Chapter IV (1)

GREEK CRITICISM AFTER ARISTOTLE. SCHOLASTIC AND MISCELLANEOUS.

DEVELOPMENT OF CRITICISM—THEOPHRASTUS AND OTHERS—CRITICISM
OF THE LATER PHILOSOPHICAL SCHOOLS: THE STOICS—THE EPICUREANS:
PHILODEMUS—THE PYRRHONISTS: SEXTUS EMPIRICUS—THE ACADEMICS—THE
NEO-PLATONTSTS—PLOTINUS—PORPHYRY—RHETORICIANS AND
GRAMMARIANS—RHETORIC EARLY STEREOTYPED—GRAMMATICAL AND SCHOLIASTIC
CRITICISM—THE PERGAMENE AND ALEXANDRIAN SCHOOLS—THEIR FOUR
MASTERS—THE SCHOLIASTS ON ARISTOPHANES—ON SOPHOCLES—ON HOMER—THE
LITERARY EPIGRAMS OF THE ANTHOLOGY—THE RHETORIC OF THE SCHOOLS—ITS
DOCUMENTS—THE ‘PROGYMNASMATA’ OF HERMOGENES—REMARKS ON
THEM—APHTHONIUS—THEON—NICOLAUS—NICEPHORUS—MINORS—GENERAL REMARKS ON
THE ‘PROGYMNASMATA’—THE COMMENTARIES ON THEM—THE “ART” OF
HERMOGENES—OTHER “ARTS,” ETC.—TREATISES ON FIGURES—THE DEMETRIAN ‘DE
INTERPRETATIONE’—MENANDER ON EPIDEICTIC—OTHERS—THE ‘RHETORIC’ OR ‘DE
INVENTIONE’ OF LONGINUS—SURVEY OF SCHOOL RHETORIC—THE PRACTICAL
RHETORICIANS OR MASTERS OF EPIDEICTIC—DION CHRYSOSTOM—ARISTIDES OF
SMYRNA—MAXIMUS TYRIUS—PHILOSTRATUS—LIBANIUS, THEMISTIUS, AND JULIAN.

The two remarkable books which have been discussed at length in the foregoing chapter represent, no doubt, the highest condition, [Sidenote: _Development of Criticism._] but certainly a condition, of Greek criticism in the second half of the fourth century before Christ. This criticism had not, indeed, yet assumed the position of a recognised art. It was at best a more or less dimly recognised function of Rhetoric, which on the one side was made to include a great deal which is not literary criticism at all, and on the other hand was made to exclude Poetics. But Rhetoric, from this time onwards, more and more tends to become the Art of Literary Criticism generally, and to absorb Poetics within itself. So that on the one hand we shall find, among the Latins, Quintilian, whose strict business is with the strictly oratorical side of prose rhetoric, dealing freely with poetry, and on the other, among the Greeks, Longinus (whose main subject is poetry), not hesitating to draw examples from prose. Nor may it be wrong to discern in this awkward separation of the two parts of criticism, and the yet more awkward adulteration of prose criticism with matters really foreign to it, an unconscious—nay, an unwilling—recognition of fact. For Poetry deals first of all with form, Prose with matter; though the matter can never be a matter of entire indifference to Poetry, and the form becomes of more and more importance as we ascend from the lower to the higher prose.

After Aristotle we fall back, for the ages immediately following, on the dreary and perilous chaos of fragments and titles. [Sidenote: _Theophrastus and others._] From the extant work, indeed, of his chief disciple, Theophrastus, we could guess that he dealt largely in Rhetoric. It is no rash conjecture that the famous _Characters_ themselves were intended, after a fashion of which we have but too many other examples, to provide orators and writers with cut-and-dried types on which to base their rhetorical appeals. Nay, we have titles as well as fragments of works of his bearing on the subject,—_on Style_, _on Comedy_,—but nothing whereon to base a real estimate.[58] And what is true of Theophrastus is true of hundreds of others. Only those who are fond of the pastime of letting down buckets into empty wells can derive the slightest satisfaction from knowing, or at least being informed, that Aristotle of Cyrene wrote a _Poetic_ of which we have nothing, and Phanias of Eresus a work _On Poets_ of which we have a couple of scraps.[59] It is certain that a very considerable literature, at least ostensibly critical, existed, dating from the third and later centuries.

Footnote 58:

As in other cases, Theophrastus has been criticised very largely on
rather slim vouchers. For instance, the quotation (in Cic. Orat., 39)
on the strength of which Mr. Nettleship, _Lectures and Essays_, ii.
47, speaks of him complimentarily, strikes me, I confess, as but a
commonplace remark enough. It is that by Herodotus and Thucydides,
“History was first stirred up to speak more freely and ornately.”

Footnote 59:

See for more, Egger, p. 347 _sq._

Two writers, later in time, not of much critical fertility but of some interest, will illustrate for us the attitude of two Greek [Sidenote: _Criticism of the later Philosophical Schools: The Stoics._] philosophical schools to criticism. None of these schools except the Peripatetics (and in a negative sort of way the Platonists) deserved very well of our Tenth Muse. The Stoics—when they were not in that mood of disdainful tolerance which is represented by Epictetus' doctrine of “the Inn,”[60] of less tolerance still and more disdain as shown by Marcus Aurelius,[61] or of affected contempt, almost pure and simple, as in Seneca,[62] which was their later attitude—seem in their earlier days to have devoted themselves with great vigour to grammatical investigations, and at all times to have affected the allegorical style. But we cannot wonder that they spent no pains on investigating, still less that they spent no pains on championing, that mixed intellectual and sensual pleasure which is the business and the glory of literature.

