CHAPTER VI.

BYZANTINE CRITICISM.

PHOTIUS—DETAILED EXAMINATION OF THE ‘BIBLIOTHECA’—IMPORTANCE OF ITS POSITION AS A BODY OF CRITICAL JUDGMENTS—TZETZES—JOHN THE SICELIOTE.

If the word Byzantine is not quite such a byword as it once was, it still has for the most part an uncomplimentary connotation. How far that connotation is justified in reference to our special subject can hardly be better set forth than by exposition of three books of the middle and later Byzantine period.[242] The first shall be the remarkable and in a way famous _Bibliotheca_[243] of Photius in the ninth century; the second, the _Homeric Allegories_ of Tzetzes in the twelfth; the third, that commentary on the περὶ ἰδέων of Hermogenes by John the Siceliote in the thirteenth, which preserves to us our earliest reference to what is almost certainly the Περὶ Ὕψους, and assigns it to Longinus.

Footnote 242:

Of course many, perhaps most, of the commentators and scholiasts referred to in chaps. iv. and v. are Byzantine in date.

Footnote 243:

Ed. Bekker. Berlin, 1824. 2 vols. 4to, but paged continuously.

The first is in its way unique. The author, it may be barely necessary to say, was Patriarch of Constantinople for a period [Sidenote: _Photius._] of nearly thirty years, though with an interval of ten, during which he was deposed or deprived (858-867, 877-886), in the latter half of the ninth century. He was originally a lay statesman, and, from causes no doubt political as well as religious, was much engaged in the disputes which led to the final separation between the Eastern and Western Churches. His birth- and death-dates are not known; but he was, in the year last mentioned—886—banished by Leo VI. to a monastery in Armenia. The _Bibliotheca_ purports to be an account or review of books read during an embassy to Assyria, written for the benefit, and at the request, of the author’s brother Tarasius. There is no reason for questioning the excellent Patriarch’s veracity; but if he actually took with him the two hundred and eighty authors (some of them very voluminous) whom he summarises, he must have had one of the largest travelling libraries on record. The form is encyclopædic, each author having a separate article beginning Ἀνεγνώθη, “there was read:” and to a great extent these articles consist of summaries of the matter of the books. This, as it happens, is fortunate. Photius seems to have had a special fancy for giving _précis_ of narrative, whether ostensibly historical or avowedly fictitious; and he has thus preserved for us all or almost all that we know of things so interesting as the _Persica_ of Ctesias, and the _Babylonica_ or _Sinonis and Rhodanes_ of the romancer Iamblichus. Naturally enough, a good deal of his matter is theological, and his abstracts here are seasoned with a sometimes piquant, but seldom strictly critical, animus. But he by no means confines himself to mere summary, and we have in his book what we have nowhere else—a sort of critical review of a very large portion of Greek literature. Pretty full abstract after his own manner, and some extract of this, will be the best basis possible for considering the state of literary study and taste at what was perhaps the only cultivated capital of Europe, if not (putting the dimmer East out of the question) of the world, at the time when the classical languages were almost half a millennium past their real flourishing time, and when as yet only Anglo-Saxon to certainty, and some other Teutonic dialects probably, had arisen to represent the new vernaculars in any kind of literary performance.

Photius observes no order in his notices, which would appear to be genuine notes of reading; and most of his earliest entries are short, and devoted to writers possessing at best interest of matter. The first that has struck me as possessing the interest of literature is Art. 26, on Synesius. The characterisation of the good Bishop of Ptolemaïs runs thus: “As for phrase, he [Sidenote: _Detailed examination of the_ Bibliotheca.] is lofty and has ὄγκος” (the word we encounter so often and find so hard to translate), “but swerves off to the over-poetical.” “His miscellaneous epistles” (the judgment just quoted is on his philosophical treatises on Providence, on Monarchy, &c.) “drip with grace and pleasure,[244] not without strength and substance[245] of thought.” The rest is personal and religious, but extremely interesting.

Footnote 244:

χάριτος καὶ ἡδονῆς ἀποστάζουσαι.

Art. 44 deals with Philostratus and his famous life of Apollonius of Tyana. The bulk of the notice, as we should expect, both from the Patriarch’s fancy for analysis of narrative and from his religious bent, is busied with the matter; but we have some actual criticism. He is as to his phrase “clear, graceful, and aphoristic, and teeming with sweetness;[246] bent on obtaining honour by archaism and the fashionableness [or new-fangledness] of his constructions.”[247] Josephus has Art. 47. He is “clean in phrasing, and clever at setting forth the intention of his speech distinctly and pleasantly; persuasive and agreeable in his speeches even if occasion compels him to speak in different senses; fertile in enthymemes on either side, and with gnomæ at command if ever any man had them; also most competent to infuse passions into his discourse, and a proved hand at awaking compassion and softening the reader.” All which (observe the strict rhetorical form of it) is very handsome towards that Ebrew Jew. The note (49) on Cyril of Alexandria, that he “keeps the character and idiom of the appropriate speech,” that “his style is fashioned and, as it were, forced to express idiosyncratic idea,”[248] and “is like loose poetry that disdains metre,” is itself thoroughly idiosyncratic, and speaks Cyril very well. Two others, 55 and 75, of a somewhat acrid character, on Johannes Philoponus (“Matæoponus rather,” quoth our Patriarch), are, though acrid, by no means uncritical. All these are late and mainly ecclesiastical writers, though of a certain general literary interest. The first author, at once of considerable age and of purely literary value, to be very fully handled is the above-mentioned Ctesias, and we have only fragments whereby to control Photius’s criticism of him. But the paragraph which comes at the end of the abstract of the _Persica_, and applies both to that and to the _Indica_, is itself worth abstracting. “This historian is very clear and simple in language, so that his style is mixed with much pleasure. He uses the Ionic dialect, not throughout, like Herodotus, but partially. Nor does he, like that writer, divert his story to unseasonable digressions. But from the mythical matters with which Herodotus is reproached neither does Ctesias abstain, especially in the book called _Indica_. Still, the pleasure of his history consists chiefly in the arrangement of his narrative, which is strong in the pathetic and unexpected, and in the variation of it by dint of the mythical. His style is slipshod more than is fitting, often falling into mere vulgarity. But the style of Herodotus, both in this and other respects of the power and art of the Word, is the canon of the Ionic dialect.”

