We might at very little expense of trouble, if at much of space, go through the whole of the little treatise and show how the hairy-hearted one of Tarsus deals in the same way with “Uses,”[[131]] Maxims, Refutation and Confirmation, Commonplace, Encomium, Comparison, Character-drawing,[[132]] Ecphrasis,[[133]] Thesis,[[134]] and Introduction. But the examples given will suffice. Each chapter consists of a definition, a division, sometimes very finely drawn, of kinds, examples, and generally a scrap of advice as to how, when, and where to introduce them.
The good and the evil of this kind of thing, as well as its special bearings on literary criticism, are not difficult to discern. |Remarks on them.| It necessitates the narrowest and most accurate investigation of the kinds and characteristics of literature, of literary means, of “composition,” in the wide and the narrow sense. It confers on apt students, besides the mere ability to play the special game of artificial oratory, a great acuteness of analysis. It entirely avoids, no doubt, the danger which is charged constantly, and sometimes not without a certain justice, on the more æsthetic kind of literary study and literary criticism—the danger of desultory chatter. It has, in short, though to a less degree, the virtues of Formal Logic. And if the subject of Education, and fresh nostrums in it, were not a weariness to all intelligent mankind, one might say that not a few things in our present curricula might with advantage be excluded to make room for a course (with some due alterations) of Rhetoric according to Hermogenes. But, at the same time, its own shortcomings and its own dangers are equally obvious. The greatest of them—indeed one which in a manner swallows up and contains within itself all the others—is the almost irresistible temptation to regard literature as something according to scheme and schedule, something that the pocket ivory rule of the architect, and his neatly latticed paper, and a short handbook like this before us, will enable you to despatch and dispose of. Acute as are the divisions and definitions, they are dead things; and nothing that imitates and follows them can be really alive.
Aphthonius adopts the same divisions of Progymnasmata, save that he makes them fourteen instead of twelve, by |Aphthonius.| separating ἀνασκευὴ [rebutting] from κατασκευὴ [confirming], and adding a section on Blame. His object was evidently to make even the business-like handling of his predecessor more precise still; and the long and revived popularity which, as has been said, he achieved, was not an undue reward for one of the most craftsmanlike crambooks that ever deserved the encomium of the epithet and the discredit of the noun. Aphthonius substitutes for the simple heading “Of Myth,” &c., “Definition of Myth,” &c.; and though he still keeps his sections very short, he manages, instead of the rather brachygraphic indication of examples in the text, to give an appendix of complete if miniature pattern at the end of each section—a fable of the ants and grasshoppers, urging youth to industry, for the first; the story of the rose and its acquiring redness from the blood of Aphrodite when she struck her foot against its thorns in trying to shield Adonis from Ares, for the second; and so on. In every respect, Aphthonius has studied clearness, and he has certainly achieved it. If it were not for the dangers of the whole method, and especially that greatest one, of encouraging the mistake of classification for fact, terms for things, orderly reference to a schedule for æsthetic appreciation, he would deserve very hearty applause. And even as it is, one could, as has been said above, see the study which he facilitates substituted for any one of at least a dozen subjects of our modern overcrowded curriculum with a great deal of equanimity. Short as the piece is, some of the examples, such as the encomia of Thucydides and of Wisdom, are compositions of considerable finish. But it is significant that in the first there is, strictly speaking, no literary criticism at all, and that even the inevitable comparison with Herodotus is poorly shuffled off with the stock reproach that Herodotus writes to please, Thucydides to speak the truth.
Theon, with greater space at his command, employs a different method. It is uncertain whether he preceded or followed |Theon.| Aphthonius; but the former theory is favoured by the fact that he, like Hermogenes, has twelve subjects only, those which Aphthonius put asunder being still united. He begins with a general disquisition on, and encomium of, the Progymnasmata, widening them somewhat, so as to bring in Figures to some extent, but also describing some of these as “contentious” or “disputed.” Then he has a rather curious chapter, nearer to our special purpose than usual, showing how, not merely the great orators, but the great writers of old, used these forms, or rather things which can be brought under these forms, citing the famous speech of Sophocles as to his emancipation from love in the Republic, the fable of the flute-player in Herodotus, others in other historians, and a very great many more things, not a few of which are lost. This enumeration is not only interesting as pointing to these desiderata, but as showing how unhappy the Greek was unless he could arrange and classify and ticket, as well as, distinguish and enjoy, the parts and characteristics of literature. The spirit is not dead yet: it has prompted a much-respected living author on Rhetoric to describe In Memoriam as “a combined Hyperbole of Affection and Sorrow.” And this may undoubtedly be said in its favour, that its exercise does really require and promote a certain intellectual alertness and activity. But the question is, Do this alertness and this activity exert themselves in actual progress, or in mere marking-time? Is the comprehension (one can hardly even ask Is the enjoyment) of In Memoriam furthered by its orderly arrangement in the case generally labelled “Hyperbole,” and in the compartment labelled “Combined Hyperboles,” and in the further pigeon-hole labelled “Of Affection and Sorrow”? Is it really important to decide whether Sophocles’s variation on “sour grapes” is a χρεία or an apophthegm, and which are the most remarkable examples of διήγημα in the orators and the historians respectively? Such things may appear to some specially and fatally to underlie the Platonic curse on the appearance of knowledge without the reality. But they have, as we see, very strong and long prescription, and there are still some who bitterly resent the exclusion of them from the teaching, not merely of technical Rhetoric, but of literature—who regard a system of “leaden rules,” of individual appreciation without classes and compartments and indorsements, as dilettante, unscientific (which it would certainly allow itself to be), and effeminate. Between the two, opinion, a little assisted by Logic and History, must be left to decide.
