UC-NRLF liiillllllllllliHilll'll 1 $B 3ftl 4S1 THE REVIVAL OF CRITICISM -, A Paper read at the Meeting of the Classical Association at Oxford on May 17th, 1919 ^ by /. 5. PHILLIMORE, M.A., LL.D., Professor of Humanity in the University of Glasgow la* and published by B. H. Blackw&il, Oxford ^ mdccccxix, nm,- ^3t# t* IT Inducor magis librariorum hoc loco esse tnendam quam ut Ciceronem parum proprio uerbo usutn esse credam. Asconius in Cornelianam, ed. Clark, p. 76. IT Emendatio est qua singula pro ut ipsa res postulat dirigimus cestimantes universorum scriptorutn diversam sententiam, vel recorrectio errorutn qui per scripturam dictionetnve fiunt. Varro apud Diomed. Gramm. Lat. ed. Keil, vol. i. p. 426 ?AH-5 The Revival of Criticism. So ambitious a title as The Revival of Criticism requires a preliminary apology. When I ask you not to look too maliciously for a ludicrous disproportion between the scope and the result, I plead two grounds : first, an unfortunate idiosyncrasy which warns me to cast the frame of an unwritten paper very wide lest my pen carry me right out of the circumscription ; secondly, it may be held that some largeness and looseness of texture is suitable to a meeting where the bond of association is Classical without restriction. Perhaps we have too little of generalities nowadays ; certainly this is a proper occasion for some. The history of scholarship (everybody allows) falls into epochs, in each of which a national influence has pre- dominated : successive stages of the Humanist Rena- scence are the Italian, the Franco-Italian, the French, the Dutch. Then at last in Britain, where the English Re- formation had nipped Renascence in the bud and the Scottish had destroyed it unborn, there begin to be great scholars in the 18th century ; and to us, by their own claim, which is generally admitted, the Germans succeeded. In each country scholarship stands highest at the time when 476502 4 THE REVIVAL OF CRITICISM the Classics are most widely read and most influential upon the national culture. Take Politian, take de Thou or Lambin, take Bentley ; each is a great name, not merely in the ' shop,' but in the literature of his country ; each belongs to an age when vernacular material was most closely obeying classical principles of construction. I do not stop to particularize the national character of each epoch, Italian grace and native artistry in restoring and comprehending the works of their ancestors ; French power of judgment and (in their second period) industry ; English inventiveness is that too risky a word ? originality and adventurous- ness. I will ask you, since the Germans claimed a supremacy during the period before 1914, to survey that period in a summary. No apology is needed for assuming that an epoch has ended. Military victory carries everything with it, because a military effort such as we have witnessed, requires the momentary con- centration of all the potential energy of a people. During those terrible four years we have not been writing a book but passing an exam. ; and Germany has been ploughed. Every sort of prestige radiates from victory; the battle of Sedan sold the Teubners ; as a typical consequence of the Battle of the Marne, I could quote you a letter from a young Swiss Docteur es lettres, who writes that Havet and Leiay at Paris inform him that it is indispensable for classical students to learn English. Future Zielinskis will not use German. Or, if they do, it will be our fault, our very great fault. Not the least remarkable result of 1870 was that French scholarship, in a fine Trojan spirit, studied its conquerors ; and, in a generation, France had learned all that Germany could teach, and THE REVIVAL OF CRITICISM 5 that, without losing what Germany had never learned. Ferum victorem cepit in quite a new sense. So much so indeed that the title of this paper would hardly have seemed excessive though its thesis had been nothing but a panegyric on the Paris Latinists. Whether Germany can or will go to school again remains to be seen. Be that as it may, an era closes with her downfall. Our concern is with the German period which has been. Two things by common consent have been causes of the German downfall ; the effort to disestablish chance, reducing everything to mechanics. Chance may not be as great a goddess as the ancients held, but Agathon's dictum is never obsolete. tvxo rkxvqv eWcp^e /cat rvxw Tkxvq. This is the first : I cannot express it in one word, but one word will name the second : Fatuity. Incom- petence in applied psychology, a sin against life, has consequences that reach even into the field of criticism ; such is the lack of humour, when you are dealing with any human material. Just think now, in cool retrospect, of the mentality which substituted the term Indo- Germanic as synonym for Indo-European. Just think of Claudian and Ausonius figuring as pieces in a Monumentum Germaniae. Why not Bede and Isidore ? Germans saw themselves everywhere in History. Theocritus' boorish ogre saw himself reflected one calm day and ventured to think he was not so ill-favoured after all. No such modesty for the modern One-eye. The casual glance at the mirror became a vicious habit : Cyclops ended as an art-nouveau Narcissus. Never has therebeensuchunconsciousness. German savants lectured 6 THE REVIVAL OF CRITICISM and wrote books about arr) and x'/ipt? ; and all the while they remained blankly, tragically, unaware of the meaning of the words. For a recent example of their habit of mind take that Demosthenist who announced that in future Demosthenes must not be put into the hands of German youth : he was now unveiled in the persons of Clemenceau and Lloyd George and Venizelos as the lawyer politician, and Germany had discovered herself to be the true Macedon. You see ? the old story of Mommsen and Cicero over again. But do not let us commit the imprudence of under- rating the enemy. Though he did not invent, he did revive in his own fashion what France had invented, and for a time forgotten, the encyclopaedic industry and the grand constructiveness of theXVI I th century masters. We must not deny that Germany stepped into a vacant heritage of Stephanus, of Ducange, of the Benedictines of S. Maur. The Germans did not emphasize their acknowledgments, and in our amazement at their industry we forgot their predecessors. Of our Albertian legend of a pious, honest, industrious German, the last part alone remains true. But it is very true. And I must