A history of criticism and literary taste in Europe, from the earliest texts to the present day. Volume 1 (of 3), Classical and mediæval criticismSaintsbury, George
History
A history of criticism and literary taste in Europe, from the earliest texts to the present day. Volume 1 (of 3), Classical and mediæval criticism
Saintsbury, George
Criticism -- History; Literature -- History and criticism; Literature, Medieval
Here the Enemy seems to have thought that he was getting too good, for
another and greater gap occurs, and when we are allowed to read again,
we are back among the Figures and dealing with Metaphor—the criticism of
examples, however, being still illuminative. It leads him, moreover, to
another of his nugget-grounds, the discussion on “Faultlessness,” which
introduces some especially valuable parallels—Apollonius and Homer,
Bacchylides and Pindar, Ion and Sophocles, Hyperides and Demosthenes,
Lysias and Plato. Then we pass to the figure Hyperbole after a gap, and
then to _ordonnance_ and arrangement, with a passage, valuable but, like
all similar passages in the ancient critics, difficult, on rhythm. After
this a section on μικρότης—“littleness,” “triviality”—leads abruptly to
the close, which is not the close, and which, after some extremely
interesting remarks on the ethical and other conditions of the time,
ends with an unfulfilled promise of treating the subject of the
Passions. The loss of this is perhaps more to be regretted than the loss
of any other single tractate of the kind in antiquity. It might have
been, and possibly was, only a freshening up of the usual rhetorical
commonplaces about the “colours of good and evil,” and the probable
disposition of the hearer or reader. But it might also, and from
Longinus’s handling of the other stock subject of the Figures it is much
more likely to, have been something mainly, if not wholly, new: in fact,
something that to this day we have not got—an analysis of the direct
appeals of literature to the primary emotions of the soul.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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