Chapter V (1)

DIONYSIUS OF HALICARNASSUS, PLUTARCH, LUCIAN, LONGINUS.

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

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

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

Footnote 186:

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

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

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

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

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

Footnote 187:

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

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

Footnote 188:

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

Footnote 189:

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

Footnote 190:

ἀρχαικὸν δέ τι καὶ αὔθαδες κάλλος.

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

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

Footnote 191:

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

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

Footnote 192:

Petronius found that it did!

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

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

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

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

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

Footnote 193:

By Vaucher and some others.

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

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

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

Footnote 194:

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

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

Footnote 195:

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

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

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

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

Footnote 196:

V. 146-202.

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

Footnote 197:

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

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

Footnote 198:

V. 203-207.

Footnote 199:

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

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

Footnote 200:

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

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

Footnote 201:

IV. 1-395.

Footnote 202:

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

Footnote 203:

_On Translating Homer_, §§ 1, 2 _passim_.

Footnote 204:

καλλιγραφίας ἕνεκα—ὥσπερ ἀνθηροῖς χρώμασι.

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

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

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

Footnote 205:

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

Footnote 206:

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

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

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

Footnote 207:

II. 1-24.

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

Footnote 208:

II. 144-152.

Footnote 209:

τὸν μὲν εἴρωνα πέδοι κατάβαλε.

Footnote 210:

Or “nibble at them.”

Footnote 211:

_Lex._, § 24, ii. 152, _op. cit._