Footnote 60:

This doctrine, best known to English readers, perhaps, from Mr
Arnold’s not quite fair application of it to Théophile Gautier, is of
much more general application in the original (_Enchiridion_, cap.
52). Man being represented as a voyager to a far country, all
occupations save duty and philosophy are really mere “inns on the
journey,” pleasant perhaps for a night, but not good to stay in.
“Eloquence” is specially dwelt on as one of these “inns.”

Footnote 61:

Who thanks Heaven (i. 17) that he did not make more progress in
rhetoric and poetry.

Footnote 62:

_V. infra_, bk. ii. p. 245 _sq._

The attitude, however, of their principal antagonists is all the more surprising. The Cynic vulgarity and insolence could not be expected to busy itself profitably with letters, and, as we shall see shortly, the ancient Pyrrhonists have at least left us nothing to show that they could combine with their _Que sais-je?_ on philosophical points, the keen literary enjoyment and the discriminating literary appreciation of their great modern champion. But the attitude of the Epicureans to literature is one of the most surprising things in the history of ancient philosophy.

One might have supposed, not merely that a Hedonist philosophy would apply itself most joyfully and energetically to the investigation and the vindication of one of the greatest of all sources of _ataraxia_ and _aponia_,[63] but that it would do [Sidenote: _The Epicureans: Philodemus._] so with all the more vigour as thus vindicating itself from the common charge of esteeming only sensual pleasures. Yet, though the scanty wreckage of original Epicurean writing warns us not to be too peremptory, there is absolutely no evidence that Epicurus, or any of his followers, took this side. Nay, the whole evidence available is distinctly against any such supposition. Perhaps we could have no stronger testimony to the reluctance with which antiquity took the view of literature as a pleasure-giver, or rather to the rarity with which such a view even presented itself. If we were here indulging further in speculation, it might not be improper to suggest that the atomic and necessitarian theory of Epicurus deprived the operations of the artist of half their interest. But this would be to travel out of bounds. It is enough to say that Epicurus is accused of slighting critical discussion altogether, that his chief disciple Metrodorus appears to have written a book on poetry which was a general attack on it as a useless and futile thing, and that the fragments of Philodemus of Gadara, which have been salvaged from Herculaneum, go to support the same idea.

Footnote 63:

Freedom from trouble and pain; the former, especially, being the
technical term for the Epicurean _nonchalance_.

At the same time, we must not lay too much stress on this. The charge against Epicurus and Metrodorus rests, mainly if not wholly, on the testimony of Plutarch, who, as we shall see, took the merely ethical view of literature, and is found in that treatise of the _Moralia_ in which he sets himself to prove that Epicureanism cannot even give the pleasure at which it aims And the tolerably abundant fragments of Philodemus[64] are, even after all the pains spent on them, in such a chaos that only extremely temerarious arguers will do more than take a vague inference from them. The remark which the latest editor of this puzzle has made about one book—"It is difficult to know whether Philodemus or his opponent is speaking"—applies, I should say, to almost all. Not only is this the case; but we can see, with hardly any danger of mistake, that if this difficulty were removed, and if we had the whole treatise fully and fairly written out before us, our state would be very little the more gracious. A very great, perhaps the greater, part of it seems to have been occupied with the discussion of one of those endless technical questions—"Is Rhetoric an _art_ or is it not?"—in which antiquity seems to have taken an interest, the utter unintelligibility of which to us is only tempered by the wise reflection that plenty of our questions to-day will seem equally “ashes, cinders, dust” to students two thousand years hence. The real and solid conclusion is, once more, that we have not lost nearly so much as we seem to have lost by the disappearance of these endless treatises on rhetoric and on poetry. It is possible, of course, that one in a thousand of them might have been another Περὶ Ὕψους: it is far more probable that not one would have been anything of the kind.

Footnote 64:

Ed. Ludhaus. Leipsic, 1892.

If Acatalepsy[65], the doxy of the Pyrrhonists, has been somewhat more fortunate in one way than her close connection [Sidenote: _The Pyrrhonists: Sextus Empiricus._] the Ataraxia of the Garden, she has paid for that fortune in another. Except in the magnificent poem of Lucretius, we have no complete document of Epicurean philosophy, and there the philosophy is utterly eclipsed, burnt up, washed away, by the blaze and the torrent of the poetry. No such disturbing element enters into the two very businesslike expositions of philosophic doubt which we possess in the _Pyrrhonic Sketches_ and the _Against the Dogmatists_ of Sextus Empiricus.[66] But, if the one writer is almost too much of a poet, the other is very much too little of a prose writer. Scepticism has assuredly no necessary connection with dulness, though it may have a good deal with levity. But Sextus Empiricus is one of the dullest writers of antiquity. There is not a spark, not a glimmer even, in his phrase, which is chiefly made up of the most damnable iteration of technical terms; his arrangement is desultory; and beyond a raking together of all the arguments, good, bad, and indifferent, for general or particular agnosticism, that he has read or can think of, he seems to find it impossible to go. At the same time, modern writers have found by no means a bad subject for such handling in the contradictions, the inconsistencies, the ineptitudes of literary critics: the eighteenth century especially, from the writings of the great Scriblerus to the _Pursuits of Literature_, is full of such things. And if there is little of the kind (for there is something) in Sextus, we may not improperly set it down to the fact that he found little to fasten upon.

Footnote 65:

The incomprehensibleness of things; the impossibility of certain
knowledge.

Footnote 66:

Ed. Bekker. Berlin, 1842.

What he gives is contained in three of the four last sections of _Against the Dogmatists_, those dealing with Grammarians, Rhetoricians, and Musicians respectively. In the last, which is the shortest, I do not know that the example of childish cavilling quoted by Egger—that a bard was set to look after Clytæmnestra, and Clytæmnestra murdered her husband—is more or less childish than the solemn sophism (not quoted by him) with which the chapter and the book closes, to the effect that as there is no “time”[67] in the wide sense, so there can be no “time”—feet, rhythms, measures—in the narrow.

