Longinus On the sublime

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PA 4229.L4 1906

Longinus On the sublime.

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LONGINUS
ON THE SUBLIME

HENRY FROWDE, M.A.

POBUSHER TO THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

LONDON, EDINBURGH

NEW YORK AND TORONTO

LONGINUS
ON THE SUBLIME

TRANSLATED BY

A. O. PRICKARD, M.A.

LATE FELLOW OF NEW COLLEGE, OXFORD

WITH INTRODUCTION, APPENDIX, AND INDEX

OXFORD

AT THE CLARENDON PRESS

1906

OXFORD
PRINTED AT THE CLARENDON PRESS

BY HORACE HART, HJU
PRINTER TO THE ONIVERSITV

PRINTED IN ENGLAND.'

INTRODUCTION

In a copjr of the first edition of the treatise knovni
since the revival of letters as Longinus an the Sublime,
which is now in the Library of the British Museum,
may be read a few lines, written in Latin, by the great
scholar Isaac Casaubon, beginning with the words 'A
golden book.' Quite recently Professor Butcher has
written of it as an ' essay of unique value and interest.'
It is unique, partly, because pf its rare intrinsic excel-
lence ; which gives it a place among the remains of -
Greek criticism, only shared by the work of Aristotle.
so diderent from it in every respect, on the Art of
Poetry. This high quality is allowed to it by a
long series of critics and scholars, — from Addison,
who first recommended it to a large public of English
readers, to Professor Saintsbury. But we need not
appeal to authority ; the true test is to read the little
work through, and to ask from how many wo'iters,
ancient or modern, we could have borne the continuous
development of the one theme, ' Be great ! live with
great minds! ' — how we should have felt if the wise and
humane Plutarch, or the careful and sound-beaded
Dionysius of Halicarnwsua, had tried to enforce it ? Yet
no one reads the Treatise for the first time without
feeling that he has found a literary guide of rare ability
to direct, to invigorate, to ennoble his thought.
Moreover, it has inspired other critics. Burke had the

Ti Introduction

older study before him, though he only once directly
refers to it, when he wrote his Philosophical Inquiry
into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful,
\ an early work, interesting to us, not only for its strong
and dignified style, but also as being a charaaeristic
attempt to base upon principles our judgements on
matters of taste and opinion ; important also, as having
had much to do with the conception by Lessing of the
ideas contained in his Laocoon. Sir Joshua Reynolds
draws from our author many of the precepts laid down
in the Discourses, and often all but quotes his words.
Bishop Lowth applied the teaching of the Treatise in
his own fresh and vigorous Lectures on Hebrew Poetry.
It is quoted again and again, vrith evidently genuine
enjoyment, by numbers of English writers in poetry
and prose ; by none more often, or with livelier appre-
ciation, than by Fielding *-

Over and above its singular attractiveness and solid
worth, there are other considerations which make the
Treatise unique. It is written in a style which is sui
generis, often more Latin than Greek, both in rhythm
and in conception, yet sometimes neither Latin nor
Greek, and always impressed with the strong per-
sonality of the writer. The interest in authors and
books, other than Greek, is unusual, but must have
appeared also in the work of Caecilius upon the same
subject, to which it is, in effect, an answer. The

' See an article in the Quarterly Review of October| 1900,
which the reader should consult (or Prof. Churton Collins' Studies
in Poetry and Criticism, 1906).

Introduction vii

range from which its abundant metaphors are drawn is
both wide and remarkable. Lastly, its strange literary
history appeals strongly to our curiosity. It has
reached us through a copy written in the tenth century,
itself so mutilated in various parts that about a third
of the original contents is wanting, without a single
word of earlier comment or notice vouchsafed to us by
antiquity — a babe cast up by the stern waters of Time,
without father or mother or any credentials of origin,
but of features which assure us certainly that it comes
of noble line.

Questions of date and authorship meet us at the
outset, and we will at once try to see clearly how they
lie. In a sense, it is possible to make too much of such
uncertainties. Any ancient critical work coming
from an author who had the great Greek books in his
hands, just as we have, only in a more complete form,
and who read them in the language of his own daily
life and from a Greek point of view, has that about it
which no modern estimate can supply ; a century or
two earlier or later is no great matter. On the other
hand, the general conditions of thought and of modes
of expression may change very greatly within such an
interval. Moreover, we naturally speak of a book, and
use it, with much greater confidence when we know all
about it — who wrote it, and when, and with what
purpose — than when these are all unknovra quantities.
Take such a writer as Horace, one whose personal
circumstances we know so familiarly, and whose judge-
ment worked so evenly, that he may be trusted to say

viii Introductim

the same thing under the same conditions at almost
any period of his life. Yet we feel on much firmer
ground when we are considering the contents, say, of
the First Book of Epistles, than if we turn to the Second
Book or to the Ars Poetica, where so many preliminary
doubts must be settled or left by agreement svh iudice,
before we are free to deal with the contents. So the
critical student enters upon Hamlet or Coriolanus with
a mind steadier and less preoccupied than he brings
to the study of, say, The Tempest or Romeo and Juliet.
The facts are briefly these. In the old manuscript
already mentioned, the treatise is headed in Greek
words: OfDionysiusLanginus concemingSublimity. This
was reproduced in the earliest editions printed in the
middle of the sixteenth century, and it seems never to
have been doubted that the author was the same person
as Cassius Longinus, a great teacher of philosophy and
language in the third century a. d., who was adviser
to Queen Zenobia of Palmyra, and paid with his life
for his share in her unfortunate rising against Aurelian
(Gibbon, chap. xi). Early in the nineteenth century
it came to be known, in the first place by a discovery
made by an Italian scholar, Amati, in the Vatican
Library, that the title was variously given ; that the
old tenth-century Paris copy itself, though it bore the
name of Dionysius Longinus above the text, yet con-
.tained an index in which the treatise was ascribed to
' Dionysius or Longinus.' A copy at Florence, dating
\ from the fifteenth century, is headed simply Of Longinus
on Sublimity if Language, and has, on a slip of parch-

Introduction ix

ment affixed to the cover, words both of Greek and
Latin, ascribing the work to an ' anonymous ' or ' un-
certain author.'

As no syllable of information has reached us from
any source earlier than the old manuscript itself, it
seemsreasonable, unless a presumption can be established
in favour of any one of these traditions, to conclude
that all are so many hypotheses or guesses, excepting
that one which leaves the author uncertain. So a
certain work attributed to Aristotle, but certainly not
his, was also attributed, in ancient times, to Plato,
another to Theophrastus. The difficulty long felt as
to the combination of the Greek and Roman names
' Dionysius-Longinns ' may not be insuperable ; but,
when the names are those of two of the best-known
critics of antiquity, it is much to ask us to believe that
they were ever borne in real life by one man.

The further hypothesis which grew up, not suggested
by any tradition, that the person described by this
double name was in fact the historical Cassius Longinus,
should, if correct, be readily supported by some such pre-
sumption as we have suggested ; since the philosopher-
statesman left many writings, both on philosophy,
and on literary subjects, of which we possess consider-
able fragments ; yet no passage has been alleged which
can fairly be quoted in this sense. The most favour-
able is one occurring in the Rhetoric of Longinus : ' Such
language is, as it were, the light of thoughts and argu-
ments.' This is sufficiently like ' beautiful words are,
in all truth, a light peculiar to mind' (p. 55), but

X Introduction

the image finds a counterpart also in Plutarch ' : —
' As light to those who see, so speech is a good
to those who hear,' and is, in fact, familiar in the
phraseology of the Latin critics ; while the idea of
some words being intrinsically beautiful is quoted by
Dionysius as from Theophrastus, three centuries before
his own time. On some particular points the presump-
tion is actually against identifying the two persons ;
such are the classification of the 'figures,' and the
estimate of particular orators, though it would not be
fair to press these discrepancies too closely.

It may seem somewhat strange that we cannot
speak with more decision as to the internal evidence
bearing on the question whethe r the treatise was
composed in the first century or the third of our era,
and whether it was or was not by tiie same hand as the
parts of the Rhetoric recovered by the great scholar
D. Ruhnken, and the other undoubted work of Cassius
■'Longinus, for these are the two issues really before us.
Such internal evidence would naturally present itself
under the heads of — persons or events mentioned, voca-
bulary and style, and general point of view, whether
literary or philosophical. In glancing at these three
points, we must remember that more cogent evidence is
required to set aside a tradition already existing, even
a faint one, than to establish a claim de novo ; and we
therefore repeat that the inscription of the Treatise on
the Sublime, which is the sole source of any tradition,
leaves the authorship entirely uncertain.

' Df rec: rat. aud: c. 5.

Introduction li

Of the numerous orators, poets, and historians
discussed and quoted in the Treatise, the latest in
date is probably Matris (p. 6) ; at any rate, no one
is named who belongs to a period later than the Au-
gustan. It was formerly thought that Ammonius,
named on p. 30, was an exception, but it turns out to
be anexceptionwhich'proves the rule,'for thereference
is certainly not to Ammonius Saccas,one of the teachers
of Cassius Longinus, but to a critic who lived before
the time of Augustus, and who wrote on the particular
subjects indicated in the passage. Again, the Treatise
is based upon a work with the same title by Caecilius, a
critic who enjoyed great reputation in the first century
A.D., and himself lived in its earlier years. It is possible,
but seems very unlikely, that an answer (for all the men-
tions of Caecilius are unfavourable) should be made in
so much detail to a work written several generations
back ; and the words used suggest at least that the
author and the younger friend addressed read the
work of Caecilius together when it was fresh from his
pen. The notice of dwarfs (p, 79) and of the Pythian
oracle (p. 30) make for the earlier date, and also the
mention, in the imperfect tense, of a practice of Theo-
dorus of Gadara, tutor of the Emperor Tiberius (p. 7).
Of Postumius Terentianus nothing is known. From
the terms in which he is addressed, he appears to have
been a younger friend, and a close friend, of the author.
' Excellent ' (p. 70) should imply official rank (see
Acts xxiii. z6, and xxvi. 25), and the author has in
view readers among men in public life (p. i). How-

m

IntretdueUm

ever, tie ' Complaisant man ' of Tbeopiifastus {char, v)
hails an ordtoary sequaintance as ' Exeellent.'

The style of the Trf^Hse-f that is, of the Greek con-
structions and idioms used, does not seem to give any
tangible criterion. The Greek used by writers of the
time of the Roman Empire was fixed and artificial,
with little growth or -ritality of its own, but capable
of immense variation, according to the individuality
of authors so different as Dionysins, Plutarch, Dion
ChrysQstom, Lucian. Vocabulary does offer a test:
'the subject caimot be profitably discussed here, bnt it
may be said that a careful analysis has been made by
M. Louis Vaueher', who finds that there are few terms,
not quite common-place, which are used both in the
Trfatise and also by Cassius Longinus, while a very
large number of words characteristic of the former
seem to have fallen out of use when the latter wrote,
or had changed their meaning. We may mention, as
a term of some general interest, the word Allegory
(p. 17) ; it is used, as it is by Quintilian and Cicero,
in the sense familiar to us, whereas in the RhftorU of
Iionginus it means the substitution, for the sake of
variety, of one word or phrase for another. That
M. Vaucher went on, strangely as it has seemed to
most people, to argue that the author of onr Treatise
was no other than Plutarch, does not in any way
impair the cogency of his negative conclusion, nor yet
the great value and interest of his excellent studies.

The attitude of Cassius Longinus to the great authors
' Etudeti eriH^Ms, 1854.

Introduction xiii

is widely different from that of our Treatise. Both
write as men of vast reading and of a high ordef of
intellect, both admire profoundly and intelligently
the masters of Greek letters. But the former thints of
them, and recommends them, as models of style, the
latter as containing and inspiring great thought. Both
Were sincere admirers of Plato, and both found, or
allowed the existence of certain shortcomings; but the
oae critic most enjoys his felicity of language and
harmony of composition, the other the richness and
grandeur of his conception. Equally different is their
feeling to the world of men outside. The Minister
of Z^nobia was a Neo-PlatoBist teacher, perhaps more
at home, as was said of him by Plotinus, in philology
than in philosophy, yet concerned with questions of
the soul and of Being. The Treatise is written for
men engaged in public life ; the one worthy end of
life is, in the author's eyes, not speculation but service,
the relief of man's estate. The word is common in
Plato, though used rather of service to friends and
comrades than to humanity; we recognize it as the aim
of a Prometheus, a Hercules, a Socrates. To Cicero
and to the later Academics, as well as to the Stoics, it
was familiar, but it had no place in Neo-Platonic
teaching. In other respects, the outlook upon life is,
as has been remarked, much that of Tacitus ; the
complaint of the paucity of men of genius or greatness,
the observation that we disparage what is virith us and
eitol the past, the demand for liberty as for the air
essential to great thought. And the ideas in it belong.

xiv Introduction

in conception and character, as has been ktely ex-
plained with great force hj a scholar of authority
(G. KaibeP), to an age when thought was free, and
when great questions were daily thrown into its glow-
ing crucible, not to one of cramped formulae and rigid
system.

We part very unwillingly with a tradition which
assigns so interesting a book to so barren a period, and
which associates it with the name of a great and un-
fortunate man. Probably it will always be known
under the name of Longinus, and little harm will be
done. I have stated the conditions of the problem, of
course, in very brief outline. As the author says :
' Let every one take the view which pleases him, and
enjoy it.'

The nature and quality of the criticism contained in
the Treatise will be best learned from the author him-
self, and we need not anticipate. Two points are
especially conspicuous. One is the sureness of the
judgement with which he fixes on the really great
writers and the real causes of their greatness. His
steady eye is never dazzled by the glare of some merely
ephemeral reputation. ' Every college youth,' says a
speaker in the Dialogue of Tacitus, ' hugs the opinion
that he is a better speaker than Cicero, though of
course far below Gabinianus,' and this pardonable
enthusiasm is a really distracting element in criticism.
Yet our critic does not disparage his contemporaries,
and recognizes the infirmity, apparent to Horace and to
' Hermes, vol. xxxiv.

Introduction iv

Tacitus, which, makes us prone to that pettiness. The
result is that his verdict is at one with that recorded
by the universal voice of men, of all places, and in every
age. The other point is his constant endeavour — one
which we have already noticed in Burke — to rest his
judgement upon settled principles — the true criteria
of greatness, the necessity of selecting and combining
salient points, the relation of passion to the forms of
speech, the value of harmonious composition.

Of his own style we need add little. The reader
will notice how, unconsciously following his own
principles, he falls into the vein of the author whom he
is for the time discussing, and seems to reproduce
the profuse imagery of Plato, the grace of Hyperides,
the condensation of Demosthenes, and the ' perils ' of
the mighty periods of the same supreme orator.

Two particular metaphors call for a word of notice.
One lies in the elaborate series of images drawn from
the craft of the mason (pp. 26, 74, &c.).

To us they seem familiar enough, though the expres-
sions used are difficult, perhaps because they have
entered into our language through the New Testament,
and ultimately from the Old. In Greek poets we
have frequent reference, in connexion with Fate, to the
coping-stone, a rudimentary feature of the art ; one
reference to more elaborate structures in Euripides'
Hifpolytus, 468 ; and one to a splendid temple-front
in Pindar. But, in fact. Architecture did not rank as
one of the Fine Arts, and perhaps did not greatly stir the
Greek mind; one of its purposes was to provide a

XVI

Introduction

framework for beautiful earring or pictures, but in it-
sdf it was merely ' useful ' (see Butcher, Aristotle's Theory
of Poetry and Fine Art, c. ii). Nor was it far otherwise
in Roman ideas. The imagery repeatedly drawn from
walls and their constituents in this Treatise touches
on something new.

Another remarkable image is that applied to Homer,
who, in the old age of his genius, which gave birth to
the Odyssey, is likened to the sea at ebb tide, confined
within the solitude of his own proper limits, but leav-
ii^ pools and creeks about which the retiring waters
meander. This personal conception of Ocean, an old
man with a proper home of his own, recalls the romantic
character in the Prometheus of Aeschylus, and it is
strange that critics have found diflSculty in the words
used in our text. But the tides were not, and could
not be, within the observation of Greek writers, who
have therefore contributed little to the science or to
the poetry connected with them. The Romans have
litde more to tell us, till we come to Caesar and his
experiences in Gaul ; and there are some really striking
lines in Silius Italicus describing the surprise of
Hannibal, when he passed the Straits of Gibraltar,
aad found the new expeiieace awaiting him on the
Atlantic coast. Tacitus also, in th« Agricola, expresses
his wonder at the great tidal rivers of Britain. The
phenomenon is one which woold be sure to appeal to
our author, with his awe at all that is vast in Nature ;
but we should like to know in w&at part of the worM
his own eyes had seen it.

Introduction rvii

A characteristic feature of the Treatise is the abun-
dance of quotations. Many passages, some long ones,
are quoted for the purpose of literary criticism, from
Homer, Plato, Demosthenes, and numerous other
writers. Great liberties are taken with the text ; two
or more passages of Homer are rolled into one, sen-
tences of Demosthenes are curtailed, and words or
phrases are altered. There is nothing to he surprised
at in this j the precise Aristotle is a very loose quoter.
Apart from these, the writer often glides into the words
of a poet or of Plato, and makes them his own ; in
many cases we can recognize the passage (see pp. 40,
81) ; in others the metrical run of the words, and their
poetical colouring (sometimes, as on p. 64, the dialect),
make it probable that they are borrowed. This habit
of unacknowledged quotation, though not unparalleled
in Greek and Latin writers, has a strangely modern
effect ; still more so when there is a touch of senti-
ment, as when we are told (p. Bj), in the words of a
well-known epigram, that the fame of great writers is
safe and inalienable

As long as waters flow and poplars bloom.

The word ' sublime,' which is now inseparably
associated with this treatise, is a somewhat embarrassing
one in English, but perhaps its analysis need not trouble
us much. It is not found at all in Shakespeare, nor
apparently in Spenser, but is used freely by Milton ;
probably Boileau and Addison have had much to do
with making it at home in our language. Coleridge, who
has elsewhere examined the word more fully, is reported

LONG. TR. }q

xviii Introduction

in the Table Talk as saying : ' Could you ever discover
anything sublime, in our sense of the term, in the
Classical Greek Literature ? I never could. Sublimity
is Hebrew by birth.' Certainly V7e feel that the word
is more properly applied to certain parts of the Old
Testament than to anything else — to the account of the
Creation, to the Book of Job. There are passages of
Greek literature, wluch any of us could name as almost
equally deserving to be called sublime, but it is notice-
able that, with the exception of the Death of Oedipus,
and perhaps of some others, they are not among those
mentioned in the Treatise. We should like to ask
Coleridge the exact meaning of ' in our sense of the
term.' When so correct a writer as Goldsmith makes
Dr. Primrose tell us how he thought proper to exhort
his family before the happy marriages which make the
Vicar a ' comedy ' : ' I told them of the grave, becom-
ing, and sublime deportment they should assume upon
this mystical occasion,' the last adjective seems to
have travelled far from any Hebrew assodations.
Certainly the German language may be held fortunate
in possessing a word of home growth to express the
sublime.

' Best leave these things to take their chance,' as our
author quotes (p. 8i), and turn to the word used in
the original. It means simply ' height,' and we have
no reason to think that, before the treatise of Caecilius,
it or its adjective had been used in any fixed literary
sense. The Latin equivalent, sublimis, is often so used,
but perhaps always with some feeling of the original

Introduction

XIX

meaning of height as a dimension in space. In the
ff^atw, sublimity is almost equivalent to greatness, but
the author expressly tells us that there may be great-
ness without sublimity. The two words ' sublimity '
and ' greatness ' are used in the singular and the plural,
in an abstract and in a concrete sense, in a manner often
baffling to a translator. For the greatness which is so
near sublimity the author has a profound respect,
which the true Greek hardly shares. Size is a factor
of beauty in Aristotle's view, but primarily because
a certain size is needed to make the symmetry of parts
perceptible ; of the awe-inspiring wonder which raises
the beautiful to the sublime he gives no hint. Hero-
dotus wonders at the Nile ; but with the wonder of
curiosity as to its hidden origin and mysterious periods
of fullness, and its symmetry with rivers of Europe,
the wonder which says ' I want to know,' not the
wonder which hears a voice warning him that the
ground is holy ; a true Greek would feel the same if
brought in sight of the Victoria Falls or the ' Golden
Throne.' Our author speaks with awe of the great
things in Nature, because they are great ; of Nile and
Ister and Ocean, and of that Aetna which to Pindar
was merely a piUar of dazzling snow planted on the
shaggy breast of the foe of Zeus, vomiting fire un-
approachable.

So of intellectual greatness ; the test of it isjthe-awe-
whict-itanspires. Hyperides never'makes his hearer
afraid, Demosthenes is terrible as a thunderstorm ;
if Homer falls ofi in his Odyssey, it is because he pleases

b2

XX Introduction

and interests, but no longer awes. This point of view
\ is pressed throughout the treatise with an intensity and
\ earnestness which would be monotonous if there were
mot so much power, expressed and latent, under it all.
No sense of humour relieves the tension ; little dis-
tinction is, in fact, made between prose and poetry,
though the author recognizes (p. 33) that they require
separate treatment ; he scolds Plato for his imagery,
without allowing for the fact that Plato is avowedly
quoting poetry. Yet the sheer greatness of the argu-
ment invariably saves it, and it is the greatness of a
good man. In this short and fragmentary pamphlet
of an austere and strenuous critic, we hear sometimes
the notes of that wisdom which is ' kind to man,' and
catch gleams of that intellectual light which is ' full
of love.'

Some apology may seem to be required for a new
translation of a book which has been so excellently
translated already, I can only offer the old one, that
no translation of a classical author is final, and that a
new translator may bring out some sides of an author's
meaning which have not perhaps been already repre-
sented, I hope that I have not carried independence
too far in replacing (on p. 63) a singularly happy
phrase of Sir R. C. Jebb's, which I had at first wished
to borrow, by inferior words. But it appeared, on
reflection, that a brilliant phrase, when borrowed,
becomes something other than itself ; it acquires, so
to say, a second intention, and is more rightly left in
its own surroundings. To the complete and scholarly

Introduction xxi

work of Professor Rhys Roberts, which has done so much
to make the study of the Treatise possible to others,
and to the brilliant translation of Mr. Havell, I feel
myself constantly indebted. Perhaps the translation
on which I have most relied for help has been the fine

"u^atin version of Bishop Pearce.

I have a more personal debt of obligation, which
I warmly and gratefully acknowledge, to my friends

J Mr. E. D. A. Morsheai^and Mr. H. E. Butler, for
VSucffTnvalSaSii^i^^and to the Rev. A. H. Cruick-
shank for guidance in a matter of special difficulty.
For any omissions or errors I am solely responsible.

The text used has been that of the Oxford Classical
Texts, 1906, to the notes of which I may be allowed
to refer any scholar into whose hands this translation
may come. The passages from Homer are quoted in
Worsley's translation (completed by Osnington) ;
those from other authors in standard translations
where available. The division into sections (an extra-
ordinarily perverse one) is due to an edition of 1569.
I have usually referred to pages.

In the Appendix will be found specimen passages
translated from various later Greek critics, of whom
the historical Cassius Longinus is one ; a note on
certain Latin critics considered in relation to the
subject-matter of the Treatise; and some extracts
from Bishop Lowth's Professorial Lectures on Hebrew
Poetry, translated from the Latin.

ANALYSIS OF CONTENTS

Sect. i. The treatment of the Sublime by CaecUius
is inadequate, and fails to tell practical men how its
effects are attained. The Sublime is ' an eminence and
excellence of language,' and its aim both in poetry and
in prose is to carry men out of themselves : this is done
by a single powerful and well-timed stroke.

Sect. 2. Is there an art of Sublimity, i. e. can the
word Art be applied to what is natural ? Yes ; for
Nature herself does not work at random, and the
greatest natural forces are the most dangerous unless
regulated (Nature comes first. Art is second, but no
less essential). Also it requires Art to estimate genius
aright.

[/i gap equal to about 6 pages of this lool^
[The special dangers to which great genius is exposed.]

Sect. 3. (i) TurgUity (instance from Tragedy) :
this is ajhrtiori a fault in prose. It is a fault to which
all greatness is liable, and easily works round to its
opposite, (ii) PueriKty — the very opposite of great-
ness — comes out of a straining for what is artificial
and high-flown, (iii) Parenthyrsus, i. e. passion out of
season.

Sect. 4. (iv) Frigidity, a. straining after novelty.
Instances quoted out of Timaeus ; but see Caecilius for
others. Plato and Xenophon are not wholly free.

Sect. 5. All these faults come out of a craze for
novelty, misdirected.

Sect. 6. Can we find a rule for avoiding them ?
Yes, if we can frame a complete working definition of
' Sublimity.'

Analysts of Contents xxiH

Sect. 7. Test. If the thought does not bear
repetition, i. e. if when repeated it does not raise the
thoughts upwards, but itself falls more flat on the ear
each time, it is no true Sublime. The verdict of all
men through all ages is final.

Sect. 8. Five sources of the Sublime (power of
speech being presupposed) : viz. A. Natural, (i) grasp of
great thoughts, (ii) passion ; B. Artificial, (iii) 'Figures,'
whetherof thought or of language; (iv) diction; (v) com-
position. (Caecilius gives an incomplete list, omitting
passion, which is not co-extensive with sublimity, but
is its powerfid ally.)

\A gap of \% pages^

Sect. 9. (i) Great thoughts. ' Sublimity rings from
a great soul.' The Sublimity of Silence — The Silence
of Ajax in the Lower World {Odyssey xi). Homeric
instance — The Battle of the Gods is sublime, but
lowers gods to men. The pure divine in Homer.
Illustration from Genesis. The human sublime, in
Homer : the Prayer of Ajax for light. (Digression
on the Odyssey, the work of Homer's old age. His
genius compared to the setting sun, or the ebbing
Ocean, but always the genius of Homer. Hence the
' Marchen,' the story telling and character sketches.)

