Not quite such a great one perhaps have we—yet one in the circumstances equally fascinating—in the contrasted remarks |Longinus on Homer.| on the Odyssey. Longinus is not himself impious; he is no Separatist (he is indeed far too good a critic to be that). But he will have the Romance of Ulysses to be “old age, though the old age of Homer.” “When a great nature is a little gone under, philomythia is characteristic of its decline.”[[229]] Evidently, he thinks, the Odyssey was Homer’s second subject, not his first. He is “a setting sun as mighty as ever, but less intense”: he is more unequal: he takes to the fabulous and the incredible. The Wine of Circe, the foodless voyage of Ulysses, the killing of the suitors—nay, the very attention paid to Character and Manners—tell the tale of decadence.
He is wrong, undoubtedly wrong—we may swear it boldly by those who fell in Lyonnesse, and in the palace of Atli, and under the echoes of the horn of Roland. The Odyssey is not less than the Iliad; it is different. But we can hardly quarrel with him for being wrong, because his error is so instructive, so interesting. We see in it first (even side by side with not a little innovation) that clinging to the great doctrines of old, to the skirts of Aristotle and of Plato, which is so often found in noble minds and so seldom in base ones. And we see, moreover, that far as he had advanced—near as he was to an actual peep over the verge of the old world and into the new—he was still a Greek himself at heart, with the foibles and limitations—no despicable foibles and limitations—of the race. Here is the instinctive unreasoning terror of the unknown Romance; the dislike of the vague and the fabulous; even that curious craze about Character being in some way inferior to Action, which we have seen before. By the time of Longinus—if he lived in the third century certainly, if he lived in the first probably—the romance did exist. But it was looked upon askance; it had no regular literary rank; and a sort of resentment was apparently felt at its daring to claim equality with the epic. Now the Odyssey is the first, and not far from the greatest, of romances. It has the Romantic Unity in the endurance and triumph of its hero. It has the Romantic Passion in the episodes of Circe and Calypso and others: above all, it has the great Romantic breadth, the free sweep of scene and subject, the variety, the contrast of fact and fancy, the sparkle and hurry and throb. But these things, to men trained in the admiration of the other Unity, the other Passion, the more formal, regulated, limited, measured detail and incident of the usual tragedy and the usual epic—were at best unfamiliar innovations, and at worst horrible and daring impieties. Longinus will not go this length: he cannot help seeing the beauty of the Odyssey. But he must reconcile his principles to his feelings by inventing a theory of decadence, for which, to speak frankly, there is no critical justification at all.
One may almost equally disagree with the special criticism which serves as setting to the great jewel among the quotations |On Sappho.| of the treatise, the so-called “Ode to Anactoria.” The charm of this wonderful piece consists, according to Longinus, in the skill with which Sappho chooses the accompanying emotions of “erotic mania.”[[230]] To which one may answer, “Hardly so,” but in the skill with which she expresses those emotions which she selects, and in the wonderful adaptation of the metre to the expression, in the mastery of the picture of the most favoured lover, drawing close and closer to the beloved to catch the sweet speech,[[231]] and the laughter full of desire. In saying this we should have the support of the Longinus of other parts of the treatise against the Longinus of this. Yet here, too, he is illuminative; here, too, the “noble error” of the Aristotelian conception of poetry distinguishes and acquits him.
With the remarks on αὔξησις, “amplification,” as it is traditionally but by no means satisfactorily rendered, another phase |“Amplification.”| of the critical disease of antiquity (which is no doubt balanced by other diseases in the modern critical body) may be thought to appear. Both in the definition of this figure and in the description of its method we may, not too suspiciously, detect evidences of that excessive technicality which gave to Rhetoric itself the exclusive title of techne. Auxesis, it seems, comes in when the business, or the point at issue, admits at its various stages of divers fresh starts and rests, of one great phrase being wheeled upon the stage after another, continually introduced in regular ascent.[[232]] This, it seems, can be done either by means of τοπηγορία, “handling of topoi or commonplaces,” or by δείνωσις, which may perhaps be best rendered tour de force, or by cunning successive disposition (ἐποικονομία) of facts or feelings. For, says he, there are ten thousand kinds of auxesis.
The first description of the method will recall to all comparative students of literature the manner of Burke, though it is not exactly identical with that manner; but the instances of means, besides being admittedly inadequate, savour, with their technicalities of terminology, much too strongly of the cut-and-dried manual. The third article, on a reasonable interpretation of ἐποικονομία, really includes all that need be said. But one sees here, as later, that even Longinus had not quite outgrown the notion that the teacher of Rhetoric was bound to present his student with a sort of hand-list of “tips” and dodges—with the kind of Cabbala wherewith the old-fashioned crammer used to supply his pupils for inscription on wristband or finger-nail. Yet he hastens to give a sign of grace by avowing his dissatisfaction with the usual Rhetorical view, and by distinguishing auxesis and the Sublime itself, in a manner which brings the former still nearer to Burke’s “winding into a subject like a serpent,” and which might have been more edifying still if one of the usual gaps did not occur. Part, at least, of the lost matter must have been occupied with a contrast or comparison between the methods of Plato and Demosthenes, the end of which we have, and which passes into one between Demosthenes and Cicero. “If we Greeks may be allowed to have an opinion,” says Longinus, with demure humility, “Demosthenes shall be compared to a flash of thunder and lightning, Cicero to an ordinary terrestrial conflagration,” which is very handsome to Cicero.
