On the Sublime | Page 9

we laugh at those fine words of Gorgias of Leontini, such as

"Xerxes the Persian Zeus" and "vultures, those living tombs," and at
certain conceits of Callisthenes which are high-flown rather than
sublime, and at some in Cleitarchus more ludicrous still--a writer
whose frothy style tempts us to travesty Sophocles and say, "He blows
a little pipe, and blows it ill." The same faults may be observed in
Amphicrates and Hegesias and Matris, who in their frequent moments
(as they think) of inspiration, instead of playing the genius are simply
playing the fool.
3 Speaking generally, it would seem that bombast is one of the hardest
things to avoid in writing. For all those writers who are ambitious of a
lofty style, through dread of being convicted of feebleness and poverty
of language, slide by a natural gradation into the opposite extreme.
"Who fails in great endeavour, nobly fails," is their creed.
4 Now bulk, when hollow and affected, is always objectionable,
whether in material bodies or in writings, and in danger of producing
on us an impression of littleness: "nothing," it is said, "is drier than a
man with the dropsy."
The characteristic, then, of bombast is that it transcends the Sublime:
but there is another fault diametrically opposed to grandeur: this is
called puerility, and it is the failing of feeble and narrow
minds,--indeed, the most ignoble of all vices in writing. By puerility we
mean a pedantic habit of mind, which by over-elaboration ends in
frigidity. Slips of this sort are made by those who, aiming at brilliancy,
polish, and especially attractiveness, are landed in paltriness and silly
affectation.
5 Closely associated with this is a third sort of vice, in dealing with the
passions, which Theodorus used to call false sentiment, meaning by
that an ill-timed and empty display of emotion, where no emotion is
called for, or of greater emotion than the situation warrants. Thus we
often see an author hurried by the tumult of his mind into tedious
displays of mere personal feeling which has no connection with the
subject. Yet how justly ridiculous must an author appear, whose most
violent transports leave his readers quite cold! However, I will dismiss
this subject, as I intend to devote a separate work to the treatment of the

pathetic in writing.
IV
The last of the faults which I mentioned is frequently observed in
Timaeus--I mean the fault of frigidity. In other respects he is an able
writer, and sometimes not unsuccessful in the loftier style; a man of
wide knowledge, and full of ingenuity; a most bitter critic of the
failings of others--but unhappily blind to his own. In his eagerness to
be always striking out new thoughts he frequently falls into the most
childish absurdities.
2 I will only instance one or two passages, as most of them have been
pointed out by Caecilius. Wishing to say something very fine about
Alexander the Great he speaks of him as a man "who annexed the
whole of Asia in fewer years than Isocrates spent in writing his
panegyric oration in which he urges the Greeks to make war on Persia."
How strange is the comparison of the "great Emathian conqueror" with
an Athenian rhetorician! By this mode of reasoning it is plain that the
Spartans were very inferior to Isocrates in courage, since it took them
thirty years to conquer Messene, while he finished the composition of
this harangue in ten.
3 Observe, too, his language on the Athenians taken in Sicily. "They
paid the penalty for their impious outrage on Hermes in mutilating his
statues; and the chief agent in their destruction was one who was
descended on his father's side from the injured deity--Hermocrates, son
of Hermon." I wonder, my dearest Terentian, how he omitted to say of
the tyrant Dionysius that for his impiety towards Zeus and Herakles he
was deprived of his power by Dion and Herakleides.
4 Yet why speak of Timaeus, when even men like Xenophon and
Plato--the very demi-gods of literature--though they had sat at the feet
of Socrates, sometimes forgot themselves in the pursuit of such paltry
conceits. The former, in his account of the Spartan Polity, has these
words: "Their voice you would no more hear than if they were of
marble, their gaze is as immovable as if they were cast in bronze; you
would deem them more modest than the very maidens in their eyes."[1]

To speak of the pupils of the eye as "modest maidens" was a piece of
absurdity becoming Amphicrates[2] rather than Xenophon. And then
what a strange delusion to suppose that modesty is always without
exception expressed in the eye! whereas it is commonly said that there
is nothing by which an impudent fellow betrays his character so much
as by the expression