Sect. 10. Rule for the application of great thoughts —
select the most essential, and combine them into
a whole, omitting secondary detail. So Sappho por-
trays the lover. Homer a storm, Archilochus a ship-
wreck, Demosthenes the arrival of the news of Elateia.
Build with squared blocks, no rubble between them.

Sects, ii and 12. 'Amplification,' the enhancing
a thought in successive stages of the treatment, is use-
ful, but, unless helped by sublimity, is merely mechanical,
working by mass, not by elevation. Exceptions, when

xxiv AnalyAs of Contents

the object is to excite pity or depreciation. To the
sublime, quantity is irrelevant.

[Gap of 6 pages.^

[Plato and Demosthenes compared : Plato often
affects us by quantity, Demosthenes by intensity.]
Cicero and Demosthenes compared in a somewhat
similar sense.

Sect. 13. The real greatness of Plato illustrated
(from RepubUc ix). Plato points us the road to great-
ness, viz. the imitation of great predecessors. Plato
steeped himself in Homer : he entered the lists against
him.

Sect. 14. We too should think how Homer, Plato,
or Demosthenes would have expressed this or that
thought : how they would have endured this or that
expression of ours. Nay, how will all future ages
endure those expressions. A great issue, but it is-
cowardice to shrink.

Sect. 15. Imagination and Images defined. Their
use in oratory and in poetry distinct. Employment by
Euripides, Aeschylus, Sophocles. Misused in modern
oratory — the right use illustrated from Demosthenes
and Hyperides.

Sect. 16. [The second source of Sublimity — Passion
— is not treated here ; see above, Sect, iii, and the last
words of the Treatise.] (iii) The Figures. Only a few
can be mentioned. Adjuration, illustrated from the
De Corona of Demosthenes, where the circumstances
make the oath sublime (contrast its bare use by the
Comic Poet Eupolis).

Sect, i 7. The Author quotes from himself a con-
clusion that the Figures help Sublimity, but Sublimity
and Passion are essential to the Figures, which other-
wise are so many tricks. The oath by ' the dead of

Analyns of Contents xxv

Marathon ' would be but an artifice, if the artifice did
not pass in the fierce light of the speaker's feeling.

Sect. i8. The Figures continued. Question and
Answer. Instance from Herodotus.
[A gap of 4 pages."]

Sect. 19. Asyndeton (i.e. omission of connecting
words).

Sect. 20. Combination of Asyndeton with other
figures often effective. Instance from the Midias of
Demosthenes,

Sect. 21. Introduce the missing conjunctions in
such instances of Asyndeton, and the passage is spoiled.

Sect. 22. Hyperbata (inversion of order) give the
effect of reality and passion. Thucydides, Demosthenes.

Sect. 23. Polyptota — interchange of case, &c. —
Plural for singular.

Sect. 24. Singular for plural.

Sect. 25. Present for past.

Sect. 26. Change of person — To the Second.
Instance from Herodotus.

Sect. 27. To the First. Instances from Homer
and Hecataeus.

Sect. 28. Periphrasis enriches style. Instances
from Xenophon, Thucydides, Herodotus.

Sect. 29. Periphrasis requires more discretion than
any other Figure.

Sect. 30. Choice of words, a potent factor in ex-
pression.

[A gap of 12 pages.]

Sect. 31. The author is challenging certain judge-
ments of Caecilius upon (i) homeliness of phrase, which
may be justified by its vigour; (ii) number of metaphors:
as to this, the practice of Demosthenes is the standard,

xxvi Analysis of Contents

and the intensity of the passion the justification.
(Aristotle and Theophrastus rightly commend the use
of qualifying words.) Metaphors are also effective in
laboured description. Instances from Xenophon and
Plato (Timaeuj). Plato's excess in Metaphor is a
fault, and Caecilius therefore prefers the faultless Lysias,
but wrongly.

Sect. 33. We must argue this point out. Which
are we to prefer — greatness with faults, or faultlessness
which stops there ? And again — the most claims to
excellence, or the greatest ? I can have no doubt.
Remember that (i) Genius has a special risk of falling ;
(ii) Men mark failures and often omit to mark greatness.
To be Homer or ApoUonius ? Bacchylides or Pindar ?
Ion or Sophocles ?

Sect. 34. Hyperides or Demosthenes ? The two
Orators are elaborately compared. Demosthenes makes
up for the powers he lacks by the terrible intensity of
those which he has.

Sect. 35. Plato or Lysias (to return to them) ?
But Lysias has fewer merits than Plato, and worse
faults. Nature herself has made Man with aspirations
and affinities towards greatness. He admires the
stupendous things in Nature — rivers, ocean, volcanoes —
not things useful and ordinary.

Sect. 36. Thus it is sublimity, not faultlessness,
which brings Man near to the divine : Homer, Demo-
sthenes, Plato have their failures, but these are as
nothing when set against their greatness — therefore
they are the immortals. Objection. — A faulty statue is
not redeemed by its size. Ans'wer. — In Art correctness
is the first thing, in Nature greatness. But language is
a natural gift.

Sect. 37. Similes, &c.

\A gap of 6 pagesl\

Analysts of Contents xxvii

Sect. 38. Hyperbole in excess becomes ridiculous.
When rightly used it should be unnoticed that it is
hyperbole : and this will be so when there is passion to
support it. So comic exaggeration is supported by
being ludicrous (for laughter is a passion, but one which
goes with pleasure, not pain).

Sect. 39. Arrangement of words (Composition):
the fifth and last constituent of Sublimity (see sect. 8).
A great factor not only of persuasion but also of
passion : as great as music but not as enthralling.
This illustrated from a famous passage of Demosthenes.

Sect. 40. A sentence or a period is an organic
structure : words and phrases contribute to a whole,
which is greater than their mere sum. Writers of
limited ability may touch greatness by rhythm and
arrangement.

Sects. 41-3. Causes of sinking in style, broken
and jingling rhythm, scrappy phrases (like rubble in
masonry), condensation or difiuseness in excess, vulgar
idioms and words (instance from Theopompus) — all
the opposites of what we have found to be factors of
sublimity.

Sect. 44. The question has been raised : Why have
we many clever men now, but no great men ? Is the
reason political — that the stimulus given by democracy
is now wanting, and that we are cramped and checked by
despotism ? The answer : — (i) Men always think their
own times the worst, (ii) It is not the peace of the
world which levels us down, but our own habits ; our
love of getting, and of spending on our pleasures, both
deadly evils, and causes of others and worse — corruption,
will-hunting, and such like. Being what we are,
perhaps we are better in servitude than if our vices had
free vent. Better pass to the next subject — the passions.

CONTENTS

PAGE

Introduction v

Analysis of Contents .... xxii

Concerning Sublimity . . . . i

Appendix I. Specimen Passages translated
from Greek Writers of the Roman
Empire on Literary Criticism . . 83

Appendix II. The Treatise on Sublimity

AND Latin Critics . . . .105

Appendix III. Passages translated from
Bishop Lowth's Oxford Lectures on
Hebrew Poetry 114

Appendix IV. Additional Note on Para-
phones 126

Index of Proper Names occurring in the

Text 127

CONCERNING SUBLIMITY
I

THE treatise written by Caecilius 'concerning
Sublimity ' appeared to us, as you will remember,
dear Postumius Terentianus, when we looked into it
together, to fall below the level of the general subject,
failing especially in grasp of vital points ; and to give
his readers but little of that assistance which should be
the first aim of every writer. In any technical treatise
two, points are essential ; the first, that the writer
should show what the thing proposed for inquiry is ;
the second, but in effect the more important, that he
should tell us by what specific methods that thing may
be made our own. Now Caecilius endeavours to show
us by a vast number of instances what the sublune is,
as though we did not know ; the process by which we
may raise our natural powers to a required advance in
scale he unaccountably passed over as unnecessary.
So far as he is concerned, perhaps we ought to praise
the man for his ingenuity and pains, not to blame him
for the omissions. Since, however, you lay your com-
mands upon me, that I should take up the subject in
my turn, and without fail put something on paper about
Sublimity as a favour to yourself, give me your
company ; let us see whether there is anything in the
views which I have formed really serviceable to men in

LONG. TR. T>

2 A "Treatise Sect. I

public life. You, comrade, will help me by passing
judgement, with perfect frankness, upon all particulars ;
you can and you ought. . It was well answered by one '
who wished to show wherein we resemble gods: 'in
doing good,' said he, ' and in speaking truth.'

Writing to you, my dear friend, with your perfect
knowledge of all liberal study, I am almost relieved at
the outset from the netessity of showing at any length
that Sublimity is always an eminence and excellence in
language ; and that from this, and this alone, the
greatest poets and writers of prose have attained the
first place and have clothed their fame with immortality.
For it is not to persuasion ' but to ecstasy that passages
of extraordinary genius carry the hearer : now the
marvellous, jvith its power to amaze, is always and
necessarily stronger than that which seeks to persuade
and to please : to be~4)eisuaded rests usually with
ourselves, genius brings force sovereign and irresistible
to bear"*upon every hearer, and takes its stand high
above him. Again, skill in invention and power of
orderly arrangement are not seen from one passage nor
from two, but emerge with effort out of the whole
context; Sublimity, we know, brought out at the
happy moment, parts all the matter this way and that,

' ' Pythagoras used to say that the two fairest gifts of gods to
men were to speak truth and to do good, and would add that each
of the two resembles the works of gods.' — Aelian, vii. 1 1, 59. A
similar remark is attributed to Demosthenes.

' Rhetoric is defined by Aristotle as ' a faculty of discovering all
the possible means of persua$ion in any subject.' Rhei. i. c. i,
Tr. Welldon.

Sect. I Concerning Sublimity 3

and like a lightning flash, reveals, at a stroke and in its
entirety, the power of the orator *. These and suchlike
considerations I think, my dear Terentianus, that
your own experience might supply.

II

WE, however, must at once raise this fiirther
question ; is there any art of sublimity or of
its opposite ? ^ For some go so far as to think all who
would-bring,_such terms under technical rules to be
entirely mistaken. ' Genius,' says one, ' is inbred, not
taught ; there is one art for the things of genius,
to be bom with them.' All natural effects are spoilt,
they think, by technical rules, and become miserable
skeletons. I assert that the reverse will prove true on
examination, if we consider that Nature, a law to

^ ' The Sublime impresses the mind at once with one great
idea ; it is a single blow ; the Elegant, indeed, may be produced
by repetition, by an accumulation of many circumstances.' — Sir J.
Reynolds, Fourth Discourse.

' If these words (literally ' of height or of depth *) are rightly
translated above. Pope's ' Art of sinking ' is also right, though he
was taken to task by scholars for the phrase. It was probably
suggested to him by a friend, perhaps Arbuthnot ; since Boileau, in
his translation, the only one, apparently, known to Pope, omits the
second noun. The alternative is to render 'of sublimity, or
(which is the same thing) of profundity.' But the idea in the
context seems to be that of rising or sinking at will to a given
point in the scale : the phrase would naturally come from an
opponent who derided the existence of such an art. Sections XL-
XLII, at the end of the Treatise, deal with the question how style
may be lowered.

B 2

4 A treatise Sect. II

herself as she mostly is in all that is passionate and
lofty, yet is no creatAe of random unpiilse delighting in
mere absence of method ; that she is indeed herself
the first and originating principle which underlies all
things, yet rules of degree, of fitting occasion, of
unerring practice, and of application can be determined
by method and are its contribution ; in ,a sense all
greatness is exposed to a danger of its own, if left to
itself without science to control, ' unsteadied, un-
ballasted',' abandoned to mere velocity and unin-
structed venture; greatness needs the spur often, it
also needs the bit *. What Demosthenes shows to be
true of the common life of men — that of all good things
the greatest is good fortune, but a s econd , not inferior
to the first, is good counse^_and that where the latter
is wanting the former is at once cancelled' — we may
properly apply to literature ;- here Nature fills the place
of good fortune, Art of good counsel. Also, and
this is most important, it is only ^fromj^rt -that. jye
can learn the very fact that certain efifects in literature
rest on Nature and on her alone *. If, as I said, the

' The latter of the two adjectives is applied by Plato i^Thtaet.
p. 144 A) to boats, which word possibly stood in the text here.

' Words said to have been used by Plato about Xenocrates and
Aristotle, and by Aristotle himself about two pupils; also by
Isocrates, as Cicero twice tells us (Brutut, 305 and Letters to
Attieus, 6, i) about Theopompus (see p. 55) and Ephorus.

' Demosthenes, Aristocr. 113.

' Cicero, in the Brutus (181, &c.), discusses the question
whether the opinion of the general public or of the expert upon
the merits of an orator is the more important. The answer is

Sect. II Concerning

critic who finds fault with earnest students, would take
all these things into his account, he would in my opinion
no longer deem inquiry upon the subjects before us
to be unnecessary or unfruitful.

[Here the equivalent of about six pages of this translation
has been lost^

III

Stay they the furnace ! quench the far-flung blaze !
For if I spy one crouching habitant,
I'll twist a lock, one lock of storm-bome flame,
And fire the roof, and char the halls to ash :
Not yet, not now my noble strain is raised '.

ALL this is tragic no longer, but burlesque of
£\, tragic ; ' locks,' ' to vomit up to heaven,' 'Boreas
turned flute player,' and the rest. It is turbid in ex-
pression, and confused in imagery, not forcible ; and if
you examine each detail in clear light, you see a gradual
sinking from the terrible to the contemptible. Now
when in tragedy, which by_its nature is pompous and
admits bombast, tasteless rant is found to be unpardon-
able", I should be slow to allow that it could be In

that on the question of effectiveness in speaking the verdict of
the public is final, that of the specialist is still required to determine
the causes of effectiveness or failure, also to pronounce whether
the orator is absolutely excellent, or only appears to be so in the
absence of his betters.

1 From the lost Oreithyia of Aeschylus (p. 381, Nauck).

' ' What can be so proper for Tragedy as a set.of big-sounding

tf A Treatise Sect. HI

^lace in true history. Thus we laugh at Gorgias ' of
Leontini for writing ' Xerxes the Zeus of the Persians '
and ' vultures, those living tombs,' and at some passages
in Callisthenes ' as being stilted, not sublime, and even
more at some in Cleitarchus ° ; he is a mere fantastic,
he ' puffs,' to apply the words of Sophocles, ' on puny pipes,
hut with no mellowing gag *.' So with Amphicrates,
Hegesias, and Matris ' ; they often appear to themselves
to be possessed, really they are no inspired revellers but
children at play. We may take it that turgidity is of all
;'* faults perhaps the most difficult to avoid. ~It is "a fact of
Nature tKalTmen'wHoraiiTi^at grandeur, in avoiding
the reproach of being weak and dry, are, we know not
how, borne off into turgidity, caught by the adage : —
'To lapse from~greatness were a generous fault'.' As

words, so contrived together as to carry no meaning? which
I shall one day or other prove to be the Sublime of Longinus.'

Fielding, Introduction to Tom Thumb.

' A Sicilian teacher of rhetoric (about B.C. 480-3 J^o), a speaker
in the dialogue of Plato which bears his name.

' Philosopher, historian, and rhetorician, a pupil of Aristotle
(died about B.C. 328).

' Cleitarchus, Historian of Alexander the Great.

* Sophocles bad written ' he fa& no longer on puny pipes, but
irith fierce bellows and no mouthpiece (to modify the sound).'
The lines, in their original form, are quoted by Cicero of
Pompey (ad Alt. ii. 16, 2).

' Amphicrates : an Athenian rhetorician and sophist, who died
at the Court of Tigranes, about B.C. 70. Hegesias: a rhetorician,
native of Magnesia, probably of the third century B. c, who wrote
on Alexander the Great. Matris of Thebes: author of an
encomium on Hercules ; mentioned by Diodotus Siculus, and
therefore not later than the Augustan period.

' A proverb,' doubtless familiar in a metrical form. Com-

Sect. Ill Concerning Sublimity 7

in bodies, so in writings, all swellings which are hollow
and unreal are bad, and very possibly work round to the
opposite condition, for ' nothing,' they say, ' so dry as a
man with dropsy.'

While tumidity thus tends to overshoot the sublime,
puerility is the direct opposite of all that is great; it is
in every sense low and small spirited, and essentially a
most ignoble fault. What then is puerility ? Clearly
it is a pedantic conceit, which overdoes itself and
becomes frigid at the last. ' Authors glide into this when
they make for what is unusual, artificial', above all, agreeable,
and so run on the reefs of nonsense and aifectation. By
the side of these is a third kind of vice, found in passages
of strong feeling, and called by Theodoras ' ' Parenthyrsus. '
This is pa^on out of £lace and unmeaning,, where there
is no call for passion, or unrestrained where restraint is
needed. Men are carried aside, as if under strong drink,
into expressions of feeling which have nothing to do with
the subject, but are personal to themselves and academic-
then they play clumsy antics before an audience which
has never been moved; it cannot be otherwise, when the
speakers are in an ecstasy, and the hearers are not. But
we reserve room to speak of the passions elsewhere.

pare Ovid's fine lines on the fall of Phaethon {Mel. ii,

325)—

His limbs, yet reeking from that lightning flame,
The kindly nymphs entomb, and grave his name :
' Phaethon lies here, who grasped the steeds of Day,
Then greatly fell, yet from a great essay I '

^ Of Gadaia, or Rhodes : a rhetorician, and instructor of the
Emperor Tiberius (Suetonius, 7V6. 57).

8 A Treatise Sect, iv

IV

OF the second fault which we mentioned, frigidity,
Timaeus* is full; an able author in other respects,
and not always wanting in greatness of style ; learned,
acute, but extremely critical of the faults of others,
while insensible to his own; often sinking into mere
childishness from an incessant desire to start new notions.
I will set down one or two instances only from this
author, since Caecilius has been before me with most of
them. Praising Alexander the Great, he writes: 'who
annexed all Asia in fewer years than Isocrates ' took to
writehis/'<wjf^rifBjin support of waragainstthePersians.'
Truly a wonderfiil comparison between the Macedonian
and the Sophist : yes, Timaeus, clearly the Lacedae-
monians were far out-matched by Isocrates in valour, for
they took Messene in thirty years, he composed his
Panegyrkus in ten ! Then how he turns upon the
Athenians captured in Sicily: 'Because they committed
imjnety against Hermes, and defaced his images, they
suffered punishment for it, largely on account of one
man, a descendant, on the father's side, of the injured
god, Hermocrates, son of Hermon.' This makes me
wonder, dear Terentianus, that he does not also write of
the tyrant Dionysius : ' He had shown impiety towards

* A Sicilian historian (about B.C. 353-256), severely criticized
by Polybius.

' A great, but somewhat tedious, Athenian orator (B. c. 436-
338), ' the old man eloquent ' of Milton's sonnet. See p. 44. The
Pantgyrieus was originally composed for the Olympic festival
of 380.

Sect. IV Concerning Sublimity 9

Zeus ' and Heracles ; therefore he was deprived of his
kingdom hy Dion and Heraclides.' What need to speak
of Timaeus, when those heroes Xenopbon and Plato,
although they were of Socrates' own school, sometimes
forgot themselves in such paltry attempts to. please. Thus
Xenophon writes in the Constitution of the Lacedaemonians:
' I mean to say that you can no more hear their voices
than if they were made of stone, no more draw their
eyes aside than if they were made of brass ; you might
think them more modest than the maiden-pupils in their
eyes.' It was worthy of Amphicrates', not of Xenophon,
to call the pupils in our eyes ' modest maidens ' : but
what a notion, to believe that the eyes of a whole row
were modest, whereas they say that immodesty in parti-
cular persons is expressed by nothing so much as by the
eyes. Addressing a forward person, 'Wine laden, dog-
eyed! 'says Homer''- Timaeus, however, as if clutching
at stolen goods, has not left to Xenophon even this point
of frigidity. He says, speaking of Agathocles, that he
even carried off his cousin, who had been given in
marriage to another man, from the solemnity of Unveiling ;
' Now who would have done this, who had maidens,
not harlots, in his eyes ? * Nay, Plato, the divine, as at

' Zeus gives in the genitive Dios, &c.

' Athenian soldier and historian (about B.C. 444-354). In our
texts of the work quoted the words run : ' than maidens in their
chambers' instead of 'than maidens in the eyes.' Our Author is
often loose in his quotations, but this is a strange variation. The
same play on the Greek word for ' pupils ' occurs in Plutarch (De
Yit. Pud. i. 538 E).

' //. i. 225.

10 A Treatise Sects. IV, V

other times he is, wishing to mention tablets, says :
' they will write and store in the temples memorials of
cypress wood,' and again ' concerning walls, O Megillus,
I would take the Spartan view, to allow our walls to
sleep on the ground where they lie, and not be raised
again.' ' And Herodotus is hardly clear of this fault,
when he calls beautiful women ' pains to the eyes ' '^ ;
though he has some excuse, for the speakers in Herodotus
are barbarians and in drink : still, not even through the
mouths of such characters is it well, out jof sheer petti-
ness, to cut a^luiH^' figure before all time.

V

A LL these undignified faults spring up in literature
Jr\. from a single cause, the craving for intellectual
novelties, on which, above all else, our own generation
goes wild. It would almost be true to say that the
sources of all the good in us are also the sources of all
the bad. Thus beauties of expression, and all which is
sublime, I will add, all which is agreeable, contribute to
success in our writing ; and yet every one of these
becomes a principle and a foundation, as of success, so
of its opposite. Much the same is to be said of changes
of construction, hyperboles, plurals for singulars ; we
will show in the sequel the danger which seems to
attend each. Therefore it is necessary at once to raise
the question directly, and to show how it is possible
for us to escape the vices thus intimately mingled.with
the sublime. '

' Plato, ian/s, vi. p. 778 D. » Herodotus, v. 18.

Sects. VI, VII Concerning Sublimity 1 1

VI

IT is possible, my friend, to do this, if we could
firs^ of all arrive at a clear and discriminating
knowledge of what true sublimity is. Yet this is hard
to grasp : judgement of style is the last and ripest fruit
of much experience. Still, if I am to speak in the
language of precept, it is perhaps not impossible, from
some such remarks as follow, to attain to a right
decision upon the matter.

VII

WE must, dear friend, know this truth. As
in our ordinary life nothing is great which
it is a mark of greatness to despise ; as fortunes,
ofRces, honour^ kingdoms, and such like, things
which are praised so pompously from without, could
never appear, at least to a sensible man, to be sur-
passing1^_good, since actual contempt for them is a
good of no mean kind (certainly men admire, more
than those who have them, those who might have them,
but in greatness of soul let them pass); even so it is
with all that is elevated in poetry and prose writings ;
we have to ask whether it may be that they have that
image of greatness to which so much careless praise is
attached, but on a close scrutiny would be found vain
and hollow, things which it is nobler to despise than
to admire. For it is a fact of Nature„that thesoul is

12 A Treatise Sect. VII

raised by true sublimity, it gains a proud step upwards,
it is filled with joy and exultation, as though itself liad
produced what it hears. Whenever therefore anything
is heard frequently by a man of sense and literary
experience, but does not dispose his mind to high
thoughts, nor leave in it material for fresh reflection,
beyond what is actually said; while it sinks, if you look
carefiilly at the whole context, and d\snndles away, this
can never be true sublimity, being preserved so long
only as it is heard. That is really great, which pves
much food for fresh reflection ; which If is Tiard, nay
impossible, to resist; of which thejnwmory js_strong
and indelible. You may take it that those are beautiful
ancTgenuine effects of sublimity which please always,
and please all. For when men of different habits,
lives, ambitions, ages, all take one and the same view
about the same writings', the verdict and pronouncement
of .juch dissimilar individuals give a powerful assurance,
beyond all gainsaying, in favour of that winch they
admire.

VIII

Now there are five different sources, so to call
them, of lofty "style, which are the most pro-
ductive ; power o f expression being presupposed as a
foundation common to all five types, and inseparable

' The words are doubtful : the rendering given above follows
, Bishop Pearce, a contributor to the Spectator, and a scholarly and
accomplished editor and translator of this treatise. Probably the
order of the Greek words has been disarranged.

Sect. VIII Concerning Sublimity 13^

from any. First and most potent is the faculty of'"-
grasping grea t con ceptions^ as I have defined it in my
worlc on Xenophon, Second comes p assion, strong
4nd_impetuous. These two constituents of sublimity--,
are in most cases native-bom,, those wh ich now follow
come through _art ; the proper handling of figures,
which again seem to fall under two heads, figures of
thought, and figures of diction ; then noble phraseology, .
with itssiibdivisions, choice of words, and use of tropes '
and of elaboration ; and fifthly, that cause of greatness
which includes in itself all that preceded it, dignified
and spirited composition. Let us now look together
at what is included under each of these heads, premis-
ing that Caecilius has passed over some of the five,
for instance, passion. If he did so under the idea
that sublimity and feeling are one and the same thing,
coexistent and of common origin, he is entirely wrong.
For some passions may be found which are distinct
from sublimity and are humble, as those of pity, grief,
fear; and again, in many cases, there is sublimity
without passion ; take, besides countless other instances,
the poet's own venturesome lines on the Aloadae :

Upon Olympus Ossa, leafy Pelion

On Ossa would they pile, a stair to heaven ; '

and the yet grander words which follow :

Now had they worked their will.

In the Orators, again, speeches of panegyric, pomp,

» Od. xi. 315 and 317.

14 A Treatise Sect. VIII

display, exhibit oh every hand majesty and the sublime,
but commonly lack passion : hence Orators of much
passion succeed least in panegyric, and again the pane-
gyrists are not strong in passion *. Or if, on the other
Han d," C a eciltgydia" not ISink that passion ever con-
tributes to sublimity, and, therefore, held it undeserving
of mention, he is quite in error. I shotdd feel con-
fidence in maintaining that npdiin g reaches great
eloquence so surely as genuine passion in the nght
placej_jt breathes the vehemence of frenzy and divine
possession, and makes the very words inspired.

