedly did make for

excessive severity to faultfulness, just as our general theory makes

perhaps for undue leniency to it. That Longinus could withstand this

tendency—could point out the faults of the faultless—was a very great

thing.

Footnote 235:

ἐγὼ δ' οἶδα μὲν ὡς αἱ ὑπερμεγέθεις φύσεις ἥκιστα καθαραί.

As always, too, his individual remarks frequently give us, not merely

the satisfaction of agreement, but that of piquant difference or

curiosity. We may agree with him about Bacchylides and Pindar—though, by

the way, the man who had the taste and the courage to admire a girl as

χλωραύχενα—as possessing that yellow ivory tint of skin which lights so

magnificently[236]—was certainly one to dare to challenge convention

with what its lilies-and-roses standard must have thought a “fault.” But

we cannot help astonishment at being told that both Pindar and Sophocles

“often have their light quenched without any obvious reason, and stumble

in the most unfortunate manner.”[237] For those of us who are less, as

well as those who are more, enthusiastic about Sophocles would probably

agree in asking, “Where does he ‘go out in snuff,’ where does he ‘fall

prostrate’ in this fashion?” Surely all the faults cannot be in the lost

plays! We want a rather fuller text of Hyperides than we possess to

enable us quite to appreciate the justice of the comparison of him with

Demosthenes, but that justice is striking even on what we have. On the

other hand, we are rather thrown out by the contrast of Plato and

Lysias—it may be owing to the same cause. Even if the comparison were

one of style only, we should think it odd to make one between Burke and

Berkeley, though the _Sublime and Beautiful_ would help us a little

here.

Footnote 236:

Simonides had used the word literally of the nightingale, and there

are those who hold that Bacchylides merely meant to compliment the

lady’s _voice_. But let us think more nobly of him.

Footnote 237:

σβέννυνται δε ἀλόγως πολλάκις, καὶ πίπτουσιν ἀτυχέστατα.

But all this is a digression,[238] and the author seems to have

[Sidenote: _Hyperboles._] returned to his Metaphors (in a gap where the

demon has interfered with less malice than usual), and to Hyperboles,

under the head of which we get a useful touch of contempt for

Isocrates.[239] We are in deeper and more living waters when we come to

the handling, alas! too brief (though nothing seems here to be lost), of

_ordonnance_, “composition,” selection and arrangement of words. Here is

yet another of those great law-making phrases which are the charter of a

new criticism. “Harmony is to men not only physically connected with

persuasion and pleasure, but a wonderful instrument of magniloquence and

passion.” It may be difficult for us, with our very slight knowledge (it

would, perhaps, be wiser to say almost absolute ignorance) of Greek

pronunciation, to appreciate his illustrations here in detail. But we

can appreciate the principle of them exactly, and apply that principle,

[Sidenote: “_Harmony._”] in any language of which we do know the

pronunciation, with perfect ease and the completest success. The silly

critics (they exist at the present day) who pooh-pooh, as niceties and

fiddle-faddle, the order of words, the application of rhythmical tests

to prose, and the like, are answered here beforehand with convincing

force by a critic whom no one can possibly charge with preferring sound

to sense.

Footnote 238:

I must be allowed to say that it contains one of the most ambitious

and successful passages of Longinus as an original writer—the

vindication of Nature’s command to man to admire the magnificent—in

cap. xxxv. It is a temptation to quote it.

Footnote 239:

οὐκ οἴδ’ ὅπως παιδὸς πρᾶγμα ἔπαθεν διὰ τὴν τοῦ πάντα αὐξητικῶς ἐθέλειν

λὲγειν φιλοτιμίαν.

This refers to prose, but the following chapter carries out the same

principle as to poetry with equal acuteness. Longinus, great as his name

is, probably is but little in the hands of those who object (sometimes

almost with foam at the mouth) to the practice of analysing the mere

harmonic effect of poetry. But it is pleasant to think of these passages

when one reads the outcries, nor is the pleasantness rendered less

pleasant by the subsequent cautions against that over-rhythmical fashion

of writing which falls to the level of mere dance-music.

The caution against over-conciseness and over-prolixity is rather more

of a matter of course, and the strictures on the μικρότης, occasionally

to be found in Herodotus, like some in the earlier parts of the

treatise, sometimes elude us, as is the case with similar verbal

criticisms even in languages with which we are colloquially familiar.

And then there is the curious Conclusion which, as we have said, is no

conclusion at all, as it would seem, and which yet has [Sidenote: _The

Conclusion._] an unmistakable air of “peroration, with [much]

circumstance,” on the everlasting question, “Why is the Sublime so rare

in our time?” In that day, as in this, we learn (the fact being, as in

King Charles II.'s fish-experiment, taken for granted), divers

explanations, chiefly political, were given for the fact. Democracy was

a good nurse of greatness: aristocracy was not. But Longinus did not

agree. It was money-getting and money-seeking, pleasure-loving and

pleasure-hunting, he thought. Plain living and high thinking must be

returned to if the Heights were to be once more scaled. A noble

conclusion, if perhaps only a generous fallacy. Had Longinus had our

illegitimate prerogative-_post_rogative of experience, he would have

known that the blowing of the wind of the spirit admits of no such

explanations as these. Ages of Liberty and Ages of Servitude, Ages of

Luxury and Ages of Simplicity, Ages of Faith and Ages of Freethought—all

give us the Sublime if the right man is there: none will give it us if

he is not. But our critic had not the full premisses before him, and we

could not expect the adequate conclusion.

Yet how great a book have we here! Of the partly otiose disputes about

its date and origin and authorship one or two things are worth

recalling, though for other purposes than those of the disputants. Let

it be remembered that it is not quoted, or even referred to, by a single

writer of antiquity.[240] There is absolutely no evidence for it, except

its own internal character, before the date of its oldest manuscript,

which is assigned to the tenth century. Even if, assuming it to be the

work of Longinus, we suppose it to have been part of one of the works

which _are_ ascribed to him (a possible assumption, see note), there is

still the absence of quotation, still the absence even of reference to

views so clearly formulated, so eloquently enforced, and in some ways so

remarkably different from those of the usual Greek and Roman

rhetorician. That the book can be of very late date—much later, that is

to say, than that of Longinus himself—is almost impossible. One of its

features, the lack of any reference to even a single writer later than

the first century, has indeed been relied upon to prove that it is not

later itself than that date. This is inconclusive for that purpose. But

it makes every succeeding century less and less probable, while the

style, though in some respects peculiar, is not in the least Byzantine.

Footnote 240:

“John of Sicily” (Walz, vi. 225), who in the thirteenth century cites

the lost φιλόλογοι ὁμιλίαι almost as if he was citing the Περὶ Ὕψους,

is certainly no exception. The undated Byzantine (Cramer, _Anecd.

Oxon._, iii. 159, quoted by Professor Roberts after Usener), who

couples Λογγίνου κρίσεις with those of Dionysius, may come nearer, as

may the anonymous scholiast on Hermogenes (Walz, vii. 963), who cites

the ὁμιλίαι on τὸ στομφῶδες, “mouthing.”

