Part 17

Had Mr. Worsfold taken his stand in his review of ancient criticism on the treatise attributed to Longinus, he would have seen that what he so strangely attributes to Addison and later writers had long been anticipated. This remarkable work which, since its translation into French by Boileau in 1674, has had more influence on criticism both in England and on the Continent than any other work that could be named, would alone show how much we owe to the Greeks. It has analyzed and defined, for all time, the essential virtues and the essential vices of diction and style, and has traced them to their sources. It has furnished us with infallible criteria in judging rhetoric and poetry. Take its analysis of the “grand style,” which is described comprehensively as μεγαλοφροσυνης απηχημα, “the echo of a great soul”; it has, the Treatise tells us, five characteristics--richness and grandeur of conception (το περι τας νοησεις ἁδρεπηβολον); vehement and inspired passion (το σφοδρον και ενθουσιαστικον παθος), the due formation of figures, which are twofold--first those of thought, and secondly those of expression (ἡ ποια των σχηματων πλασις δισσα δε που ταυτα, τα μεν νοησεως, θατερα δε λεξεως); noble diction (ἡ γενναια, φρασις); dignified and elevated composition (ἡ εν αξιωματι και διαρσει συνθεσις). Nothing could be more masterly than its detailed analysis of each of these qualities, and of the pseudo forms which they assume, as the result of stimulated enthusiasm. How admirable, too, is its test of the sublime in the seventh chapter; its criticism of Sappho, generalizing what constitutes the charm and power of lyric, in the tenth chapter; its analysis of the eloquence of Demosthenes, again generalizing the characteristics of oratory in perfection (chap. xvii.); its demonstration of the inferiority of correct mediocrity to the faulty irregularities of inspired genius; its admirable remarks about the relation of Art to Nature. Like the _Poetics_, it has come down to us in a very mutilated form, and has evidently been interpolated by some inferior hand, which no doubt accounts for the exasperating triviality of some of the sections. Here, as elsewhere, we have references to the many losses which Greek criticism has sustained, the author referring to treatises written by him on Xenophon, on Composition, and on the Passions.

It is impossible to give an adequate account of the evolution of criticism without a very careful survey of the chief contributors to criticism in each generation, and such a survey Mr. Worsfold has not attempted. To Latin criticism he never even refers. And yet it has had great influence on critical literature. The Romans, it is true, contributed scarcely anything new to criticism, except that which pertains to oratory. We know enough of Varro, with whom Roman criticism may be said to begin, to feel confident that he could have had no pretension to the finer qualities of the critic. Of the five treatises composed by him, only one, the περι χαρακτηρων, appears to have been purely critical, and it almost certainly drew largely on Greek sources. Horace derived the material of the _Ars Poetica_ from a Greek writer, Neoptolemus of Parium. Much of Quinctilian’s criticism is demonstrably a compilation from Greek writers. The best critic of poetry among the Romans is undoubtedly to be found in Petronius, occasional and scanty though his remarks are. But of prose literature Rome produced two really great critics--the one was Cicero, the other was Tacitus. The _Brutus_ and the _Dialogus de Oratoribus_ are masterpieces, equal to anything which has come down to us from the Greeks. One of the most important critical principles ever enunciated we owe to Cicero. He was the first to demonstrate that the test of excellence in oratory lay, in its appealing equally to the multitude and to the most fastidious of connoisseurs. The most consummate rhetorician which the world has ever seen, he was at the same time a consummate critic of his art. This department of criticism has, indeed, for nearly two thousand years, been practically his monopoly; it may be questioned whether anything can be added, so far as the technique of rhetoric is concerned, to what may be traced to his writings. The interest of the _Dialogus de Oratoribus_ is largely historical, but never have the causes which inspire and nourish, or depress and starve, eloquence been more eloquently and brilliantly explained. Nor must it be forgotten that it was through the medium of the Latin critics that Greek criticism became influential on modern literature.

