Longinus has been blamed by M. Egger[[150]] for comparing[[151]] this rhetorician with Demosthenes. But the excellent historian of Greek criticism must have forgotten the epigram, quoted elsewhere,[[152]] in which Aristides is frankly ranked, not merely with Demosthenes but with Thucydides, as a writer, as well as the other testimonies, both of antiquity and of the Renaissance, which are conveniently collected in an article of Jebb’s edition, to be found in that of Dindorf.[[153]] It is true that Dindorf himself speaks contemptuously of his client, but Dindorf was too deeply sworn a servant of strictly classical Greek to tolerate the pretensions of a précieux of the Antonine age. As a matter of fact, not only is Aristides a good, though by no means easy,[[154]] writer of Greek, but both the qualities and the defects of his writing and the causes of his difficulty are such as ought to have disposed him to literary criticism in the best sense. This hardness does not arise from irregular syntax, nor from any of the commoner causes of “obscurity.” What makes it necessary to read him with no common care and attention is, in the first place, the cobweb-like subtlety, not to say tenuity and intricacy, of his thought; and, in the second, his use of not ostensibly strange or archaic language with the most elusive nuances of difference from its common employment.
Now these are characteristics which are by no means uncommonly found in persons and in times friendly to criticism. And the love of Aristides for literature (at least for the rhetorical side of it) is not only outspoken, but to all appearance unfeigned. His devotion is not merely valetudinarian, but voluntary. If there is a rhetorical extravagance in the phrase, there is a more than rhetorical sincerity in the sentiment of his declarations that, while others may find love or bathing or drinking or hunting sweet, speeches[[155]] are his sole delight: they absorb all his friendship and all his faculties; they are to him as parents and children, as business and pastime. It is about them that he invokes Aphrodite: he plays with them and works with them, rejoices in them, embraces them, knocks only at their doors. Elsewhere, “the whole gain and sum of life to man is oratorical occupation”; and elsewhere again, “I would rather have the gift of speech, with a modest and honourable life as man best may, than be Darius the son of Hystaspes two thousand times over: and everything seems to me little in comparison with this.”
This is something like a “declaration.”
Nor, on merely running down the list of the fairly voluminous extant works of Aristides (especially when the inner meanings, which do not always appear in the titles, are grasped), do matters look unpromising. The majority of the pieces are indeed pure epideictic—discourses to or about the gods, a mighty “Panathenaic” (the chef d'œuvre, with only one rival, of the author)—panegyrics of Smyrna, Rome, and other places, “Leuctrics” (i.e., debating-society speeches, on the side of the Lacedæmonians, on the side of the Thebans, and neutral), arguments for and against sending assistance to the Athenian expedition at Syracuse, all the stock—a stock surprise to us—of this curious declamation-commonplace. But there are four pieces (between them making up the stuff of a good-sized volume) in which, from such a man, literary criticism might seem to be inevitable. They are the περὶ τοῦ μὴ δεῖν κωμῳδεῖν[[156]] (a discourse whether comedy shall be permitted or not), the long Defence of Rhetoric (περὶ ῥητορικῆς)[[157]] against Plato’s attacks, especially in the Gorgias, the very much longer and oddly named ὑπὲρ τῶν τεττάρων,[[158]] an apology for Miltiades, Themistocles, Pericles, and Cimon, which completes this, and the still more oddly named περὶ τοῦ παραφθέγματος[[159]] (“Concerning my blunder”), which meets, with not a little tartness and wounded conceit, but with a great deal of ingenuity, the suggestion, through a third person, of some “d——d good-natured friend,”[[160]] that Aristides had committed a fault of taste by insinuating praises of himself in an address to the divinity. We turn to these, and we find as nearly as possible nothing critical. Glimmers of interest appear, as in the description of historians (ii. 513), as “those between poetry and rhetoric,” but they are extinguished almost at once. It would be quite impossible to treat the comedy question from a less literary standpoint than that of Aristides; we might have Plutarch speaking, except that the writing is more “precious” and point-de-vice. The “Apology for my blunder” consists mainly in a string, by no means lacking in ingenuity, of citations from poets, orators, and others, in which they indulge, either for themselves or their personages, in strains somewhat self-laudatory. As for the more than four hundred pages of “On Rhetoric” and “For the Four,” they also avoid the literary handling, the strictly critical grip of the subject, with a persistency which, as has been observed in other cases, is simply a mystery, unless we suppose that the writer was either laboriously shunning this, or quite unconscious of its possibility and promise. Pages after pages on the old aporia whether Rhetoric is an art or not, sheets after sheets on the welldoing of the Four, on Plato’s evil-speaking, we have. But, unless I have missed it, never a passage on the magnificent literature with which Rhetoric has enriched Greece, on the more magnificent rhetoric which the accuser of the brethren has himself displayed in accusing her. To a man of the subtlety of Aristides, of his enthusiasm for literature, of his flair for a popular and striking paradox, one would imagine that this beating up of the enemy’s quarters would be irresistibly tempting. But it is certainly not in his main attack: and though, in the vast stretch of wiredrawn argument and precious expression, one may have missed something, I do not think that it is even in the reserves or the parentheses.
