The Aristotelian distinction of poetic from rhetoric has been sometimes blurred, sometimes ignored, by criticism. Such confusion as thus arises became more common in ancient criticism with the waning of ancient art; it was widespread in the middle age; it has reappeared many times since the Renaissance.[1] For consistent development of poetic as a technic distinct from rhetoric is beyond the occasion of most criticism, whether ancient or modern. At an ebb tide of creation especially, the average critic is likely to confine his observations to style; and there the two technics have much common ground. Even in criticism of composition we have seen often in our own time such familiar terms as unity, emphasis, and coherence restricted to their rhetorical definitions, and yet imposed in these senses on composition whose actual control was quite different. The unity of the Ancient Mariner, for instance, has been interpreted as the logical control of the proposition “He prayeth best who loveth best,” though surely that composition was unified quite otherwise. Or the term coherence is permitted to suggest that the progress of Burke’s speech on Conciliation from paragraph to paragraph is like the progress of Othello from scene to scene, though the two technics have little resemblance. Such warping of poetic has sometimes been even urged by ancient or modern schoolmasters and text-books. It has seemed thrifty to make Molière, for instance, exhibit those principles of composition which pupils must use in writing essays upon him. But even without such pedagogical perversion it is easy to think of poetic in terms of rhetoric; for rhetoric is in everybody’s head.
It was so much more a preoccupation of ancient thought that the conception of poetic as a distinct movement seems to have become less and less active. Though a few critics, even under the Empire, held the Aristotelian distinction, generally ancient poetic was more and more warped toward rhetoric. With rhetoric determining education, with even Cicero and Tacitus discussing poetic as contributory, with the later declamatores habitually blending the two, with even poets yielding to the common tendency, poetic could hardly be conceived often as a distinct movement of composition. While Vergil’s art revealed a critical conception unknown to Seneca and Lucan, Horace could repeat Aristotle without following his distinctive idea. Cicero and Tacitus, best of Latin critics, naturally contemplate in poetic rather its imagery than its movement;[2] and Quintilian,[3] even more naturally, explores only its treasures available for orators. That ancient criticism never lost the Aristotelian distinction altogether appears in the anonymous and undated De sublimitate[4] and in a few of the many words of Dio Chrysostom;[5] but Plutarch’s poetic is indistinguishable from rhetoric.
The overwhelming preponderance of rhetoric in ancient critical thought followed naturally from the dominance of rhetoric in education.[6] Formal schooling in poetic, what we now call primary instruction in literature, began with grammaticus,[7] and he was committed in advance to preparing his boys for their studies in rhetoric. With his task of inculcating correctness in reading, speaking, and writing were associated his lectures (prælectiones) on the poets. Though these may often, given the highly selected group of students, have done much for appreciation of literature, they can hardly have ranged far in poetic. Grammaticus probably confined himself in most cases to what is known in French schools as explication des textes. Within its limits this is admirable; but given the age of the pupils and their specific object, it cannot often have gone beyond words and sentences into the poetic composition of the whole. Criticism ad hoc, the detailed study of a particular poem passage by passage, is a method not only necessary for schooling, but valuable more widely. By sheer prevalence it must always be influential; illumination must in fact have come oftener from such interpretation than from a systematic treatise on poetry. None the less it needs more correction and extension from other forms of criticism than was usually possible in the ancient world. By itself it tends toward a pedestrian analysis of diction and toward emphasis on those aspects of poetic which are available for rhetoric.
Criticism by labels, the classifying of authors by accepted adjectives, is not, unfortunately, confined either to antiquity or to grammarians. A certain amount of criticism, apparently, must always be devoted to telling people what they ought to say. But the classifying habit seems to have been especially prevalent in ancient criticism. At any rate, the labels affixed by grammarians were widely repeated. Even so discerning a critic as Quintilian thus makes his tenth book a convenient “survey.” The satisfaction of an audience in neat and recognizable characterization is given by Apuleius.