Then he returns to Plato, and rightly insists that much of his splendour is derived from imitation, or at least from emulation, of that very Homer whom he so often attacks. The great writers of the past are to be constantly before us, and we are not to be deterred from “letting ourselves go” by any mistaken sense of inferiority, or any dread of posterity’s verdict.
Then comes a digression of extreme importance on the subject of φαντασίαι or εἰδωλοποιΐαι—“images.” One of the points in which a history of the kind here attempted may |“Images.”| prove to be of most service, lies in the opportunity it affords of keeping the changes of certain terms, commonly used in criticism, more clearly before the mind than has always been done. And of these, none requires more care than “Images” and “Imagination.” At the first reading, the mere use of such a word as φαντασίαι may seem to make all over-scrupulousness unnecessary, though if we remember that even Fancy is not quite Imagination, the danger may be lessened. At any rate, it is nearly certain that no ancient writer,[[233]] and no modern critic before a very recent period (Shakespeare uses it rightly, but then he was Shakespeare and not a critic), attached our full sense to the term. To Aristotle φαντασία is merely αἴσθησις ἀσθενὴς, a “weakened sensation,” a copy furnished by memory from sensation itself. Even animals have it. No idea of Invention seems to have mingled with it, or only of such invention as the artist’s is when he faithfully represents natural objects. Of the Imagination, which is in our minds when we call Shelley an imaginative poet, and Pope not one, Sir Edward Burne Jones an imaginative painter, and any contemporary whom it may be least invidious to name not one, there does not seem to have been a trace even in the enthusiastic mind of Longinus, though he expressly includes Enthusiasm—nay, Passion—in his notion of it. You think you see what you say, and you make your hearers see it. Good; but Crabbe does that constantly, and one would hardly, save in the rarest cases, call Crabbe imaginative. In short, φαντασίαι here are vivid illustrations drawn from nature—Orestes’ hallucination of the Eumenides, Euripides’ picture of Phaethon, that in the Seven of the slaying of the bull over the black-bound shield, and many others. No doubt he glances at the fabulous and incredible, the actually “imagined”; but he seems, as in the case of the Odyssey, to be a little doubtful of these even in poetry, while in oratory he bars them altogether. You must at one and the same time reason and illustrate—again the very method of Burke.
In the rest of the illustrations of the use of Figures—for the central part of the treatise expressly disclaims being a formal |The Figures.| discussion of these idols—the positive literary criticisms scattered in them—the actual “reviewing”—will give most of the interest. The great Oath of Demosthenes, “By those who fell at Marathon!” with its possible suggestion by a passage of Eupolis, supplies a whole chapter and part of another. And now we find the curious expression (showing how even Longinus was juggled by terms) that Figures “fight on the side of the Sublime, and in turn draw a wonderful reinforcement from it,” wherein a mighty if vague reality like the Sublime, and mere shadows (though neatly cut-out shadows) like the Figures, are most quaintly yoked together.
Though still harassed by gaps, we find plenty of good pasture in the remarks, the handling of Periphrasis being especially attractive. For the eighteenth century—the time which honoured Longinus most in theory, and went against him most in practice—undoubtedly took part of his advice as to this figure. It had no doubt that Periphrasis contributed to the Sublime, was ὑψηλοποιόν: unluckily it paid less attention to his subsequent caution, that it is a risky affair, and that it smells of triviality.[[234]] In fact, it is extremely noticeable that in the examples of Periphrasis which he praises we should hardly apply that name to it, but should call it “Allusion” or “Metaphor,” while the examples that he condemns are actually of the character of Armstrong’s “gelid cistern” and Delille’s “game which Palamede invented.”
At no time perhaps has the tricksy, if not (as one is almost driven to suspect) deliberately malignant, mutilator played such a trick as in abstracting four leaves from the MS. between caps. xxx. and xxxi. Here Longinus has begun to speak of diction generally; here he has made that admirable descant on “beautiful words” which, though almost all the book deserves to be written in letters of gold, would tempt one to indulge here in precious stones, so as to mimic, in jacinth and sapphire and chrysoprase, the effect which it celebrates. When we are permitted another glimpse we are back in particular criticism, interesting but less valuable save indirectly, and in criticisms, too, of Cæcilius, criticisms which we could do without. No great good can ever come of inquiries, at least general inquiries, into the permissible number and the permissible strength of Metaphors. Once more we may fall back on the Master, though perhaps rather in opposition to some of the Master’s dicta in this very field. “As the intelligent man shall decide” is the decision here, and the intelligent man will never decide till the case is before him. One bad metaphor is too much: twenty good ones are not too many. Nor is “the multitudinous seas incarnadine” an “excess,” though no doubt there have been bad critics who thought so.