On the Sublime - active 1st century Longinus (read novels website .TXT) 📗
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3 Thucydides surpasses all other writers in the bold use of this figure, even breaking up sentences which are by their nature absolutely one and indivisible. But nowhere do we find it so unsparingly employed as in Demosthenes, who though not so daring in his manner of using it as the elder writer is very happy in giving to his speeches by frequent transpositions the lively air of unstudied debate. Moreover, he drags, as it were, his audience with him into the perils of a long inverted clause. 4 He often begins to say something, then leaves the thought in suspense, meanwhile thrusting in between, in a position apparently foreign and unnatural, some extraneous matters, one upon another, and having thus made his hearers fear lest the whole discourse should break down, and forced them into eager sympathy with the danger of the speaker, when he is nearly at the end of a period he adds just at the right moment, i.e. when it is least expected, the point which they have been waiting for so long. And thus by the very boldness and hazard of his inversions he produces a much more astounding effect. I forbear to cite examples, as they are too numerous to require it.
XXIIIThe juxtaposition of different cases, the enumeration of particulars, and the use of contrast and climax, all, as you know, add much vigour, and give beauty and great elevation and life to a style. The diction also gains greatly in diversity and movement by changes of case, time, person, number, and gender.
2 With regard to change of number: not only is the style improved by the use of those words which, though singular in form, are found on inspection to be plural in meaning, as in the lines—
With joyous cries the shoal of tunny hailed,”
but it is more worthy of observation that plurals for singulars sometimes fall with a more impressive dignity, rousing the imagination by the mere sense of vast number. 3 Such is the effect of those words of Oedipus in Sophocles—
The self-same seed, and gave the world to view
Sons, brothers, sires, domestic murder foul,
Brides, mothers, wives.... Ay, ye laid bare
The blackest, deepest place where Shame can dwell.”59
Here we have in either case but one person, first Oedipus, then Jocasta; but the expansion of number into the plural gives an impression of multiplied calamity. So in the following plurals—
And in those words of Plato’s (which we have 4 already adduced elsewhere), referring to the Athenians: “We have no Pelopses or Cadmuses or Aegyptuses or Danauses, or any others out of all the mob of Hellenised barbarians, dwelling among us; no, this is the land of pure Greeks, with no mixture of foreign elements,”60 etc. Such an accumulation of words in the plural number necessarily gives greater pomp and sound to a subject. But we must only have recourse to this device when the nature of our theme makes it allowable to amplify, to multiply, or to speak in the tones of exaggeration or passion. To overlay every sentence with ornament61 is very pedantic.
XXIVOn the other hand, the contraction of plurals into singulars sometimes creates an appearance of great dignity; as in that phrase of Demosthenes: “Thereupon all Peloponnesus was divided.”62 There is another in Herodotus: “When Phrynichus brought a drama on the stage entitled The Taking of Miletus, the whole theatre fell a weeping”—instead of “all the spectators.” This knitting together of a number of scattered particulars into one whole gives them an aspect of corporate life. And the beauty of both uses lies, I think, in their betokening emotion, by giving a sudden change of complexion to the circumstances,—whether a word which is strictly singular is unexpectedly changed into a plural,—or whether a number of isolated units are combined by the use of a single sonorous word under one head.
XXVWhen past events are introduced as happening in present time the narrative form is changed into a dramatic action. Such is that description in Xenophon: “A man who has fallen, and is being trampled under foot by Cyrus’s horse, strikes the belly of the animal with his scimitar; the horse starts aside and unseats Cyrus, and he falls.” Similarly in many passages of Thucydides.
XXVIEqually dramatic is the interchange of persons, often making a reader fancy himself to be moving in the midst of the perils described—
They met in war; so furiously they fought.”63
and that line in Aratus—
2 In the same way Herodotus: “Passing from the city of Elephantine you will sail upwards until you reach a level plain. You cross this region, and there entering another ship you will sail on for two days, and so reach a great city, whose name is Meroe.”65 Observe how he takes us, as it were, by the hand, and leads us in spirit through these places, making us no longer readers, but spectators. Such a direct personal address always has the effect of placing the reader in the midst of the scene of action. 3 And by pointing your words to the individual reader, instead of to the readers generally, as in the line
and thus exciting him by an appeal to himself, you will rouse interest, and fix attention, and make him a partaker in the action of the book.
XXVIISometimes, again, a writer in the midst of a narrative in the third person suddenly steps aside and makes a transition to the first. It is a kind of figure which strikes like a sudden outburst of passion. Thus Hector in the Iliad
To storm the ships, and leave the bloody spoils:
If any I behold with willing foot
Shunning the ships, and lingering on the plain,
That hour I will contrive his death.”67
The poet then takes upon himself the narrative part, as being his proper business; but this abrupt threat he attributes, without a word of warning, to the enraged Trojan chief. To have interposed any such words as “Hector said so and so” would have had a frigid effect. As the lines stand the writer is left behind by his own words, and the transition is effected while he is preparing for it. 2 Accordingly the proper use of this figure is in dealing with some urgent crisis which will not allow the writer to linger, but compels him to make a rapid change from one person to another. So in Hecataeus: “Now Ceyx took this in dudgeon, and straightway bade the children of Heracles to depart. ‘Behold, I can give you no help; lest, therefore, ye perish yourselves and bring hurt upon me also, get ye forth into some other land.’” 3 There is a different use of the change of persons in the speech of Demosthenes against Aristogeiton, which places before us the quick turns of violent emotion. “Is there none to be found among you,” he asks, “who even feels indignation at the outrageous conduct of a loathsome and shameless wretch who,—vilest of men, when you were debarred from freedom of speech, not by barriers or by doors, which might indeed be opened,”68 etc. Thus in the midst of a half-expressed thought he makes a quick change of front, and having almost in his anger torn one word into two persons, “who, vilest of men,” etc., he then breaks off his address to Aristogeiton, and seems to leave him, nevertheless, by the passion of his utterance, rousing all the more the attention of the court. 4 The same feature may be observed in a speech of Penelope’s—
Com’st thou to bid the handmaids of my lord
To cease their tasks, and make for them good cheer?
Ill fare their wooing, and their gathering here!
Would God that here this hour they all might take
Their last, their latest meal! Who day by day
Make here your muster, to devour and waste
The substance of my son: have ye not heard
When children at your fathers’ knee the deeds
And prowess of your king?”69 XXVIII
None, I suppose, would dispute the fact that periphrasis tends much to sublimity. For, as in music the simple air is rendered more pleasing by the addition of harmony, so in language periphrasis often sounds in concord with a literal expression, adding much to the beauty of its tone,—provided always that it is not inflated and harsh, but agreeably blended. 2 To confirm this one passage from Plato will suffice—the opening words of his Funeral Oration: “In deed these men have now received from us their due, and that tribute paid they are now passing on their destined journey, with the State speeding them all and his own friends speeding each one of them on his way.”70 Death, you see, he calls the “destined journey”; to receive the rites of burial is to be publicly “sped on your way” by the State. And these turns of language lend dignity in no common measure to the thought. He takes the words in their naked simplicity and handles them as a musician, investing them with melody,—harmonising them, as it were,—by the use of periphrasis. 3 So Xenophon: “Labour you regard as the guide to a pleasant life, and you have laid up in your souls the fairest and most soldier-like of all gifts: in praise is your delight, more than in anything else.”71 By saying, instead of “you are ready to labour,” “you regard labour as the guide to a pleasant life,” and by similarly expanding the rest of that passage, he gives to his eulogy a much wider and loftier range of sentiment. Let us add that inimitable phrase in Herodotus:
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