IX

A FTER all, however, the first element, great natural
^~V genius, covers far more ground than the others :
therefore, as to this also, even if it be a gift jasJier
than a thing acquired, yet so far as is possible we must
nurture our souls to all that is great, and make them,
as it were, teem with noble endowment. How^
you will ask. I have myself written in another place
to this effect: — 'Sublimity is the note which rings
from a great mind'.' Thus it is that, without any
utterance, a notion, unclothed and unsupported, often
moves our wonder, because the very thought is great ,:
the silence of Ajax in the book of the Lower World

* See Spectator, no. 389 (Addison).

' 'Eloquence is the ring of a great soul' (Dr. G. H. Kendall,
Classical Rivieui, vol. xiii, p. 40a).

Sect. IX Concerning Sublimity i f

is great, and more sublime than any words*. First,
then, it is quite necessary to presuppose the principle
from which this springs : the true Orator must have no
low ungenerous spirit, for it is not possible that they
who think small thoughts, fit for slaves, and practise
them in all their daily life, should put out anything to
deserve wonder and immortality. Grea t, word s issue,
and it cannot be otherwise, from those whose thoughts
are weighty. So it is on the lips of men of the highest
spirit that words of rare greatness are found. Take
the answer of Alexander to Parmeriio, who had said
' I were content . . . ' '

\Here about eighteen paget have been /oj/.]

. . . the distance from earth to heaven,
a measure one may call it of the stature as well of

» Od. xi. 543.

But never Aias, child of Telamon

Came near me, but with gloomy brows and bent

Stood far aloof, in sternness eminent,

Eating his heart for that old victory '

Against him given by clear arbitrament,

Concerning brave Achilleus' arms.

The scholiast on Homer observes : ' His silence is clearly a finer
thing than the speeches in the tragic poets ' ; a principle recognized
by Aeschylus, insomuch that he was sometimes rallied upon his
habit of keeping his characters silent, as though it had passed into
a mannerism (Aristophanes, Frogs, 911).

' 'The story runs that Parmenio said to Alexander that, had
he been Alexander, he would have been content to stop the war
on those terms, and run no further risks; and that Alexander
answered that he too, had he been Parmenio, would have done
the same.' Arrian, ii. 25, 2.

1 6 ^Treatise Sect. IX

Homer as of Strife '. Unlike this is the passage of
Hesiod about Gloom (if The Shield is really to be
assigned to Hesiod), ' From out her nostrils rheum
in streams was poured ' ' : he has made the picture
hatefiil, not terrible. But how does Homer make
great all that belongs to gods ?

Far as the region of blank air in sight
Of one who sitting on some beacon height
Views the long wine-dark barrens of the deep,
Such space the horses of the realm of light
Urged by the gods, as on they strain and sweep,
While their hoofs thunder aloft, bound over at one leap'-

He measures their leap by the interval of the boundaries
of the world. Who might not justly exclaim, when
he marked this extravagance in greatness, that, if the
horses of the gods make two leaps, leap after leap, they
will no longer find room within the world. Passing
great too are the appearances in the Battle of the
Gods: —

Heaven sent its clarion forth : Olympus too : *

Trembled too Hades in his gloomy reign.
And leapt up with a scream, lest o'er his head

' //. iv. 44a (a description of Strife)

' small of stature, a low head
At first she rears, but soon with loiiier claim,
Her forehead in the sky, the earth doth tread.'

' The Shield of Hercules, 267: the authorship of the poem
was much disputed in antiquity. Hesiod may probably be placed
in the eighth century b. c, his poetry belongs to a later date than
any substantial part of Homer.

' //. V. 770. '//. zxi. 388, perhaps mixed up with v, 75a

Sect. IX Concerning Sublimity 1 7

Poseidon cleave tJie solid earth in twain,
And open the pale kingdom of the dead
Horrible, foul widi blight, which e'en Immortals dread '.

You see, comrade, how, when earth is torn up from
its foundations, and Tartarus itself laid bare, and the
Universe suffers overthrow and dissolution, all things
at once, heaven and hell, things mortal and immortd,
mingle in the war and the peril of that fight. Yet all
this is terrible indeed, though, unless taken as allegory,
thoroughly impious and out of proportion. For when
Homer presents to us woundings of the gods, their
factions, revenges, tears, bonds, sufferings, all massed
together, it seems to me that, as he has done his
uttermost to make the men of the Trojan war gods, so
he has made the gods men. Only for us, when we
are miserable, a harbour from our ills is reserved in
death; the gods, as he draws them, are everlasting,
not in their nature, but in their unhappiness. Far
better than the ' Battle of the Gods ' are the passages
which show us divinity as something undefiled and
truly great, with no admixture; for instance, to take
a passage which has been worked out by many before
us, the lines on Poseidon :

Tall mountains and wild woods, from height to

height,
The city and the vessels by the main . . .
Rocked to the ii^mortal feet that, hurrying, bare
Poseidon in his wrath . . .
. . . the light wheels along the sea-plain rolled ;

' //. XX. 5i-s.

LONG. TR. g

1 8 A Treatise Sect. IX

From cave and lair the creatures of the deep
Flocked to sport round him, and the crystal heap
Of waters in wild joy disparting know
Their lord, and as the fleet pair onward sweep ' . . .

Thus too the lawgiver of the Jews, no common man '•',
when he had duly conceived the power of the Deity,
showed it forth as duly. At the very beginning of
his Laws, ' God said,' he writes — What ? ' Let there
be light, and there was light, let there be earth, and
there was earth.' Perhaps I shall not seem wearisome,
comrade, if I quote to you one other passage from the
poet, this time on a human theme, that you may learn
how he accustoms his readers to enter with him into
majesties which are more than human. Gloom and
impenetrable night suddenly cover the battle of the
Greeks before him : then Ajax, in his helplessness.

Zeus, sire, do thou the veil of darkness rend.
And make clear daylight, that our eyes may see :
Then in the light e'en slay us — '.

* These lines are taken from //. xiii. 18-29, ^^'^ omissions,
and with the exception of the second, which is read in zx. 60.

' ' The best general that ever was — for such I really think
Moses was.' — Letter of General Sir Charles Napier, 1844. With
' conceived . . . showed forth,' words which cause some difficulty
in the original, cf. Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, v. 21. 'I
desire future readers of these books to apply their thoughts to God,
and to examine whether our legislator worthily apprehended His
nature, and always assigned to Him actions becoming His power.'
With regard to the passage generally, see Introduction.

' II. xvii. 645. With this passage compare the remarks of
Burke : — 'To make anything very terrible, obscurity seems in

Sect. IX Concerning Sublimity 1 9

Here is the very truth of the passion of Ajax:_he
does not pray to live— such a petition were too _humble
for ^e hero— but when in impracticable darkness he
could _dispose_hK^ y^om tq_no good purpose, chafing
that he stands idle for the battle, he_praj[S ^or light at
the speediest, sure of findmg^ therein at the worst
a burial worthy of his valour, even if Zeus be arrayed
against him. Truly the spirit of Homer goes along
with every struggle, in full and carrying gale ; he feels
the very thing himself, he ' rages ; —

Not fire in densest mountain glade,

Nor spear-armed Ares e'er raged dreadfiiller :

Foam started from his lips, ..."

Yet he shows throughout the Qdj/ssey (for there are
many reasons why we must look closely into passages
from that poem also), that, when a g£ggt gepi]|}$ bggins to
decline, the love of sto ry-teUi ng is a mark ofusold age.
It is clear from many other indications that this work
was ^he^secondl" but more particularly from the fact
that he introduces throughout tlje Odyssey remnants of
the~siifferings before Dium,~"as so many additional
episodes of the Trojan war ; aye, and renders to its
heroes fresh lamentations and words of pity, as though

general to be necessary. When we know the full extent of any
danger, when we can accustom our eyes to it, u great deal of the
apprehension vanishes.' — On the Sublime and Beautiful, ii, 3. Buike
quotes Milton's description of Death in the Second Book of Para-
dise Lost, and observes ' In this description all is dark, uncertain,
confnsed, terrible, and sublime to the last degree.'
' /;. XV. 605.

C 2

20 A Treatise Sect. IX

awarded in some far distant time. Yes, the Odyssey
is nothing but an epilogue of the Iliad : —

There the brave Aias and Achilleus lie ;
Patroclus there, whose wisdom matched the gods on
high;
There too Antilochus my son. . . '

From the same cause, I think, writing the ITtad^ in the
heyday of his spirit, he made the wfiole ^structiye
draniatis.and_ combative^; that of the O^jjgy is in the
main naiTOtivej^whkhLis.JbgLSpecid,.|ga]^54j£a.ge, So
it IS that in the Odyssey one might liken Homer to
a setting sun ; the intensity is gone, Jbut_jtherej«nains
the greatness. Here the tone of those great lays of
Ilium is no longer maintained — the passages on one
level of sublimity with no sinking anywhere, the same
stream of passion poured upon passion, the readiness of
turn, the closeness to life, the throng of images all
drawn from the truth: as when Ocean retires into
himself, and is left lonely around his proper bounds,
only the ebbings of his greatness are left to our view,
and a wandering among the shallows of the fabulous
and the incredible ". While I say this, I have not for-
gotten the storms in the Odyssey, nor the story of the
Cyclops ^, nor certain other passages ; I am describing
an old age, but the old age of Homer, Still in all

* Od. iii. 109.

' The rich imagery of this passage must have been drawn from
a knowledge of seas other than the almost tideless Mediterranean.
Compare Tacitus' description of his wonder at the tides and tidal
rivers of Britain in the Agricola (end of c, x), and see Introduction.

3 CW.Bookix.

Sect. IX Concerning Sublimity 2 1

these, as they follow one another, fable prevails over
action. I entered upon this digression, as I said, in
order tp show howj^ry^ easily great_geniuSjWlien^,the
PGBeisji^ji_iO«med..a§id£.J;ilJrifl^ there are
the stories of the wine-ikin, of the companions turned
by Circe to swine ' (whom ZoUus ° called ' porkers in
tears'), of Zeus fed by doves like a young bird', of
Ulysses ten days without food on the wreck*, there
are the incredible details of the slaying of the Suitors °-
What can we call these Jjut in very truth ' dreams of
Zeus ' ? ' A second reason why the incidents of the

* Od. X. 17, &c ; 229, &c.

' A grammarian of uncertain date, probably of the fourth century
B.C. He was a bitter and malignant critic, and earned the name
of • Scourge of Homer.'

' Od. xii. 62. * 03. xii, end. ° Od. xxii.

' Aristotle claims for Homer that he 'shows how lies should be
told ' ; in other words, that he so manages the irrational, a potent
element in the marvellous (Poet. c. xxiv), that the reader accepts
it, feeling that if such things happened at all they would happen
as they are described, and content to ask no questions. Horace,
a warm and also a very discriminating admirer of Homer, after
noticing the modest opening of the Odyssey, goes on to speak of
these marvels : —

Not smoke from fire his object is to bring.
But fire from smoke, a very different thing ;
Yet has he dazzling miracles in store,
Cyclops, and Laestrygon, and fifty more . . .
And all this glamour, all this glorious dream.
Truth blent with fiction in one motley scheme.
He so contrives, that, when 'tis o'er, you see
Beginning, middle, end alike agree.'

A. P. 143, &c., Conington's translation.
If we assume a single author for the Iliad and Odyssey, the
conclusion that the Odyssey was the work of his old age is a very
natural one. A familiar instance of the tendency of great writers

2 2 A Treatise Sect. IX

Odytsey also should be discussed is this ; that_ yo u
may reco gnize ho w the decline of passion in great
writers and poets passes away intojjhargff.^e^'-t^ rawin g :
the sEetcHes of the life in the household of Ulysses
much resemble a comedy ofxhatactSC-

X

I WILL now ask you to consider with me whether
we may possibly arrive at anything further, which
has power to make our writings sublime. Sin ce with
all things are associated certain elements, constituents
which are eSBetSfiallyTnherennir the substance of
eachy one factor of sublimity must necessarily be the
power "of choosing the most vital of the included elements, _
^i of making these, by mutual superposition, form as
it were a single body. On one side the hearer is attracted

towards the mythical spirit in their advancing years may be found
in Atme of Geierstein (1829), of which Lockhart writes : —
'The various play of fancy in the combination of persons and
events, and the airy liveliness of both imagery and diction, may
well justify us in applying to the author what he beautifully says
of his King Ren4 : —

A mirthful man he was ; the snows of age
Fell, but they did not chill him — Gaiety,
Even in life closing, touch'd his teeming brain
With such wild visions as the setting sun
Raises in front of some hoar glacier.
Painting the black ice with a thousand hues.'

Life of Sir W. Scotl, vol. vii.

On the relations of the Odyssey to the Iliad see the late
Dr. D. B. Monro's Odyssey 13-24 (igot), Appendix, p. 289 foil.,
and, with special reference to this Treatise, p. 334 foil.

Sect. X Concerning Sublimity 23

bythe choice of ideas, on another by the accumulation of
those wKch Ijave been chosenr~Thus Sappho, in "all
cases, takes the emotions incident to the frenzy of love
from the attendant symptoms and from actual truth.
But wherein does she show her great excellence ? In her
power of first selecting and then closely combining those
which are conspicuous and intense : —

Blest as the immortal gods is he
The youth whose eyes may look on thee,
Whose ears thy tongue's sweet melody
May still devour.

Thou smilest too ! — sweet smile, whose charm
Has struck my soul with wild alarm.
And, when I see thee, bids disarm
Each vital power.

Speechless I gaze : the flame within
Runs swift o'er all my quivering skin ;
My eyeballs swim ; with dizzy din
My brain reels round ;

And cold drops fall ; and tremblings frail
Seize every limb ; and grassy pale
I grow ; and then — together fail
Both sight and sound '.

Do you not marvel how she seeks to gather soul and
body into one, hearing and tongue, eyes and complexion ;

' This ode of Sappho, the great woman-poet of Lesbos (about
600 B. c), written in the metre which bears her name, has only
been preserved to us in this treatise. It has been partly translated
by Catullus into Latin, in the same metre. The version in the
text is by J. Herman Merivale (1833). For another ode by the
same author, which has only reached us through the critic
Dionysius, see Appendix.

24' A Treatise Sect. X

all dispersed and -strangers before : now, by a series of
contradictions, she is cold at once and bums, is irrational,
is sensible (for she is either in terror or at the point of
death)^, so that it may not appear to be a single passion
which is upon her, but an assemblage of passions ? All
the symptoms are found severally in lovers ; to the choice
of those which are conspicuous, and to their concentration
into one, is due the pre-eminent merit here. So it is,
I think, with the Poet and his storms; he picks out the
grimmest of the attendant circumstances. The author
of the AnmaspAa thinks these lines terrible : —

Here too is mighty marvel for our thought :
Mid seas men dwell, on water, far from land :
Wretches they are, for sorry toil is theirs ;
Eyes on the stars, heart on the deep they fix.
Oft to the gods, I ween, their hands are raised.
Their inward parts in ewl case upheaved '.

Any one, I think, will see that there is more em-
broidery than terror in it all. Now for Homer; take one
instance out of many : —

As when a wave swoln by the wild wind's blore '
Down from the clouds upon a ship doth light,

^ The text of the original appears to be faulty here.

' Aristeas, an early poet of Proconnesus, wrote an epic on the
Arimaspi (a one-eyed people of .the far North, mentioned by
Herodotus, who says, iv. 26, that their name was formed by the
Greeks from two Scythian words, 'Arima,' one, and ' spous,'
an eye).

' blore, it e. blast. Ci. ' The west wind and the north join in
a sudden blore,' Chapman, The word is approved by Johnion as
an ' expressive ' one.

Sect. X Concerning Sublimity 2 f

And the whole hulk with scattering foam is white,
And through the sails all tattered and forlorn
Roars the fell blast : the seamen with affright
Shake, out from death a hand-breadth they are borne '.

Aratus has attempted to transfer this very notion : —

Tiny the plank which thrusts grim death away '.

Only the result is petty and smooth, not terrible.
Moreover, he makes the danger limited, by the words ' the
plank thrusts death away ' : and so it does ! Again
our Poet does not limit the terror to one occurrence ;
he gives us the picture of men meeting destruction con-
Unuaily, wellnigh in every wave. Yet again, by forcing
together prepositions naturally inconsistent, and com-
pelling them to combine (I refer to the words ' out from
death '), he has so strained the verse as to match the
trouble which fell upon them ; has so pressed it together
as to give the very presentment of that trouble ; has
stamped, I had almost said, upon the language the form
and features of the peril: 'out from death a hand-
breadth they are borne.' Just so Archilochus' in describ-
ing the shipwreck, and Demosthenes, when the news of
Elateia comes: 'For it was evening,' he says*. They

^ II. XV. 6*4.

' Aratus, living about 270 B.C., the author of two Greek
astronomical poems, one of which was translated by Cicero. The
words quoted by St. Paul, Acts xvii. 28, occur in Aratus, and also in
another poet.

' Archilochus of Pares (about 800 B.C.), the reputed inventor of
the iambic metre. Two extant fragments describe shipwreck.

* The passage which follows {De Cor. 169) is perhaps the most
famous in Demosthenes, and should be read in its context.

26 A Treatise Sect. X

chose the expressions of real eminence, looking only to
merit (if one may use the word), took them out clean,
and placed them one upon another, introducing between
them nothing trivial, or undignified, or low. For such
things mar the whole effect, much as, in building,
massive, blocks, intended to cohere and hold together in
one, are spoilt by stop-gaps and rubble '-

XI

CLOSELY connected with the excellencies which
I have named is that called Amplification; in
which, when the facts and issues admit of severaTTresh
iieginnings and~fresh"iiaKIng-places, in periodic arrange-
r mentj^reat phrases come rolling upon others which have
gonebefore, in a^continuouslj^ascendingorderr Whether
this be done by way of pilarging upon commonplace
topics, or of exaggeration, or of intensifying facts or
reasoning, or of handling deeds^one or suffering endured

' The words are difficult, and in their details uncertain ; the
rendering in the text is a paraphrase. With the general drift, the
reader should compare chapters xzi, xl (end), xli (end). ' The
walls of Messene, on the slopes of Mt. Ithome, are among the
most perfect remains of Greek building in the Peloponnese, and are
a beautiful example of Hellenic masonry during the best period.
They are wholly built of neatly-dressed blocks, regularly hedded
without mortar in horizontal courses.' — Smith's Diet. Ant., 'Art.
Murus.' On the other hand, Vitruvius (ii. 8) recommends the
use of small stones as better preserving the mortar and con-
crete, which filled the interstices. A comparison between Greek
masonry at its best and that of the Romans under the empire
appears to bring out our author's point.

Sect. XI Concerning Sublimity 27

(for there are numberless varieties of amplification), the
orator must in any case know that none of these can
gosahl^stand^bj jt§|^ without snWiiraty.as a;;;perfect
structure. The flnlj^exceptions_are_ where pity or
depreciatio n^^e required ; in all other processes of
amplification, take away the sublime, and you will take ■
soul out of body ; they are effective no longer, and
become nerveless and hollow unless braced by passages
of sublimity. But, for clearness' sake, I must shortly lay
down wherein the difference lies between my present
precepts, and what I said above (there I spoke of a
sketch embracing the principal ideas and arranging them
into one) ; and the broad difference between Amplification
and Sublimity.

XII

I AM not satisfied with the definition given by the
technical writers. Amplification is, they say,^ language
which jnyestsjthe suBject^ltli greatness. Of course
this definition may serve in common for sublimity, and
passion, and tropes, "siSceTKeyTloo, invest theianguage
with greatness of a particular kind. To me it seems
that they differ from one another in this, that Sublimity
lies in intensity. Amplification also in multitude ; conse-
queri3ysuBrimity^ofteii,exists in a single idea, amplification
necessarily implies quantity and abundance. ~Aihplifica-
tion Js;;7-to define it in outline — an accumulation of all
the partj andtOTJcsinherent in. a subject, strengthening
the fabric ofAe^argument_by insistence ; and differs in

2 8 A "Treatise Sect. XII

this from rhetorical proof that the latter seeks to demon-
strate the point required. . . .

\Here about six pages have been lostJ\

In richest abundance, like a very sea, Plato often
pours into an open expanse of grandeur. Hence it is,
I think, that, if we look to style, the Orator, appealing
more strongly to passions, has a large element of fire
and of spirit aglow ; Plato, calm in his stately and
dignified magnificence, I will not say, is cold, but is
not so intense '. It is on these and no other points,
as it seems to me, dear Terentianus (that is, if we as
Greeks are allowed to form an opinion), that Cicero
and Demosthenes differ in _ their grand^ passages.
Demosthenes' strength is in sheer height of sublimity,
that of Cicero in ^^ diffiisifijj, , Our countryman,
because he bums and ravages all in his violence, swift,
strong, terrible, may be compared to a lightning fl^h
or a thunderbolt. Cicero, like a spreading conflagration,,
ranges and rolls over the whole field ; the fire which
burns is within him, plentiful and constant, distributed
at his will now in one part, now in another, and fed
with fuel in relays. These. are points on which you
can best judge : certainly .the moment for the sublimity

' If a brilliint, but unsupported, conjecture of Bentley's should
be right here, the passage would run . — * I will not say, is cold,
but has not the same lightning flashes,' with which compare c.xxxiv
(end). The conjecture, which involves a change or interchange of
several vowels in the Greek word, has been approved by excellent
scholars, but the point here is the concentration of Demosthenes,
not, as on p. 34, his brilliance.

Sect. XII Concerning Sublimity 29

and tension of Demosthenes is where accumulated
invective and strong passion are in play, and generally
where the hearer is to be hard struck : the moment for
difRision is where he is to be flooded with detail, as it is
always appropriate * in enlargement upon commonplaces,
in perorations and digressions, and in all passages
written for the style and for display, in scientific and
physical exposition, and in several other branches of
literature.

XIII

THAT Plato (to return to him) flowing ' in some
such noiseless stream ' ^, none the less reaches
greatness, you will not fail to recognize, since you have
read the RepuhRc, and know this typical passage: —
' Those who are unversed in wisdom and virtue,' it
runs, 'and spend all their days in feastings and the
like, are borne downwards, and wander so through life.
They never yet raised their eyes to the true world
above them, nor were lifted up, nor tasted of solid or
pure pleasure; but, like cattle, looking down, and
bowed to earth and to the table, they feed and fill
themselves and gender ; and in the greediness of these
desires they kick and butt one another with horns and
hoofs of iron, and kill because they cannot be satisfied '.'
This author shows us, if we would choose not to

' Plutarch (i«/e of Demosthenes, iii) severely blames Caecilius for
venturing on a comparision of the two Orators, and quotes a pioveib
corresponding to one of our own about the whale and the elephant.

' A quotation from Plato {Theaetetus, p. 144).

^ Plato, Republic, iz. 586 A.

30 A Treatise Sect. XIII

neglect the lesson, that there is als,o_aEatlj«; road,
besides all that we have mentioned, whigb. leads to the
sublime. Whatj^^and what manner^of_jroad^ that ?
''Imitation and em\]Jatjgn,of,grgat writers and poets who
KaveT)een before us. Here is our mark, my friend,
let us hold closely to it : for many are borne along
inspired by a breath which comes from another ; even as
the story is that the Pythian prophetess, approaching
the tripod, where is a cleft in the ground, inhales, so
they say, vapour sent by a god; and then and there,
impregnated by the divine power, sings her inspired
chants ' ; even so from the great genius of the men of
old do streams pass off to the souls of those who
emulate them, as though from holy caves ; inspired by
which, even those not too highly susceptible to the god
are possessed by the greatness which was in others.

Was Herodotus alone ' most Homeric ' ? There
was Stesichorus " before him, and Archilochus ; but,
more than any, Plato drew into himself from that
Homeric fountain countless runlets and channels of
water. (Perhaps we ought to have given examples, had
not Ammonius ' drawn up a selection under headings.)

' The author follows the same account of the Pythian oracle
as Strabo (ix. 419) ; but Plutarch, who lived on the spot, makes no
mention of the mephitic vapour, and indeed uses words (JDe defeetu
Orac. c. xlii) incompatible with its existence. For the bearing of
this passage upon the date of the treatise see Introduction.

' Stesichorus, an early poet (about 600 B. c.) of Himera.

' Ammonius, a disciple of Aristarchus, the great Alexandrian
critic, who wrote on words borrowed by Plato from Homer (not,
as was formerly thought, Ammonius Saccas, a teacher of Cassius
Longinus).

Sect. XIII Concerning Sublimity 31

,Jiere is no theft, but such a rendering as is made from
beautifd spectaSes of from carvings or other worKs of
art._ I do not think that tJiere would be such aTBloom as
we find on some of his philosophical dogmas, or that he
could have entered so often into poetical matter and
expressions, unless he had entered for the first place
against Homer, aye, with all his soul, a young
champion against one long approved ; and striven for
the mastery, too emulously perhaps and in the spirit of
the lists, yet not without his reward ; for ' good,' says
Hesiod, ' is this strife for mortals.' Yes, that contest
for fame is fair, and its crown worthy of the winning,
wherein even to be defeated by our forerunners is not
inglorious '.

XIV

THEREFOI^E even we, when we are working
out a theme which requires lofty speech and
greatness of thought, do well to imagine within
mirggllps h"'"^) 'f " ppd wfre, Homerjvould have said
this same thing, how Plato or Demosthenes, or, in
histojj;, Thucydides would have made it sublime.
The figures of those great men will meet us on the
way while we vie with them, they will stand out before

' ' In a word, Homer fills his readers with sublime ideas, and,
I believe, has 'raised the imagination of all the good poets that
have come after him. I shall only instance Horace, who immedi-
ately takes fire at fhe first hint of any passage from the Iliad or
Odyssy, and always rises above himself when he has Homer in
view.' Spectator, no. 417 (Addison) ; see also no. 339.

