Chapter VI: Byzantine Criticism (2)

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

But “something sealed the mouths of these Evangelists.” It is perhaps not unphilosophical to think that this silence was the price the world had to pay for the confident and magnificent advance which it made under the guidance of the Greek genius. If that genius had been less confident, if it had assumed less cavalierly that no other literature could be worth taking into account, if it had hesitated and faltered about systematising boldly whatever had been produced by itself, and allowing everything else (if anything else existed) to go κατ’ οὖρον, what we have would probably not have been vouchsafed to us. And in that case we should, as probably, never have made up the loss. The estimable but not wise persons who try to make out that the undoubtedly rich and great languages and literatures of Modern Europe can supply substitutes for those of Greece and Rome overlook, ignore, or perhaps are honestly ignorant of, the fact that the very strong points of these modern languages and literatures, their Romantic ebb and flow, their uncertainty, their complaisance to the vagaries of the individual, their lack of logical system and _ordonnance_, make it impossible that they should ever give us the principles of fixity which we find in the Classical tongues. Those of us who, far more by chance and good fortune than by any deliberate and virtuous _proairesis_, happen to be acquainted pretty equally with both Ancient and Modern Literature, know that neither will do alone, but that for the education both of the world at large and of any epoch of it, the Ancient is even more necessary than the Modern.

Some idea of the positive extent of our debts to Greek is necessary to this history, though a _résumé_ of them is no easy thing to give. In the first place has to be reckoned the laying of the foundations of mere grammar—the preliminary to every kind of _graphica lexis_. This must have been done pretty early, and there is no language in the literary record with which it could be done for the first time to so much advantage as with Greek. Some languages, as Latin and its daughter French, have a sort of peddling tendency to purely arbitrary rule, and to enforced observance of it. Others, the chief example of which is English, have had too haphazard a history, and are too much of ingrained rebels to strict convention, to admit of elaborate grammar, despite the athletic attempts which are sometimes made to discover it in them. Between these two, Greek presents not so much the happy mean as the consummate union of all the best qualities. It evidently possessed, from the remotest time at which we have any traces of literature, an innate sense of proportion and grammatical symmetry to guide it, first into unconscious and then into conscious symmetry of accidence and syntax, besides a native melody at once sweet, vigorous, and disciplined, which made it the ideal raw material for prosody. On the other hand, the intense philosophical spirit of the Greeks, and their love of liberty, saved them from the hard and fast irrationality of the grammars of some languages, and from the tendency, not merely to make arbitrary rules, but to insist on their observance with absolute rigidity. The result was a grammar which to this day is the pattern grammar of the world—as flexible as it is symmetrical, as intelligently free as it is philosophically policed,—an eternal harmony of idiom and rule.

We have glanced in the above paragraph at Prosody, but something more must be said on this head, for the debt of literary criticism to Greek in this respect is almost the mightiest item of the total account. The mathematical element, which distinguishes this part of Grammar, enables a people with a suitable language, and a sufficient stock of experiments in it, to discover something much more like a universal calculus than is possible in Accidence and Syntax; and the Greeks discovered this. Prosody is a science which, in its pure, though of course not in its applied, divisions, as regards strictly metrical writing, they practically found out once for all.

There are systems of rhythm—early Latin probably, early Teutonic certainly—to which this prosody does not apply, except partially, if it applies at all. But all poetries that depend upon _metre_—that is to say, on the arrangement of equivalenced syllabic values in certain recurring orders—are governed by the laws which the Greeks discovered, and which the Greeks exemplified. On this side, therefore (and it is a most important side), the literary critic owes them everything. They have furnished him with every tool that he requires for taking to pieces the mechanism of the _Ancient Mariner_, as well as of the choruses, of the _Agamemnon_, of the odes of Hugo as well as of those of Pindar, of the _Nordsee_ of Heine as of the fragments of Sappho and Alcæus. And it is not at all improbable that if we possessed more of their work on prose rhythm, that subject also, and the kindred one of the so-called accentual rhythms of Latin and early Teutonic verse, would be almost as much facilitated.

When we pass beyond these elements and come to the general subject of Rhetoric (which, it must be remembered, in at least some places is recognised as covering the whole of _graphica lexis_) and Poetics, the advances in both departments, but especially in the latter, are still very great, if not so great proportionately. We have only one poetical kind—that of Tragedy, as understood by the Greeks themselves, and practised by the three great tragedians—which has been subjected to a thorough critical examination in extant text. But then this examination is so thorough that, in reference to the particular kind, hardly anything has been added since. We have, in reference to the capital example of another kind, Epic (again as understood by the Greeks), a large variety of treatments, from Aristotle to Longinus, which, if they do not give as firm and systematic a theory of this as of the former, yet go far towards doing so. Of the remaining divisions of poetry we learn, it must be confessed, less from the Greeks; and even in examples we are, except in so far as the Ode and the Idyl are concerned, very lamentably ill supplied. But in the one case, as in the other, the fragments are precious. And it may in such a book as the present, be pardonable once more to point to the feather in the cap of Criticism furnished by the fact that, but for two critics, we should be destitute of these two great lyrics of Sappho which, outside the contents of drama, are the crown and flower of Greek lyrical poetry.