Footnote 67:

This is proved in the usual fallacy-fashion: Time must be past,
present, or future. Admittedly, neither past nor future time _is_;
present time is either divisible or indivisible, to each of which
there is an objection.

The section on Rhetoric is also short, and turns almost wholly upon the old _aporia_ whether Rhetoric is an art or not, with others of a similar kind.

As for the grammatical section, that does touch us nearer; indeed, when Sextus divides Grammar into two parts, adopting for the second the definition of Dionysius of Thrace, that “Grammar is the knowledge[68] of what is said by the poets and prose writers,”[69] we seem to be almost at home. But in this expectation we should be counting without our host, the sceptical physician, and, indeed, without antiquity generally. We have first quibbling _à perte de vue_ about _empeiria_, then other definitions, then considerations of the mere grammatical elements. Only after a long time does Sextus come to the grammarian’s business of _interpreting_ the poets and prose writers. And then he not only seems to be dealing with men of straw, but answers them with, as Luther would say, a most “stramineous” argument. Poetry, it seems, they say (and it is fair to Sextus to admit that Plutarch and other people do in effect say this) is useful as containing wise saws and philosophical instances: grammar is necessary to understand poetry: therefore, grammar is good. He does not care actually to attack poetry, but observes that, in so far as it provides matter useful or necessary for life, it is always clear, and wants no grammatical exposition, while (662-663) whatsoever deals in unfamiliar stories, or is enigmatically expressed, is useless, so that grammar can do nothing useful with it. A subsequent contention, that grammarians know neither the matter nor the words of literature, though a little sweeping, might have chapter and verse given for it in the case of at least some critics. But when Sextus establishes his first point by triumphing over the poor grammarians for not having perceived in a Homeric epithet an allusion to a pharmaceutical property, and in Euripides a point of clinical practice (671), he is either making a heavy joke or is utterly off the critical standpoint.

Footnote 68:

ἐμπειρία.

Footnote 69:

συγγραφεῖς. The opposition is as old as Plato, though συγγραφεὺς is
sometimes limited to “historian.”

A third school, in its various stages, has perhaps a better, if a vague, repute for attention to literature. Perverse as was in [Sidenote: _The Academics._] many respects the attitude of Plato to the subject in detail, it was impossible (or might have seemed impossible) that his doctrine of _psychagogia_,[70] and the magnificent eulogies bestowed in the _Ion_ and the _Phædrus_ on that poetry towards which he is elsewhere so severe, should not induce his followers—at whatever great a distance—to do likewise. It seems, however, to have been found easier by the earlier Academics to follow the crotchet than the enthusiasm, and many of the puerile and servile quibbles to which we have referred as appearing in Sextus Empiricus seem to be of Academic origin.

Footnote 70:

The “leading of the soul” to truths, and gifts, and pleasures.
Aristotle likewise adopts the word: and indeed it contains in itself
the soul of criticism, though in Plato himself it sometimes has an
unfavourable meaning, of “allurement,” “seduction.”

The Neo-Platonists, at least, might be looked to with some hope. Their spirit at any rate was not negative, and they seem, [Sidenote: _The Neo-Platonists._] as a rule, to have been diligent and eager students of literature. But, on the other hand, their tendency towards mysticism, and also the strong colour which their philosophy took from the East, made them especially susceptible to the temptations of allegory, which, as we have seen and shall see, was a Delilah of criticism in almost all its stages in Greece. And when they escaped this they nearly always succumbed to the other temptations of merely grammatical and textual inquiries, or to those of an abstract and theoretical æstheticism, which leaves the actual estimation of literature as literature out of sight.

Thus, from the two great chiefs of the school, Plotinus and Proclus, we have short treatises on the Beautiful—by Proclus [Sidenote: _Plotinus._] in the form of a commentary (not complete) on the _First Alcibiades_ of Plato, while the tractate of Plotinus[71] attaches itself somewhat less closely to the _Hippias_. From the very first this latter keeps rigidly and laboriously to the abstract. Beauty, we are told, specially affects the sense of sight, but the ear perceives it in eloquence, poetry, and music. It is also in emotions, in virtue, in science. Is all this derived from one principle or from many? What is it, or what are they? But as there is both essential and accidental beauty, we must first settle what the attractive principle is. A shrewd question, and one which, if followed out in the proper direction, would lead straight to the best criticism of literature; but, unluckily, Plotinus does not so follow it.

Footnote 71:

_Enn._, vi. 1. Separately printed with Proclus, in an edition which I
have not seen, by Creuzer, in 1814. M. Théry included a French
translation in the rather capriciously selected but interesting
appendix of _pièces justificatives_ appended to his _Histoire des
Opinions_; and I believe there is another.

He proceeds to examine and expose the difficulties attending the proposition that beauty comes mainly or chiefly from proportion of parts. There must rather, he holds, be in the soul some faculty of perceiving the divine quality, whether manifested in proportion or in anything else. The beauty of bodily substances depends on their affinity with the divine: the beauty of things not recognised by the senses depends on their identity with it. In yet other words, and from a yet other point of view, Beauty is Good, Ugliness is Evil: the attraction of the first pair, the repulsion of the second, easily explains itself.

As for the organ wherewith beauty is perceived, it is the soul: the senses only apprehend shadow-beauties—reflections and suggestions of reality. The faculty must be cultivated; it must be refined by high thinking and plain living, and at last it will see that, though Good and Beauty are one, yet Beauty is in a lower sphere than Good—is, in fact, but an imitation of it.