protest earnestly against those who deny that Germany had it, or flatter themselves that she has it no more ; and earnestly beg you not to allow the recollection of their impudent insularity to blind us to their services. True, they read only themselves ; they shamelessly appropriated other men's ideas without acknowledgment (rarely a number of the Classical Quarterly, but Prof. Housman enlivens with some fresh convictions). True, my friend Prof. Sarolea was roundly informed at Berlin in 1912 that British THE REVIVAL OF CRITICISM 7 scholarship did not exist. This is irritating, no doubt. And one may get impatient with Leo and Vollmer's taste for solecism, impatient at the crop of false quantity sowed by Fleckeisen in the text of Terence and not a blade of it would Tyrrell uproot ! But we must be moderate. It is a mistake to describe the Berlin Thesaurus as merely a great piece of steam- navvy work as great a mistake as was the stupefaction into which our fathers were thrown by the mere tonnage of German effort. One must appeal for reason. Cannot we be content with regretting that this notable bulk of material did not find an editor within the Pale a Lindsay or a Lejay ? Architecture means something more than merely 1 producing ' your foundations into the air ; but why deny that as foundations they are well laid ? The Germans are our coral insects ; they raise, as no other energy can do it, a platform on which the works of men may take their stand. With the German period there has coincided a dis- integration of criticism. Several causes have combined to work this effect during the last century. To begin with, Classics commanded a smaller proportion of the best brains. Within the circle of humane studies, competing disciplines developed. And from these came disturbing reactions. The reign of Romanticism brought in some confusion. Much bad Greek and bad Latin can be translated into English of the Romantic sort; and what can be translated often passes for approved Greek or Latin. The taste for classical symmetry being on the decline, we looked for the XIX th century in our ancients, and much was rein- 8 THE REVIVAL OF CRITICISM troduced by tiros which had been proscribed by masters. A vague sentimental Nordic sense was given to things perfectly crisp and definite. Take for example the famous Sunt lacrimae rerum which (Mr. Williamson is to be thanked for the reminder) can be reduced to a demonstrably exact meaning : what a vast deal was read into it by the last century ! The great Celtic revival came ; and it was noted that Virgil and Catullus were ' Celts ' : so whereas Pichon finds in Catullus 'de l'esprit gaulois, la clarte facile et souriante la grace elegante et limpide, l'agrement,' Mr. Garrod detects in Catullus' Cisalpine countryman a sort of prototype of Mr. Yeats. Is a Celt a Celt all the world over, in Mantua and in Galway ? and in Brooklyn ? I prefer to follow Macrobius who calls Virgil a Venetian. You can trace a likeness to Titian. The civilized mind is naturally critical : bred by the interaction of various studies, criticism is the peculiar mark of high civilization. But criticism is itself a composite thing : restlessness of intellect is a part of it, but so is a wariness against delusion : curiosity and suspicion are both necessary elements. Curiosity let loose led off many into provinces of inquiry which offered novelty and freedom of speculation such as Anthropology. But by a parallel movement suspicion, romantically coloured from the last age, ran into fantastic vagaries of scepticism. In the chaos brought about by the breakdown of the checks and balances National bias asserted itself ours amongst the rest. A civil-tongued and well-tempered, but none the less a very acute critic of British character as it was displayed THE REVIVAL OF CRITICISM 9 in a military mess in France, remarked it as a national foible of ours that every young officer invariably fancied himself as a Private Detective." A scientific colleague of mine, t a man of balanced culture and cautious judgment, stated recently in a letter to the Times that he considers our race to be the most inventive of any. One may believe him. This quality has its good side : for in criticism this inventiveness or liveliness of imagination is an initial force. But it needs corres- pondingly rigorous controls. And this native lightminded- ness of ours (in contrast with French seriousness) is a forte or a foible according as it is controlled. It was German scholarship during last century which set us the example of a widening divorce between the factors in criticism. There also Native bias has played an increasing part. The radically Romantic Northern mind romanticizes even in reasoning. One might ask the question : Has the destructive school of Homeric criticism ever escaped from a native limitation of conceiving the author of the Iliad in the person of a primitive bard of barbaric feudalism ? Wolf's great attempt on Homer has often been acclaimed for an intellectual event of cardinal moment. It was perhaps even greater than anyone has yet estimated. For the Homeric question may be called an epitome of the critical history of the XIX th century. Mr. R. Knox has lately shewn how it affected a mind working by quick instinctive processes. The typical significance which he recognized has this reason why : alone amongst the great German adventures in criticism the Homeric * Les silences du Colonel Bramble, par Andr Maurois. t Professor A. Gray. 10 THE REVIVAL OF CRITICISM heresy has been exposed to the play of time for a full review. How much survives as acquired and allowed certainty ? The question is ably and concisely answered in Laurand's pamphlet.