Footnote 245:

πυκνότης, which some would render “shrewdness.”

Footnote 246:

βρύων γλυκύτητος.

Footnote 247:

τῷ ἀρχαϊσμῷ καὶ ταῖς καινοπρεπεστέραις τῶν συντάξεων εμφιλοτιμουμενος.

Footnote 248:

εἰς ἰδιάζουσαν ἰδέαν ἐκβεβιασμένος.

Appian’s _Roman History_ and Arrian’s _Parthica_ come in for successive notice, but there is nothing about the latter’s literary character till the much later and fuller notice of his Alexander-book at 91, where Photius, as is specially his wont with historians, gives a full appreciation. The pupil of Epictetus, he thinks, "is second to none among those who have best drawn up histories, for he is both first-rate at succinct narration, and he never hurts the continuousness of his history by unseasonable divagations and parentheses.[249] He is original [“new-fangled,” the usual translation of καινοπρεπὴς, has a too unfavourable twist in it], rather by the arrangement of his words than by his vocabulary; and he manages this in such a fashion that hardly otherwise could the tale be told more clearly and luminously. He uses a vivid, euphonious, well-turned style, and has smoothness well mixed with grandeur.[250] His neologisms are not directed to mere innovation _à perte de vue_,[251] but close and emphatic, so as to be real figures of speech and not merely change for ordinary words.[252] Wherefore clearness is his companion, not merely in this respect, but most of all in the arrangement and order and constitution of his style, which is the very craft-secret of clearness. For the use of merely straightforward periods is within the power of mere uncultivated persons,[253] and, if it be maintained without admixture, brings the style down to flatness and meanness, whereto Arrian, clear as he is, has not approached. And he makes use of elliptic figures not in respect of his period but of his diction, so as never to become obscure: if any one should attempt to supply what is wanting, it would seem to tend towards the superfluous, and not really to complete the ellipse. The variety of his figures is also one of his strongest points—not changing at once from simple usage, but forming themselves gently and from the beginning, so as neither to annoy with satiety nor to worry by overcrowding. In short, if any be set against him in the matter of historical composition, many even of the old classics[254] would be found his inferiors in _taxis_."

Footnote 249:

It is odd to find the hatred of the harmless necessary parenthesis, the delight of all full minds and quick wits, and the terror of the ignorant and slow, formulated so frequently by Photius.

Footnote 250:

τὸ λεῖον ἔχει τῷ μεγέθει συγκιρνάμενον.

Footnote 251:

εἰς τὸ πόῤῥω.

Footnote 252:

ἐναλλαγὴν συνήθους ὀνόματος. This is an acute criticism, and I do not, at the time of writing, remember that it had been anticipated. Undoubtedly most practitioners of ornate and unusual style do merely “give change for ordinary words,” that is to say, they think in these, and then just write something less usual in place of them.

Footnote 253:

ἰδιώταις

Footnote 254:

τῶν ἀρχαίων.

Appian has earlier had less elaborate praise, as being terse and plain in phrase, as truth-loving as possible, an expounder of strategic methods, and very good indeed at raising the depressed spirit of an army, or soothing its excitement, and exhibiting passion by means of speeches. It is odd enough, after the exaltation of Arrian—a good writer but no marvel—to the skies, to come across the following brief and grudging estimate, inserted in the shortest of summaries, of a man of the highest genius like Herodotus. Photius here, as elsewhere, does justice to the Halicarnassian as a canon of Ionic. “But he employs all manner of old wives' fables and divagations, whereby an intellectual sweetness runs through him,[255] though these things sometimes obscure the comprehension of the history and efface its proper and corresponding type, since truth will not have her clearness clouded by myths, nor admit divagations (_parecbaseis_) further than is fitting.” This is rather dispiriting for the first really great writer whom we meet; and the long judgment upon Æschines, which follows shortly, makes little amends, because the orators had been criticised and characterised _ad nauseam_ for a thousand years. Later we have no ill criticism of Dion Cassius—indeed Photius seems more at ease with post-Christian writers, even if they be non-Christians, than with the classics proper, or ἀρχαῖοι as he calls them. The careful and somewhat artificial style of this historian, his imitation of Thucydides, and some other things, are well but briefly noted.

Footnote 255:

δι’ ὧν αὐτῷ ἡ κατὰ διάνοιαν γλυκύτης διαῤῥει. The translation in the text, which may be varied as "which gives him [or "is the source of"] his pervading intellectual charm," and which Professor Butcher approves, seems to suit the immediate context best. But διαῤῥέω very frequently means “run _off_” or “_away_,” and the general attitude of disapproval which Photius assumes towards the Herodotean fabling might seem to warrant “whereby his attraction for the intellect disappears.”

It is evident that the good Patriarch was no sparing or infrequent novel-reader, for, as has been said, he is copious both on some novels that we have and on one that we have not. The somewhat monotonous form, however, of the Lower Greek Romance gives him more room for analysis of story than for criticism of art. He justly extols the propriety of Heliodorus, is properly shocked by the looseness of Achilles Tatius, and puts the lost Iamblichus between them in this respect. His criticism of the _Æthiopica_—of many million novel reviews the interesting first—may be given, apart, of course, from the argument of the book, which, as is usual with him, and not uncommon with his followers to-day, forms the bulk of the article.

