DELIMITATION OF FRONTIER—CLASSES OF CRITICISM EXCLUDED—CLASS RETAINED—METHOD—TEXTS THE CHIEF OBJECT—“HYPOTHESES NON FINGO”—ILLUSTRATION FROM M. EGGER—THE DOCUMENTS—GREEK—ROMAN—MEDIÆVAL—RENAISSANCE AND MODERN.

It is perhaps always desirable that the readers of a book should have a clear idea of what the writer of it proposes to give them: it is very certainly desirable that such an idea should |Delimitation of frontier.| exist in the writer himself. But if this is the case generally, it must be more especially the case where there is at least some considerable danger of ambiguity. And that there is such danger, in regard to the title of the present book, not many persons, I suppose, would think of denying. The word Criticism is often used, not merely with the laxity common to all such terms, but in senses which are not so much extensions of each other as digressions into entirely different genera. In the following pages it will be used as nearly as possible univocally. The Criticism which will be dealt with here is that function of the judgment which busies itself with the goodness or badness, the success or ill-success, of literature from the purely literary point of view. Other offices of the critic, real or so-called, will occupy us slightly or not at all. We shall meddle little with the more transcendental Æsthetic, with those ambitious theories of Beauty, and of artistic Pleasure in general, which, fascinating and noble as they appear, have too often proved cloud-Junos. The business of interpretation, a most valuable and legitimate side-work of his, though perhaps only a side-work, will have to be glanced at, as we come to modern times, with increasing frequency. We shall not be able entirely to leave out of the question, though we shall not greatly trouble ourselves with it, what is called the “verbal” part of his office—the authentication or extrusion of this or that “reading.” But we shall, as far as possible, neglect and decline what may perhaps best be called the Art of Critical Coscinomancy, by which the critic affects to discern, separate, and rearrange, on internal evidence not of a literary character, the authorship and date of books. Of the Criticism, so-called, which has performed its chief exploits in Biblical discussion, which has meddled a good deal with the |Classes of Criticism excluded.| Classics, and which occupies, in regard to the older and therefore more tempting documents of modern literature, a position of activity midway between that exercised towards the sacred writings and that exercised towards Greek and Roman authors, no word will, except by some accidental necessity, be found in these pages. The rules and canons of this Criticism are different from, and in most cases antagonistic to, those of Criticism proper: its objects are entirely distinct; and in particular it, for the most part if not wholly, neglects the laws of Logic. Now Criticism proper, which is but in part a limitation, in part an extension, of Rhetoric, never parts company with Rhetoric’s elder sister.

In other words, the Criticism or modified Rhetoric, of which this book attempts to give a history, is pretty much the same thing as the reasoned exercise of Literary Taste—the |Class retained.| attempt, by examination of literature, to find out what it is that makes literature pleasant, and therefore good—the discovery, classification, and as far as possible tracing to their sources, of the qualities of poetry and prose, of style and metre, the classification of literary kinds, the examination and “proving,” as arms are proved, of literary means and weapons, not neglecting the observation of literary fashions and the like. It will follow from this that the History must pursue the humble a posteriori method. Except on the rarest |Method.| occasions, when it may be safe to generalise, it will confine itself wholly to the particular and the actual. We shall not busy ourselves with what men ought to have admired, what they ought to have written, what they ought to have thought, but with what they did think, write, admire. To some, no doubt, this will give an appearance of plodding, if not of pusillanimity; but there may be others who will recognise in it, not so much a great refusal, as an honest attempt to provide some sound and useful knowledge which does not exist in any accessible form,—to raise, by whatsoever humble drudgery, vantage-points from which more aspiring persons than the writer may take Pisgah-sights, if they please, without fear of their support collapsing under them in the manner of a tub.

It has further seemed desirable, if not absolutely necessary for the carrying out of this scheme, to confine ourselves mainly to the actual texts. This is not, perhaps, a fashionable proceeding. Not what Plato says, but what the latest |Texts the chief object.| commentator says about Plato—not what Chaucer says, but what the latest thesis-writer thinks about Chaucer—is supposed to be the qualifying study of the scholar. I am not able to share this conception of scholarship. When we have read and digested the whole of Plato, we may, if we like, turn to his latest German editor; when we have read and digested the whole of Shakespeare, and of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, we may, if we like, turn to Shakespearian biographers and commentators. But this extension of inquiry, to apply a famous contrast, is facultative, not necessary. At any rate, in the following pages it is proposed to set forth, and where necessary to discuss, what Plato, Aristotle, Dionysius, Longinus, what Cicero and Quintilian, what Dante and Dryden, what Corneille and Coleridge, with many a lesser man besides, have said about literature, noticing by the way what effect these authorities have had on the general judgment, and what, as often happens, the general judgment has for the time made up its mind to, without troubling itself about authorities. But we shall only occasionally busy ourselves with what others, not themselves critically great, have said about these great critics, and that from no arrogance, but for two reasons of the most inoffensive character. In the first place, there is no room to handle both text and margent, with the margent’s margent ad infinitum. In the second, the handling of the margent would distinctly obscure the orderly setting forth of the texts.

