Philostratus is in fact a writer of considerable charm. The Life of Apollonius is readable, not only for its matter and its literary associations with Keats through Burton; and the smaller Lives of the Sophists are not unimportant for literary history. The Eikones are perhaps the best descriptions of pictures before Diderot,[[168]] and the Letters are really nectareous. Gifford, when deservedly trouncing Cumberland (alias Sir Fretful Plagiary) for finding fault with Jonson because he made up the exquisite poem above cited from Philostratus, would have done better to vindicate the original as well from Cumberland’s bad taste and ignorance. “Despicable sophist,” “obscure collection of love-letters,” “parcel of unnatural, far-fetched conceits,” “calculated to disgust a man of Jonson’s classical taste,” are expressions which, as Gifford broadly hints, probably express not so much Cumberland’s own taste as that of his grandfather Bentley, who, if one of the greatest of scholars, was sometimes, if not always, one of the worst of literary critics. But Gifford, who, with all his acuteness, wit, and polemic power, represented too much the dregs of the neo-classic school on points of taste, was probably of no very different opinion. The fact is that, not merely in the passages which Ben has adapted, sometimes literally, for this marvellous cento, but in many others, the very wine, the very roses, of the luscious and florid school of poetical sentiment are given by Philostratus himself.
But if they are his own, and not, as seems more likely, prose paraphrases of lost poems by some other, he was not one of the “poets who contain a critic.” Not only does he put the remarkable definition[[169]] of φαντασία, which it is not clear that even Longinus fully grasped, in the mouth of Apollonius; but it is very noticeable that Apollonius is there speaking not of literary art, but of sculpture and painting. In the description of paintings themselves there is no criticism. And perhaps among the numerous examples which we have of the strange difference of view between the ancients and at least some of ourselves on the suggestiveness of literature, there is no passage more striking than the Heroic Dialogue[[170]] on the subject of Homer between a Phœnician stranger and a vine-dresser at Eleus in the Thracian Chersonese, where Protesilaus was supposed to be buried. The stuff of this fantastic piece is the information, about the matters of the Trojan war, supposed to be supplied to the vine-dresser by Protesilaus himself. There is one passage of literary estimate of the ordinary kind, but the whole is one of those curious corrections of Homeric statement which served as the ancestors of the new and anti-Homeric “tale of Troy” in the Middle Ages, and which are among the numerous puzzles of ancient literature to us, until we have mastered the strange antique horror of fiction as fiction. We cannot conceive any one—after childhood—otherwise than humorously attempting to make out that Sir Walter Scott did injustice to Waverley, and that in the duel with Balmawhapple the Baron was only second, not principal, insinuating that the novelist has concealed the real secret of Flora’s indifference to her lover, which was that she was determined, like Beatrix Esmond, to be the Chevalier’s mistress, or declaring that Fergus, instead of being captured and executed, died gloriously in a skirmish omitted by historians, after putting the English to flight. But this is what the ancients were always doing with Homer; and it is scarcely too much to say that until this attitude of mind is entirely discarded, literary criticism in the proper sense is impossible.
