How much less even does one see anything of the kind in the few and great verses of Parmenides, that extraordinary link of union between Homer and Lucretius, the poet of |Parmenides.| the “gates of the ways of night and day,”[[10]] the philosopher whose teaching is of that which “is and cannot but be?”[[11]] the seer whose sight was ever “straining straight at the rays of the sun”?[[12]] We shall see shortly how a more chastened and experienced idealism, combined in all probability with a much wider actual knowledge of literature and art, made the literary criticism of Plato a blend of exquisite rhapsody and childish crotchet. In the much earlier day of Parmenides not even this blend was to be expected. There could hardly by any possibility have been anything but the indulgence in allegorising which is equally dear to poets and philosophers, and perhaps the inception of a fanciful philology. Metaphysics and physics sufficed, with a little creative literature. For criticism there could be no room.
But it will be said, Empedocles? Empedocles who, according to some traditions, was the inventor of Rhetoric—who certainly was a native of the island where Rhetoric arose—the |Empedocles.| chief speaker among these old philosophers? That Empedocles had a good deal of the critical temper may be readily granted. He has little or nothing of the sublime beliefs of Parmenides; his scepticism is much more thorough-going than that which certainly does appear in the philosopher of Colophon. If a man do not take the discouragement of it too much to heart there is, perhaps, no safer and saner frame of mind for the critic than that expressed in the strongest of all the Empedoclean fragments, that which tells us how “Men, wrestling through a little space of life that is no life, whirled off like a vapour by quick fate, flit away, each persuaded but of that with which he has himself come in contact, darting this way and that. But the Whole man boasts to find idly; not to be seen are these things by men, nor heard, nor grasped by their minds. Thou shalt know no more than human counsel has reached.”[[13]] An excellent critical mood, if not pushed to mere inaction and despair: but there is no evidence that it led Empedocles to criticism. Physics and ethics appear to have absorbed him wholly.
That the sophist was the first rhetorician would be allowed by his accusers as well as by his apologists: and though Rhetoric long followed wandering fires before it recognised its true star and became Literary Criticism, yet nobody doubts that we must look to it for what literary criticism we shall find in these times. The Sophists, on the very face of the charge constantly brought against them of attending to words merely, are almost acknowledged to be the inventors of Grammar; while from the other charge that they corrupted youth by teaching them to talk fluently, to make the worse the better reason, and the like, it will equally follow that they practised the deliberate consideration of style. Grammar is only the ancilla of criticism, but a tolerably indispensable one; the consideration of style is at least half of criticism itself. Accordingly the two first persons in whose work (if we had it) we might expect to find a considerable body of literary criticism, if only literary criticism of a scrappy, tentative, and outside kind, are the two great sophists Gorgias and Protagoras, contemporaries, but representatives of almost the two extremities of the little Greek world, of Leontini and Abdera, of Sicily and Thrace.
We have indeed a whole catalogue of work that should have been critical or nothing ascribed by Diogenes Laertius[[14]] to the still greater contemporary and compatriot of Protagoras, Democritus. How happily would the days of Thalaba (supposing Thalaba to be a historian of criticism) go by, if he had that little library of works which Diogenes thus assigns and calls "Of Music"! They are eight in number: “On Rhythm and Harmony,” “On Poetry” (one would compound for this alone), “On the Beauty of Words,”[[15]] “On Well- and Ill-sounding Letters,” “On Homer or Right Style and Glosses,”[[16]] “On the Aoedic Art,” “On Verbs(?),”[[17]] and an Onomasticon. But Democritus lived in the fifth |Democritus.| century before Christ, and Diogenes in the second century after Christ; the historian’s attribution is unsupported, and he has no great character for accuracy; while, worst of all, he himself tells us that there were six Democriti, and that of the other five one was a musician, another an epigrammatist, and a third (most suspiciously) a technical writer on rhetoric. It stands fatally to reason that as all these (save the Chian musician) seem to have been more modern, and as the works mentioned would exactly fall in with the business of the musician and the teacher of rhetoric, they are far more likely, if they ever existed (and Diogenes seems to cite rather the catalogue of a certain Thrasylus than the books themselves), not to have been the work of the Laughing Philosopher. At any rate, even if they were, we are utterly ignorant of their tenor.
That the other great Abderite, Protagoras, the disciple of Democritus himself, wrote on subjects of the kind, there can be no reasonable doubt. It is practically impossible that he should not have done so, though we have not the exact title of any. He is said to have been the first to distinguish the parts of an oration by name, to have made some important advances in technical grammar, and to have lectured on the poets. But here again we have no texts to appeal to, nor any certain fact.
Yet perhaps it is not mere critical whim to doubt whether, if we had these texts also, we should be much further advanced. The titles of those attributed to Democritus, if we could accept |The Sophists—earlier.| the attribution with any confidence, would make such scepticism futile. But we have no titles of critical works attributed to Protagoras; we only know vaguely that he lectured on the poets.[[18]] And from all the stories about him as well as from the famous dialogue which puts the hostile view of his sophistry, we can conclude with tolerable certainty that his interests were mainly ethical, with perhaps a dash of grammar—the two notes, as we have seen and shall see, of all this early Greek criticism. Certainly this was the case with the Sicilian school which traditionally founded Rhetoric—Empedocles himself perhaps, Corax, Tisias, Gorgias, and the pupil of Gorgias, Polus, with more certainty. Here again most of our best evidence is hostile, and therefore to be used with caution; but the hostility does not affect the present point. Socrates or Plato could have put unfavourable views of Sophistic quite as well—indeed, considering Plato’s curious notions of inventive art, perhaps better—in regard to Æsthetics. If ethics and philology, not criticism proper, are the subjects in which their adversaries try to make Protagoras and Gorgias cut a bad figure, we may be perfectly certain that these were the subjects in which they themselves tried to cut a good one. If they are not misrepresented—are not indeed represented at all—in the strict character of the critic, it can only be because they did not, for good or for ill, assume that character. The philosophy of language, the theory of persuasion, the moral character of poetry and oratory, these were the subjects which interested them and their hearers; not the sources of literary beauty, the division of literary kinds, the nature and varieties of style. Wherever ethic and metaphysic are left, the merest philology seems to have been the only alternative—the few phrases attributed to any writers of this period that bear a different complexion being very few, uncertainly authentic, and in almost every case extremely vague.