* Will the history of the next age be a serial exposure of other great German mare's nests ? Will the gradually massed batteries of the European mind likewise demolish the distinctively Germanic doctrine of what took place at the two crises of history, the formation of the Church and the flooding of the barbaric metal into the moulds of civilization ? It may be so. That incapacity of the German mind for practical psychology a shortcoming which was loudly denied by our Germanizers until the Boche undertook to convince the world by proofs which only those could fail to admit who are blind to lightning and deaf to thunder is a fault in the intimate fibre, which tends to vitiate all their Humanistic work. Time may cure it, as Time refines the crudeness of the parvenu temper, but force of brain cannot correct this disability. For a certain sensibility of evocation is necessary for most parts of scholarship. To read Homer, we must portray him to ourselves. Under what likeness ? That is what our power of sympathy determines. For an example of Disintegrated Criticism (I have heard harsher names applied to it !) let me commend to you Norden's great mare's nest, the Agnostos Theos, painfully dismantled by Birt.t The case is character- istic whichever way you look at it : both that anyone should set about to prove a thesis analogous to asserting * Apropos d'Homkre. ' Progres et recul de la critique.' t Rhein. Mus., vol. LXIX, p. 342. THE REVIVAL OF CRITICISM 11 that ' all anonymous works are by the same author,'' and that it should take such a ponderous deal of disproving. True, Boyle made an ass of himself, as though by divine commission, that Bentley might use his skin for a drum. But poor Boyle, innocent of paradox, was credulously supporting a current traditional imposture. His literary ineptitude provoked a master- piece of literature. It remains impossible to read the epistles of Phalaris and not wonder how it was ever possible to take them for anything but the work of a Sophist in the Atticist Renascence. Note the difference : Norden is an innovator, and perverse at that, for his book is wholly tendencious. What is the object of his romance ? To prove that the Acts of the Apostles were either interpolated in one place (and, if in one why not in more also ? You know the trick), or, as a whole, posterior to the reign of Hadrian. It is pleasant to find Birt in his criticism, accuse his fellow countryman of ' zealous but indiscriminate collecting.' And yet Birt himself, whose speciality is caution, cannot resist the temptations of the time. Birt who has never seen, anymore than you or I, a certain stone which is in question, pretends to tell us what must have been engraved there, and charges St. Paul with a ' gross blunder' for having seen something different. Birt must be hunting out a 'tendency' to account for the course of events in the narrative. So disabled are such minds from seeing the simple explanation that things may be told so because they happened so. That would not be playing the game. For it is a game. Inventive curiosity and alert suspicion if uncorrected each run a road which leads via Baconianism to 12 THE REVIVAL OF CRITICISM Bedlam. The most laborious Research merely adds momentum to their career. There may not be lacking another necessary factor the expertise which authorizes the proverbial cuique in arte sua credendutn. But even when a critic is of trustworthy competence in Greek or Latin, and is master of the Graecity or Latinity of his particular author, still he may go all astray for want of the general co-ordinating principle of all criticism, the logic of this particular science : just that which being neglected has brought about dis- integration. I mean the office of the judge : the faculty to discern the state of the case : to frame correctly the questions at issue and assign the several functions of different forms of evidence. Communis sensus is that which should override and correct racial or national bias. Just as it has been said of Virgil * that ' he had the soul of a poet, which is the common human soul at its highest ' : so of a great critic it should be said that he has the reasoning power which represents common reason at its best. I pass now to consider a narrower front of the subject : namely, Textual criticism, that is, the art of recovering an ancient author's words by the rule of probability. The enlargement of the Classical sphere by new studies such as Anthropology, or more deeply developed studies such as History, had a peculiar reaction on the old literary part of the subject. The authenticity and correctness of texts which form the evidences of such studies must be presumed. The principle of the * By Sainte Beuve. THE REVIVAL OF CRITICISM 13 working hypothesis was therefore borrowed from Science proper. Nothing is so lasting as a provisional arrange- ment. And the working hypothesis is very apt to be surreptitiously changed into a dogma ; whereupon questions which might with good reason be deferred, are feloniously suppressed instead and buried under a convention of silence. The pretended assimilation of literary to scientific method has brought an unexpected nemesis. The claim that humanism is a scientific discipline has provoked irritation in scientists. They express a justifiable contempt when the preachers of ' culture by the classics ' write jargon or journalese and prove themselves possest of no refinement of taste. And they know that there is no strict science, in their sense, where as in Literature there are no absolute natural units of calculation. Method they can understand ; though perhaps they do not know that, with us, methodisch has come to stand for a superstitious scholasticism. We begin at last to dare to be flippant at the expense of what is called Kat-counting. But it was in great measure on the strength of Kat-counting methods that the plea was set up that humanistic studies could offer the same discipline as Natural Science. I am making no com- parison between the Humanities and the Sciences. Some may prefer, with enthusiasm, the study of Gesta Dei per naturam ; and others, that of Gesta Dei per homines; but these disciplines deal in different material and they must use diverse applications of reasoning. Every University knows that in Science a youth of 21 can pursue profitable research ; but we Classicists have seen what a vast deal of thesis work in Scholarship is 14 THE REVIVAL OF CRITICISM lumber, because the beginner has not mature taste or an adequate criterion of relevancy. For eventual scholarship it may still be maintained that the old, somewhat decried, exercise of composition gives a better preparation. It was deservedly decried because it has been narrowed and spoiled by a modern variation of the Renascence vice of Ciceronianism ; confined to versions instead of compositions properly so-called, and tending to tours de force which are highly improbable and often unintelligible unless you think them back into their modern original like a Latin preface of Dr. Vollmer's. But now observe the Nemesis: after Scholarship had gone in for indiscriminate accumulation, with a fond faith in the miraculous virtue of ' facts,' amongst the very scientists whom we had been aping, there arose new voices