This detachment from any particular age—nay, more, this _vita fallens_,

this unrecognised existence of a book so remarkable—stands in no merely

fanciful relation to the characteristics of the book itself. It abides

alone in thought as well as in history. That it is a genuine, if a late,

production of the classical or semi-classical age we cannot reasonably

doubt, for a multitude of reasons, small in themselves but strong in a

bundle,—its style, its diction, its limitations of material, and even

occasionally of literary view, its standards, all sorts of little

touches like the remark about Cicero, and so forth. Yet it has, in the

most important points, almost more difference from than resemblance to

the views of classical critics generally. The much greater antiquity of

Aristotle may be thought to make comparison with him infructuous, if not

unfair. But we have seen already how far Longinus is from Dionysius, how

much further from Plutarch; and we shall see in the next Book how far he

is from Quintilian. Let us look where we will, to critics by profession

or to critics by chance, to the Alexandrians as far as we know them, to

the professional writers on Rhetoric, to Aristophanes earlier and Lucian

later, always we see Longinus apart—among them by dispensation and time,

but not of them by tone, by tendency, by temper.

For though he himself was almost certainly unconscious of it, and might

even have denied the fact with some warmth if it had [Sidenote:

_Modernity of the treatise,_]. been put to him, Longinus has marked out

grounds of criticism very far from those of the ancient period

generally, further still from those which were occupied by any critic

(except Dante) of the Middle Ages and the Classical revival, and close

to, if not in all cases overlapping the territory of, the modern

Romantic criticism itself. As we have seen, the ancient critic was wont

either to neglect the effect of a work of art altogether, and to judge

it by its supposed agreement with certain antecedent requirements, or

else, if effects were considered at all, to consider them from the

merely practical point of view, as in the supposed persuasive effect of

Rhetoric, or from the ethical, as in the purging, the elevating, and so

forth, assigned to Tragedy, and to Poetry generally. Longinus has

changed all this. It is the enjoyment, the transport, the carrying away

of the reader or auditor, that, whether expressedly or not, is always at

bottom the chief consideration with him. He has not lowered the ethical

standard one jot, but he has silently refused to give it precedence of

the æsthetic; he is in no way for lawlessness, but he makes it clear,

again and again, that mere compliance with law, mere fulfilment of the

requirements of the stop-watch and the hundredth-of-an-inch rule, will

not suffice. Aristotle had been forced, equally by his system and his

sense, to admit that pleasure was an end—perhaps the end—of art; but he

blenches and swerves from the consequences. Longinus faces them and

follows them out.

In his attention to rhythm, especially of prose, Longinus is much less

unique, for this point (as we have seen and shall see) was never

neglected by the best ancient critics. But there is again something

particularly distinguishing in his attempt to trace the sources of the

literary pleasure in specimen passages. The ancient tendency is, though

not universally, yet too generally, the other way, to select specimen

passages merely as illustrations of general rules.

And this brings us to his greatest claim of all—that is to say, his

attitude towards his subject as a whole. Although he nowhere [Sidenote:

_or rather sempiternity._] says as much in so many words, no one can

read his book with attention—above all, no one can read it again and

again critically—without seeing that to him literature was not a

schedule of forms, departments, kinds, with candidates presenting

themselves for the critic to admit them to one or the other, on and

during their good behaviour; but a body of matter to be examined

according to its fruits, according to its provision of the literary

pleasure. When it has been examined it is still for the critic to

explain and justify (according to those unwritten laws which govern him)

his decision that this was good, this not so good, this bad,—to point

out the reasons of success and failure, to arrange the symptoms,

classify the methods, and so forth. Where Longinus fell short it was

almost always because ancient literature had not provided him with

enough material of certain kinds, not because he ruled these kinds out

_a priori_. Longinus was no Rymer. We could submit even Shakespeare to

him with very little fear, and be perfectly certain that he would not,

with Rapin, pronounce Dantes Aligerus wanting in fire.[241] Nay, with a

sufficient body of material to set before him, we could trust him with

very much more dangerous cases than Shakespeare and Dantes Aligerus.

Footnote 241:

Sir Thomas Pope Blount, _Characters and Censures of the most

Considerable Poets_. London, 1694. P. 58. “Rapin tells us that Dantes

Aligerus wants fire, and that he has not heat enough.”

Yet, as we have said, he stands alone. We must skip fifteen hundred

years and come to Coleridge before we meet any critic entirely of his

class, yet free from some of his limitations. The hand of the author of

the Περὶ Ὕψους is not subdued, but raised to what he deals in. And his

work remains towering among all other work of the class, the work of a

critic at once Promethean and Epimethean in his kind, learning by the

mistakes of all that had gone before, and presaging, with instinctive

genius, much that was not to come for centuries after.

CHAPTER VI.

BYZANTINE CRITICISM.

PHOTIUS—DETAILED EXAMINATION OF THE ‘BIBLIOTHECA’—IMPORTANCE OF ITS

POSITION AS A BODY OF CRITICAL JUDGMENTS—TZETZES—JOHN THE SICELIOTE.

If the word Byzantine is not quite such a byword as it once was, it

still has for the most part an uncomplimentary connotation. How far that

connotation is justified in reference to our special subject can hardly

be better set forth than by exposition of three books of the middle and

later Byzantine period.[242] The first shall be the remarkable and in a

way famous _Bibliotheca_[243] of Photius in the ninth century; the

second, the _Homeric Allegories_ of Tzetzes in the twelfth; the third,

that commentary on the περὶ ἰδέων of Hermogenes by John the Siceliote in

the thirteenth, which preserves to us our earliest reference to what is

almost certainly the Περὶ Ὕψους, and assigns it to Longinus.

Footnote 242:

Of course many, perhaps most, of the commentators and scholiasts

referred to in chaps. iv. and v. are Byzantine in date.

Footnote 243:

Ed. Bekker. Berlin, 1824. 2 vols. 4to, but paged continuously.

The first is in its way unique. The author, it may be barely necessary

to say, was Patriarch of Constantinople for a period [Sidenote:

_Photius._] of nearly thirty years, though with an interval of ten,

during which he was deposed or deprived (858-867, 877-886), in the

latter half of the ninth century. He was originally a lay statesman,

and, from causes no doubt political as well as religious, was much

engaged in the disputes which led to the final separation between the

Eastern and Western Churches. His birth- and death-dates are not known;

but he was, in the year last mentioned—886—banished by Leo VI. to a

monastery in Armenia. The _Bibliotheca_ purports to be an account or

review of books read during an embassy to Assyria, written for the

benefit, and at the request, of the author’s brother Tarasius. There is

no reason for questioning the excellent Patriarch’s veracity; but if he

actually took with him the two hundred and eighty authors (some of them

very voluminous) whom he summarises, he must have had one of the largest

travelling libraries on record. The form is encyclopædic, each author

having a separate article beginning Ἀνεγνώθη, “there was read:” and to a

great extent these articles consist of summaries of the matter of the

books. This, as it happens, is fortunate. Photius seems to have had a

special fancy for giving _précis_ of narrative, whether ostensibly

historical or avowedly fictitious; and he has thus preserved for us all

or almost all that we know of things so interesting as the _Persica_ of

Ctesias, and the _Babylonica_ or _Sinonis and Rhodanes_ of the romancer

Iamblichus. Naturally enough, a good deal of his matter is theological,

and his abstracts here are seasoned with a sometimes piquant, but seldom

strictly critical, animus. But he by no means confines himself to mere

summary, and we have in his book what we have nowhere else—a sort of

critical review of a very large portion of Greek literature. Pretty full

abstract after his own manner, and some extract of this, will be the

best basis possible for considering the state of literary study and

taste at what was perhaps the only cultivated capital of Europe, if not

(putting the dimmer East out of the question) of the world, at the time

when the classical languages were almost half a millennium past their

real flourishing time, and when as yet only Anglo-Saxon to certainty,

and some other Teutonic dialects probably, had arisen to represent the

new vernaculars in any kind of literary performance.

