On the Sublime

by active 1st century Longinus

... There is a genuine ring in that line of Anacreon’s—

“The Thracian filly I no longer heed.”

The same merit belongs to that original phrase in Theophrastus; to me, at least, from the closeness of its analogy, it seems to have a peculiar expressiveness, though Caecilius censures it, without telling us why. “Philip,” says the historian, “showed a marvellous alacrity in taking doses of trouble.”[73] We see from this that the most homely language is sometimes far more vivid than the most ornamental, being recognised at once as the language of common life, and gaining immediate currency by its familiarity. In speaking, then, of Philip as “taking doses of trouble,” Theopompus has laid hold on a phrase which describes with peculiar vividness one who for the sake of advantage endured what was base and sordid with patience and cheerfulness. 2 The same may be observed of two passages in Herodotus: “Cleomenes having lost his wits, cut his own flesh into pieces with a short sword, until by gradually mincing his whole body he destroyed himself”;[74] and “Pythes continued fighting on his ship until he was entirely hacked to pieces.”[75] Such terms come home at once to the vulgar reader, but their own vulgarity is redeemed by their expressiveness.

[XXXII]

Concerning the number of metaphors to be employed together Caecilius seems to give his vote with those critics who make a law that not more than two, or at the utmost three, should be combined in the same place. The use, however, must be determined by the occasion. Those outbursts of passion which drive onwards like a winter torrent draw with them as an indispensable accessory whole masses of metaphor. It is thus in that passage of Demosthenes (who here also is our safest guide):[76] 2 “Those vile fawning wretches, each one of whom has lopped from his country her fairest members, who have toasted away their liberty, first to Philip, now to Alexander, who measure happiness by their belly and their vilest appetites, who have overthrown the old landmarks and standards of felicity among Greeks,—to be freemen, and to have no one for a master.”[77] Here the number of the metaphors is obscured by the orator’s indignation against the betrayers of his country. 3 And to effect this Aristotle and Theophrastus recommend the softening of harsh metaphors by the use of some such phrase as “So to say,” “As it were,” “If I may be permitted the expression,” “If so bold a term is allowable.” For thus to forestall criticism[78] mitigates, they assert, the boldness of the metaphors. 4 And I will not deny that these have their use. Nevertheless I must repeat the remark which I made in the case of figures,[79] and maintain that there are native antidotes to the number and boldness of metaphors, in well-timed displays of strong feeling, and in unaffected sublimity, because these have an innate power by the dash of their movement of sweeping along and carrying all else before them. Or should we not rather say that they absolutely demand as indispensable the use of daring metaphors, and will not allow the hearer to pause and criticise the number of them, because he shares the passion of the speaker?

5 In the treatment, again, of familiar topics and in descriptive passages nothing gives such distinctness as a close and continuous series of metaphors. It is by this means that Xenophon has so finely delineated the anatomy of the human frame.[80] And there is a still more brilliant and life-like picture in Plato.[81] The human head he calls a citadel; the neck is an isthmus set to divide it from the chest; to support it beneath are the vertebrae, turning like hinges; pleasure he describes as a bait to tempt men to ill; the tongue is the arbiter of tastes. The heart is at once the knot of the veins and the source of the rapidly circulating blood, and is stationed in the guard-room of the body. The ramifying blood-vessels he calls alleys. “And casting about,” he says, “for something to sustain the violent palpitation of the heart when it is alarmed by the approach of danger or agitated by passion, since at such times it is overheated, they (the gods) implanted in us the lungs, which are so fashioned that being soft and bloodless, and having cavities within, they act like a buffer, and when the heart boils with inward passion by yielding to its throbbing save it from injury.” He compares the seat of the desires to the women’s quarters, the seat of the passions to the men’s quarters, in a house. The spleen, again, is the napkin of the internal organs, by whose excretions it is saturated from time to time, and swells to a great size with inward impurity. “After this,” he continues, “they shrouded the whole with flesh, throwing it forward, like a cushion, as a barrier against injuries from without.” The blood he terms the pasture of the flesh. “To assist the process of nutrition,” he goes on, “they divided the body into ducts, cutting trenches like those in a garden, so that, the body being a system of narrow conduits, the current of the veins might flow as from a perennial fountain-head. And when the end is at hand,” he says, “the soul is cast loose from her moorings like a ship, and free to wander whither she will.” 6 These, and a hundred similar fancies, follow one another in quick succession. But those which I have pointed out are sufficient to demonstrate how great is the natural power of figurative language, and how largely metaphors conduce to sublimity, and to illustrate the important part which they play in all impassioned and descriptive passages.