“Any speech composed by Avitus will be found everywhere so consistently perfect that Cato would not miss in it his dignity, nor Laelius his smoothness, nor Gracchus his vehemence, nor Cæsar his warmth, nor Hortensius his clear plan, nor Calvus his subtleties, nor Sallust his conciseness, nor Cicero his richness.” Apuleius, Apologia.
Each orator has the right label, as in a cram-book; and the same classifying neatness disposes of the poetic of Philemon.
“You who are sufficiently acquainted with his talent, hear briefly of his end. Or will you hear somewhat also of his talent? This Philemon was a poet, a writer of the Middle Comedy. He wrote pieces for the stage in the time of Menander, and in competition with him, perhaps not as an equal, but certainly as a rival. In these contests, I am sorry to say, he was often the winner. At any rate, you will find in him much that is piquant, plots neatly woven, recognitions clearly unfolded, characters adequate to the action, thoughts approved by experience, humor not too low for comedy, seriousness not involving tragedy. Seductions in his plays are rare; even legitimate loves are treated as aberrations. None the less he shows the perjured pimp, the passionate lover, the shrewd slave, the deceiving mistress, the interfering wife, the indulgent mother, the scolding uncle, the conniving crony, the bellicose soldier, not to mention greedy parasites, stingy fathers, and voluble harlots.” Apuleius, Florida, XVI.
Nor was the habit confined to rhetors. It was widespread in the “three styles”[8] of oratory, in the ten canonical Attic orators, in “Asianism” versus “Atticism,” in the bias of even Dionysius of Halicarnassus[9] toward classification. True, it appears generally in criticism of rhetoric, and is common enough in modern times; but in ancient criticism it amounts to a preoccupation,[10] and is more readily carried over into poetic.
Grammar in those wider reaches now comprehended in the term philology has much to contribute to the criticism of older poets. Theon, for instance, whose manual of school exercises (προγυμνάσματα[11]) has come down to us from the time of Augustus, annotated with scholia the tragic and the comic poets. The tradition of the Alexandrian grammarians included, besides syntax and exegesis, textual criticism. But such criticism depends for much of its value on science little explored by the ancients; and typically it makes little contribution to poetic.[12] By no good fortune, then, “philology and poetry went hand in hand in the ancient and classical literature of Italy.”[13] The result of this companionship was not, indeed, always nor necessarily so arid and confined as the criticism of the second-century lexicographer Aulus Gellius;[14] but at most it had little range.
Not only did the prevalence of rhetoric make poetic generally subsidiary, but the prevalence of declamatio[15] in later teaching and practise tended actually to confuse the two. This rhetoric was itself largely poetic, largely an art of appeal by description. Sometimes carrying descriptive dialogue into a sort of oral fiction, it had no occasion for poetic movement. The pattern of a speech sufficed as well as another where the opportunity was less of the whole than of the parts.[16] Immediate popular oral effects were then, as now, gained rather by stinging epigrams and dramatic realizations than by any onward course. The poetic that shall win a crowd on the spot is more likely than the poetic that shall be savored by individual readers to be sensational. Sensational in fact it was commonly, to judge by examples ranging all the way from Seneca’s Controversiæ well into the Christian centuries.
Even those rhetors who were not sensational in their own practise were little more likely, in a time of such preoccupations, to conceive poetic distinctively; and rhetors purveyed, among other things, literary criticism. Besides teaching and exhibiting at home, the more popular rhetors traveled as occasional orators and lecturers. Though their speeches were oftenest, of course, occasional, and, when they were rather lectures, were commonly in the fields of philosophy and ethics, still professional public speakers must have purveyed, at home and on their journeys, a good deal of the current literary criticism. Where this was incidental, it need not be taken too seriously. No device of public speaking is more persistent than the flattering of an audience by literary allusions and accepted adjectives of admiration.[17] Such passages, in ancient speeches or in modern, show merely what is regarded as the right thing to say, and are almost always limited to style. But where a rhetor develops a literary topic, even for a paragraph or two, he may be as significant as any other literary critic.
The particular rhetor might be a teacher of rhetoric primarily, or secondarily, or hardly at all. Though he hardly ranked as a philosopher,[18] yet he was an active purveyor of philosophy. An expert in public address, he professed a variety of considerable range. Occasional oratory of itself invites ranging in both emotion and thought. Conventional as he appears when considered merely as one of a numerous class, he might nevertheless be an outstanding individual; and even as a type he was at least accomplished and influential.