Photius observes no order in his notices, which would appear to be

genuine notes of reading; and most of his earliest entries are short,

and devoted to writers possessing at best interest of matter. The first

that has struck me as possessing the interest of literature is Art. 26,

on Synesius. The characterisation of the good Bishop of Ptolemaïs runs

thus: “As for phrase, he [Sidenote: _Detailed examination of the_

Bibliotheca.] is lofty and has ὄγκος” (the word we encounter so often

and find so hard to translate), “but swerves off to the over-poetical.”

“His miscellaneous epistles” (the judgment just quoted is on his

philosophical treatises on Providence, on Monarchy, &c.) “drip with

grace and pleasure,[244] not without strength and substance[245] of

thought.” The rest is personal and religious, but extremely interesting.

Footnote 244:

χάριτος καὶ ἡδονῆς ἀποστάζουσαι.

Art. 44 deals with Philostratus and his famous life of Apollonius of

Tyana. The bulk of the notice, as we should expect, both from the

Patriarch’s fancy for analysis of narrative and from his religious bent,

is busied with the matter; but we have some actual criticism. He is as

to his phrase “clear, graceful, and aphoristic, and teeming with

sweetness;[246] bent on obtaining honour by archaism and the

fashionableness [or new-fangledness] of his constructions.”[247]

Josephus has Art. 47. He is “clean in phrasing, and clever at setting

forth the intention of his speech distinctly and pleasantly; persuasive

and agreeable in his speeches even if occasion compels him to speak in

different senses; fertile in enthymemes on either side, and with gnomæ

at command if ever any man had them; also most competent to infuse

passions into his discourse, and a proved hand at awaking compassion and

softening the reader.” All which (observe the strict rhetorical form of

it) is very handsome towards that Ebrew Jew. The note (49) on Cyril of

Alexandria, that he “keeps the character and idiom of the appropriate

speech,” that “his style is fashioned and, as it were, forced to express

idiosyncratic idea,”[248] and “is like loose poetry that disdains

metre,” is itself thoroughly idiosyncratic, and speaks Cyril very well.

Two others, 55 and 75, of a somewhat acrid character, on Johannes

Philoponus (“Matæoponus rather,” quoth our Patriarch), are, though

acrid, by no means uncritical. All these are late and mainly

ecclesiastical writers, though of a certain general literary interest.

The first author, at once of considerable age and of purely literary

value, to be very fully handled is the above-mentioned Ctesias, and we

have only fragments whereby to control Photius’s criticism of him. But

the paragraph which comes at the end of the abstract of the _Persica_,

and applies both to that and to the _Indica_, is itself worth

abstracting. “This historian is very clear and simple in language, so

that his style is mixed with much pleasure. He uses the Ionic dialect,

not throughout, like Herodotus, but partially. Nor does he, like that

writer, divert his story to unseasonable digressions. But from the

mythical matters with which Herodotus is reproached neither does Ctesias

abstain, especially in the book called _Indica_. Still, the pleasure of

his history consists chiefly in the arrangement of his narrative, which

is strong in the pathetic and unexpected, and in the variation of it by

dint of the mythical. His style is slipshod more than is fitting, often

falling into mere vulgarity. But the style of Herodotus, both in this

and other respects of the power and art of the Word, is the canon of the

Ionic dialect.”

Footnote 245:

πυκνότης, which some would render “shrewdness.”

Footnote 246:

βρύων γλυκύτητος.

Footnote 247:

τῷ ἀρχαϊσμῷ καὶ ταῖς καινοπρεπεστέραις τῶν συντάξεων εμφιλοτιμουμενος.

Footnote 248:

εἰς ἰδιάζουσαν ἰδέαν ἐκβεβιασμένος.

Appian’s _Roman History_ and Arrian’s _Parthica_ come in for successive

notice, but there is nothing about the latter’s literary character till

the much later and fuller notice of his Alexander-book at 91, where

Photius, as is specially his wont with historians, gives a full

appreciation. The pupil of Epictetus, he thinks, "is second to none

among those who have best drawn up histories, for he is both first-rate

at succinct narration, and he never hurts the continuousness of his

history by unseasonable divagations and parentheses.[249] He is original

[“new-fangled,” the usual translation of καινοπρεπὴς, has a too

unfavourable twist in it], rather by the arrangement of his words than

by his vocabulary; and he manages this in such a fashion that hardly

otherwise could the tale be told more clearly and luminously. He uses a

vivid, euphonious, well-turned style, and has smoothness well mixed with

grandeur.[250] His neologisms are not directed to mere innovation _à

perte de vue_,[251] but close and emphatic, so as to be real figures of

speech and not merely change for ordinary words.[252] Wherefore

clearness is his companion, not merely in this respect, but most of all

in the arrangement and order and constitution of his style, which is the

very craft-secret of clearness. For the use of merely straightforward

periods is within the power of mere uncultivated persons,[253] and, if

it be maintained without admixture, brings the style down to flatness

and meanness, whereto Arrian, clear as he is, has not approached. And he

makes use of elliptic figures not in respect of his period but of his

diction, so as never to become obscure: if any one should attempt to

supply what is wanting, it would seem to tend towards the superfluous,

and not really to complete the ellipse. The variety of his figures is

also one of his strongest points—not changing at once from simple usage,

but forming themselves gently and from the beginning, so as neither to

annoy with satiety nor to worry by overcrowding. In short, if any be set

against him in the matter of historical composition, many even of the

old classics[254] would be found his inferiors in _taxis_."

Footnote 249:

It is odd to find the hatred of the harmless necessary parenthesis,

the delight of all full minds and quick wits, and the terror of the

ignorant and slow, formulated so frequently by Photius.

Footnote 250:

τὸ λεῖον ἔχει τῷ μεγέθει συγκιρνάμενον.

Footnote 251:

εἰς τὸ πόῤῥω.

Footnote 252:

ἐναλλαγὴν συνήθους ὀνόματος. This is an acute criticism, and I do not,

at the time of writing, remember that it had been anticipated.

Undoubtedly most practitioners of ornate and unusual style do merely

“give change for ordinary words,” that is to say, they think in these,

and then just write something less usual in place of them.

Footnote 253:

ἰδιώταις

Footnote 254:

τῶν ἀρχαίων.