32 A Treatae Sect. XIV

Qur_eyes, and lead our souls upwards towards the
measure of thr~^iC0Eb. w^ . %V6 conjured up.
SSn'inore so if we add to our mental picture this ; how
would HomcTj^^ were he here, have listened to this
phrase of mine ? or Demosthenes ? how would they
have felt at this? Truly great is this competition,
where we assume for our own words such a jury, such
an audience, and pretend that before judges and
witnesses of that heroic build we undergo a scrutiny of
what we write. Yet more stimulating_tJian_aUwill it
be if jou add : ' IF T write this, in what spirit wll all
future ages hear me?| If any man Tear" tffis1S(5ase-
quence, that he may say something which shall pass
beyond his own day and his own life, then needs
must all which such a soul can grasp be barren, blunted,
dull ; for it posthumous fame can bring no fulfilment.

XV

WEIGHT, grandeur, and energy of speaking are
fiStEer produced in a very high "degree,
young friend, by appeals to Imagination, called Ey some
'rmage making^.' Imagination is no doubt a name
given gener^ly to anythmg^wEich suggests, no matter
howi,i a thought which engenders speech ; hiit_rfie_wprd
has in our time come to be applied specially to those
cases, wherei moved By enthusiasm "and "passion, ypu

' With this section compare Addison's papers ' On the pleasures
of the Imagination ', Spectator, 411 and following numbers : also
the magnificent passage of Pascal beginning ' Cette superbe puissance,
ennemie de la raison ' {Pensies; i. p. 16, ed. Molinier).

Sect. XV Concerning Sublimity 3 3

seem to see the things of which you speak, and place
t^em_jjfiaer"tEe~ey^rTjf^'youF~hearers. Imagination
means one thing in rhetoric, another with the poets ;
andTyou cannoT"feH~tS "o b b ' CTve t ttar the oB5ect df the
- fatter is to amaze, of the former to give distiactness ;
both, howeveiT^eek to stir the mind strongly.

My mother, never hound these maids on me.
Of bloody visages and snaky locks :
Here ! here I upon me, nearer yet they leap ! '
and

Alas ! she'll slay me : whither may I flee ? '

There the poet saw the Furies with his own eyes,
and what his imagination presented he almost compelled
his hearers to behold. Now Euripides is most pains-
taking in employing for the purposes of Tragedy the
two passions of madness and love, and is more
successful with these than, so far as I know, with any
others; not that he lacks boldness in essaying other
efforts of imagination. Though his own natural
genius was far from being great, he yet forced it in
many instances to become tragic : in every detail of his
great passages, as the poet has it,

Sides and loins he lashes to and fro

With his swift tail, and stirs up battle's thirst '.

Thus Helios, handing over the reins to Phaethon,

says : —

But drive thou not within the Libyan clime,
Th' unmoistened burning air will split thy car.

' Euripides, Orestes, 255. ' Iphigenia in Tauris, 291.

' II. XX. 170.

LONG. TR. T^

34 -^ Treatise Sect. XV

Then he goes on : —

Right for the seven Pleiads shape thy course :
So spake the sire ; the son now grasped the reins,
And lashed the flanks of those winged coursers. They,
Set free, sped onwards through th' expanse of air :
The sire, astride great Sirius ' in the rear,
Rode, and the boy instructed : — thither drive !
Here wheel thy car, yea here I ^

Would you not say that the soul of the writer treads
the car with the driver, and shares the peril, and wears
wings, as the horses do ; such details could never have
been imagined by it, if it had not moved in that
heavenly display, and kept even pace. So in his
Cassandra ', ' Ho, ye horse loving Trojans . . .'

Now, whereas Agscbylus haz ards the most heroic
flights of imaginagQO) as where the Seven chieftains
against Thebes, in the play of that name : —

Seven impetuous warriors, captains bold,
Slaying the sacred bull o'er black-rimm'd shields
And touching with their hands the victim's gore,
Ares, Enyo, and blood-thirsting Fear
Invoked, and swear ... *

swearing to one another oaths of death, each man of
his own, with ' no word of ruth * ' ; yet sometimes pro-
duces thoughts which are not wrought out, but left in

^ So the MS. An alteration is suggested which gives the sense
of ' a trace-horse '. Either image is sufficiently extravagant.

' From the Phaelhon, a lost play of Euripides (Nauck 779).

' From another lost play, perhaps the Alexander, in which
Cassandra figured.

' Aeschylus, Swen against Thebes, 42. Swanwick's tr.

° Line 51 of the same play.

Sect. XV Concerning Sublimity ij

the rough, and harsh ; Euripides in emulation forces
himself upon the same perils. Thus in Aeschylus the
palace of Lycurgus is troubled by the Gods in a
manner passing strange when Dionysus is made
manifest : —

See how the palace is possessed, its halls
Are all a revel . . .

Euripides has smoothed this over and worded it
differently ; —

And all the mountain joined their revelry '-

Sophocles has used imagination finely about the dying
Oedipus ^, wEen "¥e" passes to his own burial aimidst
elemental portents ; and again where Achilles, as the
GreeEi^are saiEng" aw^'^ appears"%' them above
his tomb, just when they were standing oiif to sea*, an
appearance which no one has expressed with more
vivid imagery than Simonides * ; but it is impossible to ,
put down all instances. We may, however, say gener-
allyjthat_^wse_found_in_ poets admit an excess which
passes Jntp_the_mydiical and goes^e ^nd al l that is
credible ; ^ in rhetorical imagination that which has in
it reality and tru th is always best. Deviations from
this rule become strange and exotic when the texture
of the speech is poetic and mythical, and passes into

' Euripides, Bacchae, 726. The line of Aeschylus is from
a lost tetralogy, or set of four plays, called the Lycurgeia.

' Sophocles, Oedipus Coloneus, 1586, &c.

' The reference may be to the Polyxena, a lost play of Sophocles.

' Simonides of Ceos, 556-467 B. c, a great lyric and elegiac
poet.

D 2

$6 A Treatise Sect. XV

impossibility of every sort; surely we need look no
further than to our own clever orators, who, like
tragedians, see Furies, and cannot, honest gentlemen,
learn so much as this, that when Orestes says : —

Unhand me ; one of my own Furies thou ;

Dost grasp my waist, to thrust me down to hell ? '

he imagines all this because he is mad. What_then
can imagination in rhetoric do ? It can probably con-
tribute much else to our speeches in energy and passion ;
•faii r^ertaini yin passages deding with facts an admixture
of it not only persuades_a listener, but makes him its
slave, ' Now mark me,' says Demosthenes, ' if at
this very moment a cry should be heard in front of our
courts, and then one said that the prison has been
opened, and the prisoners are escaping, there is no one,
be he old or young, so careless but will help all he
can. But if one were to come forward and say, that
the man who released them is now before you, that
man would have no hearing, and would instantly die ^,'
So Hyperides when put on his trial, because he had
proposed, after our defeat, to make the slaves free ;
' This proposal,' he said, ' was moved not by the Orator,
but by the battle at Chaeroneia ' ' ; here, while he deals
with the facts, he at the same time has used imagination,

' Euripides, Orestes, 264.

' Demosthenes, Timoerates, 208.

* Hyperides, a great Athenian orator, on whom see p. 6 a.
Plutarch tells us that he was accused of ' illegality ' after the
disaster of Chaeroneia, and pleaded ' the arms of the Macedonians
made darkness in my eyes,' and ' it was the fight at Chaeroneia,
not I, made that proposal.'

Sect. XV Concerning Sublimity 3 7

the audacity of the conception has borne him outside and
beyond persuasion. In all such instances it is a fact of
nature that we listen to that which is strongest. We
are therefore drawn away from mere denjonstration to
that which has in it imagination and surprise, the ele-
ment of fact being wrapped and lost amid the light
which shines around it.' This process is only what
we might expect ; when two forces are combined in
one, the stronger always attracts into itself the potency
of the other.

What I have now written about the sublime effects
which belong to high thoughts, and which are pro-
duced by the greatness of man's soul, and secondarily by
imitation, or by imagination, will suffice '.

XVI

HERE comes the place reserved fo r Figu res ',
our next topic ; for these, if handled as they
ought to be, should, as I said, jorm_no_jninor element

' Some words may have been lost here.

' Jhe ' Figures,' partly of words, partly of thoughts (see p. 13)
Were idols of the rhetoricians, who nearly all wrote treatises upon
them. The bondage in which the orators stood to these ' Figures '
is well shown in a story preserved by Seneca (Controv. Ill,
Introduction). Albucius, an excellent but anxious and self-
critical member of the Roman bar, was chased out of the profession
by the unfortunate results of his use of a single figure, the Omotic.
The other side had proposed to settle a certain matter by a form of
oath. ' Swear,' replied Albucius, intending by the figure to
disclose all his opponent's iniquities, 'but I will prescribe the oath,
Swear by the ashes of your father, which lie unbnried. Swear by

38 A Treatise Sect. XVI

in greatness. As however it would be a laborious, or
rather an unlimited task to give an accurate enumeration
of all, we will go through a few of those productive
of greatness of speech, in order to make good my
assertion, and will begin thus. Demosthenes is
offering a demonstration in defending his public acts '.
Now what was the natural way to deal with it ? ' You
made no mistake, men of Athens, when you took upon
yourselves the struggle for the freedom of the Greeks :
you have examples of this near home. For they also
made no mistake who fought at Marathon, at Salamis,
at Plataea.' But when, as one suddenly inspired and
possessed, he breaks out with that oath by the bravest
men of Greece : ' It cannot be that you made a mistake ;
no, by those who bore the brunt at Marathon,' he appears
by use of a single figure, that of adjuration (which here
I call apostrophe), to have deified those ancestors ;
suggesting the thought that we ought to swear, as by
gods, by men who died so; and implanting in the
judges the spirit of the men who there hazarded their

the memory of your father I ' He finished his period, and rose.
L. Aruntius for the other side, said : ' We accept your proposal,
my client will swear.' ' I made no proposal,' shouted Albucius,
' I employed a figure.' Aruntius insisted — the court began to fidget.
Albucius continued to protest that, at that rate, the Figures were
ruled out of the Universe. 'Rule them out,' said Aruntius, 'we
shall be able to live without them.' The court took his view,
and Albucius never opened his mouth in public again. I owe the
reference to this good story to Prof. Saintsbury, in whose History
of Literary Criticism, vol. i, will be found much mention of the
' Figures.'
' De Corona, 208.

Sect. XVI Concerning Sublimity 1 9

lives of old ; changing the very nature of demonstra-
tion into sublimity and passion of the highest order,
and the assured conviction of new and more than natural
oaths ; and, withal, infusing into the souls of his
hearers a plea of sovereign and specific virtue ; that so,
relieved by the medicine of his words of praise, they
should be brought to pride themselves no less on the
battle against Philip than on the triumphs won at
Marathon and at Salamis. Doing all this, he caught
his hearers up and bore them with him, by his use of
a figure.

It is said, I know, that the germ of this oath is
found in Eupolis * : —

I swear by Marathon, the fight, my fight,
No man of them unscathed shall vex my heart.

But then it is not the mere swearing by a name
which is great ; place, manner, occasion, purpose are
all essential. In these lines there is an oath, and that
is all ; it is addressed to Athenians when prosperous
and needing no comfort ; besides the poet has not
made immortals of the men, and sworn by them, that
so he may implant within the hearts of his hearers
a worthy record of their valour; he has passed away
from the men who bore the brunt to the inanimate thing,
the battle. In Demosthenes the oath has been framed
to suit beaten men, that so Chaeroneia might appear
a failure no longer ; it is, as I said, at once a demon-
stration that they made no mistake, an example, an

' Eupolis, Athenian poet of the Old Comedy, contemporary of
Aristophanes. The lines are from the Demis,

40 A Treatise Sect. XVI

assurance resting on oaths, a word of praise, an
exhortation. And whereas the orator was liable to be
met by this objection : ' You are speaking of a defeat
under your administration, and yet you swear by
victories,' in the next words he squares his phrase
by rule, and makes his very words safe, giving us a
lesson that ' even in Bacchic transports we must yet be
sober '.' ' By those who bore the brunt,' are his words,
* at Marathon, by those who fought on sea by Salamis
and off Artemisium, by those who stood in the ranks
at Plataea ! ' Nowhere does he say ' who conquered,'
but throughout he has furtively kept back the word
which should give the result, because that result was
a happy one, the contrary to that of Chaeroneia. There-
fore he gives his hearer no time, and at once adds : —
' To all of whom the city gave public burial, Aeschines,
not to those only who succeeded.'

XVII

AT this point I must not omit, my dear friend, to
l\. state one of my own conclusions. It shall be
given quite concisely, and is this. As though by
nature, the_fig!sss jJIyjEltfrnselves with sublimity, and
in turn are marvellously .supported by the alliance.
Where and how this is so, I will explain. There
is a peculiar prejudice against a promiscuous use of
tl\e figures : it suggests a suspicion of ambuscade,
plot, sop histry ; and the more so when the speech is
addressed to a judge with absolute powers, above all

' Adapted, and partly quoted, from Euripides, Bacchae, $ij.

Sect. XVII Concerning Sublimity 41

to tyrants, kings, magistrates of the highest rank : any
of these at once becomes indignant, if he feels that
there is an attempt to outwit him, like a silly child, by
the paltry figure of a skilled orator ; he takes the fallacy
to be used in contempt for himself, and either rages
like a wild beast, or, if he master his wrath, yet is
wholly disinclined to be convinced by the arguments.
Accordingly a figure is^bestj_when the_ very fact that
it is a figure passes unnoticed. Therefore sublimity
and" passion are a help against the suspicion attaching
to the use of figures, and a resource " of marvellous
power; because the treacherous art, being once associated
with what is beautiful and great, enters and remains,
without exciting the least suspicion. This is sufficiently
proved in the words quoted above, ' By the men who
fought at Marathon ! ' By what device has the orator
concealed the figure ? Clearly, by its very light. Much
as duller lights are extinguished in the encircling beams
of the sun, so the artifices of rhetoric are obscured by
the grandeur poured about them. An effect not far
removed from this occurs in painting. When colours
are used, and the light and the shadow lie upon the
same surface beside one another, the light meets the
eye before the shadow, and seems not only more
prominent, but also much nearer. So it is in speeches ;
sublimity and passion,, lying closer to our souls, always
come into view sooner than the figures, because of what
I may call natural kinship, and also of brilliance ; the
artfulness of the figures is thrown into shadow, and, as
it were, veiled.

42 A Treatise Sect. XVIII

XVIII

WHAT are we to say of the Questions and
Interrogations ', which come next ? Is it not true
that, by the very form which this figure takes, our
orator gives intensity to his language and makes it much
more effective and vehement ? 'Or do ye wish (answer
me, sir !) to go round and inquire one of another : "is
there any news ? " What can be greater news than this,
that a man of Macedonia is subduing Greece? Is
Philip dead ? Not dead. Heaven knows, but sick.
What matter to you ? if anything happen to him, you
will quickly make you another Philip ''.' Again, ' Let
us sail to Macedonia. "What harbour shall we ever
find to put into ? " asked some one. War will discover
for itself the weak points in Philip's resources '.' The
thing put simply would be quite inadequate : as it is,
the rush and swift return of, question and answer, and
the meeting of his own difficulty as if it came from
another, make the words not only more sublime by his
use of the figure, but actually more convincing. For
U passionate language is more attractive when it seems to
|be bom of the occasion, rather than deliberately adopted
'by the speaker : question and answer carried on with
a man's self reproduce the spontaneity of passion. Much
as those who are questioned by others, when spurred by

' As all the examples are of Question and Answer it seems not
improbable that one of the two substantives has replaced the word
' Answers ' in the original.

' Philippie, i. lo. ' Id. i. 44.

Sect. XVIII Concerning Sublimity 43

the sudden appeal, meet the point vigorously and with
the plain truth, so it is with the figure of question and
answer; it draws the hearer off till he thinks that each
point in the inquiry has been raised and put into words
without preparation, and so imposes upon him. Again
(for the instance from Herodotus has passed for one of
the most sublime), if it be thus . . .

\Here about six pages have been /oj/.]

XIX

THE words drop unconnected, and are, so to say,
poured forth, almost too fast for the speaker him-
self. ' Locking their shields,' says Xenophon, ' they
pushed, fought, slew, died'.' Or take the words of
Eurylochus in Homer : —

E'en as thou bad'st, we ranged the thickets through,
We found a house fair fashioned in a glade ^.

Phrases cut off from one another, yet spoken rapidly,
carry the impression of a struggle, where the meaning
is at once checked and hurried on. Such an effect
Homer has produced by his Asyndeta.

XX

/yN excellent and stirring effect is often given by
Jr\. the concurrence of figures, when two or three
mingled in one coinpany throw into a common fiind
their force, cogency, beauty.' Thus in the speech

' Xenophon, Hist. iv. 3. 19. ' Od. x. 251.

44 -^ Treatise Sect. XX

against Midias' we have Asyndeta interwoven with
repetitions and vivid presentation. ' There are many
things which the striker might do, yet some of which
the person struck could never tell another, by gesture,
by look, by voice.' Then, in order that the passage
may not continue travelling in the same track (for rest
shows calm, disarrangement passion, which is a rush
and a stirring of the mind), he passes with a bound to
fresh Asyndeta and to repetitions : ' by gesture, by look,
by voice ; when in insult, when in enmity, when with
fists, when as slave.' In these phrases the orator does
what the striker did, he belabours the intellect of the
judges by the speed of blow following blow. Then
he goes back from this point, and makes a fresh onset,
as gusts of wind do ; ' when with fists, when on the
face,' he goes on, 'these things stir, these make men
frantic, to whom insult is not familiar. No one by
telling of these things could possibly represent their
atrocity.'

// Thus he keeps up in essence throughout the passage
jhis repetitions and Asyndeta, while he continually varies
them ; so that his order is disorderly, and again his
violation of order has in it order of a kind.

XXI

Now insert, if you will, conjunctions, as the
school of Isocrates does : "''~A"gam we must not
omit this point either, that there are many things which
the striker might do, first by gesture, and then by look,
' Midias, 72.

Sect. XXI Concerning Sublimity ^s

and yet further by his very voice ' : if you rewrite the
passage in full sequence, you will recognize how the
press and rough effectiveness of passion, when smoothed
to one level by conjunctions, fails to pierce the ear,
and its fire at once goes out. For as, if one should tie
up the limbs of runners, their speed is gone, so passion
cha fes to be shackled by conju nctions and other ¥d^-
tions. The freedom of running is destroyed, and the
moniSum as of bolt from catapult.

XXII

UNDER the same head we must set cases of
Hyperbaton. This is a disturbance of the proper
sequence of phras esw^tHbugEjS, and is the surest impress
oTvehement passion. For as those who are really angry,
orln fearTormSignant, or who fall under the influence
of jealousy or any other passion (for passions are many,
nay countless, past the power of man to reckon), are seen
to put forward one set of ideas, then spring aside to
another, thrusting in a parenthesis out of all logic, then
wheel round to the first, and in their excitement, like a
ship before an unsteady gale, drag phrases and thoughts
sharply across, now this way, now that, and so divert
the natural order into turnings innumerable; so is it in the
best writers : imitation of nature leads them by way of
Hyperbata to the effects of nature. For art is perfect
just when it seems to be nature, and nature successful
when the art underlies it unnoticed. Take the speech
of Dionysius of Phocaea in Herodotus' : — 'Our fortunes
^ Herodotus, vi. ir.

4<J A Treatise Sect,XXii

rest on the edge of a razor, O lonians, whether we are
to be free or slaves, aye runaway slaves. Now, therefore,
if you choose to take up hardships, there is toil for you
in the present, but you will be able to overcome your
enemies.' The natural order was, ' O lonians, now is
the time for you to accept toils, for our fortunes rest on
the edge of a razor.' He has transposed the words
' Men of Ionia,' starting at once with the mention of
the fear, and entirely omitting, in view of the pressing
terror, to find time to name his audience. Then he has
inverted the order of the thoughts. Before sajring that
they must endure toil (which is the point of his exhor-
tation) he first assigns the cause why they should do so :
' our fortunes ', he says, ' rest on the edge of a razor ' :
so that his words seem not to have been prepared, but
to be forced out of him. Even more marvellous is

E'hucydides in the skill with which he separates, by the
le of Hyperbata, things which nature has made one and
separable. Demosthenes is not so arbitrary as he; yet
he is never tired of the use of this figure in all its applica-
tions ; the effect of vehemence which he produces by
transposition is great, and also that of speaking on the
call of the moment; besides all this he draws his hearers
with him to face the hazards of his long Hyperbata.
For he often leaves suspended the thought with which
he began, and interposes, as though he struck into a trdn
of reasoning foreign to it and dissimilar, matter which
he rolls upon other matter, all drawn from some source
outside, till he strikes his hearer with fear that an entire
collapse of the sentence will follow, and forces him by

Sect. XXII Concerning Sublimity 47

mere vehemence to share the risk with the speaker: then,
when you least expect, after a long interval, he makes
good the -thought which has so long been owing, and
works in his own way to a happy conclusion : making
the whole a great deal more impressive by the very hazard
and imminenceof failure which goes with his Hyperbata '.
Let us spare more instances : there are so many.

XXIII

NEXT come jthe figures of many cases, so-called ;
groupings, changes, gra dations, which are very
effective, as youTiiow, and work in with ornament,
^\jHteitty^of e veiy TSnd, an d passion. Only look at
variations of case, tense, person, number, gender :
how they embroider and enliven our expressions ! Of
those which are concerned with number, I assert that
not only are those instances ornamental where the form
is singular, and the meaning, when you look into them,
is found to be plural : —
At once the people in its multitude
Break man from man, shout ' tunny ! ' o'er the beach " ;
but the other class deserves even more attention, because

' In this long period the writer has fallen, as he often does, into
the vein of the author whom he is considering.

" The tunny is a Mediterranean fish, a large mackerel. ' The
fishermen place a look-out or sentinel on some elevated spot, who
makes the signal that the shoal of tunnies is approaching, and
points out the direction in which it will come. Immediately
a great number of boats set off, range themselves in a curved line,
and, joining their boats, drive the tunnies towards the shore, where
they are eventually killed with poles.* — From The Sea and Ut
Living Wonders, by Hartwig.

48 A Treatise Sect.XXllI

there are cases where plurals fall on the ear with grander
effect, and catch our applause by the effect of multitude
which the number gives. Take' an instance from
Sophocles in the Oedipus ' : —

O marriage rites
That gave me birth, and having borne me, gave
To me in turn an offspring, and ye showed
Fathers and sons, and brothers, all in one,
Mothers and wives, and daughters, hateful names.
All foulest deeds that men have ever done.

All these express one name, Oedipus, and on the
other side Jocasta ; but for all that, the number, spread
out into plurals, has made the misfortunes plural also ;
or in another case of many for one : ' Forth Hectors
issued and Sarpedons ^.' And there is the passage of
Plato, which I have quoted also in another place, about
the Athenians ' : —

' No Pelopses, nor Cadmuses, nor Aegyptuses, nor
Danai, nor other of the natural-bom barbarian dwell
here with us ; pure Greeks with no cross of barbarian
blood are we that dwell in the land,' and so forth. For
things strike on the ear with more sonorous effect
when the names are thus piled upon one another in
groups. Yet this should be done in those cases alone
where the subject admits of enlargement, or multiplication,
or hyperbole, or passion, either one of these, or several :
for we know that to go everywhere ' hung about with
ibells ' is a sophist's trick indeed *.

' Oedipus Tyrannus, 1403. ' Unknown.

" Menexenus, 245 D.

* ' Other men take their misfortunes quietly, he hangs out bells

Sect. XXIV Concerning Sublimity 49

XXIV

YET, on the other hand, contraction from plural to (
singular sometimes produces an effect conspicuously I
sublime. ' Then all Peloponnesus was ranged on different /
sides,' says the Orator*. And look at this, 'when[
Phrynichus exhibited his drama, the Taking of
Miletus, the whole theatre fell into tears'.' Where
separate individuals are compressed into unity t he notio n
of a single body is produced. In both cases the cause
of the ornamental effect is the same : where terms are
properly singular, to turn them into plurals shows emotion
into which the speaker is surprised ; where plural, to
bring several individuals under one so norous head is a
change in the opposite direction, and equally unexpected.

XXV

A GAIN, where you introduce things past and done as \
jr\. happening in the actual present, you will make your
account no longer a narrative but a living action. 'A man
whohasfallen under thehorse of Cyrus,' says Xenophon',
' and is being trampled, strikes his sword into the belly
of the horse : the horse plunges and unseats Cyrus, and
he falls.' So Thucydides in most instances.

in his daily life a next thing to it.' — Demosthenes, Arislogeilon,
i. go.

1 De Corona, i8.

" Herodotus vi. 21. The words used in the translation are taken
from Herodotus. Our treatise has: 'the spectators burst into
tears,' by which the point of the 'figure' is missed.

' Cyropaedeia, vii. 1. 37.

LONG. TR. £

fo A Treatise Sect.

XXVI

EFFECTIVE also in the same way is the trans-
position of persons, which often makes a hearer
think that he is moving in the midst of the dangers
described : —

Of toughest kind
Thou wouldst have called those hosts, so manfully
Each fought with each '.

And Aratus ' has : —

Not in that month may seas about thee surge !

In much the same way Herodotus : ' You will sail up
stream from the city Elephantina, and then you will
come to a level plain. Passing through this tract, you
will again embark on another and sail for two days ;
then you will reach a great city, whose name is Meroe'.'
You see, comrade, how he takes your spirit with him
through the place, and turns hearing into seeing. All
such passages, being addressed to the reader in his own
person, make him take his place at the very centre of
the action. Again, when you speak as though to a single
individual, not to all : —

Nor of the son of Tydeus couldst thou know
If he with Trojans or Achaians were * ;

you will render him more moved by the passions and
also more attentive; he is filled fiill of the combat,
because he is roused by being himself addressed.