“The book (_syntagma_) is of the dramatic kind [this is noteworthy], and it uses a style suitable to the plan, for it abounds in simplicity and sweetness, and in pathetic situations actual or expected. The narrative is diversified and unexpected, and has strange chance salvations[256] and bright and pure diction. If, as is reasonable, it sometimes indulges in tropes, they, too, are brilliant, and exhibit the matter in hand. The periods are symmetrical and, on the whole, arranged with a view to succinctness. The plot and the rest are correspondent to the style. His yarn[257] is of the love of a man and a woman, and he shows an anxious and careful observance of propriety of sentiment.”

Footnote 256:

σωτηρίαις, a capital phrase for the “rescue or two [and twenty],” the “hairbreadth 'scapes” of the Romance.

Footnote 257:

This is irresistible for ὑφαίνει.

In Art. 77, on the not very interesting subject of Eunapius, we have the familiar phrase “New Edition” in its literal Greek form.[258] A fresh example of the interest he takes in history appears under the head of Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and in Art. 90 Libanius supplies him with occasion for criticising a rhetorician pure and simple. He is, he thinks, exhibited to the best advantage[259] in his “plasmatic” [speeches written on imaginary topics] and gymnastic discourses rather than in his others, for by his excessive elaboration and busybodyness[260] in these others he has hurt the grace and charm of the,[261] as one may say, naïf and impromptu style, and deprived it of verisimilitude, causing frequent obscurity by insertions, and sometimes even by abstraction of the necessary. “But in other respects he is a canon and standard of Attic speech.”

Footnote 258:

νέα ἐκδόσις.

Footnote 259:

αὐτὸς ἑαυτοῦ χρησιμώτερός εστιν.

Footnote 260:

περιεργία.

Footnote 261:

τήν ἔμφυτον τοῦ λόγου καὶ αὐτοσχέδιον (ὡς ἄν τις εἴποι.)

Lucian and the mysterious Lucius of Patræ seem to have occupied him together, and he discusses the authorship of the _Ass_ with some acumen, recognising in Lucian a merely satiric intention, in Lucius a serious belief in magic and marvels. As for Lucian himself (respecting whom he has preserved for us the great epigram quoted above), he acknowledges the universality of the Samosatan’s satire of all things Greek, their god-making and their _Aselgeia_, the extravagances of their poets and their political mistakes, the emptiness and pretentiousness of their philosophy. In fact, says Photius, in an approach at least to the true Higher Criticism, “his whole pains are spent on producing a prose Comedy of Greek things. He himself seems to be one of those who worship nothing seriously; he scoffs and mocks at other’s doxies, but lays down no creed of his own, unless one should say that it is a creed to be creedless. In style he is of the very best, brilliant and classical, and signally distinguished in diction, and of all others a lover of good order and purity, with a clear and symmetrical magnificence. His composition is arranged so that the reader seems not to be reading prose, and as though a very pleasant song, without distinct musical accompaniment, were dropping into the ears of the hearers. And altogether, as we said, his style is of the very best, and ill-matched with the subjects at which he chose to laugh.”

Photius is not lavish of the word _aristos_, and it is only fair to say that, for its day and way, this criticism is not far itself from deserving the epithet.

After some shorter notices, including a good many of Lexicons (Photius himself, it need hardly be said, was a lexicographer), we come, at Art. 159, to Isocrates, on whom the Byzantine judgment is again noteworthy. He has more, Photius thinks, of the sophist than, like the other Nine, of the actual advocate. “His readers can see at once that he employs a distinct and pure style, and shows a great deal of care about the craftsmanship of his speeches, so that his order and his care overreach themselves a little and become excessive. In fact, this excess of apparatus does not so much provide genuine arguments as tasteless ineptitude.”[262]

Footnote 262:

τὸ ἀπειρόκαλον, one of the most damaging of Greek critical terms.

“Again, he is wanting in ethical character and truth and nervousness of style (γοργότης.) Of sublimity, so far as it suits political discourses, he mixes a very good dose, and suitably to his clearness. But his style is more languid[263] than it ought to be. And he is not least blamed for attention to trifles, and a balancing of clauses[264] which disgusts. But we say this in reference to the excellence of his speeches, pointing out what fails, and is exceptional in them, inasmuch as in comparison with some of those who have made bold to write speeches, even his shortcomings would appear to be excellence.”

Footnote 263:

ἄτονος.

Footnote 264:

σμικρολογία καὶ τὸ προσκορὲς τιον παρισώσεων. It is needless to say that this προσκορὲς, this “satiated nausea” of the balanced antithetic sentence, has recurred as regularly as the resort to the most obvious, and, so long as it is fresh, most effective, of rhetorical devices.

Immediately before this article on Isocrates there is a very shrewd note (and one which is “for thoughts” to any one who has ever written books) on the _Sophistike Paraskeue_ of Phrynichus. “This writer, if any ever was, is fullest of various knowledge, but otherwise redundant and garrulous: _for when it was open to him to have got the matter completely finished off, without missing a single important point, in not a fifth part of his actual length, he, by saying things out of season, has stretched it out to an unmanageable bulk; and while he has collected for others' use the matter of a good and suitable treatise, he cannot be said to have made much use of it himself_.”

It would be possible to extend these excerpts and abstracts very considerably from my notes of reading the great mass of the _Bibliotheca_; though the larger part of that mass is itself made up, not of literary criticisms at all, but, as has been said, of summaries, abstracts, and extracts. In not a few cases the longest articles deal with commentaries or anthologies, the Platonic studies of the rhetorician Aristides, the _meletæ_ or declamations of Himerius, the _Bibliotheca_ of Diodorus, the fortunately still extant Commonplace-books of Stobæus, and the like. But the foregoing pages have probably given sufficient foundation for a study of the Photian position, which may be taken, without rashness, as a very favourable representative of Byzantine criticism generally.[265]

Footnote 265:

And it cannot be too often repeated that when Byzantine men of letters were not criticising they were often doing something better _for us_. He would be a sorry critic himself who would not give a wilderness of all but the very greatest members of his own class for John Stobæus or Constantine Cephalas.

