as he calls it. But I should say that Lethe and the outgoing of memory help us little or nothing, hurt the best and greatest things of life, defraud and keep us short of happiness. For the most hateful of sins and crimes, ingratitude, we find oft occurring when memory’s powers fail; but he who remembers benefits is neither ungrateful nor unjust. When men forget the laws and the doctrines that keep us straight, needs must they become poor creatures, and bad, and shameless. Yea, all folly and all inculture of soul occur through forgetfulness. But he who remembers best is chiefly wise.”
This may not itself be the very crown of wisdom; it is not Plato; it is not even Ecclesiasticus. But it is at any rate the work of a man who can look a little beyond stasis and diegema. As if we were to have nothing certain from this great critic, the attribution of this treatise also to him is only based on a conjecture of Ruhnken’s, itself depending on a citation by the commentator John of Sicily in the thirteenth century. It is devoted to the subject of Εὔρεσις—so badly translated by “Invention”—and it treats of its subject under the heads of prosopopœia, starting-points, elocutory mimicry, memory, topics |The Rhetoric or De Inventione of Longinus.| drawn from things connected with the chief good, and passion. There is a fairly wide range of literary reference, though few citations are given at length. And it is only fair to bear in mind that even in the Περὶ Ὕψους, short and broken as it is, there are signs of a certain weakness for Figures and other technicalities, indications that in his more professional moments, and when inspiration deserted him, even the author of that wonderful little masterpiece might have approached (though he never could long have been satisfied with) the endless, the fruitless, the exasperating distinguo which seemed to be art, and wisdom, and taste, to Hermogenes and the rest. And though one cannot quite agree with Walz that there is in this De Inventione a “doctrine drawn from Homer and the poets, elegantly and equably disposed,” yet one must admit that the handling shows something different from, and above, the heartbreaking jargon-mongering of the usual rhetorician. What follows is not the style of the Longinus that we know; it seems to come short of his manly sense almost as much as of his far-reaching flights of poetical appreciation. But it is a long way from the mere arrangement of compartments and ticket-boxes, and the mere indulgence in a kind of game of rhetorical “egg-hat” in and out of them when they are made.
Enough, perhaps, has been said of the defects of this great mass of composition, both from the point of view of our special |Survey of School Rhetoric.| investigation and from more general ones. It remains to say something of its merits from the former. As will have been seen, the relations of the rhetoricians to literary criticism differ at first sight surprisingly—less so, perhaps, when they come to be examined. Sometimes the general literary view seems to be almost entirely lost in a wilderness of details and technicalities. But sometimes also the merely forensic tendency disappears, the merely technical one in the narrow sense effaces itself, and we have an almost pure treatise on Composition, limited it may be by arbitrary restrictions, conditioned by professional needs, but still Composition in general—that is to say, after a fashion, and in a manner, Literature. Every now and then, as we saw above, the writer rises to the conception of Rhetoric as Prosaics—as the other half of that Art of Literature of which Poetics is the one. And—a less good thing, but also not without its good side—we even find glimpses and glimmerings of the notion, to be taken up and widely developed later, of Rhetoric as including Poetics.
But the best and most important part of the matter has yet to be summarised. The technical study of Rhetoric, even when pushed to the extremities of the terminological and classifying mania, encouraged and almost necessitated constant overhauling of actual literature for examples, and encouraged the characterisation of famous authors from this point of view. Even the orators by themselves formed no inconsiderable or undistinguished corpus of Greek prose literature. But, as we have seen, it was customary, even for very strict formalists, to include the historians whose connection with the orators was so close; and it was very difficult to exclude philosophical writers, especially Plato. A man must have been of preternatural stolidity if he could ransack Demosthenes and Isæus, Herodotus and Thucydides and Xenophon, Plato, and the school philosophers whom we have so freely lost, and if he did not in the process develop some notion of prose literary criticism at large, nay, formulate some rules of it. And, as we have also seen from the very first, poetry was by no means barred. The orator might very often quote it; he was constantly to go to it for suggestions of subject or treatment, beauties of style, examples of figure and form. Therefore, directly if not indirectly, the rhetorical teacher and the historical student accepted the whole of literature for their province.
