Excerpt from Greek Literary Criticism
The teacher had to be separated from the poet before criticism could begin:The rationalizing work of Heracleitus of Miletus, the allegorical interpretations of Anaximander, Stesimbrotus and Anaxagoras, and the direct attacks of Xenophanes may be said to have completed this preliminary work. Homer was not robbed of his authority, but bis infallibility had been called in question. He was exposed to criticism, though to a criticism which primarily at least was not literary.
A second and more potent obstacle was that Greek view of life which may perhaps be termed the monistic view, - the idea that all activities must stand in immediate relation to a single definite end. The Greek was always unwilling to accept co-ordination; he endeavoured to substitute for it a scheme of subordination. When this prevailing habit of mind is accentuated by the entire absence of the conception of a world of imagination distinct from the world of common realities, it must inevitably offer strenuous resistance to the criticism of literature as literature. In Greece the first reflection on literary questions took the form of an attempt to find poetry's due place in an already accepted scheme of life. That scheme was roughly identical with the City-state; and hence the first criticism was devoted to an examination of the relations between literature and political life. It asked in effect one of two questions. The loftier-minded critics asked, "Is literature compatible with the duty of a citizen?" the more practical asked, "Of what use is literature to a man engaged in politics?" In other words the attempt was made to subordinate literature either to the rules of conduct which governed the citizen, or to the exigencies of rhetoric by which the policy of the State was determined. These extraneous principles govern all the first period of Greek literary criticism. Whether we consider the popular criticism of the comic stage, or the lofty speculations of Plato, or the shallow disputations of the Sophists, we find ethical and rhetorical principles in the main predominant. Plato and Aristotle indeed transcended the narrow limits of the City-state in their metaphysical speculations, but here again the monistic tendency was at work, and aesthetic was strictly-subordinated to a philosophy which took no account of imagination.
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