Enough, perhaps, has been said of the defects of this great mass of composition, both from the point of view of our special |Survey of School Rhetoric.| investigation and from more general ones. It remains to say something of its merits from the former. As will have been seen, the relations of the rhetoricians to literary criticism differ at first sight surprisingly—less so, perhaps, when they come to be examined. Sometimes the general literary view seems to be almost entirely lost in a wilderness of details and technicalities. But sometimes also the merely forensic tendency disappears, the merely technical one in the narrow sense effaces itself, and we have an almost pure treatise on Composition, limited it may be by arbitrary restrictions, conditioned by professional needs, but still Composition in general—that is to say, after a fashion, and in a manner, Literature. Every now and then, as we saw above, the writer rises to the conception of Rhetoric as Prosaics—as the other half of that Art of Literature of which Poetics is the one. And—a less good thing, but also not without its good side—we even find glimpses and glimmerings of the notion, to be taken up and widely developed later, of Rhetoric as including Poetics.
But the best and most important part of the matter has yet to be summarised. The technical study of Rhetoric, even when pushed to the extremities of the terminological and classifying mania, encouraged and almost necessitated constant overhauling of actual literature for examples, and encouraged the characterisation of famous authors from this point of view. Even the orators by themselves formed no inconsiderable or undistinguished corpus of Greek prose literature. But, as we have seen, it was customary, even for very strict formalists, to include the historians whose connection with the orators was so close; and it was very difficult to exclude philosophical writers, especially Plato. A man must have been of preternatural stolidity if he could ransack Demosthenes and Isæus, Herodotus and Thucydides and Xenophon, Plato, and the school philosophers whom we have so freely lost, and if he did not in the process develop some notion of prose literary criticism at large, nay, formulate some rules of it. And, as we have also seen from the very first, poetry was by no means barred. The orator might very often quote it; he was constantly to go to it for suggestions of subject or treatment, beauties of style, examples of figure and form. Therefore, directly if not indirectly, the rhetorical teacher and the historical student accepted the whole of literature for their province.
Of the actual results of this enormous period, the best part (even if we cut off the Dark Ages) of a thousand years of |The Practical Rhetoricians or Masters of Epideictic.| elaborate concentration upon an extremely artificial art, our remains are in proportion much less than we should expect; in fact, it is hardly too much to say that they are less than those of the technical books which taught how to produce them. It is scarcely fair to call Dionysius of Halicarnassus a rhetorician, though he sometimes goes near to being one. He is a serious teacher of Rhetoric, not a giver of displays in it, a real literary critic, a laborious historian. Plutarch is saved from inclusion in the class by the very same characteristic which interferes so sadly with his literary criticism as such. He is too practical, too keenly interested in life, too busy about the positive sciences of ethical and physical inquiry, to devote himself to rhetorical exercises of the pure declamatory kind. That Lucian did so devote himself for no inconsiderable time, we know from his own description of his breaking away from the Delilah Rhetoric; and there are scraps of purely or mainly rhetorical matter in him even as it is. But though it be perfectly possible to serve two mistresses, no man ever could have, for his Queens of Brentford, Irony and the falser and more artificial kind of Rhetoric. The two are irreconcilable enemies: they would make their lover’s life an impossible and maddening inconsistency. We must therefore look elsewhere, and in writers on the whole lesser, for the artificial Rhetorical composition which is of interest to us, not merely inasmuch as it sometimes deals with or comes near to literary criticism itself, but as it is, even on other occasions, a valuable and undeniable evidence as to the state of universal crisis, the condition of literary taste, at its time. We shall find such witnesses in Dion Chrysostom for the late first and early second century; in Aristides of Smyrna and Maximus Tyrius for the second exclusively; in Philostratus for the end of the second and the beginning of the third; while to these we may perhaps add Libanius and Themistius for the fourth, with the imperial rhetorician Julian to keep them company.
Of these, Dion Chrysostom is not merely the earliest in date, but, on the whole, the most important to literature. He |Dion Chrysostom.| appears to have been a distinguished and rather fortunate example of a “gentleman of the press” (as we should now say) before the press existed. He travelled over a[over a] great part of the Roman Empire in the pursuit of his profession as Lecturer—that perhaps comes nearest to it—and would appear to have been well rewarded. The description of his morning’s employment, which begins his study of the three Poets' plays on Philoctetes,[[147]] is one of the most interesting passages in the later and less-known classics, and so is worth giving here, though it exists in at least one unlearned language: “I rose about the first hour of the day, both because I was poorly, and because the air was cooler at dawn, and more like autumn, though it was midsummer. I made my toilette, said my prayers, and then getting into my curricle, went several times round the Hippodrome, driving as easily and quietly as possible. Then I took a walk, rested shortly, bathed and anointed myself, and after eating a slight breakfast, took up some tragedies.” The careful “study of the body,” the quiet affluence of a well-to-do professional man, and the attention to professional work without any hurry or discomfort, are all well touched off here; and what follows gives us, as it happens, the closest approach to our subject proper to be found in the considerable collection of Dion’s Orations, or, as they have been much more properly called, Essays. There are, however, others which are more characteristic of this division of literature, and we may deal with these first.
