CHAPTER V.

DIONYSIUS OF HALICARNASSUS, PLUTARCH, LUCIAN, LONGINUS.

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

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

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

Footnote 186:

6 vols., Leipsic, 1775-77. The first four contain the historical, the two last the rhetorical work. A pamphlet edition of rhetorical fragments, by C. T. Rössler (Leipsic, 1873), may be usefully bound in with this. But Usener’s still more recent edition of the so-called περὶ μιμήσεως and the Epistles of Ammæus and Pompey (Bonn, 1889) is of great importance for its remarks on Dionysius and Quintilian, and for other animadversions.

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

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

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

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

Footnote 187:

See _infra_, bk. ii. p. 304 _sq._

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

Footnote 188:

See also the amended text in Bergk’s _Lyrici Græci_, i. 392-395.

Footnote 189:

ἴδετ’ ἐν χορὸν Ὀλύμπιοι. Some MSS. read δεῦτ’, which appears in Reiske. The comment requires a _verb_: but perhaps Dionysius might have regarded δεῦτε as such.

Footnote 190:

ἀρχαικὸν δέ τι καὶ αὔθαδες κάλλος.

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

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

Footnote 191:

See on this point Usener (_op. cit._), who would rather suppose a common indebtedness. The “censures” form the bulk of the fragments which he has published as περὶ μιμήσεως. Perhaps the best examples of really illuminative critical phrase in them are the “pugnacious roughness,” ἀγωνιστικὴ τραχύτης, ascribed to Antimachus, and the “combination of magnificence and terseness,” μεγαλοφυὲς καὶ βραχύ, to Alcæus. Of the shorter fragments the summary of the requirements of art as “a happy nature, exact study, and laborious practice” is good if not astonishing.

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

Footnote 192:

Petronius found that it did!

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

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

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

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

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

Footnote 193:

By Vaucher and some others.

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

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

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

Footnote 194:

I use the Teubner edition by Hercher and Bernardakis, 5 vols., Leipsic (1872-1893).

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

Footnote 195:

The section “Euphues and his Ephœbus.” The three tractates commented on in this and the next paragraph will be found in vol. i. pp. 1-111 of the edition cited.

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

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

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

Footnote 196:

V. 146-202.

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

Footnote 197:

V. 208-263. “Bad-bloodedness” is perhaps more equal than “malignity” to κακοήθεια.

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

Footnote 198:

V. 203-207.

Footnote 199:

The late Professor Nettleship, as noted already, was the first, I think, to put together a list of these stock terms, which is not uninteresting. It will be further referred to in the next Book.

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

Footnote 200:

II. 250-320. The Greek title αἴτια is rather “cause” than “question.” But Philemon Holland’s translation of 1603 (recently reprinted, with an introduction by Mr F. B. Jevons, London, 1892) has naturalised this latter version in English.

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

Footnote 201:

IV. 1-395.

Footnote 202:

We are, however, by no means so fortunate (from the point of view of this book) in our remains of Greek Symposiacs as we are in those of Latin. The famous _Deipnosophists_ of Athenæus, in which, about 230 A.D., its invaluable author accumulated (under the guise of a conversation in which persons of the importance of Ulpian and Galen took part) the most enormous miscellany of quotation, anecdote, and _quodlibeta_, in ancient if not in all literature, is, of course, for all its want of literary form, a priceless book. As a storehouse of quotation it has no rival but the _Anatomy of Melancholy_: and though it is, in spirit, unity, literary gifts, and almost everything else, as far below the _Anatomy_ as one book can be below another, it is from this special point of view to be preferred to it, because the vast majority of its sources of quotation are lost. For the history of literature, as for that of manners, it is a mine of wealth; for the history of literary criticism almost barren. For expression Athenæus seems to have had no care at all, though his curiosity as to matter was insatiable, and as nearly as possible indiscriminate. His spirit is exactly that of the scholiasts referred to in a former page; and whether he is discussing the varieties of vegetables and wines and oysters, or the highly spiced and salted witticisms of Athenian ladies of pleasure, or any other subject, he hardly becomes a critic for one moment, though no critic can neglect him. Perhaps the nearest approach to sustained critical remark is the captious attack on Plato at the end of the 11th book, which is as feeble as it is captious. (The standard edition of Athenæus is still that of Schweighaüser (14 vols., Argentorati, 1801-7); but those who suffer from inadequate shelf-room may have (as the present writer long ago had regretfully) to expel this in favour of the far less handsome and useful, but compacter, one of Dindorf (3 vols. Leipsic, 1827).)

Footnote 203:

_On Translating Homer_, §§ 1, 2 _passim_.

