The Scholiast, on the other hand, if of a less traceable creation, is of almost equally old lineage, and he may conveniently |Grammatical and Scholiastic criticism.| be dealt with, in such detail and variety as he requires, before the more formidable bulk of the School Rhetoricians occupies us. We have already seen, in glimpses, that the restless curiosity of the Greeks took very early to purely philological inquiry, to the separation and naming of parts of speech, to the codification of grammar. And it was impossible that a people furnished with such an admirable language and so early developing accomplishment, both in music and poetry, should not, at a stage proportionately much earlier than in other cases, discover and prosecute inquiries as to Prosody. To this day, Greek grammar is, to some tastes at any rate, the only grammar which is not too arbitrary or too jejune to excite any interest. The wonderful symmetry of Greek accidence, the mazy but by no means unplanned intricacy of Greek syntax, have had power to fascinate schoolboys who, both at that age and later, were merely bored by the arbitrary niceties of Latin, and refused to accept the attempts that have been made to impose an appearance of system on the antinomianism and the compromises of English. As for Greek metre, though the subject has not the historic interest—the interest of great yet not inexplicable changes—which belongs to the prosody of the two other languages just brought into comparison, it is capable of much more exact handling. And, in particular, the peculiar structure of Greek choric verse, that hitherto unparalleled blend which unites much of the liberty of prose with the ordered charm of poetry, gave practically endless occupation to intellects which would soon have been satiated with the comparative monotony of Latin, and which might have recoiled before the apparent lawlessness of English.
It is not very certain at what precise time these two studies (or, if we take prosody to be a part of grammar, this joint-study) began to occupy considerable numbers of professional students. But it must have been a tolerably early one, and by degrees the grammarian in his pure function, the scholiast in his applied one, became recognised personages.
The profession, so to speak, may be said (according to the common tradition, but with sufficient justice) to have been formally constituted in the third and second centuries |The Pergamene and Alexandrian Schools.| before Christ, under the patronage of the successors of Alexander at the courts of Pergamus and Alexandria. To these schools belong the famous names of Zenodotus (the earliest, and belonging partly to the third century), of Crates of Mallos, and, above all, of Aristarchus. It is, perhaps, only at first sight surprising that, famous as the names are, they are for the most part names only. Not one single work, nor even any substantial passage of a work, by any of the three masters just mentioned, or by any of their contemporaries or near pupils, has come down to us, save in the case of one pupil of Zenodotus, more famous even than his master, the grammarian Aristophanes. Criticism indeed, it has been said, has, of all literature that is really literature, the most precarious existence. Still, we know a good deal about them from citations, allusions, and discussions in later writers, while of Aristophanes of Byzantium we have a fairly considerable collection of fragments.
The disappearance of texts, always lamentable, if not actually irremediable, is here more to be regretted than anywhere, because there is fair reason for believing that, at any rate, some of these grammarians were critics in the full and proper sense of the term. By far the greater part of their labours appears to have been directed to Homer, and there is no reason to contradict the general, the received, opinion that while the Pisistratean redaction is not quite certain in fact, and almost entirely unknown in nature, while it is certain that even Aristotle had before him a text differing remarkably from our own, the Alexandrian grammarians practically produced that which we have. It is accordingly from this time that the famous and formidable craft—science it would no doubt call itself—of textual criticism may be said to date; and from our information, second-hand as it is, we are enabled to recognise some types of textual critics which are not, and are never likely to be, obsolete. In Aristophanes, the spelling reformer, the practical originator of accents, it is not rash to see the great exemplar of the critic |Their Four Masters.| of the purely philological kind, who busies himself with those literary matters which are most remote from literature proper, though no doubt he is a very valuable person when he is kept in his proper place. Zenodotus stands in the same relation to the lexicographical critic, and seems also to have been the father of all those who by “a critical text” mean a text arranged at their own discretion, passages being expunged, transposed, or corrected, not in accordance with any testimony as to what the author did write, but according to the critic’s idea of what he ought to have written—in other words, what the critic himself would have liked him to write, or would, if he could, have written in his place. Aristarchus appears to have deserved the primacy generally accorded to him by being more wisely conservative than Zenodotus, and less tempted to stick in the letter than the lesser Aristophanes; as well as by a general display, in his more literary remarks, of critical faculty greater than was possessed by either, and infinitely greater than that of the average scholiast. While the still earlier, and at least equally famous or notorious, name of Zoilus is of itself sufficient to show that the critic who is merely or mainly a snarler can at least boast that he is of an ancient house.