In making this estimate we must first of all take note of [Sidenote: _Importance of its position as a body of critical judgment._] certain limitations, which may be accidental but which also may not. It is at least curious that he never deals directly with a poet. Even his indirect references, borrowed from his authors, to the greater Greek verse-writers are few, and, speaking with the reserves due in the case of so voluminous and peculiar a compilation as the _Bibliotheca_, I do not remember any independent poetical criticism of his. On the other hand, such criticisms as those which have been quoted above on Lucian, on Isocrates, on Phrynichus, and others, show, in the first place, no contemptible critical acumen, and in the second place, a critical attitude which is worthy of a good deal of attention. For the literary characteristics of his authors Photius distinctly “has a good eye”: he can see a church by daylight and a little more also. We may even say that he shows a good deal more detachment, more faculty of seeing his man in the round, than any purely classical critic displays. Here and there, as in his eulogy of Arrian, he is a little too technically rhetorical, and has evidently not got rid of the notion of the Figures as things possessing a real existence. And there is more than a trace in him of the growth of that critical jargon which has been noticed above, certain phrases recurring rather too often, like “gusto” with old-fashioned critics, and divers terms, which it is not necessary to mention, with new-fangled ones. But technicalities are, at their worst, an evidence that the _techne_ exists. Further, it would be, as has been seen, extremely unjust to regard Photius as a mere phrase-monger. His criticism of Lucian is as comprehensive as it is shrewd, it is “criticism of life” as well as criticism of literature; that of Isocrates shows that he was not to be caught by mere scholastic elegance; that of Phrynichus, that he had an eye for method; his notices of the Romancers, that he could appreciate and relish kinds out of the beaten track of classical literary classification and practice; the remark on “merely straightforward periods” is a just and shrewd one. Not only would Photius have made an exceedingly good reviewer, but we may say that he is almost the patriarch of reviewers in two senses, that he is the first of all such as have dealt practically with literature from the reviewer’s point of view.

To say this is of course not to give unmitigated and indisputable praise. There is no lack of advocates of the devil who will say that the reviewer’s point of view is not easily found in a very original age, or by a very original genius. It may be so—the age of Photius himself was certainly not a very original age, except in countries where the point of view of the reviewer was as certainly quite unknown. But this is not the question for us; the question for us is, Have we met this attitude? Have we come upon any one occupying this point of view before? And the answer must, I think, be, “No; we have not.” Dionysius, of all our writers, comes nearest to it, for Quintilian is too summary, and Longinus is considering rather a single quality of literature, as shown in divers authors, than divers authors by themselves, and as presenting a combination of qualities in each case. What we would give almost anything for is a collection of such reviews by Aristotle; and we have not got them. We do not know that Aristotle ever thought of such a thing,[266] though he might well have made it as a preparation for the _Rhetoric_ and the _Poetics_, just as he made his collection of “polities” as a preparation for the _Politics_.

Footnote 266:

Unless, which one would rather not think, he meant the _Problems_ (_v. supra_ p. 49 _sq._) as such.

The absence of poetical criticism from Photius is specially to be regretted, because it leaves us in doubt as to his power of recognising and analysing, not merely the finer subtleties of form, but the more complex and interesting kinds of literary matter. His own interests, it is pretty clear, were, though he had the liking for novels which is often found in men of science and business, chiefly scientific, historical, and philosophical, including, of course, religion in philosophy. There is probably no Greek writer, whose subject in any way admitted of it, who has said so little about Homer. In dealing with Stobæus he has the patience (though, as has been seen, he is far from being a mere enumerator) to enumerate all the heads of the _Florilegium_ and the _Eclogæ_, and all the authors, hundreds of them as there are, whom the anthologist has laid under contribution. But he is tempted into no critical asides about them. He is essentially positive—frankly busied with matter, or with the more material side of form.

Yet to the historian of criticism he has a singular interest, because of that position of origin which has been noted. Cicero and Pliny in their libraries were in a position to do much the same thing; had, as we shall see, a kind of dim velleity of doing it now and then, but did it not. Athenæus, if he had cared less for cooks and courtesans, more for literature; Aulus Gellius and Macrobius, if mere philology on the one hand, and mere folk-lore and mythology on the other, had not drawn them aside, would probably have anticipated him. But no one actually has; none has applied to the library or its prose division the process which goes to the making of a _catalogue raisonné_ in painting. No doubt Photius leaves a good deal to be done, independently of his silence on poetry and drama. His comparison is so limited as to be almost non-existent; it is much if he can compare Heliodorus, Iamblichus, and Achilles Tatius in reference to the treatment of matters erotic; Ctesias and Herodotus, on the score of resisting, or succumbing to, story-telling digression. But even in this there is the germ, the rudiment, of the great Comparative Method. So again the other great Lamp of Criticism, the historical estimate, still has its shutter drawn for him. A vague distinction between the ἀρχαῖοι and the moderns is indeed not uncommon; but we have, so far as I have noticed, no distinct line drawn between the two, and both are huddled and jumbled together. Photius has not yet risen to that highest conception of criticism which involves the “grasping” of each author in his complete self, and the placing of him in the general literary map or genealogy (whichever phase may be preferred) of the world. And lastly, the silly old etiquette of silence about Latin still seems to weigh, if unconsciously, on him. He does indeed allude to the birth-year of Virgil. In his notices of historians of Rome he necessarily has to mention some Roman matters, and he mentions that Cicero was slain while reading the _Medea_. But my memory, assisted by Bekker’s excellent index, traces no critical remark, comparative or independent, about any great Latin writer, and nothing more than the barest mention of one or two by name. Yet, with all these drawbacks, the niche we have indicated is securely his, though he has scarcely yet been established in it.[267]

Footnote 267:

There is in Photius a later notice of Isocrates, in connection with others of the usual set of Attic orators; and these are chiefly interesting for some references to the literary historian Cæcilius, referred to by Longinus, and to Longinus himself as “the critic who flourished under Claudius” (predecessor of Aurelian), “and took great share in the struggle of Zenobia, queen of the Osrhoeni.” But the criticism on Demosthenes referred to can hardly be that of the Περὶ Ὕψους.