Appian has earlier had less elaborate praise, as being terse and plain

in phrase, as truth-loving as possible, an expounder of strategic

methods, and very good indeed at raising the depressed spirit of an

army, or soothing its excitement, and exhibiting passion by means of

speeches. It is odd enough, after the exaltation of Arrian—a good writer

but no marvel—to the skies, to come across the following brief and

grudging estimate, inserted in the shortest of summaries, of a man of

the highest genius like Herodotus. Photius here, as elsewhere, does

justice to the Halicarnassian as a canon of Ionic. “But he employs all

manner of old wives' fables and divagations, whereby an intellectual

sweetness runs through him,[255] though these things sometimes obscure

the comprehension of the history and efface its proper and corresponding

type, since truth will not have her clearness clouded by myths, nor

admit divagations (_parecbaseis_) further than is fitting.” This is

rather dispiriting for the first really great writer whom we meet; and

the long judgment upon Æschines, which follows shortly, makes little

amends, because the orators had been criticised and characterised _ad

nauseam_ for a thousand years. Later we have no ill criticism of Dion

Cassius—indeed Photius seems more at ease with post-Christian writers,

even if they be non-Christians, than with the classics proper, or

ἀρχαῖοι as he calls them. The careful and somewhat artificial style of

this historian, his imitation of Thucydides, and some other things, are

well but briefly noted.

Footnote 255:

δι’ ὧν αὐτῷ ἡ κατὰ διάνοιαν γλυκύτης διαῤῥει. The translation in the

text, which may be varied as "which gives him [or "is the source of"]

his pervading intellectual charm," and which Professor Butcher

approves, seems to suit the immediate context best. But διαῤῥέω very

frequently means “run _off_” or “_away_,” and the general attitude of

disapproval which Photius assumes towards the Herodotean fabling might

seem to warrant “whereby his attraction for the intellect disappears.”

It is evident that the good Patriarch was no sparing or infrequent

novel-reader, for, as has been said, he is copious both on some novels

that we have and on one that we have not. The somewhat monotonous form,

however, of the Lower Greek Romance gives him more room for analysis of

story than for criticism of art. He justly extols the propriety of

Heliodorus, is properly shocked by the looseness of Achilles Tatius, and

puts the lost Iamblichus between them in this respect. His criticism of

the _Æthiopica_—of many million novel reviews the interesting first—may

be given, apart, of course, from the argument of the book, which, as is

usual with him, and not uncommon with his followers to-day, forms the

bulk of the article.

“The book (_syntagma_) is of the dramatic kind [this is noteworthy], and

it uses a style suitable to the plan, for it abounds in simplicity and

sweetness, and in pathetic situations actual or expected. The narrative

is diversified and unexpected, and has strange chance salvations[256]

and bright and pure diction. If, as is reasonable, it sometimes indulges

in tropes, they, too, are brilliant, and exhibit the matter in hand. The

periods are symmetrical and, on the whole, arranged with a view to

succinctness. The plot and the rest are correspondent to the style. His

yarn[257] is of the love of a man and a woman, and he shows an anxious

and careful observance of propriety of sentiment.”

Footnote 256:

σωτηρίαις, a capital phrase for the “rescue or two [and twenty],” the

“hairbreadth 'scapes” of the Romance.

Footnote 257:

This is irresistible for ὑφαίνει.

In Art. 77, on the not very interesting subject of Eunapius, we have the

familiar phrase “New Edition” in its literal Greek form.[258] A fresh

example of the interest he takes in history appears under the head of

Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and in Art. 90 Libanius supplies him with

occasion for criticising a rhetorician pure and simple. He is, he

thinks, exhibited to the best advantage[259] in his “plasmatic”

[speeches written on imaginary topics] and gymnastic discourses rather

than in his others, for by his excessive elaboration and

busybodyness[260] in these others he has hurt the grace and charm of

the,[261] as one may say, naïf and impromptu style, and deprived it of

verisimilitude, causing frequent obscurity by insertions, and sometimes

even by abstraction of the necessary. “But in other respects he is a

canon and standard of Attic speech.”

Footnote 258:

νέα ἐκδόσις.

Footnote 259:

αὐτὸς ἑαυτοῦ χρησιμώτερός εστιν.

Footnote 260:

περιεργία.

Footnote 261:

τήν ἔμφυτον τοῦ λόγου καὶ αὐτοσχέδιον (ὡς ἄν τις εἴποι.)

Lucian and the mysterious Lucius of Patræ seem to have occupied him

together, and he discusses the authorship of the _Ass_ with some acumen,

recognising in Lucian a merely satiric intention, in Lucius a serious

belief in magic and marvels. As for Lucian himself (respecting whom he

has preserved for us the great epigram quoted above), he acknowledges

the universality of the Samosatan’s satire of all things Greek, their

god-making and their _Aselgeia_, the extravagances of their poets and

their political mistakes, the emptiness and pretentiousness of their

philosophy. In fact, says Photius, in an approach at least to the true

Higher Criticism, “his whole pains are spent on producing a prose Comedy

of Greek things. He himself seems to be one of those who worship nothing

seriously; he scoffs and mocks at other’s doxies, but lays down no creed

of his own, unless one should say that it is a creed to be creedless. In

style he is of the very best, brilliant and classical, and signally

distinguished in diction, and of all others a lover of good order and

purity, with a clear and symmetrical magnificence. His composition is

arranged so that the reader seems not to be reading prose, and as though

a very pleasant song, without distinct musical accompaniment, were

dropping into the ears of the hearers. And altogether, as we said, his

style is of the very best, and ill-matched with the subjects at which he

chose to laugh.”

Photius is not lavish of the word _aristos_, and it is only fair to say

that, for its day and way, this criticism is not far itself from

deserving the epithet.

After some shorter notices, including a good many of Lexicons (Photius

himself, it need hardly be said, was a lexicographer), we come, at Art.

159, to Isocrates, on whom the Byzantine judgment is again noteworthy.

He has more, Photius thinks, of the sophist than, like the other Nine,

of the actual advocate. “His readers can see at once that he employs a

distinct and pure style, and shows a great deal of care about the

craftsmanship of his speeches, so that his order and his care overreach

themselves a little and become excessive. In fact, this excess of

apparatus does not so much provide genuine arguments as tasteless

ineptitude.”[262]

Footnote 262:

τὸ ἀπειρόκαλον, one of the most damaging of Greek critical terms.

“Again, he is wanting in ethical character and truth and nervousness of

style (γοργότης.) Of sublimity, so far as it suits political discourses,

he mixes a very good dose, and suitably to his clearness. But his style

is more languid[263] than it ought to be. And he is not least blamed for

attention to trifles, and a balancing of clauses[264] which disgusts.

But we say this in reference to the excellence of his speeches, pointing

out what fails, and is exceptional in them, inasmuch as in comparison

with some of those who have made bold to write speeches, even his

shortcomings would appear to be excellence.”

Footnote 263:

ἄτονος.

Footnote 264:

σμικρολογία καὶ τὸ προσκορὲς τιον παρισώσεων. It is needless to say

that this προσκορὲς, this “satiated nausea” of the balanced antithetic

sentence, has recurred as regularly as the resort to the most obvious,

and, so long as it is fresh, most effective, of rhetorical devices.

Immediately before this article on Isocrates there is a very shrewd note

(and one which is “for thoughts” to any one who has ever written books)

on the _Sophistike Paraskeue_ of Phrynichus. “This writer, if any ever

was, is fullest of various knowledge, but otherwise redundant and

garrulous: _for when it was open to him to have got the matter

completely finished off, without missing a single important point, in

not a fifth part of his actual length, he, by saying things out of

season, has stretched it out to an unmanageable bulk; and while he has

collected for others' use the matter of a good and suitable treatise, he

cannot be said to have made much use of it himself_.”