Yet, further, leave will be taken to neglect guesswork as |"Hypotheses non fingo."| far as possible, and for the most part, if not invariably, to refrain from building any hypotheses upon titles, casual citations, or mere probabilities.

To illustrate what is meant, let us take a book which every one who makes such an attempt as this must mention with the utmost gratitude and respect, the admirable Essai sur l'Histoire de la Critique chez les Grecs^[3] of the late M. Egger. That excellent scholar and most agreeable writer was perhaps as free from “hariolation” as any one who has ever dealt with classical subjects; yet the first ninety pages of his book are practically in the air. The judges of rhapsodical competitions were the first critics; the Homeric edition of Pisistratus presupposes and implies criticism, which is equally—which is even more—presupposed and implied in the choragic system of Athens, whereby plots were chosen for performance; there are known to have been successive and corrected versions of plays, from which the same conclusions may be drawn. We are told, and can readily believe, that the actors had their parts suited to them, and this means criticism. Nay, was not the |Illustration from M. Egger.| whole Comedy, the Old Comedy at least, a criticism, and often a purely literary one? Is not the Frogs, in particular, a dramatised “review” of the most slashing kind? And have we not even the titles, at least, of regular treatises, presumably critical, by Pratinas, by Lasus, by the great Sophocles himself?

Now all this is probable; nearly all of it is interesting, and some of it is, so far as it goes, certain. But then as a certainty it goes such a very little way! M. Egger himself, with the frankness which the scholar ought to have, but has not always, admits the justice of the reproach of one of his critics, that part of it is conjecture. It would scarcely be harsh to say that all of it is, in so far as any solid information as to the critical habits of the Greeks is furnished by it. In the pages that follow at least a steady effort will be made to discard the conjectural altogether, and to reduce even the amount of superstructure on |The Documents.| second-hand foundations to the minimum. The extant written word, as it is the sole basis of all sound criticism in regard to particulars, so it is the only sound basis for the history of Criticism in general. The enormous losses which we have suffered in this department of Greek literature, and the scanty supply which, except in the department of the Lower Rhetoric, seems to be all that existed in Latin, may appear to make the effort to conduct inquiry in this way a rash or a barren one; but the present writer at least is convinced that no effort can usefully be made in any other. And after |Greek.| all, though so much is lost, much remains. In point of tendency we can ask for nothing better than Plato, provoking and elusive as he may seem in individual utterances; in point of particular expression and indication of general lines, the Rhetoric and the Poetics of Aristotle are admittedly priceless; and such writers as Dionysius of Halicarnassus, as Plutarch, as Dion Chrysostom, as Lucian, and above all as Longinus, leave us very little reason to complain, even when we turn from the comparative scantiness of this corpus to the comparative wealth of arid rhetorical term-splitting which still remains to us.

Nor is it at all probable that if we had more Latin literary criticism we should be so very much better off. For, once more,|Roman.| the existing work of such men as Cicero, Quintilian, Tacitus, and above all Horace, with the literary allusions of the later satirists, not to mention for the present the gossip of Aulus Gellius and the like, gives more than sufficient “tell-tales.” We can see the nature and the limitations of Roman criticism in these as well as if they filled a library.

In the great stretch of time—some thousand years—between the decadence of the pure Classics and the appearance of the |Mediæval.| Renaissance it is not the loss but the absence of material that is the inconvenience, and this inconvenience is again tolerable. The opinions of the Dark and Early Middle Ages on the Classics themselves are only a curiosity; for real criticism or matured judgment on existing work in the vernacular they had little opportunity even in a single language, for comparative work still less. Only the astonishing and strangely undervalued tractate of Dante remains to show us what might have been done; the rest is curious merely.

But the Renaissance has no sooner come than our difficulties assume a different form, and increase as we approach our |Renaissance and Modern.| own times. It is now not deficiency but superabundance of material that besets us; and if this work reaches its second volume, a rigid process of selection and of representative treatment will become necessary.

But in this first the problem is how to extract from comparatively, though not positively, scanty material a history that, without calling in guesswork to its assistance, shall present a fairly adequate account of the Higher Rhetoric and Poetic, the theory and practice of Literary Criticism and Taste, during ancient and during mediæval times. At intervals the narrative and examination will be interrupted for the purpose of giving summaries of a kind necessarily more temerarious and experimental than the body of the book, but even here no attempt will be made at hasty generalisation. Where the path has been so little trodden, the loyal road-layer will content himself with making it straight and firm, with fencing it from precipices, and ballasting it across morasses as well as he can, leaving others to stroll off on side-tracks to agreeable view-points, and to thread loops of cunning expatiation.

In conclusion, with special regard to this Book and the next, I would, very modestly but very strenuously, deprecate a line of comment which is not unusual from exclusively classical students, and which stigmatises “judging ancient literature from modern points of view.” Such a process is no doubt even more grossly wrong than that (not unknown) of judging modern literature from ancient standpoints. But the true critic admits neither. He endeavours—a hard and ambitious task!—to extract from all literature, ancient, mediæval, and modern, lessons of its universal qualities, which may enable him to see each period sub specie æternitatis. And nothing less than this—with the Muses to help—is the adventure of this work.

