THE ATTIC ORATORS.*

OF the two objects which Professor Jebb aimed at in this book, he has succeeded in attaining the second. This was, he tells us, to supply an aid to the particular study of the Attic orators before Demosthenes. For so eminent a Greek scholar as Mr. Jebb, this was compartitively an easy task, and he has accomplished it successfully and exhaustively. Whether it was worth doing at * 271d Attic Orators, frost Antiphon to havoc By B. 0. Jebb. London: Macmillan Co.& all, at least on such a scale, is another question. We are inclined to think that it was not, and that the " close study of the best

Greek literature" need not include the works of Antiphon, Andocides, Lysias, Isocratea, and Isaeus. In any case, the author should have done his spiriting more briefly, for in an attempt to- resuscitate the children of oblivion to be tedious is to fail. Yet the number of utterly unimportant facts recorded in this book is simply overwhelming. Can anything, for instance, be more wearisome or unprofitable than discussions about the dates of events which, even to a voluminous historian of Greece, would' be no more significant than the dates of Captain Famish's divorce and of Ensign Ragg's first game at billiards would be to an his-

torian of the British Army ? Goaded by the depraving stimu- lus of marks, a Cambridge undergraduate might for a time give his mind to such questions, and a German philologist- might devote years to their elucidation, in a series of volumes,

which even a Ruskin would despair of rivalling ; but why a ripe scholar, who is Public Orator in the University of Cambridge, as well as Professor of Greek in the University of Glasgow, should devote his hard-won leisure to polishing these mouldy bones is a problem too hard for us to solve. We are bound, however, to admit that he polishes them well. His arguments are moderate and logical, and his Greek scholarship is sound and accurate. It lacks, indeed, the geniality and power which marked the scholar- ship of Wolf and Bentley ; but it is genuine and trustworthy, equal or nearly equal to that of Professor Kennedy, and supe- rior to that of Professors Jowett and CampbelL His translations are, for the most part, as spirited as they are accurate, and we must congratulate him upon the great improvement he has made iLv

this respect ; for in his excellent editions of the Ajax and Electra

of Sophocles, although he was nearly always right in his interpreta- tions, the interpretations themselves were frequently given in lan- guage that was singularly tasteless and unpoetical. We may repeat, therefore, that this portion of Mr. Jebb's book is a complete success, and that no student of the Attic Orators who preceded Demos- thenes need look for assistance elsewhere. Still we cannot help protesting against so much misdirected industry, and express- ing a belief that the linked sweetness in which all this minute- and loving criticism of the styles of Andocides and Co. in

drawn out is sweetness wasted on the desert air. We dis- sent in tote from Mr. Jebb's estimate of the absolute and rela-

tive value of his clients. The giants of antiquity, " the dead but sceptred sovereigns who rule our spirits from their urns," lose nothing of their majesty and dominion as the kingdom of letters.

grows wider and richer. But inferior men, men of the stamp of the minor orators of Athens, must evermore find fewer and' fewer readers. The value of their writings as historical doom- ments will, indeed, remain unchanged ; but we venture to assert

that no sensible historian of Greece—and the history of Greece, for Englishmen, has yet to be written—will devote to these writings

one-half of that attention which Mr. Jebb would fain claim for them from his scientific students of antiquity. " The Compara- tive Method" (we are quoting now from his preface) "in its appli- cation to language, to literature, to mythology, to political or

constitutional history, has "—not, in our opinion—" given to the Classics a general interest and importance far greater than they

possessed in the days when the devotion they attracted was most exclusive." But we have no time to dwell upon this burning ques- tion, and must now consider bow the Professor has executed the first and more important portion of his task. On the whole, we think, not well.