• 11. XV. 697.

" Phaenomma, 287 (see above on p. 35). ' ii. 29.

• /;. V. 85.

XXVII Concerning Sublimity fi

XXVII

THEN there are other cases where the writer is
giving a narrative about a person, and by a sudden
transition himsel f pass es into that p erson ; in this class/
there is an outburst of passion : — /

But Hector warned the Trojans with loud cry,
To rush upon the ships, and pass the plunder by :
' But whom elsewhere than at the ships I sight,
Death shall be his that moment*.'

Here the poet has assigned the narradve part to
himself, as is fitting : the sharp threat he has suddenly,
without previous explanation, attached to the angry
chieftain: it would have been cold had he inserted
' Hector then said so and so,* whereas now the change
of construction has anticipated the poet's change of
speaker.

Hence the proper use of the figure is where th«
occasion is short and sharp, and does not allow the
writer to stop, but forces him to hurry from person t(
person, as in Hecataeus ' : ' Ceyx, indignant at this,
at once commanded the Heraclidae of the later genera-
tion to leave the country : " for I have no power to help
you ; therefore, that you may not perish yourselves,
and infiict a wound on me, depart to another people." '
Demosthenes, in his Aristogeiton speech', has found

* n. XV. 346-9.

' Hecataeus of Miletus (living about B.c. 520), historian and
geographer.
' Aristogeiton, i. 27.

E 2

fi A Treatiie Sect.

a different method to throw passion and swiftness into
this change of persons : ' And will none of you be
found,' he says, ' to entertain wrath or indignation at
the violence of this shameless miscreant ; who, thou
foulest of mankind, when thy effrontery is stopped,
not by barriers nor by gates, such as man might open
' He has not finished what he intended, but pass-
ing quickly aside, and, I had almost said, splitting a
single sentence between two persons, because he is so
angry — ' Who, thou foulest of mankind,' he says ;
with the result that, having turned his speech away
from Aristogeiton, and having done with him, you
tliink, he directs it upon him again with far more
intensity through the passion.

Much in the same way Penelope : —

What brings thee, herald, thee, the pioneer
Of these imperious suitors ? Do they send
To bid the servants of my husband dear
Of their appointed task-work to make end,
And on their lordly revelries attend ?
Never elsewhere may they survive to meet !
Here in these halls, while our estates they rend,
May they their latest and their last now eat,
Who thus with outrage foul Telemachus entreat.
Ye to your parents heedful ear lend none,
Nor hearken how Odysseus lived of yore '.

1 Orf. iv. 68i.

XXVIII Concerning Sublimity j-j

XXVIII

NO one I think would be in doubt as to £eii^
phrasis being a factor of sublimity. For as in!
musicTarapKones' make the principal melody sweeter *,
so Periphra5is_o ftensh«nesJaJi3thjh^^
anathe concurrence adds to the be aut y, mor e especially
if it have not a ny windy, unmusical ef&ct, but be
pleasantly j;gt[^)aUQded. In proof of this it will be
sufficient to quote Plato at the beginning of the Funeral
Speech': — ' Of all that we can give, these have now
what is rightly theirs, and, having received it, they
pass on their appointed journey, escorted publicly by
the city, personally each man by those of his kin.'
Here he has called death an ' appointedjoumey,' and
the bestowal of the ii£^3T'"??<wjTjiiiHiy_ pstiMt..givg"
by their country.' Is the dignity added to the thought
'^ these tums^ut a smatPrriatter^ Or fiSTierather
takeir laiiguuge ^lam SH~una3oimed, and made it
melodious by pouring around it the harmonies which
came of periphrasis ? Xenophon again : — ' Ye reckon
toil to be the guide to happy life, and have received it

' Paraphones, The musical term is an obscure one. It has
been suggested that our Author means to contrast the rich effect of
a chord with the thinner sound of a single note, and thus to
illustrate, through the notion of musical accompaniment, the
relation of a periphrasis to a ample word or phrase. The phrase
has been sometimes identified with Cicero's ' iaisae vocuiae ' {de
Orat. iii. 98). See the authorities quoted in the Appendix.

' Menexenus, 336 D.

^4 -^ Treatise Sect,

into your souls as the fairest and the most gallant of
all possessions: for ye take more delight in being praised
than in any other thing '.' By calling toil ' the guide to
happy life,' and giving a like expansion to the other
points, he has attached to his words of praise a great
and definite thought. And that inimitable phrase of
Herodotus : — ' On those of the Scythians who
plundered the temple the goddess sent a plague which
made them women.' ^

XXIX

YET Periphrasis is exposed tp_5pecial iisks^_inore
special than any of the figures, if used by a writer_
withour"Sefi'se "STpfSpsniotrr for ttfalls feebly on the
ear, and savours of tHHing and of rank stupidity. So
when Plato, (for he always employs the figure with great
force, occasionally out of season,) says in the Laws ' :
" we must not allow wealth, either of silver or of gold,
to be established in the city and settle there,' mocking
critics say that, if he had wanted to forbid them to
possess sheep, he would clearly have talked of ' wealth
of sheep and wealth of cattle*.'

Enough however of this disquisition (which came in
by way of parenthesis) on the use of figures in pro-
ducing sublime effects, all those which we have men-:

' Cyropaedia, i. 5. la. ' i. 105. ' Laws, vii. 80. I.

* It has been pointed out by Dr. Verrall (Class. Rev, xix.
p. 303) that the writer ignores the fact that Plato is avowedly
quoting from poetry. (See Introduction.)

XXIX Concerning Sublimity ff

tioned make speeches more passionate and stirring ;
an(Ppassionris aTlarge^^£n^°^^reHK^'ih sUUimity as
sense oTcEracter in an agreeable style.

XXX

NEXT, since the thoug ht_and^ the diction of a
speech are in most cases mutually interlaced,
I will ask you to consider with me whether any
partiS[aT oF what concerns^ expression ..^li^SBiain.
That a choice of the right words and of grand words
wonderfully attracts and charms hearers — that this
stands very high as a point of practice with all orators
and all writers, because, of its own inherent virtue, it
brings greatness, beauty, raciness, weight, strength,
mastery, and an exultation all its own, to grace our words,
as though they were the fairest statues — that it imparts
to mere facts a soul which has speech — it may perhaps
be superfluous to set out at length, for my readers know
it. For beautiful words are, in a r eal and sp ecialsense,

the light of i^iiniight - VVf-Tt;pir^nj:|ji^<ity is n^t; qf spryice

in jjCpiaces,!. to apply to trifling details grand and
solemn words would appear much the same as if one
were to fasten a large tragic mask upon a little child '.
Yet in poetry . . .

[Here about twelve pages have been lostJ\

1 The same figure is used by Quintilian (vi. I. 36).

ftf A Treatise Sect.

XXXI

. . . very rich and pithy ; and this of Anacreon ' : —

The Thracian filly has no more my care.
So too the novel phrase of Theopompus' has merit,
from the closeness of the correspondence it appears to
me most expressive, yet Caecilius has strangely found
fault with it. ' Philip,' he says, ' has a rare power of
swallowing down facts perforce.' So vulgar idiom is
sometimes much more expressive than ornamental
language; itis recogniz,§4j?tpnc£as"atoucff^jpmmon
life; a nd what is familiar is on the way to be crediUe^
Therefore, when applied to a man who patiently puts
up with and enjoys what is mean and repulsive in order
to better himself, the phrase adopted, ' to swallow down
perforce,' is very telling. So in Herodotus ' : — ' Then
Cleomenes went mad, and cut his own flesh with the
knife into little strips, until he had made collops of
himself and so died.' And 'Pythes held on to his
ship and fought until he was chopped to pieces*.'
These scrape the corner of vulg ar idiom, but they
"Sei^t vulgar Becailse they are so expressive.

' Anacreon of Teos, a lyric poet who died about B.C. 4^8.
Most of the well-known poems which bear his name are spurious.

^ Theopompus, an historian of Chios, born about B.c, 37S.
see p. 75.

' vi. 75. * vii. 181.

XXXII Concerning Sublimity S7

XXXII

AS to number of Metaphors, Caecilius appears to
.ijf"agree"witli those wHo'Tay Hown a rule allowing
two, or at the most three, applied to the same object.
About such figures again Demosthenes is the true
standard, and the time for their use is, when passions
are driven onwards like a torrent, and draw with them-
selves, as necessary to the passage, the multiplication of
metaphors.

' Men foul and flatterers,' he says, ' having mutilated
their fatherlands, every one of them, having pledged
away their freedom in wine, first to Philip, now to
Alexander, measuring happiness by their belly and by
the appetites which are most shameful, having thrown
to the ground that freedom and that life without a
master, wherein the Greeks of old found their very
standard and definition of good '.' Here the orator's
wrath against the traitors screens the number of the
metaphors used. Accordingly Aristotle and Theo-
phrastus " say that bold metaphors are softened by such
devices as the insertion of 'as though,' and 'as it
were,' and ' if I may speak thus,' and ' if I am right
in using somewhat venturesome phrase* ; for 'censure,'
they say, ' cures bold expression.' For myself, I
accept all these ; yet I afiirm, as I said in speaking of
figures, ij^at bursts of passion, being seasonable and

' De Corona, 296.

' Theophrastus, of Lesbos, Aristotle's successor as head of the
Peripatetic School at Athens.

f8 A Treatise Sect.

vehement, and sublimity when genuine, are sure speci-
-fics~foF numerous ^an3~Haring metaphors ; because as
they surge and sw«epj_they^ naturaUy^^aw everything
their_own way, and force it onwards, rather, I would
say, they require and exact bold metaphors, and do not
allow the hearer leisure to go into questions of their
number, because the speaker's excitement is his. Yet
further, in speeches _about commonplaces and in set
descriptions, nothing ig,ao„ejgjressive as contiuBsd, and
succ^sise^ tropesv It is by means of these that in
Xenophon ' the anatomy of man's bodily tabernacle is
painted with so much magnificence, and still more
admirably in Plato ^. The head he calls the citadel ;
between this and the chest an isthmus has been con-
structed, the neck, to which vertebrae have been
attached like hinges ; pleasure is a bait tempting men to
their hurt, and the tongue supplies the test of taste ; the
heart is the knot of the veins, and the fountain of the
blood which courses violently around, is appointed to
be the guard-house. The passages or pores he calls lanes.
' For the beating of the heart, in the expectation of
danger or on the summons of wrath, because it is a
fiery organ, they devised a resource, introducing the
structure of the lungs, which are soft and bloodless,
and perforated with cavities like a sponge, in order
that, when wrath boils up within it, the heart may
beat upon a yielding substance, and so receive no hurt.'
The chamber where the appetites dwell he styled the
women's chamber, that where the passions, the men's
' Memorabilia, i. 4. f . ' Timaeus, 69 D.

XXXII Concerning Sublimity S9

chamber. The spleen is a napkin for the parts within ;
filled with their purgings it grows large and unsound.
'After this,' he goes on, 'they enshrouded all with
fleshy parts, placing the flesh in front, to be a pro-
tection from matter outside, like layers of felt.' He
called blood the food of the fleshy parts. ' And for
the sake of nourishment they made water-courses
through the body, like water-courses cut in gardens,
that the currents of the veins might run as from an
inflowing stream, the body being a narrow canal.' But
when the end is at hand, he says that the cables of the
souls are loosed, as though of a ship, and it is let go
free. Countless similar details follow : those which
we have set down suffice to show how grand in their
nature tropical expressions are7~and how metaphors
produce sublimity, and that impassioned and descriptive
passages admit them most readily. Yet that the use
of tropes, IJEe aff other beauties of style, leads writers
on to neglect proportion, is clear without my saying it.
For it is upon these especially that critics pull Plato to
pieces, he is so often led on, as though his style were
possessed, into untempered and harsh metaphors and
portentous allegory. ' For it is not easy to realize,' he
says, ' that a city ought to be mixed like a cup, where-
into wine is poured and boils ; yet, when chastened by
another and a temperate god, in that fair partnership
forms an honest and a sober draught.' For to call
water ' a temperate god,' they say, and admixture
' chastening,' is the mark of a poet who is anything but
sober. Caecilius however, taking up such weak points

6o A Treatise Sect.

as this in his pamphlets in praise of Lysias ', actually
dared to make out Lysias better all round than Plato,
mixing up two different feelings : for loving Lysias
more than he loved himself, he yet hates Plato more
thoroughly than he loves Lysias. Only he is carried
away by combatireness, nor are his premisses admitted
as he thought them to be. For he puts forward his
orator as without a fault and clear in his record, as
against Plato who had made many mistakes. The fact
is not so, nor anything like it.

XXXIII

COME now : let us find some writer who is really
clear and beyond criticism. Upon this point, is
it^ not worth while to raise the question in a general
f^rm, whether in poems and prose writings a greatness
with some failings is the better, or a genius which is
limited in its successes, but is always sound and never
drops ? Aye, and this further question ; whether the
first prize should be carried off by the most numerous
excellences in literature or by the greatest? These
questions are germane to the subject of Sublimity, and
absolutely require a decision. I know, for my own part,

^ Attic orator (about B.C. 459-380). ' His distinctive qualities
are a delicate mastery of the purest Attic, a subtle power of
expressing character, a restrained sense of humour, and a certain
flexibility of mind which enables him under the most diverse
circumstances to write with almost unfailing tact and charm with
that x<V" • • ■ which the old critics felt in him.* — Prof. Sir R. C.
Jebb, SeUcliotu from Attic Orators, p. 186.

XXXIII Concerning Sublimity 6\

•that genius of surpassing greatness has always the least
clear record. Precision in every detail comes perilousry
near littleness ; "JsqgTea.natureSi as In great ibrfunesi "
there ought to be something which may even be
"neglected. Further, this may perhaps be a necessary
law, that humble or modest geniusT" wliicK never runs
a risk, and never aims at excellence, remains in most
cases without a failure and in comparative safety ; but
that what jj^ great js hazardous by very reason of the
greatness. Not that I fail to recognize this second law,
that all human things are more easily recognized on
their worse sTdF;" that the' memory of failures remains
indeliBle, while that of the good points passes quickly
away. I have myself brought forward not a few
failures in Homer and in others of the very greatest,
yet never take pleasure in their slips, which I do not
call voluntary mistakes, but rather oversights caused by
the random, haphazard carelessness of great genius,
and passed unmarked by it ; and I remain unshaken in
my opinion, that in all cases great excellence, although
not kept up to one fevel^ throughout, should always
bear off first award, if for nothing else, yetfbr the
sake of simple intellectual greatness. To take an
instance, ApoUonius in the Argonautae ^ is a poet who
never drops, and Theocritus ' in his Pastorals is most
successful, except as to a few extraneous matters : now

*■ ApoUonius of Rhodes (bom about B.C. 335), an Alexandrian
poet, to whom Virgil is much indebted.

' Theocritus, the great pastoral poet, living at Syracuse about
380 B.C.

62 A Treatise Sect.

this being so, would you not rather be Homer than
ApoUonius ? Take again Eratosthenes ' in the Erigone,
a little poem with nothing in it to blame; is he a
greater poet than Archilochus °, who drags much ill-
arranged matter along in that outpouring of divine
inspiration which it is difficult to range under a law ?
In lyrics again, would you choose to be Bacchylides '
rather than Pindar, in Tragedy Ion of Chios than
Sophocles himself? * These poets no doubt never drop,
their language is always smooth and the writing beautiful,
whereas Pindar and Sophocles at one time set all ablaze
in their rush, but the fire is quenched when you least
expect it, and they fail most unhappily. Am I not
right in saying that no man in his senses, if he put the
works of Ion together in a row, would value them
against a single play, the Oedipus ? *

* Eratosthenes of Cyrene. A great astronomer and scientific
geographer, born about B.C. 276. He also wrote on Homer and
on the Old Attic Comedy. Nothing else is known of this ' fault-
less poem,' but he is said to have been a pupil of Callimachus, and
to have written an astronomical poem, Hermes.

' Archilochus, see above, p. 25.

' Bacchylides of Ceos, a lyric poet, contemporary with Pindar,
and his rival. His works, other than mere fragments, have been
known to us since 1 897, when they were published by Dr. F. G.
Kenyon from a recently discovered Egyptian papyrus. Interesting
as they are, the judgement of our critic as to their relative poetic
value, is confirmed.

' Ion of Chios, a tragic poet of considerable merit, contemporary
with Sophocles : he attempted literature in almost all its branches,
and was famous as an anecdotist.

' With this judgement on Sophocles, which comes to us as some-
thing of a surprise, compare Plutarch (fin hearing poets, c. xiii),

XXXIV Concerning Sublimity 6^

XXXIV

IF successful passages were to be numbered, not
weighed; ~Hyperides '■ would, dn jTijs reckonuig,
far surpass "DemdstHenes. He sounds more notes ^,
andT)as"Tnore pomts of excellence ; he wins a second
place in pretty well every competition, like the hero
of the Pentathlon, being beaten for the first prize
by some trained competitor in each, but standing first
of the non-professionals. Hyperides certainly, besides
matching the successful points in Demosthenes, always
excepting composition, has included, over and above
these, the virtues and graces of Lysias. He talks
with simplicity, when it is required, not in a sustained
monotonous manner like Demosthenes, and he shows
sense of character, a fiavouring added with a light
hand ; he has indescribable graces, the wit of a man
who knows life, good breeding, irony with readiness
of fence, jokes not vulgar nor ill-bred as in those
great Attic orators, but appropriate, clever raillery,
comic power in plenty, the sting which goes with well-
aimed fun, and with all this what I may call inimitable
charm. He has a strong natural gift for compassion,
and also for telling a story fluently, running through
a description before a flowing breeze with admirable
who says that Sophocles may be blamed ' for his inequality.' Bergk
understands it with reference to such passages as Antigone, 904, &c.,
which many good judges hare felt unable to accept as genuine.

' Hyperides, an Attic orator, born about B.C. 396, died 322,
' the Sheridan of Athens.' Sir R. C. Jebb in Atlie Orators, vol.
ii. c. 22, where this passage of our text is translated.

' ' He has more tones in his voice,' Jebb,

54 -^ "Treatise Sect.

ease in tacking : for instance, the story of Latona he
has treated rather as a poet, the Funeral Speech as
a set, perhaps an unmatched, effort of the oratory of
display. Demosthenes has no touches of character,
no flowing style ; certainly he is not supple, and
cannot speak for display: he lacks the whole list
of qualities mentioned above : when he is forced to
be witty and smart, he raises a laugh against, rather
than with himself; when he wants to approach charm
of manner he passes farthest from it. We may be
sure that if he had attempted to write the little speech
on Phryne or that on yithenogenes, he would have
established even more firmly the fame of Hyperides.
As I see it, the case stands thus : — The beauties
of the latter though they be many, are devoid of
greatness \ dull ' to a sober man's heart,* and allow the
hearer to rest unmoved (who feels fear when he reads
Hyperides ?) ; Demosthenes ' taking up the tale ',' adds
excellences of the highest genius and of consummate
perfection, sublimity of tone, passions in living em-
bodiment, copiousness, versatility, speed ; also, which
is his own prerogative, ability and force beyond
approach. Now whereas, I say, he has drawn to
himself in one all those marvellous and heaven-sent
gifts, for human we may not call them, therefore by
the beauties which he has he surpasses all other men

' Similar words occur in a passage of Plutarch (2)« Garr. 4)
where they appear to be a poetical quotation.

' An Homeric phrase {Od, viii. 500), used when one minstrel
succeeds another.

XXXV Concerning Sublimity 6$

and outmatches those which he has not. With his
thunder, with his lightning, he bears down the
orators of all time ; sooner might one open one's eyes
in the face of thunderbolts as they rush, than gaze full
upon the passions which follow upon passions in
Demosthenes.

XXXV

WHEN we come to Plato, there is, as I said,
another kind of pre-einmence. For Lysias, who
is far below him in the number, as well as in the
magnitude of his good points, is yet more in excess of
him in faults than in defect as to good points. What
then did those immortals see, the writers who aimed
at all which is greatest, and scorned the accuracy
which lies in every detail ? They saw many other
things, and they also saw this, that Nature determined
man to be no low or ignoble animal ; but introducing
us into life and this entire universe as into some vast
assemblage, to be spectators, in a sort, of her contests,
and most ardent competitors therein, did then implant
in our souls an invincible and eternal love of that
which is great and, by our own standard, more divine.
Therefore it is, that for the speculation and thought
which are within the scope of human endeavour not all
the universe together is sufficient, our conceptions often
pass beyond the bounds which limit it ; and if one
were to look upon life all round, and see how in all
things the extraordinary, the great, the beautiful stand
supreme, he will at once know for what ends we have
been bom. So it is that, as by some physical law, we

66 A Treatise Sect.

admire, not surely the little streams, transparent though
they be, and useful too, but Nile, or Tiber, or Rhine,
and far more than all, Ocean ; nor are we awed by
this little flame of our kindling, because it keeps its
light clear, more than by those heavenly bodies, often
obscured though they be, nor think it more marvellous
than the craters of Etna, whose eruptions bear up
stones and entire masses, and sometimes pour forth
rivers of that Titanic and unalloyed fire. Regarding
all such things we may say this, that what is serviceable
or perhaps necessary to man, man can procure; what
passes his thought wins his wonder.

XXXVI

HENCE, when we speak of men of great genius
in literature, where the greatness does not
necessarily fall outside the needs and service of man,
we must at once arrive at the conclusion, that men of
this stature, though far removed from flavyless ^per-
fection, yet all rise above the mortal : other qualities
prove those wHo possess them to be men, sublimity
raises them almost to the intellectual greatness~3^od.
No failure, no blame ; but greatness has our very wonder.
What need still to add, that each of these great men
is oft«i_ seen to redeem all his failures by a single
sufiimity, a single success ; and further, which is most
convincing, that if we were to pick out all the failures
of Homer, Demosthenes, Plato, and the other greatest
writers, and to mass them together, the result would
be a small, an insignificant fraction of the successes

XXXVI Concerning Sublimity 67

which men of that heroic build everywhere exhibit.
Therefore every age and all time, which envy itself
can never prove to be in its dotage, has bestowed upon
them the assured prizes of victory ; it guards and keeps
them to this day safe and inalienable, and will as it
seems, keep them

As long as waters flow and poplars bloom'.
To the writer, however, who objects that the faulty
Colossus is not better work than the Spearman of
Polycleitus * I might say much, but I say this. In
Art the most accurate work is jdmired, in the works of
Nature greatness. Now it is by Nature that man is
a bemg endowed" with speech; therefore in statues we
seek what is like man, in speech what surpasses, as I
said, human st andard s. Yet it is right (for our precept
returns to the early words of this treatise), because the
success of never failing is in most cases due to Art,
the success of high aldiou^ not uniform excellence, to
Geniusj_.that, therefore. Art should ever be brought in
to aid Nature ; where they are reciprocal the result
sliould be perfection. It was necessary to go thus far
towards a decision upon the points raised : let every one
take the view which pleases him, and enjoy it.

* From an epigram on Midas, quoted by Plato (Phatdna,
264 C). The somewhat sentimental character of the quotation
here may be noticed.

^ Perhaps the famous Colossus of Rhodes, perhaps a later work.
Polycleitus, an artist of Sicyon of the fifth century B. c. His
Spearman was known as the ' Canon ' or Standard of proportion
in Art. Copies have reached us, of which the best is probably
a figure from Herculaneum now at Naples.

F 2

6i A Treatise Sect.

XXXVII

IN close neighbourhood to Metaphors, for we must
go back to them, come Illustrations and Similes,
which differ from them in this respect . . }

[Here about six pages have been lostJ\

XXXVIII

SUCH Hyperboles as this arealsojudjcrous, ' un-
less you~wear'your"Brains in your heels to be
trampled down'.' I^nce we ought to know exact-
ly how far each should go, Tor^ sometimes to advance
beyond these limits destroys the hyperbole ; in such
cases extreme tension brings relaxation, and even
works right round to its opposite. Thus Isocrates
fell into a strange puerility owing to his ambition to
amplify at all points. The Argument of his Pane-
gyricus is that the state of the Athenians surpasses
that of the Lacedaemonians in services to the Greeks ;
but at the very beginning he has this : — ' More-
over words are so potent, that it is possible thereby
to make what is great lowly, and to throw great-
ness about what is small, and to treat old things
in a new fashion, and those which have recently

/ * ' The simile too is a metaphor, the difference between them

' being only slight. Thus where Homer says of Achilles that " he

rushed on like a lion," it is a simile ; but when he says that "he

rushed on, a very lion," it is a metaphor.' — Aristotle, Rhetorie, 3,

c. iv, tr. Welldon.

' From the Halonnesus, a speech once attributed to Demosthenes.

XXXVIII Concerning Sublimity 6^

happened in an old fashion.' ' ' What, Isocrates ',
some one will say, ' do you mean then to change the
parts of the Lacedaemonians and Athenians^' For
this set praise of speech goes near to an open warning
at the outset not to believe him. Possibly then the
best hyperboleSj as we said above in speaking of figures,
are those which are not noticed as hyperboles at all.
This result is^ obtained jvhen they are uttered in an
outburst of strong feeling and in harmony widb a certain
grandeur in the crisis described, as where Thucydides
is speaking of the men slaughtered in Sicily. ' For
the Syracusans', he says, 'also came down and
butchered them, but especially those in the water,
which was thus immediately spoiled, but which they
went on drinking just the same, mud and all, bloody
as it was, even fighting to have it.' ' That blood and
mud were drunk together, and yet were things fought over,
passes for credible in the intensity of the feeling and
in the crisis. The passage in Herodotus about the
men of Thermopylae is similar : ' On this spot ', he
says, ' while defending themselves with daggers, that
is, those who still had them left, and also with hands
and with teeth, they were buried alive under the
missiles of the Barbarians.' ' Here ' What sort of
thing is it', you will say, 'to fight with very teeth
against armed men ', or what to be ' buried alive under
missiles ' ? But it passes for true like the other ; for
the fact does not appear to be introduced for the sake
of the hyperbole, but the hyperbole to pass because
' c. viii. ' vii. 84. ' vii. 225.