Mr. Worsfold has very properly drawn attention to the fine passage about poetry in the second book of Bacon’s _Advancement of Learning_, but he says not a word about Sidney’s remarkable treatise, one of the most charming contributions to the criticism of poetry which has ever been made, or about the admirable remarks in Ben Jonson’s _Discoveries_. The interest of Elizabethan criticism, as represented by these works--and they are the only works on this subject of any value produced during the Elizabethan period--lies partly in its return to Aristotelian canons, and partly in the importance which, in accordance with the ancients, it attaches to the didactic element in poetry. This is expressed very eloquently in Ben Jonson’s dedication of the _Fox_:--

“If men will impartially and not asquint look toward the offices and function of a poet, they will easily conclude to themselves the impossibility of a man’s being the good poet without being first the good man,--he that is able to inform young men to all good discipline, inflame young men to all good virtues, keep old men in their best and supreme state, or, as they decline to childhood, recover them to their first state, that comes forth the interpreter and arbiter of nature, a teacher of things divine no less than human.”

This was precisely Spenser’s conception of one of the chief functions of poetry. Thus the Elizabethan critics, who were followed afterwards by Milton, if they did not formally discuss the relation of æsthetic to ethic, insisted on their essential connection in the higher forms of poetry. Even in the succeeding age, when poetry lost all its high seriousness and much of its moral dignity, criticism, if it did not always insist on the application of this test, still retained it. Dryden could write, “I am satisfied if verse cause delight, for delight is the chief, if not the only end, of poesy”; but in adding “instruction can be admitted but in the second place, for poesy only instructs as it delights,” he half corrected his former statement, and, indeed, simply reverted to what Aristophanes, Ben Jonson, and Milton would have been the first to admit.

But to return to Mr. Worsfold. A very serious defect in his work is his omission of all notice of Boileau and Dryden, and of the critics contemporary with them in France and England. The consequence is, that much is attributed to Addison which belongs to them, and Addison’s importance as a critic is much overrated. Again, of the many memorable contributions to this branch of literature in England, in France, in Italy, and in Germany, which were made between the appearance of the Abbé Dubos’s _Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et la peinture_ in 1719, and the lectures of Coleridge and Schlegel about 1812, all that is said is represented by what is said of Lessing. Though a long chapter is given to Matthew Arnold, Matthew Arnold’s master, Sainte-Beuve, is, if we remember rightly, not so much as named.

Dr. Johnson divided critics into three classes--those who know the rules and judge by them, those who know no rules but judge entirely by natural taste, those who know the rules but are above them. This has been true in all ages, and sufficiently disposes of Mr. Worsfold’s hypothesis about the stages through which criticism has passed. All that can be said is, that at certain times there has been a tendency, determined of course by the character of the particular age, towards the predominance of a particular critical method and of particular points of view. Further than this it would be perilous to go. It has been the task of the present age to develop each of these methods to the full, and the most authoritative critics of the last twenty years might easily be ranged under one of those classes.

The soundest and most valuable part of Mr. Worsfold’s book is the part dealing with the criticism of the last few years. His chapter on Matthew Arnold, in particular, is admirable, and his remarks on the functions of criticism at the present time, deduced as they have been from Wordsworth, Arnold and Ruskin, are in a high degree instructive and interesting. In pointing out that criticism should not confine itself merely to the investigation of technical excellence, and to all that is implied in the doctrine of Art for Art’s sake, but should recognise that there are limits beyond which the artist should not exercise his technical skill, he recalls us to principles which it is well that criticism should not forget. We quite agree with him that there is now an increasing tendency to recognise these limits, and to lay most stress on the interpretation of the ideal element in literature and art. That is certainly the modern note. We have expressed our reasons for dissenting from Mr. Worsfold’s historical view of the evolution of criticism, but his book is full of interest, and will amply repay the attention of serious readers. It is a book which does not deserve to be lost in the crowd.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 38: ὁ δε κατ’ αυτην την φυσιν του πραγματος ὁρος, αει μεν ὁ μειζων μεχρι του συνδηλος ειναι καλλιων εστι κατα το μεγεθος. ὡς δε ἁπλως διορισαντας ειπειν, εν ὁσω μεγεθει κατα το εικος η το αναγκαιον εφεξης γιγνομενων συμβαινει εις ευτυχιαν εκ δυστυχιας, η εξ ευτυχιας εις δυστυχιαν μεταβαλλειν, ἱκανος ὁρος εστιν του μεγεθους. (_Poet._, vii. 7.)]