There are perhaps few, at least among the less read Greek writers, who, in small compass and at no great expense of trouble, throw more negative light on Greek criticism than |Maximus Tyrius.| Maximus Tyrius.[[161]] This rhetorician or philosopher (he would probably have disclaimed the first epithet and modestly demanded promotion to the second) has left us, in a style as easy as that of Aristides is difficult, and showing at least a strong velleity to be Platonic, some forty essays, or dissertations, or theses. They are on questions or propositions of the usual kind, as these: “Pleasure may be a good but is not a stable thing.” “On Socratic Love” (an amiable but slightly ludicrous example of whitewashing everybody, from Socrates himself to Sappho). “On the God of Socrates and Plato,” &c., &c. Several of them might, at any rate from the titles, seem to touch our subject; two at least might seem to be obliged to touch it. These are the Tenth (in Reiske’s order), “Whether the poets or the philosophers have given the soundest ideas of the gods?” and the Twenty-third, “Whether Plato was right in banishing Homer from his Republic?” Yet, apt to slip between our fingers as we have found and shall find apparently critical theses of this sort, hardly one (at least outside Plutarch) is so utterly eel-like as those of Maximus of Tyre. As to the first,[[162]] he suggests that the very question is a misunderstanding—as no doubt it is, though not quite in his sense. Philosophy and poetry are really the same thing. Poetry is a philosophy, “senior in time, metrical in harmony, based on fiction as to its arguments.” Philosophy is a poetry “renewed in youth, more lightly equipped in harmony, more certain in sense.” They are, in short, as like as my fingers to my fingers, “and there are ænigmas in both.” If you are wise you will interpret the poets allegorically, but go to the philosophers for clear statements. And we must allow, to the credit of the former, that there is no poet who talks such mischievous nonsense as Epicurus.
This is all that, as a critic, Maximus has to say on this head; and though at least equally ingenious in evasion, he gives us nothing more solid in the debate on Homer and Plato.[[163]] He speaks, indeed, words of sense (by no means always kept in mind by critics) as to the absolute compatibility of admiration of Homer with admiration of Plato. But his argument for this, and at the same time the whole argument of the essay, is only a kind of “fetch.” Homer was banished from the Platonic Republic not because Plato thought him bad per se, but because the special conditions of the Republic itself made Homer an inconvenient inmate. He was not qualified for admission to this particular club: that was all. Equally far from our orbit is a third essay, the Thirty-second,[[164]] the subject of which is, “Is there any definite philosophic opinion[[165]] in Homer?” Elsewhere Maximus has refused to include literary criticism where it might justly have been expected: here (with, it must be admitted, much countenance from persons in more recent times, and especially in the present day) he determines to import into literary criticism things which have no business there. He begins, indeed, with a hearty and not unhappy eulogy of Homer himself for his range of subject and knowledge: but the rest of the piece is little more than an application of the theory laid down earlier, that philosophers and poets are only the same people in different coats, of antique or modern cut as the case may be, dancing to different tunes, and gesticulating in a different way. It may be so; but whether it is or not, Maximus has nothing more to tell us in our own division.[[166]]
There are not many positions in literary history more apparently covetable than that of being the first certain authority |Philostratus.| for a definition of Imagination which (in a sense different from Sir Thomas Browne’s) “antiquates antiquity,” which anticipates Shakespeare, which has been piously but vainly thought to have been first reached in criticism by Addison, and which, in its fulness, and as critically put, waited for the Germans of the late eighteenth century, if not for their greater scholar Coleridge, to display it in perfection. When it is added that this person was a professional rhetorician, that he had sufficient original, or at least mimetic, skill to supply the pattern of
“Drink to me only with thine eyes,”
and of others of the prettiest if not the greatest things in literature, with sufficient appreciation of arts other than literature to have left us a capital collection of descriptions of painting,—it may seem that great, or at least interesting, literary criticism must have proceeded from him.
Yet whoso shall go to the work of Flavius Philostratus[[167]] in search of this will be wofully disappointed, unless (and perhaps even if) he have the wisdom necessary to the acceptance of what the gods provide, and the more or less resigned relinquishment of what they do not.