The whole conception of the kind of piece, of which Dion himself has left us some fourscore examples, is a curious, and to merely modern readers (nor perhaps to them only) something of a puzzling one. It is called an Oration because it was intended to be delivered by word of mouth; but it often, if not usually, has no other oratorical characteristic. The terms “lecture” and “essay” have also been applied to it incidentally above, and both have some, while neither has exact, application. Except that its subject is generally (not always) profane, it has strong points of resemblance to some kinds of Sermon. Classified by the subject, it presents at first sight features which look distinct enough, though perhaps the distinctness rather vanishes on examination. Not a few of the examples (and probably those which were more immediately profitable, though they could not be used so often) are what may be called local panegyrics, addresses to the citizens of Corinth, Tarsus, Borysthenes, New Ilium, in which their historical and literary associations are ingeniously worked in, and the importance of the community is more or less delicately “cracked up.” Others are moral discourses on Vices and Virtues, others abstract discussions on politics, others of yet other sorts. But the point in which they all agree, the point which is their real characteristic, is that they are all rather displays of art, rather directly analogous to a musical “recital” or an entertainment of feats of strength and skill, than directed to any definite purpose of persuasion, or to the direct exposition of any subject. The object is to show how neatly the speaker can play the rhetorical game, how well he can do his theme. Each is, in fact (what Thucydides so detested the idea of his history appearing to be), a distinct agonisma, a competitive display of cleverness and technical accomplishment.
Nothing perhaps is more tedious than a game that is out of fashion; and this game has been out of fashion for a very long time. Moreover, it has been out of fashion so long, and its vogue depended upon conditions now so entirely changed, that it is for us occasionally difficult, even by strong effort of mental projection into the past, to discover where the attraction can ever have lain. Equally good style (and Dion’s is beyond question good) could surely have been expended on something less utterly arbitrary and unreal. Nor do these reflections present themselves more strongly anywhere than in regard to the pieces which touch more directly on our subject. Take, for instance, the Trojan oration, which has for its second title “That Troy was not captured.” It is supposed to be addressed to the citizens of the New Ilium, and to clear away the reproach of the Old. The means taken to do this are mainly two. In the first place, the authority of an entirely unnamed Egyptian priest, the author of a book named unintelligibly, is invoked as giving the lie direct to Homer, and supporting himself on the documentary evidence of stelæ, which (unluckily) had perished. The second argument (obviously thought of most weight) is an elaborate examination of the Homeric narrative itself from the point of view of what seems probable, decent, and so forth to Dion the Golden-mouthed. Some of the objections are new; most of them very old. Is it likely that a lady who had the honour of being the bedfellow of Zeus would be doubtful of her beauty if an Idæan shepherd did not certify to it? Would a goddess have given such improper rewards to Paris, and put herself in such an ugly relation to Helen, who, by one story, was her sister? What a shocking thing that the poet should constantly speak well of Ulysses and yet represent him as a liar! How could Homer have had any knowledge of the language of the gods, or have seen through the cloud on Ida? And so forth, for some sixty mortal pages.
From such a procedure no literary criticism is to be expected; and, as has been said, the difficulty is to discern what was its original attraction. As a serious composition it is clearly nowhere; as a jeu d’esprit, the rules of the game quite puzzle us, and the spirit seems utterly to have evaporated. The Olympic[[148]] “On the Idea of God” has been cited by some as a contribution to our subject, and certainly contains some remarks about Plato and about Myths—interesting remarks too. In substance it is a supposed discourse of Phidias to the assembled Greeks on the principles he had in mind in the conception of his statue of Zeus; but its most interesting passage is a comparison of poetry and sculpture. The mixture of dialects in Homer is compared to the making up of the palette and the use of “values” in painting; the selection of archaic words to the choice of the virtuoso lighting on an antique medal. The variety of epithet and synonym for the description of natural and other objects is contrasted with the restraint and simplicity of the sculptor’s art. The passage is a really remarkable one, and stands almost alone, in elaboration if not in suggestion, as the forerunner of a kind of criticism, fruitful but rather dangerous, which has often been supposed to have originated with Winckelmann and Lessing and Diderot in the last century. But it stands almost alone.
The greater apparent promise of the paper on the synonymous plays is less well fulfilled. Dion seems to imply that this was the only instance where the Three competed on the very same subject, and he finds in the three pieces agreeable instances of the well-known general characteristics of their authors—the grandeur, simplicity, and audacity of Æschylus; the artifice, variety, rhetorical skill of Euripides; the mediocrity (in no evil sense) and the charm of Sophocles. He has also some interesting remarks on the chorus, together with some others less interesting, because more in the common style of ancient criticism, on impossibilities, improbabilities, breaches of usage and unity, and the like. Dion, in fact, goes so far as to express an indirect wish that the chorus were cut out of tragedy. He had, no doubt, lost the sense of the religious use which certainly existed in Æschylus, and perhaps survived in Sophocles; he could not but observe the combination of nullity and superfluity (which may too often be detected even in these great poets) of the chorus, if regarded as anything else than an intercalated lyric of the most exquisite beauty; and he of course saw that the choruses of Euripides were often as merely parabasic, as entirely separated from all strict dramatic connection, as any address to the audience in Aristophanes himself.
On the whole, it may best be said of the Golden-mouthed that, in other circumstances, and if he had cared, he might have made a critic perhaps better than Dionysius, and perhaps not so very far below Longinus; but that, as a matter of fact, neither time, circumstances, nor personal disposition attracted him, save here and there, to the subject.
There is another author, not far removed in age from Dion Chrysostom, whom I should be sorry to pass without at least |Aristides of Smyrna.| as minute an examination. Had we only the notices of him which exist, with a few fragments, there is perhaps no Greek writer from whom it would be reasonable to expect an abundance of literary criticism, of a type almost as startlingly modern as that of Longinus himself, with more confidence than that with which we might expect it from Aristides of Smyrna.[[149]]