Part 16

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,--

the doctrine of which is repeated in 241-2 of the same play, and in other passages in his dramas, notably in _Choephoroe_, 950-955, and in _Eumenides_, 495, συμφερει σωφρονειν ὑπο στενει. The fact that suffering and calamity have resulted in blessing is emphasized as strongly in the concluding drama of the Orestean Trilogy, the _Eumenides_, as it is in the _Œdipus Coloneus_. Again, when Professor Butcher says that “in Sophocles the divine righteousness asserts itself not in the award of happiness or misery to the individual, but in the providential wisdom which assigns to each individual his place and function in a universal moral order,” he says what it is very difficult to understand. Surely in the case of each one of the protagonists in Sophocles, to employ the word in its non-technical sense, their deserts are very exactly meted out. Antigone deliberately courts her fate by setting the law at defiance, though she knew what the penalty was, and falls, but has her compensation in the applause of her own conscience and “in the faith that looks through death.” Ajax paid the penalty, as the poet emphasizes, for brutality and impious insolence; Œdipus suffers for his impetuosity and intemperance, but, his punishment exceeding the offence, the balance is adjusted for him in final triumph over the sons who had wronged him, in procuring blessings for his protector, in the peace of the soul, and in a glorious death. Clytemnestra and Ægisthus well deserve their fate, as, in addition to committing their crime, they continue ostentatiously to glory in it. In the _Trachiniæ_ Hercules is punished for a base and cowardly murder, followed by an act of cruel and indiscriminate vengeance, retribution coming on him through the sister of the man thus murdered, and the daughter of the prince on whom this iniquitous vengeance had been wreaked, as Deianeira, but for Iole, would not have sent the poisoned tunic. Sophocles has even altered the legend to emphasize the guilt of Hercules. The _Philoctetes_, indeed, is the only play which lends any support to Professor Butcher’s statement. Here the gods undoubtedly condemn a man to a life of torture that their designs, irrespective of the individual, may be fulfilled, and that Troy may not fall before the appointed time; but how fully, how nobly is he compensated! It seems to us that the award of happiness and misery to the individual, in accordance with desert, is as conspicuous in the ethics of Sophocles as it is in the ethics of Shakespeare. And it is the more conspicuous, when we remember the hampering conditions under which Sophocles had to work, the limitations conventionally imposed on the treatment of the legends.

We wish we had space to comment on Professor Butcher’s admirable, though somewhat defective, chapter on the dawn of Romanticism in Greek poetry, but we must forbear, and repeat our thanks to him for a book full of interest and instruction, not the least of its charms being the lively and graceful style in which it is written.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 35: This blow has, since these words were written, been inflicted. See _supra_ pp. 45-75.]

[Footnote 36: So he says, _Poet._, xxvi., of epic and tragedy, that each ought not to produce any chance pleasure, but the pleasure proper to it (δει γαρ ου την τυχουσαν ἡδονην ποιειν αυτας αλλα την ειρημενην, _i.e._ οικειαν).]

THE PRINCIPLES OF CRITICISM[37]

[Footnote 37: _The Principles of Criticism. An Introduction to the Study of Literature._ By W. Basil Worsfold. London: Allen.]

Bishop Warburton said that there were two things which every man thought himself competent to do, to manage a small farm and to drive a whisky. Had Warburton lived in our time, he would probably have added a third--to set up for a critic. What the author of the best critical treatise in the Greek language pronounced to be the final fruit of long experience, culture, and study, directed and illumined by certain natural qualifications, has now come to be represented by the idle and irresponsible gossip of any one who can gossip agreeably. Agreeable gossip and good criticism are, as Sainte-Beuve and others have shown, far from being incompatible, the misfortune is that they should be confounded; but confounded they are, and the confusion is the curse of current literature. We have recently observed, with concern, that the rubbish which used formerly to be shot into novels and poems is now being shot into criticism, and that there appears to be a growing impression that the accomplishments which qualify young men for spinning cobwebs in fiction and manufacturing versicles can, with a little management, serve to set them up as critics. There is not much more difficulty in forming an opinion about a book than there is in reading it, and as criticism in the hands of these fribbles becomes little more than the dithyrambic expression of that opinion, the profession of criticism is one in which it is delightfully easy to graduate. It requires neither learning nor knowledge, neither culture nor discipline. It is neither science nor art; it is the gift of nature, a sort of “lyric inspiration.” With principles, with touchstones, with standards, it has nothing whatever to do. Its business is to declaim, to coin phrases, to juggle with fancies and to say “good things.”

