Ephemera Critica; Or, Plain Truths About Current Literature

by John Churton Collins

We welcome with joy the advent of Professor Butcher among these prophets. Few names stand higher than his in the roll of modern scholars, and assuredly few modern scholars possess, in so large a measure, the power of applying scholarship to the purposes of liberal criticism and exegesis. He has written a delightful book, in a pleasant style, full of learning, suggestive, stimulating, a book which no student of Greek literature can lay down without a hearty feeling of gratitude to the author. Porson said of Bentley that more might be learned from his work when he was in error than from the work of a rival scholar when he was in the right. We shall not presume to accuse Professor Butcher of error, but we are bound to say that there is much in his book which appears to us very questionable, and much also from which we entirely dissent.

Professor Butcher discusses, for example, at great length, the leading characteristics of the Greek temper, but, in drawing his conclusions, he has not sufficiently distinguished between what was more or less accidental and what was essentially peculiar. The fact is that nothing is so easy as generalisations of this kind, if the deduction of half truth be our aim; and nothing so difficult if whole truth, or truth which may be accepted without reserve, is to be the result. The most mobile, plastic, Protean people who have ever lived, their activity, within the strict limits of classical literature, extended over about six centuries, and, if we protract it to the point included in Professor Butcher's illustrations, to more than nine centuries. Of their literature, though we appear to have the best of it, not a third part has survived. By an adroit use of illustration, it is, therefore, easy to predicate anything of them. Go to serious epic, to serious as distinguished from passionate lyric, to tragedy, to threnody, and they were, if you please, the gravest people on earth's face; go to Aristophanes and to the poets of the Old Comedy, and they were the merriest; go to the Ionic Elegists and to the fragments of the New Comedy, and they were the saddest and most cynical; go to Thucydides, Plato, and Aristotle, and they were, like Dante's sages, ni tristi ni lieti. We do not quarrel with Professor Butcher's general position in his Essay on the melancholy of the Greeks, or question that there existed in certain moods a profound melancholy and dissatisfaction with life in the Greek temper. But of what intelligent and reflective people or individual who have ever existed is this not equally true? Where we do quarrel with Professor Butcher is on the following point, the point on which he chiefly rests in proving that the Greeks were pre-eminently distinguished by pessimistic melancholy—an assertion that we deny in toto. He tells us that, with one notable exception, to which he subsequently adds three others, the Greeks regarded hope not as a solace and support in life, but as a snare and a delusion, not as a power to cling to, but as an influence fraught with mischief. Nothing surely can be more erroneous. The wisest people who have ever lived are not likely to have confounded baseless and flighty desires or aspirations with what is implied in hope, though Professor Butcher has done so in the illustrations advanced by him in support of his theory. All through Greek literature, from Hesiod to Theocritus—not to go further—the importance and wisdom of cherishing hope, as one of the chief supports of life, are emphatically dwelt on. Professor Butcher has surely misrepresented—certainly Æschylus and the Greeks generally did not interpret it in the sense in which he has done—the fable of Pandora's chest. It was not "as part of the deadly gift of the goddess" that hope was there; it was as the one blessing amid the crowd of ills. "As long as a man lives," says Theognis, "let him wait on hope.... Let him pray to the gods; and to Hope let him sacrifice first and last" (1143-1146). Pindar, if he warns man against baseless, wild, or extravagant expectation, is emphatic on the wisdom of cherishing hope. It is "the sweet nurse of the heart in old age," "the chief helmsman of man's versatile will." (Fragment, 233.) "A man should cherish good hope." (Isth., vii. 15.) "It is the wing on which soaring manhood is supported." (Pythian, viii. 93.) "The wise," says Euripides, "must cherish hope." (Frag. of Ino.) Again: "Prudent hope must be your stay in misfortune." (Id.) Life, he says in the Troades (628), is preferable to death, in that it has hopes. A sentiment repeated by Euripides again in the Hercules Furens (105-6): "That man is the bravest who trusts to hope under all circumstances; to be without hope is the part of a coward." So Menander: "Hold before yourself the shield of good hope." (Incert. Frag. xlvii.) The passages quoted by Professor Butcher from Thucydides are not to the point. It would have been much more to the point had he quoted the passage in which Pericles eulogizes those who "committed to hope the uncertainty of success" (II. 42), or the passage (I. 70) in which the superiority of the Athenians to the Lacedæmonians in civil and military efficiency is largely attributed to their reliance on hope. Again, what, according to Cephalus, in the Republic, is the chief solace of old age?—"The abiding presence of sweet hope." But it would be easy to multiply indefinitely from the Greek classics what Professor Butcher calls "rare examples of hope in the happier aspect."

