Note 26 — Chapter II · GREEK CRITICISM BEFORE ARISTOTLE.

If the space and treatment here allotted to Plato seem exceeding poor and beggarly, it can but be urged that his own criticism of literature is so exceedingly general that in this book no other treatment of it was possible. On his own principles we should be “praising the horse in terms of the ass” if we did otherwise. It is true that besides the attitude above extolled, there are to be found, from the glancing, many-sided, parabolic discourse of the Phædrus to the mighty theory of the Republic, endless things invaluable, nay, indispensable, to the critic. It is nearly certain that, as Professor Butcher thinks, no one had anticipated him in the recognition of the organic unity necessary to a work of literary, as of all, art. But even here, as in the messages “to Lysias and all others who write orations, to Homer and all others who write poems, to Solon, &c.,” we see the generality, the abstraction, the evasiveness, one may almost say, of his critical gospel. Such concrete things as the reference to Isocrates at the end of the Phædrus are very rare; and, on the other hand, his frequent and full dealings with Homer are not literary criticism at all. In a treatise on Æsthetics Plato cannot have too large a space; in a History of Criticism the place allotted to him must be conspicuous, but the space small.