And this brings us to his greatest claim of all—that is to say, his attitude towards his subject as a whole. Although he nowhere |or rather sempiternity.| says as much in so many words, no one can read his book with attention—above all, no one can read it again and again critically—without seeing that to him literature was not a schedule of forms, departments, kinds, with candidates presenting themselves for the critic to admit them to one or the other, on and during their good behaviour; but a body of matter to be examined according to its fruits, according to its provision of the literary pleasure. When it has been examined it is still for the critic to explain and justify (according to those unwritten laws which govern him) his decision that this was good, this not so good, this bad,—to point out the reasons of success and failure, to arrange the symptoms, classify the methods, and so forth. Where Longinus fell short it was almost always because ancient literature had not provided him with enough material of certain kinds, not because he ruled these kinds out a priori. Longinus was no Rymer. We could submit even Shakespeare to him with very little fear, and be perfectly certain that he would not, with Rapin, pronounce Dantes Aligerus wanting in fire.[[241]] Nay, with a sufficient body of material to set before him, we could trust him with very much more dangerous cases than Shakespeare and Dantes Aligerus.
Yet, as we have said, he stands alone. We must skip fifteen hundred years and come to Coleridge before we meet any critic entirely of his class, yet free from some of his limitations. The hand of the author of the Περὶ Ὕψους is not subdued, but raised to what he deals in. And his work remains towering among all other work of the class, the work of a critic at once Promethean and Epimethean in his kind, learning by the mistakes of all that had gone before, and presaging, with instinctive genius, much that was not to come for centuries after.
[186]. 6 vols., Leipsic, 1775-77. The first four contain the historical, the two last the rhetorical work. A pamphlet edition of rhetorical fragments, by C. T. Rössler (Leipsic, 1873), may be usefully bound in with this. But Usener’s still more recent edition of the so-called περὶ μιμήσεως and the Epistles of Ammæus and Pompey (Bonn, 1889) is of great importance for its remarks on Dionysius and Quintilian, and for other animadversions.
[187]. See infra, bk. ii. p. 304 sq.
[188]. See also the amended text in Bergk’s Lyrici Græci, i. 392-395.
[189]. ἴδετ’ ἐν χορὸν Ὀλύμπιοι. Some MSS. read δεῦτ’, which appears in Reiske. The comment requires a verb: but perhaps Dionysius might have regarded δεῦτε as such.
[190]. ἀρχαικὸν δέ τι καὶ αὔθαδες κάλλος.
[191]. See on this point Usener (op. cit.), who would rather suppose a common indebtedness. The “censures” form the bulk of the fragments which he has published as περὶ μιμήσεως. Perhaps the best examples of really illuminative critical phrase in them are the “pugnacious roughness,” ἀγωνιστικὴ τραχύτης, ascribed to Antimachus, and the “combination of magnificence and terseness,” μεγαλοφυὲς καὶ βραχύ, to Alcæus. Of the shorter fragments the summary of the requirements of art as “a happy nature, exact study, and laborious practice” is good if not astonishing.
[192]. Petronius found that it did!