Remarks on emphasis, hiatus, cacophonous conjunction of consonants, jingle, plethora of monosyllables, and the like, |Prose rhythm.| follow, and then the great and difficult subject of rhythm is tackled directly. Distinguishing it from metre, correctly if not quite sufficiently, by the necessity that the latter should show a certain order, he proceeds to deal with the proper rhythm of prose in the most difficult, but not least important, passage of his book, rightly insisting in sum on the presence of numbers, which are not to be monotonous. Some of his minor directions are, indeed, dark to us, especially his objection, not merely in prose, but even in verse, to polysyllables at the end. And though we are in full light again when he denounces complete verses in prose (the chief formal fault of Mr Ruskin), he, here also, goes too far for us. The most delicate English ear would not object to the equivalent of Sallust’s “Falso queritur de natura sua,”[[404]] to the commencement of a hexameter in the Timæus,[[405]] or to the muffled Galliambic of Thucydides.[[406]]
But this in the last case is, perhaps, due to the fact that the pæon is hardly an English poetic foot at all, and in the first to the fact that we have nothing corresponding to the strangely broken rhythm of the Latin comic senarius and tetrameter. It is, however, in dealing with the feet of prose that Quintilian, like Aristotle, gets most out of our depth, and for the same reason, that we really do not know enough—if we know anything—about the pronunciation, or intonation, of Greek and Latin. Yet the general drift, if here and there we do not quite “feel our feet,” is unmistakable and unmistakably correct, and the whole is an excellent sample of a kind of criticism most necessary, much neglected in modern times till very recently, and entirely independent of any mere rhetorical technicality. And it is followed—at section 116 onward—by some general remarks of capital importance, laying down among other things that the chief touchstone of composition is the ear, and admitting that in many cases, both of selection of single words and ordonnance of phrases, it is impossible to render an exact reason why one thing is right and another wrong. It is so: and there’s an end on’t! In the peroration of the Book, first the orator receives some special, and then (at 138 onward) the author, in verse as well as in prose, some general, cautions and admonitions as to musical effect.
But all this, good as it is, could be easily spared, if the choice lay between it and the Tenth book. For here, and here only, do |Book X.: Survey of Classical Literature.| we get, from an eminent critic of the first rank, a critical survey of the joint literatures of Greece and Rome, during the main classical course of both. Interesting as this would be from any one of tolerable ability, seeing that it is precisely what we lack—doubly interesting as it is from a man of Quintilian’s learning, long practice in teaching, and interest in the subject—it becomes trebly so from certain characteristics of his which have been more than once glanced at, and which make him an almost perfect, certainly a typical, exponent in rational form of what may be regarded as the standard orthodoxy—the textus receptus of the critical creed—of the ancients. Aristotle came too early to give this opinion with full knowledge, and would, perhaps, always have been disinclined to give it in the same way. Longinus, we feel, is an exception of genius. But what Quintilian says the enormous majority of cultivated Greeks and Romans (allowing in the former case for particularist and parochial contempt of the latter) are likely to have thought. He prefaces the survey by an interesting, and perhaps not really equivocal, explanation of the reasons for its insertion. I say “perhaps not really equivocal,” because Quintilian, a very genuine person, would not have hesitated to give it the form of an apology if he had meant it apologetically. The orator on his probation must, he says, study and imitate for himself all the best authors, not merely the orators themselves, but, as no less an authority than Theophrastus recommended, poets, and historians, and philosophers. But this must be done with care and judgment; for the methods of history are not the same as those of oratory, and it is no use addressing one kind of juryman with the pregnant terseness of Sallust, or another kind with the lactea ubertas of Livy, while the philosophers require the same caution, put in a different way. And some remarks of his on at least the more celebrated authors will be expected by his friends—to which friends we owe more thanks than is always the case.
He “begins with Zeus,” that is to say, Homer, and delivers a very neat set criticism on him from that oratorical point of view which was so common in regard to both Homer and Virgil.