7 That the use of figurative language, as of all other beauties of style, has a constant tendency towards excess, is an obvious truth which I need not dwell upon. It is chiefly on this account that even Plato comes in for a large share of disparagement, because he is often carried away by a sort of frenzy of language into an intemperate use of violent metaphors and inflated allegory. “It is not easy to remark” (he says in one place) “that a city ought to be blended like a bowl, in which the mad wine boils when it is poured out, but being disciplined by another and a sober god in that fair society produces a good and temperate drink.”[82] Really, it is said, to speak of water as a “sober god,” and of the process of mixing as a “discipline,” is to talk like a poet, and no very sober one either. 8 It was such defects as these that the hostile critic[83] Caecilius made his ground of attack, when he had the boldness in his essay “On the Beauties of Lysias” to pronounce that writer superior in every respect to Plato. Now Caecilius was doubly unqualified for a judge: he loved Lysias better even than himself, and at the same time his hatred of Plato and all his works is greater even than his love for Lysias. Moreover, he is so blind a partisan that his very premises are open to dispute. He vaunts Lysias as a faultless and immaculate writer, while Plato is, according to him, full of blemishes. Now this is not the case: far from it.

[XXXIII]

But supposing now that we assume the existence of a really unblemished and irreproachable writer. Is it not worth while to raise the whole question whether in poetry and prose we should prefer sublimity accompanied by some faults, or a style which never rising above moderate excellence never stumbles and never requires correction? and again, whether the first place in literature is justly to be assigned to the more numerous, or the loftier excellences? For these are questions proper to an inquiry on the Sublime, and urgently asking for settlement.

2 I know, then, that the largest intellects are far from being the most exact. A mind always intent on correctness is apt to be dissipated in trifles; but in great affluence of thought, as in vast material wealth, there must needs be an occasional neglect of detail. And is it not inevitably so? Is it not by risking nothing, by never aiming high, that a writer of low or middling powers keeps generally clear of faults and secure of blame? whereas the loftier walks of literature are by their very loftiness perilous? 3 I am well aware, again, that there is a law by which in all human productions the weak points catch the eye first, by which their faults remain indelibly stamped on the memory, while their beauties quickly fade away. 4 Yet, though I have myself noted not a few faulty passages in Homer and in other authors of the highest rank, and though I am far from being partial to their failings, nevertheless I would call them not so much wilful blunders as oversights which were allowed to pass unregarded through that contempt of little things, that “brave disorder,” which is natural to an exalted genius; and I still think that the greater excellences, though not everywhere equally sustained, ought always to be voted to the first place in literature, if for no other reason, for the mere grandeur of soul they evince. Let us take an instance: Apollonius in his Argonautica has given us a poem actually faultless; and in his pastoral poetry Theocritus is eminently happy, except when he occasionally attempts another style. And what then? Would you rather be a Homer or an Apollonius? 5 Or take Eratosthenes and his Erigone; because that little work is without a flaw, is he therefore a greater poet than Archilochus, with all his disorderly profusion? greater than that impetuous, that god-gifted genius, which chafed against the restraints of law? or in lyric poetry would you choose to be a Bacchylides or a Pindar? in tragedy a Sophocles or (save the mark!) an Io of Chios? Yet Io and Bacchylides never stumble, their style is always neat, always pretty; while Pindar and Sophocles sometimes move onwards with a wide blaze of splendour, but often drop out of view in sudden and disastrous eclipse. Nevertheless no one in his senses would deny that a single play of Sophocles, the Oedipus, is of higher value than all the dramas of Io put together.