Footnote 204:

καλλιγραφίας ἕνεκα—ὥσπερ ἀνθηροῖς χρώμασι.

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

“Lucian wrote this, knowing old things and vain— For vain is also that which men think wise: No human thought is wholly clear and plain; What thou ador’st is scorn in others' eyes.”[206]

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

Footnote 205:

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

Footnote 206:

This is fairly close, I think, but the two first lines, at any rate, are too perfect not to be quoted in their own tongue—

Λουκιανὸς τάδ´ ἔγραφε, παλαιά τε μωρά τε εἰδῶς· μωρὰ γὰρ ἀνθρώποις καὶ τὰ δοκοῦντα σοφά,

lines which grave themselves on the memory at twenty, and at fifty are only graven deeper.

Footnote 207:

II. 1-24.

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

Footnote 208:

II. 144-152.

Footnote 209:

τὸν μὲν εἴρωνα πέδοι κατάβαλε.

Footnote 210:

Or “nibble at them.”

Footnote 211:

_Lex._, § 24, ii. 152, _op. cit._

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

Footnote 212:

I. 26.

Footnote 213:

I. 9.

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

Footnote 214:

III. 1.

Footnote 215:

II. 358.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Footnote 216:

The most elaborate discussion of the whole matter still is that of Vaucher (Geneva, 1854). The editions I myself use are those of Toup (Oxford, 1778); Egger (Paris, 1837), a particularly handy little volume, _with the fragments_; and Prof. Rhys Roberts (Cambridge, 1899), with translation and full editorial apparatus. Those who do not read the Greek lose much: but they will find a good (though somewhat too free) translation, with an excellent introduction by Mr Andrew Lang, in the work of Mr H. L. Havell (London, 1890).

Footnote 217:

Διονυσίου ἢ Λογγίνου of the Paris MS. 2036. (Others even have ἀνωνύμου.) Robortello intentionally or unintentionally dropped the η, thereby putting students off the scent.

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

Footnote 218:

Blair saw this, but, with the ill-luck of his century, regarded the work as merely “elegant.”

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

Footnote 219:

Longinus (? 213-273) represents the middle of the _third_ century. Nobody puts it later than this, and nobody earlier than the _first_.

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

Footnote 220:

A Sicilian rhetor, probably of Calacte, said by Suidas to have been of Greek, or at any rate non-Roman, birth, and a Jew in religion. Dionysius knew him, and he lived in the time of Augustus. There was another (confused by Suidas) in that of Hadrian. This _may_ be our C.

Footnote 221:

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

Footnote 222:

καιρίως ἐξενεχθέν.

Footnote 223:

A phrase of the rhetor Theodorus, meaning “the thyrsus poked in at the wrong time,” “enthusiasm out of place.”

Footnote 224:

λόγων κρίσις πολλῆς ἐστι πείρας τελευταῖον ἐπιγέννημα. Dionysius (_v. supra_, pp. 130, 131) had said as much in sense, but less magisterially in phrase. I have translated λόγων in its narrowest equivalent, instead of “style” or “literature,” which it doubtless also means, in order to bring out the antithesis better. I have small doubt that Longinus meant, here as elsewhere, to fling back the old contempt of the opposition of “words” and “things.”

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

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

Footnote 225:

This word, which has the stamp of Dryden, is often preferable to “composition.”

Footnote 226:

τὸ μεγαλοφυές.

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

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

Footnote 227:

φῶς γὰρ τῷ ὄντι ἵδιον τοῦ νοῦ τὰ καλὰ ὁνόματα.

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

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

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

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

μίαν παρείρας πλεκτάνην χειμάρῥοον—

is a really splendid piece of metre and phrase, worthy, high-pitched as it is, of the author of the _Oresteia_ and the _Prometheus_ at his very best. So, too, the much-enduring Gorgias would hardly have received very severe reprehension from any but the extremest precisians of modern criticism, at its most starched time, for calling vultures “living tombs.” But the horror of the Greeks on the one hand for anything extravagant, bizarre, out of measure, on the other for the slightest approach in serious work to the unbecoming, the unpleasantly suggestive, makes Longinus here a very little prudish. And his general remarks are excellent, especially in reference to τὸ παρένθυρσον, which I have ventured to interpret, not quite in accordance with the general rendering, “the poking in of the thyrsus at the wrong time,” the affectation of Bacchanalian fury where no fury need be.