All this is not merely Platonic—it is itself beautiful and good: it is noble, it is true, it deserves everything that can possibly be said in its favour. But for the actual purposes of literary criticism it is but as a sweet song in a foreign language. It will hardly help us in the very least degree to distinguish Shelley from the most estimable of minor poets, or Thackeray from the least estimable of minor novelists. It does, by way of illustration, touch literary criticism once itself, for it refers to “the admirable allegory” which represents Ulysses as using all his efforts to withdraw himself from the enchantments of Circe and the passion of Calypso, resisting all the enticements of bodily beauty and delight. To the greatest as to the least of Neo-Platonists the allegorical explanation is itself Circe, itself Calypso; and instead of endeavouring to escape from it, he willing meets it willing, and abides contented in those ever-open arms.

This is especially seen in the writings, known or attributed, of the most industrious and variously accomplished, if not the [Sidenote: _Porphyry._] most gifted, of the Neo-Platonists, Porphyry. Porphyry has to his credit two documents which, in title and subject, are undoubtedly literary, the _Quæstiones Homericæ_ and the _De Antro Nympharum_; while some would take away from Plutarch, and give to him, the work on Homer’s Life and Poems, which has undergone the indignity of being spoken of as “miserable” by M. Egger,[72] while, on the other hand, Archbishop Trench[73] gives the author, whoever he was, what would, if deserved, be the very high praise of having thus early “recognised very distinctly the charm which rhyme has for the ear.” If this were so, I should be inclined to put him together with Philostratus, as having at least stumbled on a great critical truth. But perhaps the words will hardly bear the burden, for the writer, quoting μελισσάων ἀδινάων ... ἐρχομενάων, adds, “These words and their likes add much grace and pleasure to the expression.”[74] And unluckily, the remark occurs only in an examination of Homer _by figures_, where this is taken as representing _homoeoteleuton_. Now, _homoeoteleuton_, though it is a sort of poor relation of rhyme, belongs to that branch of the family which more rightly bears the name of Jingle. However this may be, the treatise, as a whole, would scarcely add to the reputation either of Plutarch or of Porphyry.

Footnote 72:

_Op cit. plur._, p. 484.

Footnote 73:

_Sacred Latin Poetry_ (ed. 2, London, 1864), p. 30, _note_.

Footnote 74:

μάλιστα προστίθησι τῷ λόγῳ χάριν καὶ ἡδονήν.

The two more certain works, on the other hand, belong only to those outskirts of our subject which have been so often characterised. The _Questions_[75] busy themselves almost wholly with the text and the meaning, though it is fair to say that Porphyry is much above the usual scholiast in sense and judgment, and sometimes approaches criticism proper. This approach, however, is generally, if not always, displayed in the same direction as that of Aristotle’s extant _Homeric Problems_ (_v. supra_, p. 49 _sq._) and of many of the remarks made by the Master in the twenty-fifth chapter of the _Poetics_—the direction, namely, of solving material _aporiæ_, such as Aristotle’s own comment on ζωρότερον κέραιε, and Porphyry’s[76] on the demurrer why Penelope did not send Telemachus for aid to her own parents? The process, in short, illustrates frequently, if not always, that curious _swerving_ from the purely literary question which we so often notice. Almost any magnet is strong enough to draw the commentator away from that question. He will even ask, and gravely answer, the question, Why men, but not gods, are represented as washing their hands before dinner?

Footnote 75:

Ed. Schrader, 2 vols., Leipsic, 1890.

Footnote 76:

For this and the subsequent oddity see Schrader (_op. cit._, _Ad
Odysseam_), pp. 40-43. The subject is dealt with, from another point
of view, in a monograph by M. Carroll, _Aristotle’s Poetics in the
Light of the Homeric Scholia_, Baltimore, 1895.

The _De Antro Nympharum_,[77] on the other hand, is the principal example, in intermediate times, of that allegorical interpretation or misinterpretation which, unless kept severely in order, is sure to usurp the place of the criticism to which it can at best be ancillary. From no other members of the school, so far as I know, have we anything that comes even as near to criticism as this.

Footnote 77:

My copy of this is the separate edition of Van Goens (Trajecti ad
Rhenum, 1765). It can hardly be necessary to say that the subject is
the famous and beautiful opening of _Od._ xiii. As for the
treatment—the cave, the double entrance, the nymphs, the vases, the
bees, are all allegorised to the _n_^{th}, pressed to death, broken on
the wheel, sublimated to a non-essence in the Neo-Platonic laboratory.

But the Schools have led us far from our immediate context and subject, the literature of the three centuries after Aristotle. [Sidenote: _Rhetoricians and Grammarians._] From all this literature it cannot be said that one single text, of undoubted genuineness and substantive importance, preserves for us the critical views of the something like three hundred years which passed between the philosopher’s death in 322 B.C. and the flourishing of Dionysius of Halicarnassus in the third decade before Christ. Two things, however, may be said to be, in a round and general manner, ascertained as having either taken definite form or come into existence during this time; and though both are conditioned very uncomfortably by our lack of texts, they are both of the utmost importance to the history of Criticism, and they can both be spoken of, with caution, indeed, but with some general induction not too far from certainty. The one is the establishment of the teaching of Rhetoric in a form which underwent no very important modification for five or six hundred years, and no absolute revolution for fifteen or sixteen hundred. The other is the birth of Verbal Criticism—of the kind of criticism which long arrogated to itself something like a primary title to the name, and has, in the same or other forms, not yet quite given up its pretensions—under the auspices of Aristarchus and the great Alexandrian school of commentators. The importance assigned to these can be justified from the fact, whether that fact be or be not in itself distasteful, that of such ancient criticism as remains to us, by far the larger part is busied rather in these two directions than in that of Criticism proper. On the one hand, we have the huge body of work, not even so quite completely collected, which fills the seven thousand pages of Walz’s _Rhetores Græci_, and the less voluminous thesaurus which does duty for Roman effort on the same lines. On the other, we have the body (whether as great or greater its more scattered condition does not permit one to say certainly) of Scholia. And we constantly find—to our grief—that the better writers (of whom, at least in some cases, something survives to us) are apt to stray, in one or other of these directions, from the proper path of that criticism which, though it does not neglect either Rhetorical method or verbal minuteness, yet busies itself mainly with far other questions, asking, “Is this writer or this work, on the whole, good or bad as work or writer?” “What variety of the poetical or prosaic pleasure does he or it give?” “What are the sources, so far as they are traceable, of this pleasure?” “What is the special idiosyncrasy of the author or the book?” “What place do both hold, in relation to other books or authors of the same or other times, in the same or other languages?” It will not be otiose if we attempt to sketch, from the extant examples, what the Rhetorician and the Scholiast, as a rule, actually did, what aim they seem to have set before them, what connection with the best literary criticism they seem to have had.

