being. He is too like a judge at a competitive musical festival, allotting so many marks for intonation, so many for tone, so many for ensemble, etc. He has not very much real enthusiasm for literature. His criticism of Demosthenes is one of the few passages in which he is really carried away. Not that perpetual "Schwärmerei" is a mark of good criticism. But, as the work of the greatest critics shows, enthusiasm may be communicated without being directly expressed. And the passages which Dionysius selects for commendation do not, on the whole, show that sense for literature which Longinus, for example, possesses. Moreover, if at times Dionysius rises above the level of sound common sense, at times he falls far below it. He is, without any doubt, right in maintaining that Thucydides sometimes sacrifices lucidity to terseness. But the attempt to re-write so subtly pregnant an author as Thucydides is precarious, and Dionysius fails in it lamentably. Plato, or Plato at least in the noblest of his moods, he simply cannot understand. He brushes aside, without discussion, the very idea of the admissibility of poetical prose. He pronounces

Plato inferior to Demosthenes on the score of the funeral speech in the Menexenus. But the speech is quite possibly a parody of Pericles' funeral oration in Thucydides: and, if it is not a parody, the gross unfairness of representing Plato by such a work should have been obvious. It is sometimes said that Dionysius' minute disquisitions on the emotional effect of certain rhythms and certain letters of the alphabet are a useful antidote to the vagueness of much modern criticism. And so they might be if they were scientific. But what can be more unscientific, more puerile even, than the passage in which he essays to prove that the rhythm of prose approximates to that of verse by quoting a passage from Thucydides, hunting out as many examples as he can of his favourite feet, manufacturing a

few more by the aid of mis-scansion, and then exclaiming triumphantly, "Can all this be coincidence ? ” ?

The treatise On the Sublime is inscribed with the name of Longinus, minister to Zenobia, queen of Palmyra in the third century A.D. But modern scholars agree that it is a much earlier work, not later probably than the first century of our era. For the sake of brevity, however, it will be convenient to refer to the unknown author as Longinus. The English title, established by long usage, is a singularly misleading one. "On Genius" would scarcely perhaps be too wide. Like Dionysius, Longinus was an Atticist, and exalted "imitation" in a way scarcely intelligible to our own age, which sets originality before everything. We should scarcely agree, for instance, that one author could supply inspiration to another: still less that if a man wishes to write well he should perpetually be saying to himself, "How would Plato or Demosthenes have expressed this?" But Longinus is far less hide-bound than Dionysius: indeed he is remarkably free from dogmatism and pedantry. Take for example his treatment of metaphor. "Not more than two at a time, and when in doubt put in an 'as it were' or 'sort of,'" is the Aristotelian precept, dutifully echoed in Demetrius' On Style. Longinus goes deeper. "First stir your hearer," he says in essence, "and he will not stop to count your metaphors: and the metaphors will help to stir him yet more. Thus passion helps metaphor and metaphor passion. And the same is true in general of all the devices of language." Surely the relation between expression and technique has never been put more simply and more profoundly. Mutatis mutandis a musician might well say the same of inversion and augmentation and other devices of the fugue. This freedom from formalism, which makes even the treatment of " figures" throb with life, is no doubt mainly to be attributed to Longinus' native genius and intense

admiration for great writing. But his literary antecedents may also have helped him here. It has been suggested, with some reason, that he was influenced by Theodorus of Gadara, a rhetorical professor of the Augustan age. Now Theodorus did not believe in fixed rules for writing. Here he differed from his contemporary Apollodorus of Pergamum, who did believe in them, and who regarded rhetoric as a science, not an art. Apollodorus is known to have influenced Dionysius. And Longinus seems to be writing in conscious opposition to Dionysius and Caecilius. It was his dissatisfaction with Caecilius' treatment of the sublime," he tells us, that moved him to write on the subject himself; while the pith and kernel of his work (that 'the divine fire," as Beethoven called it, is what really matters in literature, not mere freedom from faults) constitutes a complete negation of Dionysius' rather peddling tabulation of merits and defects,

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In general, it can hardly be denied that Longinus is a critic of quite outstanding genius, and it is a matter for congratulation that, after being neglected throughout the nineteenth century, he is coming back into something of the esteem which he possessed in the seventeenth and eighteenth. His work is one which gains in value on each successive reading. Time after time, a sure instinct leads him to the heart of a matter, where others had but scratched the surface. Take his definition of a classic: his psychological analysis of the pleasure derived from great literature: or his account of the relation between emotion and technique, to which reference has been made above. In every case Longinus has something both original and fundamental to say: and says it, too, in the best possible way. For his style, which combines much that is Platonic with a peculiar burning intensity that is all Longinus' own, is no unworthy vehicle of his thought.

From Longinus to Demetrius on Style is a steep descent. This book is ascribed to Demetrius of Phalerum, the last of the fourth-century Attic orators. But it is patently of a much later date: and the most probable supposition is that the author was some other Demetrius (the name is a very common one), possibly of the first century a.d. It begins with an analysis of sentence-building, in which the author treats of the number and length of "members" (cola) and their combination in periods. But the greater part of the work is a description of the four types of style, the "elevated," the "elegant," the "plain plain" and the "forcible," and the four corresponding perversions, the "frigid," the "affected," the "arid," and the "graceless." Each type is considered in all its aspects, subject-matter, diction and metaphor, arrangement of words, figures of speech, etc. The writer follows the Peripatetic school, constantly and respectfully quoting Aristotle and Theophrastus. His treatise reads like the work of a diligent compiler, with little distinction of mind or individuality of style. It lacks alike the living inspiration of Longinus and the rather pompous self-importance of Dionysius.

By the end of the second century A.D. the literary impulse which the Atticist revival gave to oratorical theory had died down. In Hermogenes of Tarsus, who flourished about 170 A.D., and to an even greater degree in his successors, the mechanical formulation of rules has replaced the vital appreciation of classical models. The study of rhetoric has crystallised into formality, and here parts company with the study of literature.

After traversing the main highways of our subject, it remains to scour the by-paths, and finally to attempt some estimate of the tendencies and the value of Greek literary criticism as a whole.

As to the former task, even a summary review cannot

wholly neglect the scholars who, during the third, second and first centuries B.C., at Alexandria and Pergamum, and latterly at Rome, devoted laborious lives to the collecting, cataloguing, emending and interpreting of the great authors of the creative period which had ended. A brief mention will suffice. The works of these scholars, Zenodotus, Aristophanes of Byzantium, Aristarchus, and other lesser names, have perished, but much of their doctrine survives. For while little original work was done in scholarship between the Christian era and the Renaissance, the labours of the Alexandrian critics were collected and peptonised by such men as Didymus, in the reign of Augustus, were handed down from generation to generation, and finally reach us in the margins of the mediaeval manuscripts which have preserved for us the classical texts themselves. It was observed at the beginning of this essay that interpretation and criticism are nearly allied. And in fact no one can go very far in the first without to some extent touching the second. Scholars like Verrall and Wilamowitz are also literary critics in the fullest sense of the term. But the Alexandrian scholars never made the transition, for the reason that they did not go deep enough into interpretation. They were mainly and essentially concerned with the letter, not with the spirit. When Aristarchus remarked that we must read Homer in the light of Homer, not in the light of our own age, he was asserting a principle fundamental to literary criticism as well as to scholarship, and one too often forgotten even by ourselves, who boast of our historical spirit. But the Alexandrians did not often light upon such truths, and indeed were not primarily concerned to look for them. More important for our purpose are the writers of belles lettres, who from the first century of our era onwards turned out in profusion more or less popular essays on all imaginable subjects, literature among them: