How diction should be suited to subject-matter.
We come now to the question of conforming the diction and subject-matter to nature, in which, as was said above, nature must be considered in its double aspect: namely, in relation to the subjects of which we speak, and in relation to the audience by whom we are heard or read.
The agreement of words and subject consists in this: that lofty words should be fitted to lofty subjects, and lowly to lowly. It is true, of course, that every kind of writing demands simplicity, but the simplicity meant is such as does not exclude sublimity or vehemence. In fact, it is no less faulty to treat high and weighty subjects in a slight and unassuming style than it is to treat what is slight and unassuming in a high and weighty style. In both of these ways one departs from that agreement with nature in which, we have said, beauty resides. Therefore, not every piece of writing admits the rhetorical figures and ornaments, and likewise not every one excludes them. The answer lies wholly in whether there is throughout a complete harmony between diction and subject.
In addition, I wish you would carefully observe something that few do—namely, when you temper your diction to the subject, to regard it not only as it is in itself or in the mind of the writer, but also as it has been formed by your speech in the minds of your audience. Thus, the reader is assumed to be unacquainted with what you have to say at the beginning of a work, and hence you must use simple language to initiate him into your lines of thought. Afterwards you may build upon this foundation what you can. It follows that if you are to speak of some outrageous crime, you should not inveigh against it with a comparable violence of diction until your audience has achieved such a notion of the crime as will not be at odds with such force and violence.
Thus Vergil begins in the best way with simple diction:
Arms and the man I sing who first from Troy
Banished by fate came to the Italian shore.
And Homer, too, who was praised for this by Horace:
Speak to me, Muse, of him, when Troy had fallen,
Who saw the ways of many and their cities.
But Statius begins badly, and sweeps the reader away too suddenly in these verses:
Fraternal arms, and alternate rule by hate
Profane contested, and the guilt of Thebes
I sing, moved by the fiery Muse.
Claudian is even more at fault, and thrusts these bombastic lines on our unprepared attention:
The horses of Hell's rapist, the stars blown
By the Taenarian chariot, chambers dark
Of lower Juno ...
But this rule should particularly be observed in the use of adjectives, which are always ill-joined with their noun when they disaccord with the impression the reader has in his mind. I have seen the opening of Lucan censured on this point:
Wars through Emathian fields, wars worse than civil,
And crime made legal is my song.
The critics urge that the epithet worse than civil could justly be employed after the depiction of the slaughter at Pharsalia, but that here it is out of order and suddenly attacks the reader who was thinking of no such thing. It offends against the precept of Horace:
Not smoke from brightness is his aim, but light
He gives from smoke.[5]