which proclaimed boldly that nine out of ten ' facts ' were irrelevant and that true method con- sisted in selecting and appraising just that tenth which had significance. Rutherford wasted years on a labour which alas ! his fine intelligence had not warned him was intrinsically unfruitful. He confessed it in some poignant pages. One may spend a deal of time in com- bining a scheme of evidences which by other and prescrip- tive tests can be proved to be one and all untrustworthy. The same energies devoted to deepening and widening one's knowledge of the language would have given better results. For much so-called research work is not only sterile but sterilizes the mind by destroying perspective. The working hypothesis plan has produced some strange results. Towering fabrics have been reared on a text misunderstood, or not understood, but assumed. THE REVIVAL OF CRITICISM 15 Remy de Gourmont* rejoices in fantastic enormities of language which he attributes to some of his mystic poets. Most of these huge bubbles of supposed imagination could be pricked by the veriest tyro in palaeography ; he could restore ordinary diction by the change of a letter. What sermons had been preached on sunt lacrimae rerum ! And think of all that dis- quisition on the origins of Satura built on the quick- sands of a text in Livy half understood and not unquestionably sound ! For one thing, speculators will outrun their book rather than let go their fancies ; but, besides that, it must be allowed that Criticism had lagged and fallen out. Can we wonder if people said : ' We cannot wait till you have tested our bases ; we are in a hurry to get on with our interesting new superstructures ' ? What was the matter with Criticism ? Well, it is a difficult art, requiring a very long apprenticeship and perhaps a peculiar knack. Other causes I have already named or hinted. But above all a generation arose in Germany which could do other philological tasks well but not that ; and therefore induced the mood that the other things mattered more. I say ' induced the mood,' perhaps I should have chosen other words. Would not l Threw us into the state of imagining ' be more exactly true ? For what has happened is that the very principles of the art have been quietly waved away as by passes of the hand, and a new set of axioms ' palmed ' into their place. No pitched battle ; nothing decided by argument ; just a change of fashion. Even so on a word from three * Le latin mystique. 16 THE REVIVAL OF CRITICISM or four persons in Paris, does the short skirt succeed the long, and the big hat silently give place to the small. They did not disprove the old logic of criticism, they just got tired of it. The contrary was assumed. To follow the old way was an anachronism, or worse, a sin against good form. What is so hard to assail as a tacit convention, protected by ridicule ? Doubt the word of a copyist, and you were dubbed ' Bentley's ape.' It was repeated that ' All that game of emendation is out of date.' But facts do not change, nor truth stale because man is fickle. Let us return to the elementary question. What is the true reading of a given text in Latin ? Not what the author just possibly might have said, received on the sole faith of a scribe's word ; but what all the probabilities of the case, weighed together, each for what it is worth ; the scribe's report and all the available checks upon that report commonsense, Latinity in general, Latinity of the given date, Latinity of the given author, the recognized rules of the art in which he worked, what all these give as total result. That is a rough expression of the general principles of Textual Criticism as practised by the great masters in the great days. What are the principles which have usurped their place since the Disintegration ? Allow me to quote an example. In a celebrated passage of a Patristic author,* where the text has considerable historic interest and importance, the change of a letter brings the reading into agreement with all the above-mentioned tests (only substituting * Ignatius ad Romanos titulus. See Journal of Theol. Studies, Vol. XIX, p. 272. THE REVIVAL OF CRITICISM 17 Greek for Latin). The learned German editor* thus observes: ' Even a mediocre sense,' extracted from the mis- reading, ' is better than the most plausible emendation.' On this 1 ventured to observe that on these principles texts might be edited by an office boy. Or, if you prefer it : collators become ipso facto editors. A mediocre sense! Whata delicacy in characterizing nonsense, short of arrant nonsense. Such then is criticism. A judge means one who takes down depositions. Dr. Funk's statement may be rather exceptionally crude ; but he merely blurts out what hundreds of others either assert in other terms or tacitly practise. And for the last forty years you would find English, American and Italian scholars meekly falling into line, even Frenchmen which is more surprising. Germania locuta est, causa finita est. But if the Authority be not allowed, causa non finita est. Truth will not allow logic to be lightly suppressed without debate and conviction. What is a misfortune is that some of our great scholars, past masters in text correction, may allow phrases to escape them casually which obscure just that main question which is so necessary (and so difficult) to keep steadily in view. I read with regret a playful touch of Prof. Lindsay's pen in a recent number of The Classical Review (xxxii. p. 123) ; one is alarmed lest so weighty a name might be borrowed to adorn the cause of dogged unreason. He says : ' The never ending stream of emendation . . . carries too often a line of Virgil with it.' Well, of course, bad emendations may * Dr. F. X. Funk : Patres Apostolici, ed. Tubing. 1881. 