A writer, therefore, who tries to recall criticism to a sense of its responsibilities and true functions deserves all sympathy and encouragement. It is refreshing to turn from the sort of thing to which we have referred to such a work as Mr. Worsfold has given us. His design is “to present an account of the main principles of literary criticism,” which he professes to trace from Plato to Matthew Arnold. Mr. Worsfold’s thesis simply stated is that criticism--and he deals with criticism chiefly in its application to poetry--has passed successively through five stages. With the Greeks it concerned itself principally with form. “The first question it asked with them was not, as with us, What is the thought? but What is the form?” By Addison--for here Mr. Worsfold makes a prodigious leap over some twenty centuries--it was furnished with a new test, and it asked, How does a given poem affect the imagination? By Lessing a return was made to the formal criticism of the ancients, but he adopted also Addison’s criterion, and added definiteness to it. Victor Cousin followed in 1818 with his lectures, entitled, _Du Vrai, du Beau, et du Bien_, and enlarged the boundaries of the science by a complete theory of beauty and art, developed mainly out of Plato. Lastly came Matthew Arnold, who extended the realm still further, by the addition of certain other important touchstones of poetic excellence. At the present time a gradual limitation of the scope of its rules, and a gradual extension of the scope of its principles, are the tendencies most discernible in criticism. “An enlightened criticism no longer aims at directing the artist by formulating rules which, if they were valid, would only tend to obliterate the distinction between the fine and the technical arts. It allows him to work by whatever methods he may choose, and it is content to estimate his merit not by reference to his method but by reference to his achievement, as measured by principles of universal validity.”

All this is exceedingly ingenious, and has in it a measure of truth, but, like most generalisations on vast and complicated subjects, it is more plausible than sound. The stages in the progress of criticism are not so sharply defined as Mr. Worsfold would have us believe. If Greek criticism were represented only by Plato and the extant works of Aristotle, English by Addison and Matthew Arnold, German by Lessing, and French by Victor Cousin, what Mr. Worsfold postulates might, after a manner, pass muster. But by far the greater portion of Greek criticism has perished; it exists only in fragments, and to the most important and remarkable work on this subject which has come down to us from antiquity, the _Treatise on the Sublime_, Mr. Worsfold does not even refer. If he had done so, and had he considered what is scattered fragmentarily through the Greek writers, or may be gathered from the titles of treatises which are lost, he would have seen that much which he supposes to mark development in criticism has long been old. Innumerable passages in the minor Greek critics, in Plutarch and in the Scholia, especially if we add what is to be found in Roman writers, derived no doubt from Greek sources, amply warrant doubt whether, after all, it is not with criticism as it is, to use Goethe’s expression, with wit, “Alles Gescheidte ist schon gedacht worden, man muss nur versuchen, es noch einmal zu denken.” At all events, it is a great mistake to suppose that Greek criticism, in its application to poetry, is represented by Plato and Aristotle. It would be almost as absurd to go to Plato for typical Greek criticism on poetry as it would be to go to Henry More or the Puritan Divines for typical English criticism. He approached it only as such a philosopher would be likely to approach it. He regarded art and letters generally simply as means of educational discipline and culture, or as mere playthings, of which the best to be expected was harmless pleasure. He despised poetry not only as an appeal, and a perturbing appeal, to the senses and the passions, but as representing the shadows of shadows. It may be pronounced with confidence that, had he seriously applied himself to literary and artistic criticism, he would have been one of the subtlest and profoundest critics who ever lived, and would probably have anticipated, so far as principles are concerned, all that Mr. Worsfold attributes to Addison, to Lessing, and to Victor Cousin; but, like our own Ruskin, he was wilful and fanatical.

Still less is Greek criticism represented by Aristotle. It is in the highest degree misleading to generalize from such a work as the _Poetics_. It is not merely a fragment, but a fragment deformed by desperate corruption, hopeless interstices and contemptible interpolations. If it confines itself, or in the main confines itself, to formal criticism, it is simply because it was designed to deal with that particular department of criticism, not because its author supposed that the chief question which concerned criticism was form. Again, if by form Mr. Worsfold understands, as he appears to do, expression and structure, he very much misrepresents the Treatise. Aristotle’s criterion of poetry is not its formal expression, for he distinctly declares that it is not metre which makes a poem, and even seems to maintain that a poem may be composed without metre. In Aristotle’s definition and conception of poetry as the concrete expression of the universal, in his definition of the scope and functions of tragedy, and in innumerable occasional remarks we have the germs of much, and of very much, which Mr. Worsfold would attribute to the later developments of criticism.

Aristotle, it is true, derived his canons from an analysis of the masterpieces of Greek poetry, but it is doing him great injustice to say, that he would make all epics Homeric, and all plays Sophoclean, and most erroneous to assume that modern criticism commenced at this point. Aristotle distinctly questions whether tragedy had as yet perfected its proper types or not (_Poet._, IV. 11), and in discussing the proper length of tragedy he makes a remark which shows that such a plot as the plot of _Hamlet_ or the plot of _Lear_ would have been quite compatible with his canons.[38] The truth is that Mr. Worsfold has gone too far; he has confounded the various aspects of criticism with stages in its development. Aristotle dealt mainly with form, because it was his business to deal with form. Plato approached poetry from a particular point of view, because it was from that particular point of view that it concerned him.