If an example be required between Photius and John, it may be found (of no encouraging character) in the almost contemptible [Sidenote: _Tzetzes._] _Homeric Allegories_ of Tzetzes[268] written in that dreary “political” verse, the only consolation of which is the remembrance that, whether as origin or echo, it has sometimes been connected with the charming _Meum est propositum_ metre of the Latin Middle Ages. In Tzetzes, the allegorical method neither reaches its pinnacle of fantasticality as in the _Romance of the Rose_,—there is often something faintly fascinating there,—nor attains to the rather imposing mazes and meanderings of fifteenth-century personification, but stumbles along in pedestrian gropings of this kind[269] (on _Il._ i. 517 _sq._): “The groaning of Zeus signifieth a puff of wind moving the eyebrows of him, and conducting the thickness of clouds. The downcoming of Thetis indicates that there was rain, which is also a kind of consentment of assistance. And the coming of Zeus to his own home is the restoration of the atmosphere to its former condition, having thinned out the thickness of the cloud to rain. The rising up of the gods from their seats is the confusion and disturbance of the elements,” &c., &c. The much-ridiculed allegorical morals of the _Gesta Romanorum_ are sense, poetry, piety, to this ineffably dull and childish attempt to substitute a cheap pseudo-scientific Euhemerism for the criticism of literature. If Allegory had not too profitably assisted at the cradle of Greek literature, she certainly infested its death-bed in her most decrepit and malignant aspect.

Footnote 268:

Ed. Boissonade, Paris, 1851.

Footnote 269:

Ed. cit., p. 81, l. 299 _sq._

At the same time, we must not be too contemptuous of Byzantine criticism. Had the vast mass of the later rhetorical [Sidenote: _John the Siceliote._] scholiasts yielded nothing to the sifting but the quotation in John the Siceliote (though as from the _Philological Homilies_, not the Περὶ Ὕψους), by name, of the Longinian censure on the _Orithyia_, it would almost be justified in existing, not to mention references in others, one of which shows us that in the same collection Longinus gave a discussion (the tendency of which we can easily guess) on the _stomphodes_ or “mouthy.”[270] But the siftings are not quite limited to these two.

Footnote 270:

_V. supra_, p. 171 _note_.

John, who appears possibly, if not at all certainly, to have had the surname of Doxopater, and to have been sometimes designated by it, appears also to have been a monk. He must (on his own authority) have observed the virtue of Poverty much better than some of his fellows, and few of them can have more avoided the vice of laziness. His voluminous works devoted to Rhetoric are ranged by Walz[271] under eleven titles: to wit, Prolegomena and Homilies on the Progymnasmata of Aphthonius, General Prolegomena to Rhetoric, Commentaries on the States, Inventions and Ideas of Hermogenes, Epideictic speeches on the Horse and against the Saracens, a destructive discussion of the myth of Prometheus, a “Basileios” and a “Politikon.” These works contain some personal details and complaints, which, if he subsequently became Patriarch of Constantinople, were heard by Fortune in her less savage mood; and he seems to have busied himself with theology and history, as well as rhetoric. But it is very difficult to place either his patriarchate, or consequently his life, chronologically. He might have been the John Glycas who held the dignity from 1316 to 1320, when he abdicated; but Glycas seems to have been married. So perhaps he was John Camater, an earlier occupant (under the Latin Empire) of the see in 1204.

Footnote 271:

Vol. vi. p. 5 _sq._

All this, it will be seen, is a rather unsubstantial pageant; but John’s works are solid enough. Even the _Prolegomena_ (taking them as his) of Doxopater, and the _Commentaries on the Ideas_ (to which alone we have access), fill five hundred pages. It is in the latter that we are to look for anything touching our subject. They are rather wide-ranging, to which character of theirs we doubtless owe the Longinian citation.

Neither did John always observe that scrupulous accuracy which is so dear to the heart of a certain class of critic, that, like a true altruist, he would have every one, except himself, possess it. At the opening he writes “Themistocles” for “Miltiades.” But his erudition is considerable, and his qualities in other respects not contemptible. It is, however, very noticeable that he is as much inclined to the general and disinclined from the particular as if he had lived fifteen hundred years earlier. Although he is no slavish Platonist (he has somewhere the happy phrase Πλάτων Πλάτωνος ἀναξίως. “Did Plato? the less Plato he”), he is fully Platonic in his scorn of the μερικαὶ ἰδέαι, of the mere “characterising” speeches, Lysiac and Isocratean, and so forth, and aims at the “circumprehensive and comprehensive” idea and phrase which transcends all these. Thus we are once more face to face with that putting of the cart before the horse which has met us so often—with that discussion of δεινότης and γλυκύτης which is no doubt a capital thing in its way, but which ought to be preluded and, as military men say, “prepared” by a long, by an almost infinite, examination of the individual exponents and practitioners of the Vigorous and the Sweet.

It is, of course, fair to remember that he is annotating Hermogenes, and that he can hardly be expected to follow methods different from those of his text. But it necessarily follows that his loyalty leads him away from the fields most likely to be fertile for us, and, when he does approach them, directs him mainly to the Orators, and to them chiefly, if not wholly, from the strictly rhetorical point of view. Yet he is by no means ill to read, though a little technical and abstract, on rhythm (opening of Bk. i. chap. i.); and if he has gone no further in reference to φαντασία than all before him except Philostratus, that is no great reproach to him. Undoubtedly, however, his chief—as at the same time his most tantalising—attraction is his reference to things which, in his comparatively modern period, must have still existed, but which seem now to be irrecoverably lost. Such is his quotation, p. 93, of certain remarks of Longinus on the poet Menelaus.[272] We may doubt whether definite poetical criticism from the excellent John would have been satisfactory, when we find him assigning “out-and-out”[273] poetical quality to the soft inanity of Isocrates, and the want of it to the rough fire of Thucydides. Yet in the lower and “composition-book” kind of criticism he is not to seek—the synopsis of clearness at p. 173 being a very workmanlike composition.[274]

Footnote 272:

Apparently this poet, “by taking pains, changed an unhappily gifted nature into exactness and blamelessness.”