Apuleius, lively and daring enough in his narrative,[19] seems in the excerpts preserved from his oratory quite conventional. The Florida show certain typical encomia, two passages of critical labels, three long pieces on philosophy, and several of those exordia which traveling lecturers prepared, and still prepare, for extempore adaptation. If the Great Unknown’s De sublimitate[20] was a public address—and its suggestiveness is strongly oral—its author rose quite above the type without losing the typical opportunity of oral criticism. One may fancy the close of that noble appeal echoing long in the ears of a rapt audience. But without any flight of fancy one may read the possibilities of ancient oral criticism in certain of the orations of Dio of Prusa, often called Dio Chrysostom.[21]
Dio’s speech known as the Olympic, and having for subtitle The Primary Conception of God, opens with a proem characteristic of the form, an introduction separable, adjustable, ostensibly impromptu, but none the less following a type. A fable of the owl—occasional oratory seems inevitably to begin with a story—leads to other proverbs, to historical allusions, to the speaker’s profession of modesty, sincerity, and homeliness. “I am just come from the Getæ. Shall I tell you about this interesting people?” A rhetor’s offering the choice of theme to the audience might be merely conventional; for Dio effectively recalls it by adding: “Here at Olympia, beside your wondrous statue of the Olympian, shall I not rather speak of Zeus himself?”
So is approached a discourse upon embodiments of deity in poetry and in sculpture, a lecture carefully conducted from point to point, and delivered doubtless in these words, certainly by this plan, in more than one welcoming city. Such a prepared address needed only the adjustment of the proem to the place and the occasion.[22] The lecture itself remained substantially the same. This one makes first the following points.
The knowledge of Zeus comes through nature; men become aware of him as the nourisher of them all. To such realization is added that of poetry, of cult, and finally of the arts of painting and sculpture, not to mention the theories of the philosophers. Limiting ourselves to poetry and sculpture, let us begin (49) with Phidias, whose marvelous statue here compels our admiration. Does this statue embody deity truly?
That question was answered to the Athenians of the same generation quite differently, by a speaker less different than his conclusion, a Roman Jew of Tarsus, one Paul. Dio goes on, after an encomium of Phidias:
Phidias might well reply that it is true to tradition as that is conceived and defined by the poets (55-57), that since we yearn for a personal divine, the human body is its best expression, and that Homer too (62) made his gods human.
There follows a comparison of sculpture with poetry (70). Though this stresses unduly, perhaps, the mere range of verbal suggestion, it make none the less clearly a fundamental distinction.
“Again, besides this, the very conditions of working out a conception in sculpture impose one form for each statue, a form immovable and permanent, [yet] such as to comprehend in itself the god’s whole nature and power; but poets may easily include in their poetic many forms and all sorts of shapes, for they add such movements or repose as they think appropriate to each moment, actions too, words, and finally, I think, the illusion of time.”
So (Phidias is supposed to go on) my Zeus, embodying in a single representation the typical Greek conception (74) of the ruler of an ordered world, shows him as gentle, grave, serene, as giver, father, savior, protector, and yet does not exclude his other aspects (75). How could I represent him (78) continually hurling the thunderbolt, sending rain or stretching the rainbow, renewing battle-lust? Our art is adjusted to the immediate and clear test of actual seeing (79).
An encomium of Phidias, a discours de circonstance, has been made to involve two large principles of artistic theory. The first is ethical, expressing a fundamental relation of art to human life. Art, and especially poetry, is a revelation to us of what we vaguely feel to be divine; it interprets communal experience as communal vision. The second is æsthetic, deriving a difference of technic from the fundamental difference between stimulating mental images by successive verbal suggestions, visual, auditory, motor, and actually representing to the eye alone all together and all at once. While poetry ranges through successive suggestions, sculpture focuses statically by typical representation. Though it is easy to read into these principles from modern criticism more than Dio intended, they can hardly be regarded as less than penetrative and fundamental. The first, often reaffirmed in modern times and sometimes apparently rediscovered, is often implied in ancient criticism. Dio’s contribution is to formulate it explicitly, and to express it with unusual warmth. The second is clear, though less explicit, in Aristotle’s Poetic. It is ignored by both Horace and Plutarch.[23] As Dio’s words went down the ancient wind, so Lessing’s almost identical distinction[24] has not precluded much bland modern confusion of the arts.