EARLIEST CRITICISM OF THE GREEKS—PROBABLY HOMERIC IN SUBJECT—PROBABLY ALLEGORIC IN METHOD—XENOPHANES—PARMENIDES—EMPEDOCLES—DEMOCRITUS—THE SOPHISTS: EARLIER—THE SOPHISTS: LATER—PLATO—HIS CROTCHETS—HIS COMPENSATIONS—ARISTOPHANES—THE ‘FROGS’—OTHER CRITICISM IN COMEDY—SIMYLUS(?)—ISOCRATES.

Although we have, putting aside Aristophanes, an almost utter dearth of actual texts before Plato, it is possible, without |Earliest criticism of the Greeks.| violating the principles laid down in the foregoing chapter, to discern some general currents, and a few individual deliverances, of Greek criticism^[4] in earlier ages. The earliest character of this criticism that we perceive is, as we should expect, a tendency towards allegorical explanations of literature. And the earliest subject of this that we discover is, again as we should expect, the work attributed to Homer.

If we had older and more certain testimony about the fact, and still more about the exact character, of the |Probably Homeric in subject.| world-famous Pisistratean redaction of the Homeric and other poems, it would be necessary to reverse the order of this statement; and even as it is, the utmost critical caution may admit that it was probably with Homer that Greek criticism began. We shall find nothing so constantly borne out in the whole course of this history as the fact—self-evident, but constantly neglected in its consequences—that criticism is a vine which must have its elm or other support to fasten on. And putting aside all the endless and (from some points of view at least) rather fruitless disputes about the age, the authorship, and so forth, of Homer, we know, from what is practically the unanimous and unintentional testimony of the whole of Greek literature, that “Homer” and the knowledge of Homer were anterior to almost all of it. And it was impossible that a people so acute and so philosophically given as the Greeks should be soaked in Homer, almost to the same extent as that to which the English lower and middle classes of the seventeenth century were soaked in the Bible, without being tempted to exercise their critical faculties upon the poems. It was long, as we shall see, before this exercise took the form of strictly literary criticism, of the criticism which (with the provisos and limitations of the last chapter) we call æsthetic. It was once said that the three functions of criticism in its widest sense are to interpret, to verify or sanction, and to judge, the last being its highest and purest office. |Probably allegoric in method.| But the other two commend themselves perhaps more to the natural man—they certainly commended themselves more to the Greeks—and we should expect to find them, as we do find them, earlier practised. The Pisistratean redaction, if a fact (as in some form or other it pretty certainly was), is an enterprise both bold and early in the one direction; there is no reason to doubt that many enterprises were made pretty early in the other; and not much to doubt that most of these experiments in interpretation took the allegorical form.

Modern readers and modern critics have usually a certain dislike to Allegory, at least when she presents herself honestly and by her own name. Her government has no doubt at times been something despotic, and her votaries and partisans have at times been almost intolerably tedious and absurd. Yet in the finer sorts of literature, at any rate, the apprehension of some sort of allegory, of some sort of double meaning, is almost a necessity. The student of any kind of poetry, and the student of the more imaginative prose, can never rest satisfied with the mere literal and grammatical sense, which belongs not to literature but to science. He cannot help seeking some hidden meaning, something further, something behind, if it be only rhythmical beauty, only the suggestion of pleasure to the ear and eye and heart. Nor ought he to help it. But the ill repute of Allegory arises from the ease with which her aid is borrowed to foist religious, philosophical, and other sermons into the paradise of art. This danger was especially imminent in a country like Greece, where religion, philosophy, literature, and art of all kinds were, from the earliest times, almost inextricably connected and blended.

Accordingly allegory, and that reverse or seamy side of allegory, rationalistic interpretation, seem to have made their appearance very early in Greece. This latter has only to do with literary criticism in the sense that it is, and always has been, a very great degrader thereof, inclining it to be busy with matter instead of form. The allegorising tendency proper is not quite so dangerous, though still dangerous enough. But in the second-hand and all too scanty notices that we have of the early philosophers, it is evident that the two tendencies met and crossed in them almost bewilderingly. When Xenophanes found fault with the Homeric anthropomorphism, when Anaxagoras and others made the scarcely audacious identification of the arrows of Apollo with the rays of the sun, and the bolder one of Penelope’s web with the processes of the syllogism, they were anticipating a great deal which has presented itself as criticism (whether it had any business to do so or not) in the last two thousand and odd hundred years. We have not a few names, given by more or less good authority and less or more known independently, of persons—Anaximander, Stesimbrotus, a certain Glaucus or Glaucon, and others—who early devoted themselves to allegorical interpretation of Homer and perhaps of other poets; but we have hardly even fragments of their work, and we can found no solid arguments upon what is told us of it. Only we can see dimly from these notices, clearly from the fuller and now trustworthy evidence which we find in Plato, that their criticism was criticism of matter only,—that they treated Homer as a historical, a religious, a philosophical document, not as a work of art.