The relatively considerable space, some six or seven pages, which is allotted to Libanius in Egger’s book, may have encouraged |Libanius.| readers to expect some considerable contribution to critical literature from that sophist and rhetorician. But a careful reading of the French historian’s text will show that he has really nothing to produce to justify the space assigned: and an independent examination of Libanius himself (which, as hinted already, is not too easy to make[[171]]) will more than confirm this uncomfortable suspicion. Libanius is enormously copious, and he is not exactly contemptible,[[172]] seeing that he can apply the sort of “Wardour Street” Attic, in which he and the better class of his contemporaries wrote, to a large number of subjects with a great deal of skill. But the curse of artificiality is over everything that he writes:[[173]] and, to do him justice, his writings proclaim the fact beforehand with the most praiseworthy frankness. They belong almost entirely to those classes of conventional exercise of which full account has been given, and will be given, in the present Book and its successor. They are Progymnasmata, Meletæ, “orations,” that is to say, rather more practical compositions of the same class, ethical dissertations, letters of the kind in which A writes that B is a new Demosthenes, and B replies that A really is a second Plato. The Progymnasmata include all the kinds mentioned earlier in this chapter, fables and narrations, uses and sentences, encomia and ethopoiæ and the rest; the Meletæ range from the complaint of a parasite who has been done out of his dinner, through all manner of historical, mythical, and fantastic cases, to the question whether Lais (after being exiled) had not better be recalled as a useful member of society. But literary criticism is nullibi. If it were anywhere we should look for it in the comparison of Demosthenes and Æschines which figures among the Progymnasmata, in the Life[[174]] of the first-named orator and the arguments to his speeches, and perhaps in the Apologia Socratis. In the first there is not a scintilla of the kind: the comparison wholly concerns the lives, characters, and successes of the two. In the Apologia there is pretty constant reference to Socrates' conversation, with some to that of others, Prodicus, Protagoras, &c. But any literary consideration is avoided with that curious superciliousness, or more curious subterfuge, which we have noticed often already, and which is so rigid and so complete that it suggests malice prepense—a deliberate and perverse abstention. The “editorial” matter (to vary a happy phrase of M. Egger) on Demosthenes is even more surprisingly barren,—mere biography, and mere reference to the stock technicalities and classifications of stasis and the like, practically exhaust it. I do not know how far the fact that he composed, in answer to Aristides,[[175]] a defence of stage dancing or pantomime, may by some be reckoned to him as literary righteousness. In his wordy Autobiography[[176]] I can find nothing to our purpose: and though, in the difficulties of study of him referred to, I daresay I have not thoroughly sifted the huge haystack of the Orations, I think there is very little more there. The For Aristophanes[[177]] has nothing to do with the Aristophanes we know or with literature, except that it seems to have been the speech in which Julian (v. infra, p. [126]) discovered such wonderful qualities.
The “Monody” and the “Funeral Oration” on Julian himself may again excite expectation, for the dead Emperor was certainly a man of letters; but they will equally disappoint it. The quaintly named “To Those Who Do Not Speak” (pupils of his who on growing up and entering the senate or other public bodies prove dumb dogs) might help us, but does not. Libanius merely exhorts these sluggards, in the most general way, to be good boys, to pay less attention to chariot-racing and more to books. By far the larger number of the “Orations” are on political or legal subjects, and it would be unreasonable to expect critical edification from them; but even where it might seem likely to come in, it does not. The “Against Lucian” (Reiske, vol. iii.) is in the same case as the “For Aristophanes.” The not uninteresting oration in defence of the system of his School (No. LXV., the last of Reiske’s third volume) constantly refers to a matter which might be of great concern to us—the difficulty which schoolmasters or professors had at this time in keeping their pupils up to the mark in the two languages and literatures, Greek and Latin. But the discourse is not turned our way.
Nor do the Letters, our last resort, furnish us with much consolation. Their enormous number—there are over 1600 in Wolf’s edition of the Greek originals, while the editio princeps of Zambicarius, in Latin only, adds problems of divagation and duplication to the heart’s content of a certain order of scholar—is to some extent mitigated by their usual brevity. But this very brevity is often an aggravation not a mitigation of teen. Very many are mere “notes,” as we should say, written, indeed, with the pomp and circumstance of the epistoler-rhetorician, but about nothing or next to nothing. Very often Libanius seems to be unconsciously anticipating the young person who said that he did not read books, he wrote them. Sometimes, at least, an apparently promising reference leads to a bitter disappointment, as in the case of that to Longinus. The reader—his appetite only whetted by the exertion of rectifying a miscitation in Wolf’s Preface (it quotes the Letter as 990, while it is really 998)—at last approaches his quest, and reads as follows: To Eusebius, “The speech [or book] which I want is Odenathus, and it is by Longinus. You must give it me, and keep your promise.” This is indeed precious; though a remembrance of the information, epistolary and other, vouchsafed in many modern biographies, may moderate sarcastic impulses. No sarcasm, but profound sympathy, should be excited by the professor’s constant complaints of headache; yet again they are unilluminative for our purpose. In fact, such examination as I have been able to give to these Epistles shows that it is unreasonable to demand from them what they have no intention to supply. Very likely there are passages in this mass, as in that other of the Orations, which might be adduced: but I am pretty sure that they would not invalidate the general proposition that, to Libanius also, those who want literary criticism proper need not go. Perhaps the nearest approaches to it are such things as the curious mention to Demetrius (128, Wolf, p. 67) of parts of an artificial epistolary discourse of his friend’s which he, Libanius, received when he had pupils with him, and, after being much bored by their recitations, read to them instead of lecturing himself.
