The ravening billows hunger for their lives;
And oft each shivering wretch, constrained to weep,
With suppliant hands to move heaven’s pity strives,
While many a direful qualm his very vitals rives.”
All must see that there is more of ornament than of terror in the description. Now let us turn to Homer. 5 One passage will suffice to show the contrast.
“On them he leaped, as leaps a raging wave,
Child of the winds, under the darkening clouds,
On a swift ship, and buries her in foam;
Then cracks the sail beneath the roaring blast,
And quakes the breathless seamen’s shuddering heart
In terror dire: death lours on every wave.”[26]
6 Aratus has tried to give a new turn to this last thought—
“But one frail timber shields them from their doom,”[27]—
banishing by this feeble piece of subtlety all the terror from his description; setting limits, moreover, to the peril described by saying “shields them”; for so long as it shields them it matters not whether the “timber” be “frail” or stout. But Homer does not set any fixed limit to the danger, but gives us a vivid picture of men a thousand times on the brink of destruction, every wave threatening them with instant death. Moreover, by his bold and forcible combination of prepositions of opposite meaning he tortures his language to imitate the agony of the scene, the constraint which is put on the words accurately reflecting the anxiety of the sailors’ minds, and the diction being stamped, as it were, with the peculiar terror of the situation. 7 Similarly Archilochus in his description of the shipwreck, and similarly Demosthenes when he describes how the news came of the taking of Elatea[28]—“It was evening,” etc. Each of these authors fastidiously rejects whatever is not essential to the subject, and in putting together the most vivid features is careful to guard against the interposition of anything frivolous, unbecoming, or tiresome. Such blemishes mar the general effect, and give a patched and gaping appearance to the edifice of sublimity, which ought to be built up in a solid and uniform structure.
[XI]
Closely associated with the part of our subject we have just treated of is that excellence of writing which is called amplification, when a writer or pleader, whose theme admits of many successive starting-points and pauses, brings on one impressive point after another in a continuous and ascending scale. 2 Now whether this is employed in the treatment of a commonplace, or in the way of exaggeration, whether to place arguments or facts in a strong light, or in the disposition of actions, or of passions—for amplification takes a hundred different shapes—in all cases the orator must be cautioned that none of these methods is complete without the aid of sublimity,—unless, indeed, it be our object to excite pity, or to depreciate an opponent’s argument. In all other uses of amplification, if you subtract the element of sublimity you will take as it were the soul from the body. No sooner is the support of sublimity removed than the whole becomes lifeless, nerveless, and dull.
3 There is a difference, however, between the rules I am now giving and those just mentioned. Then I was speaking of the delineation and co-ordination of the principal circumstances. My next task, therefore, must be briefly to define this difference, and with it the general distinction between amplification and sublimity. Our whole discourse will thus gain in clearness.