Longinus himself, though he had not had the happiness to read Macbeth, was clearly not far out of agreement with the |“Faultlessness.”| concluding sentiment of the last paragraph, and he makes this certain by the disquisition on Faultlessness which follows. As a general question this is probably, for the present time at any rate, past argument, not so much because the possibility of a “faultless” great poem is denied, as because under the leaden rule of the best modern criticism—leaden not from dulness but from adaptability—few things are recognised as “faults” in se and per se. A pun may be a gross fault in one place and a grace beyond the reach of art in another: an aposiopesis may be either a proof of clumsy inequality to the situation or a stroke of genius. But the declaration of Longinus that he is not on the side of Faultlessness[[235]] is of infinitely greater importance than any such declaration from an equally great critic (“Where is he? Show him to me,” as Rabelais would say) could possess to-day. The general Greek theory undoubtedly did make for excessive severity to faultfulness, just as our general theory makes perhaps for undue leniency to it. That Longinus could withstand this tendency—could point out the faults of the faultless—was a very great thing.
As always, too, his individual remarks frequently give us, not merely the satisfaction of agreement, but that of piquant difference or curiosity. We may agree with him about Bacchylides and Pindar—though, by the way, the man who had the taste and the courage to admire a girl as χλωραύχενα—as possessing that yellow ivory tint of skin which lights so magnificently[[236]]—was certainly one to dare to challenge convention with what its lilies-and-roses standard must have thought a “fault.” But we cannot help astonishment at being told that both Pindar and Sophocles “often have their light quenched without any obvious reason, and stumble in the most unfortunate manner.”[[237]] For those of us who are less, as well as those who are more, enthusiastic about Sophocles would probably agree in asking, “Where does he ‘go out in snuff,’ where does he ‘fall prostrate’ in this fashion?” Surely all the faults cannot be in the lost plays! We want a rather fuller text of Hyperides than we possess to enable us quite to appreciate the justice of the comparison of him with Demosthenes, but that justice is striking even on what we have. On the other hand, we are rather thrown out by the contrast of Plato and Lysias—it may be owing to the same cause. Even if the comparison were one of style only, we should think it odd to make one between Burke and Berkeley, though the Sublime and Beautiful would help us a little here.
But all this is a digression,[[238]] and the author seems to have |Hyperboles.| returned to his Metaphors (in a gap where the demon has interfered with less malice than usual), and to Hyperboles, under the head of which we get a useful touch of contempt for Isocrates.[[239]] We are in deeper and more living waters when we come to the handling, alas! too brief (though nothing seems here to be lost), of ordonnance, “composition,” selection and arrangement of words. Here is yet another of those great law-making phrases which are the charter of a new criticism. “Harmony is to men not only physically connected with persuasion and pleasure, but a wonderful instrument of magniloquence and passion.” It may be difficult for us, with our very slight knowledge (it would, perhaps, be wiser to say almost absolute ignorance) of Greek pronunciation, to appreciate his illustrations here in detail. But we can appreciate the principle of them exactly, and apply that principle, |“Harmony.”| in any language of which we do know the pronunciation, with perfect ease and the completest success. The silly critics (they exist at the present day) who pooh-pooh, as niceties and fiddle-faddle, the order of words, the application of rhythmical tests to prose, and the like, are answered here beforehand with convincing force by a critic whom no one can possibly charge with preferring sound to sense.
This refers to prose, but the following chapter carries out the same principle as to poetry with equal acuteness. Longinus, great as his name is, probably is but little in the hands of those who object (sometimes almost with foam at the mouth) to the practice of analysing the mere harmonic effect of poetry. But it is pleasant to think of these passages when one reads the outcries, nor is the pleasantness rendered less pleasant by the subsequent cautions against that over-rhythmical fashion of writing which falls to the level of mere dance-music.
The caution against over-conciseness and over-prolixity is rather more of a matter of course, and the strictures on the μικρότης, occasionally to be found in Herodotus, like some in the earlier parts of the treatise, sometimes elude us, as is the case with similar verbal criticisms even in languages with which we are colloquially familiar.