The titles at least of his correspondent Themistius[[178]] are sometimes a little more promising, and Themistius, a man of considerable |Themistius.| and varied public employment, might seem less likely to indulge in the excesses of mere scholastic exercise which Libanius permitted himself. But, on the whole, we shall have to acknowledge that this other famous rhetorician also is drawn practically blank for our purpose. “The Philosopher,” “The Sophist,” “How a man should address the public”—these are subjects on which one might surely think that a little criticism would break in somehow and somewhere. But it never does. To Themistius, as to so many others, the great writers of old are persons worthy of infinite respect, to be quoted freely, but to be quoted as a lawyer quotes this or that year-book, report, decision, for the substance only. The general banality of his literary references may be tested by anybody who chooses to refer to his citations and discussions of various authors in the Basanistes (Orat. xxi., ed. cit. in note, p. 296), or more succinctly still, to the reference to “golden Menander, and Euripides, and Sophocles, and fair Sappho, and noble Pindar” in the pleasant little piece, “To his Father,” which comes before it.
It is no doubt extremely unjust to argue from the performance of the pupil to the quality of the teacher; but we may at least say that, if there was any stronger critical tendency |Julian.| in Libanius or Themistius than appears in their own works, it is not reflected in one of their most diligent and distinguished pupils.[[179]] The references to literature in the extant works[[180]] of Julian the Apostate are, in a certain sense and way, extremely numerous; in fact, it was almost vital to the odd mixture of dupery and quackery which had mastered him that he should be constantly quoting classical, if only because they were heathen, authors. His Orations[[181]] are crammed with such quotations. Moreover, we have from him a declaration in form of love for books. “Some,” he says, at the beginning of his epistle (the ninth) to Ecdicius,[[182]] “love horses, some birds, some other beasts; in me from a child there has raged a dire longing for the possession of books.” But in this, as in other cases, Desire seems rather to have excluded Criticism. One is rather annoyed than edified by the banal reference, at the beginning of the Misopogon,[[183]] to his having seen “the barbarians beyond the Rhine singing wild songs composed in a speech resembling the croakings of rough-voiced fowls, and rejoicing in this music.” If only the princely pedant would have copied a few of these croaks, and studied them, instead of trying to put back the clock of the world! His compliments and thanks to Libanius himself for the above-mentioned speech (Ep. 14) are of the most hackneyed character. He read it, he says, nearly all before breakfast, and finished it between breakfast and siesta.[[184]] “Thou art blessed to write thus, and still more to be able to think thus! O speech! O brains! O composition! O division! O epicheiremes! O ordonnance! O departures of style! O harmony! O symphony!” To which we may add “O clichés! O tickets! O [in Mr Burchell’s rudeness] Fudge!”
In Ep. 24 there is a playful and pleasant discourse on the sense of the epithet γλυκὺς given by the poets and others to figs and honey, but it is only a trifle; and in 34, to Iamblichus, it is noteworthy how entirely the philosophic interest of literature overshadows, or rather how completely it blocks out, the literary whole. In 42, on education, and literature as its instrument, the old Plutarchian view[[185]] is refurbished, almost without alteration, and with only a fling or two at the Galilæans as an addition; while in 55 Eumenius and Pharianus are explicitly adjured “not to despise” logic, rhetoric, poetics, to study mathematics “more carefully,” but to give their whole mind to the understanding of the dogmas of Aristotle and Plato. This is to be “the real business, the foundation and the structure and the roof,” the rest are πάρεργα. The assertion is of course the reverse of original; but at this juncture it is all the more valuable to us, as a sort of summary and clincher at once of a large and important part of ancient opinion. In the borrower of it, as in those from whom it was borrowed, literary criticism, to full purpose and with full freedom, simply could not exist.
[58]. As in other cases, Theophrastus has been criticised very largely on rather slim vouchers. For instance, the quotation (in Cic. Orat., 39) on the strength of which Mr. Nettleship, Lectures and Essays, ii. 47, speaks of him complimentarily, strikes me, I confess, as but a commonplace remark enough. It is that by Herodotus and Thucydides, “History was first stirred up to speak more freely and ornately.”