70 A Treatise Sect.

fathered by the fact. For, as I am never tired of
sajnng, every bold experiment in language finds a solvent
and a specific in deeds and passions which approach
frenzy. So, in Comedy, utterances which approach
the incredible pass for true because of the ludicrous : —

He had a field no bigger than the sheet
Which holds a Spartan letter.'

For laughter too is a passion, a passion which lies in
pleasure. There is an hyperbole on the side of excess,
and also one on the side of defect: the common point
is a straining of the truth. And, in a manner of
speaking, satire is an exaggeratjan^namdy of pettiness.

XXXIX

THE fifth of the factors which we mentioned at the
outset, as contnbuting to Sublimity, still remains
to be considered, my excellent friend ; compositipn. in
words, or the precise manner of arran^ng them. I have
already published two treatises on this subject, in
which I have rendered full account of such theoretical
views as I could form ; and need, therefore, only add,
as necessary for our present purpose, that melody is
not only an instrument natural to man^ which produces
persuasion and pleasure ; it is a marvellous instriuneoit,
which produces passion, yet leaves him free. Does

' The brevity of Spartan letters may be illustrated by the
famous dispatch reporting the disaster of Cyzicus (410 B.C.):
' Honour is lost : Mindarus is gone : the men starve : we know not
what to do.'

XXXIX Concerning Sublimity 71

not the flute implant within the hearers certain passions,
and place them out of their senses, full of wild revelry ?
Does it not set a certain rhythmical step, and force
them to keep step with it, and to conform themselves
to the air, though a man have ' no music in him ' ? '
Do not the notes of the harp, which in themselves
signify nothing, yet by the interchange of sounds, the
mutual accompaniment, the mingled harmony, cast upon
us a spell, which is, you well know, often marvellous ;
although these are but images and bastard copies of
persuasion, not genuine forces operative upon human
nature ? And then are we not to think that com-
position — ^being as it is, a special melody of words,
words whi^h are in man by nature and ^vhich reach
his very soul, and not his ears, alone; stirring, as it
does, manifold ideas of words, thoughts, actions, beauty,
tunefulness, all of them things bom and bred within us ;
cairyiig. moreover, by the very commixture and multi-
plicity of its own sounds, the passion which is present
to the speaker into the souls of the bystanders, and
bringing them into partnership with" hfinself ; building
phrase on phrase and so shaping whole passages of
gTeatness— ^t "CompositionT^ say7 must by all these
means at once soo^gjjs as we hear and also dispose to
stateliness, and high mood, and sublimity, and ^very-
thingwhich it contains with itself, in eachand every
direction gaining the mastery over minds ? Although it
is mere folly to raise problems about things which are so
fully admitted, for experience is proof sufficient, I am
' Quoted from the Sthmehoea, a lost play of Euripides.

72 -A Treatise Sect. XL

sure that you will think that a sublime thought, and
marvellous indeed it is, which Demosthenes applied to
his decree : — ' This decree made the danger, which
then encompassed the city, to pass away like a vapour '.'
But the harmony of the thought, no less than the
thought itself, has given it voice. For the whole ex-
pression rests upon the dactylic rhythms^the most noble
and productive of grandeur, which make the structure
of heroic metre the noblest known to us. Take any
word out of its own place, and transfer it where you
will : — ' This proposal, like a vapour, made the danger
of that day to pass away ' ; or, again, cut off one
syllable only : — ' made it to pass like vapour ' ; and you
will learn how closely the rhythm echoes the sublimity.
For the actual phrase ' like a vapour ' moves with the
first rhythm long, if measured by four times.^ Cut out
the one syllable, you have 'as vapour', the curtailment
mutilates the grandeur ; as, on the other hand, if you
lengthen it out, ' made to pass away like to a vapour ',
,the sense is the same, but not the effect on the ear,
because by the length of the times at the end of the
phrase, its sheer sublimity is broken up and unstrung.

XL

1ANGUAGE is made .grand in the highest
_> "degree by that which corresponds to the
collocation of limbs in the body, of which no one, if

' Dt Corona, l88.

'i.e. equivalent to four short syllables. The difficult metrical
questions raised in the passage are discussed by Dr. Verrall (^Class.
Rev. xix. p. 354).

Sect. XL Concerning Sublimity 73

cut off from another, has anything noticeable in itself,
yet all in combination produce a perfect structure. So
great passages, when separate and scattered in diifeient
parts, scatter also the sublimity ; but if they are formed
by partnership into a body, and also enclosed by the
bond of rhythm, the limits wfich encircle them give
them new voice ; one might put it fliat grand effects
within a period contribute to a common fund of
grandeur. However it has been already shown that
many prose writers and poets of no natural sublimity,
possibly themselves altogether wanting in grandeur, and
using in general common and popular words, such as
contribute nothing remarkable, have yet, by mere arrange-
ment and adjustment, attained a real dignity and dis-
tinction of style, in which no pettiness is apparent; so,
amongst many others, Philistus, Aristophanes in certain
passages, Euripides in most. After the murder of his
children Hercules cries : —

I am full fraught with ills — no stowing more.'
The phrase is quite popular, but has become sublime
because the handling of the words conforms to the
subject. If you place the wbrdFln"otEer combinations,
you wTll see clearly that Euripides is a poet of com-
position rather than of intellect. When Dirce is being
Jragged~a'way"byThe bull : —

Where'er it chanced.
Rolling around he with him ever drew
Wife, oak-tree, rock, in constant interchange.''

• Hercules Furens, 1245, tr. R. Browning.
' From the Aniiope, a lost play.

74 -^ Treatise Sect. XL

The conception in itself is a noble one, but has become
more forcible from the rhythm not being hurried, nor
borne along as on rollers ; the words are solidly
attached to one another, and checks caused by the
syllabic quantities, which result in stability and grandeur.

XLI

THERE is nothing which introduces pettiness
into sublime passages so much as a broEen~and
esccited rhythm, as pyrrhics, trochees, and dichorees,
which fall into a thorough dancing measure. For in
pn5se~complSEe" rhythm appears dainty and trivial, and
entirely lacks passion, because the sameness makes it
superficial. The worst point of all about this is, that,
as ballad-music draws away the hearers perforce from
the subject to itself, so prose which is made over-
rhythmical does not give the hearers the effect of the
prose but that of the rhythm ; so that in some cases,
knowing beforehand the endings as they become due,
people actually beat time with the speakers, and get
before them, and render the movement too soon, as
though in a dance. Equally devoid of grandeur are
^passages which lie too close, cut up into scraps and
' minute syllables, and bound together by clamps between
piece and piece in the way of socket and insertion.'

' Here again (as on p. a6) the terms of masonry are obscure,
though the general drift of the simile is apparent.

Sect.XLII Concerning Sublimity 7S

XLII

ANOTHER means of lowering sublimity is ex-
X\. cessive conciseness of expression ; a grand
phrase is inaiineS when it is gathered into too short
a compass. I must be understood to refer not to
mere undue compression, but to what is absolutely
small and comminuted ' : contraction stunts the sense,
a short cut goes straight. In the other direction it is
clear that what is spun out is lifeless, all ' which
conjures up unseasonable length '.'

XLIII

PETTINESS of words, again, is strangely potent in
making fine passages mean. Thus in Herodotus
the storm' has been finely described with great spirit,
so far as the ideas go, but certain words are included
which are surely too ignoble for the subject; this in
particular, 'when the sea boiled', the word 'boiled'
greatly spoils the sublimity, being so poor in sound ;
then he has ' the wind flagged ', and again ' Those who
were about the wreck and clutching it met an un-
welcome end ', ' flagged ' is an undignified vulgarism,
and ' unwelcome ' is an inadequate word for such a
disaster. So also Theopompus*, in a brilliant and
elaborate account of the descent of the Persian army

' Perhaps this should read ' not to proper compression ' (if
a negative be omitted in the original).
' Apparently a poetical quotation,
' vii. 1 88. • See .p. 56.

7<J A Treatise Sect.XLIII

upon Egypt, by a few paltry words has spoilt the
whole passage: — 'For what city of Asia, or what
tribe, did not send envoys to the King? What
beautiful or costly thing which earth grows, or art
produces, was not brought as a gift to him? Were
there not many and costly coverlets and cloaks, purple,
and variegated, and white pieces, and many tents of
gold, furnished with all things serviceable ; many
costly robes and couches ? There were also vessels of
wrought gold and silver, drinking cups and bowls, of
which you might have seen some crusted with precious
stones, others worked with elaborate and costly art :
besides these were untold quantities of arms, some
Greek, some barbarian, beasts of burden in exceedingly
great numbers, and victims fatted for slaughter, many
bushels of spices, many sacks and bags and sheets of
papyrus and all other commodities; and so many
pickled carcases of all sorts of animals, that the size of
the heaps made those who approached from a distance
think that they were mounds and hillocks as they
Jostled one another '. He runs off from the loftier to
the more humble details, whereas he ought to have
made his description rise in the other direction. With
his marvellous account of the whole provision he has
mixed up his bags and spices, and has drawn to the
imagination — a cook-shop ! Suppose one had really
placed among those things of show, in the middle of
the gold and the gem-crusted cups and the silver
vessels, common bags and sacks, the effect to the eye
would have been unseemly ; so in a description each of

Sect. XLIII Concerning Sublimity 77

such words placed there out of season is ^n ugliness
and, so to say, a blot where it stands. It was open
to him to go through all in broad outline : as he has
told us of heaps taken to be hillocks, so he might have
given us all the rest of the . pageant, camels, a
multitude of beasts of burden carrying all supplies for
luxury and the enjoyment of the table, or he might
have specified heaps of every sort of grain and of all
that is best for confectionery and daintiness ; or, if he
meant, at all costs, to put the whole down in an inclusive
list, he might have said ' all the dainties known to
victuallers and confectioners ' '. For we ought not in ,
sublime passages to stoop to mean and discredited!
terms unless we are compelled by some strong necessity ; !
but it would be proper even in words to keep to those '
which sound worthy of the subject, and to copy
Nature who fashioned man ; for she did not place our
less honourable parts in front, nor the purgings of all
gross matter, but hid them away so far as she could,
and, as Xenophon tells us ", removed the channels of
such things to as great a distance as possible, nowhere
disfiguring the beauty of the whole animal. But there
is no present need to enumerate by their kinds the
means of producing pettiness ; when we have once
shown what things make writings noble and sublime,
it is clear that their opposites will make them in most
cases low and uncouth.

' * The critic complains of bathos, but the passage reads like the
intentional bathos of satire.'^G. Murray, Hist, of Ancient Greek
Literature, p. 390.

' Memorabilia, i. 4. 6.

78 A Treatise Sect.XLIV

XLIV

ONE point remains, which in view of your dili-
gence in learning, I shall not hesitate to add.
This is to give a clear answer to a question lately put
to me by one of our philosophers: 'I wonder', he
said, ' as assuredly do many others, how it is that in
our age we have men whose genius is persuasive and
statesman-like in the extreme, keen and versatile ; but
minds of a high order of sublimity and greatness are no
longer produced, or quite exceptionally, such is the
world-wide barrenness of literature that now pervades our
life. Are we indeed ', he went on, ' to believe the
common voice*, That democracy is a good nurse of all
that is great ; that with free government nearly all power-
ful orators attained their prime, and died with it ? For
Freedom, they say, has the power of breeding noble
spirits ; it gives them hopes, and passes hand in hand
with them through their eager mutual strife and their
ambition to reach the first prizes. Further, because
of the prizes offered to competition in commonwealths,
the intellectual gifts of acators,.are^kept in exercise and
whetted by use ; the rub of poli&cs, irTTnay use~3ie
word, kindles them to fire ; they shine, as shine they must,
with the light of public freedom. But we in our day ',
he went on, ' seem to be from our childhood scholars
of a dutiful slavery ; in its customs and practices we

' Compare Tacitus, DicUogut, 40. ' But the great and memor-
able eloquence of which men tell is the foster child of license, which
foolt used to call liberty,' (Materaus, the poet, is summing up.)

Sect. XLIV Concerning Sublimity 79

are enwrapped and swathed from the very infancy of our
thoughts, never tasting that fairest and most abundant
fount of eloquence, I mean Freedom ; ^yherefore we
turn out.nothing but flatterers of j)ortentous growth.'.
Other faculties, he asserted, might be the portion of
mere household servants, but no slave becomes an
orator; for instantly there surges up the helplessness
to speak out, there is the guard on the lips enforced by
the cudgel of habitude '. As Homer has it : —

Half that man's virtue doth Zeus take away.
Whom he surrenders to the servile day.' ^

' As then ', he went on, ' if what I hear is to be be-
lieved, the cages in which the Pygmies, also called
dwarfs ', are reared, not only hinder the growth of
those who are shut up in them, but actually shrivel
them because of the bonds lying about their bodies, so
one might show that all slavery, though it be never so
dutiful, is a cage of the soul and a public prison.'
Here _I_reJ2ined : 'Sir,' I said, 'it is easy, and it is
man's special habit,_ always to find fault with things
present : but consider whether it may not be that what
spoils noble natures is, not the peace of the universal
world, but much rather this war which masters our
desires, and to which no bounds are set, aye, and more

* The rare verb used here in the original is found in a passage
of the Jewish writer Philo (de tmul, i, p. 387 A), also of slaves.

' Od. xvii. 322.

' There was a fashion of keeping dwarfs at Rome under the
early emperors. Augustus himself, who abhorred freaks and mon-
strosities, took pleasure in them (Suetonius, Life of Augustus,
c. 83).

8o A Treatise Sect. XL IV

than that, these passions which keep our life a prisoner
and make spoil of it altogether ? The love of money,
which cannot be satisfied and is a disease wTth'u's'all,
and the love of pleasure both lead us into slavery, or
rather, as oneraight put it,'thrust our lives and ourselves
down into the depths : the love of money, a disease
which makes us little, the love of pleasure, which is
utterly ignoble. I try to reckon it up, but I cannot
discover how it is possible that we who so greatly
honour boundless wealth, who, to speak more truly,
make it a god, can fail to receive into our souls the
kindred evils which enter with it. There follows on
unmeasured and unchecked wealth, bound to it and
keeping step for step, as they say, costliness of living ;
which, when wealth opens the way into cities and
houses, enters and settles therein. When these evils
have passed much time in our lives, they build nests,
the wise tell us, and soon proceed to breed and
engender boasting, and vapouring, and luxury ; no
spurious brood, but all too truly their own. For this
must perforce be so ; men will no longer look up, nor
otherwise take any account of good reputation ; little
by little the ruin of their whole life is effected ; all
greatness of soul dwindles" and withers, and ceases to
be emulated, while men admire their own mortal parts,
and neglect to improve the immortal. A judge bribed
for his verdict could never be a free and sound judge
of things just and good, for to the corrupted judge the
side which he is to take must needs appear good and
just. Even so, where bribes already rule our whole

Sect. XL IV Concerning Sublimity 8i

lives, and the hunt for other men's deaths, and the
lying in wait for their wills, and where we purchase
with our soul gain from wherever it comes, led captive
each by his own luxury, do we really expect, amidst
this ruin and undoing of our life, that any is yet left
a free and uncorrupted judge of great things and things
which reach to eternity ; and that we are not downright
bribed by qur_ desire JxtiettecoiHselses.-? Fo r such m en
as we are, it may possibly be better to be governed than
to be free; since greed and grasping, if let loose together
against our neighbours, as beasts out of a den, would
soon deluge the world with evils.' I gave the general
explanation that what eats up our modem characters is
the indolence in which, with few exceptions^ we all now
live, never working or undertaking work save for the
sake of praise or of pleasure, instead of that assistance
to others which is a thing worthy of emulation and of
honour.

' Best leave such things to take their chance ' ', and
pass we to the next topic ; this was to be the passions,
about which I promised beforehand to write in a
separate paper, inasmuch as they cover a side of the
general subject of speech, and of sublimity in particular.

' From Euripides, Electro, 379.

APPENDIX
I

Specimen Passages translated from
Greek Writers of the legman Empire
on Literary Criticism

DIONYSIUS OF HALICARNASSUS

Dionysius of Halicarnassus (about 78-7 B.C.), a learned writer
on history and criticism. Under the latter head come the Thru
Literary Leilers, dealing with Demosthenes, Plato, and Thucydides,
»Dd Notes on the Ancient Orators (the former work translated and
edited by Professor Rhys Roberts), and the treatise On Composition,
from which our extract is taken. The style is pure and the criticism
marked by good judgement and taste, and of real value. There
are many phrases which he uses in common with the writer of the
Treatise on the Sublime ; but the difference in point of view may
be seen in the differing conclusions which they respectively illustrate
by the two Odes of Sappho which we owe to them. On the passage
here selected, see Jebb's Attic Orators, ii. 56-8.

ON THE SMOOTH STYLE

THE smooth and florid mode of composition,
which I placed second in order, has the following
characteristics : — It does not seek to be seen in clear
light in its every word, nor always to move on a broad
safe platform, nor to have long intervals between words ;
this slow balanced procedure is not at all to its taste, it
asks for a vocabulary which is in motion and activity,
G 2

84 appendix I

where half the words lean upon the other half, and
all find steadiness in the mutual support, like flowing
streams which run without a tremor. It requires that its
several members be included and interwoven in one
another, and produce, so far as that is possible, a visible
effect. This is done by accurate junctures, admitting
no perceptible interval between the words ; upon this
side it resembles fine-woven stuffs, or paintings wherein
the lights melt into the shadows. It would have all its
words euphonious and smooth, tender and maidenish.
Rough strident syllables are its special aversion ; it is
always shy of what is bold and hazardous.

It not only desires that the words be fitly joined
with words and fitted, but also that clauses be woven in
with clauses, and that all take final form in a period ; it
must have clauses of a length neither longer nor shorter
than what is moderate, and a period shorter than a
man's completed breath: it could not endure to turn out
a passage without periods, or a period without clauses,
or a clause without symmetry. Of rhythms it employs,
not the longest, but those which are moderate or
comparatively short ; the ends of its periods must be
rhythmical and firm, as though by square and level.
In the joinings of periods and of words it takes two
different rules ; words it makes glide into one, periods
it forces apart, they must present a clear view all
round. It will have no figures of the most old-
fashioned kind, none to which any solemnity attaches,
or ponderousness, or the dust of ages ; it mostly loves
to use those which are dainty and soft^in which there

DionyAus of Halicarnasms %f

is so much theatrical beguilement. To use plainer words,
this style is on most important points the opposite of
that mentioned before *, but of these points I need not
speak again.

The next thing would naturally be to enumerate
those who have reached the first place in it. Of Epic
poets, I think myself that Hesiod most fully developed
its character ; of lyric poets Sappho, and, next to her,
Anacreon and Simonides ; of tragic poets Euripides
alone; of historians, no one in perfect detail, but
Ephorus and Theopompus better than the majority ;
of orators Isocrates. I will add the following
specimens of the cadence, selecting Sappho for the
poets, and Isocrates for the orators : I will begin with
the lyricist : —

Immortal Venus, throned above
In radiant beauty, child of Jove,
O skilled in every art of love

And artful snare;
Dread power, to whom I bend the knee,
Release my soul and set it free
From bonds of piercing agony

And gloomy care.
Yet come thyself, if e'er, benign
Thy listening ears thou didst incline
To my rude lay, the starry shrine

Of Jove's court leaving.
In chariot yoked with coursers fair,
Thine own immortal birds that bear
Thee swift to earth, the middle air

With bright wings cleaving.

' i. e. the Austere,

Sd appendix 1

Soon they were sped — and thou, most blest,
In thine own smiles ambrosial dressed.
Didst ask what griefs my mind oppressed —

What meant my song —
What end my frenzied thoughts pursue
For what loved youth I spread anew
My amorous nets — ' Who Sappho, who

Hath done thee wrong ?
What though he fly, he'll soon return —
Still press thy gifts, though now he spurn ;
Heed not his coldness — soon he'll bum.

E'en though thou chide.'
— And saidst thou thus, dread goddess ? Oh,
Come then once more to ease my woe ;
Grant all, and thy great self bestow,

My shield and guide ! *

Here the beauty and grace of the language lies in
the connexion of the words and the smoothness of the
junctures. For the words lie by the side of one
another, and are woven into one, as though there were
in each case a natural affinity or a marriage between the
letters. Vowels are fitted on to mutes and semi-
vowels through nearly the entire Ode, these in a leading
place, those in a subordinate. Of concurrences of semi-
vowels with semi-vowels, or of vowels with vowels, to
trouble the smooth waters of the cadences, there are
very few. I have looked carefully through the whole
Ode ; and among all that number of nouns, verbs, and
other parts of speech, I find only five cases, or possibly
six, of the combination of semi-vowels not naturally

' Translated by J. Herman Merivale, 1833. The original is in
the same metre, the Sapphic, as the Ode quoted in sect, 3 of
the Treatise.

Dionysius of Halicarnassus 87

suited to be commingled, and even these do not
roughen the flow of language in any great degree.

[De Compos'ttione Verborum, c. xxiii.]

PLUTARCH

Plutarch (about 40-120 a.d.), a native of Cbaeroneia ia
Boeotia, where, in later life, he held a priesthood : he spent many
years in Rome, and visited other parts of Italy. Besides his
great work, the Parallel Lives of Greeks and Romans, written in
his later years, he is the author of many miscellaneous essays on
historical, ethical, and literary subjects, which bear the general
title of Moralia. All his writings are distinguished by strong
good sense, right feeling, amiability and a love of anecdote : his
style is cumbrous, but has much individuality. The Treatise ftom
which our extract is taken deals with the question : How a young
man should be introduced to Poetry in preparation for Moral
Philosophy. Plutarch may be read in Amyot's French translation,
or in English in Philemon Holland's.

HOW A YOUNG MAN SHOULD READ POETRY
Still more carefully will we impress upon him,
as soon as we introduce him to poems, a conception
of poetry as an art of imitation, in its scope corre-
sponding to painting. Do not let his lesson stop at the
old jingle, that Poetry is Painting which speaks, and
Painting is Poetry which is mute ; let us teach him
further that, when we see a lizard painted, or an ape,
or the face of a Thersites, we enjoy and admire it
because it is like, not because it is beautiful. In itself
the ugly can never become beautiful j but we praise
imitation if it effects a likeness, whether the subject
be bad or good. On the other hand, if it present
a beautiful copy of an ugly form, it has failed to render

88 jippendix I

a proper likeness. There are artists who paint un-
natural actions, as Timomachus painted Medea slaying
her children, and Theon Orestes slaying his mother,
and Parrhasius Ulysses feigning madness. Our pupil
should be made familiar with all these ; we must teach
him that we do not praise the action, of which the
imitation is before him, but the art which has imitated
the action properly : that accordingly, when Poetry also
tells us, in imitative form, of bad actions and vicious
feelings and characters, he is not to accept as true
what is admired and successful therein, nor yet to
approve it as beautiful, but only to prdse it in so far
as it is suitable and proper to the given person. Just
as when we heair the squealing of a pig, and the dull
noise of a windlass, and the whistling of winds, and
the roar of the sea, we are troubled and disgusted, but
if any one imitate these naturally, as Parmeno used to
give the sow, and Theodoras the windlass, we enjoy
it. Again, we shun a man stricken by sickness and
full of sores, as being a disagreeable spectacle ; but we
look with pleasure at the Philoctetes of Aristophon,
and the Jocasta of Silanion, represented like wasted
and dying men. Just so, when a young man reads
what Thersites the buffoon, or a Sisyphus, or
a Batrachus, has been exhibited saying or doing, let
him be taught to praise the art and the power which
imitated such things, but as for the disposition and the
conduct described, to repudiate and think meanly of
them. It is one thing to imitate a beautiful object,
and another to imitate an object beautifully. For

Plutarch 8 9

' beautifully ' means fitly, suitably, but to the ugly the
only fit and suitable things are the ugly. Why, the
shoes of Demodocus the cripple, which he lost, and
then prayed that they might fit the feet of the thief
well, were shabby affairs, but they fitted him.
The lines : —

If thou must sin at all, take courage man,
Sin where a kingdom is the prize,
an^— [Eur. Phoen. 245.]

Make thou thy credit angel-white, thy deeds
As dark as desperation — both for gain !
a„d_ ylnon. (tr. E. M.)

To take or not to take? a talent — humph —
A talent I can pass, yet live — and sleep,
As sleep the just — no, never shall they say
Down there, 'he lost his soul and won a groat.'

uinon.
are so many vicious lies, but good enough for Eteocles
and Ixion and a hoary artist in sixty per cent.

\De Audiendis Poetis, c. iii.]

DION CHRYSOSTOM

Dion Chrysostom (about 50-117 *■!>.), a native of Prusa in
Bithynia — a famous rhetorician and sophist ; in philosophy an
eclectic, with a strong attraction to Stoic and Platonic views.
His Orations, really Essays on literary and philosophical subjects,
have charm of thought and purity of style, with little severity
or seriousness of aim. The passage translated is an interesting
comparison of the methods of Poetry and Sculpture, put into the
mouth of Phidias, whose art is supposed to be put upon its defence.