And then there is the curious Conclusion which, as we have said, is no conclusion at all, as it would seem, and which yet has |The Conclusion.| an unmistakable air of “peroration, with [much] circumstance,” on the everlasting question, “Why is the Sublime so rare in our time?” In that day, as in this, we learn (the fact being, as in King Charles II.'s fish-experiment, taken for granted), divers explanations, chiefly political, were given for the fact. Democracy was a good nurse of greatness: aristocracy was not. But Longinus did not agree. It was money-getting and money-seeking, pleasure-loving and pleasure-hunting, he thought. Plain living and high thinking must be returned to if the Heights were to be once more scaled. A noble conclusion, if perhaps only a generous fallacy. Had Longinus had our illegitimate prerogative-postrogative of experience, he would have known that the blowing of the wind of the spirit admits of no such explanations as these. Ages of Liberty and Ages of Servitude, Ages of Luxury and Ages of Simplicity, Ages of Faith and Ages of Freethought—all give us the Sublime if the right man is there: none will give it us if he is not. But our critic had not the full premisses before him, and we could not expect the adequate conclusion.
Yet how great a book have we here! Of the partly otiose disputes about its date and origin and authorship one or two things are worth recalling, though for other purposes than those of the disputants. Let it be remembered that it is not quoted, or even referred to, by a single writer of antiquity.[[240]] There is absolutely no evidence for it, except its own internal character, before the date of its oldest manuscript, which is assigned to the tenth century. Even if, assuming it to be the work of Longinus, we suppose it to have been part of one of the works which are ascribed to him (a possible assumption, see note), there is still the absence of quotation, still the absence even of reference to views so clearly formulated, so eloquently enforced, and in some ways so remarkably different from those of the usual Greek and Roman rhetorician. That the book can be of very late date—much later, that is to say, than that of Longinus himself—is almost impossible. One of its features, the lack of any reference to even a single writer later than the first century, has indeed been relied upon to prove that it is not later itself than that date. This is inconclusive for that purpose. But it makes every succeeding century less and less probable, while the style, though in some respects peculiar, is not in the least Byzantine.
This detachment from any particular age—nay, more, this vita fallens, this unrecognised existence of a book so remarkable—stands in no merely fanciful relation to the characteristics of the book itself. It abides alone in thought as well as in history. That it is a genuine, if a late, production of the classical or semi-classical age we cannot reasonably doubt, for a multitude of reasons, small in themselves but strong in a bundle,—its style, its diction, its limitations of material, and even occasionally of literary view, its standards, all sorts of little touches like the remark about Cicero, and so forth. Yet it has, in the most important points, almost more difference from than resemblance to the views of classical critics generally. The much greater antiquity of Aristotle may be thought to make comparison with him infructuous, if not unfair. But we have seen already how far Longinus is from Dionysius, how much further from Plutarch; and we shall see in the next Book how far he is from Quintilian. Let us look where we will, to critics by profession or to critics by chance, to the Alexandrians as far as we know them, to the professional writers on Rhetoric, to Aristophanes earlier and Lucian later, always we see Longinus apart—among them by dispensation and time, but not of them by tone, by tendency, by temper.
For though he himself was almost certainly unconscious of it, and might even have denied the fact with some warmth if it had |Modernity of the treatise,|. been put to him, Longinus has marked out grounds of criticism very far from those of the ancient period generally, further still from those which were occupied by any critic (except Dante) of the Middle Ages and the Classical revival, and close to, if not in all cases overlapping the territory of, the modern Romantic criticism itself. As we have seen, the ancient critic was wont either to neglect the effect of a work of art altogether, and to judge it by its supposed agreement with certain antecedent requirements, or else, if effects were considered at all, to consider them from the merely practical point of view, as in the supposed persuasive effect of Rhetoric, or from the ethical, as in the purging, the elevating, and so forth, assigned to Tragedy, and to Poetry generally. Longinus has changed all this. It is the enjoyment, the transport, the carrying away of the reader or auditor, that, whether expressedly or not, is always at bottom the chief consideration with him. He has not lowered the ethical standard one jot, but he has silently refused to give it precedence of the æsthetic; he is in no way for lawlessness, but he makes it clear, again and again, that mere compliance with law, mere fulfilment of the requirements of the stop-watch and the hundredth-of-an-inch rule, will not suffice. Aristotle had been forced, equally by his system and his sense, to admit that pleasure was an end—perhaps the end—of art; but he blenches and swerves from the consequences. Longinus faces them and follows them out.
In his attention to rhythm, especially of prose, Longinus is much less unique, for this point (as we have seen and shall see) was never neglected by the best ancient critics. But there is again something particularly distinguishing in his attempt to trace the sources of the literary pleasure in specimen passages. The ancient tendency is, though not universally, yet too generally, the other way, to select specimen passages merely as illustrations of general rules.