Indeed, as one turns over the volumes of Karsten^[5] and Mullach^[6] with their budgets of commentary and scholia enveloping the scanty kernel of text; as one reads the |Xenophanes.| relics, so interesting, so tantalising, so pathetic, of these early thinkers who already knew of metaphysics ce qu’on a su de tous les temps,—one sees, scanty as they are, how very unlikely it is that, if we had more, there would be anything in it that would serve our present purpose. These Greeks, at any rate, were children—children of genius, children of extraordinary promise, children almost of that gigantic breed which has to be stifled lest it grow too fast. But, like children in general, when they have any great mental development, they scorned what seemed to them little things. And, also like children, they had not and could not have the accumulation of knowledge of particulars which is necessary for the criticism of art. The audacious monopantheism of Xenophanes could not, we are sure, have stooped to consider, not as it actually did^[7] whether Homer and Hesiod were blasphemers, but whether they did their blaspheming with technical cunning. In its sublimer moments and in its moments of discussion, in those of the famous single line—

as well as in the satire on the ox- and lion-creed of lions and oxen, it would have equally scorned the attempt to substitute for mere opinion a humble inductive approach to knowledge on the differences of Poetry and prose and the proper definition of Comedy. Even in those milder moods when the philosopher gave, if he did give, receipts for the proper mode of mixing negus,^[8] and was not insensible to the charms of a soft couch, sweet wine, and devilled peas,^[9] one somehow does not see him as a critic.

How much less even does one see anything of the kind in the few and great verses of Parmenides, that extraordinary link of union between Homer and Lucretius, the poet of |Parmenides.| the “gates of the ways of night and day,”^[10] the philosopher whose teaching is of that which “is and cannot but be?”^[11] the seer whose sight was ever “straining straight at the rays of the sun”?^[12] We shall see shortly how a more chastened and experienced idealism, combined in all probability with a much wider actual knowledge of literature and art, made the literary criticism of Plato a blend of exquisite rhapsody and childish crotchet. In the much earlier day of Parmenides not even this blend was to be expected. There could hardly by any possibility have been anything but the indulgence in allegorising which is equally dear to poets and philosophers, and perhaps the inception of a fanciful philology. Metaphysics and physics sufficed, with a little creative literature. For criticism there could be no room.

But it will be said, Empedocles? Empedocles who, according to some traditions, was the inventor of Rhetoric—who certainly was a native of the island where Rhetoric arose—the |Empedocles.| chief speaker among these old philosophers? That Empedocles had a good deal of the critical temper may be readily granted. He has little or nothing of the sublime beliefs of Parmenides; his scepticism is much more thorough-going than that which certainly does appear in the philosopher of Colophon. If a man do not take the discouragement of it too much to heart there is, perhaps, no safer and saner frame of mind for the critic than that expressed in the strongest of all the Empedoclean fragments, that which tells us how “Men, wrestling through a little space of life that is no life, whirled off like a vapour by quick fate, flit away, each persuaded but of that with which he has himself come in contact, darting this way and that. But the Whole man boasts to find idly; not to be seen are these things by men, nor heard, nor grasped by their minds. Thou shalt know no more than human counsel has reached.”^[13] An excellent critical mood, if not pushed to mere inaction and despair: but there is no evidence that it led Empedocles to criticism. Physics and ethics appear to have absorbed him wholly.

That the sophist was the first rhetorician would be allowed by his accusers as well as by his apologists: and though Rhetoric long followed wandering fires before it recognised its true star and became Literary Criticism, yet nobody doubts that we must look to it for what literary criticism we shall find in these times. The Sophists, on the very face of the charge constantly brought against them of attending to words merely, are almost acknowledged to be the inventors of Grammar; while from the other charge that they corrupted youth by teaching them to talk fluently, to make the worse the better reason, and the like, it will equally follow that they practised the deliberate consideration of style. Grammar is only the ancilla of criticism, but a tolerably indispensable one; the consideration of style is at least half of criticism itself. Accordingly the two first persons in whose work (if we had it) we might expect to find a considerable body of literary criticism, if only literary criticism of a scrappy, tentative, and outside kind, are the two great sophists Gorgias and Protagoras, contemporaries, but representatives of almost the two extremities of the little Greek world, of Leontini and Abdera, of Sicily and Thrace.

We have indeed a whole catalogue of work that should have been critical or nothing ascribed by Diogenes Laertius^[14] to the still greater contemporary and compatriot of Protagoras, Democritus. How happily would the days of Thalaba (supposing Thalaba to be a historian of criticism) go by, if he had that little library of works which Diogenes thus assigns and calls "Of Music"! They are eight in number: “On Rhythm and Harmony,” “On Poetry” (one would compound for this alone), “On the Beauty of Words,”^[15] “On Well- and Ill-sounding Letters,” “On Homer or Right Style and Glosses,”^[16] “On the Aoedic Art,” “On Verbs(?),”^[17] and an Onomasticon. But Democritus lived in the fifth |Democritus.| century before Christ, and Diogenes in the second century after Christ; the historian’s attribution is unsupported, and he has no great character for accuracy; while, worst of all, he himself tells us that there were six Democriti, and that of the other five one was a musician, another an epigrammatist, and a third (most suspiciously) a technical writer on rhetoric. It stands fatally to reason that as all these (save the Chian musician) seem to have been more modern, and as the works mentioned would exactly fall in with the business of the musician and the teacher of rhetoric, they are far more likely, if they ever existed (and Diogenes seems to cite rather the catalogue of a certain Thrasylus than the books themselves), not to have been the work of the Laughing Philosopher. At any rate, even if they were, we are utterly ignorant of their tenor.

