discoverer delving at will for new ideas, and labelling them when found with strange word-marks. The critic also deals with τὰ πρὸς δόξαν, but their range is for him far wider, and he possesses a certain scientific freedom of treatment in idea and language. The artist of Japan or China must work with the materials his social condition offer; the artist of Athens possessed a far finer quarry, but his materials were also socially limited; the true critic, the "discerner," compares and contrasts the most divergent types of social and individual character at will, and, if the development he observes is fatal to any universal aesthetic standard and deprives him of the enthusiasm such a standard might supply, he is at least superior to the artist alike in the range and quality of his knowledge.
The critic cannot, therefore, allow the art-conception of literature to stand for a moment between him and the object of his study, whether the champions of that conception are found among the Athenians themselves or their modern disciples.[1] And so, to return to our prosaic question, we ask again, With what kind of literary stock did the Athenians start upon their career of literary production?
- ↑ "The students of antiquity," says Mr. J. A. Symonds (Greek Poets, Second Series, p. 303), "attached less value than we do to literature of secondary importance. It was the object of their criticism, especially in the schools of Alexandria, to establish canons of perfection in style. … Marlowe, according to their laws of taste, would have been obscured by Shakspere; while the multitude of lesser playwrights, whom we honour as explaining and relieving by their comradeship the grandeur of the dramatist (ὁ τραγῳδοποιὸς they might have styled Shakspere, as their Pindar was ὁ λυρικός), would have sunk into oblivion, leaving him alone in splendid isolation. Much might be said for this way of dealing with literature. By concentrating attention on undeniable excellence, a taste for noble things in art was fostered, while the danger that we run of substituting the historical for the æsthetic method was avoided." Mr. Symonds, however, forgets that in their unhistorical criticism the Greeks committed the far more serious error of substituting the aesthetic method for the historical—an error which, decked in the beauty of Greek art, has done more to check the growth of historical science in modern Europe than can be easily estimated.