It would be possible to extend these excerpts and abstracts very

considerably from my notes of reading the great mass of the

_Bibliotheca_; though the larger part of that mass is itself made up,

not of literary criticisms at all, but, as has been said, of summaries,

abstracts, and extracts. In not a few cases the longest articles deal

with commentaries or anthologies, the Platonic studies of the

rhetorician Aristides, the _meletæ_ or declamations of Himerius, the

_Bibliotheca_ of Diodorus, the fortunately still extant

Commonplace-books of Stobæus, and the like. But the foregoing pages have

probably given sufficient foundation for a study of the Photian

position, which may be taken, without rashness, as a very favourable

representative of Byzantine criticism generally.[265]

Footnote 265:

And it cannot be too often repeated that when Byzantine men of letters

were not criticising they were often doing something better _for us_.

He would be a sorry critic himself who would not give a wilderness of

all but the very greatest members of his own class for John Stobæus or

Constantine Cephalas.

In making this estimate we must first of all take note of [Sidenote:

_Importance of its position as a body of critical judgment._] certain

limitations, which may be accidental but which also may not. It is at

least curious that he never deals directly with a poet. Even his

indirect references, borrowed from his authors, to the greater Greek

verse-writers are few, and, speaking with the reserves due in the case

of so voluminous and peculiar a compilation as the _Bibliotheca_, I do

not remember any independent poetical criticism of his. On the other

hand, such criticisms as those which have been quoted above on Lucian,

on Isocrates, on Phrynichus, and others, show, in the first place, no

contemptible critical acumen, and in the second place, a critical

attitude which is worthy of a good deal of attention. For the literary

characteristics of his authors Photius distinctly “has a good eye”: he

can see a church by daylight and a little more also. We may even say

that he shows a good deal more detachment, more faculty of seeing his

man in the round, than any purely classical critic displays. Here and

there, as in his eulogy of Arrian, he is a little too technically

rhetorical, and has evidently not got rid of the notion of the Figures

as things possessing a real existence. And there is more than a trace in

him of the growth of that critical jargon which has been noticed above,

certain phrases recurring rather too often, like “gusto” with

old-fashioned critics, and divers terms, which it is not necessary to

mention, with new-fangled ones. But technicalities are, at their worst,

an evidence that the _techne_ exists. Further, it would be, as has been

seen, extremely unjust to regard Photius as a mere phrase-monger. His

criticism of Lucian is as comprehensive as it is shrewd, it is

“criticism of life” as well as criticism of literature; that of

Isocrates shows that he was not to be caught by mere scholastic

elegance; that of Phrynichus, that he had an eye for method; his notices

of the Romancers, that he could appreciate and relish kinds out of the

beaten track of classical literary classification and practice; the

remark on “merely straightforward periods” is a just and shrewd one. Not

only would Photius have made an exceedingly good reviewer, but we may

say that he is almost the patriarch of reviewers in two senses, that he

is the first of all such as have dealt practically with literature from

the reviewer’s point of view.

To say this is of course not to give unmitigated and indisputable

praise. There is no lack of advocates of the devil who will say that the

reviewer’s point of view is not easily found in a very original age, or

by a very original genius. It may be so—the age of Photius himself was

certainly not a very original age, except in countries where the point

of view of the reviewer was as certainly quite unknown. But this is not

the question for us; the question for us is, Have we met this attitude?

Have we come upon any one occupying this point of view before? And the

answer must, I think, be, “No; we have not.” Dionysius, of all our

writers, comes nearest to it, for Quintilian is too summary, and

Longinus is considering rather a single quality of literature, as shown

in divers authors, than divers authors by themselves, and as presenting

a combination of qualities in each case. What we would give almost

anything for is a collection of such reviews by Aristotle; and we have

not got them. We do not know that Aristotle ever thought of such a

thing,[266] though he might well have made it as a preparation for the

_Rhetoric_ and the _Poetics_, just as he made his collection of

“polities” as a preparation for the _Politics_.

Footnote 266:

Unless, which one would rather not think, he meant the _Problems_ (_v.

supra_ p. 49 _sq._) as such.

The absence of poetical criticism from Photius is specially to be

regretted, because it leaves us in doubt as to his power of recognising

and analysing, not merely the finer subtleties of form, but the more

complex and interesting kinds of literary matter. His own interests, it

is pretty clear, were, though he had the liking for novels which is

often found in men of science and business, chiefly scientific,

historical, and philosophical, including, of course, religion in

philosophy. There is probably no Greek writer, whose subject in any way

admitted of it, who has said so little about Homer. In dealing with

Stobæus he has the patience (though, as has been seen, he is far from

being a mere enumerator) to enumerate all the heads of the _Florilegium_

and the _Eclogæ_, and all the authors, hundreds of them as there are,

whom the anthologist has laid under contribution. But he is tempted into

no critical asides about them. He is essentially positive—frankly busied

with matter, or with the more material side of form.

Yet to the historian of criticism he has a singular interest, because of

that position of origin which has been noted. Cicero and Pliny in their

libraries were in a position to do much the same thing; had, as we shall

see, a kind of dim velleity of doing it now and then, but did it not.

Athenæus, if he had cared less for cooks and courtesans, more for

literature; Aulus Gellius and Macrobius, if mere philology on the one

hand, and mere folk-lore and mythology on the other, had not drawn them

aside, would probably have anticipated him. But no one actually has;

none has applied to the library or its prose division the process which

goes to the making of a _catalogue raisonné_ in painting. No doubt

Photius leaves a good deal to be done, independently of his silence on

poetry and drama. His comparison is so limited as to be almost

non-existent; it is much if he can compare Heliodorus, Iamblichus, and

Achilles Tatius in reference to the treatment of matters erotic; Ctesias

and Herodotus, on the score of resisting, or succumbing to,

story-telling digression. But even in this there is the germ, the

rudiment, of the great Comparative Method. So again the other great Lamp

of Criticism, the historical estimate, still has its shutter drawn for

him. A vague distinction between the ἀρχαῖοι and the moderns is indeed

not uncommon; but we have, so far as I have noticed, no distinct line

drawn between the two, and both are huddled and jumbled together.

Photius has not yet risen to that highest conception of criticism which

involves the “grasping” of each author in his complete self, and the

placing of him in the general literary map or genealogy (whichever phase

may be preferred) of the world. And lastly, the silly old etiquette of

silence about Latin still seems to weigh, if unconsciously, on him. He

does indeed allude to the birth-year of Virgil. In his notices of

historians of Rome he necessarily has to mention some Roman matters, and

he mentions that Cicero was slain while reading the _Medea_. But my

memory, assisted by Bekker’s excellent index, traces no critical remark,

comparative or independent, about any great Latin writer, and nothing

more than the barest mention of one or two by name. Yet, with all these

drawbacks, the niche we have indicated is securely his, though he has

scarcely yet been established in it.[267]

Footnote 267:

There is in Photius a later notice of Isocrates, in connection with

others of the usual set of Attic orators; and these are chiefly

interesting for some references to the literary historian Cæcilius,

referred to by Longinus, and to Longinus himself as “the critic who

flourished under Claudius” (predecessor of Aurelian), “and took great

share in the struggle of Zenobia, queen of the Osrhoeni.” But the

criticism on Demosthenes referred to can hardly be that of the Περὶ

Ὕψους.

