We do not get much beyond this cheerful doctrine in his more directly critical utterances. Much acuteness has been ascribed to the πῶς δεῖ ἱστορίαν συγγράφειν.[[207]] But one had |The How to Write History.| hardly need be a Lucian to see that the historian (or anybody else) must understand his subject, and know how to set it forth: though it may be very freely granted that a strict application of the doctrine would make considerable gaps on the shelves of libraries, or rather would leave very few books on them. Indeed the whole tractate, though very sound sense, is in more ways than one a prologue to the True History. And from its opening account of the unlucky Abderites and their epidemic of tragedy, through its application of the story of Diogenes rolling his tub, to its demure assertion at the end that the tub is rolled, the irony is sufficiently apparent.
If the “How to Write History” is chiefly concerned with matter, the Lexiphanes[[208]] is, with at least equal thoroughness, devoted |The Lexiphanes.| to words. The comedy here is of a different kind, broader, but hardly less subtle. The play on αὐχμὸς (“dry”) and νεοχμὸς (“newfangled”), the taste which Lexiphanes gives at once of his preciousness by the use of the word κυψελόβυστα (“wax-stuffed”), his superb contempt for irony,[[209]] with his interlocutor’s audacious punning and sham reverence, “set” the piece at once for us. The wonderful lingo which Lexiphanes proceeds to pour forth in his “Anti-symposium” is matter for another inquiry than this; but the subsequent criticism of it by Lycinus and Sopolis is quite within our competence. And there is nowhere any sounder prophylactic against one of the recurrent diseases of literature, an access of which has been on us, as it happens, for a considerable time past. There are other diseases, of course—affected archaism, affected purism, &c. But this particular one of “raising language to a higher power,” as it has been called by some of those afflicted (and pleased) with it in our days, has never been better characterised. “Before all things,” says Lycinus, “prythee remember me this, not to mimic the worst inventions of modern rhetoricians, and smack your lips over them,[[210]] but to trample on them, and emulate the great classical examples. Nor let the wind-flowers of speech bewitch you, but, after the manner of men in training, stick to solid food. Sacrifice first of all to the Goddess Clearness and to the Graces by whom you are quite deserted. Bid avaunt! to bombast and magniloquence, to tricks of speech. Do not turn up your nose, and strain your voice, and jeer at others, and think that carping at everybody else will put yourself in the front rank. Nay, you have another fault, not small, but perhaps your greatest, that you do not first arrange the meaning of your expressions, and then dress them up in word and phrase; but if you can pick up anywhere some outlandish locution, or invent one that seems pretty to you, you try to tack a meaning on to it, and are miserable if you cannot stuff it in somewhere, though it may have no necessary connection with what you have to say.”[[211]] It would be impossible to put more forcibly or better the necessary caution, the Devil’s Advocate’s plea, against the abuse and exaggeration of the doctrine of the “beautiful word.”
The “Indictment of the Vowels”[[212]] is rather a grammatical and rhetorical jeu d’esprit than a criticism; but if the curious |Other pieces: The Prometheus Es.| little piece, “To one who said 'You are the Prometheus of Prose,'”[[213]] were a little longer and more explicit, it would give us rather a firmer hold of Lucian’s serious views of literature than we have actually got. At first he plays, in his usual manner, with the notion of his real or invented flatterer. Are his works called Promethean because they are of clay? He sorrowfully admits the justice of the comparison. Or because they are so clever? This is sarcastic; and besides he has no wish to deserve the Caucasus. After all, too, it is a dubious compliment, for did not a comic writer call Cleon “a Prometheus”? Then he drolls variously on the “potter’s art” attributed to him, the slightness of his work, the ease with which it can be smashed, &c. But, perhaps there is a complimentary meaning—that Lucian, like Prometheus, is an inventor—that his books are not merely to pattern. He does not altogether reject the soft impeachment, though he hastens (in harmony with that conclusion of the Lexiphanes which has been just quoted) to say that mere novelty is no merit in his eyes. And this he proceeds to illustrate, in his own manner, by a story of the black camel and the magpie-coloured man that Ptolemy brought to Egypt, with the result that the Egyptians thought the camel frightful and the magpie-man a rather disgusting joke. But he has, he admits, attempted to adjust the philosophical dialogue to something like the tone of the comic poets, to avoid the faults of both, and to adjust their excellences. At any rate, says he, with one of his inimitable changes, Prometheus was a thief, and he, Lucian, is not. Nobody can call him a plagiarist, and he must stick to his art, such as it is, for otherwise he were Epimetheus if he changed his mind. In this quaint glancing mixture of the serious and the sarcastic, it is possible to guess a good deal, but guessing, as I have ventured to announce pretty prominently, is not the object of this book.