18 THE REVIVAL OF CRITICISM be made in Virgil ; but they have a dog's life a mad dog's life. And bad though they be, they do good. Oportet esse haereses ut magis eluceat Veritas. The play of criticism is healthy. Discussion keeps texts clear of rust. But are all emendations in Virgil bad alike ? For Virgil write Milton. The never ending stream of emendation has carried with it a line of the Lycidas vulgate : ' Were it not better done as others use To sport with Amaryllis in the shade, And with the tangles of Neaera's hair.' a line offensive to taste as soon as one grew a taste. But suppose it has restored a line of Milton's making by reading ' And withe.the tangles of Neaera's hair ' ? One may suppose it on critical grounds, i.e. sense of poetic form, sense of Milton's manner and prosody ; one might protest against the vulgate as corrupt, lopsided in form and short weight in quantity. Yet the vulgate could certainly be said to give 'a mediocre sense.' Copyists, from first to last and under the phrase I must include all compositors, some palaeographers, and alas, many editors will continue to propagate such errors, until a critic calls attention to it ; and even after that, perhaps five out ot ten will continue still. For we are very like the hen, which if you place its beak on the ground and draw a chalk line from the tip of it, will remain hypnotized in that position probably, could we divine its inner language, repeating to itselt ' Streng methodisch ! ' An English instance is welcome because I look for a much closer alliance with our colleagues in that branch, and for a new vindication of criticism there. Let me THE REVIVAL OF CRITICISM 19 add here a first Latin example from the early days of the language. The poet Naevius, as you know, fell foul of the Metelli. Our witnesses report that in this famous verbal duel the verse which provoked the Metelli to reply with that most lapidary saturnian : Dabunt malum Metelli Naevio poetae, was itself ... an iambic senarius ! Surely this was odd. The Metelli had better weapons than parody, but was their parody so clumsy as all that ? Did Naevius' provoking verse run Fato Metelli Romae fiunt consults ? Is it not a regular senarius ? Was the saturnian such a metrical chamaeleon that it could be equated with an iambic senarius ? I suspect our witnesses, who are many centuries remote from the event, lie ; shall we venture an emend- ation which carries away a line ... of Naevius ? Query. It carries away a senarius and substitutes a Saturnian ; it gives a verse which jingles oiia efc ly with the retort (surely a point in parody) and offers a characteristic allit- eration and grouping* of words. It is a mere re- arrangement : Fato fiunt Metelli consules Romai. When I read Plautus I notice that the never-ending stream of emendation has carried away many a line ; but I bless the skilful editor of the Oxford text as Augeas' neighbours blessed Hercules when the Arcadian river carried with it much that they had been accustomed to see ... or smell. It would be foolish to make so much of a word lightly dropped, if this were not a case of fashion and Schwarmerei and shouting with the * Livy XXI, 6. 20 THE REVIVAL OF CRITICISM crowd : every light word helps to do the mischief. For these conditions there is no remedy but a dogged, ill-bred, wearisome pertinacity; only the brazen front of the obstructor avails against parliamentary prepotence ; and only a continued infliction of truisms will break a conspiracy of indolent paralogism. Suppose the authenticity of a line in Virgil be called in doubt. Well, no sane person will do so at all without stating grounds for suspicion, an inconsistency among the witnesses, or a prima facie improbability in their report. These grounds may be judged adequate or inadequate, but surely it would be well to have them examined. It is not in the long run convincing to argue by pooh-poohs. Till the objection has been refuted and the doubt allayed, may it not be modestly claimed that the question is in being and the rules of civilized debate should be observed ? And how ought the question to be stated ? This is of the heart of the matter. Just what Criticism has forgotten is its chief duty : to draw the issues properly for trial. I venture to suggest to you that the right and reason- able way of stating the case is not ' Here's so-and-so, he's a bore, always blundering over sleeping dogs. He has the cheek to suggest that he has found something which we have all walked past every day for the last 1,000 years. This must be stopped. And anyhow emendation is quite out of date, it is pre-German.' not that, but something far less simple and con- venient, viz. : ' Here is a line of Virgil impugned. 1 Either it is Virgil's Latinity or it is scribe's Latinity. ' Which ? ' THE REVIVAL OF CRITICISM 21 This is not a new, an amusing, or a popular method, but is this method of stating the case faulty ? If so, where is the fault ? I keep asking questions to which I can get no answers. Prof. Clark makes the same com- plaint : when he visited the theologians he asked questions to which he can get no answers. I foresee his end. The final answer is the hemlock, which silences all emendatory restlessness. However, if the question is correctly framed, then, to assert or assume that the line impugned is a line of Virgil how does it differ from what we used to be taught was a vicious process in reasoning called Petitio Principii ? It is to be feared that hasty readers of Prof. Lindsay's recent utterances may run away with the flattering notion that a new panacea called ilberliefer- ungsgeschichte has superseded logic. Great is ilber- lieferungsgeschichte and Traube is its prophet. But Traube has no more abolished human error in all copy- ists of every age, than the great Debrett has abolished Original Sin among Persons of Quality. Let us remember Prof. Clark's words : ' a text ran the same risks on each occasion when it was transcribed, since all copyists were subject to the same infirmities.'* Nobody will be so rash as to deny that a great number of emendations misfire, or, shall I say, fail at their Prelim. ? But take one of the very rare instances of a text where the best (not merely another the distinction is important) MS. authority has only recently been * Descent of Manuscripts, p. 26. For an early instance see The Latin Language, p. 48 ; add a modern one to Clark's list : 'I am very sorry to say I discover a great many new and original mistakes in my book of which both the MS. and proofs were utterly guiltless.' Meredith to his publisher, 1851, quoted in S. M. Ellis' book, p. 55. 