The dignity, grandeur, and energy of a style largely depend on a proper employment of images, a term which I prefer to that usually given.[32] The term image in its most general acceptation includes every thought, howsoever presented, which issues in speech. But the term is now generally confined to those cases when he who is speaking, by reason of the rapt and excited state of his feelings, imagines himself to see what he is talking about, and produces a similar illusion in his hearers. 2 Poets and orators both employ images, but with a very different object, as you are well aware. The poetical image is designed to astound; the oratorical image to give perspicuity. Both, however, seek to work on the emotions.
“Mother, I pray thee, set not thou upon me
Those maids with bloody face and serpent hair:
See, see, they come, they’re here, they spring upon me!”[33]
And again—
“Ah, ah, she’ll slay me! whither shall I fly?”[34]
The poet when he wrote like this saw the Erinyes with his own eyes, and he almost compels his readers to see them too. 3 Euripides found his chief delight in the labour of giving tragic expression to these two passions of madness and love, showing here a real mastery which I cannot think he exhibited elsewhere. Still, he is by no means diffident in venturing on other fields of the imagination. His genius was far from being of the highest order, but by taking pains he often raises himself to a tragic elevation. In his sublimer moments he generally reminds us of Homer’s description of the lion—
“With tail he lashes both his flanks and sides,
And spurs himself to battle.”[35]
4 Take, for instance, that passage in which Helios, in handing the reins to his son, says—
“Drive on, but shun the burning Libyan tract;
The hot dry air will let thine axle down:
Toward the seven Pleiades keep thy steadfast way.”
And then—
“This said, his son undaunted snatched the reins,
Then smote the winged coursers’ sides: they bound
Forth on the void and cavernous vault of air.
His father mounts another steed, and rides
With warning voice guiding his son. ‘Drive there!
Turn, turn thy car this way.’”[36]