We need not very greatly disturb ourselves at the fact that, of complete Rhetorical treatises, we have probably nothing between Aristotle and Dionysius, if even that attributed to the latter be genuine; and that modern investigations refuse indorsement to the genuineness of the _De Interpretatione_ attributed to Demetrius Phalereus,[78] which would, if it were genuine, be the oldest we have. For, from myriad petty indications, there is no reasonable reason for believing that a genuine _Rhetoric_ by Demetrius would be very different from that which is now attributed to some later Alexandrian writer. Rhetoric, as we have seen, had from the first been hampered by special attributions and limitations; nor (as so often happens in history) did these limitations cease, at any rate to some extent, to work when their causes ceased to exist. The sentry in St James’s Park, who continued to be posted till the other day at the garden-door of a certain house, because (as it was found out long after the reason had been forgotten) some Royal or Ambassadorial personage had been quartered there for a time generations earlier, was a great and admirable allegory—and in wiser days than our own would have remained undisturbed as such. Moreover, though the political importance of Rhetoric decreased, and the assemblies of Greece became mere parish councils; though the law courts went more and more either by fixed codes or personal influence; though philosophy became _phluaria_; Rhetoric, having once, with unconscious cunning, [Sidenote: _Rhetoric early stereotyped._] got Education practically into her hands, retained that powerful engine and all the influence that it confers. It would seem however that, pretty early, a very mischievous process of stereotyping took place. Grammar and Logic, the companions of Rhetoric, were to some extent saved by their having positive things to deal with—the facts of speech and the Laws of Thought. But Rhetoric dealt with fashion, opinion, etiquette: and except when, in the hands of superior persons like Dionysius and Longinus among the Greeks, like Quintilian among the Latins, it shook itself free and became the Literary Criticism that it ought to be, it became a rather parlous thing. It early developed the disease of technical jargon, in that specially dangerous form—recognisable perhaps in times nearer our own than those of Demetrius or even of Hermogenes—the form of giving wantonly new meanings to common words. It elaborated an arbitrary and baneful system of “common form”—of schemes, and types, and conventional schedules, into which, by a minimum of intellectual exertion, the orator or writer could throw what he wanted. On the one hand, it constantly increased and multiplied the Figures; on the other hand, it invented a system of things called _staseis_—"states of the case"—which attempted to classify and stereotype the matter of the orator’s brief, just as the Figures classified and stereotyped his oratorical means of dealing with it. In other words, and to adopt the terms of literary criticism itself, the stop-watch ruled supreme. In the more technical examples of Rhetorical art, such as those of the far later but characteristic Hermogenes, it is often difficult to find anything which touches literary criticism at all. Only the greater men, as has been said, were ever able to break free; and the sort of scorn with which they speak of their predecessors—Quintilian of the figure-mongers, Longinus of Cæcilius—is invaluable (especially as neither Quintilian nor Longinus seems to have been at all a bad-blooded person) as showing how irksome the traditional Rhetoric was felt to be by men who had in them the sense of literature.

Footnote 78:

_V. infra_, p. 103.

The Scholiast, on the other hand, if of a less traceable creation, is of almost equally old lineage, and he may conveniently [Sidenote: _Grammatical and Scholiastic criticism._] be dealt with, in such detail and variety as he requires, before the more formidable bulk of the School Rhetoricians occupies us. We have already seen, in glimpses, that the restless curiosity of the Greeks took very early to purely philological inquiry, to the separation and naming of parts of speech, to the codification of grammar. And it was impossible that a people furnished with such an admirable language and so early developing accomplishment, both in music and poetry, should not, at a stage proportionately much earlier than in other cases, discover and prosecute inquiries as to Prosody. To this day, Greek grammar is, to some tastes at any rate, the only grammar which is not too arbitrary or too jejune to excite any interest. The wonderful symmetry of Greek accidence, the mazy but by no means unplanned intricacy of Greek syntax, have had power to fascinate schoolboys who, both at that age and later, were merely bored by the arbitrary niceties of Latin, and refused to accept the attempts that have been made to impose an appearance of system on the antinomianism and the compromises of English. As for Greek metre, though the subject has not the historic interest—the interest of great yet not inexplicable changes—which belongs to the prosody of the two other languages just brought into comparison, it is capable of much more exact handling. And, in particular, the peculiar structure of Greek choric verse, that hitherto unparalleled blend which unites much of the liberty of prose with the ordered charm of poetry, gave practically endless occupation to intellects which would soon have been satiated with the comparative monotony of Latin, and which might have recoiled before the apparent lawlessness of English.

It is not very certain at what precise time these two studies (or, if we take prosody to be a part of grammar, this joint-study) began to occupy considerable numbers of professional students. But it must have been a tolerably early one, and by degrees the grammarian in his pure function, the scholiast in his applied one, became recognised personages.

