PLINY'S HISTORY OF ARTISTS1

[1897: AET. 34]

HEN the late Mr. James Boswell's narrative of a tour in Corsica appeared, Gray, writing to Walpole, said that it proved that even a fool could write a good book, if he would only put down what he saw and heard. Now the elder Pliny, though no fool, was essentially as incompetent to manage the province which he usurped-namely, all knowledge-as Boswell was to conceive or compose genuine history. He was neither a scientific observer, like Aristotle, nor a philosophical thinker, like Lucretius. But when a compiler to whom-like the man with the muck-rakenothing comes amiss, for whom no relic is too broken and no fable too absurd, confines his curiosity and his industry only within the limits of reality, the gathered result must impose itself by its mass, if not by its majesty. And then, again, Pliny owes much to this grand prerogative of the ancients, namely, that in process of time their ignorance becomes a something as " rich and strange" as their knowledge. Everything that "the glory that was Greece" once touched, it turned to gold, as the sun gilds the barren peak and the salt sea.

And whether Pliny cuts his commentators or not in Elysium, as we are informed Homer and Aristotle do, of one thing we may be certain: they are just as numerous and obsequious a crowd. And from this point of view it will be clear why the very defects of Pliny as a writer-his looseness of thought and inaccuracy of fact-by adding to the difficulty should add also to the number and the zeal of his commentators. "They that are whole need not a physician." The work of a thinker can be viewed comprehensively, or it can be

1 "The Elder Pliny's Chapters on the History of Art." Translated by K. JexBlake. With Commentary and Historical Introduction, by E. Sellers. The "Guardian" February 24, 1897.

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tested at particular points. But in the case of a compilation such as this, a register of the infinite variety of manifestations, each item must be separately weighed and checked on its merits. And so it has come to pass that nowadays it takes a whole disciplined army to measure the man who sprawled over the universe like Gulliver in Lilliput. Each can only bring and apply the instrument used in his own particular field, for the ideal editor would have to be greater than his author knowing not only what he knew, but also what he should have known. In short, the ideal commentary may be looked for, as the Editor suggests, in Utopia; but then

Nemo etiam celebri regnat in Utopia.

The present work is an edition, with a translation and a full commentary, of the chapters dealing with the history of art. These form a complete and peculiar episode, and it is to be noted that the artists enter the gigantic scheme not in their own right, as it were, as expressions of a high order of human genius and activity, but in absolute subordination to the material in which they worked. Aretino called Titian the god of colours, and Sansovino the breath of marbles, and in Pliny's scheme the colours and the marbles come first. It is only when the body has been described and disposed of that he comes to mention that it used once to speak and to move -that he can turn aside for an instant to gossip about Pheidias and Apelles. Nevertheless, these few chapters, quaintly conceived and loosely compacted as they are, form not by nature, but by accident, one of the most precious legacies of antiquity:

An irreparable accident-the total loss of the art-literature which preceded Pliny-has given to the books with which we are here concerned a unique value. It so happens that from his pages only can we now obtain something like a connected impression of the art-literature of the Greeks, as it lay open, if not actually to him, at any rate to some of his immediate predecessors.

This then is what the critic of Pliny has to offer, and to the student of history or of art there can be no greater boon-namely, the restoration to identity, from behind the blurred scribble of the compiler of the men who guided and expressed the thought and feeling of their contemporaries or of posterity, like Vasari and Burke; but with this great difference, that they lived "in the morn

ing of the times," in full view of those first faultless masterpieces, of which, even after their disappearance, the world has never ceased to dream.

To show how far this analysis has been carried is one of the main objects of Miss Sellers in the introduction, where she displays the resources of comprehensive knowledge and accurate scholarship in a degree which only those who have themselves attempted such a task of minute inquiry will be able fully to appreciate.

It may be worth while just to dwell upon one or two of these Greek art critics, for some of them were the happy originators of anecdotes and fables which have gone on echoing from mouth to mouth ever since, and some already expressed tendencies and employed methods which are once more beginning to proclaim themselves freshly modern at the present day.

We can see Xenocrates, for instance, almost as closely and clearly as we see Vasari. A Sicyonian, or at least bred in that school, he allows the influence of local patriotism not only to colour his estimate of artists, but even to determine their places in his peculiar scheme. A firm believer in what would now be called "evolution," he arranges them in a descending line which also traces the path of a logical development. Each artist attacks and masters some one problem, leaving the next stage to be surmounted by his successor, and the possibilities of art are thus progressively revealed and exhausted, until "the diapason closes full "-in the Sicyonian sculptor Lysippus, and the Sicyonian painter Apelles.