Theon’s handling of the Progymnasmata (which he often speaks of without the pro) is, as has been said, much fuller than those of Hermogenes and Aphthonius. He does not, like the latter of these, give a regular formal pattern of each kind; but he has a great many illustrative references to literature, and he has a good deal of discussion on what may be called the philosophy of the several kinds. Nor is it unnoteworthy that in dealing with Commonplace he drops the “common,” substitutes prosopopœia for ethopœia, and introduces the curious new heading of “Law.” On the whole, Theon is more “for thoughts” than either of his forerunners;[[135]] he might profit a clever boy more, and he has much more numerous and deeper glimmerings of insight into the purely critical side of the matter. But he lacks system, and this, in dealing with a subject which is systematic or nothing, is a drawback.
There was a rhetorical Nicolaus (indeed the name was very common) who was a student of Proclus; but the author of the |Nicolaus.| Progymnasmata we possess seems to have flourished later, under the Emperor Leo and after him. For some reason or none, MSS. of him seem to be specially found at Oxford. They are merely examples, several of each kind, and sometimes minutely subdivided, there being, for instance, separate patterns of mixed, unmixed, logical, and practical “Use.” They form, in fact, a curious bundle, and by no means a very small one, of partial declamations in common form, the examples of Ethopœia being especially remarkable: “What sort of things Niobe would say,” “What Menœceus the patriotic suicide,” “What Cassandra at the sight of the horse,” &c. No less than fourteen in all are given.
This is also the principle of the Progymnasmata of Nicephorus Basilicus, a notary (not the son-in-law chronicled by |Nicephorus.| Scott) of Alexius Comnenus, who gives no less than three-and-twenty Ethopœiæ on subjects Pagan and Christian. In fact, these two collections, which together fill some two hundred and fifty well-packed pages, may be regarded rather as rhetorical reading-books, designedly intended to possess a certain interest, than as anything else. Familiarity with them would be likely to produce much the same sort of literary facility, and in a sense “correctness,” as that which we find in the minor French writers of the eighteenth century. It could, after mere childhood (when it might insensibly inculcate some good principles and some sound models), have little other good effect.
The few μελέται of Adrianus, the successor and funeral eulogist of Herodes Atticus, are whole declamations, not |Minors.| brought under any of the heads. The Diegemata and Ethopœiæ of Severus, after what has been said of these kinds, will need no special characterisation; and the Progymnasmata of George Pachymeres (who was nearly contemporary with Dante) and of the Anonymus are, like so many of the others, pure examples, indeed (as the former are well called in one MS.) Meletæ on the Progymnasmata themselves.
No great resumption or amplification of the scattered comments already made on these works can be necessary. They form a by no means contemptible group of "Composition |General remarks on the Progymnasmata.| books," creditably distinguished from some more modern examples of the same kind by being busy with something better than mere grammar, but not as a rule showing any of that conception of style which is visible as early as Dionysius, distinct in Quintilian, and present in a form at once vigorous and exquisite in Longinus. They are by no means ill calculated to excite an interest in literature, and even to facilitate the production, in not contemptible form, of certain kinds of it. But there is upon all of them the curse of beginning at the wrong end—of constructing an elaborate skeleton system of forms, and kinds, and sub-kinds, and then classifying literature under these, instead of beginning with the literature, separating the good from the bad, and examining, as far as may be possible, the sources of goodness and badness. A man trained in them would have many advantages over our heaven-born, but hardly even earth-instructed, reviewers and students of literature. But he would be very apt to miss the finer touches, to lose the nobler gusts, of literature; and he would be especially disposed towards that worst disease of criticism, so often manifested in its history, which leads men to ignore, or even blaspheme, great work, because it refuses to be classified, or to obey the arbitrary rules which have been foisted into, or encrusted upon, the classification.
Not from such a point of view did the still later teachers, who set themselves to comment on the comment of Hermogenes |The Commentaries on them.| and Aphthonius, regard their authorities. The second volume of Walz—a stout one of nearly seven hundred pages—is entirely occupied with scholia on Aphthonius alone, at the rate, that is to say, of about fourteen pages of margent to one of text. This flood of words about words has been too much for the patience even of the editor, who gives specimens only of some, and in just wrath labels one as “a futile opuscule botched together with utter stupidity.” Much, indeed, is of the usual kind which we associate with scholia—verbal interpretation, sometimes not useless, but as a rule singularly pedestrian and uninspired, introduced with a monotonous rattle of clichés and catchwords. But there are also better things, and the so-called “Homilies” of Doxopater, besides being of very considerable bulk (they fill some four hundred pages, not of mere scrappy annotation but of substantive commentary), attest the intelligence as well as the industry of their author, a Byzantine of the eleventh century. But they are (necessarily, no doubt) cribbed and cabined by the circumscriptions of their text.