The next division is one of the very apices of the whole. It deals with that subject of the rhythm of prose which, though |Prose rhythm.| (as we see from Quintilian as well as from Aristotle) never neglected by the ancients, is one of the most difficult parts of their critical Rhetoric for us to understand, and (perhaps for that reason) has been, till the last hundred years or so, strangely neglected in the criticism of modern languages.
We see from its very opening words that the great distinctions between verse and prose literature on the one hand, and between literary and non-literary composition on the other, had been already hit upon. Prose style, says he, must be neither emmetron nor arrhythmon—that is to say, it must not have metre nor lack rhythm. But he does not very accurately define the difference between these things; and it cannot be said that any of his commentators and successors have supplied this defect, though it is easy enough to do so.[[48]] He, however, allows feet if not metre in prose, and proceeds to inquire what feet will do, making observations on the subject which are in the three degrees of obscurity to all who are not fond of guessing. Dactylic, iambic, and trochaic rhythms are dismissed for various reasons, rather bad than good—it not having apparently struck the critic that all these arrange themselves too easily, certainly, and definitely into metre. He pitches finally on the pæan, a foot which, though admissible in those Greek choric measures which are a sort of compromise between prose and poetry, at once reveals its suitableness for prose in modern languages by the fact that it is unsuitable for modern verse. The pæan or pæon is a tetrasyllabic foot, consisting of three short syllables and a long one, of which in strictness there may be four varieties, the long syllable being admissible in any of the four places. But Aristotle only admits two, with the long syllable in the first and fourth place respectively. And here, most tantalisingly, he breaks off.
The distinction between loose and periodic style,[[49]] which the modern composition-books have run so tiresomely to death, |Loose and periodic style, &c.| and which is really a very unimportant technical detail, follows; and then we return to those Delilahs of the ancient rhetorician, Figures—Metaphor once more, Antithesis, Personification, Hyperbole, &c. Yet even this is more to our purpose than the demonstration that follows, showing that each kind of Rhetoric, judicial, deliberative, and declamatory, should have its particular style. And with this the handling of lexis proper closes, the rather brief remainder of the book being devoted partly to taxis (ordonnance, as Dryden would say), but with special reference to the needs of the pleader, and partly to a fresh handling of the old questions of enthymeme, the dispositions of the audience, and the like.
It will be seen from this that the Rhetoric, like the Poetics, is invaluable to the historian of literary criticism, but that, in |General effect of the Rhetoric.| this case as in that, literary criticism was only partly the object in the writer’s eye, while even so far as he had it before him, his views were very largely limited, and were even in some cases distorted, coloured, and positively spoilt by certain accidents of place, time, and circumstance. As our poetical criticism was injuriously affected by the non-existence of the novelist, so our prose criticism is injuriously affected by the omnipresence of the orator. As our Poetics were adulterated with ethic and other things, so our Rhetoric is warped by poetical, jurisprudential, and other preoccupations. In the first, poetry itself is not indeed itself a secondary consideration, but divers secondary considerations ride it, like a company of old men of the sea. In the second, prose as prose is merely and avowedly a secondary consideration: it is always in the main, and sometimes wholly, a mere necessary instrument of divers practical purposes.
To supplement these two general treatises, we could wish for more particular applications, but we have not got them. We have indeed some vestiges of work of the kind which are not altogether encouraging. M. Egger[[50]] has endeavoured to extract some references to literary criticism from the general Problems; but these deal at best with the remotest fringes of the topic—why melancholy is so often apparent in persons of genius, and the like,—questions indeed of the very first interest, but not of the kind which we are here pursuing. In the extant fragments, however, which belong or may have belonged to the lost Homeric Problems[[51]] (or aporems or zetems) |The Homeric Problems.| we have metal more attractive. It may be said that the scholiasts, through whom we have most of these excerpts, were likely to select them according to the principles which, as we shall see,[[52]] governed themselves; but they do not all come through scholiasts, and yet the complexion of all is more or less uniform. It is that “ethical-dramatic” complexion, as we may call it, which we have noticed and shall notice as being the Greek critical “colour”—sometimes to the utter exclusion, and almost always to the effacement, of actual criticism. “Why did Agamemnon try experiments on the Greeks? Why did Odysseus take his coat off? Why is Menelaus represented as having no female companion? Why [curial] instance of that commentatorial lues which infects the greatest commentators as the least, the most ancient as the most modern] is Lampetie represented as carrying to the Sun the news of the slaughter of his oxen, when the Sun sees everything? Why did the poet make Paris a wretch who was not only beaten in duel, who not only ran away, but who was specially excited by love immediately afterwards?”
These are mainly moral questions; but the great philosopher appears to have carried his solicitude so far as to meddle with military matters. “Why [somebody had asked], in Il. iv. 67-69, are the cavalry represented as marshalled in front, the cowards in the middle, and the best infantry behind?” If Aristotle had heard of the “cavalry screen” he would no doubt have used this lusis: as it is, it appears, he suggested that prota means not “in front” but “on the wings.” And there is all the quality which endeared Aristotle to the idler side (which was not the only side by any means) of Scholasticism, in his condescension to the aporia—"If the gods drank nothing but nectar, why is Calypso spoken of as ‘mixing’ for Hermes? For any ‘mixture,’ even with water, is something different from nectar; and, therefore, as the gods do not drink their nectar neat, they do not drink that only." Quoth the great master (in reply, or at least “Schol. T.” says so), “The word does not only mean to ‘mix,’ but also simply to ‘pour,’ and this is what Calypso did.” But why should Calypso herself and Circe and Ino, alone of goddesses, have the epithet αὐδήεσσα? Even he could not answer that, and was driven ignominiously to suggest a change of reading.