But we still have the same warning in the chapter on Frigidity, coupled with another—that, perhaps, as sometimes happens, Longinus' sense of humour was not quite [Sidenote: _Frigidity._] equal to his sense of sublimity, and yet another—that the historic sense, so late developed everywhere, was, perhaps, not very strong in him. We, at least, should give Timæus the benefit of a doubt, as to the presence of a certain not inexcusable irony in the comparison (in which, for instance, neither Swift nor Carlyle would have hesitated to indulge) of the times taken by Alexander to conquer Asia and by Isocrates to write the _Panegyric_. On the other hand, he seems to forget the date of Timæus when he finds the μικροχαρές, the paltrily funny, in the historian’s connection of the Athenian Hermocopidæ and their punishment by Hermocrates, the son of Hermon. There is no reason why Timæus should not have been quite serious, though in the third century after Christ, and even in the first, the allusion might seem either a tasteless freethinking jest or a silly piece of superstition.

But by far the most interesting thing in this context is Longinus' irreconcilable objection to a fanciful metaphor [Sidenote: _The “maidens in the eyes.”_] which, as it happens most oddly, was, with a very slight variation, an equal pet of the Greeks of the great age and of our own Elizabethans. Every reader of the latter knows the phrase, “to look babies in the eyes” of the beloved—that is to say, to keep the face so close to hers that the little reflections of the gazer in the pupils of her eyes are discernible. The Greek term for these little images, and the pupils that mirrored them, was slightly different—it was κόραι, maidens. And as, from the famous quarrel scene in Homer downwards, the eyes were always, in Greek literature, the seat of modesty or of impudence, the combination suggested, not merely to Timæus but even to Xenophon, a play of words, “more modest than the maidens in their eyes,” or conversely, as where Timæus, speaking of the lawless lust of Agathocles, says that he must have had “harlots” (πόρνας), not “maidens” (κόρας), in his eyes. And Longinus is even more angry or sad with Xenophon than with Timæus, as expecting more propriety from him.

But whether we agree with him in detail or not, the inestimable passage, on the mere quest and craze for novelty, which [Sidenote: _The canon “Quod semper.”_] follows, more than reconciles us, as well as the other great saying in cap. vi. as to the “late-born” character of the judgment of style, and that in the next as to the canon of Sublimity being the effect produced unaltered in altered circumstances and cases. When we read these things we feel that literary criticism is at last fully constituted,—that it wants nothing more save greater variety, quantity, and continuance of literary creation, upon which to exercise itself.

No nervous check or chill need be caused by the tolerably certain fact that more than one hole may be picked in the [Sidenote: _The sources of sublimity._] subsequent classification of the sources[228] of ὕψος. These attempts at an over-methodical classification (it has been said before) are always full of snares and pitfalls to the critic. Especially do they tempt him to the sin of arguing in a circle. It cannot be denied that in every one of the five divisions (except, perhaps, the valuable vindication of the quality of Passion) there is some treacherous word or other, which is a mere synonym of “sublime.” Thus in the first we have ἁδρεπήβολον, mastery of the ἅδρον, a curious word, the nearest equivalent of which in English is, perhaps, “stout” or “full-bodied,” as we apply these terms to wine; in the fourth γενναία, “noble,” which is only “sublime” in disguise; and in the fifth εν δε φαει και ολεσσον, of which much the same may be said.

Footnote 228:

It may, however, be plausibly argued that the circle is more apparent than real, resulting from a kind of ambiguity in the word πηγαί. If Longinus had slightly altered his expression, so as to make it something of this kind, “There are five points [or ways, or aspects] in which ὕψος may be attained, thought, feeling, ‘figure,’ diction, and composition,” he would be much less vulnerable. And, after all, this is probably what he meant.

Any suggestion, however, of paralogism which might arise from this and be confirmed by the curious introduction in the third of the Figures, as if they were machines for automatic sublime-coining, must be dispelled by the remarks on Passion of the right kind as tending to sublimity, and by the special stress laid on the primary necessity of μεγαλοφροσύνη, whereof ὕψος itself is the mere ἀπήχημα or echo. Unfortunately here, as so often, the gap comes just in the most important place.

When the cloud lifts, however, we find ourselves in one of the most interesting passages of the whole, the selection of “sublime” passages from Homer. A little superfluous matter about Homer’s “impiety” (the old, the respectable, Platonic mistake) occurs; but it matters not, especially in face of the two praises of the “Let there be light” of the Jewish legislator, “no chance comer,” and of the great ἐν δὲ φάει καὶ ὄλεσσον of Ajax, the mere juxtaposition of which once more shows what a critic we have got in our hands.