The profession, so to speak, may be said (according to the common tradition, but with sufficient justice) to have been formally constituted in the third and second centuries [Sidenote: _The Pergamene and Alexandrian Schools._] before Christ, under the patronage of the successors of Alexander at the courts of Pergamus and Alexandria. To these schools belong the famous names of Zenodotus (the earliest, and belonging partly to the third century), of Crates of Mallos, and, above all, of Aristarchus. It is, perhaps, only at first sight surprising that, famous as the names are, they are for the most part names only. Not one single work, nor even any substantial passage of a work, by any of the three masters just mentioned, or by any of their contemporaries or near pupils, has come down to us, save in the case of one pupil of Zenodotus, more famous even than his master, the grammarian Aristophanes. Criticism indeed, it has been said, has, of all literature that is really literature, the most precarious existence. Still, we know a good deal about them from citations, allusions, and discussions in later writers, while of Aristophanes of Byzantium we have a fairly considerable collection of fragments.

The disappearance of texts, always lamentable, if not actually irremediable, is here more to be regretted than anywhere, because there is fair reason for believing that, at any rate, some of these grammarians were critics in the full and proper sense of the term. By far the greater part of their labours appears to have been directed to Homer, and there is no reason to contradict the general, the received, opinion that while the Pisistratean redaction is not quite certain in fact, and almost entirely unknown in nature, while it is certain that even Aristotle had before him a text differing remarkably from our own, the Alexandrian grammarians practically produced that which we have. It is accordingly from this time that the famous and formidable craft—science it would no doubt call itself—of textual criticism may be said to date; and from our information, second-hand as it is, we are enabled to recognise some types of textual critics which are not, and are never likely to be, obsolete. In Aristophanes, the spelling reformer, the practical originator of accents, it is not rash to see the great exemplar of the critic [Sidenote: _Their Four Masters._] of the purely philological kind, who busies himself with those literary matters which are most remote from literature proper, though no doubt he is a very valuable person when he is kept in his proper place. Zenodotus stands in the same relation to the lexicographical critic, and seems also to have been the father of all those who by “a critical text” mean a text arranged at their own discretion, passages being expunged, transposed, or corrected, not in accordance with any testimony as to what the author did write, but according to the critic’s idea of what he ought to have written—in other words, what the critic himself would have liked him to write, or would, if he could, have written in his place. Aristarchus appears to have deserved the primacy generally accorded to him by being more wisely conservative than Zenodotus, and less tempted to stick in the letter than the lesser Aristophanes; as well as by a general display, in his more literary remarks, of critical faculty greater than was possessed by either, and infinitely greater than that of the average scholiast. While the still earlier, and at least equally famous or notorious, name of Zoilus is of itself sufficient to show that the critic who is merely or mainly a snarler can at least boast that he is of an ancient house.

It would be rash to deny, and even unjust to doubt, that some of these famous critics, as well as others less known or not known at all, practised criticism in its best and widest sense, regulating texts by a sanely conservative acuteness, interpreting meanings and purpose with adaptable but not too fantastic compliance, annotating matter with intelligent erudition, and even achieving, as best they could, the explanation of the nature and success of their author’s literary appeal, and the placing of his work in the general map of literary history. Nay, there were actually, though our remains of them are but tantalising, literary historians of tolerably old date. But it is possibly neither presumptuous nor ungenerous to suspect that, if we had the whole works of Aristarchus before us, we should find in him (allowing for his grammatical tendency) at least as much shortcoming as we found, probably far more than we found, in Aristotle from the rhetorical side. For the old disability—the absence of comparison, the possession [Sidenote: _The Scholiasts on Aristophanes._] of not even a second literature for purposes of contrast—must have weighed upon Aristarchus just as it weighed upon Aristotle. And it is at any rate not uncharitable, it is merely a plain recognition of actual fact, to say that on the great mass of Greek grammatical criticism, as it comes down to us in the so-called scholiasts, the curse of the letter does undoubtedly rest. Nothing, for instance, is more curious than to read, from the critical point of view, the Scholia on Aristophanes,[79] some of which are undoubtedly among the oldest that we have on any author, except Homer. The commentators are irreproachable in noting the slightest grammatical peculiarity; they map out the metres with religious care. Difficulties of mere meaning they tackle with the same imperturbable seriousness, the same grave and chaste attention to duty, whether the _crux_ is a recondite “excursion into the _blue_,” or a mystery of the kitchen and the fishmarket, or a piece of legal technicality. They give careful and useful abstracts and arguments, dates now and then, sometimes not contemptible scraps of literary history. But of literary criticism proper, of appreciation of Aristophanes' ever fresh wit, of his astonishing intellectual alertness, of his wide knowledge, of his occasional bursts of magnificent poetry, there is not one word. You may spend hours, days, weeks almost over the huge collection; but the result will only be that, for this special purpose, page after page will be drawn blank.

Footnote 79:

I do not pretend to have extensively consulted or “compulsed” the
learned and admirable labours of Mr Rutherford on this subject. But I
have taken care to refresh and confirm old familiarity with Dindorf’s
edition by reading that of Dübner with the additions in the Didot
collection.

But it may be said, “The scholia on Aristophanes are confessedly[80] poor in literary annotation. Why do you take them [Sidenote: _On Sophocles._] as an example? Why not take in preference, or give in addition, one at least of those collections of scholia which the same authorities[81] accept as richer in the matter?” Very well: let us take those on Sophocles,[82] the admittedly richest of all. It will—or certainly may—seem at the opening as if a more promising “pocket” had been struck, for the first annotation on the _Ajax_ is busy with the arrangement and contents of the prologue, and its relation to what follows; and there is a good deal of similar matter throughout the commentary on this play at least. But when we come to read it in detail we find that its criticism is, at its widest departure from the mere explanatory _supellex_ of the ordinary scholiast, almost purely _theatrical_. For instance, here is the note on 66: “The introduction of Ajax is persuasive; for thus the pathos of the tragedy becomes greater, the spectators perceiving him now out of his mind, and a little later in his senses.”