Of the actual results of this enormous period, the best part (even if we cut off the Dark Ages) of a thousand years of |The Practical Rhetoricians or Masters of Epideictic.| elaborate concentration upon an extremely artificial art, our remains are in proportion much less than we should expect; in fact, it is hardly too much to say that they are less than those of the technical books which taught how to produce them. It is scarcely fair to call Dionysius of Halicarnassus a rhetorician, though he sometimes goes near to being one. He is a serious teacher of Rhetoric, not a giver of displays in it, a real literary critic, a laborious historian. Plutarch is saved from inclusion in the class by the very same characteristic which interferes so sadly with his literary criticism as such. He is too practical, too keenly interested in life, too busy about the positive sciences of ethical and physical inquiry, to devote himself to rhetorical exercises of the pure declamatory kind. That Lucian did so devote himself for no inconsiderable time, we know from his own description of his breaking away from the Delilah Rhetoric; and there are scraps of purely or mainly rhetorical matter in him even as it is. But though it be perfectly possible to serve two mistresses, no man ever could have, for his Queens of Brentford, Irony and the falser and more artificial kind of Rhetoric. The two are irreconcilable enemies: they would make their lover’s life an impossible and maddening inconsistency. We must therefore look elsewhere, and in writers on the whole lesser, for the artificial Rhetorical composition which is of interest to us, not merely inasmuch as it sometimes deals with or comes near to literary criticism itself, but as it is, even on other occasions, a valuable and undeniable evidence as to the state of universal crisis, the condition of literary taste, at its time. We shall find such witnesses in Dion Chrysostom for the late first and early second century; in Aristides of Smyrna and Maximus Tyrius for the second exclusively; in Philostratus for the end of the second and the beginning of the third; while to these we may perhaps add Libanius and Themistius for the fourth, with the imperial rhetorician Julian to keep them company.
Of these, Dion Chrysostom is not merely the earliest in date, but, on the whole, the most important to literature. He |Dion Chrysostom.| appears to have been a distinguished and rather fortunate example of a “gentleman of the press” (as we should now say) before the press existed. He travelled over aover a great part of the Roman Empire in the pursuit of his profession as Lecturer—that perhaps comes nearest to it—and would appear to have been well rewarded. The description of his morning’s employment, which begins his study of the three Poets' plays on Philoctetes,[147] is one of the most interesting passages in the later and less-known classics, and so is worth giving here, though it exists in at least one unlearned language: “I rose about the first hour of the day, both because I was poorly, and because the air was cooler at dawn, and more like autumn, though it was midsummer. I made my toilette, said my prayers, and then getting into my curricle, went several times round the Hippodrome, driving as easily and quietly as possible. Then I took a walk, rested shortly, bathed and anointed myself, and after eating a slight breakfast, took up some tragedies.” The careful “study of the body,” the quiet affluence of a well-to-do professional man, and the attention to professional work without any hurry or discomfort, are all well touched off here; and what follows gives us, as it happens, the closest approach to our subject proper to be found in the considerable collection of Dion’s Orations, or, as they have been much more properly called, Essays. There are, however, others which are more characteristic of this division of literature, and we may deal with these first.
The whole conception of the kind of piece, of which Dion himself has left us some fourscore examples, is a curious, and to merely modern readers (nor perhaps to them only) something of a puzzling one. It is called an Oration because it was intended to be delivered by word of mouth; but it often, if not usually, has no other oratorical characteristic. The terms “lecture” and “essay” have also been applied to it incidentally above, and both have some, while neither has exact, application. Except that its subject is generally (not always) profane, it has strong points of resemblance to some kinds of Sermon. Classified by the subject, it presents at first sight features which look distinct enough, though perhaps the distinctness rather vanishes on examination. Not a few of the examples (and probably those which were more immediately profitable, though they could not be used so often) are what may be called local panegyrics, addresses to the citizens of Corinth, Tarsus, Borysthenes, New Ilium, in which their historical and literary associations are ingeniously worked in, and the importance of the community is more or less delicately “cracked up.” Others are moral discourses on Vices and Virtues, others abstract discussions on politics, others of yet other sorts. But the point in which they all agree, the point which is their real characteristic, is that they are all rather displays of art, rather directly analogous to a musical “recital” or an entertainment of feats of strength and skill, than directed to any definite purpose of persuasion, or to the direct exposition of any subject. The object is to show how neatly the speaker can play the rhetorical game, how well he can do his theme. Each is, in fact (what Thucydides so detested the idea of his history appearing to be), a distinct agonisma, a competitive display of cleverness and technical accomplishment.
