CHAPTER II.

GREEK CRITICISM BEFORE ARISTOTLE.

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

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

Footnote 4:

I am not aware of any _complete_ treatment of the subject of Greek criticism except that of M. Egger already cited, and, as part of a still larger whole, that of M. Théry (see note on Preface). The German handlings of the subject, as Professor Rhys Roberts (p. 259 of his ed. of Longinus) remarks, seem all to be concerned with the philosophy of æsthetic. If the work which Professor Roberts himself promises (ibid., p. ix.) had appeared, I should doubtless have had a most valuable guide and controller in him.

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

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

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

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

οὖλος ὁρᾷ, οὖλος δὲ νοεῖ, οὖλος δέ τ᾿ ἀκούει,

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

Footnote 5:

_Philosophorum Græcorum Veterum Reliquiæ. Rec. et ill. Simon Karsten_ (Amsterdam, 1830-38). Vol. i. pars 1, Xenophanes; vol. i. pars 2, Parmenides; vol. ii. Empedocles.

Footnote 6:

_Democriti Abderitæ Operum Fragmenta. Coll., &c., F. G. A. Mullachius_ (Berlin, 1843).

Footnote 7:

Karsten, i. 1. 43. Fr. 7.

Footnote 8:

Ibid., i. 1.77. Fr. 23. Xenophanes is emphatic on the necessity of putting the water in _first_.

Footnote 9:

Ibid., i. 1. 55. Fr. 17. The philosopher says merely ἐρεβίνθους, but we know from Pherecrates (_ap. Athenæum_, ii. 44) that they were parched or devilled, πεφρυγμένους.

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

Footnote 10:

Parm. _de Natura_, l. 11; Karsten, I. ii. 29.

Footnote 11:

Ibid., l. 35.

Footnote 12:

Ibid., l. 144.

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

Footnote 13:

Emp. _de Natura_ l. 34-40; Karsten, ii. 89, 90.

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

We have indeed a whole catalogue of work that should have been critical or nothing ascribed by Diogenes Laertius[14] to the still greater contemporary and compatriot of Protagoras, Democritus. How happily would the days of Thalaba (supposing Thalaba to be a historian of criticism) go by, if he had that little library of works which Diogenes thus assigns and calls "Of _Music_"! They are eight in number: “On Rhythm and Harmony,” “On Poetry” (one would compound for this alone), “On the Beauty of Words,”[15] “On Well- and Ill-sounding Letters,” “On Homer or Right Style and Glosses,”[16] “On the Aoedic Art,” “On Verbs(?),”[17] and an _Onomasticon_. But Democritus lived in the fifth [Sidenote: _Democritus._] century before Christ, and Diogenes in the second century after Christ; the historian’s attribution is unsupported, and he has no great character for accuracy; while, worst of all, he himself tells us that there were six Democriti, and that of the other five one was a musician, another an epigrammatist, and a third (most suspiciously) a technical writer on rhetoric. It stands fatally to reason that as all these (save the Chian musician) seem to have been more modern, and as the works mentioned would exactly fall in with the business of the musician and the teacher of rhetoric, they are far more likely, if they ever existed (and Diogenes seems to cite rather the catalogue of a certain Thrasylus than the books themselves), _not_ to have been the work of the Laughing Philosopher. At any rate, even if they were, we are utterly ignorant of their tenor.

Footnote 14:

Diog. Laert., ix. 7, p. 239 ed. Cobet (Didot Collection).

Footnote 15:

ἐπέων. It is very difficult to be certain whether this means here “word,” “song,” or “epic.”

Footnote 16:

ὀρθοεπείης καὶ γλωσσέων.

Footnote 17:

ῥημάτων

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

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

Footnote 18:

And the authority for this, Themistius, is very late. The catalogue of the works given by Diogenes Laertius (ed. cit., p. 240) includes nothing even distantly bearing on criticism.

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

Footnote 19:

Gorgias ap. Plutarch.

Footnote 20:

Prodicus in the “Choice of Hercules.”

Footnote 21:

V. the _Cratylus_, _passim_.

Footnote 22:

V. _Hippias Minor_.

Footnote 23:

There is not the slightest evidence for assigning the _Rhetoric_ called _ad Alexandrum_, and variously attributed to Aristotle and Anaximenes, to any pre-Aristotelian writer, least of all for giving it to Corax himself.