In prose the same complete examination was only given, and, in the special conditions so often referred to, could only have been given, to one, and that the least important of all the divisions of prose literature—to Oratory. Oratory is, after all, the prose literature of the savage. It is in no degree a contradiction to this that it should have reached its highest pitches at periods which were not at all savage—in the palmy days of Athens, in the agony of the Republic at Rome, in the England of the eighteenth century—for it is scarcely necessary to take into account the one period of modern times when savagery ruled once more supreme, the French Revolution, though Oratory certainly did then share the shameful throne. This confirms the doctrine just laid down _simpliciter_, the others confirm it indirectly. In the great age of Greece savagery was passing; but the efforts of civilisation were directed to making perfect what the savage ages had regarded as most important. The whole condition of Roman life tended to support oratory. And in eighteenth-century England it so happened that poetry was in abeyance; prose fiction was making its way half in the dark; history was but just rising and philosophy, though still much cultivated, had not got out of the strangling grasp of Locke. Even if these propositions be disputable, the fact of the predominance of oratory in Greece is not, nor is the thoroughness (surpassing even that of the treatment of tragedy) which was accorded to its study.

Inadequate, however, as was the treatment of prose kinds in general by the Greeks, even with such examples before them as Plato and Thucydides and Herodotus, they _did_ treat them: and their treatment of the main critical aspects of prose was, if not always well directed, even more searching and thorough than their treatment of verse. They did not neglect rhythm as it was neglected, with rare exceptions, by all modern criticism till recently. They bestowed upon prose diction much of the sometimes to us not fully intelligible, but constantly fruitful, care which they had also bestowed on the diction of poetry. They hit at once on the great fundamental principle—that while ordinary language breeds clearness, language of an unfamiliar character (from whatever source that unfamiliarity may be derived) breeds the power of _striking_—which again not all modern critics, nor even the majority of modern critics, seem to have been able to grasp. And then they hit upon the Figures.

A good deal of evil—too much some may think—has here been spoken of the Figures: it will, at any rate, dispense us from saying any more in this place, though the occasion for doing so may recur. But the good of them as an exercise—as, in the language of their own curious technique, a _progymnasma_—cannot be exaggerated. Short of the merest rote-work, the consideration of them, the realisation of what they meant, the investigations necessary to refer to one or the other head the phrases of the great writers, were all of them critical processes, the defect rather than the excess of which is to be reproached upon most modern criticism. Exclaim as we may against the practice of ticketing a peculiarity of style as if it were an atom, scientifically isolated, foreordained from the creation of things, and merely gathered and applied by the writer—yet it required at least some exercise of the pure critical spirit to separate this atom, consider it, class it. Figure-hunting and figure-shaping may have been aberrations of the critical spirit, but they showed that spirit: they may have led too many to acquiesce in mere terminology, but they showed the way to something very different from any such acquiescence.

If, finally, we turn to the results of Greek criticism as applied to Greek authors, we come to a region necessarily of doubt, if not exactly of dread. The preoccupations of the writers in various directions, which have already been mentioned, and the occasional difficulty of placing ourselves at their point of view, make the necessary adjustments difficult, but they do not make them hopeless.

In Homeric criticism, the oldest, the largest, and in some respects at least the most interesting department of the whole subject, we find less difference from somewhat similarly situated bodies of criticism in other times than might be expected by some—as little as might be expected by others. As with Shakespeare, as with Dante, as with Cervantes, as with Molière, we find a vast body of unintelligent, if respectable, plodding, and of futile, if occasionally ingenious, crotchet and hypothesis. As in those cases, we find the phenomenon, curious if it were not so familiar, of a sort of personal partisanship or antipathy—two things the most unfavourable to criticism, yet the most frequently found in connection with it.[275] What we do not find, in any satisfactory measure, is literary criticism, pure and simple. The critics are constantly drawn away to side questions, after a fashion which is only more excusable than similar conduct in modern times because of the very different relations in which Homer stood to the Greeks. We have talked (Heaven knows!) nonsense enough about Shakespeare as it is. How much more should we have talked if he had been at once the oldest and greatest of our men of letters, the most ancient literary repository of our history, and a kind of Scripture, a religious document, as well? To the Greek Homer was all this, and more than all this. To the student of language he presented the oldest literary exponent of it, to the lover of poetry the admittedly sovereign poet. But neither could bring himself to regard him merely in these lights. The Greeks cared less than the Romans, and very much less than most modern nations, for personal genealogy; the personal grudge and jealousy which is the ugliest feature of the Greek character, but which is probably inseparable from small democratic societies, made too strongly against this. Very rarely do we find in Greeks any of the feeling which made Romans cherish the notion of being descended from the fabulous companions of Æneas, and from the perhaps not fully historical heroes of the monarchy and the early republic—which, to this day, makes all, save foolish fanfarons of freedom from prejudice, rejoice in the possession, or regret the absence, of a Crusading ancestor. On the other hand, local patriotism and local pride were as notoriously strong in the Greek breast; and to the latest periods we find, not merely Homer but even Herodotus, treated exclusively as if they were stores of flattering or unflattering particulars about the critic’s birthplace and its history. Again, most Greeks were religious, if not quite in our way, and almost all Greeks were interested in philosophy. With religious and even with philosophical questions Homer had been for ages (even at the beginning of the bulk of the literature that we have) so intimately associated that few could disentangle themselves from the associations. If we refuse to remember that the questions discussed resemble rather the questions of Original Sin, or of Innate Ideas, than those of Classic and Romantic, it may astonish us that age after age should busy itself unweariedly with the discussion of Homer’s moral or immoral purpose in depicting the scenes between Helen, Paris, and Aphrodite, between Zeus and Hera with the cestus, instead of dilating upon the character-force of the first scene and the voluptuous beauty of the second. But if we realise the motives which actuated them, we shall be less surprised to find so little literary criticism of Homer.