If an example be required between Photius and John, it may be found (of

no encouraging character) in the almost contemptible [Sidenote:

_Tzetzes._] _Homeric Allegories_ of Tzetzes[268] written in that dreary

“political” verse, the only consolation of which is the remembrance

that, whether as origin or echo, it has sometimes been connected with

the charming _Meum est propositum_ metre of the Latin Middle Ages. In

Tzetzes, the allegorical method neither reaches its pinnacle of

fantasticality as in the _Romance of the Rose_,—there is often something

faintly fascinating there,—nor attains to the rather imposing mazes and

meanderings of fifteenth-century personification, but stumbles along in

pedestrian gropings of this kind[269] (on _Il._ i. 517 _sq._): “The

groaning of Zeus signifieth a puff of wind moving the eyebrows of him,

and conducting the thickness of clouds. The downcoming of Thetis

indicates that there was rain, which is also a kind of consentment of

assistance. And the coming of Zeus to his own home is the restoration of

the atmosphere to its former condition, having thinned out the thickness

of the cloud to rain. The rising up of the gods from their seats is the

confusion and disturbance of the elements,” &c., &c. The much-ridiculed

allegorical morals of the _Gesta Romanorum_ are sense, poetry, piety, to

this ineffably dull and childish attempt to substitute a cheap

pseudo-scientific Euhemerism for the criticism of literature. If

Allegory had not too profitably assisted at the cradle of Greek

literature, she certainly infested its death-bed in her most decrepit

and malignant aspect.

Footnote 268:

Ed. Boissonade, Paris, 1851.

Footnote 269:

Ed. cit., p. 81, l. 299 _sq._

At the same time, we must not be too contemptuous of Byzantine

criticism. Had the vast mass of the later rhetorical [Sidenote: _John

the Siceliote._] scholiasts yielded nothing to the sifting but the

quotation in John the Siceliote (though as from the _Philological

Homilies_, not the Περὶ Ὕψους), by name, of the Longinian censure on the

_Orithyia_, it would almost be justified in existing, not to mention

references in others, one of which shows us that in the same collection

Longinus gave a discussion (the tendency of which we can easily guess)

on the _stomphodes_ or “mouthy.”[270] But the siftings are not quite

limited to these two.

Footnote 270:

_V. supra_, p. 171 _note_.

John, who appears possibly, if not at all certainly, to have had the

surname of Doxopater, and to have been sometimes designated by it,

appears also to have been a monk. He must (on his own authority) have

observed the virtue of Poverty much better than some of his fellows, and

few of them can have more avoided the vice of laziness. His voluminous

works devoted to Rhetoric are ranged by Walz[271] under eleven titles:

to wit, Prolegomena and Homilies on the Progymnasmata of Aphthonius,

General Prolegomena to Rhetoric, Commentaries on the States, Inventions

and Ideas of Hermogenes, Epideictic speeches on the Horse and against

the Saracens, a destructive discussion of the myth of Prometheus, a

“Basileios” and a “Politikon.” These works contain some personal details

and complaints, which, if he subsequently became Patriarch of

Constantinople, were heard by Fortune in her less savage mood; and he

seems to have busied himself with theology and history, as well as

rhetoric. But it is very difficult to place either his patriarchate, or

consequently his life, chronologically. He might have been the John

Glycas who held the dignity from 1316 to 1320, when he abdicated; but

Glycas seems to have been married. So perhaps he was John Camater, an

earlier occupant (under the Latin Empire) of the see in 1204.

Footnote 271:

Vol. vi. p. 5 _sq._

All this, it will be seen, is a rather unsubstantial pageant; but John’s

works are solid enough. Even the _Prolegomena_ (taking them as his) of

Doxopater, and the _Commentaries on the Ideas_ (to which alone we have

access), fill five hundred pages. It is in the latter that we are to

look for anything touching our subject. They are rather wide-ranging, to

which character of theirs we doubtless owe the Longinian citation.

Neither did John always observe that scrupulous accuracy which is so

dear to the heart of a certain class of critic, that, like a true

altruist, he would have every one, except himself, possess it. At the

opening he writes “Themistocles” for “Miltiades.” But his erudition is

considerable, and his qualities in other respects not contemptible. It

is, however, very noticeable that he is as much inclined to the general

and disinclined from the particular as if he had lived fifteen hundred

years earlier. Although he is no slavish Platonist (he has somewhere the

happy phrase Πλάτων Πλάτωνος ἀναξίως. “Did Plato? the less Plato he”),

he is fully Platonic in his scorn of the μερικαὶ ἰδέαι, of the mere

“characterising” speeches, Lysiac and Isocratean, and so forth, and aims

at the “circumprehensive and comprehensive” idea and phrase which

transcends all these. Thus we are once more face to face with that

putting of the cart before the horse which has met us so often—with that

discussion of δεινότης and γλυκύτης which is no doubt a capital thing in

its way, but which ought to be preluded and, as military men say,

“prepared” by a long, by an almost infinite, examination of the

individual exponents and practitioners of the Vigorous and the Sweet.

It is, of course, fair to remember that he is annotating Hermogenes, and

that he can hardly be expected to follow methods different from those of

his text. But it necessarily follows that his loyalty leads him away

from the fields most likely to be fertile for us, and, when he does

approach them, directs him mainly to the Orators, and to them chiefly,

if not wholly, from the strictly rhetorical point of view. Yet he is by

no means ill to read, though a little technical and abstract, on rhythm

(opening of Bk. i. chap. i.); and if he has gone no further in reference

to φαντασία than all before him except Philostratus, that is no great

reproach to him. Undoubtedly, however, his chief—as at the same time his

most tantalising—attraction is his reference to things which, in his

comparatively modern period, must have still existed, but which seem now

to be irrecoverably lost. Such is his quotation, p. 93, of certain

remarks of Longinus on the poet Menelaus.[272] We may doubt whether

definite poetical criticism from the excellent John would have been

satisfactory, when we find him assigning “out-and-out”[273] poetical

quality to the soft inanity of Isocrates, and the want of it to the

rough fire of Thucydides. Yet in the lower and “composition-book” kind

of criticism he is not to seek—the synopsis of clearness at p. 173 being

a very workmanlike composition.[274]

Footnote 272:

Apparently this poet, “by taking pains, changed an unhappily gifted

nature into exactness and blamelessness.”

Footnote 273:

ἄντικρυς.

Footnote 274:

Besides citing the _Orithyia_ passage John also refers to Longinus as

admiring Moses (Walz, vi. 211), which, of course, strengthens the

supposition that he had the Περὶ Ὕψους before him not a little (_v.

supra_, pp. 156, 162).

And so, without further minute examination of this curiosity, we may

take some general view of it as the last words—or fairly representative

of the last words—of Greek rhetorical criticism, unaffected by mediæval

literature, unaffected even by Latin, to any considerable, or at least

avowed, extent, but turning round and round the long-guarded treasures

of its own special hoard, like the dragons of fable. To us, perhaps, the

hoard does not seem very inviting. The enormous apparatus of distinction

and terminology is set to work, almost exclusively, on matter which has

neither the attraction of the highest æsthetic problems, nor the

practical interest and profit of direct literary criticism of

particulars. There is abundance of learning, and by no means a dearth of

mother-wit. But the worst side of Scholasticism—the side which was long

unjustly taken for the whole, but which _is_ a side thereof—makes itself

almost universally felt. Sometimes one almost thinks of one of the

keenest, if not the most generally delectable, strokes of Rabelaisian

satire, the duel of signs between Panurge and Thaumast. This -_tes_ and

that -_ia_ hurtle through the air almost without conveying

understanding, though they may darken a good deal. With sufficient pains

and goodwill, you may disinter many a shrewd remark, many a really

useful definition, many a scrap of precious information, by no means

unintelligently used. But on the whole, the impression is as of the

ghost of Rhetoric struggling against being re-embodied as the soul of

Criticism.