THE DEFENCE OF PHIDIAS

To all this Phidias might perhaps reply, being no

man without a tongue, a citizen of no city without

90 Appendix 1

a tongue, and moreover a friend and intimate of
Pericles : —

' Men of Greece, the issue is the greatest which has
ever been tried ; for it is not about power or office in
a single city, nor about numbers of navy or of army,
and their right or wrong administration, that I am put
upon my defence this day; but about the God who
rules all, and his likeness, whether it has been wrought
handsomely and with truth to life, wanting nothing of
the best rendering which man can give of the divine,
or whether it be unworthy and unfit. But consider
that I was not the first to be the expounder and
teacher of truth among you. For I. was not bom in the
early days when Greece had still no clear and steady
principles about these things ; she was already in a sort
elderly, and had convictions about the gods, which she
held with vehemence. Of the works of stone-cutters
and masons which are older than my own handiwork,
harmonious enough unless as to accuracy of finish,
I have nothing to say. But I found your opinions old
and immovable, to which no opposition was possible,
and I found other artists in divine things, much older
than myself, and claiming to be much wiser, I mean
the poets ; able, they said, to lead us by their poetry
to full knowledge of the divine, whereas our works
have only just this passable resemblance. For divine
appearances, those of the sun and moon, and all the
heaven, and the stars, are most wonderful in their own
selves, but their imitation is simple and artless, if a
man were to try to copy the phases of the moon or

Dion Chrysostom 91

the disk of the sun. Again, the objects themselves
are full of character and of thought, in their likenesses
nothing of the sort is exhibited. Accordingly the
Greeks of old took this view. For mind and wisdom,
as they are in themselves, no sculptor or painter will
ever be able to represent, they are absolutely unable
to see such things or to search them out. But we do
not guess at that wherein this originates, we know it,
and therefore we have recourse to it, attaching a human
body to a god, as a vessel which contains wisdom and
reason ; we have no pattern and despair of getting one,
so we seek to exhibit under a visible and intelligible
form that which is beyond our intelligence and in-
visible ; and we use the aid of a symbol, more
effectually than some barbarians, who, they tell us,
liken the divine to animals upon trifling and absurd
pretexts. He who most greatly excels in a sense of
beauty, dignity, and magnificence should be the best
artificer by far of images of the gods. Nor can it be
said that it were .better that no shrine, no likeness of
a god should be exhibited among men, as though we
ought to gaze only on the heavenly things. All those
heavenly things are honoured by a sensible man, who
deems them to be blessed gods, beholding them from
afar. But because of our feeling towards what is
divine, ail men have a strong desire to have the deity
near them, to honour and to care for ; approaching, and
addressing themselves to it with conviction, burning
incense, and placing crowns. For just as young
children when torn from father and mother feel a

92 Appendix I

strange yearning and desire, and often stretch out their
hands in dreams to those who are not there, so also
do men to gods ; they rightly love them because of
benevolence and kinship, and are eager to do
anything to follow and be with them. Accordingly
many barbarians, in the poverty and meagreness of their
art, call hills, and motionless trees, and unmarked
stones by the name of gods, though in no way nearer to
gods than is their form. If I am to be blamed about
the figure, you cannot be too prompt in directing your
wrath against Homer first ; he not only imitated the
form in a manner most closely resembling art, mention-
ing the hair of the god, and his beard too, at the very
beginning of the poem, when he speaks of Thetis
entreating for the honour of her son ; but, besides all
this, he ascribes to the gods meetings, deliberations,
harangues, how they came from Ida and arrived at
Olympus and heaven, their sleeping, their drinking,
their courting, with great loftiness no doubt, and
ornament of verse, yet keeping closely always to
a mortal likeness. Yes, and when he dared to compare
Agamemnon to the god in his most sovereign attri-
butes : —

' In eyes and head like thunder-loving Zeus '.

But the work of my handicraft no man, no lunatic,
could ever compare to mortal man, if fairly examined
in view of beauty or size. So it comes to this, that if
I do not appear to you a far better and wiser poet than
Homer, whom you have decided to be a peer of the

Dion Chrysostom 93

gods in wisdom, I am ready to undergo any penalty
you choose. I am speaking with the powers of my
own art in view. For poetry is a copious undertaking,
resourceful and independent ; it wants a tongue to help
it and a supply of words, and then it can, of its own
self, express all the wishes of the soul : whatever it be
which its thought perceives, figure or fact, passion or
grandeur, it can never be at fault for a speaking voice
to announce all this very distinctly.

' Man's tongue wags lightly, and his words o'erflow ',
— these are Homer's own words —
'Full swift: and wide their range to move in to and fro'.
For the human race is likely to go short of everything
sooner than of speech and language ; of this alone it has
laid up marvellous great wealth. Nothing reaches the
senses, which it has left unspoken or unstamped; down
goes upon the conception the clear seal of a word, often
several words for one thing ; speak any one of them,
and you convey a thought scarcely less powerful than the
reality. So man has very great power and resource in
language to express what occurs to him. But the art
of the poets is very wilful and irresponsible, most of all
that of Homer, who is bolder than they all ; he did not
choose one type of language, but mixed up all the
Hellenic language, long distinct in its parts, Dorian
and Ionian, and Athenian too, he mixed them all up
into one as dyers mix colours, only more freely; he did
not stop at his own generation, but went back to ances-
tors ; had a word dropped out, he was sure to pick it

94 appendix I

up, like an old coin out of an uncldmed treasure-house,
all for love of words ; and again many barbarian terms,
sparing no single word which seemed to have in it
enjoyment or intensity ; and, besides all these, he drew
in metaphors, not only neighbour-words or those lying
at hand, but the very most remote, to charm his hearer,
and astonish and bewitch him. Even these he did not
allow to keep their own ground, but lengthened here,
and contracted there, and altered all round ; and at last
came out as a maker not of verses only, but also of
terms, speaking out of his inner self, sometimes just
inventing names for things, sometimes giving a new
sense to standard words, as if he were impressing upon
a seal a clear and yet more distinct seal, leaving no sound
alone, but, in a word, imitating sounds of river and wood,
of wind, and fire, and sea.'

\0r. xii, Olympicui.^

LUCIAN

Lucian (about 120-200 a.d.), of Samosata, the capital of
CommagenS. A brilliant and witty writer, who has left works on
a great variety of subjects. His style is excellent, and is, generally
speaking, a pure Attic. The treatise on the question ' How
History should be written,' shows, as do many of his writings,
much discrimination and literary feeling.

HOW NOT TO WRITE HISTORY'

There is a story of a curious epidemic at Abdera,

just after the accession of King Lysimachus. It began

' The passage which follows is extracted, by the kind permission
of the translators, irom the translation of Lucian by H. W, Fowler
and F. O. Fowler (Clarendon Press, 4 vols., 1905).

Lucian 9 f

with the whole population's exhibiting feverish symptoms,
strongly marked and uninterraittent from the very first
attack. About the seventh day, the fever was relieved,
in some cases by a violent flow of blood from the nose,
in others by perspiration not less violent. The mental
effects, however, were most ridiculous ; they were all
stage-struck, mouthing blank verse and ranting at the
top of their voices. Their favourite recitation was the
Andromeda of Euripides ; one after another would go
through the great speech of Perseus ; the whole place
was full of pale ghosts, who were our seventh-day
tragedians vociferating,

O Love, who lord'st it over Gods and men,

and the rest of it. This continued for some time, till
the coming of winter put an end to their madness with
a sharp frost. I find the explanation of the form it
took in this fact : Archelaus was then the great tragic
actor, and in the middle of the summer, during some
very hot weather, he had played the Andromeda there ;
most of them took the fever in the theatre, and con-
valescence was followed by a relapse — into tragedy, the
Andromeda haunting their memories, and Perseus hover-
ing, Gorgon's head in hand, before the mind's eye.

Well, to compare like with like, the majority of our
educated class is now suffering from an Abderite
epidemic. They are not stage-struck, indeed; that
would have been a minor infatuation — to be possessed
with other people's verses, not bad ones either 5 no ;
but from the beginning of the present excitements — the

9<J appendix I

barbarian war, the Annenian disaster, the succession of
victories — you cannot find a man but is writing history;
nay, every one you meet is a Thucydides, a Herodotus,
a Xenophon. The old saying must be true, and war
be the father of all things, seeing what a litter of
historians it has now teemed forth at a birth.

Such sights and sounds, my Fhilo, brought into my
head that old anecdote about the Sinopean. A report
that Philip was marching on the town had thrown all
Corinth into a bustle ; one was furbishing his arms,
another wheeling stones, a third patching the wall, a
fourth strengthening a battlement, every one making
himself useful somehow or other. Diogenes having
nothing to do — of course no one thought of giving htm
a job — was moved by the sight to gird up his philosopher's
cloak and begin rolling his tub-dwelling energetically up
and down the Craneum ; an acquaintance asked, and
got, the explanation : ' I do not want to be thought die
only idler in such a busy multitude ; I am rolling my
tub to be like the rest.'

I too am reluctant to be the only dumb man at so
vociferous a season ; I do not like walking across the
stage, like a 'super,' in gaping silence ; so I decided to
roll my cask as best I could. I do not intend to write
a history, or attempt actual narrative ; I am not coura-
geous enough for that; have no apprehensions on my
account ; I realize the danger of rolling the thing over
the rocks, especially if it is only a poor little jar of
brittle earthenware like mine; I should very soon
knock against some pebble and find myself picking up

Lucian 97

the pieces. Come, I will tell you my idea for campaign-
ing in safety, and keeping well out of range.

Give a wide berth to all that foam and spray,

and to the anxieties which vex the historian — that I
shall be wise enough to do ; but I propose to give a
little advice, and lay down a few principles for the
benefit of those who do venture. I shall have a share
in their building, if not in the dedicatory inscription ; my
finger-tips will at least have touched their wet mortar.

However, most of them see no need for advice here;
there might as well be an art of talking, seeing, or eating i
history-writing is perfectly easy, comes natural, is a uni-
versal gift ; all that is necessary is the faculty of translating
your thoughts into words. But the truth is — you know
it without my telling, old friend — , it is not a task to be
lightly undertaken, or carried through without effort;
no, it needs as much care as any sort of composition
whatever, if one means to create * a possession for ever,'
as Thucydides calls it. Well, I know I shall not get
a hearing from many of them, and some will be seriously
offended — especially any who have finished and produced
their work; in cases where its first reception was favour-
able, it would be folly to expect the authors to recast or
correct; has it not the stamp of finality? is it not almost
a State document ? Yet even they may profit by my
words ; we are not likely to be attacked again ; we
have disposed of all our enemies ; but there might be
a Celto-Gothic or an Indo-Bactrian war ; then our
friends' composition might be improved by the applica-

9 8 appendix I

tion of my measuring-rod — always supposing that they
recognize its correctness; failing that, let them do their
own mensuration with the old foot-rule ; the doctor will
not particularly mind, though all Abdera insists on
spouting the Andromeda.

Advice has two provinces — one of choice, the other
of avoidance; let us first decide what the historian is to
avoid — of what faults he must purge himself — , and
then proceed to the measures he must take for putting
himself on the straight high road. This will include
the manner of his beginning, the order in which he
should marshal his facts, the questions of proportion, of
discreet silence, of full or cursory narration, of comment
and connexion. Of all that, however, later on ; for
the present we deal with the vices to which bad writers
are liable. As to those faults of diction, construction,
meaning, and general amateurishness, which are common
to every kind of composition, to discuss them is neither
compatible with my space nor relevant to my purpose.

But there are mistakes peculiar to history; your own
observation will show you just those which a constant
attendance at authors' readings has impressed on me ;
you have only to keep your ears open at every oppor-
tunity. It will be convenient, however, to refer by the
way to a few illustrations in recent histories. Here is
a serious fault to begin with. It is the fashion to
neglect the examination of facts, and give the space
gained to eulogies of generals and commanders ; those
of their own side they exalt to the skies, the other side
they disparage intemperately. They forget that between

Lucian ^^

history and panegyric there is a great galf fixed, barring
communication; in musical phrase, the two things are
a couple of octaves apart. The panegyrist has only
one concern — to commend and gratify his living theme
some way or other ; if misrepresentation will serve his
purpose, he has no objection to that. History, on the
other hand, abhors the intrusion of any least scruple of
falsehood ; it is like the windpipe, which the doctors
tell us will not tolerate a morsel of stray food.

Another thing these gentlemen seem not to know is
that poetry and history offer different wares, and have
their separate rules. Poetry enjoys unrestricted freedom ;
it has but one law — the poet's fancy. He is inspired
and possessed by the Muses ; if he chooses to horse
his car with winged steeds, or set others a-galloping
over the sea, or standing com, none challenges his right;
his Zeus, with a single cord, may haul up earth and sea,
and hold them dangling together — there is no fear the
cord may break, the load come tumbling down and be
smashed to atoms. In a complimentary picture of
Agamemnon, there is nothing against his having Zeus's
head and eyes, his brother Posidon's chest, Ares's belt
— in fact, the son of Atreus and Aerope will naturally
be an epitome of all Divinity; Zeus or Posidon or Ares
could not singly or severally provide the requisite per-
fections. But, if history adopts such servile arts, it is
nothing but poetry without the wings; the exalted tones
are missing ; and imposition of other kinds virithout the
assistance of metre is only the more easily detected. It
is surely a great, a superlative weakness, this inability to

H Z

loo appendix 1

distinguish history from poetry ; what, bedizen history,
like her sister, with tale and eulogy and their attendant
exaggerations ? as well take some mighty athlete with
muscles of steel, rig him up with purple drapery and
meretricious ornament, rouge and powder his cheeks ;
faugh, what an object would one make of him with such
defilements !

[Quoffist/o Historia contcribenda sit, sect. 1-8.]

CASSIUS LONGINUS

Cassius Longinus (113-273 a.d.) : » great philosophical and
literary teacher, bom, according to varying accounts, at Palmyra,
Emesa in Syria, or Athens, where his uncle, Phronto, taught
rhetoric. He was a great student and interpreter of Plato,
and did not satisfy the Neoplatonist teachers, being called by
Plotinus a philologer and no philosopher. Porphyrins the com-
mentator on Homer was one of his most distinguished pupils. He
became the teacher, and afterwards the political adviser, of Queen
Zenobia. Moved by a genuine love of liberty, he encouraged the
Queen to assert her independence of the Emperor Aurelian ; and for
his share in the rising he paid with his life, when Palmyra was
taken and destroyed. Considerable fragments of his works
remain, the most notable being a part of his Rhetoric, which had
been intermixed in MSS. with a similar work by Apsines, and
was extricated by the insight of the great scholar D. Ruhnken,
though not published till after his death by W. Bake.

LONGINUS ON THE TIMAEUS OF PLATO
' One, two, three : but where, dear Timaeus, is the
fourth of our guests of yesterday, our entertainers of
to-day — where is he ? "

* The opening words of the Timaeus of Plato.

Cassius Longinus loi

Longinus the critic, considering this passage as to
language, says that it is composed of three members ;
of which the first is somewhat trivial and ordinary,
because the expression wants connexion, but is rendered
dignified by the second, through the variation in the
wording, and the continuity of the phrases ; that both,
however, receive a much greater accession of grace and
elevation^ from the third. Thus the clause, 'One, two,
three,' composed of unconnected terms, made style flat.
The next clause, ' our fourth, dear Timaeus, where is he ? '
is varied by the ordinal ' fourth ' as against the cardinal
numbers used before; it is also constructed of words in
an effective manner, and in both ways makes the ex-
pression more dignified. But the words, 'of our guests
of yesterday, our entertainers of to-day,' over and above
the grace and beauty of the words used, give spirit and
elevation to the whole period by the fresh turn.

\_From the Commentary of Proclus, Voucher, p. 274.]

LONGINUS ON STYLE
Not the least important part of an inquiry into the
Art of Rhetoric is Style; for the arguments and all
the parts of Discourse appear to the hearers just what
Style makes them. Such Discourse may be called a
light of thoughts and of trains of reasoning, illuminating
for the judges the cogency of the proof. Accordingly,
Style is not to be neglected ; on the contrary, the
greatest care should be given to it, and those orators

1 The Greek word is that used in the Treatise to express
' Sublimity.'

I02 Appendix I

taken as models who have excelled in this depart-
ment, and have invested their delivery with the
utmost beauty and variety. There will not be the
slightest use in a ready and nimble wit applied to
the judgement, the discrimination, the sagacity of a
whole train of reasoning, and its individual steps, if
you fail to set the thoughts to the best expression, and
to use those cadences which are most suitable, attending
to the selection and arrangement of nouns, and to the
number of verbs. For there are many things which
charm a hearer, wholly apart from the thought, and the
treatment of facts, and a study of character which
carries conviction. Music and harmony of expression
are found even in those animals which herd together,
much more in one social and rational, and possessing
a sense of symmetry. If then you could produce what is
musical, harmonious, and rhythmical, and elaborate it
to the utmost nicety, cutting out here, and adding there,
taking the measure of what the time, the needs of the
passage, the sense of beauty require, your discourse will
be truly convincing and eloquent ; even as the poetry of
Homer, who did not reckon this a paltry or a cheap
matter, for each of his poems has a good and easy
style. Take again Archilochus of Paros, for he, too,
has taken great pains with this. Or take the Tragic
poets in a body, or those of Comedy, or the Sophists ;
not even those who write of philosophy have been
careless or disdainful of style: Plato and Xenophon,
Aeschines and Antisthenes have been extraordinarily
careful, and have used all due pains. To the great

Cassius Lmginus io|

leader of the choir of orators this merit belongs as his
own ; by this he would seem to surpass all others who
come within the same class.

The office of style is to give our hearers a clear,
clean, intelligible, rational account; and, while doing so,
never to drop proper dignity, but to appear to use and
combine the same elements of speech, the same symbols,
to express the subject of thought, with all the rest of
mankind ; but to mingle with the familiar that which is
strange, and also that which is novel and beautiful in
the utterance; here are two marks to set before us,
clearness in statement, and with clearness pleasure. If
you should use Hyperbata out of season, forcibly sepa^
rating words, breaking the events, and disturbing the
sequence, you will displease and irritate, and your
language will be ambiguous and show great gaps, even
if the period be unseasonably extended, and its limits
exceed all measure. You will not carry men with you,
unless you are a wizard with grace and pleasure in your
gift, changing and embroidering your terms.

Avoid staining the body of your discourse and
breaking its continuous texture by words too archaic
and unfamiliar. Again, it will not be without service
to observe the injunctions of Isocrates; not to make
your style rough by the juxtaposition and concurrence
of vowels, so called, which do not admit of combination
and therefore seem to make the texture of the language
discontinuous, not passing it to the ear smoothly and
without a trip, but arresting the breath and staying the
flow of voice. » * *

I04 appendix I

The distinctive mark of good rhythm is clear to
any one who has been accustomed to the effect of
rhythmical, well turned and rounded sentences, the
discoverers of which, those who first exhibited
specimens of beautiful language, I enumerated above.
If you give your mind to the matter, you will see how
they discriminate and apportion their study of euphonious
speech. Now they add a detail to the common, plain,
dull phrase, the one in prevailing use among the mass
of ordinary people, and found in every mouth. Any-
body — the first person you meet — can say irait,tis, but
naii^eic cxuv presents a distinctive type of language and
phraseology ; there are many such redundant additions,
nearly all the parts of speech, down to single letters.
They even add two such parts, or even more; but with
these you must take care, and observe the standard of
language; for you must not introduce or appoint yourself
as a law of your own making, to which to refer : the
law of language does not rest upon us, but we upon
the law.

[Rhetoric of Long'mus, ch. 3.J

II

The Treatise on Sublimity and Latin
Critics

A COMPARISON of the Treatise on the Sublime
with the specimens of the later Greek critics con-
tained in Appendix I shows a wide divergence in
style, treatment, and conception. Even more striking
is the contrast, if we turn back to the works of Aristotle
on Rhetoric and Poetic Art. Aristotle is business-like,
analytical, ready with a shrewd anecdote or a point
of caustic humour; he deals with literature, much as
Bacon does, as a part of the intellectual equipment of
the human race, and it does not come in his way to touch
upon that quality of sublimity, or elevation, which is at
present before us. Plato, in his own writings, and
notably in his ' Myths,' strikes a note which is, in any
sense of the word, sublime ; but his criticism is
whimsical and intangible ; he disparages poetry as it
actually existed, and places the ideal poet one degree,
on a scale of nine, above the artisan, and two above the
tyrant ; he exhibits the eloquence of Pericles and Cimon
as ineffectual, if not mischievous. The author of the
Treatise venerates Plato, and copies him, but they do not
meet on any common ground as critics.

Thus we cannot but be aware of a certain non-Greek
character in the work ; it may have been partly a sense
of this which led Mommsen to write : —

J0(S Appendhc II

' The dissertation on the Sublime, written in the first
period of the Empire by an unknown author, one of the
finest aesthetic works preserved to us from antiquity,
certainly proceeds, if not from a Jew, at any rate
from a man who revered alike Homer and Moses.'

\The Provinces, Bk. viii. ch. il.J
And again ; —

' The gulf between that treatise on the Sublime, which
ventures to place Homer's Poseidon, shaking land and
sea, and Jehovah, who creates the shining sun, side by
side, and the beginnings of the Talmud which belong
to this epoch, marks the contrast between the Judaism
of the first and that of the third century.' [Ibid.]

Assuming, for there seems to be no special reason to
question it, the substantial integrity of the text in the
passages to which reference is made, we observe that, if
the writer had been himself a Jew, he would not have
quoted the opening words of the Law incorrectly.
Nor can we speak with any certainty in the absence of
the work of Caecilius ; many of whose illustrations are
repeated in the Treatise, and who was, if we may believe
Suidas, a Jew.

It remains to ask whether the language and thought
of the Treatise betray the influence of the Latin basis
of the great Empire under which the author lived.
His latest English editor ' has pointed out Latinisms of
construction and rhythm, which we cannot usefully follow
out here, but which seem undeniable. We notice also
the frequent lists of words unconnected by conjunctions.
' See Rhys Roberts, pp. ii and iS8.

Sublimity and Latin Critics 107

Such lists may be found in Longinus and Dionysius,
but not so framed as to give the sense of intensity and
fervour of which we are often aware in the Treatise,
especially when the terms, by a device familiar in Latin
Rhetoric, fall into pairs, or other combinations '.

Coincidences of detail with the critic Quintilian (about
40-118 A. D.) have been pointed out. Such are : —

' Some are pleased with these obscurities ; when they
have taken them in, they are delighted with their own
penetration, enjoying them as though they had discovered,
not heard them.' {Quint, viii. 2. 21 ; cp. p. 12.)

' What the Greeks call fantasies we may call visions ;
whoever has conceived these well will be most effective in
matters of feeling.' {Quint, vi. z. 29; cp. p. 32, &c.)

' The turning of the speech away from the judge,
which is called Apostrophe, is wonderfully stirring.'
{Quint, ix. 2. 38 ; cp. p. 38.)

' As though you were to attach the mask and buskins
of Hercules to infants.' {Quint, vi. i. 36 ; cp. p. 55.)

' If we are likely to have gone to hazardous lengths
in expression, we must come to the rescue with certain
specifics, " so to speak," and the like.'

{Quint, viii. 3, 37; cp. p. 57.)

The treatment of the ' Figures ' and of ' Composition '
in Quint, ix may be compared with pp. 70-2 of the
Treatise.

These instances are drawn from Vahlen's notes,
See also Vaucher, p. 85, and add : —

' Although these luminous effects appear to shine and
» See pp. 17, 23-4.

id8 appendix II

to a certain extent to show in relief, it would be more
true to compare them to sparks glittering in the midst
of smoke than to flame ; they are not seen at all when the
whole speech is in light, just as stars disappear in sun-
shine,' {Quint, viii. 6. 29; cp. p. 41.)

It is possible that these details may have been borrowed
by both writers from the lost work of Caecilius. At any
rate there is not much in common between Quintilian,
the professional critic, writing with a limited educational
purpose in view, though many of his judgements go
deeper than this and are admirably expressed, and the
exponent of the Sublime, writing for men already in public
life.

If we look for the most characteristic views of the
latter, for the purpose of comparing them with anjrthing
to be found in Latin authors, we may select two of a
general kind, the love of civil liberty, and the sense of
greatness in Nature. Others, which more immediately
concern literature, may be stated as precepts : — ^Think
great thoughts — live with great authors — form your own
standard with reference to their practice — dare to look
beyond your own contemporaries for applause.

The blessings of liberty, and the numbing depression
of the imperial system are commonplaces in Tacitus,
and are specially prominent in the Dialogue on the Causes
of the Decay of Oratory. ' Eloquence requires motion to
fan it,' that stir of free civil life, which is so forcibly
described in the Treatise. Yet neither author is a
fanatic ; each is aware of the weakness which makes
men praise the past, at the expense of what is within

Sublimity and Latin Critics 109

reach. Tacitus reminds us that the boasted liberty of
the Republic was often turmoil and lawlessness; he allows
that a dignified opportunism may be more patriotic
than a pretentious death, and that examples were
needed that even under bad emperors there might be
great men. Both writers look beyond mere political
status to the freedom which character alone gives — the
emancipation from distracting desires and fears. ' All
are slaves besides ' ; and perhaps for such it is better to
be ruled than to live free. Here Cicero and Horace (the
latter of whom thought and felt more earnestly on these
subjects than he sometimes receives credit for doing),
Persius and Juvenal, are vehemently with them in
opinion.

The awe in the presence of what is great in Nature is
familiar to Romans. Horace speaks of those who could
look ' with no fear ' on the mighty regularity of the heavenly
bodies ; but he makes it clear that he is not a good enough
Epicurean to be one of them. He laughs at the man
who likes to draw his pint of water from a great river
or who cuts his mouthfuls from a great mullet ; but then
he is dealing with the avaricious man, and the glutton,
and any stick is good enough to belabour them. Cicero's
mind was impressed by the vastness of Nature and of
the Universe ; he felt as a poet, and in his philosophical
works often makes this clear, nowhere in more detail
than in the Dream of Scifio, a fragment of his work On
the Republic preserved by Macrobius. We hear in it of
Nile thundering down from the cliffs and deafening the
dwellers around, of Ganges, of Ocean, in his different

1 1 o Appendix II

parts, and under his diflerent names, of the great barrier
of Caucasus ; all dwarfed when seen in relation to the
Solar system and the Universe, yet, even so, vast
and wonderful. The heavenly bodies themselves are
awfiil, in their immensity, and in the regularity of their
courses, especially in the conception of that great cycle
of time of which the years then recorded by history were
not a twentieth part, which was to bring the heavens
back to their ancient order.

