George Saintsbury

“ Not only are the subjects of literature in part men or devils masquerading as gods, in part men committing more or less shameful acts; but, even when they are in themselves unobjectionable, they are idle fiction, there is no truth or usefulness in them. Men with immortal souls to be saved or lost should at the worst be horrified at touching such pitch, at the best be ashamed of burdening themselves with such trumpery. Great as is St Augustine’s genius for producing literature, one doubts whether he had much taste for estimating it. ”

“ To Catullus, his exquisite and hardly surpassed poetical faculty was evidently little more than a toy or a pastime—helpful to express his moods of love or of laughter, and that was all. So the magnificent singing robes of Lucretius cover a man who has hardly a thought of being a poet, who aims mainly at being a 357philosopher; and the scarcely inferior Muse of Juvenal positively turns her back on her sisters, and busies herself with a sardonic “criticism of life,” in which indignant disdain is oddly blended with a strange interest in all trifles, and all serious things, that are not literary. ”

“ Some form of the Ideal Theory is indeed necessary to the critic: the beauty of literature is hardly accessible, except to one who is more or less a Platonist. No system so well accounts for the ineffable poetic pleasure, the sudden “gustation of God” which poetry gives, as that of an archetypal form of every possible thought and passion, as well as person and thing, to which as the poet approaches closer and closer, so he gives his readers the deeper and truer thrill. But Plato’s unfortunate impatience of anything but the idea pure and simple, led him all wrong in criticism. ”

“ Of course there are capital fabliaux in Herodotus, fine apologues in Plato, good things of other kinds elsewhere. But the ancients not only hampered themselves by almost always telling their longer stories in verse, but seldom knew how to manage them in verse or prose. The Iliad is such a bad story that it has tempted the profanity of those who would make it not one but a dozen stories; the Æneid is a story, dull à dormir debout as such, with some good rambling and fighting, a great descent to Hades, a capital boxing-match, not a bad regatta, and a famous but borrowed episode of passion. ”

“ The faculty must be cultivated; it must be refined by high thinking and plain living, and at last it will see that, though Good and Beauty are one, yet Beauty is in a lower sphere than Good—is, in fact, but an imitation of it.
All this is not merely Platonic—it is itself beautiful and good: it is noble, it is true, it deserves everything that can possibly be said in its favour. But for the actual purposes of literary criticism it is but as a sweet song in a foreign language. ”

“ We shall see shortly how a more chastened and experienced idealism, combined in all probability with a much wider actual knowledge of literature and art, made the literary criticism of Plato a blend of exquisite rhapsody and childish crotchet. In the much earlier day of Parmenides not even this blend was to be expected. There could hardly by any possibility have been anything but the indulgence in allegorising which is equally dear to poets and philosophers, and perhaps the inception of a fanciful philology. ”

“ No pitch of mental wiredrawing, no extravagance of play on word or phrase, was too great for some declaimers, of whom a certain Murredius is Seneca’s favourite Helot. In fact, in both classes, epideictic and forensic, one can see that a plain, forcible, manly style could only be commended by a combination of very unusual genius on the part of the speaker, and still more unusual taste and receptivity on the part of the audience. ”

“ No idea of Invention seems to have mingled with it, or only of such invention as the artist’s is when he faithfully represents natural objects. Of the Imagination, which is in our minds when we call Shelley an imaginative poet, and Pope not one, Sir Edward Burne Jones an imaginative painter, and any contemporary whom it may be least invidious to name not one, there does not seem to have been a trace even in the enthusiastic mind of Longinus, though he expressly includes Enthusiasm—nay, Passion—in his notion of it. ”

“ There is no reason why as Pliny himself seems to have thought in his own case and the cases of many of his friends, you should not be at once an orator and a historian, an epic poet and a comic, a dramatist and an epigram-writer. And the age still believed devoutly in the rules, though free-lances like Martial might kick at them in verse, and though Quintilian, with his unfailing good sense, might hint that there were far too many Figures, and that the subdivisions of Greek rhetoric were in many cases idle. ”

“ It is true that, for good as well as for evil, there was about Europe then a certain solidarity which has entirely disappeared; but local, as distinct from national, patriotism was as strong, and occasionally as silly, as at any other time. Dante’s own attitude puts us at once into a position for literary criticism which neither Greek nor Roman had enjoyed—the Greek losing it by his arrogant assumption of a solitary literary position for his own tongue, and the Roman partly by his imitation of Greek, partly by the lurking desire to make out that Latin was not so very inferior after all. ”

“ The earlier lost Roman tragedy was, it is clear, simply calqué upon Greek, as was the Roman comedy (though the mother-wit of Plautus, one of the most original of Latin writers not of the decadence, gives it an original air) absolutely calqué upon the later forms of the Attic. The Epic was even more slavishly imitative—those who rate Virgil highest must admit that, delicately as he walks, and elegant as is his footgear, he simply steps in the footprints, now of Homer, now of Apollonius, now, in all probability, of writers who happen to be lost. The Latin Lyric poets dare invent no fresh scheme ”

“ Inferior as Latin criticism, on the Rhetorical side, is in comparison with Greek, it is not fanciful to say that it ends with a better note, though a quaint and fantastic one. The later stages in Greek, as we have seen, were mere arid technicalities or idle epideictic—ghosts of things no longer alive, and never perhaps alive with the best kind of life. What followed in the Byzantine age had at best the character of literary research. Such a book as that of Photius, invaluable as it is to us, has no life-promise in it, either as regards its own generation or for the future. ”