Nothing perhaps is more tedious than a game that is out of fashion; and this game has been out of fashion for a very long time. Moreover, it has been out of fashion so long, and its vogue depended upon conditions now so entirely changed, that it is for us occasionally difficult, even by strong effort of mental projection into the past, to discover where the attraction can ever have lain. Equally good style (and Dion’s is beyond question good) could surely have been expended on something less utterly arbitrary and unreal. Nor do these reflections present themselves more strongly anywhere than in regard to the pieces which touch more directly on our subject. Take, for instance, the Trojan oration, which has for its second title “That Troy was not captured.” It is supposed to be addressed to the citizens of the New Ilium, and to clear away the reproach of the Old. The means taken to do this are mainly two. In the first place, the authority of an entirely unnamed Egyptian priest, the author of a book named unintelligibly, is invoked as giving the lie direct to Homer, and supporting himself on the documentary evidence of stelæ, which (unluckily) had perished. The second argument (obviously thought of most weight) is an elaborate examination of the Homeric narrative itself from the point of view of what seems probable, decent, and so forth to Dion the Golden-mouthed. Some of the objections are new; most of them very old. Is it likely that a lady who had the honour of being the bedfellow of Zeus would be doubtful of her beauty if an Idæan shepherd did not certify to it? Would a goddess have given such improper rewards to Paris, and put herself in such an ugly relation to Helen, who, by one story, was her sister? What a shocking thing that the poet should constantly speak well of Ulysses and yet represent him as a liar! How could Homer have had any knowledge of the language of the gods, or have seen through the cloud on Ida? And so forth, for some sixty mortal pages.
From such a procedure no literary criticism is to be expected; and, as has been said, the difficulty is to discern what was its original attraction. As a serious composition it is clearly nowhere; as a jeu d’esprit, the rules of the game quite puzzle us, and the spirit seems utterly to have evaporated. The Olympic[148] “On the Idea of God” has been cited by some as a contribution to our subject, and certainly contains some remarks about Plato and about Myths—interesting remarks too. In substance it is a supposed discourse of Phidias to the assembled Greeks on the principles he had in mind in the conception of his statue of Zeus; but its most interesting passage is a comparison of poetry and sculpture. The mixture of dialects in Homer is compared to the making up of the palette and the use of “values” in painting; the selection of archaic words to the choice of the virtuoso lighting on an antique medal. The variety of epithet and synonym for the description of natural and other objects is contrasted with the restraint and simplicity of the sculptor’s art. The passage is a really remarkable one, and stands almost alone, in elaboration if not in suggestion, as the forerunner of a kind of criticism, fruitful but rather dangerous, which has often been supposed to have originated with Winckelmann and Lessing and Diderot in the last century. But it stands almost alone.
The greater apparent promise of the paper on the synonymous plays is less well fulfilled. Dion seems to imply that this was the only instance where the Three competed on the very same subject, and he finds in the three pieces agreeable instances of the well-known general characteristics of their authors—the grandeur, simplicity, and audacity of Æschylus; the artifice, variety, rhetorical skill of Euripides; the mediocrity (in no evil sense) and the charm of Sophocles. He has also some interesting remarks on the chorus, together with some others less interesting, because more in the common style of ancient criticism, on impossibilities, improbabilities, breaches of usage and unity, and the like. Dion, in fact, goes so far as to express an indirect wish that the chorus were cut out of tragedy. He had, no doubt, lost the sense of the religious use which certainly existed in Æschylus, and perhaps survived in Sophocles; he could not but observe the combination of nullity and superfluity (which may too often be detected even in these great poets) of the chorus, if regarded as anything else than an intercalated lyric of the most exquisite beauty; and he of course saw that the choruses of Euripides were often as merely parabasic, as entirely separated from all strict dramatic connection, as any address to the audience in Aristophanes himself.
On the whole, it may best be said of the Golden-mouthed that, in other circumstances, and if he had cared, he might have made a critic perhaps better than Dionysius, and perhaps not so very far below Longinus; but that, as a matter of fact, neither time, circumstances, nor personal disposition attracted him, save here and there, to the subject.