Footnote 80:

See the useful and interesting, if rather widely titled, paper of Ad.
Trendelenburg, _Grammaticorum Græcorum De Arte Tragicâ Judiciorum
Reliquiæ_. Bonn: 1867.

Footnote 81:

Ibid., p. 1.

Footnote 82:

Ed. P. N. Papageorgius. Leipsic: 1888.

And again on 112: “He speaks as in other respects yielding to the goddess but in this opposing her, and the poet hence shows his disposition to be haughty (since the spectators are much disposed in favour of Ajax by his misfortunes, and all but wroth with the poet), that Ajax may seem to suffer justly from his want of submission to the divinity.”

We might quote the long and curious note on 134 as to the composition of the chorus from Salaminians; the criticism of the expostulation of the said chorus with the conduct of the Greeks to Ajax, 158; the still odder note on 201, as of one expounding to a very little school-child how Tecmessa and the Chorus exchange information; the formal explanation, on 342, why Teucer is introduced later than Tecmessa, and of the hero’s language to his captive mistress; the rationale, 770, of the arrival of the messenger; the description of the scene at 815. But the mere enumeration of such things as these should, without the expenditure of more space, be sufficient to show what the character of this annotation is. It is not so very different in places from the elaborate stage directions with which, for the last century, some playwrights, especially German and Scandinavian, have been wont to assist the imagination of their readers or hearers, or their own dramatic incapacity; and even when it goes beyond this, it hardly ever goes further than the explanation and justification of the _action_.

The same is, I think, almost without exception the character of the relatively considerable number of observations of a critical kind which I have noted on other plays. Sometimes they are actual directions to the actor—who is told on _Electra_ 823 that he “ought, at the moment of uttering the cry, to look up to heaven, and raise his hands”—sometimes, as on _Œdipus Tyrannus_ 141, the note is made that “this will stir the theatre.” But always, I think,—certainly in the vast majority of cases,—the critic abstains, with a rigidity which can only come from deliberate purpose (and this is unlikely), or from unconsciousness that the thing is likely to be required of him, from any comments on the beauty or appropriateness of the verse, on the idiosyncrasy of the phrase or its agreement with others, on the Sophoclean characteristics of the poetry, or even (except from the pure stage point of view) on the evolution of the characters. He has evidently learnt his Aristotle, and looks at the action first: he has not learnt him with a sufficiently independent intelligence to remember that even Aristotle does not look at the action only.

But the case becomes strongest when we come to what should be the stronghold of literary criticism in this quarter—the [Sidenote: _On Homer._] Scholia[83] on Homer himself. Here we have the thrice—nay, thirty times—decocted essence of the critical study of generations, centuries, almost millennia (certainly more than one millennium), of study of the writer who entered into Greek life, Greek thought, Greek education, as no book, save the English Bible, has ever entered into the life, the thought, the education, of any other country. We have it in ample bulk, of all ages, presented in that special fashion of comment on comment, of annotated annotation, which, whatever may be its merits or whatever may be its drawbacks, is at any rate suited to draw out examination of the common subject from almost every point of view.

Footnote 83:

Ed. Dindorf and Maass. Oxford, 6 vols., 1855-88.

And what do we find in this? We find, of course, verbal explanation in floods, in oceans, sometimes of the most valueless, often of the most valuable kind. We find laborious comment on etymology (not quite so often valuable as eccentric), on grammar (invaluable often), on mythology, &c., &c., giving us what, whether it be artistically worthy or worthless, we often could not otherwise by any possibility know. We get the most painstaking, if not always the most illuminative or illuminated, discussions of the poet’s meaning, handled simply, handled allegorically, handled “this way, that way, which way you please.” Not seldom, as elsewhere (in Eustathius, for instance), we get certain references to Figures and the technical rules of Rhetoric, which touch the outer skirts, the fringes, of literary criticism itself. But of that criticism, as represented even in Dionysius, much more in Longinus, the allowance is astonishingly small. You may read page after page, volume after volume, and find absolutely nothing, or next to nothing, of the sort. Take, for instance, the two volumes of Scholia on the _Odyssey_, as published by Dindorf—on the _Odyssey_, the very touchstone of all Greek literature for literary criticism, and one which proves the gold in Longinus at the very moment that it shows what we may think not so golden in him. You turn and turn. Besides the matter classified above, a great many extremely valuable, or at worst more or less curious, thoughts meet you. You will be informed (on Od. ii. 99) that “It is natural to women to dislike the parents of their husbands”; on vi. 137, that “All youth is fearful because of its want of experience, but especially female youth.” You will find examples of the puerile quibbling of Zoilus, such as that it was unlikely that exactly six sailors were taken from each ship; with the common-sense, if not much less puerile, retort that it is difficult to get ἑβδομήκοντα δύο into verse. But such things are no great windfall; and such others as the observation, at 391 of the same book, on the poet’s wonderful faculty and daring in making the sound suit the sense, and of showing in that sound “all the sorrow of the sight,” are very rare. They still more rarely soar above observations on special points, or reach criticism of general handling of the relations of one part of the story to another, of its pervading poetical quality and charm. For one note, vol. i. p. 425, a little farther on, as to the variety and aptness of the Homeric compound epithets for beasts, we shall find pages and sheets of mere trifling. And when we get a more thoughtful examination (see, for instance, that given as apparently Porphyry’s in the Appendix, ii. 789, on the conduct of Ulysses in selecting the persons to whom he shall first reveal himself), it strikes one at once that these, like the comments above cited on the _Ajax_, are comments on the _action_, on the dramatic structure, and not on the literary execution.