Not quite such a great one perhaps have we—yet one in the circumstances equally fascinating—in the contrasted remarks [Sidenote: _Longinus on Homer._] on the _Odyssey_. Longinus is not himself impious; he is no Separatist (he is indeed far too good a critic to be that). But he will have the Romance of Ulysses to be “old age, though the old age of Homer.” “When a great nature is a little gone under, philomythia is characteristic of its decline.”[229] Evidently, he thinks, the _Odyssey_ was Homer’s second subject, not his first. He is “a setting sun as mighty as ever, but less intense”: he is more unequal: he takes to the fabulous and the incredible. The Wine of Circe, the foodless voyage of Ulysses, the killing of the suitors—nay, the very attention paid to Character and Manners—tell the tale of decadence.

Footnote 229:

μεγάλης φύσεως ὑποφερομένης ἤδη ἰδιόν ἐστιν ἐν γήρᾳ τὸ φιλύμυθον.

He is wrong, undoubtedly wrong—we may swear it boldly by those who fell in Lyonnesse, and in the palace of Atli, and under the echoes of the horn of Roland. The _Odyssey_ is not less than the _Iliad_; it is different. But we can hardly quarrel with him for being wrong, because his error is so instructive, so interesting. We see in it first (even side by side with not a little innovation) that clinging to the great doctrines of old, to the skirts of Aristotle and of Plato, which is so often found in noble minds and so seldom in base ones. And we see, moreover, that far as he had advanced—near as he was to an actual peep over the verge of the old world and into the new—he was still a Greek himself at heart, with the foibles and limitations—no despicable foibles and limitations—of the race. Here is the instinctive unreasoning terror of the unknown Romance; the dislike of the vague and the fabulous; even that curious craze about Character being in some way inferior to Action, which we have seen before. By the time of Longinus—if he lived in the third century certainly, if he lived in the first probably—the romance did exist. But it was looked upon askance; it had no regular literary rank; and a sort of resentment was apparently felt at its daring to claim equality with the epic. Now the _Odyssey_ is the first, and not far from the greatest, of romances. It has the Romantic Unity in the endurance and triumph of its hero. It has the Romantic Passion in the episodes of Circe and Calypso and others: above all, it has the great Romantic breadth, the free sweep of scene and subject, the variety, the contrast of fact and fancy, the sparkle and hurry and throb. But these things, to men trained in the admiration of the _other_ Unity, the _other_ Passion, the more formal, regulated, limited, measured detail and incident of the usual tragedy and the usual epic—were at best unfamiliar innovations, and at worst horrible and daring impieties. Longinus will not go this length: he cannot help seeing the beauty of the _Odyssey_. But he must reconcile his principles to his feelings by inventing a theory of decadence, for which, to speak frankly, there is no critical justification at all.

One may almost equally disagree with the _special_ criticism which serves as setting to the great jewel among the quotations [Sidenote: _On Sappho._] of the treatise, the so-called “Ode to Anactoria.” The charm of this wonderful piece consists, according to Longinus, in the skill with which Sappho chooses the accompanying emotions of “erotic mania.”[230] To which one may answer, “Hardly so,” but in the skill with which she expresses those emotions which she selects, and in the wonderful adaptation of the metre to the expression, in the mastery of the picture of the most favoured lover, drawing close and closer to the beloved to catch the sweet speech,[231] and the laughter full of desire. In saying this we should have the support of the Longinus of other parts of the treatise against the Longinus of this. Yet here, too, he is illuminative; here, too, the “noble error” of the Aristotelian conception of poetry distinguishes and acquits him.

Footnote 230:

Literal.

Footnote 231:

Fond and foolish fancy as it may be, there seems to me something miraculous in the mere juxtaposition of πλησίον and ἁδὺ—the silent adoring lover, jealous, as it were, of the very air robbing him of a portion of the sweetness.

With the remarks on αὔξησις, “amplification,” as it is traditionally but by no means satisfactorily rendered, another phase [Sidenote: “_Amplification._”] of the critical disease of antiquity (which is no doubt balanced by other diseases in the modern critical body) may be thought to appear. Both in the definition of this figure and in the description of its method we may, not too suspiciously, detect evidences of that excessive technicality which gave to Rhetoric itself the exclusive title of _techne_. _Auxesis_, it seems, comes in when the business, or the point at issue, admits at its various stages of divers fresh starts and rests, of one great phrase being wheeled upon the stage after another, continually introduced in regular ascent.[232] This, it seems, can be done either by means of τοπηγορία, “handling of _topoi_ or commonplaces,” or by δείνωσις, which may perhaps be best rendered _tour de force_, or by cunning successive disposition (ἐποικονομία) of facts or feelings. For, says he, there are ten thousand kinds of _auxesis_.