That the other great Abderite, Protagoras, the disciple of Democritus himself, wrote on subjects of the kind, there can be no reasonable doubt. It is practically impossible that he should not have done so, though we have not the exact title of any. He is said to have been the first to distinguish the parts of an oration by name, to have made some important advances in technical grammar, and to have lectured on the poets. But here again we have no texts to appeal to, nor any certain fact.

Yet perhaps it is not mere critical whim to doubt whether, if we had these texts also, we should be much further advanced. The titles of those attributed to Democritus, if we could accept |The Sophists—earlier.| the attribution with any confidence, would make such scepticism futile. But we have no titles of critical works attributed to Protagoras; we only know vaguely that he lectured on the poets.^[18] And from all the stories about him as well as from the famous dialogue which puts the hostile view of his sophistry, we can conclude with tolerable certainty that his interests were mainly ethical, with perhaps a dash of grammar—the two notes, as we have seen and shall see, of all this early Greek criticism. Certainly this was the case with the Sicilian school which traditionally founded Rhetoric—Empedocles himself perhaps, Corax, Tisias, Gorgias, and the pupil of Gorgias, Polus, with more certainty. Here again most of our best evidence is hostile, and therefore to be used with caution; but the hostility does not affect the present point. Socrates or Plato could have put unfavourable views of Sophistic quite as well—indeed, considering Plato’s curious notions of inventive art, perhaps better—in regard to Æsthetics. If ethics and philology, not criticism proper, are the subjects in which their adversaries try to make Protagoras and Gorgias cut a bad figure, we may be perfectly certain that these were the subjects in which they themselves tried to cut a good one. If they are not misrepresented—are not indeed represented at all—in the strict character of the critic, it can only be because they did not, for good or for ill, assume that character. The philosophy of language, the theory of persuasion, the moral character of poetry and oratory, these were the subjects which interested them and their hearers; not the sources of literary beauty, the division of literary kinds, the nature and varieties of style. Wherever ethic and metaphysic are left, the merest philology seems to have been the only alternative—the few phrases attributed to any writers of this period that bear a different complexion being very few, uncertainly authentic, and in almost every case extremely vague.

Nothing else could reasonably be expected when we consider the nature of Rhetoric as we find it exhibited in Aristotle himself, and as it was certainly conceived by its first inventors or nomenclators. It was the Art of Persuasion—the Art of producing a practical effect—almost the Art of Succeeding in Life. We shall see when we come to Aristotle himself that this was as inevitable a priori as it is certain in fact: for the present the certainty of the fact itself may content us. Where the few recorded or imputed utterances of the later sophists do touch on literature they bear (with a certain additional ingenious wire-drawing) the same marks as those of the early philosophers. |The Sophists—later.| They play upon the “honourable deceit” of tragedy;^[19] they tread harder the old road of allegorical interpretations;^[20] they dwell on words and their nature;^[21] or else, overshooting mark as far as elsewhere they fall short of it, they attempt ambitious theories of beauty in general, whether it is “harmony,” utility, sensual pleasure, what not.^[22] This is—to adopt the useful, if accidental, antithesis of metaphysic—metacritic, not criticism. And we shall not, I think, be rash in assuming that if we had the texts, which we have not, we should find—we are most certainly not rash in saying that in the actual texts we do find—nothing but excursions in the vestibules of Criticism proper, or attempts more or less in vain upon her secret chambers,—no expatiation whatever in her main and open halls.^[23]

Two only, and those two of the very greatest, of Greek writers before Aristotle—Plato and Aristophanes—furnish us with literary criticism proper, while of these two the first is a critic almost against his will, and the second one merely for the nonce. Yet we may be more than thankful for what they give us, and for the slight reinforcement, as regards the nature of pre-Aristotelian criticism, which we derive from a third and much lesser man—Isocrates.