Again and again his good genius seems to desert him. He is often pedantic and often so curiously puzzle-headed that we feel, like Faust's pupil, als ging uns sin Mithlrad in: Kopf herunt. We suspect that the whole of his theory about ancient oratory being one of the fine arts is a blunder. We are sure that the arguments by which he attempts to support it are unsatisfactory. Dogberry may have been wrong in his view of the origin of reading sad writing, but speaking unquestionably does come by natuFe. Orator nascitur, non ft, and we refuse to believe that the thunders of Pericles and the seductive arrogance of Alcibiades were not far superior to the cut-and-dried pettiness and prettiness of Andocides, Isaeus, and Co. It is the merest justice, however, to Mr. Jebb to say that he has given us an admirable sketch of d'Eschines and Demosthenes, and would that he had treated their predecessors with the same judicious brevity ! But it is time to examine his theory, and the following passage may be quoted as fairly enough expressing the fundamental conception on which that theory is framed :— " At the outset," he says, " it is well to clear away a verbal hindrance to the comprehension of this subject in its right bearings. The English term orator,' when it is not used ironically, is reserved for one who, in relation to speaking, has genius of an order analogous to that which entitles a man to be seriously called' a poet.' The term' oratory,' though the exigencies of the language lead to its often being used as a mere synonym for set speaking,' is yet always inconveniently coloured with the same suggestion, either of irony or of superlative praise. The Roman term orator, ' pleader,' had this advantage over ours,—that it related, not to a faculty, but to a professional or official attitude. It could, therefore, be applied to any one who stood in :hat attitude, whether effectively or otherwise. Thus the Romans could legitimately say mediocris or mamas orator,' whereas in English the corresponding phrases are either incorrect or sarcastic. Even the Romans, however, seem to have felt that their word was unsatisfactory, and to have con- fessed this sense by using dicere," are dicendi,' as much as possible. But the Greeks had a word which presented the man of eloquence, not, like the English word, as a man of genius, nor like the Roman word, as an official person, but simply as a speaker,—pinup. This designation was claimed by those Sicilian masters who taught men how to speak, at Athens it was given especially to the habitual speakers in the public assembly, in later iimea it was applied to students or theorists of rhetoric. What, then, is the fact signified by this double phenomenon, —that the Greeks had the word rhetor, and that they did not apply it to everybody ? It is this :—That in the Greek view, a man who speaks may, without necessarily having first-rate natural gifts for eloquence, or being invested with office, yet deserve to be distinguished from his fellows by the name of ' a speaker.' It attests the conception that speaking is potentially an art, and that one who speaks may, in speaking, be an artist. This is the fundamental conception on which rests, first, the relation between ancient oratory and ancient prose ; secondly, the relation between ancient and modern oratory."