To Rhetoric, as distinguished from literary criticism proper, Lucian’s chief (indeed his only considerable and substantive) contribution is the so-called “Master of the Orators,”[[214]] |Works touching Rhetoric.| to which may be added a μελέτη or declamation on one of the stock subjects (a case of tyrannicide) and some parts of the “Twice Accused Man.”[[215]] This last is a curious pot-pourri of satire on the different schools of philosophy, on the methods of the law courts, and on forensic eloquence. Rhetoric herself appears, besides an impersonation of Dialogue, both in the character of public prosecutors against “the Syrian.” Rhetoric states that he has deserted her for Dialogue, Dialogue that he has disgraced and shamed him by burlesque. Now Lucian, it is hardly necessary to say, was a Syrian, and had been a professional teacher of Rhetoric himself. The piece is chiefly parody, especially in the two speeches just mentioned, where Lucian displays that faculty of causing his characters to make themselves ridiculous, in which he has had no rival (except the authors of the Satire Menippée and Butler), to admiration. The reasons given by the “Syrian” for deserting Rhetoric are also very funny.
But the whole has only a partial connection with literature, and is even more concerned with the degradation of the Rhetorical profession than with Rhetoric herself. Incidentally, however, it shows the strong attraction of that subject, warped and mismanaged as it was, for persons with the literary interest in them. If Rhetoric could have seen herself as she ought to be—even as she is in Longinus—it is pretty certain that Lucian would not have said the hard things against her which here appear.
The “Master of the Rhetors” or Orators is in the common form of rhetorical treatises, the form of the Περὶ Ὕψους itself, that of an address to a young friend. This young friend had asked how a man might become a rhetor and a sophist, a position and title which he thought the noblest of all. Lucian has not the least objection to tell him, so let him listen. He shall climb the steep easily and rest on the heights, while others are tumbling down and cracking their crowns. Let there be no doubt about this. Poetry is a more difficult thing than rhetoric, and did not Hesiod master it by just plucking a few leaves from Helicon? Did not a merchant show Alexander a short cut from Persia to Egypt, only the unbelieving Macedonian would not listen? Lucian will be that merchant.
There are two ways to Rhetoric (see Cebes on another matter). One (to cut short the abundant and agreeable “chaff” of which, here as elsewhere, Lucian is so prodigal) is the long, troublesome, and ungrateful imitation of the mighty men of antiquity, of Plato and Demosthenes and the rest. The other, dealt with more copiously and more ironically still, is quite different. You learn a few fashionable catchwords for ordinary use, and some precious archaisms for occasional ornament; you must get rid of all bashfulness, dress yourself very well, cultivate the vices which happen to be in vogue, or at any rate pretend to them, and keep a good deal of company with women and servants, for both are babblesome and seldom at a loss. There is nothing hard in this and other precepts; and if you observe them, you will soon become a famous orator. Very good fun all of it, and very shrewd “criticism of life,” no doubt, but only distantly connected with criticism of literature.
Yet it requires no hazardous conjecture to discern a very considerable literary critic in Lucian, and to discover the |His critical limitations.| reason why that critic did not come out in himself or in his contemporaries, unless we are to rank the lonely and magnificent personality of Longinus among these. There was interesting literature in Lucian’s time—it is enough to mention the name of Apuleius to establish that proposition—but hardly any of it was exactly great, and the best of it was marred, either by the negative tendency which is one side of despair of greatness, or else by the hectic colours of decadence, or by the dubious struggles of new tendencies not yet quite ready to be born. Lucian himself (at any rate, after that youth of which we know so little) inclined, it is not necessary to say, to the negative side. He was distinctly deficient in enthusiasm (with which, perhaps, the critical artist can dispense as little as the creative), and had small feeling for poetry. His admiration for the great Attic prose writers, and its result in his own delightful style, are obvious enough; while the justice, if also the rigour, of his onslaughts on the characteristics most opposed to theirs, the characteristics of florid, “conceited,” neologistic prose and verse, cannot be denied. But the unsatisfactory negation of his religious and philosophical criticism extends also to his literary attitude. “Cannot you,” one feels inclined to say, “find something to say for as well as against luxuriance of fancy, wealth of colour, delicate suggestiveness of thought and phrase?” Cannot you, like Longinus, admit that Nature meant men to think and write magnificently of the magnificent? He could not, or he would not: his very interest in literature as literature seems to have been lukewarm. And so the greatest writer of all the later Greeks, a writer great enough to rank with all but the very greatest of the earlier, gives us very little but carping criticism of literature, and not much even of that.
It does not fall within the plan of this work to examine at any length the recently much-debated question whether the |Longinus: the difficulties raised.| treatise Περὶ Ὕψους is, as after its first publication by Robortello in 1554 it was for nearly three centuries unquestioningly taken to be, the work of the rhetorician Longinus, who was Queen Zenobia’s Prime Minister, and was put to death by Aurelian. It has been the mania of the nineteenth century to prove that everybody’s work was written by somebody else, and it will not be the most useless task of the twentieth to betake itself to more profitable inquiries. References which will enable any one who cares to investigate the matter are given in a note.[[216]] Here it may be sufficient to say two things. The first is, that these questions appertain for settlement, less to the technical expert than to the intelligent judex, the half-juryman, half-judge, who is generally acquainted with the rules of logic and the laws of evidence. The second is, that the verdict of the majority of such judices on this particular question is, until some entirely new documents turn up, likely to be couched in something like the following form:—
1. The positive evidence for the authorship of Longinus is very weak, consisting in MS. attributions, the oldest of which[[217]] is irresolute in form, while it certainly does not date earlier than the tenth century.