WOMEN IN GREEK POETRY[39]

[Footnote 39: _Antimachus of Colophon and the Position of Women in Greek Poetry._ By E. F. M. Benecke.]

The editor of this book cannot be congratulated either on his competence or on his discretion. To hurry into the world a work which is not merely a fragment, but which cries for revision, suppression, and correction in almost every page, is a literary crime of the first magnitude, and deserves the severest castigation. Of the author of the work, who appears to have been a young man of some attainments and of much promise, we desire to speak with all gentleness; we wholly absolve him from blame, for we have no right to assume that he would himself have given to the world what his editor admits was _intra penetralia Vestæ_, and what we hope and believe he would himself have committed _emendaturis ignibus_, had he arrived at years of discretion. But the dissemination of error is no light thing, especially in relation to subjects which are of great interest, and, from an historical and literary point of view, of great importance. When we think of the many amiable and industrious tutors at Oxford and Cambridge who, unless they are put on their guard, will unsuspiciously fill their note-books with the nonsense of this volume, and impart it, by degrees, to the listening credulity of youth, we feel we have no alternative but to perform a plain, if painful, duty. We repeat, we absolve the author from all blame; the sole culprit is the editor.

That Solomon was the author of the _Iliad_, Poggio the author of the _Annals_ of Tacitus, and Bacon the author of Shakespeare’s plays, are hypotheses scarcely less monstrously absurd than the thesis propounded in this volume. Mr. Benecke’s main contentions are “that a pure love between man and woman seemed to the early Greeks” (that is, to those who lived before the latter end of the Peloponnesian War) a sheer impossibility; that “in extant Greek poetry there is no trace of romantic love poetry addressed to women prior to the time of Asclepiades and Philetas”; that “in the works of these writers this element suddenly appears not in the nature of an experiment but as a leading motive”; that the appearance of this element was due to the influence of Antimachus, “who was the first man who had the courage to say that a woman was worth loving, and who may thus be regarded as the originator of the romantic element in literature.” As we have not space to refute this nonsense in detail, we will give some examples of the way in which it is supported. First come misrepresentations and blunders. To emphasize the degradation of women, passages in translation are twisted and perverted almost beyond recognition.

Thus the couplet of Catullus--

“Tunc te dilexi, non tantum ut vulgus amicam, Sed pater ut natos diligit et generos”--

is actually paraphrased “I loved you, not as a man loves a woman, but as a man loves a youth.” The couplet in which Antigone says, “If my husband died, I could get another, and were I deprived of him too, I could be a mother by another man”--

ποσις μεν αν μοι, κατθανοντος, αλλος ην και παις απ’ αλλου φωτος, ει τουδ’ ημπλακον--

is translated “If my husband had died, I could have married another, if he had failed to get me children, I could have committed adultery.” The “main motive of the Iliad,” we are informed, (p. 76), “is the love of Achilles for Patroclus.” The interest of the _Ajax_ “is meant to centre on Teucer, the _amasius_ of the dead Ajax.” That the _Alcestis_ may not be pressed into the service of those who would maintain that the Greeks knew how to respect women, the key to it is to be found “in the relation existing between Admetus and Apollo”(!) The revolting coarseness and flippant vulgarity which mark the book, and, which do very little credit to Oxford training, are illustrated by the remarks employed to disparage these types of womanhood which the writer well knows would refute his theory. Thus of Nausicaa, “she is always regarded as a charming type of woman; but, after all, how one naturally thinks of her is (_sic_) as a charming type of washerwoman”; of Penelope, “she longs for the return of her husband, no doubt; but what really grieves her about the suitors is not their suggestions as to his death, but the quantity of pork they eat.” On a par with this sort of thing is the remark about a play of Sophocles, which, by the way, is not extant, that “it merely drew the usual picture of the gods playing shove-halfpenny with human souls” (p. 47); or flippant vulgarity like the following--Admetus expresses “his deep regret that he cannot accompany Alcestis, as Charon does not issue return tickets.” If this is the humour of young Oxford, the progress of which we hear so much has been purchased at a heavy price.