It is the same—it is perhaps even more the same—if we turn to the _Iliad_. The famous first words elicit naturally a good deal[84] of comment, which has some promise. Why did he begin with “wrath,” which is an ill-sounding word? For two reasons. First, that he might purify the corresponding part of the souls of his readers by the passions, &c. Secondly, that he might give his “praises of the Greeks” greater verisimilitude. Besides, this was the practical subject with which he was first to deal as in a kind of tragic prologue. Then there is an odd gradation of the states of wrath itself, from ὀργὴ to μῆνις. Next, an inquiry why the poet begins with the end of the war, and so forth. This, of course, is literary criticism of a sort, but on thin and threadbare lines enough; and there is not very much even of this. The scholiasts are far more at home with accentuation and punctuation; with the endless question of _athetesis_ (or blackmarking, as spurious); with such technical ticketings as at i. 366: “The trope is _anakephalaiosis_.[85] There are four kinds of narrative—homiletic, apangeltic, hypostatic,[86] and mixed”; or with such curiously unintelligent attempts to pin down poetic beauty as the note at i. 477 on ῥοδοδάκτυλος as a synecdoche, in which, by the way, even the colour-scheme seems to be misunderstood.

Footnote 84:

See Dindorf’s collection, enlarged with variants at the beginning of
vol. v. by Maass.

Footnote 85:

_I.e._, “recapitulation.”

Footnote 86:

_I.e._, “in the nature of conversational address, regular history, or
argument.” But it is often very difficult to translate these
rhetorical terms exactly. _Hypostasis_ in particular is even more
elusive in rhetoric than in theology.

At the close of these remarks on the Scholiasts I must enter in a fresh form the _caveat_ which has perhaps been wearisomely iterated, but which it is better to repeat too often than to suppress even in a single place where its omission might mislead. I am not finding fault with these laborious and invaluable persons for not doing what they had not the least intention to do. I am not (Heaven forbid!) arguing for any superiority in the modern critic over the ancient. I am only endeavouring to show that the subjects to which modern literary critics—who, as it seems to me, stick to their business most closely, and abstain most from metabasis ἐς ἄλλο γένος—pay most attention, were precisely those to which ancient critics, as a matter of fact, paid least. And this it is not only the right but the duty of the historian to point out.

Nor will it, I trust, while we are thus examining Miscellanea, be considered frivolous or superfluous to examine [Sidenote: _The Literary Epigrams of the Anthology._] that vast mass of information on Greek life and thought after the Golden Age which is called the _Greek Anthology_,[87] to see whether it can afford us any light. In this mass, with its thousands of articles ranging from exquisite to contemptible in actual literary quality, the range of subject is notoriously as wide as that of merit. The devotees of the Minor Muses of Hellas will “rhyme,” as we should say, anything from a riddle and an arithmetical conundrum, to Myron’s cow and the complimentary statues to the latest fashionable athlete. It would be odd, therefore, if books and authors escaped or were ignored, and they duly appear. In the battalions of _adespota_, besides a stray versification[88] of the rules for making iambics, and a wail[89] from some grammarian unnamed that he cannot write as well as Palladius or Palladas, we come to a considerable body[90] of literary epigrams arranged, by some one or other of the numerous ancient editors of the _Anthology_, in vaguely chronological order of subject. First, as in duty bound, come Linus and Orpheus, then a considerable batch on Homer, and then the long succession of poets and philosophers, dramatists and historians, to follow. For the most part, of course, the epigrams contain generalities and commonplaces, but with more or less of the neatness and prettiness that we associate with the very name of the _Anthology_; sometimes they go a little closer to the matter, as in the piece (523 of Jacobs) on Erinna’s much-praised “Distaff.” As we have only five[91] (and those not consecutive) out of the three hundred verses which this girl of nineteen years composed, it would be rash as well as unkind to question the judgment of the epigrammatist that they are “equal to Homer.” But it may safely be said that the judgment itself is in a rudimentary style of criticism. It is natural, but rather “tell-tale,” that the critic-poets always, when they can, take some non-literary point—Anacreon’s fondness for wine, the equality in number of the Muses and the books of Herodotus, the supposed physical and moral shortcomings of Aristotle, and the like. But sometimes they go higher. There is plenty of spirit and sense in the epigram on Panætius for pronouncing the _Phædo_ spurious,—as is well known, this idlest of critical debauches was at least as great a favourite with the ancients as with the moderns (548). Sometimes we get valuable testimony as to popular judgments—the unfeigned admiration which was felt for Menander, though the sounder critics might put him below Aristophanes; the mighty repute of Aristides of Smyrna (see p. 113) who is pretty certainly _not_ the Aristides congratulated ironically in another epigram as never having less than seven auditors—the four walls of the room, and the three benches in it. Perhaps Claudian is a little overparted with the “mind of Virgil and the Muse of Homer.” But all decadences are given to exaggeration of this kind; and the reviews of the closing years of the nineteenth century in England will furnish much more extravagant instances of comparison.

Footnote 87:

I use the ed. of Jacobs, Leipsic, 1794, 10 vols. (nominally 3 vols. of
Commentary, in 7 parts, 4 vols. of text, and 1 of Indices).

Footnote 88:

Ep. Adesp., 454, ed. cit., Text, iv. 214.

Footnote 89:

Ibid., Ep. 468, p. 218.

Footnote 90:

Ibid., p. 221 _sq._

Footnote 91:

_V._ Bergk, _Poet. Lyr._, iii. 143.