INTERCHAPTER I.

We have endeavoured, in the foregoing Book, to survey—from the actual

texts, and admitting no conjectural or theoretical reconstruction—the

history of literary criticism in Greece and the Greek Empire till its

fall. It is our duty in this first halt to survey this survey—to see

what results it actually gives us, to classify and arrange them, to

account for them as philosophically as possible, and, without digressing

into the quicksands of theory, to lay down the solid road of logical and

historical perspective.

We have seen that criticism in Greece began from two different sources,

neither of which, perhaps, was, or could have been expected to be,

likely to supply it in an absolutely unmixed condition. There was, in

the first place, the strong Greek philosophising tendency, working upon

the earliest documents (the most important, then as now, identified with

the name of Homer), and subjecting them to processes which oftenest took

the form of a kind of rationalising allegory. The second was the

invention, for more or less practical purposes, of the art of Rhetoric

or Persuasive Composition. As, in the first place, the collection of

written literature was very small, and as the oratorical character

impressed itself more or less strongly upon nearly _all_ literature in

the process of publication, this dominance of Oratory was long

maintained, and continued, almost to the latest times, to prevent

Rhetoric from assuming its proper etymological position as

“speech-craft” in the widest sense, as the art of artificially arranged

language.

But this inconvenience, always more or less existing, was mitigated by

practice in divers ways. As actual literature, both prose and verse,

mustered and multiplied, and as it was more and more enjoyed by the keen

Greek appetite for pleasures of all kinds, it at the same time presented

more and more temptation to the equally keen Greek aptitude for

philosophical inquiry. Larger and larger treasuries were made available

for quotation and imitation; more and more kinds of literature were

presented to the student for investigation, classification, inquiry into

sources, methods, effects. And so after a century, or a century and a

half, of progress and exercise, of which little remains to us except the

brilliant, but from this point of view wayward, work of Plato, we are

confronted, in the work of Aristotle, with an Art of Poetry, incomplete

in certain ways, but singularly mature in its own way, with an Art of

Prose which, though it has not yet by any means recognised its real

nature and estate, and persists in regarding itself as an Art of

Persuasion merely, has yet accumulated many valuable observations, and

has made the paths of future investigators fairly straight and smooth.

While, however, the oratorical preoccupation prevented Rhetoric from

attaining the development which might otherwise have been expected, both

Rhetoric and Poetics were very seriously obstructed by the unequal

growth of literary kinds within Greek itself, and by the absence of any

other literature with which to compare such kinds as existed, and by

which to discern the absence of those that did not exist. The whole of

Greek Poetic was prejudicially affected—and the affection has continued

to be a source of evil in all criticism since—by the accidental lateness

of prose fiction in Greek literature; just as the whole of Greek

Rhetoric was prejudicially affected by the accidental predominance of

Greek oratory. The habit—in the main a sound one—of generalising from

the actual facts, led to very arbitrary theories of more literary kinds

than one. It was assumed that what we may call “periodic” Epic was the

only kind; and Romance, which may be very fairly called a “loose” Epic,

was barred as improper. Still more was the same distinction ignored in

drama; where a single, though in its way very perfect, form of Tragedy

was arbitrarily assumed to be the only one possible or permissible. So

the accidental and easily separable extravagances and licences of the

Ancient Comedy were allowed to obscure its merits, and depress its rank,

in the eyes of the critic. Lyric—perhaps the very highest of all

literary kinds, as it must be the oldest, and is the most

perennial—became a mere appendage to tragedy. The great kind of History,

in which Greece had already produced such magnificent examples, was in

the same way regarded as a sort of baggage-waggon to oratorical

Rhetoric; and the dialogic form which was preferred in philosophy,

partly owing to the habits of the nation, and partly owing to the

towering eminence of Plato, was in the same way, or much the same way,

allowed or forced to attach itself to the same train.

But these mischiefs, though sufficiently considerable, and assisted by

the ignorance (changed latterly in the worse days to a contemptuous

ignoring) of other languages, were by no means the equals of those

caused directly by this ignorance, while they were aggravated by it in

every way. If, while we are certainly not superior to the ancients in

most branches of literature, where comparison is possible, we may

challenge them more safely in criticism, it is due almost, if not quite

wholly, to what has been called the illegitimate advantage of our

possession of an infinitely larger stock of accumulated literature, and

of the fact that this literature is distributed over the most various

times, nations, and languages. It is the rarest thing at any time to

find a critic of the first class who is not acquainted with literatures

besides his own; and it is almost invariable to find that the mistakes

which great critics make arise out of ignorance or forgetfulness of

other literatures besides their own. But even in antiquity there is no

critic of, or approaching, this first class, except Aristotle, who

suffered the full exposure to this disability. As a “tongue of

comparison” Longinus knew Latin: Dionysius and Quintilian, who, if not

critics of the first class, are not far off it, knew, the one Latin, the

other Greek. But Aristotle (unless the legends about Alexander having

sent him Indian communications have any basis, and unless we take the

references of Plato and others to Egyptian stories as having much more

solid ground than there is any reason to accord them) had none, and

could have had none: while, even if he had been stocked with Egyptian

and Sanscrit, these would have done him but little good, though they

might have corrected his delusions as to the necessary connection of

poetry and fiction. It must always be reckoned as one of the most fatal

proofs of the literary inferiority of the Roman genius that the younger

literature, though it enjoyed the bilingual advantage to the full, made

so little advance on the older in criticism.

For the three centuries between Aristotle and Dionysius we are but ill

provided with original texts. But both from what we have, and from such

notices as are trustworthy, we can be tolerably sure that attention was

almost entirely devoted, on the one side to the verbal or material

criticism of the Alexandrian and Pergamene schools, on the other to

technical Rhetoric. Now the former, though a most necessary ancilla to

literary appreciation proper, is always to be kept in proper

subordination to her mistress; and the conditions of the latter, though

in one sense favourable to criticism (inasmuch as the stock of actual

literature was always increasing, and the temptation to turn to it from

mere declamation-making might at least be expected to be always

stronger), was in itself becoming more and more a futile technique.

Symbouleutic oratory (above vestry rank) was killed and kept dead by the

petty tyrants, the less successors of Alexander, and lastly the Roman

rule. Judicial Rhetoric tended to confine itself to minor causes. Only

Epideictic, the most dangerous of the kinds, began to flourish more and

more, and resulted by degrees, as we have seen, in the creation of a

singular profession or pseudo-profession, the members of which had about

them something of the travelling lecturer, something of the popular

preacher, something—nay, a good deal—of the hack book-maker, and not a

little of the journalist pure and simple. Their own study of literature,

unless they kept to the stock passages of the textbooks, must have been

fairly thorough; but literature was to them partly what Burton’s

_Anatomy_ was to Captain Shandon, a mere dictionary of quotations,

partly a collection of patterns. Very rarely did they take it by itself

even for the canvas of one of their show-orations, and when they did it

was seldom or never from the point of view of appreciation of strictly

literary beauty.

