Yet where shall we find earlier in time, where shall we find nobler in tone at any time, a critical position to match with that of the Phædrus and the Ion as wholes, and of |His compensations.| many other passages? That “light and winged and sacred thing the poet” had never had his highest functions so celebrated before, though in the very passage which so celebrates him the antithesis of art and delirium be dangerously over-worked. Alas! it is in the power of all of us to avoid bad art, and it is not in the power of us all to secure good delirium! But this matters little, or at worst not so very much. No one can acknowledge more heartily than Plato—no one has acknowledged more poetically—that the poet is not a mere moralist, a mere imitator, a mere handler of important subjects. And from no one, considering his other views, could the acknowledgment come with greater force and greater authority. In him and in that great enemy of his master, to whom we come next, we find first expressed that real enthusiasm for literature of which the best, the only true, criticism is but a reasoned variety.
If we but possessed that ode or pæan of Tynnichus[[24]] of Chalcis, which, it would appear from the Ion,[[25]] Plato not merely thought the only good thing among its author’s works, but regarded as a masterpiece in itself! If we could but ourselves compare the works of Antimachus with those of the more popular Chœrilus, to which Plato himself is said to have so much preferred them that he sent to Colophon to have a copy made for his own use! Then we might know what his real literary preferences in the way of poetry were, instead of being put off with beautiful, invaluable, but hopelessly vague enthusiasms about poetic beauty in the abstract, and with elaborate polemics against Homer and Hesiod from a point of view which is not the point of view of literary criticism at all. But these things have been grudged us. There are assertions, which we would not only fain believe, but have no difficulty whatever in believing, that the aversion to poets represented in the Republic and the Laws was, if not feigned, hypothetical and, as one may say, professional. But this, though a comfort generally, is of no assistance to us in our present inquiry. The old comparison of the lantern “high, far-shining, empty” recurs depressingly.[[26]]
There have been periods, not the happiest, but also not the least important of her history, when Criticism herself would have absolutely fenced her table against Aristophanes. |Aristophanes.| That a poet, and a dramatic poet, and a dramatic poet who permitted himself the wildest excesses of farce, should be dignified with the name of critic, would have seemed to the straiter sect a monstrous thing. Yet the Old Greek Comedy was emphatically “a criticism of life,” and as such it could not fail to meddle with such an important part of Athenian life as Athenian literature. It might be not uninteresting, but is at best superfluous, if not positively irrelevant here, to point out how important that part was; the fact is certain. And while it is going rather a long way round to connect the rivalries of serious poets, and the alterations which these or other causes brought about in their works, with the history of criticism proper, there is no doubt of such a connection in the case of the work—fortunately in fairly large measure preserved—of Aristophanes, and with that—unfortunately lost, except in fragments—of his fellows.
Nor can there be very much doubt that, though our possessions might be greater in volume, we could hardly have anything better in kind than the work of Aristophanes, and especially the famous play of the Frogs, which was probably the earliest of all the masterpieces of hostile literary criticism, and which remains to this day among the very finest of them. Aristophanes indeed united, both generally and in this particular instance, all the requisites for playing the part to perfection, with one single exception—the possession, namely, of that wide comparative knowledge of other literatures which the Greeks lacked, and which, in this as in other matters, was their most serious deficiency. His own literary faculty was of the most exquisite as well as of the most vigorous kind. His possession, not merely of wit but of humour in the highest degree, saved him from one of the commonest and the greatest dangers of criticism—the danger of dwelling too long on single points, or of giving disproportionate attention to the different points with which he dealt. And though no doubt the making a dead-set at bad or faulty literature, not because it is bad or faulty, but because it happens to be made the vehicle of views in politics, religion, or what not which the critic dislikes, is not theoretically defensible; yet the historian and the practical philosopher must admit that, as a matter of fact, it has given us some of the very best criticism we have.
Nor has it given us anything much better than the Frogs. That the polemic against Euripides, here and elsewhere, is unfairly |The Frogs.| and excessively personal, is not to be denied; and even those who almost wholly agree with it from the literary side may grant that it admits, here and there, of an answer. But still as criticism it is both magnifique and also la guerre. The critic is no desultory snarler, unprovided with theory, and simply snapping at the heels of some one he dislikes. His twenty years' campaign against the author of the Medea, from the Acharnians to the Frogs itself, is thoroughly consistent: it rests upon a reasoned view of art and taste as well as of politics and religion. He disapproves the sceptical purpose, the insidious sophistic, the morbid passion of his victim; but he disapproves quite as strongly the tedious preliminary explanations and interpolated narratives, the “precious” sentiment and style, the tricks and the trivialities. And let it be observed also that Aristophanes, fanatic as he is, and rightly is, on the Æschylean side, is far too good a critic and far too shrewd a man not to allow a pretty full view of the Æschylean defects, as well as to put in the mouth of Euripides himself a very fairly strong defence of his own merits. The famous debate between the two poets, with the accompanying observations of Dionysus and the Chorus, could be thrown, with the least possible difficulty, into the form of a critical causerie which would anticipate by two thousand years and more the very shrewdest work of Dryden, the most thoughtful of Coleridge, the most delicate and ingenious of Arnold and Sainte-Beuve. It is indeed rather remarkable how easily literary criticism lends itself to the dramatic-poetical form, whether the ease be owing to the fact of this early and consummate example of it, or to some other cause. And what is especially noticeable is that, throughout, the censure goes documents in hand. The vague generalities of the Poetics in verse, in which, after Horace and Vida, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries delighted, are here eschewed in favour of direct criticism of actual texts. One might call the Frogs, borrowing the phrase from mediæval French, a review par personnages, and a review of the closest, the most stringent, and the most effective. We can indeed only be surprised that with such an example as this, and others not far inferior, in the same dramatist if not in others, formal criticism in prose should have been so long in making its appearance, and when it appeared, should have shown so much less mastery of method. Beside Aristophanes, the pure critical reviewing of Aristotle himself is vague, is desultory, and begins at the wrong end; even that of Longinus is scrappy and lacking in grasp; while it would be as unfair as it would be unkind to mention, in any comparison of genius with the author of the Frogs, the one master of something like formal critical examination of particular books and authors that Greek preserves for us in Dionysius of Halicarnassus.