Footnote 232:

ἕτερα ἑτέροις ἐπεισκυκλούμενα μεγέθη συνεχῶς ἐπεισάγηται κατ’ ἐπίβασιν.

The first description of the method will recall to all comparative students of literature the manner of Burke, though it is not exactly identical with that manner; but the instances of means, besides being admittedly inadequate, savour, with their technicalities of terminology, much too strongly of the cut-and-dried manual. The third article, on a reasonable interpretation of ἐποικονομία, really includes all that need be said. But one sees here, as later, that even Longinus had not quite outgrown the notion that the teacher of Rhetoric was bound to present his student with a sort of hand-list of “tips” and dodges—with the kind of Cabbala wherewith the old-fashioned crammer used to supply his pupils for inscription on wristband or finger-nail. Yet he hastens to give a sign of grace by avowing his dissatisfaction with the usual Rhetorical view, and by distinguishing _auxesis_ and the Sublime itself, in a manner which brings the former still nearer to Burke’s “winding into a subject like a serpent,” and which might have been more edifying still if one of the usual gaps did not occur. Part, at least, of the lost matter must have been occupied with a contrast or comparison between the methods of Plato and Demosthenes, the end of which we have, and which passes into one between Demosthenes and Cicero. “If we Greeks may be allowed to have an opinion,” says Longinus, with demure humility, “Demosthenes shall be compared to a flash of thunder and lightning, Cicero to an ordinary terrestrial conflagration,” which is very handsome to Cicero.

Then he returns to Plato, and rightly insists that much of his splendour is derived from imitation, or at least from emulation, of that very Homer whom he so often attacks. The great writers of the past are to be constantly before us, and we are not to be deterred from “letting ourselves go” by any mistaken sense of inferiority, or any dread of posterity’s verdict.

Then comes a digression of extreme importance on the subject of φαντασίαι or εἰδωλοποιΐαι—“images.” One of the points in which a history of the kind here attempted may [Sidenote: “_Images._”] prove to be of most service, lies in the opportunity it affords of keeping the changes of certain terms, commonly used in criticism, more clearly before the mind than has always been done. And of these, none requires more care than “Images” and “Imagination.” At the first reading, the mere use of such a word as φαντασίαι may seem to make all over-scrupulousness unnecessary, though if we remember that even Fancy is not quite Imagination, the danger may be lessened. At any rate, it is nearly certain that no ancient writer,[233] and no modern critic before a very recent period (Shakespeare uses it rightly, but then he was Shakespeare and not a critic), attached our full sense to the term. To Aristotle φαντασία is merely αἴσθησις ἀσθενὴς, a “weakened sensation,” a copy furnished by memory from sensation itself. Even animals have it. No idea of Invention seems to have mingled with it, or only of such invention as the artist’s is when he faithfully represents natural objects. Of the Imagination, which is in our minds when we call Shelley an imaginative poet, and Pope not one, Sir Edward Burne Jones an imaginative painter, and any contemporary whom it may be least invidious to name not one, there does not seem to have been a trace even in the enthusiastic mind of Longinus, though he expressly includes Enthusiasm—nay, Passion—in his notion of it. You think you see what you say, and you make your hearers see it. Good; but Crabbe does that constantly, and one would hardly, save in the rarest cases, call Crabbe imaginative. In short, φαντασίαι here are vivid illustrations drawn from nature—Orestes’ hallucination of the Eumenides, Euripides’ picture of Phaethon, that in the _Seven_ of the slaying of the bull over the black-bound shield, and many others. No doubt he glances at the fabulous and incredible, the actually “imagined”; but he seems, as in the case of the _Odyssey_, to be a little doubtful of these even in poetry, while in oratory he bars them altogether. You must at one and the same time reason and illustrate—again the very method of Burke.

Footnote 233:

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

In the rest of the illustrations of the use of Figures—for the central part of the treatise expressly disclaims being a formal [Sidenote: _The Figures._] discussion of these idols—the positive literary criticisms scattered in them—the actual “reviewing”—will give most of the interest. The great Oath of Demosthenes, “By those who fell at Marathon!” with its possible suggestion by a passage of Eupolis, supplies a whole chapter and part of another. And now we find the curious expression (showing how even Longinus was juggled by terms) that Figures “fight on the side of the Sublime, and in turn draw a wonderful reinforcement from it,” wherein a mighty if vague reality like the Sublime, and mere shadows (though neatly cut-out shadows) like the Figures, are most quaintly yoked together.

