[271]. Vol. vi. p. 5 sq.
[272]. Apparently this poet, “by taking pains, changed an unhappily gifted nature into exactness and blamelessness.”
[273]. ἄντικρυς.
[274]. Besides citing the Orithyia passage John also refers to Longinus as admiring Moses (Walz, vi. 211), which, of course, strengthens the supposition that he had the Περὶ Ὕψους before him not a little (v. supra, pp. [156], [162]).
INTERCHAPTER I.
We have endeavoured, in the foregoing Book, to survey—from the actual texts, and admitting no conjectural or theoretical reconstruction—the history of literary criticism in Greece and the Greek Empire till its fall. It is our duty in this first halt to survey this survey—to see what results it actually gives us, to classify and arrange them, to account for them as philosophically as possible, and, without digressing into the quicksands of theory, to lay down the solid road of logical and historical perspective.
We have seen that criticism in Greece began from two different sources, neither of which, perhaps, was, or could have been expected to be, likely to supply it in an absolutely unmixed condition. There was, in the first place, the strong Greek philosophising tendency, working upon the earliest documents (the most important, then as now, identified with the name of Homer), and subjecting them to processes which oftenest took the form of a kind of rationalising allegory. The second was the invention, for more or less practical purposes, of the art of Rhetoric or Persuasive Composition. As, in the first place, the collection of written literature was very small, and as the oratorical character impressed itself more or less strongly upon nearly all literature in the process of publication, this dominance of Oratory was long maintained, and continued, almost to the latest times, to prevent Rhetoric from assuming its proper etymological position as “speech-craft” in the widest sense, as the art of artificially arranged language.
But this inconvenience, always more or less existing, was mitigated by practice in divers ways. As actual literature, both prose and verse, mustered and multiplied, and as it was more and more enjoyed by the keen Greek appetite for pleasures of all kinds, it at the same time presented more and more temptation to the equally keen Greek aptitude for philosophical inquiry. Larger and larger treasuries were made available for quotation and imitation; more and more kinds of literature were presented to the student for investigation, classification, inquiry into sources, methods, effects. And so after a century, or a century and a half, of progress and exercise, of which little remains to us except the brilliant, but from this point of view wayward, work of Plato, we are confronted, in the work of Aristotle, with an Art of Poetry, incomplete in certain ways, but singularly mature in its own way, with an Art of Prose which, though it has not yet by any means recognised its real nature and estate, and persists in regarding itself as an Art of Persuasion merely, has yet accumulated many valuable observations, and has made the paths of future investigators fairly straight and smooth.
While, however, the oratorical preoccupation prevented Rhetoric from attaining the development which might otherwise have been expected, both Rhetoric and Poetics were very seriously obstructed by the unequal growth of literary kinds within Greek itself, and by the absence of any other literature with which to compare such kinds as existed, and by which to discern the absence of those that did not exist. The whole of Greek Poetic was prejudicially affected—and the affection has continued to be a source of evil in all criticism since—by the accidental lateness of prose fiction in Greek literature; just as the whole of Greek Rhetoric was prejudicially affected by the accidental predominance of Greek oratory. The habit—in the main a sound one—of generalising from the actual facts, led to very arbitrary theories of more literary kinds than one. It was assumed that what we may call “periodic” Epic was the only kind; and Romance, which may be very fairly called a “loose” Epic, was barred as improper. Still more was the same distinction ignored in drama; where a single, though in its way very perfect, form of Tragedy was arbitrarily assumed to be the only one possible or permissible. So the accidental and easily separable extravagances and licences of the Ancient Comedy were allowed to obscure its merits, and depress its rank, in the eyes of the critic. Lyric—perhaps the very highest of all literary kinds, as it must be the oldest, and is the most perennial—became a mere appendage to tragedy. The great kind of History, in which Greece had already produced such magnificent examples, was in the same way regarded as a sort of baggage-waggon to oratorical Rhetoric; and the dialogic form which was preferred in philosophy, partly owing to the habits of the nation, and partly owing to the towering eminence of Plato, was in the same way, or much the same way, allowed or forced to attach itself to the same train.
But these mischiefs, though sufficiently considerable, and assisted by the ignorance (changed latterly in the worse days to a contemptuous ignoring) of other languages, were by no means the equals of those caused directly by this ignorance, while they were aggravated by it in every way. If, while we are certainly not superior to the ancients in most branches of literature, where comparison is possible, we may challenge them more safely in criticism, it is due almost, if not quite wholly, to what has been called the illegitimate advantage of our possession of an infinitely larger stock of accumulated literature, and of the fact that this literature is distributed over the most various times, nations, and languages. It is the rarest thing at any time to find a critic of the first class who is not acquainted with literatures besides his own; and it is almost invariable to find that the mistakes which great critics make arise out of ignorance or forgetfulness of other literatures besides their own. But even in antiquity there is no critic of, or approaching, this first class, except Aristotle, who suffered the full exposure to this disability. As a “tongue of comparison” Longinus knew Latin: Dionysius and Quintilian, who, if not critics of the first class, are not far off it, knew, the one Latin, the other Greek. But Aristotle (unless the legends about Alexander having sent him Indian communications have any basis, and unless we take the references of Plato and others to Egyptian stories as having much more solid ground than there is any reason to accord them) had none, and could have had none: while, even if he had been stocked with Egyptian and Sanscrit, these would have done him but little good, though they might have corrected his delusions as to the necessary connection of poetry and fiction. It must always be reckoned as one of the most fatal proofs of the literary inferiority of the Roman genius that the younger literature, though it enjoyed the bilingual advantage to the full, made so little advance on the older in criticism.