Footnote 275:

Probably the very temperament, which spurs the critic on to his
business, afflicts him with this thorn in the flesh. I should not be
surprised if examples of it were found in the present volume. But it
has been kept down as far as possible.

We have far more in regard to the Tragedians, and for obvious reasons: indeed we have more strictly literary criticism in regard to the drama than to any other division of Greek literary art. The estimates of the Three in general seem to have been not very different from what we should expect, but still somewhat different. The magnificence of Æschylus struck the scrupulous Greek taste as too often approaching bombast, and we look with surprised disappointment for so much as a single appreciation of his unequalled choruses (that of Dion, noted above, is slight and little to the point). With the Greek public generally Euripides seems, on the whole, and putting different times together, to have been the favourite of the three, and if the critics were less favourable to him, it was rather for extra-literary than for literary reasons. Public and critics together seem to have felt for Sophocles that special esteem, as distinguished, perhaps, from actual enthusiasm, which has descended to us moderns as a sort of venerable convention—to be acquiesced in even when we do not actively share it, and to be transformed occasionally into vehement championship. Only from Longinus do we learn that Sophocles was considered to be far from impeccable, but to atone for his faults by his beauties: and Longinus himself, unfortunately, does not tell us what the faults were.

The Orators have naturally been discussed with greater minuteness than any other group, nor have the results of the discussion been much interfered with by modern study. The pre-eminence of Demosthenes was as much “matter of breviary” with Dionysius as with Longinus, with Longinus as with Hermogenes: and if Aristotle says little about his mighty contemporary, we know what the great ox was that trod on his tongue. Necessarily the criticism bears largely—indeed almost entirely—on the oratorical effect; but this effect, narrowly studied as it was, in the hopes of, at any rate to some extent, reproducing it, was analysed into parts which had not a little to do with literature. And, except in Longinus himself (some of whose best remarks are on the orators), there is no chapter of Greek literary criticism richer than the commentaries of Dionysius on these orators generally.

In the same way, Plato seems to have early won, and easily kept, his proper place at the head of philosophers who are men of letters, while the more mannered graces of Isocrates seem, at least generally, to have been put in their proper position. That so obvious, and at the same time so complicated and tempting, a contrast as that of the historical manners of Thucydides and Herodotus should escape quickwitted students was of course impossible; but here those drawbacks, to which reference has been made above, are specially apparent. The animus of Dionysius against the one is as patent, though not quite so stupid, as that of Plutarch or the pseudo-Plutarch against the other; and on the whole the ancient critics seem to have stuck, with surprising want of energy and acuteness, in the commonplace contrast of the instructive and the amusing, instead of going on to the far more interesting contrast of strict literary manner which the two authors offer.

Of the other kinds we have much more scattered and less satisfactory observations. The Greeks were clearly not happy with their Comedy; they were half ashamed of Aristophanes, who might suffice for the glory of a whole literature; and they seem to have too often ranked the ingenious and fertile, but distinctly thin and “pretty,” talent of Menander above his. The same curious kind of mistaken belittling would appear to have hung upon Lyric. Both upon these and several other kinds, from Dithyramb to Mimiambics, they remind us of the apologetic remarks of our own eighteenth-century censors on the work of their own time, which, from the point of view of universal literature, will last longest and rank highest—fiction, essay, and the like. In fact, this mistaken calculus of appraisement of kinds is one of the main notes of the whole subject.

The punishment, as usual, has been adjusted to the crime; and the merit, as usual also, has met with its reward from the secure judgment of the world. The more a man knows Greek literature the more deeply will he be impressed with the inestimable services which, in criticism as elsewhere, the Greeks rendered to humanity. But the more he knows other literatures, besides Greek, the more will he be convinced of the necessity of enlarging, extending, and at the same time correcting, the Greek point of critical view.