Footnote 273:

ἄντικρυς.

Footnote 274:

Besides citing the _Orithyia_ passage John also refers to Longinus as admiring Moses (Walz, vi. 211), which, of course, strengthens the supposition that he had the Περὶ Ὕψους before him not a little (_v. supra_, pp. 156, 162).

And so, without further minute examination of this curiosity, we may take some general view of it as the last words—or fairly representative of the last words—of Greek rhetorical criticism, unaffected by mediæval literature, unaffected even by Latin, to any considerable, or at least avowed, extent, but turning round and round the long-guarded treasures of its own special hoard, like the dragons of fable. To us, perhaps, the hoard does not seem very inviting. The enormous apparatus of distinction and terminology is set to work, almost exclusively, on matter which has neither the attraction of the highest æsthetic problems, nor the practical interest and profit of direct literary criticism of particulars. There is abundance of learning, and by no means a dearth of mother-wit. But the worst side of Scholasticism—the side which was long unjustly taken for the whole, but which _is_ a side thereof—makes itself almost universally felt. Sometimes one almost thinks of one of the keenest, if not the most generally delectable, strokes of Rabelaisian satire, the duel of signs between Panurge and Thaumast. This -_tes_ and that -_ia_ hurtle through the air almost without conveying understanding, though they may darken a good deal. With sufficient pains and goodwill, you may disinter many a shrewd remark, many a really useful definition, many a scrap of precious information, by no means unintelligently used. But on the whole, the impression is as of the ghost of Rhetoric struggling against being re-embodied as the soul of Criticism.

INTERCHAPTER I.

We have endeavoured, in the foregoing Book, to survey—from the actual texts, and admitting no conjectural or theoretical reconstruction—the history of literary criticism in Greece and the Greek Empire till its fall. It is our duty in this first halt to survey this survey—to see what results it actually gives us, to classify and arrange them, to account for them as philosophically as possible, and, without digressing into the quicksands of theory, to lay down the solid road of logical and historical perspective.

We have seen that criticism in Greece began from two different sources, neither of which, perhaps, was, or could have been expected to be, likely to supply it in an absolutely unmixed condition. There was, in the first place, the strong Greek philosophising tendency, working upon the earliest documents (the most important, then as now, identified with the name of Homer), and subjecting them to processes which oftenest took the form of a kind of rationalising allegory. The second was the invention, for more or less practical purposes, of the art of Rhetoric or Persuasive Composition. As, in the first place, the collection of written literature was very small, and as the oratorical character impressed itself more or less strongly upon nearly _all_ literature in the process of publication, this dominance of Oratory was long maintained, and continued, almost to the latest times, to prevent Rhetoric from assuming its proper etymological position as “speech-craft” in the widest sense, as the art of artificially arranged language.

But this inconvenience, always more or less existing, was mitigated by practice in divers ways. As actual literature, both prose and verse, mustered and multiplied, and as it was more and more enjoyed by the keen Greek appetite for pleasures of all kinds, it at the same time presented more and more temptation to the equally keen Greek aptitude for philosophical inquiry. Larger and larger treasuries were made available for quotation and imitation; more and more kinds of literature were presented to the student for investigation, classification, inquiry into sources, methods, effects. And so after a century, or a century and a half, of progress and exercise, of which little remains to us except the brilliant, but from this point of view wayward, work of Plato, we are confronted, in the work of Aristotle, with an Art of Poetry, incomplete in certain ways, but singularly mature in its own way, with an Art of Prose which, though it has not yet by any means recognised its real nature and estate, and persists in regarding itself as an Art of Persuasion merely, has yet accumulated many valuable observations, and has made the paths of future investigators fairly straight and smooth.

While, however, the oratorical preoccupation prevented Rhetoric from attaining the development which might otherwise have been expected, both Rhetoric and Poetics were very seriously obstructed by the unequal growth of literary kinds within Greek itself, and by the absence of any other literature with which to compare such kinds as existed, and by which to discern the absence of those that did not exist. The whole of Greek Poetic was prejudicially affected—and the affection has continued to be a source of evil in all criticism since—by the accidental lateness of prose fiction in Greek literature; just as the whole of Greek Rhetoric was prejudicially affected by the accidental predominance of Greek oratory. The habit—in the main a sound one—of generalising from the actual facts, led to very arbitrary theories of more literary kinds than one. It was assumed that what we may call “periodic” Epic was the only kind; and Romance, which may be very fairly called a “loose” Epic, was barred as improper. Still more was the same distinction ignored in drama; where a single, though in its way very perfect, form of Tragedy was arbitrarily assumed to be the only one possible or permissible. So the accidental and easily separable extravagances and licences of the Ancient Comedy were allowed to obscure its merits, and depress its rank, in the eyes of the critic. Lyric—perhaps the very highest of all literary kinds, as it must be the oldest, and is the most perennial—became a mere appendage to tragedy. The great kind of History, in which Greece had already produced such magnificent examples, was in the same way regarded as a sort of baggage-waggon to oratorical Rhetoric; and the dialogic form which was preferred in philosophy, partly owing to the habits of the nation, and partly owing to the towering eminence of Plato, was in the same way, or much the same way, allowed or forced to attach itself to the same train.

