The Neo-Platonists, at least, might be looked to with some hope. Their spirit at any rate was not negative, and they seem, |The Neo-Platonists.| as a rule, to have been diligent and eager students of literature. But, on the other hand, their tendency towards mysticism, and also the strong colour which their philosophy took from the East, made them especially susceptible to the temptations of allegory, which, as we have seen and shall see, was a Delilah of criticism in almost all its stages in Greece. And when they escaped this they nearly always succumbed to the other temptations of merely grammatical and textual inquiries, or to those of an abstract and theoretical æstheticism, which leaves the actual estimation of literature as literature out of sight.
Thus, from the two great chiefs of the school, Plotinus and Proclus, we have short treatises on the Beautiful—by Proclus |Plotinus.| in the form of a commentary (not complete) on the First Alcibiades of Plato, while the tractate of Plotinus[[71]] attaches itself somewhat less closely to the Hippias. From the very first this latter keeps rigidly and laboriously to the abstract. Beauty, we are told, specially affects the sense of sight, but the ear perceives it in eloquence, poetry, and music. It is also in emotions, in virtue, in science. Is all this derived from one principle or from many? What is it, or what are they? But as there is both essential and accidental beauty, we must first settle what the attractive principle is. A shrewd question, and one which, if followed out in the proper direction, would lead straight to the best criticism of literature; but, unluckily, Plotinus does not so follow it.
He proceeds to examine and expose the difficulties attending the proposition that beauty comes mainly or chiefly from proportion of parts. There must rather, he holds, be in the soul some faculty of perceiving the divine quality, whether manifested in proportion or in anything else. The beauty of bodily substances depends on their affinity with the divine: the beauty of things not recognised by the senses depends on their identity with it. In yet other words, and from a yet other point of view, Beauty is Good, Ugliness is Evil: the attraction of the first pair, the repulsion of the second, easily explains itself.
As for the organ wherewith beauty is perceived, it is the soul: the senses only apprehend shadow-beauties—reflections and suggestions of reality. The faculty must be cultivated; it must be refined by high thinking and plain living, and at last it will see that, though Good and Beauty are one, yet Beauty is in a lower sphere than Good—is, in fact, but an imitation of it.
All this is not merely Platonic—it is itself beautiful and good: it is noble, it is true, it deserves everything that can possibly be said in its favour. But for the actual purposes of literary criticism it is but as a sweet song in a foreign language. It will hardly help us in the very least degree to distinguish Shelley from the most estimable of minor poets, or Thackeray from the least estimable of minor novelists. It does, by way of illustration, touch literary criticism once itself, for it refers to “the admirable allegory” which represents Ulysses as using all his efforts to withdraw himself from the enchantments of Circe and the passion of Calypso, resisting all the enticements of bodily beauty and delight. To the greatest as to the least of Neo-Platonists the allegorical explanation is itself Circe, itself Calypso; and instead of endeavouring to escape from it, he willing meets it willing, and abides contented in those ever-open arms.
This is especially seen in the writings, known or attributed, of the most industrious and variously accomplished, if not the |Porphyry.| most gifted, of the Neo-Platonists, Porphyry. Porphyry has to his credit two documents which, in title and subject, are undoubtedly literary, the Quæstiones Homericæ and the De Antro Nympharum; while some would take away from Plutarch, and give to him, the work on Homer’s Life and Poems, which has undergone the indignity of being spoken of as “miserable” by M. Egger,[[72]] while, on the other hand, Archbishop Trench[[73]] gives the author, whoever he was, what would, if deserved, be the very high praise of having thus early “recognised very distinctly the charm which rhyme has for the ear.” If this were so, I should be inclined to put him together with Philostratus, as having at least stumbled on a great critical truth. But perhaps the words will hardly bear the burden, for the writer, quoting μελισσάων ἀδινάων ... ἐρχομενάων, adds, “These words and their likes add much grace and pleasure to the expression.”[[74]] And unluckily, the remark occurs only in an examination of Homer by figures, where this is taken as representing homoeoteleuton. Now, homoeoteleuton, though it is a sort of poor relation of rhyme, belongs to that branch of the family which more rightly bears the name of Jingle. However this may be, the treatise, as a whole, would scarcely add to the reputation either of Plutarch or of Porphyry.
The two more certain works, on the other hand, belong only to those outskirts of our subject which have been so often characterised. The Questions[[75]] busy themselves almost wholly with the text and the meaning, though it is fair to say that Porphyry is much above the usual scholiast in sense and judgment, and sometimes approaches criticism proper. This approach, however, is generally, if not always, displayed in the same direction as that of Aristotle’s extant Homeric Problems (v. supra, p. [49] sq.) and of many of the remarks made by the Master in the twenty-fifth chapter of the Poetics—the direction, namely, of solving material aporiæ, such as Aristotle’s own comment on ζωρότερον κέραιε, and Porphyry’s[[76]] on the demurrer why Penelope did not send Telemachus for aid to her own parents? The process, in short, illustrates frequently, if not always, that curious swerving from the purely literary question which we so often notice. Almost any magnet is strong enough to draw the commentator away from that question. He will even ask, and gravely answer, the question, Why men, but not gods, are represented as washing their hands before dinner?
The De Antro Nympharum,[[77]] on the other hand, is the principal example, in intermediate times, of that allegorical interpretation or misinterpretation which, unless kept severely in order, is sure to usurp the place of the criticism to which it can at best be ancillary. From no other members of the school, so far as I know, have we anything that comes even as near to criticism as this.