It could not possibly be but that so great a writer as Plato, with an ethos so philosophical as his, should display a strong |Plato.| critical element. Yet there were in him other elements and tendencies, which repressed and distorted his criticism. To begin with, though he less often lingered in the vestibule than his enemies the sophists, he was by the whole tendency of his philosophy even more prompted than they were to make straight for the adytum, neglecting the main temple. Some form of the Ideal Theory is indeed necessary to the critic: the beauty of literature is hardly accessible, except to one who is more or less a Platonist. No system so well accounts for the ineffable poetic pleasure, the sudden “gustation of God” which poetry gives, as that of an archetypal form of every possible thought and passion, as well as person and thing, to which as the poet approaches closer and closer, so he gives his readers the deeper and truer thrill. But Plato’s unfortunate impatience of anything but the idea pure and simple, led him all wrong in criticism. Instead of welcoming poetry for bringing him nearer to the impossible and unattainable, he chides it for interfering with possession and attainment. In the Phædrus and the Republic especially, but also elsewhere, poetic genius, poetic charm, poetry itself, are described, if not exactly defined, with an accuracy which had never been reached before, and which has never been surpassed since; in the same and other places the theory of Imitation, or, as it might be much better called, Representation, is outlined with singular acuteness and, so far as we know, originality, though it is pushed too far; and remarks on the divisions of literature, at least of poetry, show that a critic of the highest order is but a little way off. But then comes that everlasting ethical and political preoccupation which is at once the real forte and the real foible of the Greek genius, and (with some other peculiarities) succeeds to a great extent in neutralising the philosopher’s critical position as a whole. In the first place, the “imitation” theory (imperfectly grasped owing to causes to be more fully dealt with later) deposes the poet from his proper position, and, combined with will-worship of the Idea, prevents Plato from seeing that the poet’s duty, his privilege, his real reason for existence, is to “dis-realise,” to give us things not as they are but as they are not. In the second, that curious, interesting, and in part most fruitful and valuable Manichæism which Idealism so often comports, makes him gradually |His crotchets.| look more and more down on Art as Art, more and more take imagination and invention as sinful human interferences with “reminiscence,” and the simple acceptance of the Divine. In the third place, the heresy of instruction grows on him, and makes him constantly look, not at the intrinsic value of poetry, its connection with beauty, its importance to the free adult human spirit, but at its position in reference to the young, the private citizen, and so forth. These things sufficiently account for the at first sight almost unintelligible, though exquisitely put, caprices of the Republic and the Laws, which at their worst represent the man of letters and the man of art generally as a dangerous and anti-social nuisance, at the very best admit him as a sort of Board-Schoolmaster, to be rigidly kept in his place, and to be well inspected, coded, furnished with schedules and rules of behaviour, in order that he may not step out of it.

Even here, as always, there is some excuse for the choice cum Platone errare, not merely in the exquisiteness of the literary form which this unworthy view of literature takes, but in the fact that, as usual, Plato could not go wrong without going also right. He had probably seen in Athenian life, and he had certainly anticipated in his instinctive command of human nature, the complementary error and curse of “Art for Art only”—of the doctrine (itself, like his own, partly true, but, like his own also, partly false and mischievous) of the moral irresponsibility of the artist. And looking first at morals and politics with that almost feverish eagerness of the Greek philosopher, which was in great part justified by the subsequent Greek collapse in both, he shot wide of the bow-hand from the purely critical point of aim.

Yet where shall we find earlier in time, where shall we find nobler in tone at any time, a critical position to match with that of the Phædrus and the Ion as wholes, and of |His compensations.| many other passages? That “light and winged and sacred thing the poet” had never had his highest functions so celebrated before, though in the very passage which so celebrates him the antithesis of art and delirium be dangerously over-worked. Alas! it is in the power of all of us to avoid bad art, and it is not in the power of us all to secure good delirium! But this matters little, or at worst not so very much. No one can acknowledge more heartily than Plato—no one has acknowledged more poetically—that the poet is not a mere moralist, a mere imitator, a mere handler of important subjects. And from no one, considering his other views, could the acknowledgment come with greater force and greater authority. In him and in that great enemy of his master, to whom we come next, we find first expressed that real enthusiasm for literature of which the best, the only true, criticism is but a reasoned variety.

If we but possessed that ode or pæan of Tynnichus^[24] of Chalcis, which, it would appear from the Ion,^[25] Plato not merely thought the only good thing among its author’s works, but regarded as a masterpiece in itself! If we could but ourselves compare the works of Antimachus with those of the more popular Chœrilus, to which Plato himself is said to have so much preferred them that he sent to Colophon to have a copy made for his own use! Then we might know what his real literary preferences in the way of poetry were, instead of being put off with beautiful, invaluable, but hopelessly vague enthusiasms about poetic beauty in the abstract, and with elaborate polemics against Homer and Hesiod from a point of view which is not the point of view of literary criticism at all. But these things have been grudged us. There are assertions, which we would not only fain believe, but have no difficulty whatever in believing, that the aversion to poets represented in the Republic and the Laws was, if not feigned, hypothetical and, as one may say, professional. But this, though a comfort generally, is of no assistance to us in our present inquiry. The old comparison of the lantern “high, far-shining, empty” recurs depressingly.^[26]

There have been periods, not the happiest, but also not the least important of her history, when Criticism herself would have absolutely fenced her table against Aristophanes. |Aristophanes.| That a poet, and a dramatic poet, and a dramatic poet who permitted himself the wildest excesses of farce, should be dignified with the name of critic, would have seemed to the straiter sect a monstrous thing. Yet the Old Greek Comedy was emphatically “a criticism of life,” and as such it could not fail to meddle with such an important part of Athenian life as Athenian literature. It might be not uninteresting, but is at best superfluous, if not positively irrelevant here, to point out how important that part was; the fact is certain. And while it is going rather a long way round to connect the rivalries of serious poets, and the alterations which these or other causes brought about in their works, with the history of criticism proper, there is no doubt of such a connection in the case of the work—fortunately in fairly large measure preserved—of Aristophanes, and with that—unfortunately lost, except in fragments—of his fellows.