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

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

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

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

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

Footnote 24:

Not only have we not this: we have practically nothing of Tynnichus. His page in Bergk (iii. 379) is blank, except for the phrase which Plato himself quotes: εὕρημά τι Μοισᾶν—“a windfall of the Muses.” Of a very commonplace distich about Agamemnon’s ship, quoted by Procopius, we may apparently relieve him.

Footnote 25:

534 D.

Footnote 26:

If the space and treatment here allotted to Plato seem exceeding poor and beggarly, it can but be urged that his own criticism of literature is so exceedingly _general_ that in this book no other treatment of it was possible. On his own principles we should be “praising the horse in terms of the ass” if we did otherwise. It is true that besides the _attitude_ above extolled, there are to be found, from the glancing, many-sided, parabolic discourse of the _Phædrus_ to the mighty theory of the _Republic_, endless things invaluable, nay, indispensable, to the critic. It is nearly certain that, as Professor Butcher thinks, no one had anticipated him in the recognition of the organic unity necessary to a work of literary, as of all, art. But even here, as in the messages “to Lysias and all others who write orations, to Homer and all others who write poems, to Solon, &c.,” we see the generality, the abstraction, the evasiveness, one may almost say, of his critical gospel. Such concrete things as the reference to Isocrates at the end of the _Phædrus_ are very rare; and, on the other hand, his frequent and full dealings with Homer are not literary criticism at all. In a treatise on Æsthetics Plato cannot have too large a space; in a History of Criticism the place allotted to him must be conspicuous, but the space small.

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

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

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

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

Footnote 27:

This passage, which is twenty-five lines long, is from the play _Chiron_, and may be found at p. 110 of the Didot edition of Meineke’s _Poet. Com. Græc. Fragmenta_. Egger (p. 40) only gives it in translation. It is not in the least literary but wholly _musical_ in subject, Music appearing in person and complaining of the alteration of the lyre from seven strings to twelve.

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

Footnote 28:

Thus we find it constantly in the Middle Ages, where pure criticism is still almost unknown.

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

Footnote 29:

See Egger (p. 73), who as usual makes a little too much of it. The original may be found in Athenæus (at the opening of Bk. vi. 222 _a_: vol. i. p. 485, ed. Dindorf), where it is followed by a burlesque encomium on tragedy from the comic poet Timocles, or in Meineke, ed. cit., p. 397.

Footnote 30:

As the Greek is not in some editions of Meineke’s _Fragments_, and is not given by Egger at all, while his translation is very loose, it will be best to quote it in full from the former’s edition of Stobæus' _Florilegium_, ii. 352:—

Οὔτε φύσις ἱκανὴ γίγνεται τέχνης ἄτερ πρὸς οὐδὲν ἐπιτήδευμα παράπαν οὐδενί, οὔτε πάλι τέχνη μὴ φύσιν κεκτημένη. τούτων ὁμοίως τοῖν δυοῖν συνηγμένων εἰς ταυτόν, ἔτι δεῖ προσλαβεῖν χορηγίαν, ἔρωτα, μελέτην, καιρὸν εὐφυῆ, χρόνον, κριτὴν τὸ ῥηθὲν δυνάμενον συναρπάσαι. ἔν ᾧ γὰρ ἂν τούτων τις ἀπολειφθεὶς τύχῃ, οὐκ ἔρχετ’ ἐπὶ τὸ τέρμα τοῦ προκειμένου. φύσις, θέλησις, ἐπιμέλει’, εὐταξία σοφοὺς τίθησι κἀγαθούς· ἐτῶν δέ τοι ἄριθμος οὐδὲν ἄλλο πλὴν γῆρας ποιεῖ.

Footnote 31:

_I.e._, the official acceptance of the piece, and the supply of a chorus to bring it out. It ought, however, perhaps to be added that the word is often used in a more general sense, “appliances and means,” pecuniary and otherwise.

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

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

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

Footnote 32:

εὐκαιρίαν. Ed. Benseler (Leipsic, 1877), ii. 21.

Footnote 33:

Ibid., i. 23.

Footnote 34:

Ibid., i. 24.

Footnote 35:

Section 16. Ibid., ii. 9, 10.

Footnote 36:

Section 3. Ibid., i. 207, 208.

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