For about half a century before and a century after the Christian era

the record, even putting Latin criticism aside altogether, is a more

distinct one. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Plutarch, and Dion Chrysostom,

give us a good deal more material than we have yet had. But the results

of the inspection of it are not wholly satisfactory. Dionysius of

Halicarnassus is, as has been said, perhaps our typical specimen of the

literary critic of antiquity. He has far less force and method and

originality than Aristotle; but then he is a student confining himself

to Rhetoric and History, not a world-philosopher, taking up the

philosophy of literature merely as part of a whole. He has far less

genius than Longinus; but he is also far more copiously preserved. We

read him with respect; we meet just and acute observations in him, we

can even occasionally compliment him on something like (never quite) the

“grasp” of the comic fragment. But he is still partly under the

limitations of his technical rhetoric, partly under others less easy to

describe exactly; and he neglects Latin literature, by his time a very

considerable entity. He cannot wholly bring himself to regard literature

as literature. With Plutarch the case is much worse, for it is evident

that he will not do this at all. It is an educating and ethical

influence; a convenient storehouse of fact and example; a respectable

profession; but not a great, a sovereign, and an infinitely delightful

art. As for Dion (the most literary of the pure rhetoricians, and a

favourable example of them), he is only an entertainer, the showman of

another art, which is not quite coarse, but is certainly not in the

highest sense fine. Lucian, somewhat later, is a true artist, a true man

of letters, and occasionally a critic, endowed with unerring eyes and

the very Sword of Sharpness itself, but he is this only at times, and

even at those times he is too negative.

If we advance a little in point of time and turn our attention to the

strict teaching and practice of Rhetoric itself, from the second century

onward, and probably backward almost to the very time of Aristotle, the

spectacle is even less satisfactory. The work, of which Hermogenes and

Aphthonius are the coryphæi, leading an innumerable chorus of followers

and commentators, who continue for more than a thousand years, is not

exactly contemptible work. Work conducted with extreme diligence and

also, at any rate in some cases, with remarkable alertness and acuteness

of mind, can never be wholly contemptible. But it is work disappointing,

unsatisfying, and even irritating to the last degree. The technical

Rhetoric, always arbitrarily limited in subject and perversely

conventional in method, has practically lost all chance of exercising

itself in the noblest of its three divisions. Deliberative oratory is

dead, except in exercises and make-believes, and the bread-winning

chicanery of forensic, the frivolities (hollow except as also

bread-winning) of epideictic, have usurped the whole room. It might be

thought that in this bereaved condition the art would bethink itself of

that profitable, dignified and delightful application which it had

always more or less directly practised, but which had seemed less

dignified than Persuasion—the art of literary criticism proper. But it

does nothing—or but little—of the kind. The remarks of Hermogenes on

Frigidity are not bad; the doubtful Demetrius, in his study of

Interpretation, is not far from the true kingdom others approach it here

and there. The invention of that critical “lingo,” to which reference

has more than once been made, is something, though a something liable to

abuse, and capable of standing in the way of better things. But, on the

whole, the endless procession of some fifty generations, from the author

of the _Rhet. ad Alex._ to John of Sicily, busies itself either on the

one hand with endless distinctions, systematisations, and terminologies,

with everlastingly twining strands of new colour into the rope that lets

down the bucket into the empty well, and varying the staves and hoops of

the bucket itself; or on the other with the provision of cut-and-dried

patterns for the use of the brainless, with telling tongue-tied sophists

what they are to say at the funeral of a fifth cousin, and how to make

the most of a harbour which is dry for three-quarters of every tide.

Amidst all this desert and chaos of wasted industry there stands the

great rock of the Περὶ Ὕψους with its shade and refreshment in the weary

land of its own contemporaries, and with its brow catching the dawn

which was not to shine fully for more than fifteen hundred years, and is

hardly noon-day yet. In the section devoted to it we have examined, as

thoroughly as our limits permitted, the special merits and defects of

this great little book; it is only necessary here to lay a slight

additional stress on the fact that if it be not the sole book of

antiquity—the sole book, except Dante’s, of antiquity, the Middle Ages,

the Renaissance, and the earlier modern times—to set forth that critical

ideal which comprehends the formal and the material, the verbal and the

ideal merits of literature, it exhibits this comprehension as no other

book does. To confine ourselves to our present special subject—the

criticism of Greek antiquity—Plato may alternate noble flights with

curious crotchets about literature; Aristophanes may criticise from the

point of view of robust common-sense which is yet not in the least

Philistine; Aristotle may have almost a mathematical grasp of his own

notions of form, and a generous enthusiasm for certain kinds of dignity

in subject and proportion; Dionysius may show that adherence to

technique (and a rather vicious technique too) is quite compatible with

genuine literary appreciation. But all these, and much more others, have

their eyes mainly off the object. Aristotle himself at times, lesser men

like Plutarch, who have misread their Plato, continually, seem to think

it rather vain to look at that object at all. The intelligent enjoyment

of literature; the intimacy with it, at once voluptuous and

intellectual; the untiring, though it may be never fully satisfied,

quest after the secret of its charms, never neglecting the opportunity

of basking and revelling in them—these things, till we come to Longinus,

are rare indeed. And when we do meet them, the rencontre is of a sort of

accidental and shamefaced character. When we come to Longinus there is

no more false modesty. “Beautiful words are the light of thought.” These

words themselves are the lantern of criticism.

Elsewhere it gleams more faintly; though it would be as ungrateful as it

would be Philistine to ignore the debt which we owe to others, from

Aristotle himself downwards. It is characteristic of Greek criticism—and

it is the secret of its weakness as well as of its strength—that it is

more busy with kinds than with authors, with authors than with books.

And when it is busy with authors at all, it is hardly ever busy with

them as wholes, as phenomena occupying an individual place in the

literary cosmos; but almost always as examples of this or that quality,

as supplying illustrations of this or that Figure, as giving a good

pattern for such-and-such a progymnasma, a model for dealing with

such-and-such a stasis. Proceeding in this way, criticism attempts—and

fails—to be scientific; it renounces its right to be artistic, and

effects the renunciation. The individual _ethos_ of the poet, the more

solid but not less individual _ethos_ of the proseman, flies off and

melts away, when each is merely regarded as an example of “_todetes_” or

“_tallotes_” as a lecturer’s cabinet, in which you put your hand to draw

out an illustration of Anadiplosis or Palillogia. Almost may the most

idealist of metaphysical students think of turning to sheer Hobbism, of

blaspheming “_nesses_ and _tudes_ and _ties_,” when he sees them dragged

in and abused after this fatal fashion, which even Aristotle does not

wholly escape, and in which others indulge as if it were their sole and

legitimate business.

It follows that, except for the stock contrast of Herodotus and

Thucydides, in respect of the Orators (the exception being there due to

an obvious reason), and to a less extent of the Three Tragedians, we

have very few studies at once comprehensive and comparative of authors

in Greek, and that, out of Longinus, such studies as we have are

scrappy, technical, and altogether lacking in that critical συνάρπασμα

which the great _locus_ of Simylus requires. There is really no second

passage in Greek which can be put alongside of the Longinian estimate of

the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_, agree or disagree as we may with the

details of this.