Though still harassed by gaps, we find plenty of good pasture in the remarks, the handling of Periphrasis being especially attractive. For the eighteenth century—the time which honoured Longinus most in theory, and went against him most in practice—undoubtedly took part of his advice as to this figure. It had no doubt that Periphrasis contributed to the Sublime, was ὑψηλοποιόν: unluckily it paid less attention to his subsequent caution, that it is a risky affair, and that it smells of triviality.[234] In fact, it is extremely noticeable that in the examples of Periphrasis which he praises we should hardly apply that name to it, but should call it “Allusion” or “Metaphor,” while the examples that he condemns are actually of the character of Armstrong’s “gelid cistern” and Delille’s “game which Palamede invented.”

Footnote 234:

ἐπίκηρον πρᾶγμα ... κουφολογίας ὄζον. ἐπίκηρος means literally “perishable,” “apt to go off,” to get stale or flat.

At no time perhaps has the tricksy, if not (as one is almost driven to suspect) deliberately malignant, mutilator played such a trick as in abstracting four leaves from the MS. between caps. xxx. and xxxi. Here Longinus has begun to speak of diction generally; here he has made that admirable descant on “beautiful words” which, though almost all the book deserves to be written in letters of gold, would tempt one to indulge here in precious stones, so as to mimic, in jacinth and sapphire and chrysoprase, the effect which it celebrates. When we are permitted another glimpse we are back in particular criticism, interesting but less valuable save indirectly, and in criticisms, too, of Cæcilius, criticisms which we could do without. No great good can ever come of inquiries, at least general inquiries, into the permissible number and the permissible strength of Metaphors. Once more we may fall back on the Master, though perhaps rather in opposition to some of the Master’s dicta in this very field. “As the intelligent man shall decide” is the decision here, and the intelligent man will never decide till the case is before him. One bad metaphor is too much: twenty good ones are not too many. Nor is “the multitudinous seas incarnadine” an “excess,” though no doubt there have been bad critics who thought so.

Longinus himself, though he had not had the happiness to read _Macbeth_, was clearly not far out of agreement with the [Sidenote: “_Faultlessness._”] concluding sentiment of the last paragraph, and he makes this certain by the disquisition on Faultlessness which follows. As a general question this is probably, for the present time at any rate, past argument, not so much because the possibility of a “faultless” great poem is denied, as because under the leaden rule of the best modern criticism—leaden not from dulness but from adaptability—few things are recognised as “faults” _in se_ and _per se_. A pun may be a gross fault in one place and a grace beyond the reach of art in another: an aposiopesis may be either a proof of clumsy inequality to the situation or a stroke of genius. But the declaration of Longinus that he is not on the side of Faultlessness[235] is of infinitely greater importance than any such declaration from an equally great critic (“Where is he? Show him to me,” as Rabelais would say) could possess to-day. The general Greek theory undoubtedly did make for excessive severity to faultfulness, just as our general theory makes perhaps for undue leniency to it. That Longinus could withstand this tendency—could point out the faults of the faultless—was a very great thing.

Footnote 235:

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

As always, too, his individual remarks frequently give us, not merely the satisfaction of agreement, but that of piquant difference or curiosity. We may agree with him about Bacchylides and Pindar—though, by the way, the man who had the taste and the courage to admire a girl as χλωραύχενα—as possessing that yellow ivory tint of skin which lights so magnificently[236]—was certainly one to dare to challenge convention with what its lilies-and-roses standard must have thought a “fault.” But we cannot help astonishment at being told that both Pindar and Sophocles “often have their light quenched without any obvious reason, and stumble in the most unfortunate manner.”[237] For those of us who are less, as well as those who are more, enthusiastic about Sophocles would probably agree in asking, “Where does he ‘go out in snuff,’ where does he ‘fall prostrate’ in this fashion?” Surely all the faults cannot be in the lost plays! We want a rather fuller text of Hyperides than we possess to enable us quite to appreciate the justice of the comparison of him with Demosthenes, but that justice is striking even on what we have. On the other hand, we are rather thrown out by the contrast of Plato and Lysias—it may be owing to the same cause. Even if the comparison were one of style only, we should think it odd to make one between Burke and Berkeley, though the _Sublime and Beautiful_ would help us a little here.

Footnote 236:

Simonides had used the word literally of the nightingale, and there are those who hold that Bacchylides merely meant to compliment the lady’s _voice_. But let us think more nobly of him.

Footnote 237:

σβέννυνται δε ἀλόγως πολλάκις, καὶ πίπτουσιν ἀτυχέστατα.