There is another author, not far removed in age from Dion Chrysostom, whom I should be sorry to pass without at least |Aristides of Smyrna.| as minute an examination. Had we only the notices of him which exist, with a few fragments, there is perhaps no Greek writer from whom it would be reasonable to expect an abundance of literary criticism, of a type almost as startlingly modern as that of Longinus himself, with more confidence than that with which we might expect it from Aristides of Smyrna.[149]
Longinus has been blamed by M. Egger[150] for comparing[151] this rhetorician with Demosthenes. But the excellent historian of Greek criticism must have forgotten the epigram, quoted elsewhere,[152] in which Aristides is frankly ranked, not merely with Demosthenes but with Thucydides, as a writer, as well as the other testimonies, both of antiquity and of the Renaissance, which are conveniently collected in an article of Jebb’s edition, to be found in that of Dindorf.[153] It is true that Dindorf himself speaks contemptuously of his client, but Dindorf was too deeply sworn a servant of strictly classical Greek to tolerate the pretensions of a précieux of the Antonine age. As a matter of fact, not only is Aristides a good, though by no means easy,[154] writer of Greek, but both the qualities and the defects of his writing and the causes of his difficulty are such as ought to have disposed him to literary criticism in the best sense. This hardness does not arise from irregular syntax, nor from any of the commoner causes of “obscurity.” What makes it necessary to read him with no common care and attention is, in the first place, the cobweb-like subtlety, not to say tenuity and intricacy, of his thought; and, in the second, his use of not ostensibly strange or archaic language with the most elusive nuances of difference from its common employment.
Now these are characteristics which are by no means uncommonly found in persons and in times friendly to criticism. And the love of Aristides for literature (at least for the rhetorical side of it) is not only outspoken, but to all appearance unfeigned. His devotion is not merely valetudinarian, but voluntary. If there is a rhetorical extravagance in the phrase, there is a more than rhetorical sincerity in the sentiment of his declarations that, while others may find love or bathing or drinking or hunting sweet, speeches[155] are his sole delight: they absorb all his friendship and all his faculties; they are to him as parents and children, as business and pastime. It is about them that he invokes Aphrodite: he plays with them and works with them, rejoices in them, embraces them, knocks only at their doors. Elsewhere, “the whole gain and sum of life to man is oratorical occupation”; and elsewhere again, “I would rather have the gift of speech, with a modest and honourable life as man best may, than be Darius the son of Hystaspes two thousand times over: and everything seems to me little in comparison with this.”
This is something like a “declaration.”
Nor, on merely running down the list of the fairly voluminous extant works of Aristides (especially when the inner meanings, which do not always appear in the titles, are grasped), do matters look unpromising. The majority of the pieces are indeed pure epideictic—discourses to or about the gods, a mighty “Panathenaic” (the chef d'œuvre, with only one rival, of the author)—panegyrics of Smyrna, Rome, and other places, “Leuctrics” (i.e., debating-society speeches, on the side of the Lacedæmonians, on the side of the Thebans, and neutral), arguments for and against sending assistance to the Athenian expedition at Syracuse, all the stock—a stock surprise to us—of this curious declamation-commonplace. But there are four pieces (between them making up the stuff of a good-sized volume) in which, from such a man, literary criticism might seem to be inevitable. They are the περὶ τοῦ μὴ δεῖν κωμῳδεῖν[156] (a discourse whether comedy shall be permitted or not), the long Defence of Rhetoric (περὶ ῥητορικῆς)[157] against Plato’s attacks, especially in the Gorgias, the very much longer and oddly named ὑπὲρ τῶν τεττάρων,[158] an apology for Miltiades, Themistocles, Pericles, and Cimon, which completes this, and the still more oddly named περὶ τοῦ παραφθέγματος[159] (“Concerning my blunder”), which meets, with not a little tartness and wounded conceit, but with a great deal of ingenuity, the suggestion, through a third person, of some “d——d good-natured friend,”[160] that Aristides had committed a fault of taste by insinuating praises of himself in an address to the divinity. We turn to these, and we find as nearly as possible nothing critical. Glimmers of interest appear, as in the description of historians (ii. 513), as “those between poetry and rhetoric,” but they are extinguished almost at once. It would be quite impossible to treat the comedy question from a less literary standpoint than that of Aristides; we might have Plutarch speaking, except that the writing is more “precious” and point-de-vice. The “Apology for my blunder” consists mainly in a string, by no means lacking in ingenuity, of citations from poets, orators, and others, in which they indulge, either for themselves or their personages, in strains somewhat self-laudatory. As for the more than four hundred pages of “On Rhetoric” and “For the Four,” they also avoid the literary handling, the strictly critical grip of the subject, with a persistency which, as has been observed in other cases, is simply a mystery, unless we suppose that the writer was either laboriously shunning this, or quite unconscious of its possibility and promise. Pages after pages on the old aporia whether Rhetoric is an art or not, sheets after sheets on the welldoing of the Four, on Plato’s evil-speaking, we have. But, unless I have missed it, never a passage on the magnificent literature with which Rhetoric has enriched Greece, on the more magnificent rhetoric which the accuser of the brethren has himself displayed in accusing her. To a man of the subtlety of Aristides, of his enthusiasm for literature, of his flair for a popular and striking paradox, one would imagine that this beating up of the enemy’s quarters would be irresistibly tempting. But it is certainly not in his main attack: and though, in the vast stretch of wiredrawn argument and precious expression, one may have missed something, I do not think that it is even in the reserves or the parentheses.
