On the Sublime Part 5

XVIII

The figures of question and interrogation[1] also possess a specific quality which tends strongly to stir an audience and give energy to the speaker's words. "Or tell me, do you want to run about asking one another, is there any news? what greater news could you have than that a man of Macedon is making himself master of h.e.l.las? Is Philip dead? Not he. However, he is ill. But what is that to you? Even if anything happens to him you will soon raise up another Philip."[2] Or this pa.s.sage: "Shall we sail against Macedon? And where, asks one, shall we effect a landing? The war itself will show us where Philip's weak places lie."[2] Now if this had been put baldly it would have lost greatly in force. As we see it, it is full of the quick alternation of question and answer. The orator replies to himself as though he were meeting another man's objections. And this figure not only raises the tone of his words but makes them more convincing.

[Footnote 1: See Note.]

[Footnote 2: _Phil._ i. 44.]

2 For an exhibition of feeling has then most effect on an audience when it appears to flow naturally from the occasion, not to have been laboured by the art of the speaker; and this device of questioning and replying to himself reproduces the moment of pa.s.sion. For as a sudden question addressed to an individual will sometimes startle him into a reply which is an unguarded expression of his genuine sentiments, so the figure of question and interrogation blinds the judgment of an audience, and deceives them into a belief that what is really the result of labour in every detail has been struck out of the speaker by the inspiration of the moment.

There is one pa.s.sage in Herodotus which is generally credited with extraordinary sublimity....

XIX

... The removal of connecting particles gives a quick rush and "torrent rapture" to a pa.s.sage, the writer appearing to be actually almost left behind by his own words. There is an example in Xenophon: "Clashing their shields together they pushed, they fought, they slew, they fell."[1] And the words of Eurylochus in the _Odyssey_--

"We pa.s.sed at thy command the woodland's shade; We found a stately hall built in a mountain glade."[2]

Words thus severed from one another without the intervention of stops give a lively impression of one who through distress of mind at once halts and hurries in his speech. And this is what Homer has expressed by using the figure _Asyndeton_.

[Footnote 1: Xen. _Hel._ iv. 3. 19.]

[Footnote 2: _Od._ x. 251.]

XX

But nothing is so conducive to energy as a combination of different figures, when two or three uniting their resources mutually contribute to the vigour, the cogency, and the beauty of a speech. So Demosthenes in his speech against Meidias repeats the same words and breaks up his sentences in one lively descriptive pa.s.sage: "He who receives a blow is hurt in many ways which he could not even describe to another, by gesture, by look, by tone."

2 Then, to vary the movement of his speech, and prevent it from standing still (for stillness produces rest, but pa.s.sion requires a certain disorder of language, imitating the agitation and commotion of the soul), he at once dashes off in another direction, breaking up his words again, and repeating them in a different form, "by gesture, by look, by tone--when insult, when hatred, is added to violence, when he is struck with the fist, when he is struck as a slave!" By such means the orator imitates the action of Meidias, dealing blow upon blow on the minds of his judges. Immediately after like a hurricane he makes a fresh attack: "When he is struck with the fist, when he is struck in the face; this is what moves, this is what maddens a man, unless he is inured to outrage; no one could describe all this so as to bring home to his hearers its bitterness."[1] You see how he preserves, by continual variation, the intrinsic force of these repet.i.tions and broken clauses, so that his order seems irregular, and conversely his irregularity acquires a certain measure of order.

[Footnote 1: _Meid._ 72.]

XXI

Supposing we add the conjunctions, after the practice of Isocrates and his school: "Moreover, I must not omit to mention that he who strikes a blow may hurt in many ways, in the first place by gesture, in the second place by look, in the third and last place by his tone." If you compare the words thus set down in logical sequence with the expressions of the "Meidias," you will see that the rapidity and rugged abruptness of pa.s.sion, when all is made regular by connecting links, will be smoothed away, and the whole point and fire of the pa.s.sage will at once disappear.

2 For as, if you were to bind two runners together, they will forthwith be deprived of all liberty of movement, even so pa.s.sion rebels against the trammels of conjunctions and other particles, because they curb its free rush and destroy the impression of mechanical impulse.

XXII

The figure hyperbaton belongs to the same cla.s.s. By hyperbaton we mean a transposition of words or thoughts from their usual order, bearing unmistakably the characteristic stamp of violent mental agitation. In real life we often see a man under the influence of rage, or fear, or indignation, or beside himself with jealousy, or with some other out of the interminable list of human pa.s.sions, begin a sentence, and then swerve aside into some inconsequent parenthesis, and then again double back to his original statement, being borne with quick turns by his distress, as though by a shifting wind, now this way, now that, and playing a thousand capricious variations on his words, his thoughts, and the natural order of his discourse. Now the figure hyperbaton is the means which is employed by the best writers to imitate these signs of natural emotion. For art is then perfect when it seems to be nature, and nature, again, is most effective when pervaded by the unseen presence of art. An ill.u.s.tration will be found in the speech of Dionysius of Phocaea in Herodotus: "A hair's breadth now decides our destiny, Ionians, whether we shall live as freemen or as slaves--ay, as runaway slaves.

Now, therefore, if you choose to endure a little hardship, you will be able at the cost of some present exertion to overcome your enemies."[1]

[Footnote 1: vi. 11.]

2 The regular sequence here would have been: "Ionians, now is the time for you to endure a little hardship; for a hair's breadth will now decide our destiny." But the Phocaean transposes the t.i.tle "Ionians," rushing at once to the subject of alarm, as though in the terror of the moment he had forgotten the usual address to his audience. Moreover, he inverts the logical order of his thoughts, and instead of beginning with the necessity for exertion, which is the point he wishes to urge upon them, he first gives them the reason for that necessity in the words, "a hair's breadth now decides our destiny," so that his words seem unpremeditated, and forced upon him by the crisis.

3 Thucydides surpa.s.ses 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.

XXIII

The 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--

"A countless host dispersed along the sand 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--

"Oh fatal, fatal ties!

Ye gave us birth, and we being born ye sowed 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."[1]

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--

"There came forth Hectors, and there came Sarpedons."

[Footnote 1: _O. R._ 1403.]

4 And in those words of Plato's (which we have 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 h.e.l.lenised barbarians, dwelling among us; no, this is the land of pure Greeks, with no mixture of foreign elements,"[2] etc. Such an acc.u.mulation 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 pa.s.sion. To overlay every sentence with ornament[3] is very pedantic.

[Footnote 2: _Menex._ 245, D.]

[Footnote 3: Lit. "To hang bells everywhere," a metaphor from the bells which were attached to horses' trappings on festive occasions.]

XXIV

On 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."[1] There is another in Herodotus: "When Phrynichus brought a drama on the stage ent.i.tled _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 circ.u.mstances,--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.

[Footnote 1: _De Cor._ 18.]

XXV

When 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 pa.s.sages of Thucydides.

XXVI

Equally dramatic is the interchange of persons, often making a reader fancy himself to be moving in the midst of the perils described--