We venture to assert that this fundamental conception is no conception at all. The Professor has strung together a number of hazy statements, and nearly all of them are false. How, for instance, is it incorrect or sarcastic to say that So-and-so is an execrable orator, and that So-and-so is a miserable poet? To be incorrect and sarcastic, we should have to say that Tupper was a splendid poet, and that the Member for Peterborough was a con- summate orator. Used by themselves, and with no qualifying adjectives, to express blame or praise, the words " orator" and 4t poet" have not much meaning. Homer was a poet, and Cicero was an orator, are propositions which might serve for the minor premiss of a syllogism, but we doubt if any one would think that either predicate was "coloured with a suggestion of superlative praise." Again, Mr. Jebb's Latin scholarship would seem to be hardly so strong as his Greek. There can be no doubt whatever that Cicero used orator in exactly the same sense as we do -" orator." Fa his Brutus he repeatedly asserts and implies that this word connotes some degree of excellence. He apologises for mentioning, in his list of pleaders, men qui nec habiti sent oratores, neque fuerunt ; and says that in discussing the merits of aspirants for the prizes of eloquence at Rome, he shall make it abund- antly clear quern existintet clamatorem, quern oratorem fuisse. Is Mr. Jebb more correct in what he says about gimp? We think not. A term applicable alike to Sicilian masters, to Athenian mob-orators, and to theorists of Rhetoric, must be rather -too elastic and vague to serve as a basis for the fundamental con- ception on which the relation between ancient and modern oratory rests. the habitual speakers in the public assembly were un- doubtedly called ' Piropq, and Cleon was a typical specimen of that class of men at Athens. Now, we know from Aristophanes what Cleon's rhetoric was like, and it is obvious at once that in resting his theory upon a supposed connotation of the word grop, Mr. Jebb has built upon the sand. He evidently, however, has no such misgivings himself. " Having proved his point, bcdad!" in much the same way as Father Tom proved his against the Pope, the Professor goes away at score. " Ancient oratory is a fine art, an art regarded by its cultivators and by the public as analogous to sculpture, to poetry, to painting, to music, and to acting." From this, by an easy leap, we come to " Demosthenes is a sculptor, Burke a painter ;" and by another easy leap, to that terrible word " Plastic," that word of fear, unpleasing to the critic's ear. "That character," says the Professor—(his singing robes are on 'him now, let no dog bark !)—" that character which, with special modifications, belongs to every artistic creation of the Greek mind, whether this be a statue, a temple, a poem, a speech, or an individual's (!) conception of his own place in life, is usually, and rightly, called the plastic." Is it unfair to ask in what respects the conception formed by Alcibiades of his own place in life was more " plastic " than the similar conceptions formed by the First Napoleon, for instance, Or even by Dr. Kenealy ? But here we must leave the Professor, in a quagmire, as it seems to us, haunted by " Gorgons and Chimaeras dire," by the " sculpturesque" and the " plastic," and by the " fundamental conception of the an- tique" and by the "standard of the picturesque." We leave him, however, battling with a body of opponents whom he dubs " the ingenious." It is not often that a man is bowled over by giants of his own creating, but judging from the opening sentences put into the mouths of "the ingenious"—" It is a mistake. It is pedantry and sentiment "—we should say that if " the ingenious" have fair-play, it is odds against the Professor.

For ourselves, we frankly say that we have no sympathy with a "big-mouthed Boeotian" who "draws out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument." That Mr. Jebb does so, and in doing so errs in company with many a prose Rossetti, who "feeds on honey-dew and drinks the milk of,—" Germany, is as true as it is pitiful, and proves that proficiency in Greek, like proficiency in chess or mathematics, gives no pre- sumption that the man who possesses it will be able to think clearly in aliend arte. Mr. Jebb closes the last page of his preface —a page, by the way, whichof itself would go far to justify much of what we have said—with these words: Securus judicat orbis terrarum. Whether this quotation comes from the Fathers, or the Schoolmen, or from Lord Bacon, we have clean forgotten—perhaps from none of them—but we seem to recollect that it struck the imagi- nation of J. H. Newman. How he and the Professor would translate it is clear enough, and their translation would accurately express the meaning of its author; but it admits of another and more scholarly version, which we especially commend to Mr. Jebb's attention. We will give it in the Hamiltonian way:— Orbit? terrarum, "the world," judicat, "passes its verdict" (on such matters as these), secures, "without caring a dram about them."

One word, in conclusion. We regret to see that so sound a scholar as Mr. Jebb has given in his adhesion to the silly and ignorant—for it does not deserve to be called pedantic—way of spelling Greek proper names, which was introduced by Grote, because having been educated in Germany, he knew no better, and has been followed by many writers since, because, as Goethe says, there are few voices in the world and many echoes. The Germans, of course, may spell these words as they like, though why they should write " lsaeos " instead of " Isaios " is inscrut- able, but we have no such liberty. The Latin element in our language is bone of its bone and flesh of its flesh. Literary chauvinism may for a while uphold this stupid innovation, bat the time will come when Alcibiades will be restored to us, when shameful execution will be done upon Solcrates, and when Epikuros, Proklos, and Isaeos will be packed off to play at Spelling-bees with the Plataians and the Korkyraians.