Nothing else could reasonably be expected when we consider the nature of Rhetoric as we find it exhibited in Aristotle himself, and as it was certainly conceived by its first inventors or nomenclators. It was the Art of Persuasion—the Art of producing a practical effect—almost the Art of Succeeding in Life. We shall see when we come to Aristotle himself that this was as inevitable a priori as it is certain in fact: for the present the certainty of the fact itself may content us. Where the few recorded or imputed utterances of the later sophists do touch on literature they bear (with a certain additional ingenious wire-drawing) the same marks as those of the early philosophers. |The Sophists—later.| They play upon the “honourable deceit” of tragedy;[[19]] they tread harder the old road of allegorical interpretations;[[20]] they dwell on words and their nature;[[21]] or else, overshooting mark as far as elsewhere they fall short of it, they attempt ambitious theories of beauty in general, whether it is “harmony,” utility, sensual pleasure, what not.[[22]] This is—to adopt the useful, if accidental, antithesis of metaphysic—metacritic, not criticism. And we shall not, I think, be rash in assuming that if we had the texts, which we have not, we should find—we are most certainly not rash in saying that in the actual texts we do find—nothing but excursions in the vestibules of Criticism proper, or attempts more or less in vain upon her secret chambers,—no expatiation whatever in her main and open halls.[[23]]
Two only, and those two of the very greatest, of Greek writers before Aristotle—Plato and Aristophanes—furnish us with literary criticism proper, while of these two the first is a critic almost against his will, and the second one merely for the nonce. Yet we may be more than thankful for what they give us, and for the slight reinforcement, as regards the nature of pre-Aristotelian criticism, which we derive from a third and much lesser man—Isocrates.
It could not possibly be but that so great a writer as Plato, with an ethos so philosophical as his, should display a strong |Plato.| critical element. Yet there were in him other elements and tendencies, which repressed and distorted his criticism. To begin with, though he less often lingered in the vestibule than his enemies the sophists, he was by the whole tendency of his philosophy even more prompted than they were to make straight for the adytum, neglecting the main temple. Some form of the Ideal Theory is indeed necessary to the critic: the beauty of literature is hardly accessible, except to one who is more or less a Platonist. No system so well accounts for the ineffable poetic pleasure, the sudden “gustation of God” which poetry gives, as that of an archetypal form of every possible thought and passion, as well as person and thing, to which as the poet approaches closer and closer, so he gives his readers the deeper and truer thrill. But Plato’s unfortunate impatience of anything but the idea pure and simple, led him all wrong in criticism. Instead of welcoming poetry for bringing him nearer to the impossible and unattainable, he chides it for interfering with possession and attainment. In the Phædrus and the Republic especially, but also elsewhere, poetic genius, poetic charm, poetry itself, are described, if not exactly defined, with an accuracy which had never been reached before, and which has never been surpassed since; in the same and other places the theory of Imitation, or, as it might be much better called, Representation, is outlined with singular acuteness and, so far as we know, originality, though it is pushed too far; and remarks on the divisions of literature, at least of poetry, show that a critic of the highest order is but a little way off. But then comes that everlasting ethical and political preoccupation which is at once the real forte and the real foible of the Greek genius, and (with some other peculiarities) succeeds to a great extent in neutralising the philosopher’s critical position as a whole. In the first place, the “imitation” theory (imperfectly grasped owing to causes to be more fully dealt with later) deposes the poet from his proper position, and, combined with will-worship of the Idea, prevents Plato from seeing that the poet’s duty, his privilege, his real reason for existence, is to “dis-realise,” to give us things not as they are but as they are not. In the second, that curious, interesting, and in part most fruitful and valuable Manichæism which Idealism so often comports, makes him gradually |His crotchets.| look more and more down on Art as Art, more and more take imagination and invention as sinful human interferences with “reminiscence,” and the simple acceptance of the Divine. In the third place, the heresy of instruction grows on him, and makes him constantly look, not at the intrinsic value of poetry, its connection with beauty, its importance to the free adult human spirit, but at its position in reference to the young, the private citizen, and so forth. These things sufficiently account for the at first sight almost unintelligible, though exquisitely put, caprices of the Republic and the Laws, which at their worst represent the man of letters and the man of art generally as a dangerous and anti-social nuisance, at the very best admit him as a sort of Board-Schoolmaster, to be rigidly kept in his place, and to be well inspected, coded, furnished with schedules and rules of behaviour, in order that he may not step out of it.
Even here, as always, there is some excuse for the choice cum Platone errare, not merely in the exquisiteness of the literary form which this unworthy view of literature takes, but in the fact that, as usual, Plato could not go wrong without going also right. He had probably seen in Athenian life, and he had certainly anticipated in his instinctive command of human nature, the complementary error and curse of “Art for Art only”—of the doctrine (itself, like his own, partly true, but, like his own also, partly false and mischievous) of the moral irresponsibility of the artist. And looking first at morals and politics with that almost feverish eagerness of the Greek philosopher, which was in great part justified by the subsequent Greek collapse in both, he shot wide of the bow-hand from the purely critical point of aim.