As critics, Cicero and Horace have not much in com-
mon with one another. Cicero was profoundly interested
in the history and prospects of Roman oratory ; Horace
never mentions it, unless to express approval of the pure
Latinity which it exacts. Horace was deeply concerned
for the future of Roman poetry ; Cicero loved poetry,
especially that of his countrymen, and had much poetry
in his own genius, but he does not contemplate poetical
literature as a critic. In both authors, however, we have
ideas which meet us also in the Treatise. Horace is
constantly exhorting the young poets of Rome to study
Greek models, and of them the greatest — his own were
Homer, Pindar, Alcaeus, Sappho, Alcman — not the
Alexandrians. He is himself, as Addison has well
pointed out (see note on p. 31), singularly responsive to
inspiration drawn from Homer. Cicero, besides giving
us in the Brutus a series of careful and sympathetic
portraits of Roman orators, reproduced in Latin
the Speeches of Aeschines against Ctes'tphon and
Demosthenes On the Crown, as an orator, he tells us,
not as a translator, thus meeting the question, How

Sublimity and Latin Critics

III

would these masters of language have said this or this,
had they spoken in Latin? Horace, proud of his supre-
macy as lyric poet of Rome, assured to him by the voice of
his contemporaries, yet looked to a more lasting reward
in a fame which should be part of Roman history.
Cicero thanks Brutus in touching terms ^ for reminding
him of performances ' which will speak with a voice of
their own when mine is silent, and live when I am
dead.'

The most remarkable judgement in the Treatise is
that in which the author expresses his preference for
great excellence, though marred by failure, to moderate
excellence, however flawless. It was hardly to be
expected that Horace should proclaim the same view,
and indeed it was a dangerous one to send abroad in
Rome. His anxiety was to impress upon men of his
generation the truth that a happy gift of verse, even if
it should amount to genius, would not ensure them
success without study of the grammar of the poetic
art, whatever might have been the case with Greeks
working upon their more plastic material ; that slovenly
work is bad work; and that a poem which declines
from the highest, at once sinks to the lowest. Cicero, in
the person of Antonius, requires perfection in an orator,
since any failure is taken to come of ' stupidity.' Yet
both writers would allow, we may be sure, unstinted
praise to actual genius, even if it flagged palpably or spoke
with a stammering tongue. Certainly Horace discusses
with excellent good sense the old question of Genius
^ Brutus, end.

112 Appendix II

and Art : he allows that Homer can be drowsy, though
he himself chafes at every nod.

Even more remarkable than this judgement itself is
the basis upon which the author of the Treatise rests it.
Perfection is to be exacted in a statue, for that is a work
of art; it is not to be found in literature,_/or •words
are an endowment luhich comes from Nature, This
might seem to contradict Aristotle's view that Poetry
and Painting, or Sculpture, are alike imitative arts. But
Aristotle expressly distinguishes arts which, like Music
(and he ranks Poetry with Music), reproduce action and
character themselves from arts which, like Painting or
Sculpture, imitate the features or gestures accompanying
action or character ; between the imitation of nature in
her processes, and the imitation of nature in her effects.
Burke touches on the point in the last chapter of his
Essay, but is hardly explicit ; Shelley, in his Defence of
Poetry, goes nearer to it.

So far as ancient literature is concerned, the reasoning
remains unique, and we cannot expect to find it
anticipated in Latin, Yet Latin literature itself
furnishes a practical commentary on the strange, yet
essential, link between greatness and imperfection. ' It
is a noticeable result,' writes Professor Sellar, ' of the
vastness of the task which Roman genius sets before
itself, that two such works as the didactic poem of
Lucretius and the Aeneid of Virgil were left unfinished
by their authors, and given to the world in a more or
less impwfect condition by other hands.' No poem was
ever projected upon lines more likely to produce the

Sublimity and Latin Critics 113

' legitimate poem ' which Horace desires, than was the
Aenad, none was more faithfully elaborated, and, after
all, the great poem needs to be studied with allowances,
over and above those due to failing time. Yet, if Horace
had been consulted by Varius and Tucca, he would
certainly have given his voice against that of the dying
poet, and preserved to the world so much greatness,
with its inseparable imperfections.

It is not desired to draw any conclusion from these
observations, nor indeed would any be possible. Future
research may have some discovery in store for us as to
the Treatise in its complete form, or as to its authorship,
and any discovery may be in the nature of a surprise.
It may therefore not be wholly idle to point out certain
afEnities to Latin thought, to remind ourselves that
Horace began his literary life by writing Greek lyrics,
and to add that the professions of Greek nationality
implied on p. 28 may have been understood to be merely
conventional, a thin disguise which need deceive
no one.

114

III

Passages translated from Bishop Lowth^s
Oxford Lectures on Hebrew Poetry

ROBERT LOWTH

Robert Lowth (1710-87), a native of Winchester, and educated
in the College there, and at New College, Oxford, of which he was
a Fellow (1729-50). He was Professor of Poetry at Oxford
(1741-50), and from that Chair delivered in Latin the Lectures on
Hebrew Poetry from which our extracts are tramlated. An argument
used in this course drew on him an attack from Warburton, which
he answered in a letter which has become a classic. In later life
(1778-9) he published Isaiah, a New Translation with notes.
He was Bishop successively of St. Davids (1 766), Oxford (l 'j66-'j'),
and London (1767-87).

The extracts have been chosen solely for their literary interest,
and as showing how the Treatise on the Sublime was constantly
in the thoughts of eighteenth-century critics ; also because many
points relating to ' the Figures ' receive illustration in them. It is
possible, however, that, if the arguments and illustrations were
checked by a competent Hebrew Scholar, the contents of the
Lectures would even now be found of value.

OF SUBLIMITY IN DICTION
I HERE understand Sublimity in the widest sense of
the word ; not only the sublimity which puts forward
great subjects with magnificent images and elaborate
words, but that indescribable power in style which
strikes the mind through and through, which stirs the
feelings, which expresses ideas with clearness and

l^ohert Lowth iif

distinction, never thinking whether the words be
simple or ornate, choice or vulgar: and in this I follow
Longinus, the greatest authority upon Sublimity, its
meaning and treatment.

Sublimity lies either in the diction or in the feelings.
In most cases it arises from both causes simultaneously,
the one helping the other, and sharing with it its own
force and weight, in a sort of friendly partnership. This
does not prevent our being able to treat each separately
without much inconvenience. We will therefore first
look into the poetic diction of the Hebrews, in itself
and as compared with prose, and ask what it has in it to
deserve a name given in virtue of sublimity.

Poetry, in whatever language, has a diction peculiarly
its own — vigorous, grand, sonorous, in its words full to
exaggeration, in their arrangement choice and artistic,
far removed from vulgar usage by its entire form and
complexion, often, in the freedom which indignation
gives, breaking the barriers which confine common
speech. Reason speaks with a low, temperate, gentle
voice; is orderly in arranging its subjects, plain in
setting terms to them, distinct in their exposition; it
studies first of all perspicuity, careful to leave nothuig
confused, obscure, involved. With the Feelings, there
is not much care for all this ; ideas flow tc^ether in
swollen stream, they struggle within; of these the more
vehement burst out as chance wills it, wherever they
may; whatever has life and glow and speed they snatch
up, they do not seek out. In a word. Reason uses
unassisted speech, the Feelings utter the language of
t 2

ii(J Appendix III

poetry. Whatever be the feeling which stirs the mind,
the mind goes deep down into that which stirs it and
clings there, labouring to give it utterance; it is not
enough to express a thing barely and as it actually
is; it must express it according to its own concep-
tion, with splendour, it may be, or melancholy, or
exultation, or horror. For the feelings by their own
natural force are borne towards fullness of speech; they
marvellously enhance and exaggerate all that is within
the mind, they strive to express it with elevation,
magnificence, distinction ; and this they effect by two
principal methods; either by illustrating the subject
itself with splendid images drawn from elsewhere, or
by introducing new and strange forms of speech; which
have great power just because they copy, and in a manner
reproduce, the actual condition of the mind at the time.
Hence those Figures of which rhetorical writers make
so much, attributing to Art the one thing which of all
others belongs to Nature : —

For Nature forms our spirits to receive
Each bent that outward circumstance can give;
She kindles pleasure, bids resentment glow.
Or bows the soul to earth in hopeless woe;
Then, as the tide of feeling waxes strong.
She vents it through her conduit pipe, the tongue.

Horace, A. P.

What is true of the nature of all poetry will be at
once acknowledged to hold specially good of Hebrew
poetry. We have already seen how much power it has
in transferring and adapting Images, and what great

J^bert Lowth 117

brilliance, majesty, elevation it has drawn from this.
Then, in diction, we have observed what power to adorn
and dignify is possessed by the poetic dialect which it
often employs, and also by the artistic arrangement of
sentences, so closely connected with a metrical system,
which is itself entirely lost. We have now to ask
whether there are any other potent el«nents in Hebrew
poetic diction, which separate it off from that of
prose ?

Nothing can be conceived simpler than the ordinary
Hebrew language: all in it is bare, straightforward,
sane, simple; the words are neither far-fetched nor
carefully chosen ; there is no attention to periods, not
even a thought about them ; the very order of words is
for the most part constant and uniform, the verb comes
first, then the noun which denotes the agent, the rest
follow; separate phrases express separate things, the
adjuncts are subjoined by themselves, the parts are
never involved, and do not obstruct one another ; most
important of all, a single particle may carry the connexion
unbroken from beginning to end, so that no struggling,
or abruptness, or confusion is apparent. Thus the
whole order of the writing, and the conUnuity of its
connected parts, are such as to show an even mental
condition in the writer, to reflect the image of
a calm and tranquil spirit. But in Hebrew poetry
the case is quite different. The spirit dashes on un-
checked, having no leisure or will to attend to minute
and frigid details ; its conceptions are often not clothed
or adorned by language, but laid open and hare ; a veil

ii8 Appendix III

is drawn aside, so that we look straight into every
condition and movement of the mind, the sudden
impulse, the onward rush, the manifold turnings.

Any one who wishes to be satisfied of this will, I am
sure, see it for himself, if he will only make an experi-
ment. Let him take up the book of Job, first read
through the historical preface, and then pass on to the
metrical part, and carefully examine Job's first speech.
I think that he will now allow that something has
happened : when he came to the poetry, he felt himself
carried suddenly into what is almost another language ;
the difference in style appeared to him greater than
if he passed from Livy to Virgil, or even from
Herodotus to Homer, or put down Xenophon to
plunge into a chorus of Sophocles or Euripides. It is
so indeed : this passage imitates a passion so vehement
that no poet has ever attempted anything more burning
and intense: not only are thoughts and images admirable
in force, beauty, and sublimity, but the whole style and
character are such, the verbal colouring so vivid, the
piling up of matter so abundant, the sentences so close
and continuous in their multitude, the whole fabric so
spirited and passionate, that Poetry herself has nothing
more poetical. Most of these points are so clear that
they cannot possibly escape a diligent reader ; others,
especially those relating to form and structure, lie
somewhat deeper ; in some cases, what is powerful in
effect, and easy to take in mentally, is hard to explain ;
when you look into it, it seems clear ; handle it, and it
is found to vanish. As it is much to our point, I shall

T{ohert Lovoth 119

endeavour, with your indulgence, to put before you a
specimen of these beauties of style.

The reader should first notice how violently the grief
of Job, long boiling within his bosom, and forcibly
confined there, breaks out : —

Let the day perish — I was to be born on it — (i.e. on

which I was to be born)
And the night (which) said, There is a man child

conceived '.

Observe the concise, abrupt structure of the first line,
and the bold figure, and still more abrupt construction, in
the second. Ask yourself whether so sharp a contor-
tion of language could have been endured in any prose
style, or even in verse, without underlying passion of the
strongest kind to support it. Yet you will acknowledge,
I think, that the sense of the period is thoroughly clear,
so clear that, if the expression were fuller and more
explicit, it would give the thought and feeling of the
speaker less fitly and less distinctly. By a fortunate
accident we are able to put this to the proof; for
Jeremiah has a passage so like this one, being so to
say its twin, that it might seem to be copied. The
sense is the same, and the words not very unlike ; but
Jeremiah has filled in the gaps in the structure, smoothing
out the broken language of Job, and expanding the short
distich into a pair of long lines, such as he often uses: —

Cursed be the day wherein I was bom:
Let not the day wherein my mother bare me be
blessed.

' Job iii. 3.

I20 appendix III

Cursed be the man who bringing glad tidings to my

father,
Saying, A man child is born unto thee, made him

very glad'-

The result is that Jeremiah's imprecation is rather
querulous than indignant; it is more gentle, quiet,
plaintive, so framed as to arouse pity in a high degree,
a feeling in which this Prophet is especially strong ;
whereas Job does not stir pity, but inspires terror.

Let us move on a little. We pass over obvious
points ; the closely set thoughts, following in but
slight connexion, and bursting with impetuosity and
force from a burning breast ; the grand and magnificent
words rolled along in a headlong stream of indignant
eloquence ; we have four, in a space of twice
as many short lines, only used, it would seem, in
poetry ; at least, two of them constantly occur in poetry,
and never out of it, the others are still more unfamiliar.
Not to dwell on all this, what is the meaning of the
fullness of language, which takes the place of the former
curtness, in this : —

That night — let darkness have it.
In this, again, we have an indication of strong feeling
and mental disturbance. No doubt he first conceived
the sentence thus :

Let that night be darkness.
But, when he had started, he caught up his own words,
and the result is increased spirit and intensity.

' Jeremiah xx. 14, 15,

1{ohert LoToth 121

We return to Job —

Lo, let that night be barren ! '
He seems to set before his eyes the form and image
of that night, to look into it, to point to it with his
finger. ' The doors of my womb ' for ' the doors of
my mother's womb ' (v. lo) is an ellipsis which is easily
to be supplied, but which no one when tranquil and
master of himself would venture. Not to take up too
much of your time, I will only quote one passage
towards the end of this speech :

Wherefore will he give light to him that is in misery.

And life unto the bitter in soul;

Which long for death, but it cometh not;

And would dig for it more than for hid treasures;

Which would rejoice exceedingly, and exult.

They would triumph if they could find the grave —

— To a man whose way is hid from the sight of God,

And whom God hath hedged in ?

For my sighing cometh before I eat,

And my roarings are poured forth with my drink'.

The composition of the whole passage is admirable :
let us touch briefly on single points. ' Wherefore will
he give light to him that is in misery?' Who will give?
God, no doubt ; whom the speaker had in mind, and
failed to notice that no mention had been made of Him
in what went before. He seems to speak of the
miserable in general terms, but by an abrupt turn of
thought he applies these to himself: 'for my sighing
cometh before I eat': from which it appears that all the
foregoing expressions are to be understood specially of
' Job. iii. 7. » Job iii. ao-4.

I 22

appendix III

himself. He passes from singular to plural, and back
from plural to singular, first introducing that grand
expansion of phrase by which he expresses the desire
for death, a bold and powerful passage ; then he
suddenly resumes and continues the original thought
which he seemed to have done with. From all this
it is clear, I think, that the excitement and disturbance
in the speaker's mind are expressed, not only by happy
boldness in thoughts and images, and the use of
weighty words, but even more by the whole drift and
tenor of the speech.

What I have thus far tried to point out in this noble
passage, holds good, in my opinion, in a high degree
of all Hebrew Poetry, regard being had to the subjects
and matter; it uses a language of an active, ardent
character, and one naturally adapted to mark the feelings.
Hence it is full of turns of speech from which their own
prose style shrinks, and which sometimes seem to have
a hard and unfamiliar, even a barbarous sound; but
which, as we may reasonably conjecture, have their own
force and purpose, even when least patent to us. Going
a step further, it will perhaps be worth our while to
venture our experiments on other points of the kind, in
the hope of clearing up some of them.

[Lecture xiv.J

OF SUBLIMITY IN DICTION {continued)

In order to bring out more clearly Sublimity as a
characteristic of Hebrew poetry contrasted with prose,
I sent the reader to the Book of Job, where he may

I^obert Lowth 123

easily observe the great difFerence, both in matter and
also in diction, between the historical preface, and the
metrical sequel. As the comparison may seem unfairly
drawn upon a passage where, even if both parts had been
written in metre or both in plain prose, the difFerence in
subject-matter would have required a great difference in
style, let us now make the experiment on another place,
taking one where the same subject-matter is treated in
prose, and also with a poetical setting. We shall find
an excellent example in the Book of Deuteronomy,
where Moses takes the two parts of orator and poet.
First, in a most impressive speech, he exhorts the
Israelites to observe the Covenant, setting before them
the richest rewards, and deters them from breaking it
by threats of the greatest penalties 5 then, that this may
sink deep and remain fixed within their hearts, he sets
out the same theme, by the express command of God,
in a poem which is essentially sublime. In both passages
we perceive every quality of force, grandeur, magnificence,
possessed by the Hebrew language in either style, and
its great power in both ; and we see meanwhile the
points of difference between the two, in thoughts, images,
arrangement of subjects, form and colouring of the
diction. Any one who may wish to look closely into
the nature and genius of poetical expression in Hebrew
will do well to compare these passages carefully with
one another, and see the great difference between the
one style, grand, no doubt, and vehement, and full, but
also orderly, flowing, consecutive, and, for all its rush
and vehemence, moving evenly on, and poetry, with its

124 appendix III

sharp, swift, thrilling sentences, elevated in thought,
glowing in words, novel in their arrangement, varied
in structure, as the spirit of the prophet once and
again hurries itself from this to that, and never rests
stationary. Most of these points are such that it is much
easier for a careful reader to note them from his own
observation, than it is to explain them intelligently, or
to understand them as explained. Certain points, how-
ever, call for notice in this noble poem, which belong to
a class common in Hebrew poetry, yet by their great
force, and sometimes by their extreme difficulty, demand
more careful examination.

A first point which I wish to notice as of general
application, taking my example from this passage, is the
frequent change of persons; I mean in addresses, for of
the introduction of various speakers I have already spoken
sufficiently. Near the beginning of the poem, Moses
sets out the absolute truth and justice observed in all the
counsels and doings of God ; and he takes the oppor-
tunity to inveigh suddenly agdnst the criminal perfidy of
the ungratefiil People ; first, as though they were not
present : —

They have corrupted themselves, they are not his
children, it is their blemish ^

Then he addresses them directly :
A perverse and crooked generation.
Do ye thus requite the Lord,
O foolish people and unwise ?
Is not he thy father, that hath bought thee i
He hath made thee and established thee.

' Dent, xxxii, 5.

'Robert Lorvth lay

Then, as his burning indignation abates a little, and
he looks more deeply into the matter, he sets out in
most beautiful terms the indulgence of God and his
more than fatherly affection towards the Israelites,
witnessed continually since the day when he chose
them to be his own people, and all this in language
turned away from the Israelites ; then he marvellously
emphasizes the dullness and stupidity of the ungrateful
and impious people, or rather sheep. Now mark with
what a burst the indignation of the prophet once again
breaks forth : —

But Jeshurun waxed fat, and kicked:

Thou art waxen fat, thou art grown thick, thou

art become sleek;
Then he forsook God which made him.
And lightly esteemed the Rock of his salvation '.

In one brief sentence the speech is suddenly directed
to the Israelites, and then turned from them afresh,
with admirable effect; it is fervid, forcible, pointed,
charged with hate and indignation. Worthy to be com-
pared with this passage of Moses is Virgil's apostrophe,
less burning but most ingenious, where he taunts the
traitor with his crime, and at the same time clears the
king of the odium of cruelty :

'Not far off Mettus had already been torn asunder by
the chariots driven apart — ^ah, false Alban, were you
but a keeper of your word ! * '

[Lecture xv.]

• Dent, xxxii. 15. » Aen. viii. 642.

I2<J IV

Additional Note on Paraphones [p. f3).

'Deux autres musicistes grecs postfirieurs i I'ere
chrftienne font mention d'une catfigorie intermSdiaire
d'accords: les paraphones, expression qu'on pourrait
rendre en franjais par demi-comonances. Thrasylle, con-
temporain de N^ron, donne la qualification de paraphones
aux intervalles de quinte et de quarte. L'dcrivain le
plus recent, Gaudence, difinit les paraphones : " sons
[accouplls] tenant le milieu entre les symphonies et les
diaphonies, et qui, dans le jeu hStfaophone des instru-
ments, paraissent consonants ". Tels sont, ajoute-t-il,
I'accord de triton, formfi de la parhypate et de la
paramese, ainsi que la tierce majeure compos£e de la
diatonique et de la paramese.' (Gevaert et VollgrafF,
Problhnes musicaux d'Aristote, Gand, 1899.)

The date of Gaudentius is uncertain. No explana-
tion is quite satisfactory which does not imply the
resolution of one sound into several, since periphrasis is
essentially the use of many words in place of one or
few. It may therefore be of interest to add an explana-
tion quoted from the Abb6 Amaud (1721-84): —

'Je suis convaincu que, par les sons paraphones,
Denys Longin n'entend autre chose que ces notes que
nous appelons de gofit et de passage, et qui, loin de
d&aturer la subsistance du chant, I'enrichissent et
Foment infiniment. De mSme que les •variations
musicales, qui portent dans un air un beaucoup plus
grand norabre de sons, sans en altfirer le sens et le
theme, lui prStent plus d'agrlment et de vie, ainsi la
piriphrase, qui consiste i expliquer une chose par un
certain, nombre de mots au lieu de la d&igner par son
terme propre, donne souvent i cette chose plus d'&ergie
et de grice. Des lors il n'y a plus d'obscuritfi; la
comparaison devient on ne peut pas plus juste.'

127

INDEX OF PROPER NAMES
OCCURRING IN THE TEXT

(TA« references are to pages.')

Achilles, 35.
Aegyptus, 48.
Aeschines, 40.
Aeschylus, 5, 34-5.
Agathocles, 9.
Ajax, 14, 18.
Alexander, 8, 15, 57.
Alvadae, 13.
Ammonius, 30,
Amphicrates, 6, 9,
Anacreon, 56.
Apollonius, 6r-3.
Aratus, 25, 50.
Archilochus, 25, 30, 62.
Arimaspeia, The, 24.
Aristeas, 24.
AristogeitoD, gl-a.
Aristophanes, 73-
Aristotle, 57.
Artemisium, 40.

Bacchylides, 62.
Boreas, 5.

Cadmus, 48.

Caecilius, 1, 8,13,14,56,57,

59-
Callisthenes, 6.
Cassandra, 34.
Ceyx, 51.

Clvieroneia, 36, 39-40.
Cicero, 28.
Circe, a I.
Cleitarchus, 6.
Cleomenes, 56.
Colossus, The, 67.
Cyrus, 49.

Danaus, 48.

Demosthenes, 4, 25, 28-9, 31-2,

36, 38, 46, 49, 51, 57, 63,

66, 72.
Dion, 9.

Dionysius, 8, 35, 45.
Dirce, 73.

Elateia, 35,
Elephantina, 50.
Eratosthenes, 62.
Erigone, 62.
Etna, 66.
Eupolis, 39.
Euripides, 33, 35, 73.

Gorgias, 6.

Hecataeus, 51.

Hector, 48, 51.

Hegesias, 6.

Helios, 33.

Heraclidae, 51.

Heraclides, 9.

Hercules, *j^,

Hermocrates, 8.

Herodotus, 9, 10, 13, 45, 50,

54. 56> 69> 75-
Hesiod, 16.
Homer, 16-22, 24, 32, 43,

61-2, 66, 79.
Hyperides, 36, 63-5.

Iliad, The, 20.
Ion Chius, 62.
lonians, 46.

128 Index of Proper Names

Isocrates, 8, 44, 68-9.
Ister, The, 66.

Lycurgus, 35.
Lysias, 60, 63, 65.

Marathon, 38-41.
Matris, 6.
Megillus, 9.
Meidias, 44.
Meroe, 50,

Miletus, Taking of, 49.
Moses, quoted, 18.

Nile, The, 66.

Ocean, 66.

Odyssey, The, 19-22.
Oedipus Tyrannus, 48, 61.
Oedipus Coloneus, 35,
Orestes, 36.

Parmenio, 15.
Pelops, 48.
Peloponnesus, 49.
Penelope, 52.
Phaethon, 33.
Philip, 42, 56, 57.
Philistus, 73.
Phocaea, 45.
Phrynichus, 49.
Pindar, 62.
Plataea, 38, 40.
Plato, 9, 28, 29, 31, 48,

58-60, 65, 66.
Pleiads, The, 34.

53>

Polycleitus, 67.
Poseidon, 17.

Postumius Terentianus, i .
Pygmies, The, 79.
Pythes, 56.
Pythia, The, 30.

Rhine, The, 66.

Salamis, 38-40.
Sappho, 23.
Sarpedon, 48.
Simonides, 35.
Sirius, 34.
Socrates, 9.
Sophocles, 6, 48.
Spearman, The, 67.
Stesichorus, 30.

Terentianus, I, 3, 8.
Theocritus, 61.
Theodorus, 7.
Theophrastus, 57.
Theopompus, 35-7, 75.
Thermopylae, 69.
Thucydides, 31, 46, 49, 69.
Tiber, The, 66.
Timaens, 8, 9.

Ulysses, 21, 22.

Xenophon, 9, 13, 43, 49, 53,

58. 77-
Xerxes, 6.

Zeus, 21.
Zoilus, 21.

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