Nor can there be very much doubt that, though our possessions might be greater in volume, we could hardly have anything better in kind than the work of Aristophanes, and especially the famous play of the Frogs, which was probably the earliest of all the masterpieces of hostile literary criticism, and which remains to this day among the very finest of them. Aristophanes indeed united, both generally and in this particular instance, all the requisites for playing the part to perfection, with one single exception—the possession, namely, of that wide comparative knowledge of other literatures which the Greeks lacked, and which, in this as in other matters, was their most serious deficiency. His own literary faculty was of the most exquisite as well as of the most vigorous kind. His possession, not merely of wit but of humour in the highest degree, saved him from one of the commonest and the greatest dangers of criticism—the danger of dwelling too long on single points, or of giving disproportionate attention to the different points with which he dealt. And though no doubt the making a dead-set at bad or faulty literature, not because it is bad or faulty, but because it happens to be made the vehicle of views in politics, religion, or what not which the critic dislikes, is not theoretically defensible; yet the historian and the practical philosopher must admit that, as a matter of fact, it has given us some of the very best criticism we have.

Nor has it given us anything much better than the Frogs. That the polemic against Euripides, here and elsewhere, is unfairly |The Frogs.| and excessively personal, is not to be denied; and even those who almost wholly agree with it from the literary side may grant that it admits, here and there, of an answer. But still as criticism it is both magnifique and also la guerre. The critic is no desultory snarler, unprovided with theory, and simply snapping at the heels of some one he dislikes. His twenty years' campaign against the author of the Medea, from the Acharnians to the Frogs itself, is thoroughly consistent: it rests upon a reasoned view of art and taste as well as of politics and religion. He disapproves the sceptical purpose, the insidious sophistic, the morbid passion of his victim; but he disapproves quite as strongly the tedious preliminary explanations and interpolated narratives, the “precious” sentiment and style, the tricks and the trivialities. And let it be observed also that Aristophanes, fanatic as he is, and rightly is, on the Æschylean side, is far too good a critic and far too shrewd a man not to allow a pretty full view of the Æschylean defects, as well as to put in the mouth of Euripides himself a very fairly strong defence of his own merits. The famous debate between the two poets, with the accompanying observations of Dionysus and the Chorus, could be thrown, with the least possible difficulty, into the form of a critical causerie which would anticipate by two thousand years and more the very shrewdest work of Dryden, the most thoughtful of Coleridge, the most delicate and ingenious of Arnold and Sainte-Beuve. It is indeed rather remarkable how easily literary criticism lends itself to the dramatic-poetical form, whether the ease be owing to the fact of this early and consummate example of it, or to some other cause. And what is especially noticeable is that, throughout, the censure goes documents in hand. The vague generalities of the Poetics in verse, in which, after Horace and Vida, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries delighted, are here eschewed in favour of direct criticism of actual texts. One might call the Frogs, borrowing the phrase from mediæval French, a review par personnages, and a review of the closest, the most stringent, and the most effective. We can indeed only be surprised that with such an example as this, and others not far inferior, in the same dramatist if not in others, formal criticism in prose should have been so long in making its appearance, and when it appeared, should have shown so much less mastery of method. Beside Aristophanes, the pure critical reviewing of Aristotle himself is vague, is desultory, and begins at the wrong end; even that of Longinus is scrappy and lacking in grasp; while it would be as unfair as it would be unkind to mention, in any comparison of genius with the author of the Frogs, the one master of something like formal critical examination of particular books and authors that Greek preserves for us in Dionysius of Halicarnassus.

It is, however, extremely rash to conclude, as has sometimes been concluded, that because we find so much tendency towards |Other criticism in Comedy.| literary criticism in Aristophanes, we should find a proportionate amount in other Comic writers (at least in those of the Old Comedy, who had perhaps most genius and certainly most parrhesia), if their works existed. The contrary opinion is far more probable. For though we have nothing but fragments, often insignificant in individual bulk, of the writers of the Old Comedy except Aristophanes, and of all the writers of the Middle—nothing but fragments, though sometimes not insufficient in bulk, of Menander, Philemon, and the other writers of the New—yet it must be remembered that these fragments are extremely numerous, and that in a very considerable number of cases, fragments as they are, they give a fair glimpse of context and general tone. I do not hesitate to say, after most careful examination of the collections of Meineke and his successors, that there are not more than one or two faint and doubtful approaches to our subject discoverable there. The passage of Pherecrates^[27] on which M. Egger chiefly relies to prove his very wide assertion that “il n’y a peut-être pas un seul poète” of the Old Comedy “qui n’ait mêlé la critique littéraire à ses fictions comiques” deals with music, not literature. And it is exceedingly rash to argue from titles, which, as we know from those of the plays remaining to us in their entirety, bore as little necessary relation to contents in ancient as in modern times.

It may be pleaded, of course, that our comic fragments are very mainly preserved to us by grammarians, scholiasts, and lexicographers, who were more likely to find the unusual locutions for which they principally looked in those descriptions of the fishmarket and the stews, of which we have so many, than in literary disquisitions. But in these myriads of fragments, motelike as they often are, it is contrary to probability that we should not find at least a respectable proportion of allusions to any subject which was frequently treated by the comic writers, just as we do find references not merely to fish and the hetæræ, but to philosophy (such references are common enough), to cookery, politics, dress, and all manner of things except literary criticism. Parodies of serious pieces there may have been; but parody, though akin to criticism, is earlier,^[28] and is rather criticism in the rough. And it is probable, or rather certain, that the example of the greatest of Comic poets was followed by the smaller fry in attacks on Euripides; but these attacks need not have been purely literary at all. The contrast between comedy and tragedy attributed to Antiphanes^[29] in his Poiesis bears solely on the subject, and the necessity of greater inventiveness on the part of the comic poet.