22 THE REVIVAL OF CRITICISM discovered, and count the number of places in the Silvae of Statius where Heinsius or Gronovius, or most often Markland, had carried away a line of scribe's Latin and restored what the Matritensis afterwards confirmed. And now suppose on the other part that we assert The never-ending stream of human error has for many centuries been carrying with it unquestioned lines of all the Latin poets ' less of Virgil than of others ; but still I am sceptical of Conington's* theory of miraculous exemption for Virgil. Will anyone assert that ancient texts have not been vitiated by errors of copyists and patching and botching by correctors ? Or that the work of criticism is ended and the last valid emendation was made out about the time when the bitterns disappeared.! Of course Mr. Lindsay would not say anything so absurd ; but when the Lion jests, God knows what the Jackals will not go about repeating in solemn earnest. Argue that this is not sense, or that is not Latin, or not Latin of the date of the author ; and you are entitled to demand in answer a vindication of * Conington never stated his dogma about Virgilian MSS. quite as roundly ; there are of course factors in the question of the tradition of this author which impose peculiar cautions the unrevised publication of the Aeneid, the immediate and universal acknowledgment of the poet's classic rank. There is a deal of testimony which modern Virgilians systematically ignore because it is to be sought for among the Fathers of the Church, testimony which is sometimes of decisive weight either in the scale of tradition or that of emendation. I do not say that all Mark Pattison's spiteful criticism of Conington was justified, but it must be acknowledged that mental inertia is one of the greatest of human motives. I reckon among the triumphant restorations of commonsense Clark's great observation that omission is prima facie more probable than interpolation, because it requires no brainwork. The hand omits ; it takes a brain to invent. Now evidently it is very comfortable to inertia when it can postulate the soundness of tradition as indiscutible. f Bitterns now breed again in Essex, Omen accipio, THE REVIVAL OF CRITICISM 23 the sense, a witness to the Latinity, a solution of the alleged discrepancy of manner. But how often do you get that, and not a blind appeal to authority ? Whose authority ? Our dear old friends the Copyists. ' We saw it in the MSS.' Just so a child says : * I read it in print.' If we could Somatically force the school of Funk to tell us what they think and not what they want to think that they think, would they not say something like this : 1 You appeal to Latinity and stylistic criticism ? What do we know about Latinity ? You call solecisms what are just exceptions, material for most interesting mono- graphs. Do you mean to tell us that it is impossible for an ancient writer to write nonsense' I beg pardon, 1 mediocre sense ' ; I thank thee, Funk, for teaching me that word make lopsided constructions and lame rhythms ? ' No, it is not impossible ; there are possibilities both ways. But probability is our guide ; it is more probable that some one copyist somewhere in the tradition has blundered, than that the classical poet lapsed unless the lapse was remarked on, and thereby for us authenticated, at an early date, as e.g. Quintilian testifies to an oddity of syntax in Virg. Buc. iv. 62. Our adversary maintains the opposite : drive him to state his principles instead of assuming them, and he will be found to maintain that the chances are in favour of the author having lapsed. What appears unclassical is hailed as a precursory flash of Romanticism. Is this one of those irreducible differences of mere opinion where proof is impossible ? With great defer- ence I submit that it is not ; that on the one side the 24 THE REVIVAL OF CRITICISM last word lies with expertise, and on the other not. The collators must not be horrified. I am not denying them the title of experts. To read, to date, to explore the pedigree of MSS. is, of course, a highly skilled and honourable business. But all such evidence must eventually come up before the bar of commonsense where the question will be asked : ' Who vouches for the truth of any or all of these witnesses, whose evidence is here so admirably tabulated ? ' To that question Palaeography has no answer to make. She presents the tradition, to the best of her power. There ends her competence. She may be dismissed from the court with a bow ; and criticism proceeds to consider her documents along with all the rest. Let us take a parallel illustration. When a judge is to decide the authenticity of a picture, he will, of course, get the uberlieferungs- geschichte and weigh it for himself with absolute authority. He will say ' Yes, Dick told Tom that the picture was as he had got it, and Tom told Harry ; but how am I to know that Dick, Tom and Harry are not themselves mistaken, or accurately repeating a mistake which was there previously ? ' But, the moment he comes to intrinsic evidence, he will call in experts. Experts ! One recalls the Scale of Liars. Even when they speak the truth, is not their very existence felt to be an offensive pretension ? And yet you cannot get past them. Give an ordinary judge on the Bench the decision whether or no say a given verse is Terentian or a given peroration Ciceronian ; when he has heard the collators he must call in someone who is deep in Terentian or Ciceronian usage and someone THE REVIVAL OF CRITICISM 25 who can explain to him the Law of Breves Breviantes, the mysteries of Numerous Prose ; and this evidence is of another quality, such that it can trump all the collators' reports. For we have scientific certainty here of things which we know that even Donatus knew nothing about. Another example : If in Propertius, Mr. Rich- mond by ingenuity of analysis can pick out and recover either stanza arrangement or some other piece of Alexandrian pattern, there at once is intrinsic evidence, something of an altogether different order from any palaeographical evidence that could be summoned. Prove that a given poem in English was written in couplets, and a critic will confidently restore a damaged rhyme ; neither mis-writing nor mis-print will be sacred to him. All the collators of all the editions make no difference. I have endeavoured to show that though it may be convenient or necessary for those who wish to theorise (or alas ! merely to prate) about an author, to assume provisionally that the textus receptus is bedrock, reason disallows this provisional reception for absolute ; and to show that there are logical principles of criticism which though they may be overlaid and buried in neglect from time to time, are yet eternal and necessary and as often as they be fairly exhibited, irrefutable in argument. I have merely essayed to vindicate the a-priori probability of emendation being necessary and possible. Every emendation, as every miracle does, stands on its own merits. But it needs to be repeated that there is a radical question which gives a governing principle : ' Does human nature err in copying, and does it patch its errors ? ' I never heard 26 THE REVIVAL OF CRITICISM anyone deny it in words ; but their practice belies them. And to this must be added another. Is it not of the essence of any work of literary art (especially Classical) that it has strict form and pattern and law and therefore an intrinsic power of repair and reconstruction in case of superficial damage ? We may not be able to recover a whole creature from a single bone, but if we are told by the scribes that in a highly formal poem of an elegist, a certain quatrain had verbs in verses b, c and d, then we can be certain that verb a is to be conjecturally restored.