But to continue. On page 27 we are confronted with the astounding statement that “it is in Anacreon that we find for the first time love-poetry addressed to a woman.” Why, Hermesianax (15, 16) distinctly states that Musæus wrote love-poetry to his wife or mistress, Antiope, and that Hesiod wrote many poems in honour of his love, Eoia (_Id._ 22-24). Alcæus notoriously wrote love-poems to Sappho, as we need go no further than the first book of Aristotle’s _Rhetoric_ to know; both Alcman, the lover of Egido and Megalostrate, and, probably Ibycus also wrote love-poetry to women. It is mere special pleading to contend that Mimnermus did not write poetry to the mistress of his affections, to whom, according to Strabo, his erotic poetry was addressed. Hermesianax distinctly states that Mimnermus was passionately in love with Nanno, and certainly implies that his love-poetry was addressed to her (35-38). It is true that two of the fragments of Archilochus are ambiguous, but one is not; and, if we may judge by a single line (Fr. 71), his love for Neobule expressed itself in a manner indistinguishable from Petrarch’s vein--“Would that I might touch Neobule’s hand”: ει γαρ ὡς εμοι γενοιτο χειρα Νεοβουλης θιγειν. It is clear that women had a prominent place in the poetry of Stesichorus, and in his poem entitled _Calyce_ we seem to have had an anticipation of the modern love romance. And yet, in spite of all this, we are informed that the Greeks had no love-poetry addressed to, or concerning women, before Anacreon.

The methods adopted for minimizing or disguising the importance of women in the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ are very amusing. “The Trojan war was the work of a woman; but how very little that woman appears in the _Iliad_.” She appears quite as frequently and imposingly as the action admits, and she and Andromache are painted as elaborately as any of the _dramatis personæ_ in the poem. Indeed, it would not be too much to say that, with the exception of Achilles and Agamemnon, they leave the deepest impression on us. “A woman has been managing the affairs of Odysseus for twenty years in an exemplary fashion; but the hero of the _Odyssey_ on his return prefers to associate with the swineherd.” Comment is superfluous. Nothing could be more striking than the prominence which is given to women both in the _Iliad_ and in the _Odyssey_. To cite such writers as Simonides of Amorgus, Phocylides and Theognis, as authorities on the position of women, is as absurd, in Sancho Panza’s phrase, as to look for pears on an elm.

The Greek Tragedies are treated after the same fashion as the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_. We are told that the remarkable prominence given in Sophocles’s plays to the affection between brother and sister affords conclusive proof that the nature of modern love between man and woman was unknown to him; and we are also informed, that the relations between Electra and Orestes, and Antigone and Polynices “are absolutely those of modern lovers.” It would be difficult to say which is more absurd, the deduction or the statement. What love could be more loyal and more passionate than Hæmon’s love for Antigone? The prominence given by Sophocles to the love between brother and sister has its origin from the same cause as the very small part played by lovers in the Greek tragedies generally. In the first place, a poet who took his plot from the fortunes of the houses of Pelops or Laius could only work within the limits of tradition; in the second place, love romances, unless involving deep tragical issues as in the _Trachiniæ_, the _Medea_, and the _Hippolytus_, were totally incompatible with the Greek idea of tragedy. But we must hurry to the grand discovery made by the author of this volume.

Somewhere about 405 B.C. flourished Antimachus, of Colophon, the author of a voluminous epic, and of several other poems. He had the misfortune to lose his wife Lyde, and, to beguile his sorrow, he composed a long elegy in her honour. Of the far-reaching consequences of this act let our author speak. “When Antimachus first sat down in his empty house at Colophon to write an elegy to his dead wife, consciously or unconsciously he was initiating the greatest artistic revolution that the world has ever seen.” Asclepiades and Philetas followed him as imitators, and the thing was done. Woman was at last “connected with ‘romance.’” Our author admits the difficulty of supposing that “any one man could invent and popularize an entirely new emotion”; but suggests that if we regard it as “simply due to the readjustment of an already existing emotion,” that is παιδεραστια, such a supposition is “no longer absurd.” It is not only absurd but monstrous.

