In nothing, perhaps, is this tendency of ancient criticism better shown than in its attitude to the question of Faultlessness. |“Faultlessness.”| Of course, on this question there were two parties, with many subdivisions in each. There were the extreme classics of that classic time, the wooden persons of whom Martial tells us, for whom it was enough if a thing was not “correct,” to whom a fault was a fault—indelible, incompensable, to be judged off-hand and Draconically. And at the other side there were the sensible persons, like Quintilian, like Pliny, like Martial himself (not to mention Longinus, whom some would have to be their contemporary), who contended that faults might be made up by beauties, who sneered at mere “faultlessness.” But no one, not Longinus himself, seems to have taken up the position which the boldest and most consistent (it would be question-begging to say the best) modern critics take, that the whole calculus is wrong—that this notion of “faults” made up by “beauties,” of a balance-sheet, debtor and creditor, with the result struck one way or the other, is wholly a misconception. Two, I suppose, of the most representative passages in English poetry touching this subject are Lear’s apostrophe to the elements, and Milton’s episode of Sin and Death. The extreme stop-watch and foot-rule critics of the first century, like those of the eighteenth, and, perhaps, some (though they are not a prevailing party) even at the present day would call these undoubted faults, both of them sinning against the law or conception of measure in language, and the second offending still more gravely against that or those of decency, propriety, the becoming, in imagery, subject, language. The defenders, or those who might have been the defenders, of Shakespeare and Milton, from the other point of view, would admit in varying degrees that the things were faulty; but would urge the pathos of the first, the gloomy magnificence of the second, the force and power and grandeur of both, as redeeming them—in a degree and to an extent again varying with the individual critic.
Now, a thoroughgoing “Romantic” and comparative critic of the modern type, while he would, of course, scout the first party, would be loath to adopt either the method or the exact conclusions of the second. “Let us clear our minds of cant,” he would say. “These things are not ‘faults’ at all. They do not leave the court pardoned on consideration of the previous or subsequent good behaviour of the culprit, but simply because there is no stain on his or their character. There is no need to plead extenuating circumstances: we stand for acquittal sans phrase. These things might be faults elsewhere, in other poems: they are not so here. They are the absolutely right things in the right place, producing the right effect, driven home by the right power to the right mark. Shakespeare and Milton have faults—the somewhat excessive tendency of the first to play on words out of season as well as in, and the deplorable propensity of the second to joke when joking was absolutely impossible to him. But these are not of the character of the Longinian or Quintilianian ‘fault’ at all. They do not endear the poets; they make them less good; we wish they were faultless in this sense. Your ‘faultlessness’ simply means that the man has that most hopeless of all faults—mediocrity: and your ‘fault’ is simply derived from the existence in your mind of a more or less complicated set of rules which have no real existence. Nay,” he might proceed, “the extremest classical men are sounder in a way than you are. They are right in thinking that a fault is a fault, and can never be ‘redeemed,’ much less purged, by a beauty. They are only wrong in not knowing what beauties or what faults really are.”
Now, I do not say whether the criticism of antiquity was right or wrong in not taking this view. But I think there is absolutely no evidence that it was ever taken at this time.
In some other agreements and differences we find ourselves more at home. The everlasting questions of archaic or modern |Ornate or plain style.| language, of conceited or direct thought, of ornate or plain style, occupied the critics of the end of the first and the beginning of the second century, just as they have occupied those of more recent pasts, are occupying those of the present, and will occupy those of the future. As has been indicated in detail, there was not here quite the critical unanimity which some periods have shown on these and similar questions. Among the general there was something like an agreement; it seems undeniable that the popular taste of Roman audiences at recitations ran towards elaborate and slightly archaic phraseology, to Greek literary subjects, and (both in verse-epics and tragedies and in prose declamations) to topsy-turvy conceit. This was evidently frequent in verse, though time has carried away most traces of it; and in prose it is not entirely alien from the magnificent phrase-making of Tacitus, it shows itself amply in the rhetoric of Seneca the son, as in the earlier rhetorical examples of Seneca the father, is almost openly defended by Pliny, and seems to receive a certain amount of “colour” (as the rhetoricians themselves would have said) even from some passages of Quintilian. It is very noteworthy that all these prose-writers incline more or less to the artificial side, while the verse-satirists argue and sally for terseness, elegance, concinnity. And the cause may not improbably be sought in those very declamations of which mention has been so often made. We have no enormous stock of them, which is not to be regretted; but in the surviving examples we have material which is welcome in its way, and which amply proves what has been said.[[376]]
[303]. I use the smaller edition of Bücheler, Berlin, 1862.
[304]. There is a theory that the verses put in the mouth of Eumolpus are parodies of Lucan and Seneca.
[305]. Or “good taste is as impossible as good smell to those,” &c. I have not hit on any satisfactory English equivalents for sapere (with its double sense) and bene olere. What is meant, of course, is that the power of distinguishing is lost in the vicious atmosphere.
[306]. Ludibria quædam excitando.
[307]. Umbraticus doctor, which Ben Jonson Englishes directly as “umbratical doctors” in the Discoveries, and De Quincey rather hardily converts to a compliment in his Essay on Rhetoric.