The most important chapters in Professor Butcher's work—indeed they occupy nearly one half of it—are those dealing with Aristotle's theory of fine art and poetry. On no subject in criticism have there been so many misconceptions current and influential even among scholars, originating for the most part from mistranslations and misunderstandings of the treatise in which they find their chief embodiment—the Poetics. This has unfortunately come down to us in a very imperfect and corrupt state, and, what is more unfortunate still, it became a classic in criticism long before it was properly understood. Thus, in the clause in the famous definition of tragedy, where Aristotle describes it as δι' ελεου και φοβου περαινουσα την των τοιουτων παθηματων καθαρσιν, "through pity and fear effecting the purgation of these emotions," the French and English critics of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, ignoring the words των τοιουτων, have totally misinterpreted the passage, and given it a meaning which was not only not intended by Aristotle, but which has falsified his whole theory of the scope and functions of tragedy. An unsound text, the insertion of αλλα before the clause, sent Lessing on a wrong track. From the misinterpretation of another passage in the treatise (V. 4) has been deduced the famous doctrine of the Unities. The mistranslation of σπουδαιος in the definition of Tragedy, and of the same word in the comparison between Poetry and History, has led to misconceptions on other points. The scholars who did most in England to place the study of this treatise on a sound footing were Twining and Tyrwhitt. In the present century it has received exhaustive illustration from Saint-Hilaire, Stahr, Susemihl, Vahlen, Teichmüller, Ueberweg, Reinkens, Jacob Bernays, and others; while such works as E. Müller's Geschichte der Theorie der Kunst bei den Alten have thrown general light on the question of Greek æsthetics. That Professor Butcher has not been able to advance anything new in these essays is very creditable to him, for the simple reason that, as all that is worth saying has been said, his sole resource, had he attempted to be original, would have been paradox and sophistry. With regard to the question of the Katharsis, it will probably be, for all time, a case of "quot homines tot sententiæ"; and we have certainly no intention of accompanying Professor Butcher into this labyrinth. We entirely agree with him and Bernays that the passage in the Politics (V. viii. 7) settles conclusively at least one part of the meaning, but we differ from Bernays, in contending that the "lustratio" is included, and from Professor Butcher, in contending that the "lustratio" is not effected merely by the relief. Professor Butcher seems here indeed to be a little confused, or at all events confusing. He first explains "katharsis" as "a purging away of the emotions of pity and fear," and then explains it as "a purifying of them"; but it is neither easy to understand how "purging away" is "purifying," nor why we should "purify" what we "purge away." Surely it is better—but we speak with all submission—to take the word in two different meanings, the one signifying the immediate effect of tragedy in its direct appeal to the passions referred to, the other not to its immediate, but to its ulterior and total effect in educating the passions thus excited.

Professor Butcher, who appears to belong to the Pater School, dwells with great complacency on the fact that Aristotle "attempted to separate the function of æsthetics from that of morals," that "he made the end of art reside in a pleasurable emotion," that he says "nothing of any moral aim in poetry," and that though he often takes exception to Euripides as an artist, "he attaches no blame to him for the immoral tendency in some of his dramas," so severely censured by Aristophanes. If Professor Butcher implies, as he seems to imply by this, that Aristotle would lend any countenance to the modern art-for-art's-sake doctrine, and proceeded on the assumption that there was no necessary connection between æsthetics and morals, he does Aristotle very great injustice, and is refuted by the Poetics themselves. In the fifth chapter Aristotle lays stress on the fact that tragedy is, like epic, a representation of "superior or morally good characters" (μιμησις σπουδαιων)—that the characters are to be good (χρηστα). In the twenty-fifth chapter he says that nothing can excuse the exhibition of moral depravity (μοχθηρια), unless it be one of the things implicit in the plot; and that among the most serious objections which can be brought against a drama is that it is likely to do moral harm (βλαβερα). In the thirteenth chapter he shows,—and on moral grounds,—why the protagonist in a tragedy should not be a perfectly good man or a perfectly bad man. Indeed, the very definition of tragedy refutes Professor Butcher's statement. It may be said, no doubt, that Aristotle maintains that the end of poetry is pleasure, but it must be "the proper pleasure," and in the proper pleasure moral satisfaction is implied.[36] It is only by a quibble that Professor Butcher's theory can be supported, and it is a pity to quibble on subjects which may be so mischievously misunderstood. Aristotle was, we suspect, very much nearer to Ben Jonson and Milton than to Mr. Pater in his conception of the functions and scope of poetry.

In the interesting essay on Sophocles there are two statements which appear to us very questionable. It is surely not true to say that Sophocles was "the first of the Greeks who has clearly realized that suffering is not always penal." Who could have expressed this truth more forcibly than Æschylus? To say nothing of the well-known passage in the Agamemnon, 167-171:—

Ζηνα ...

τον φρονειν βροτους ὁδωσαντα, τον παθει μαθος

θεντα κυριως εχειν.

σταζει δ' εν θ' ὑπνω προ καρδιας

μνησιπημων πονος, και παρ' ακοντας ηλθε σωφρονειν,—