It is often said that truth is eternal, and so probably it is; but only in the sense in which the soul is immortal. For just as we can never realize the immortal in its naked separateness, but only assume or suspect it behind the never-ceasing flow of the visible and material, so truth seems to depend for its maintenance upon a constant supply of fable. The incidents that are always fresh are those that never happened, and they draw their vitality from no root in the world of external fact, but from the deep hidden springs of emotion and aspiration. The colour-grinders probably never laughed at Alexander; but we hear the laugh still, when every word of what was once actually imparted by the father of the wise to the conqueror of the world has been forgotten. Now among the early founders and benefactors who by the invention or circulation of fable have insured truth against the risk of time, Duris of Samos

must henceforth hold an honoured place, for it is to him that, directly or indirectly, Pliny owes the story of Apelles and Protogenes and the split line, of Apelles and the cobbler, and many another delightful tale besides. The pages which Miss Sellers has devoted to tracing and collecting the Duridian elements, as they sparkle here and there in the complex mass, are a very brilliant piece of work, and we cannot do better than quote the conclusion:

We may feel impelled from the side of historical verity to echo the complaint of Plutarch that Duris shows, even where not misled by interest, an habitual disregard of truth, but we are none the less indebted to him for what is perhaps the most enduring charm in the history of the ancient artists. The stories we have been studying, like those countless others which enliven the pages of Greek history, have their rise in a profoundly popular instinct, in the desire to find expression, at once simple and striking, for distinguishing qualities of temperament or of workmanship. And in their graphic force, that "power," if we may borrow from the words which Dionysios applies to the oratory of Lysias, of "driving home to the senses the subject of discourse," they have entered into the very substance of our thought. While every schoolboy is familiar with the tale of Zeuxis and the grapes, a scholar such as August Boeckh could express his ideal of the learned life in the words "dies diem docet ut perdideris quam sine linea transmiseris," or the orator Burke sum up the qualities of that masterly State-paper, "whose every stroke had been justified by historic fact," in the telling phrase, Thus painters sign their names at Co.

Another section deals with the cases in which Pliny has been detected repeating or recalling the epigrammatists, those "little masters" of a fastidious decadence, whose tiny chalices sparkle, nevertheless, from the ancient springs. And here, if anywhere, we can feel that Pliny and ourselves stand on common ground, for at the present day we are more ready and apt than he was to mistake literary embroidery about or upon a work of art for the forms and facts of the thing itself. Most people receive no very precise or satisfactory intimation through the sense of sight. They like to have the meaning and motive of what they see carefully drawn out and presented in a compact form of words; but then words, fluent and insinuating, quickly decompose and supplant what they were invoked only to support. The reflection of the real thing, playing fitfully in and out among the adjectives, simulates its first cause or inner motive, and the mind, distracted by the shuffling of labels and

the calling of crow-words, finds no way of escape from the limits of talk to reach the immediate perception of art.

It is said that Memnon used to speak when the sun at his rising, and again at his setting, kissed him. But now "the oracles are dumb" in a sense other than Milton's, and the dry light of science has no such warmth of stimulus to impart, so, like the priests of Baal, we are reduced to the necessity of torturing the tenderness of our own "psychology" to compel the stone gods of the Greeks to hear and answer.

The translation will doubtless be a great help to those of our modern critics who, without knowing either Greek or Latin, must yet be fluent upon the subject of ancient art in the ordinary course of business. We are glad that the learned editors resisted the temptation to reproduce the old version of Holland, not that we ignore the value and the beauty of these English masterpieces, but they belong to the age of full-blooded adventure, when fancy tempted discovery, and their naïve exuberances and innocent inaccuracies assort ill with the systematic precaution and precision of modern science. Buddha in one of his parables recounts how that Panini, the great grammarian, through pride in his own attainments, failed to reach Nirvana. Accordingly he was born into the next stage of existence as a dullard, and at school was constantly being whipped for his grammar. It is not for us, however, to disturb the repose of the adventurers upon the ocean of truth, who had first to be bold if their descendants were ever to be wise, and to force upon them all the changes and chances of a new career under the rigid rule of the privat docent. "They laboured, so must we." The text that has been followed is, in the main, that of Detlefsen; but not a word has been adopted without revision, or a further appeal, if necessary, to MS. sources.

In conclusion, the present work must be pronounced to be a remarkable achievement on several grounds. As an example of method it should have its effect far beyond the limits of Latin scholarship, for art criticism must begin with documents, even if it ends in delirium. The critic, while he pretends to be as keen as Argus and as quick as Ariel, is tethered to tradition by the ears, and we shall not begin to rave with sobriety about Italian art until it has been shown in the same lucid and systematic way what it is precisely that we have to trade upon.