“For he, as,” in his own words, "the violence of rivers and the courses of the springs take their beginning from the ocean, |Greek: Homer and other Epic poets.| has given an example and a starting-point to all parts of eloquence. Him none has excelled, for great things in sublimity as for small ones in propriety of speech. At once abundant and compressed, agreeable and serious, wonderful now in volume, now in terseness, is he; and not only in poetical, but also in oratorical, virtue most eminent. For, not to say anything of his panegyrics, his hortatives, his consolations, do not the Ninth Book, with the embassy sent to Achilles, and the quarrel between the generals in the First, and the sentences expressed in the Second, set forth every device of advocacy and debate?" &c., &c.
Others he treats more briefly. Hesiod is in the middle style only, but easy and sententious in that. Antimachus[[407]] (one of our losses) is second to Homer, has force, energy, originality, but is deficient in attractiveness and in ordonnance. Panyasis (another) excels Hesiod in subject and Antimachus in treatment. Apollonius has an evenly sustained mediocrity. Aratus is “equal to the work to which he thought himself equal”—an ingeniously double-edged compliment. Theocritus (one must quote the whole of this, and waive the discussion of it) “is admirable in his peculiar style, but his rustic and pastoral muse shrinks not only from appearing in the forum, but even from approaching the city.” And then Pisander, Nicander, Euphorion, Tyrtæus, Callimachus, Philetas are slid over rapidly, while, though Aristarchus had sanctioned three iambographi, Simonides and Hipponax are passed in silence, Archilochus only receiving very high praise for vigour and all similar qualities.
So, too, of the nine canonical lyrists, Bacchylides, Ibycus, Anacreon, Alcman, and even Sappho, are overlooked. Pindar |The Lyrists.| has a brilliant testimonial, to which, however, the authority of Horace seems to be thought necessary as an indorsement. Stesichorus is “equal to a great subject, strong, dignified, but exuberant.” Alcæus is magnificent, but descends to sportive and amorous subjects (ecce idola scholæ!); and Simonides, though of no very lofty genius, is correct and pleasing.
The Old Comedy, with the usual three selected, but not characterised separately, is better adapted for the orator’s use |Drama.| than anything save Homer: it is the cream of Attic; it is graceful, elegant (and one may wonder for a moment, but it is a useful warning as to the connotation of the word), “sublime.” The judgment of the three tragedians is scarcely worthy of Quintilian. He speaks of Æschylus very much as a Frenchman, not in the times of utter ignorance, used to speak of Shakespeare. He is half silent, half enigmatic, on Sophocles; but he gives Euripides obviously heartfelt praise, and thinks him the most serviceable study of all for the orator. To which observations Aristophanes would pretty certainly have retorted (clothing the retort in language perhaps sadly lacking in decorum) that it was not very wonderful that the sophist should be useful to the rhetorician.
Very high, too, is the praise of Menander. Indeed, as we have seen before, Menander held a much higher position with the ancients than, if we had more than fragments of him, he would, from those fragments, be likely to hold with the moderns. He is praised (almost in the very words) for his “criticism of life,”[[408]] and a tradition is mentioned that he was an orator as well as a poet. But whether this be the case or not, passages in his plays are cited as possessing all the charms of eloquence, and he is especially extolled for that presentation of character—ethopœia—which the ancients exacted from the orator even more than from the poet. Philemon is the other late comic mentioned, and though the taste of the age that preferred him is denounced as bad, he is admitted as a fair second.
Herodotus and Thucydides are of course put in front of the historians, and are contrasted fairly, though not with a great |The Historians.| deal of penetration. Theopompus, Philistus, Ephorus, Clitarchus, and Timagenes are slightly mentioned: but Xenophon, somewhat to our surprise, is put off to the philosophers. Yet this is of itself a useful datum for our inquiry, when we think how low we should put Xenophon’s contributions to philosophy (as distinguished of course from philosophical biography), how much higher even the rather dry annals of the Hellenics, how much higher still the agreeable miscellanies, and the pleasant didactic romance of the Cyropædia, and how far highest of all, the Anabasis, with its vivid realisation of action and scenery, and the narrative power which gives a romantic interest to the rather undeserved escape of a gang of mercenary filibusters.