There are perhaps few, at least among the less read Greek writers, who, in small compass and at no great expense of trouble, throw more negative light on Greek criticism than |Maximus Tyrius.| Maximus Tyrius.[161] This rhetorician or philosopher (he would probably have disclaimed the first epithet and modestly demanded promotion to the second) has left us, in a style as easy as that of Aristides is difficult, and showing at least a strong velleity to be Platonic, some forty essays, or dissertations, or theses. They are on questions or propositions of the usual kind, as these: “Pleasure may be a good but is not a stable thing.” “On Socratic Love” (an amiable but slightly ludicrous example of whitewashing everybody, from Socrates himself to Sappho). “On the God of Socrates and Plato,” &c., &c. Several of them might, at any rate from the titles, seem to touch our subject; two at least might seem to be obliged to touch it. These are the Tenth (in Reiske’s order), “Whether the poets or the philosophers have given the soundest ideas of the gods?” and the Twenty-third, “Whether Plato was right in banishing Homer from his Republic?” Yet, apt to slip between our fingers as we have found and shall find apparently critical theses of this sort, hardly one (at least outside Plutarch) is so utterly eel-like as those of Maximus of Tyre. As to the first,[162] he suggests that the very question is a misunderstanding—as no doubt it is, though not quite in his sense. Philosophy and poetry are really the same thing. Poetry is a philosophy, “senior in time, metrical in harmony, based on fiction as to its arguments.” Philosophy is a poetry “renewed in youth, more lightly equipped in harmony, more certain in sense.” They are, in short, as like as my fingers to my fingers, “and there are ænigmas in both.” If you are wise you will interpret the poets allegorically, but go to the philosophers for clear statements. And we must allow, to the credit of the former, that there is no poet who talks such mischievous nonsense as Epicurus.
This is all that, as a critic, Maximus has to say on this head; and though at least equally ingenious in evasion, he gives us nothing more solid in the debate on Homer and Plato.[163] He speaks, indeed, words of sense (by no means always kept in mind by critics) as to the absolute compatibility of admiration of Homer with admiration of Plato. But his argument for this, and at the same time the whole argument of the essay, is only a kind of “fetch.” Homer was banished from the Platonic Republic not because Plato thought him bad per se, but because the special conditions of the Republic itself made Homer an inconvenient inmate. He was not qualified for admission to this particular club: that was all. Equally far from our orbit is a third essay, the Thirty-second,[164] the subject of which is, “Is there any definite philosophic opinion[165] in Homer?” Elsewhere Maximus has refused to include literary criticism where it might justly have been expected: here (with, it must be admitted, much countenance from persons in more recent times, and especially in the present day) he determines to import into literary criticism things which have no business there. He begins, indeed, with a hearty and not unhappy eulogy of Homer himself for his range of subject and knowledge: but the rest of the piece is little more than an application of the theory laid down earlier, that philosophers and poets are only the same people in different coats, of antique or modern cut as the case may be, dancing to different tunes, and gesticulating in a different way. It may be so; but whether it is or not, Maximus has nothing more to tell us in our own division.[166]
There are not many positions in literary history more apparently covetable than that of being the first certain authority |Philostratus.| for a definition of Imagination which (in a sense different from Sir Thomas Browne’s) “antiquates antiquity,” which anticipates Shakespeare, which has been piously but vainly thought to have been first reached in criticism by Addison, and which, in its fulness, and as critically put, waited for the Germans of the late eighteenth century, if not for their greater scholar Coleridge, to display it in perfection. When it is added that this person was a professional rhetorician, that he had sufficient original, or at least mimetic, skill to supply the pattern of
and of others of the prettiest if not the greatest things in literature, with sufficient appreciation of arts other than literature to have left us a capital collection of descriptions of painting,—it may seem that great, or at least interesting, literary criticism must have proceeded from him.