But these mischiefs, though sufficiently considerable, and assisted by the ignorance (changed latterly in the worse days to a contemptuous ignoring) of other languages, were by no means the equals of those caused directly by this ignorance, while they were aggravated by it in every way. If, while we are certainly not superior to the ancients in most branches of literature, where comparison is possible, we may challenge them more safely in criticism, it is due almost, if not quite wholly, to what has been called the illegitimate advantage of our possession of an infinitely larger stock of accumulated literature, and of the fact that this literature is distributed over the most various times, nations, and languages. It is the rarest thing at any time to find a critic of the first class who is not acquainted with literatures besides his own; and it is almost invariable to find that the mistakes which great critics make arise out of ignorance or forgetfulness of other literatures besides their own. But even in antiquity there is no critic of, or approaching, this first class, except Aristotle, who suffered the full exposure to this disability. As a “tongue of comparison” Longinus knew Latin: Dionysius and Quintilian, who, if not critics of the first class, are not far off it, knew, the one Latin, the other Greek. But Aristotle (unless the legends about Alexander having sent him Indian communications have any basis, and unless we take the references of Plato and others to Egyptian stories as having much more solid ground than there is any reason to accord them) had none, and could have had none: while, even if he had been stocked with Egyptian and Sanscrit, these would have done him but little good, though they might have corrected his delusions as to the necessary connection of poetry and fiction. It must always be reckoned as one of the most fatal proofs of the literary inferiority of the Roman genius that the younger literature, though it enjoyed the bilingual advantage to the full, made so little advance on the older in criticism.

For the three centuries between Aristotle and Dionysius we are but ill provided with original texts. But both from what we have, and from such notices as are trustworthy, we can be tolerably sure that attention was almost entirely devoted, on the one side to the verbal or material criticism of the Alexandrian and Pergamene schools, on the other to technical Rhetoric. Now the former, though a most necessary ancilla to literary appreciation proper, is always to be kept in proper subordination to her mistress; and the conditions of the latter, though in one sense favourable to criticism (inasmuch as the stock of actual literature was always increasing, and the temptation to turn to it from mere declamation-making might at least be expected to be always stronger), was in itself becoming more and more a futile technique. Symbouleutic oratory (above vestry rank) was killed and kept dead by the petty tyrants, the less successors of Alexander, and lastly the Roman rule. Judicial Rhetoric tended to confine itself to minor causes. Only Epideictic, the most dangerous of the kinds, began to flourish more and more, and resulted by degrees, as we have seen, in the creation of a singular profession or pseudo-profession, the members of which had about them something of the travelling lecturer, something of the popular preacher, something—nay, a good deal—of the hack book-maker, and not a little of the journalist pure and simple. Their own study of literature, unless they kept to the stock passages of the textbooks, must have been fairly thorough; but literature was to them partly what Burton’s _Anatomy_ was to Captain Shandon, a mere dictionary of quotations, partly a collection of patterns. Very rarely did they take it by itself even for the canvas of one of their show-orations, and when they did it was seldom or never from the point of view of appreciation of strictly literary beauty.

For about half a century before and a century after the Christian era the record, even putting Latin criticism aside altogether, is a more distinct one. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Plutarch, and Dion Chrysostom, give us a good deal more material than we have yet had. But the results of the inspection of it are not wholly satisfactory. Dionysius of Halicarnassus is, as has been said, perhaps our typical specimen of the literary critic of antiquity. He has far less force and method and originality than Aristotle; but then he is a student confining himself to Rhetoric and History, not a world-philosopher, taking up the philosophy of literature merely as part of a whole. He has far less genius than Longinus; but he is also far more copiously preserved. We read him with respect; we meet just and acute observations in him, we can even occasionally compliment him on something like (never quite) the “grasp” of the comic fragment. But he is still partly under the limitations of his technical rhetoric, partly under others less easy to describe exactly; and he neglects Latin literature, by his time a very considerable entity. He cannot wholly bring himself to regard literature as literature. With Plutarch the case is much worse, for it is evident that he will not do this at all. It is an educating and ethical influence; a convenient storehouse of fact and example; a respectable profession; but not a great, a sovereign, and an infinitely delightful art. As for Dion (the most literary of the pure rhetoricians, and a favourable example of them), he is only an entertainer, the showman of another art, which is not quite coarse, but is certainly not in the highest sense fine. Lucian, somewhat later, is a true artist, a true man of letters, and occasionally a critic, endowed with unerring eyes and the very Sword of Sharpness itself, but he is this only at times, and even at those times he is too negative.

If we advance a little in point of time and turn our attention to the strict teaching and practice of Rhetoric itself, from the second century onward, and probably backward almost to the very time of Aristotle, the spectacle is even less satisfactory. The work, of which Hermogenes and Aphthonius are the coryphæi, leading an innumerable chorus of followers and commentators, who continue for more than a thousand years, is not exactly contemptible work. Work conducted with extreme diligence and also, at any rate in some cases, with remarkable alertness and acuteness of mind, can never be wholly contemptible. But it is work disappointing, unsatisfying, and even irritating to the last degree. The technical Rhetoric, always arbitrarily limited in subject and perversely conventional in method, has practically lost all chance of exercising itself in the noblest of its three divisions. Deliberative oratory is dead, except in exercises and make-believes, and the bread-winning chicanery of forensic, the frivolities (hollow except as also bread-winning) of epideictic, have usurped the whole room. It might be thought that in this bereaved condition the art would bethink itself of that profitable, dignified and delightful application which it had always more or less directly practised, but which had seemed less dignified than Persuasion—the art of literary criticism proper. But it does nothing—or but little—of the kind. The remarks of Hermogenes on Frigidity are not bad; the doubtful Demetrius, in his study of Interpretation, is not far from the true kingdom others approach it here and there. The invention of that critical “lingo,” to which reference has more than once been made, is something, though a something liable to abuse, and capable of standing in the way of better things. But, on the whole, the endless procession of some fifty generations, from the author of the _Rhet. ad Alex._ to John of Sicily, busies itself either on the one hand with endless distinctions, systematisations, and terminologies, with everlastingly twining strands of new colour into the rope that lets down the bucket into the empty well, and varying the staves and hoops of the bucket itself; or on the other with the provision of cut-and-dried patterns for the use of the brainless, with telling tongue-tied sophists what they are to say at the funeral of a fifth cousin, and how to make the most of a harbour which is dry for three-quarters of every tide.