More and more a moralist as his life advanced, turning from rhetor into preacher, Dio nevertheless maintains a variety reminding us that this form of oratory had great range. The prelude of his Euboica, extensively descriptive of simple frontier life, is almost a short story. Quite different from the conventional expatiation, which Dio elsewhere does not despise, it shows him expert not only in the theory of narrative, but also in its practise. Some of his discourses are less speeches than what we should call essays. The one on Practise in Speaking[25] is in topics, plan, and style quite conventional. The remarkable one on Greek drama is as it stands an essay in literary criticism. By the insertion of recited passages it could easily and effectively have been expanded into a lecture; but even without these it is both sustained and suggestive.
DIO CHRYSOSTOM, ORATIO LII
ÆSCHYLUS, SOPHOCLES, AND EURIPIDES, OR THE BOW OF PHILOCTETES
1. [I rose early, walked, meditated, prayed, exercised, bathed, breakfasted.] 2. I chanced upon certain tragedies of the masters, Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, all upon the same theme. It is that of the theft of the bow and arrows of Philoctetes—perhaps one should say the seizure. At any rate, Philoctetes was deprived of his arms by Odysseus, and himself brought to Troy, largely of his own free will, partly also by the persuasion of necessity, since he was bereft of the arms which provided at once his living on the island, his courage in such disease, and his glory. 3. Well, I feasted on the spectacle, and I reflected that even if I had been at Athens in their time, I could not have seen all three great men in competition. Some, indeed, did see the competition of the young Sophocles with the old Æschylus, and of the older Sophocles with the younger Euripides; but Euripides was quite outside of the generation of Æschylus, and competed with him seldom, if ever, in the same drama. My having all three to read together seemed a revel, and a fresh consolation for my inability [to see them].
4. Well, I imagined myself putting the plays on quite splendidly, and tried to fix my attention as a judge of the first tragic choruses. But though I had taken my oath, I could not have given a decision; nor, for all me, would any of those masters have been held inferior. The greatness of mind in Æschylus and his sense of tradition, as well as his austerity of thought and expression, seemed appropriate to tragedy and to the ancient heroic ethics—nothing contrived or glib or low. 5. Even Odysseus he introduced as shrewd and crafty in the way of that time, [a way] so far removed from the baseness of to-day that what is really traditional [in Æschylus] seems beyond those who now try to be simple and high-minded.
When Athena transforms him, nothing more is needed to keep Philoctetes in ignorance of who he is. So Homer made the story, and after him Euripides. Therefore, if some unfriendly critic should accuse Æschylus of taking no care as to how Odysseus shall be convincing without being recognized by Philoctetes, (6) his defense, I think, would be as follows. While the time was not, perhaps, so great that the character could not be sustained (i.e., through ten years), yet the disease of Philoctetes, his misery, and his having passed the interim in a desert are sufficient to make plausible his not recognizing Odysseus. For many have experienced the same lapse, some from weakness, some from misfortune. No, the chorus had no need, as in Euripides, to excuse themselves to him. 7. Both [poets] represented the chorus as composed of Lemnians. Euripides has made them at once apologize for their former neglect because for so many years they had not come to Philoctetes or helped him at all. Æschylus simply brought on the chorus—a method far more tragic as well as simpler, whereas that of Euripides is more oratorical and precise. If [dramatists] could escape all absurdities in their tragedies, perhaps there would be reason for not neglecting this; but actually they make their heralds accomplish in one day several days’ journey. 8. Now the case was not quite that none of the Lemnians came to him or gave him any care. Probably he would not have passed ten years without finding any help at all. Probably he did find it, though rarely and of no great account; and no one chose to take him in and tend him because of the loathsomeness of his disease. Euripides, forsooth, out of his own head introduces Actor, one of the Lemnians, as an acquaintance who went out to Philoctetes and often helped him.