The truth almost certainly is, that the love between man and woman in ancient Greece differed very little from the love between man and woman as it exists now. Marriage was, it is true, purely a matter of business; most wives aspired to nothing more than the management of the nursery and the household, and most women being without education, and living in seclusion, could scarcely associate, intellectually at least, on equal terms with their husbands or lovers. But this proves nothing more than _mariages de convenance_, and love based on the fascination exercised by sensuous attraction prove now. Then, as in our own time, there were marriages and marriages, liaisons and liaisons. The story which Plutarch tells of Callias (_Cimon._ iv.) shows that marriage was often based on love. The pictures given of Hector and Andromache in the _Iliad_, of Alcinous and Arete, of Ulysses and Penelope, of Menelaus and Helen in the _Odyssey_, the charming account of Ischomachus and his young wife in the _Œconomics_ of Xenophon, the noble and pathetic story of Pantheia and Abradatas in the _Cyropædeia_, the story which, in his life of Agis,[40] Plutarch tells of Chilonis, and, in the _Morals_, of Camma,[41] and innumerable other legends, traditions, and anecdotes, prove that women could inspire and return as pure and as chivalrous a love as any of the heroines of chivalry. The poet who could write about marriage as Homer does in the Sixth Odyssey would have had little to learn from modern refinement.[42] The love which Critobulus describes himself as having for Amandra, in the _Symposium_ of Xenophon, and the remarks made by Socrates in that dialogue embody the most exalted conceptions of the passion of love between the sexes. The sentiments of Plutarch on this subject are indistinguishable from the most refined notions of the modern world, as is abundantly illustrated in the _Amatorius_, the _Conjugalia Præcepta_, and in the remarks on marriage in the eighth chapter of the Essay on Moral Virtue. If Ajax and Hercules became brutes, Tecmessa and Deianeira were not the only women who have discovered that men are, too often, May when they woo, and December when they wed. It is ridiculous to suppose that a people whose popular poetry could present such types of womanhood as Arete, Antigone, Alcestis, Deianeira, Electra, Macaria, Iphigenia, Evadne, and Polyxena, who could boast such poetesses as Sappho, Erinna, Corinna, Myrtis, and Damophila, and whose society was graced by such women as Aspasia, Diotima, Gnathæna, Herpyllis, Metaneira, and Leontium, should have given expression to passion, sentiment, and romance only in παιδικοι ὑμνοι.

What the author of this book, and what others who are fond of generalizing about the Greeks, forget, is, that of a once vast and voluminous literature we have only fragments. That portion of their poetry which would have thrown light on the subject here discussed has perished. It is certain, for example, that of their lyric poetry a very large portion was erotic, of that portion exactly one poem has survived in its entirety, while a few hundred scattered lines, torn from their context, represent the rest that has come down to us. We know, again, that in some hundreds of their dramas, in the Middle and New Comedy that is to say, the plots turned on love--of these dramas not a single one is preserved. But the reflection of some twenty of them in Terence and Plautus, and several scattered fragments, clearly indicate, that the passion between the sexes involved as much sentiment and romance as it does in our Elizabethan dramatists. In what respect do Charinus and Pamphilus in the _Andria_ and Antipho in the _Phormio_--mere replicas, of course, of Greek originals--differ from modern lovers? What could be more romantic than the love story which formed the plot of the _Phasma_ of Menander? It is fair to our author to say that he fully admits this, in the only tolerably satisfactory part of his book, the chapter on Women in Greek Comedy. The great blot on Greek life, to which Mr. Benecke gives so much prominence, has probably had far too much importance attached to it, partly, perhaps, owing to its accentuation in the writings of Plato, and partly owing to that rage for scandalous tittle-tattle, so unhappily characteristic of ancient anecdote-mongers from Ion to Athenæus.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 40: Agis, xvii., xviii.]

[Footnote 41: De Mulierum Virtutibus.]

[Footnote 42: See particularly lines 180-185.]

MR. STEPHEN PHILLIPS’ POEMS[43]