Amidst all this desert and chaos of wasted industry there stands the great rock of the Περὶ Ὕψους with its shade and refreshment in the weary land of its own contemporaries, and with its brow catching the dawn which was not to shine fully for more than fifteen hundred years, and is hardly noon-day yet. In the section devoted to it we have examined, as thoroughly as our limits permitted, the special merits and defects of this great little book; it is only necessary here to lay a slight additional stress on the fact that if it be not the sole book of antiquity—the sole book, except Dante’s, of antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the earlier modern times—to set forth that critical ideal which comprehends the formal and the material, the verbal and the ideal merits of literature, it exhibits this comprehension as no other book does. To confine ourselves to our present special subject—the criticism of Greek antiquity—Plato may alternate noble flights with curious crotchets about literature; Aristophanes may criticise from the point of view of robust common-sense which is yet not in the least Philistine; Aristotle may have almost a mathematical grasp of his own notions of form, and a generous enthusiasm for certain kinds of dignity in subject and proportion; Dionysius may show that adherence to technique (and a rather vicious technique too) is quite compatible with genuine literary appreciation. But all these, and much more others, have their eyes mainly off the object. Aristotle himself at times, lesser men like Plutarch, who have misread their Plato, continually, seem to think it rather vain to look at that object at all. The intelligent enjoyment of literature; the intimacy with it, at once voluptuous and intellectual; the untiring, though it may be never fully satisfied, quest after the secret of its charms, never neglecting the opportunity of basking and revelling in them—these things, till we come to Longinus, are rare indeed. And when we do meet them, the rencontre is of a sort of accidental and shamefaced character. When we come to Longinus there is no more false modesty. “Beautiful words are the light of thought.” These words themselves are the lantern of criticism.

Elsewhere it gleams more faintly; though it would be as ungrateful as it would be Philistine to ignore the debt which we owe to others, from Aristotle himself downwards. It is characteristic of Greek criticism—and it is the secret of its weakness as well as of its strength—that it is more busy with kinds than with authors, with authors than with books. And when it is busy with authors at all, it is hardly ever busy with them as wholes, as phenomena occupying an individual place in the literary cosmos; but almost always as examples of this or that quality, as supplying illustrations of this or that Figure, as giving a good pattern for such-and-such a progymnasma, a model for dealing with such-and-such a stasis. Proceeding in this way, criticism attempts—and fails—to be scientific; it renounces its right to be artistic, and effects the renunciation. The individual _ethos_ of the poet, the more solid but not less individual _ethos_ of the proseman, flies off and melts away, when each is merely regarded as an example of “_todetes_” or “_tallotes_” as a lecturer’s cabinet, in which you put your hand to draw out an illustration of Anadiplosis or Palillogia. Almost may the most idealist of metaphysical students think of turning to sheer Hobbism, of blaspheming “_nesses_ and _tudes_ and _ties_,” when he sees them dragged in and abused after this fatal fashion, which even Aristotle does not wholly escape, and in which others indulge as if it were their sole and legitimate business.

It follows that, except for the stock contrast of Herodotus and Thucydides, in respect of the Orators (the exception being there due to an obvious reason), and to a less extent of the Three Tragedians, we have very few studies at once comprehensive and comparative of authors in Greek, and that, out of Longinus, such studies as we have are scrappy, technical, and altogether lacking in that critical συνάρπασμα which the great _locus_ of Simylus requires. There is really no second passage in Greek which can be put alongside of the Longinian estimate of the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_, agree or disagree as we may with the details of this.

Another and a very important matter (which it is fairer and more philosophical to call rather a defect of our understanding than a defect of the matter presented to it) lies in that impossibility of attaining the Greek standpoint as to certain rhythmical and verbal matters, which has been more than once glanced at, and which is instanced in the case of Longinus himself. Few among the wiser even of those who have paid special attention to the subjects of Greek music and Greek pronunciation would, I think, assert, that they thoroughly understand the passages relating to prose rhythm, and the special suitableness of the cretic and some of the pæons as the base-feet for it. And it is practically admitted by most sober and well-instructed critics that both Aristotle and Longinus make strictures upon things as “frigid” and in bad taste, that they ostracise metaphors and ban conceits which to any modern criticism (putting aside mere assentation) seem perfectly harmless, if not positively admirable. The same thing occurs in English and French to this day, although in this case all the difficulties which beset us in relation to Greek disappear, except the radical difference of national (not now even of temporal) ear and brain. A phrase of Bossuet, which seems to French ears even of to-day the _ne plus ultra_ of majestic melody, will strike very well-instructed Englishmen as a rhetorical jingle and French critics of enthusiasm and enlightenment will see no difference between the music of Moore and that of Shelley, or rather prefer the former. In the other sphere, what is to an Englishman a piece of dry humour will appear to a Frenchman a _saugrenu_ monstrosity; and a Frenchman’s ideal of manly eloquence, dignified or passionate as the case may be, will seem to an Englishman to show nothing but the maudlin pathos of a drunkard, or the petulant braggadocio of a child. Yet here there are innumerable side-lights, a long course of partially identical history, literature, and religion, the experience of persons of both nations who have lived in and with the other, to guide us. No wonder that, when we have none of these things, we should be puzzled. Yet the quarrel, such as it is, with the Greek critics, is not so much that their estimates, low or high, differ from ours, as that they have given us so few documents from their own side to help out the contrast. Even one essay, on both the literatures, by a Greek to set over against the invaluable survey by Quintilian would be not merely something for which we could gladly exchange most of the Greek writers on Rhetoric, except Aristotle, but something in consideration of which we would gladly read all these writers, and make no complaint of them. As it is, we have to go to Photius, a representative of a time and thought far more alien from those of the Greeks proper than is Quintilian himself, for full review of even Greek writers, and he also is silent about Latin.

But “something sealed the mouths of these Evangelists.” It is perhaps not unphilosophical to think that this silence was the price the world had to pay for the confident and magnificent advance which it made under the guidance of th