9. Neither does it seem to me that any one can justly find fault with making [Philoctetes] narrate to the chorus, as if they did not know it, his abandonment by the Achæans and everything else that happened to him; for an unfortunate is wont to recount his mishaps often, even to those who know them in detail, and wearies those who have no need to hear his woes by telling them over and over again. Moreover the deceit of Odysseus toward Philoctetes, and the arguments by which he induces him, are not only more in character, such as befit a hero and unlike the pleas of Eurybatus or Patæcion, but also, I think, more convincing. 10. For what need was there of manifold art and device with a sick man, and a bowman at that, whose strength became useless so soon as one but stood near? And the announcing of the mishaps of the Achæans, that Agamemnon was dead, that Odysseus was to blame most disgracefully, that the army had perished utterly—all this is not only useful for putting Philoctetes in a good humor and disposing him to accept the speech of Odysseus, but is not in any wise improbable, considering the length of the campaign and what had happened not long before through the wrath of Achilles, when Hector almost went to burn the beached ships.
11. The intelligence of Euripides, that unfailing care which neither leaves anything unconvincing or unprovided nor simply uses actions but [uses them] with all force in the expression, is as it were the converse of the habit of Æschylus, being most oratorical, most rhetorical, most available for the use of debaters. At the very beginning, for instance, Odysseus has been represented in the prologue as revolving in his mind political enthymemes and at first doubtful of himself, lest while he seems to the crowd to be wise and distinguished in intelligence, he may be the opposite. 12. It is open to him to live unfretted and inactive; but his wish is to be always in deeds and dangers. The cause of this, he says, is his emulation of men goodly and noble. For these who are bent on good report and universal fame willingly undertake the greatest and most difficult toils. “Nothing is born so proud as man.” Then sapiently and precisely he discloses the plot of the drama and why he has come to Lemnos. 13. He says he has been transformed by Athena so that when he meets Philoctetes he shall not be recognized. (Euripides imitates Homer in this; for Homer had Odysseus transformed by Athena when he met not only others, but even Eumæus and Penelope.) He says an embassy is about to come from the Trojans to Philoctetes, to ask that he offer them himself and his arms in return for the kingship of Troy. [Thus Euripides] makes the action more various and invents occasions for the arguments by which, when he turns them the other way around, Odysseus seems most resourceful and most sufficient for anything.
14. He has represented Odysseus as arriving not alone, but with Diomed (Homeric this, too). All in all, as I said, through all the drama, he displays the greatest intelligence and plausibility in action, extraordinary and marvellous force in the speeches, dialogue at once sapient and natural and oratorical, and lyrics that not only please, but also strongly move to virtue.
15. Sophocles seems to be between the two, having neither the austerity and singleness of Æschylus nor the precision and sharpness and oratorical cast of Euripides, but a grave and magnificent poetic embracing all that is most tragic and most eloquent, uniting the greatest charm with sublimity and gravity. For his action he has used the best and most convincing plan, representing Odysseus as arriving with Neoptolemus, since it was fated that Troy should be taken by Neoptolemus and by Philoctetes using the bow of Hercules. [He has] Odysseus concealed, but Neoptolemus sending to Philoctetes and advising him what to do. He has made the chorus not, as Æschylus and Euripides, Lemnians, but shipmates of Odysseus and Neoptolemus.
16. The characters are marvellously grave and free. That of Odysseus is much gentler and more single than Euripides has made it; that of Neoptolemus, surpassingly single and high-bred, first when he wishes to get the better of Philoctetes not by craft and deceit, but by force and in the open, then when at the instance of Odysseus he has deceived him and got possession of the weapons. When Philoctetes becomes aware and urges a cheated man’s reproaches, Neoptolemus is so moved that he is about to give them back; and even when Odysseus intervenes, still at last he gives them, and as he gives them tries by argument to make Philoctetes go to Troy of his own free will.