Yet whoso shall go to the work of Flavius Philostratus[167] in search of this will be wofully disappointed, unless (and perhaps even if) he have the wisdom necessary to the acceptance of what the gods provide, and the more or less resigned relinquishment of what they do not.
Philostratus is in fact a writer of considerable charm. The Life of Apollonius is readable, not only for its matter and its literary associations with Keats through Burton; and the smaller Lives of the Sophists are not unimportant for literary history. The Eikones are perhaps the best descriptions of pictures before Diderot,[168] and the Letters are really nectareous. Gifford, when deservedly trouncing Cumberland (alias Sir Fretful Plagiary) for finding fault with Jonson because he made up the exquisite poem above cited from Philostratus, would have done better to vindicate the original as well from Cumberland’s bad taste and ignorance. “Despicable sophist,” “obscure collection of love-letters,” “parcel of unnatural, far-fetched conceits,” “calculated to disgust a man of Jonson’s classical taste,” are expressions which, as Gifford broadly hints, probably express not so much Cumberland’s own taste as that of his grandfather Bentley, who, if one of the greatest of scholars, was sometimes, if not always, one of the worst of literary critics. But Gifford, who, with all his acuteness, wit, and polemic power, represented too much the dregs of the neo-classic school on points of taste, was probably of no very different opinion. The fact is that, not merely in the passages which Ben has adapted, sometimes literally, for this marvellous cento, but in many others, the very wine, the very roses, of the luscious and florid school of poetical sentiment are given by Philostratus himself.
But if they are his own, and not, as seems more likely, prose paraphrases of lost poems by some other, he was not one of the “poets who contain a critic.” Not only does he put the remarkable definition[169] of φαντασία, which it is not clear that even Longinus fully grasped, in the mouth of Apollonius; but it is very noticeable that Apollonius is there speaking not of literary art, but of sculpture and painting. In the description of paintings themselves there is no criticism. And perhaps among the numerous examples which we have of the strange difference of view between the ancients and at least some of ourselves on the suggestiveness of literature, there is no passage more striking than the Heroic Dialogue[170] on the subject of Homer between a Phœnician stranger and a vine-dresser at Eleus in the Thracian Chersonese, where Protesilaus was supposed to be buried. The stuff of this fantastic piece is the information, about the matters of the Trojan war, supposed to be supplied to the vine-dresser by Protesilaus himself. There is one passage of literary estimate of the ordinary kind, but the whole is one of those curious corrections of Homeric statement which served as the ancestors of the new and anti-Homeric “tale of Troy” in the Middle Ages, and which are among the numerous puzzles of ancient literature to us, until we have mastered the strange antique horror of fiction as fiction. We cannot conceive any one—after childhood—otherwise than humorously attempting to make out that Sir Walter Scott did injustice to Waverley, and that in the duel with Balmawhapple the Baron was only second, not principal, insinuating that the novelist has concealed the real secret of Flora’s indifference to her lover, which was that she was determined, like Beatrix Esmond, to be the Chevalier’s mistress, or declaring that Fergus, instead of being captured and executed, died gloriously in a skirmish omitted by historians, after putting the English to flight. But this is what the ancients were always doing with Homer; and it is scarcely too much to say that until this attitude of mind is entirely discarded, literary criticism in the proper sense is impossible.