But all this is a digression,[238] and the author seems to have [Sidenote: _Hyperboles._] returned to his Metaphors (in a gap where the demon has interfered with less malice than usual), and to Hyperboles, under the head of which we get a useful touch of contempt for Isocrates.[239] We are in deeper and more living waters when we come to the handling, alas! too brief (though nothing seems here to be lost), of _ordonnance_, “composition,” selection and arrangement of words. Here is yet another of those great law-making phrases which are the charter of a new criticism. “Harmony is to men not only physically connected with persuasion and pleasure, but a wonderful instrument of magniloquence and passion.” It may be difficult for us, with our very slight knowledge (it would, perhaps, be wiser to say almost absolute ignorance) of Greek pronunciation, to appreciate his illustrations here in detail. But we can appreciate the principle of them exactly, and apply that principle, [Sidenote: “_Harmony._”] in any language of which we do know the pronunciation, with perfect ease and the completest success. The silly critics (they exist at the present day) who pooh-pooh, as niceties and fiddle-faddle, the order of words, the application of rhythmical tests to prose, and the like, are answered here beforehand with convincing force by a critic whom no one can possibly charge with preferring sound to sense.

Footnote 238:

I must be allowed to say that it contains one of the most ambitious and successful passages of Longinus as an original writer—the vindication of Nature’s command to man to admire the magnificent—in cap. xxxv. It is a temptation to quote it.

Footnote 239:

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

This refers to prose, but the following chapter carries out the same principle as to poetry with equal acuteness. Longinus, great as his name is, probably is but little in the hands of those who object (sometimes almost with foam at the mouth) to the practice of analysing the mere harmonic effect of poetry. But it is pleasant to think of these passages when one reads the outcries, nor is the pleasantness rendered less pleasant by the subsequent cautions against that over-rhythmical fashion of writing which falls to the level of mere dance-music.

The caution against over-conciseness and over-prolixity is rather more of a matter of course, and the strictures on the μικρότης, occasionally to be found in Herodotus, like some in the earlier parts of the treatise, sometimes elude us, as is the case with similar verbal criticisms even in languages with which we are colloquially familiar.

And then there is the curious Conclusion which, as we have said, is no conclusion at all, as it would seem, and which yet has [Sidenote: _The Conclusion._] an unmistakable air of “peroration, with [much] circumstance,” on the everlasting question, “Why is the Sublime so rare in our time?” In that day, as in this, we learn (the fact being, as in King Charles II.'s fish-experiment, taken for granted), divers explanations, chiefly political, were given for the fact. Democracy was a good nurse of greatness: aristocracy was not. But Longinus did not agree. It was money-getting and money-seeking, pleasure-loving and pleasure-hunting, he thought. Plain living and high thinking must be returned to if the Heights were to be once more scaled. A noble conclusion, if perhaps only a generous fallacy. Had Longinus had our illegitimate prerogative-_post_rogative of experience, he would have known that the blowing of the wind of the spirit admits of no such explanations as these. Ages of Liberty and Ages of Servitude, Ages of Luxury and Ages of Simplicity, Ages of Faith and Ages of Freethought—all give us the Sublime if the right man is there: none will give it us if he is not. But our critic had not the full premisses before him, and we could not expect the adequate conclusion.

Yet how great a book have we here! Of the partly otiose disputes about its date and origin and authorship one or two things are worth recalling, though for other purposes than those of the disputants. Let it be remembered that it is not quoted, or even referred to, by a single writer of antiquity.[240] There is absolutely no evidence for it, except its own internal character, before the date of its oldest manuscript, which is assigned to the tenth century. Even if, assuming it to be the work of Longinus, we suppose it to have been part of one of the works which _are_ ascribed to him (a possible assumption, see note), there is still the absence of quotation, still the absence even of reference to views so clearly formulated, so eloquently enforced, and in some ways so remarkably different from those of the usual Greek and Roman rhetorician. That the book can be of very late date—much later, that is to say, than that of Longinus himself—is almost impossible. One of its features, the lack of any reference to even a single writer later than the first century, has indeed been relied upon to prove that it is not later itself than that date. This is inconclusive for that purpose. But it makes every succeeding century less and less probable, while the style, though in some respects peculiar, is not in the least Byzantine.

Footnote 240:

“John of Sicily” (Walz, vi. 225), who in the thirteenth century cites the lost φιλόλογοι ὁμιλίαι almost as if he was citing the Περὶ Ὕψους, is certainly no exception. The undated Byzantine (Cramer, _Anecd. Oxon._, iii. 159, quoted by Professor Roberts after Usener), who couples Λογγίνου κρίσεις with those of Dionysius, may come nearer, as may the anonymous scholiast on Hermogenes (Walz, vii. 963), who cites the ὁμιλίαι on τὸ στομφῶδες, “mouthing.”