But the Schools have led us far from our immediate context and subject, the literature of the three centuries after Aristotle. |Rhetoricians and Grammarians.| From all this literature it cannot be said that one single text, of undoubted genuineness and substantive importance, preserves for us the critical views of the something like three hundred years which passed between the philosopher’s death in 322 B.C. and the flourishing of Dionysius of Halicarnassus in the third decade before Christ. Two things, however, may be said to be, in a round and general manner, ascertained as having either taken definite form or come into existence during this time; and though both are conditioned very uncomfortably by our lack of texts, they are both of the utmost importance to the history of Criticism, and they can both be spoken of, with caution, indeed, but with some general induction not too far from certainty. The one is the establishment of the teaching of Rhetoric in a form which underwent no very important modification for five or six hundred years, and no absolute revolution for fifteen or sixteen hundred. The other is the birth of Verbal Criticism—of the kind of criticism which long arrogated to itself something like a primary title to the name, and has, in the same or other forms, not yet quite given up its pretensions—under the auspices of Aristarchus and the great Alexandrian school of commentators. The importance assigned to these can be justified from the fact, whether that fact be or be not in itself distasteful, that of such ancient criticism as remains to us, by far the larger part is busied rather in these two directions than in that of Criticism proper. On the one hand, we have the huge body of work, not even so quite completely collected, which fills the seven thousand pages of Walz’s Rhetores Græci, and the less voluminous thesaurus which does duty for Roman effort on the same lines. On the other, we have the body (whether as great or greater its more scattered condition does not permit one to say certainly) of Scholia. And we constantly find—to our grief—that the better writers (of whom, at least in some cases, something survives to us) are apt to stray, in one or other of these directions, from the proper path of that criticism which, though it does not neglect either Rhetorical method or verbal minuteness, yet busies itself mainly with far other questions, asking, “Is this writer or this work, on the whole, good or bad as work or writer?” “What variety of the poetical or prosaic pleasure does he or it give?” “What are the sources, so far as they are traceable, of this pleasure?” “What is the special idiosyncrasy of the author or the book?” “What place do both hold, in relation to other books or authors of the same or other times, in the same or other languages?” It will not be otiose if we attempt to sketch, from the extant examples, what the Rhetorician and the Scholiast, as a rule, actually did, what aim they seem to have set before them, what connection with the best literary criticism they seem to have had.
We need not very greatly disturb ourselves at the fact that, of complete Rhetorical treatises, we have probably nothing between Aristotle and Dionysius, if even that attributed to the latter be genuine; and that modern investigations refuse indorsement to the genuineness of the De Interpretatione attributed to Demetrius Phalereus,[[78]] which would, if it were genuine, be the oldest we have. For, from myriad petty indications, there is no reasonable reason for believing that a genuine Rhetoric by Demetrius would be very different from that which is now attributed to some later Alexandrian writer. Rhetoric, as we have seen, had from the first been hampered by special attributions and limitations; nor (as so often happens in history) did these limitations cease, at any rate to some extent, to work when their causes ceased to exist. The sentry in St James’s Park, who continued to be posted till the other day at the garden-door of a certain house, because (as it was found out long after the reason had been forgotten) some Royal or Ambassadorial personage had been quartered there for a time generations earlier, was a great and admirable allegory—and in wiser days than our own would have remained undisturbed as such. Moreover, though the political importance of Rhetoric decreased, and the assemblies of Greece became mere parish councils; though the law courts went more and more either by fixed codes or personal influence; though philosophy became phluaria; Rhetoric, having once, with unconscious cunning, |Rhetoric early stereotyped.| got Education practically into her hands, retained that powerful engine and all the influence that it confers. It would seem however that, pretty early, a very mischievous process of stereotyping took place. Grammar and Logic, the companions of Rhetoric, were to some extent saved by their having positive things to deal with—the facts of speech and the Laws of Thought. But Rhetoric dealt with fashion, opinion, etiquette: and except when, in the hands of superior persons like Dionysius and Longinus among the Greeks, like Quintilian among the Latins, it shook itself free and became the Literary Criticism that it ought to be, it became a rather parlous thing. It early developed the disease of technical jargon, in that specially dangerous form—recognisable perhaps in times nearer our own than those of Demetrius or even of Hermogenes—the form of giving wantonly new meanings to common words. It elaborated an arbitrary and baneful system of “common form”—of schemes, and types, and conventional schedules, into which, by a minimum of intellectual exertion, the orator or writer could throw what he wanted. On the one hand, it constantly increased and multiplied the Figures; on the other hand, it invented a system of things called staseis—"states of the case"—which attempted to classify and stereotype the matter of the orator’s brief, just as the Figures classified and stereotyped his oratorical means of dealing with it. In other words, and to adopt the terms of literary criticism itself, the stop-watch ruled supreme. In the more technical examples of Rhetorical art, such as those of the far later but characteristic Hermogenes, it is often difficult to find anything which touches literary criticism at all. Only the greater men, as has been said, were ever able to break free; and the sort of scorn with which they speak of their predecessors—Quintilian of the figure-mongers, Longinus of Cæcilius—is invaluable (especially as neither Quintilian nor Longinus seems to have been at all a bad-blooded person) as showing how irksome the traditional Rhetoric was felt to be by men who had in them the sense of literature.