The relatively considerable space, some six or seven pages, which is allotted to Libanius in Egger’s book, may have encouraged |Libanius.| readers to expect some considerable contribution to critical literature from that sophist and rhetorician. But a careful reading of the French historian’s text will show that he has really nothing to produce to justify the space assigned: and an independent examination of Libanius himself (which, as hinted already, is not too easy to make[171]) will more than confirm this uncomfortable suspicion. Libanius is enormously copious, and he is not exactly contemptible,[172] seeing that he can apply the sort of “Wardour Street” Attic, in which he and the better class of his contemporaries wrote, to a large number of subjects with a great deal of skill. But the curse of artificiality is over everything that he writes:[173] and, to do him justice, his writings proclaim the fact beforehand with the most praiseworthy frankness. They belong almost entirely to those classes of conventional exercise of which full account has been given, and will be given, in the present Book and its successor. They are Progymnasmata, Meletæ, “orations,” that is to say, rather more practical compositions of the same class, ethical dissertations, letters of the kind in which A writes that B is a new Demosthenes, and B replies that A really is a second Plato. The Progymnasmata include all the kinds mentioned earlier in this chapter, fables and narrations, uses and sentences, encomia and ethopoiæ and the rest; the Meletæ range from the complaint of a parasite who has been done out of his dinner, through all manner of historical, mythical, and fantastic cases, to the question whether Lais (after being exiled) had not better be recalled as a useful member of society. But literary criticism is nullibi. If it were anywhere we should look for it in the comparison of Demosthenes and Æschines which figures among the Progymnasmata, in the Life[174] of the first-named orator and the arguments to his speeches, and perhaps in the Apologia Socratis. In the first there is not a scintilla of the kind: the comparison wholly concerns the lives, characters, and successes of the two. In the Apologia there is pretty constant reference to Socrates' conversation, with some to that of others, Prodicus, Protagoras, &c. But any literary consideration is avoided with that curious superciliousness, or more curious subterfuge, which we have noticed often already, and which is so rigid and so complete that it suggests malice prepense—a deliberate and perverse abstention. The “editorial” matter (to vary a happy phrase of M. Egger) on Demosthenes is even more surprisingly barren,—mere biography, and mere reference to the stock technicalities and classifications of stasis and the like, practically exhaust it. I do not know how far the fact that he composed, in answer to Aristides,[175] a defence of stage dancing or pantomime, may by some be reckoned to him as literary righteousness. In his wordy Autobiography[176] I can find nothing to our purpose: and though, in the difficulties of study of him referred to, I daresay I have not thoroughly sifted the huge haystack of the Orations, I think there is very little more there. The For Aristophanes[177] has nothing to do with the Aristophanes we know or with literature, except that it seems to have been the speech in which Julian (v. infra, p. 126) discovered such wonderful qualities.
The “Monody” and the “Funeral Oration” on Julian himself may again excite expectation, for the dead Emperor was certainly a man of letters; but they will equally disappoint it. The quaintly named “To Those Who Do Not Speak” (pupils of his who on growing up and entering the senate or other public bodies prove dumb dogs) might help us, but does not. Libanius merely exhorts these sluggards, in the most general way, to be good boys, to pay less attention to chariot-racing and more to books. By far the larger number of the “Orations” are on political or legal subjects, and it would be unreasonable to expect critical edification from them; but even where it might seem likely to come in, it does not. The “Against Lucian” (Reiske, vol. iii.) is in the same case as the “For Aristophanes.” The not uninteresting oration in defence of the system of his School (No. LXV., the last of Reiske’s third volume) constantly refers to a matter which might be of great concern to us—the difficulty which schoolmasters or professors had at this time in keeping their pupils up to the mark in the two languages and literatures, Greek and Latin. But the discourse is not turned our way.
Nor do the Letters, our last resort, furnish us with much consolation. Their enormous number—there are over 1600 in Wolf’s edition of the Greek originals, while the editio princeps of Zambicarius, in Latin only, adds problems of divagation and duplication to the heart’s content of a certain order of scholar—is to some extent mitigated by their usual brevity. But this very brevity is often an aggravation not a mitigation of teen. Very many are mere “notes,” as we should say, written, indeed, with the pomp and circumstance of the epistoler-rhetorician, but about nothing or next to nothing. Very often Libanius seems to be unconsciously anticipating the young person who said that he did not read books, he wrote them. Sometimes, at least, an apparently promising reference leads to a bitter disappointment, as in the case of that to Longinus. The reader—his appetite only whetted by the exertion of rectifying a miscitation in Wolf’s Preface (it quotes the Letter as 990, while it is really 998)—at last approaches his quest, and reads as follows: To Eusebius, “The speech [or book] which I want is Odenathus, and it is by Longinus. You must give it me, and keep your promise.” This is indeed precious; though a remembrance of the information, epistolary and other, vouchsafed in many modern biographies, may moderate sarcastic impulses. No sarcasm, but profound sympathy, should be excited by the professor’s constant complaints of headache; yet again they are unilluminative for our purpose. In fact, such examination as I have been able to give to these Epistles shows that it is unreasonable to demand from them what they have no intention to supply. Very likely there are passages in this mass, as in that other of the Orations, which might be adduced: but I am pretty sure that they would not invalidate the general proposition that, to Libanius also, those who want literary criticism proper need not go. Perhaps the nearest approaches to it are such things as the curious mention to Demetrius (128, Wolf, p. 67) of parts of an artificial epistolary discourse of his friend’s which he, Libanius, received when he had pupils with him, and, after being much bored by their recitations, read to them instead of lecturing himself.