Once only, so far as I have been able to discover, do we come upon a passage which (if it be genuine, of which there |Simylus (?).| seems to be doubt for more than one reason) has undoubted right to rank. This is the extremely, the almost suspiciously, remarkable passage attributed to the Middle Comic poet, Simylus, by Stobæus, who, be it remembered, can hardly have lived less than eight or nine hundred years later. This advances not only a theory of poetry and poetical criticism, but one of such astonishing completeness that it goes far beyond anything that we find in Aristotle, and is worthy of Longinus himself at his very happiest moment, while it is more complete than anything actually extant in the Περὶ Ὕψους. It runs as follows:^[30] “Neither is nature without art sufficient to any one for any practical achievement, nor is art which has not nature with it. When both come together there are still needed a choragia,^[31] love of the task, practice, a lucky occasion, time, a critic able to grasp what is said. If any of these chance to be missing, a man will not come to the goal set before him. Natural gifts, good will, painstaking method—this is what makes wise and good poets. Number of years makes neither, but only makes them old.”

It would be impossible to put the matter better after more than two thousand years of literary accumulation and critical experiment. But it is very hard to believe that it was said in the fourth century before Christ. The wits, indeed, are rather those of that period than of a later; but the experience is that of a careful comparer of more than one literature. In other words, it is the voice of Aristotle speaking with the experience of Quintilian. And it stands, let me repeat, so far as I have been able to discover, absolutely alone in the extant representation of the department of literature to which it is attributed.

To pass from Aristophanes and Plato to Isocrates is to pass from persons of the first rank in literature to a person not of |Isocrates.| the first rank. Yet for our purpose the “old man eloquent” is not to be despised. On the contrary, he even has special and particular value. For the worst—as no doubt also the best—of men like Aristophanes and Plato is, that they are too little of their time and too much for all time. Moreover, in Isocrates we come not merely to a man above the common, though not reaching the summits of wit, but also to something like a “professional”—to some one who, to some extent, supplies the loss of the earlier professionals already mentioned.

To some extent only: for Isocrates, at least in so far as we possess his work, is a rhetorician on the applied sides, which commended themselves so especially to the Greeks, not on the pure side. The legend of his death, at least, fits the political interests of his life; his rhetoric is mostly judicial rhetoric; little as he is of a philosopher, he attacks the sophists as philosophers were in duty bound to do. His purely literary allusions (and they are little more) have a touch of that amusing, that slightly irritating, that wholly important and characteristic patronage and disdain which meets us throughout this period. He was at least believed to have written a formal Rhetoric, but it is doubtful whether we should find much purely literary criticism in it if we had it. His own style, if not exactly gaudy, is pretentious and artificial: we can hardly say that the somewhat vaguely favourable prophecy which Plato puts into the mouth of Socrates about him at the end of the Phædrus was very conspicuously fulfilled. And his critical impulses cannot have been very imperative, seeing that though he lived till nearly a hundred, he never found the “happy moment”^[32] to write about poetry spoken of in the 12th section of the Panathenaic with a scornful reference to those who “rhapsodised and chattered” in the Lyceum about Homer and Hesiod and other poets. Most of his actual literary references are, as usual, ethical, not literary. In the 12th and 13th section of the oration-epistle to Nicocles^[33] he upbraids mankind for praising Hesiod and Theognis and Phocylides as admirable counsellors in life, but preferring to hear the most trumpery of comedies; and himself declares Homer^[34] and the great tragic masters worthy of admiration because of their mastery of human nature. In the Busiris^[35] he takes quite a Platonic tone about the blasphemies of poets against the gods. There is, indeed, a curious and interesting passage in the Evagoras^[36] about the difficulties of panegyric in prose, and the advantages possessed by verse-writers. They have greater liberty of handling their subject; they may use new words and foreign words and metaphors; they can bewitch the soul with rhythm and metre till even bad diction and thought pass unnoticed. For if (says the rhetor naïvely enough) you leave the most celebrated poets their words and meaning, but strip them of their metre, they will cut a much shabbier figure than they do now. But this does not take us very far, and with Isocrates we get no further.

Nor need we expect to get any further. Criticism, in any full and fertile sense of the word, implies in all cases a considerable body of existing literature, in almost all cases the possibility of comparing literatures in different languages. The Greeks were but accumulating (though accumulating with marvellous rapidity) the one; they had as yet no opportunity of the other, and it must be confessed that they did not welcome the opportunity with any eagerness when it came. All the more glory to them that, when as yet the accumulation was but proceeding, they produced such work in the kind as that of Plato and Aristophanes; that at the first halt they made such astonishing, if in some ways such necessarily incomplete, use of what had been accumulated, as in the next chapter we shall see was made by Aristotle.