* My title would have been warranted had I taken a much narrower scope and merely advertised to you the epoch-making excellence of the work done by Havet and Clark, in particular, as in itself not merely the promise but the actuality of a Revival in Criticism. * In a deeply corrupt passage of a corrupt poem III. ix. 23 26, Propertius is supposed to have penned this quatrain : Cum tibi Romano dominas in ho.nore securis Et liceat medio ponere iura Fo^u,' Uel tibi Medorum pugnaces ire per hostis Atque onerare tuam fixa per arma domum. I have argued elsewhere that there has been a text-earthquake which has forcibly intruded pieces of one verse into another. In the effort to restore the damaged stratification I missed one glaring fact, viz., that f>onere, ire, onerare in vv. 24, 25, 26 require a verb in v. 23. That the letters inhonore are the remains of a verb infinitive is necessary and certain. ' How do you know ? ' How do I know that a four-poster had four posts even though one has been destroyed ? We have our argument from design. When you find a watch on a heath, first look whether the works are per- fect. Do not be content with a moderately complete set of works. It is an odious task to wash out corruptions which have been endeared by generations of commentators and furnished instru- ments to hundreds of examiners, but I do believe that the poet's idea is probably recovered if we read Cum tibi sit rerum dominas renouare securis Et tibi Romano ponere iura Foro, Uel liceat medio pugnaces ire per hostis Atque onerare tuam fixa per arma domum. At least the watch goes. THE REVIVAL OF CRITICISM 27 Havet's great book is of value for all editors ; not the least of Clark's achievements is to have proved how different is the case of ancient poetry from ancient prose. They are two grand contributions to an Ars Critica. And is not that our great need ? About twenty-five years ago Bywater was kind enough to give me some advice, as to a beginner. He told me with a curiously confidential air that he regarded Greek Tragedy as worked out ; but that was incidental. He told me that for anyone who might be going into the criticism of Latin poetry, no Ars Critica had been written since Scioppius ; plenty of palaeography, no criticism. It must be gathered from the works of the great masters. And even now after Havet's masterpiece, could you give better advice to a young man whose ambitions lie that way, than to read Bentley's Horace, Madvig'sA-ctidemics, Markland's Statins, Lachmann's Propertius, Palmer's Heroides, Housman's Manillas and Juvenal ? An art is learned by watching the master-craftsman at work, and the form of criticism which attempts the restoration or understanding of a work of art cannot be exercised without an element of artistry. But do we read Bentley & Co. ? The latest text is usually what we read ; the permanent is allowed to go out of date with the ephemeral part of these master- pieces. Of the greatest names little more survives than a legend and a catalogue of results, only accepted where so self evident, that, for very shame, the forces of fashion and perversity cannot disestablish them. The great school was built up by the practice of the masters; it was destroyed no, not destroyed, but abandoned 28 THE REVIVAL OF CRITICISM by means of a convention which reduced the editorial office to a mere recording. How many of Bentley's conjectures on say, Lucan as happy and inevitable as that emendation of a blot from Lycidas, have been, if not exiled into utter oblivion, relegated to the foot of the page by mechanical proscription ? Emendation is not all guesswork : it entails a process of reasoning, an appeal to common sense, and exposition of some point in (Greek or) Latin usage or the idiom of an author. When a modern editor still condescends to mention the doubts and divinations of men who were steeped in the two languages till they thought in them and dreamed in them the grounds of reasoning are always suppressed : the critic is not allowed to speak, even with his head on the block. It is a hazardous thing to say ; but, to give a fair chance to a probable emendation, you must put it into the text, on probation. The late Emil Baehrens did this, and many have admired his courage ; where, in his editions you meet something odd or repugnant to classical niceties, you look at the foot of the page and, sure enough, discover scripsi. There you are ! The never-ending stream has carried it with it. . . . No. Stop a bit, not a line of Catullus or whom you will, but a piece of nonsense which Baehrens had the wit to detect but not the wit to put right. The man had a strong, sound instinct for what the sense required, but a deplor- ably clumsy hand at restoring the impaired form. But though he did much, negatively, by starting discussion, to promote criticism, his inartistic touch was largely to blame for bringing textual correction into discredit. So acute in diagnosis, so grotesque in prescription and so ubiquitous in industry ! For unfortunately it is true THE REVIVAL OF CRITICISM 29 that taste is a part of skill intellegentia, and wit a form of thinking, but TToXXol pAV Vapd7)K6(f>OpOL TTOLVpOL 8f T j3dl<XOl. And we have lived to see dulness, under polite aliases, dignified almost into a religion ; bright, young intellig- ences labouring to be dull and will not be comforted because they are not. I briefly resume and conclude. Human error in copyists is an axiom. Clark's amusing modern instances are a welcome corroboration. Error is most frequent in authors who have neither ecclesiastical use nor school use to protect them. Even supposing an equal show of surviving MSS., an author who was little read will be more corrupt than one who was much read ; Virgil may have blemishes, but few deep corruptions. Yet even authors protected by all the forces of authority and use, suffered in the Dark Ages.