The titles at least of his correspondent Themistius[178] are sometimes a little more promising, and Themistius, a man of considerable |Themistius.| and varied public employment, might seem less likely to indulge in the excesses of mere scholastic exercise which Libanius permitted himself. But, on the whole, we shall have to acknowledge that this other famous rhetorician also is drawn practically blank for our purpose. “The Philosopher,” “The Sophist,” “How a man should address the public”—these are subjects on which one might surely think that a little criticism would break in somehow and somewhere. But it never does. To Themistius, as to so many others, the great writers of old are persons worthy of infinite respect, to be quoted freely, but to be quoted as a lawyer quotes this or that year-book, report, decision, for the substance only. The general banality of his literary references may be tested by anybody who chooses to refer to his citations and discussions of various authors in the Basanistes (Orat. xxi., ed. cit. in note, p. 296), or more succinctly still, to the reference to “golden Menander, and Euripides, and Sophocles, and fair Sappho, and noble Pindar” in the pleasant little piece, “To his Father,” which comes before it.
It is no doubt extremely unjust to argue from the performance of the pupil to the quality of the teacher; but we may at least say that, if there was any stronger critical tendency |Julian.| in Libanius or Themistius than appears in their own works, it is not reflected in one of their most diligent and distinguished pupils.[179] The references to literature in the extant works[180] of Julian the Apostate are, in a certain sense and way, extremely numerous; in fact, it was almost vital to the odd mixture of dupery and quackery which had mastered him that he should be constantly quoting classical, if only because they were heathen, authors. His Orations[181] are crammed with such quotations. Moreover, we have from him a declaration in form of love for books. “Some,” he says, at the beginning of his epistle (the ninth) to Ecdicius,[182] “love horses, some birds, some other beasts; in me from a child there has raged a dire longing for the possession of books.” But in this, as in other cases, Desire seems rather to have excluded Criticism. One is rather annoyed than edified by the banal reference, at the beginning of the Misopogon,[183] to his having seen “the barbarians beyond the Rhine singing wild songs composed in a speech resembling the croakings of rough-voiced fowls, and rejoicing in this music.” If only the princely pedant would have copied a few of these croaks, and studied them, instead of trying to put back the clock of the world! His compliments and thanks to Libanius himself for the above-mentioned speech (Ep. 14) are of the most hackneyed character. He read it, he says, nearly all before breakfast, and finished it between breakfast and siesta.[184] “Thou art blessed to write thus, and still more to be able to think thus! O speech! O brains! O composition! O division! O epicheiremes! O ordonnance! O departures of style! O harmony! O symphony!” To which we may add “O clichés! O tickets! O [in Mr Burchell’s rudeness] Fudge!”
In Ep. 24 there is a playful and pleasant discourse on the sense of the epithet γλυκὺς given by the poets and others to figs and honey, but it is only a trifle; and in 34, to Iamblichus, it is noteworthy how entirely the philosophic interest of literature overshadows, or rather how completely it blocks out, the literary whole. In 42, on education, and literature as its instrument, the old Plutarchian view[185] is refurbished, almost without alteration, and with only a fling or two at the Galilæans as an addition; while in 55 Eumenius and Pharianus are explicitly adjured “not to despise” logic, rhetoric, poetics, to study mathematics “more carefully,” but to give their whole mind to the understanding of the dogmas of Aristotle and Plato. This is to be “the real business, the foundation and the structure and the roof,” the rest are πάρεργα. The assertion is of course the reverse of original; but at this juncture it is all the more valuable to us, as a sort of summary and clincher at once of a large and important part of ancient opinion. In the borrower of it, as in those from whom it was borrowed, literary criticism, to full purpose and with full freedom, simply could not exist.