17. When Philoctetes will in no wise yield nor be persuaded, but begs Neoptolemus to keep his promise of taking him back to Greece, he undertakes that and is ready to do it, till the intervention of Hercules wins the consent of Philoctetes to embark for Troy. The lyrics have not so much of the sententious and hortatory as those of Euripides, but a marvellous charm and magnificence. Not at random Aristophanes said of him: “The mouth of Sophocles is anointed with honey, as if he had licked the box.”
Conventional as this is in making the usual contrast between Æschylus and Euripides, with Sophocles as a golden mean, it defines these distinctions afresh with suggestive precision. Moreover, the essay is free from the usual preoccupation with diction. What is said on that point, though not original, is tersely subordinated. If the manuscript is complete, therefore, the close upon the quotation from Aristophanes gives a false emphasis; for the criticism as a whole is quite different from the usual comparison of style with style.
Plot, indeed, is not developed extensively as a separate item; but it is clearly implied in the treatment of characterization. The constant theme is motivation, the bringing out of character through the movement of the plot, the dramatic management of persons through interaction. Thus Dio has made his criticism singularly consistent. Instead of merely appreciating one dramatist after the other, he has made his comparison progressive. The oral criticism uttered by Greek and Roman rhetors of the Empire, we may guess from what has survived in manuscript, was not often either so sustained or so free from the bias of rhetoric. Perhaps Dio’s unusual grasp came from his missionary sense of the tradition of Hellenism.
Literary criticism has often taken direction from philosophy. In ancient criticism such a slant was habitual. Most ancient critics show definite preoccupation with some school of philosophy.[27] For example, there was a Stoic theory of style; and “the æsthetic theories of Panætius are reproduced in the first book of Cicero’s De officiis.”[28] Such cases are typical even to the involving of æsthetics with ethics; for ancient literary criticism, more generally and avowedly than modern, is ethical. Aristotle is almost alone in proposing for poetic principles frankly æsthetic. The general tendency of ancient criticism is to give poetic a moral color. This ethical direction of critical thought confirmed the tendency to conceive poetic in terms of rhetoric. Not only are the implications of rhetoric inevitably moral, but the theories of rhetoric associated with ancient theories of morals were often extended to include even poetic expression. Ancient poetic was thus rhetoricated partly by being moralized.
An extreme instance of this ancient habit is Plutarch’s Greek treatise of the first century, How Youth Should Read Poetry. Here the familiar idea that poetry is a means of ethical education is so expounded as to reveal the limits of Plutarch’s conception. He is not merely, as grammaticus commenting Homer in school, offering poetry as a propædeutic to philosophy; he is repeating a narrow and commonplace æsthetic. His treatment of imitation, ignoring Aristotle’s use of that term,[29] has in mind faithfulness to fact. Ignoring also the Aristotelian idea of poetic movement, he repeats the commonplace and misleading analogy from painting[30] with a barren literalness.
“We shall still more thoroughly ground the young man, if, on introducing him to poetry, we explain to him that it is an imitative art and agent, analogous to painting. Not only must he be made acquainted with the common saying that poetry is vocal painting, and painting silent poetry, but we must also teach him that when we see a painting of a lizard, an ape, or the face of Thersites, our pleasure and surprise are occasioned, not by the beauty of the object, but by the likeness of the painting to it.... In such instances it is especially important that the young man come to understand that we do not praise the action imitated, but the art, provided the subject is treated accurately.”[31]
Poetry is pictorial in this sense not to authors whose creative bent is distinctively dramatic or narrative, but to the describers and expatiators, not to Vergil, but to Ovid.
For this narrow conception of poetic truth Plutarch’s recurring terms[32] are not merely narrow; they are distinctly rhetorical. They are the very ones commonly used by rhetoricians to describe success in prosopopœia,[33] or characterization according to type. That Plutarch means them so is clear in section x on characterization in Homer.