It would be rash to deny, and even unjust to doubt, that some of these famous critics, as well as others less known or not known at all, practised criticism in its best and widest sense, regulating texts by a sanely conservative acuteness, interpreting meanings and purpose with adaptable but not too fantastic compliance, annotating matter with intelligent erudition, and even achieving, as best they could, the explanation of the nature and success of their author’s literary appeal, and the placing of his work in the general map of literary history. Nay, there were actually, though our remains of them are but tantalising, literary historians of tolerably old date. But it is possibly neither presumptuous nor ungenerous to suspect that, if we had the whole works of Aristarchus before us, we should find in him (allowing for his grammatical tendency) at least as much shortcoming as we found, probably far more than we found, in Aristotle from the rhetorical side. For the old disability—the absence of comparison, the possession |The Scholiasts on Aristophanes.| of not even a second literature for purposes of contrast—must have weighed upon Aristarchus just as it weighed upon Aristotle. And it is at any rate not uncharitable, it is merely a plain recognition of actual fact, to say that on the great mass of Greek grammatical criticism, as it comes down to us in the so-called scholiasts, the curse of the letter does undoubtedly rest. Nothing, for instance, is more curious than to read, from the critical point of view, the Scholia on Aristophanes,[[79]] some of which are undoubtedly among the oldest that we have on any author, except Homer. The commentators are irreproachable in noting the slightest grammatical peculiarity; they map out the metres with religious care. Difficulties of mere meaning they tackle with the same imperturbable seriousness, the same grave and chaste attention to duty, whether the crux is a recondite “excursion into the blue,” or a mystery of the kitchen and the fishmarket, or a piece of legal technicality. They give careful and useful abstracts and arguments, dates now and then, sometimes not contemptible scraps of literary history. But of literary criticism proper, of appreciation of Aristophanes' ever fresh wit, of his astonishing intellectual alertness, of his wide knowledge, of his occasional bursts of magnificent poetry, there is not one word. You may spend hours, days, weeks almost over the huge collection; but the result will only be that, for this special purpose, page after page will be drawn blank.
But it may be said, “The scholia on Aristophanes are confessedly[[80]] poor in literary annotation. Why do you take them |On Sophocles.| as an example? Why not take in preference, or give in addition, one at least of those collections of scholia which the same authorities[[81]] accept as richer in the matter?” Very well: let us take those on Sophocles,[[82]] the admittedly richest of all. It will—or certainly may—seem at the opening as if a more promising “pocket” had been struck, for the first annotation on the Ajax is busy with the arrangement and contents of the prologue, and its relation to what follows; and there is a good deal of similar matter throughout the commentary on this play at least. But when we come to read it in detail we find that its criticism is, at its widest departure from the mere explanatory supellex of the ordinary scholiast, almost purely theatrical. For instance, here is the note on 66: “The introduction of Ajax is persuasive; for thus the pathos of the tragedy becomes greater, the spectators perceiving him now out of his mind, and a little later in his senses.”
And again on 112: “He speaks as in other respects yielding to the goddess but in this opposing her, and the poet hence shows his disposition to be haughty (since the spectators are much disposed in favour of Ajax by his misfortunes, and all but wroth with the poet), that Ajax may seem to suffer justly from his want of submission to the divinity.”
We might quote the long and curious note on 134 as to the composition of the chorus from Salaminians; the criticism of the expostulation of the said chorus with the conduct of the Greeks to Ajax, [158]; the still odder note on 201, as of one expounding to a very little school-child how Tecmessa and the Chorus exchange information; the formal explanation, on 342, why Teucer is introduced later than Tecmessa, and of the hero’s language to his captive mistress; the rationale, 770, of the arrival of the messenger; the description of the scene at 815. But the mere enumeration of such things as these should, without the expenditure of more space, be sufficient to show what the character of this annotation is. It is not so very different in places from the elaborate stage directions with which, for the last century, some playwrights, especially German and Scandinavian, have been wont to assist the imagination of their readers or hearers, or their own dramatic incapacity; and even when it goes beyond this, it hardly ever goes further than the explanation and justification of the action.
The same is, I think, almost without exception the character of the relatively considerable number of observations of a critical kind which I have noted on other plays. Sometimes they are actual directions to the actor—who is told on Electra 823 that he “ought, at the moment of uttering the cry, to look up to heaven, and raise his hands”—sometimes, as on Œdipus Tyrannus 141, the note is made that “this will stir the theatre.” But always, I think,—certainly in the vast majority of cases,—the critic abstains, with a rigidity which can only come from deliberate purpose (and this is unlikely), or from unconsciousness that the thing is likely to be required of him, from any comments on the beauty or appropriateness of the verse, on the idiosyncrasy of the phrase or its agreement with others, on the Sophoclean characteristics of the poetry, or even (except from the pure stage point of view) on the evolution of the characters. He has evidently learnt his Aristotle, and looks at the action first: he has not learnt him with a sufficiently independent intelligence to remember that even Aristotle does not look at the action only.
But the case becomes strongest when we come to what should be the stronghold of literary criticism in this quarter—the |On Homer.| Scholia[[83]] on Homer himself. Here we have the thrice—nay, thirty times—decocted essence of the critical study of generations, centuries, almost millennia (certainly more than one millennium), of study of the writer who entered into Greek life, Greek thought, Greek education, as no book, save the English Bible, has ever entered into the life, the thought, the education, of any other country. We have it in ample bulk, of all ages, presented in that special fashion of comment on comment, of annotated annotation, which, whatever may be its merits or whatever may be its drawbacks, is at any rate suited to draw out examination of the common subject from almost every point of view.