It is, however, extremely rash to conclude, as has sometimes been concluded, that because we find so much tendency towards |Other criticism in Comedy.| literary criticism in Aristophanes, we should find a proportionate amount in other Comic writers (at least in those of the Old Comedy, who had perhaps most genius and certainly most parrhesia), if their works existed. The contrary opinion is far more probable. For though we have nothing but fragments, often insignificant in individual bulk, of the writers of the Old Comedy except Aristophanes, and of all the writers of the Middle—nothing but fragments, though sometimes not insufficient in bulk, of Menander, Philemon, and the other writers of the New—yet it must be remembered that these fragments are extremely numerous, and that in a very considerable number of cases, fragments as they are, they give a fair glimpse of context and general tone. I do not hesitate to say, after most careful examination of the collections of Meineke and his successors, that there are not more than one or two faint and doubtful approaches to our subject discoverable there. The passage of Pherecrates[[27]] on which M. Egger chiefly relies to prove his very wide assertion that “il n’y a peut-être pas un seul poète” of the Old Comedy “qui n’ait mêlé la critique littéraire à ses fictions comiques” deals with music, not literature. And it is exceedingly rash to argue from titles, which, as we know from those of the plays remaining to us in their entirety, bore as little necessary relation to contents in ancient as in modern times.
It may be pleaded, of course, that our comic fragments are very mainly preserved to us by grammarians, scholiasts, and lexicographers, who were more likely to find the unusual locutions for which they principally looked in those descriptions of the fishmarket and the stews, of which we have so many, than in literary disquisitions. But in these myriads of fragments, motelike as they often are, it is contrary to probability that we should not find at least a respectable proportion of allusions to any subject which was frequently treated by the comic writers, just as we do find references not merely to fish and the hetæræ, but to philosophy (such references are common enough), to cookery, politics, dress, and all manner of things except literary criticism. Parodies of serious pieces there may have been; but parody, though akin to criticism, is earlier,[[28]] and is rather criticism in the rough. And it is probable, or rather certain, that the example of the greatest of Comic poets was followed by the smaller fry in attacks on Euripides; but these attacks need not have been purely literary at all. The contrast between comedy and tragedy attributed to Antiphanes[[29]] in his Poiesis bears solely on the subject, and the necessity of greater inventiveness on the part of the comic poet.
Once only, so far as I have been able to discover, do we come upon a passage which (if it be genuine, of which there |Simylus (?).| seems to be doubt for more than one reason) has undoubted right to rank. This is the extremely, the almost suspiciously, remarkable passage attributed to the Middle Comic poet, Simylus, by Stobæus, who, be it remembered, can hardly have lived less than eight or nine hundred years later. This advances not only a theory of poetry and poetical criticism, but one of such astonishing completeness that it goes far beyond anything that we find in Aristotle, and is worthy of Longinus himself at his very happiest moment, while it is more complete than anything actually extant in the Περὶ Ὕψους. It runs as follows:[[30]] “Neither is nature without art sufficient to any one for any practical achievement, nor is art which has not nature with it. When both come together there are still needed a choragia,[[31]] love of the task, practice, a lucky occasion, time, a critic able to grasp what is said. If any of these chance to be missing, a man will not come to the goal set before him. Natural gifts, good will, painstaking method—this is what makes wise and good poets. Number of years makes neither, but only makes them old.”
It would be impossible to put the matter better after more than two thousand years of literary accumulation and critical experiment. But it is very hard to believe that it was said in the fourth century before Christ. The wits, indeed, are rather those of that period than of a later; but the experience is that of a careful comparer of more than one literature. In other words, it is the voice of Aristotle speaking with the experience of Quintilian. And it stands, let me repeat, so far as I have been able to discover, absolutely alone in the extant representation of the department of literature to which it is attributed.
To pass from Aristophanes and Plato to Isocrates is to pass from persons of the first rank in literature to a person not of |Isocrates.| the first rank. Yet for our purpose the “old man eloquent” is not to be despised. On the contrary, he even has special and particular value. For the worst—as no doubt also the best—of men like Aristophanes and Plato is, that they are too little of their time and too much for all time. Moreover, in Isocrates we come not merely to a man above the common, though not reaching the summits of wit, but also to something like a “professional”—to some one who, to some extent, supplies the loss of the earlier professionals already mentioned.