“It is worth while, in this connection, to notice the conduct of Agamemnon; for he passes Sthenelus by without noticing him, yet he does not neglect Odysseus, but answers him, ‘seeing how he was wroth, and took back his saying.’ Had he apologized to all, he would have appeared undignified and servile, and had he disdained all, arrogant and unreasonable.... It is also a good idea to take notice of the difference between the ways in which a discreet man and a pompous soothsayer addresses a crowd. Thus Calchas.... One should notice as well the differences in racial characteristics. For example, the Trojans rush ferociously to battle with savage cries, but the Greeks ‘in silence feared their captains’; for to fear officers in the presence of the enemy is the mark of heroism and obedience.... Hence foresight is Grecian and civil; rashness, barbaric and rude; the one to be emulated, the other to be avoided.”
In a word, Plutarch’s moralizing of poetic is definitely rhetorical. For the schools of philosophy generally poetic was incidental to the consideration of diction; for him it was indistinguishable in method.
That the unsystematic epistolary reflections of a Latin poet on poetry should for centuries have influenced criticism of poetic more than the searching analysis and consecutive synthesis of the greatest Greek philosopher has seemed strange to the point of irony. Not only was Horace quoted while Aristotle was forgotten, but even after the recovery of the Poetic he was quoted still. He is quotable. He abounds in sententiæ; and they have a long life. Though he would have been himself the first to smile at the putting of his epistle to the Pisos beside Aristotle’s Poetic, he knew none the less the sort of criticism that people like. We have been often reminded that Ars Poetica is neither Horace’s title nor accurately descriptive. But it is a title naturally given by grammarians who hardly conceived poetic as a distinct technic, and naturally accepted by readers who found Horace’s epigrams no less suggestive because they were detached. Certainly the epistle is not an ars; but certainly its criticism has enough shrewdness, lucidity, brilliancy, adaptability to the short flights of ordinary thinking on the subject, to explain all its popularity. One need not be cynical to think that the poetic of a Horace will usually be more popular than the poetic of an Aristotle.
At the risk of wronging Horace, his editors and other critics have tried to brief this epistle. Wickham,[34] for instance, finds three parts: (1) 1-118, “the original principles of poetry, unity of conception, choice of words, style of diction;” (2) 119-284, characterization in drama, the Greek practise of drama; (3) 285-end, “the two aims of poetry, the necessity of excellence.” But this is not a division at all. Wilkins,[35] admitting difficulties of sequence, even digressions and repetitions, nevertheless finds “three main sections”: (1) 1-72, unity of style and conception; (2) 73-288, application of “these general principles ... to the various kinds of poetry, and especially to the drama”; (3) 189-476, requisites for cultivating poetry, and difficulties. None of these coincides with any of Wickham’s. Plessis[36] more cautiously says: “His principal counsels are three: the importance of composition and of the harmony of the parts, the supremacy of taste, perfection of craftsmanship.” Three again, and again not the same three. Could there be clearer proof that the epistle is not logical, nor even consecutive?
Since it is in fact one of the least consecutive of Horace’s epistles, so expert a composer must have meant it to be taken, as it has been taken, not as a logical progress, but as a collection of sententiæ. These, whatever their particular source or sources,[37] may safely be taken as generally current in Græco-Roman literary circles. Thus they have the more significance; for Horace’s originality is hardly in conception. His contribution to criticism, like Cicero’s, is in finality of phrase. The maxims that have echoed so often down the corridors of criticism have the carrying power of simplicity.
Commonplaces some of these must have been even in Horace’s time; but they have persisted in criticism because he stamped them.
The one that is most clearly a distinctive principle of poetic is the familiar “Semper ad eventum festinat,” etc. (148). The idea of so adjusting the time of the plot as to insure a significant beginning and a continuous and accelerated movement up to an issue is central in Greek drama. That Horace applies it to epic evinces no sharp discrimination of technic. Ut pictura poesis (361) is not, as in Plutarch,[38] a comparison of the technic of poetry with that of painting; it merely insists that a poem, as a picture, be judged according to its kind, according to its specific object. Horace may, indeed, imply a vindication of his own poems beside those of longer reach and more sustained power; or he may be merely repeating his dominant idea of appropriateness; but in either case he is not formulating a principle of poetic. The rule of five acts (189), wherever he got it, is not vital. Though he spends more time on drama than on any other mode, though he uses Aristotle, he does not carry out the principle of dramatic movement.