It is not, I hope, necessary to say that I have no intention of raising an inept laugh at the Great One. As has been already said, the attitude of the Greeks to Homer was the attitude of a seventeenth-century Puritan to the English Scriptures. Every word, almost every letter, had its reason and its meaning—often many more than one—which had to be reverently sought out. The analogy, however, itself establishes and makes clear my point, which is to show that an attitude of this kind practically excludes pure literary criticism on the one hand, and is exceedingly unlikely on the other to be taken up by any one who is strongly bent towards such criticism. We know how Milton, who must have had an exquisite critical gusto originally, and who never wholly lost it, was by the cultivation of such an attitude so stunted and checked in his taste that he could throw the reading of Shakespeare in his dead king’s face,[[53]] dismiss the delightful work (hardly inferior to the best of his own) of the Cavalier poets as “vulgar amorism” and “trencher fury,” and even when he was not thinking of matter, sink all critical perspective in his blind craze against rhyme itself. The Homer-worship of the Greeks on the one hand, and their philosophical preoccupations on the other, had almost unavoidably a similar effect, though not so bad a one.
Yet the value of the two main documents is so inestimable, that if the incompleteness and the shortcomings of the Poetics, the unavoidable irrelevance of much of the Rhetoric, |Value of the two main treatises.| were far greater than they are, our gratitude for both would still be hard to exaggerate. We have here not merely the first constituting documents, the earliest charters at once and discussions of European criticism, but we have them from the hand of a master whose very weaknesses make him, as compared with some other masters, specially fit for the office of critic. For the magnificent but almost always a priori and unpractical metaphysics of Plato, for the shrewd but personal and rather unfair polemic of Aristophanes, we have a patient examination of a subject in itself so rich and varied, that one regrets having to point out that its riches and its variety are not quite exhaustive. Nowhere, perhaps, does Aristotle sketch the actual Wesen of the man of letters with the dæmonic completeness of the author of the extraordinary passage attributed to Simylus and quoted formerly; but that might be, and probably is, a mere flash. His own conclusions, only sometimes inadequate, very seldom positively erroneous, exhibit the true modes of criticism as perhaps they have never been exhibited since—with an equal combination of patience and of power. It is impossible for Aristotle to do harm, unless his principles are not merely taken too literally, but augmented and falsified, as was done by the “classical” criticism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is impossible for any one who undertakes the office of a critic to omit the study of him without very great harm. Let us first review briefly what seem to be the shortcomings, accidental or essential, of his performance, and then set down what its better parts establish for us as the state of Literary Criticism at the close of the first and greatest age of Greek literature, at the close of the first age of the literature of Europe as a whole.
Partly by mere induction from actual Greek practice, and partly no doubt also as a genuine result of Greek |Defects and drawbacks in the Poetics.| taste and literary philosophy, we find the importance and the character of certain kinds of literature treated with some extravagance. The importance of Tragedy (as we are enabled to see clearly by the invaluable though rather unfair aid of the historic estimate) is altogether exaggerated. It never, as a matter of fact, has held anything like the position here assigned to it, save twice in two thousand years and more, on each occasion for a generation or two only. And there is no reason, in the order and logic of thought, why it should hold such a position. It is again clearly evident (though we owe the clearness again not to our own wits, but to time and chance) that part of this importance is attained by an illegitimate sacrifice, or an accidental ignoring, of the just claims of other branches of literature—by making lyric a mere playhouse handmaid, by converting the stage into a pulpit, and by blocking out, not merely the existence, but the very possibility, of the prose novel. We can see further that the glorious achievements of the three great tragedians whom we in part possess, and of others, probably not much inferior, whom we have almost wholly lost, seduced their critic into taking what he found in them too hastily for what ought to be found in all—induced him (aided no doubt by the Greek taste generally) to exalt Plot, to depress Character, to put quite undue stress on artificial Unity. Lastly (to keep to the Poetics), we perceive a most unfortunate, though by no means inexplicable, tendency to give insufficient weight to Metre, and a decided inclination, on the one hand not to give quite enough importance to Diction, and on the other to lay down arbitrary rules about it.
Something of the same general tendency manifests itself in the Rhetoric, reinforced by the necessary results of the Persuasion-theory, |And in the Rhetoric.| and the inordinate importance given to Oratory. With every possible allowance for the undoubtedly true plea that Aristotle had no intention of writing a treatise on Prose Composition generally, but only one on such Prose Composition as suited the purposes of the Orator, we can see that if he had written Prosaics, to match the Poetics, the same limitations would have appeared. He cannot free himself from the notion that there is, after all, something derogatory in paying great attention to style: and it is clear that he does not wish to consider a piece of prose as a work of art destined, first of all, if not finally, to fulfil its own laws on the one hand, and to give pleasure on the other. The salutary but easily exaggerated difference between prose and poetic style is actually exaggerated here. Above all, the germ of mischief, if not exactly the mischief itself, is clearly discernible in his account of the Figures of Speech. It was the drawback, not merely (as is sometimes said unjustly) of the Platonic philosophy only, but of all Greek philosophy, to “multiply entities”—to take for granted that because names are given to things, things must necessarily exist behind names. And so, instead of regarding these Figures as merely rather loose, sometimes not inconvenient, but in reality often superfluous, tickets for certain literary devices and characteristics, there grew up, if not in Aristotle himself, at any rate in his followers, a tendency to regard the Figures (which were soon enormously multiplied) as drugs or simples, existing independently, acting automatically, and to be “thrown in,” as the physician exhibits his pharmacopœia, to produce this or that effect.