* The Dark Ages. Have you remarked a curious phenomenon ? Renascence snobbism and Reformation prejudice applied the term indiscriminately to all the centuries preceding the XV th . History has now pain- fully corrected this perversion ; the more that is known * One more example if you are not weary of detail. Of St. Ambrose's Hymns we have MSS. evidence which when an editor of Silver poets thinks of it, his mouth will water. Many of the codices go behind the age when interpolation was rife, some approach within 300 years of the Saint's lifetime. His Hymns were regularly sung in hundreds of religious houses. What guarantees ! Yet in one of them there is a piece* of quiet nonsense which the never-ending stream has not yet removed : Profecit ad fidem labor, Armisque docti bellicis Pro rege vitam ponere Didicere pro Xto mori. That makes sense ; but the unanimous testimony of scribes and editors gives . . . mediocre sense : viz. decere. 30 THE REVIVAL OF CRITICISM of the successive Renascences, the more appears that the absurdity of calling the period of the great School- men, or the period of Alcuin, a Dark Age. It passed for Dark, because we were told to shut our eyes, or look another way. But there was a Dark Age, and through that, as through a tunnel, all antique learning has had to pass. The VI th VI I I th centuries were dark ; great as is Europe's debt to Spain, Ireland and England, for what they preserved to us, not much came through quite unscathed. Very rude hands salved what was salved from the ruins of civilization. Do we always remember that uberlie- ferungsgeschichte in the great majority of instances carries us up to that darkness and no further ? Just compare Donatus' innocence of Terentian metre with the knowledge that scientific criticism has restored to us, and ask if the text of Terence is likely to be immaculate ? Consider the scholia to Ibis and draw your inferences as to the competence of the VII th century corrector to remake Augustan literature out of what an illiterate scribe handed up to him for revision. Or go to what is, in a manner, the fountain-head, Cassiodorius. Read his instructions to his copyists, grammaticae artis expertes, as he says (de Instit. Migne P.L., vol. 70, p. 1128). Contrast his scrupulous precaution in treating a Sacred text with the dangerous precept ' wherever in 1 disertis hominibus miswritings are found, the faulty ' places are to be unhesitatingly corrected,' quoniam viri supradicti sic dicta sua cotnposuisse credendi sunt ut regulas artis grammaticae quas didicerant custod- iisse iudicentur (ib. p. 1130). A sound principle, but dangerous for the men of that age to apply. THE REVIVAL OF CRITICISM 31 We are touched by his care for his copyists the patent lamps, the sun-clock and waterclock, the little manual of orthography which he drew up for their use when he was ninety-three years old. The barbarism of his Latinity has been absurdly overcharged, but yet when we remember that this is a stage of scholarship to which every classical author almost has had, in a sense, his style accommodated, let us ask ourselves : 1 How likely are say the refinements of Alexandrian 1 elegiac technique, in a difficult and unpopular poet, to 1 have survived, intact, the double ordeal of antiquarius 1 and corrector ? ' To say nothing of the damp, the worms, and the Opic mice. Think of the author whose literary life hung on a single thread spun in the copying room at Vivarium. Evoke the picture of a young religious, hardly more than a boy, doing his task in the spirit of a manual labour, as a modern schoolboy writes his lines subject to revision by an elder who was himself no deeper in scholarship than Cassiodorius' rudimentary abridgment of the grammarians would carry him. Was the person so pleasantly described as Vir Christianus nomine Lucianus, admit andus et eruditus qui vitam exercebat monasticam et elegantis librarii artetn apprime tenebat, eique navans strenue operant ex eo pattern quaerebat quotidianum (Vit. S.Epiphanii) a safe channel to transmit Augustan Latinity ? Would a lacuna content him ? Would a patch of casual tinkering discontent him ? I would take the elegance of his hand- writing on the testimony of the hagiographer, but I refuse to believe that his erudition was 'admirable' if judged by the standards of Heinsius or Bentley or Housman, nr >K IS DFT! - 32 THE REVIVAL OF CRITICISM There is a story of Equitius in S. Gregory's Dialogues (P.L. 77, p. 172) : A messenger from the Pope came to find him at his Abbey. The messenger was brought in to the antiquarii, who were busy at their manuscripts, and asked for Equitius. They replied : 1 You will find him in the meadow. He is making hay.' So were they, though they little thought it ; with the best intentions in the world they were making hay. Let us remember the Age of the Haymakers. In order to get past them let us above all revive the lost art of reading ; let us read enormously better and also enormously more than we do. We should be reading deeply and perpetually in all Greek and Latin, without respect of departments * and the cells of hermit specialists; and above all, let us have the courage to argue and challenge principles. If, as some fear, right reason is in general decline, let it at least be said that right reason died last in classical criticism. Extrema per illos . . . excedens terris uestigia fecit. * J. E. B. Mayor's little introduction to the edition of Tertul- lian's Apologeticus , published recently by Prof. Souter (C. U. P., 1917) contains among many good things this : ' Madvig told me that he had read no Greek or Latin theological author but Josephus, and that only for information on ancient warfare.' What an appalling admission ! Mayor puts his finger on one great general inferiority of XIX th century Latinists. We do not read enough Latin, or read it often enough. Oxford : Printed by Rogers & Broome, The Cowley S. John Press. 14 DAY USE RETURN TO DESK FROM WHICH BORROWED LOAN DEPT. This book is due on the last date stamped below, or on the date to which renewed. Renewals only: Tel. No. 642-3405 Renewals may be made 4 days prior ro date due. Renewed books are subject to immediate recall. /^V^Ss*-t ><--&<, ^Ug^ ^TlR-L tfWAR* LOAM -^- ^ \r,- FEB 02 2(1(13 LD21A-40m-8,'71 (P6572sl0)476-A-32 General Library University of California Berkeley