The conception of characterization is clearly rhetorical,
“It will matter much whether a god speak or a hero, ripe age or the ardor of budding youth, a matron of authority or an anxious nurse, a traveling merchant or a farmer bound to his field, a Colchian or an Assyrian, a Theban or an Argive. Follow tradition, or invent what fits each character. If perchance your poem revives time-honored Achilles, let the active, touchy, stubborn, fierce hero think that laws were not made for him, and rest his claim on arms. Let Medea be cruel and unconquered, Ino tearful, Ixion faithless, Orestes gloomy.” (114-124.)
“Each time of life demands your study of its habits. As natures and years move on, you must assign to each what is appropriate. The boy who is old enough to answer when he is spoken to, and steps off firmly, yearns to play with his mates, takes offense as quickly as he lays it by, and changes from hour to hour. The beardless youth....” (156-178.)
and so on through Horace’s seven ages of man. Thus stripped of their style, these counsels might have come from any classical rhetoric. Nothing was more firmly fixed in the tradition of the schools than characterization according to age, sex, race, occupation. Such characterization by type suffices for prosopopœia in school, for the fathers and sons and pirates of declamatio, for even the spendthrifts and slaves and parasites of Latin comedy; it does not suffice for Œdipus or Neoptolemus, for Medea or Dido. Nor is the difference merely in degree; it is in the distinctively poetic habit of creating. Poetic movement, if Horace indeed glimpses it as distinct from that of rhetoric, he does not fully define; poetic characterization he seems not to regard as distinct at all.
Indeed, most of the Ars Poetica applies equally to ars rhetorica.
If oratores be substituted for poetæ we have the familiar docere, delectare of rhetoric, as we have it in the summary miscuit utile dulci (343); and with Horace the movere that remains hardly suggests a different technic. Si vis me flere, dolendum est (102) will be found in Cicero and Quintilian. The counsel of congruity with which he begins, and to which he reverts again and again, is a preoccupation of ancient rhetoric. No better phrase has been found for the progress of a speech than lucidus ordo (41); and the iunctura (47) to which it is immediately applied is a term of compositio. In the thought of Horace’s circle the distinction between rhetoric and poetic as two movements, two ways of composing, seems to have been inactive. Rather Horace seems to think of composition as generally constant throughout various forms, and as involving mainly the control of conception by congruity and plan, of expression by adaptation and finish. That such ideas were salutary when declamatio had begun to threaten both rhetoric and poetic, and that they are salutary still, no one should deny; but they make no contribution to the distinctive development of poetic.
Grammarians, rhetors, philosophers, men of letters seem thus to converge under the Empire toward a poetic strongly tinged with rhetoric, no longer distinct as a movement having its own technic. The inference, though not conclusive, is suggestive as an hypothesis. Less conclusive, but still suggestive, is the further inference that this habit of critical thought was intensified in the specifically Latin tradition. In sustained emotional movement the Æneid is solitary; and even while it was revered, its poetic seems less influential than that of Ovid. Vergil had turned for his poetic from the newer Greek ways adopted by his countrymen to the tradition interpreted by Aristotle. That older tradition is no longer active in the poetic descending from the Roman Empire through the Holy Roman Empire.
The ancient experience with rhetoric and with poetic is seen in retrospect as typical. The theory of rhetoric as the energizing of knowledge and the humanizing of truth is explicitly the philosophy of Aristotle and implicitly that of Cicero, Tacitus, Quintilian. What the later ancient professors of rhetoric had rather in mind is the training of immediate personal effectiveness; and this theory of rhetoric as the art of the speaker is at once as old as the other and as permanent. Its name is sophistic. Aristotle deprecated it in his first chapter; St. Augustine turned his back on it at the end of the ancient world; but meantime it had been for centuries, and it has been again and again, a popular pedagogy. Further discussion of these traditions, and of such details as the persistence of classical metric after the beat of more popular stress rhythms had become insistent, is properly historical. Historical interpretation of the ancient lore of composition and of its influence in the middle ages is relegated to another volume. The expository task of this one concludes naturally with the completion of the ancient experience.