This detachment from any particular age—nay, more, this _vita fallens_, this unrecognised existence of a book so remarkable—stands in no merely fanciful relation to the characteristics of the book itself. It abides alone in thought as well as in history. That it is a genuine, if a late, production of the classical or semi-classical age we cannot reasonably doubt, for a multitude of reasons, small in themselves but strong in a bundle,—its style, its diction, its limitations of material, and even occasionally of literary view, its standards, all sorts of little touches like the remark about Cicero, and so forth. Yet it has, in the most important points, almost more difference from than resemblance to the views of classical critics generally. The much greater antiquity of Aristotle may be thought to make comparison with him infructuous, if not unfair. But we have seen already how far Longinus is from Dionysius, how much further from Plutarch; and we shall see in the next Book how far he is from Quintilian. Let us look where we will, to critics by profession or to critics by chance, to the Alexandrians as far as we know them, to the professional writers on Rhetoric, to Aristophanes earlier and Lucian later, always we see Longinus apart—among them by dispensation and time, but not of them by tone, by tendency, by temper.

For though he himself was almost certainly unconscious of it, and might even have denied the fact with some warmth if it had [Sidenote: _Modernity of the treatise,_]. been put to him, Longinus has marked out grounds of criticism very far from those of the ancient period generally, further still from those which were occupied by any critic (except Dante) of the Middle Ages and the Classical revival, and close to, if not in all cases overlapping the territory of, the modern Romantic criticism itself. As we have seen, the ancient critic was wont either to neglect the effect of a work of art altogether, and to judge it by its supposed agreement with certain antecedent requirements, or else, if effects were considered at all, to consider them from the merely practical point of view, as in the supposed persuasive effect of Rhetoric, or from the ethical, as in the purging, the elevating, and so forth, assigned to Tragedy, and to Poetry generally. Longinus has changed all this. It is the enjoyment, the transport, the carrying away of the reader or auditor, that, whether expressedly or not, is always at bottom the chief consideration with him. He has not lowered the ethical standard one jot, but he has silently refused to give it precedence of the æsthetic; he is in no way for lawlessness, but he makes it clear, again and again, that mere compliance with law, mere fulfilment of the requirements of the stop-watch and the hundredth-of-an-inch rule, will not suffice. Aristotle had been forced, equally by his system and his sense, to admit that pleasure was an end—perhaps the end—of art; but he blenches and swerves from the consequences. Longinus faces them and follows them out.

In his attention to rhythm, especially of prose, Longinus is much less unique, for this point (as we have seen and shall see) was never neglected by the best ancient critics. But there is again something particularly distinguishing in his attempt to trace the sources of the literary pleasure in specimen passages. The ancient tendency is, though not universally, yet too generally, the other way, to select specimen passages merely as illustrations of general rules.

And this brings us to his greatest claim of all—that is to say, his attitude towards his subject as a whole. Although he nowhere [Sidenote: _or rather sempiternity._] says as much in so many words, no one can read his book with attention—above all, no one can read it again and again critically—without seeing that to him literature was not a schedule of forms, departments, kinds, with candidates presenting themselves for the critic to admit them to one or the other, on and during their good behaviour; but a body of matter to be examined according to its fruits, according to its provision of the literary pleasure. When it has been examined it is still for the critic to explain and justify (according to those unwritten laws which govern him) his decision that this was good, this not so good, this bad,—to point out the reasons of success and failure, to arrange the symptoms, classify the methods, and so forth. Where Longinus fell short it was almost always because ancient literature had not provided him with enough material of certain kinds, not because he ruled these kinds out _a priori_. Longinus was no Rymer. We could submit even Shakespeare to him with very little fear, and be perfectly certain that he would not, with Rapin, pronounce Dantes Aligerus wanting in fire.[241] Nay, with a sufficient body of material to set before him, we could trust him with very much more dangerous cases than Shakespeare and Dantes Aligerus.

Footnote 241:

Sir Thomas Pope Blount, _Characters and Censures of the most Considerable Poets_. London, 1694. P. 58. “Rapin tells us that Dantes Aligerus wants fire, and that he has not heat enough.”

Yet, as we have said, he stands alone. We must skip fifteen hundred years and come to Coleridge before we meet any critic entirely of his class, yet free from some of his limitations. The hand of the author of the Περὶ Ὕψους is not subdued, but raised to what he deals in. And his work remains towering among all other work of the class, the work of a critic at once Promethean and Epimethean in his kind, learning by the mistakes of all that had gone before, and presaging, with instinctive genius, much that was not to come for centuries after.