The end of the Eighth book, and the beginning of the Ninth, deal with the subject—the all too famous and long-studied |Books VIII., IX.: Tropes and Figures.| subject—of Tropes and Figures, which Quintilian distinguishes from one another a little artificially, and with a kind of confession that the distinction is sometimes correspondent to no real difference. It is not till rather late in his handling (IX. i. 22) that he makes that scornful reference to the Greek abundance in this kind which has been itself more than once referred to here. He is bound to say that figures are by no means so numerous as some would make them out. Nor have the names, which the Greeks can botch up at any occasion, the least influence with him.[[393]] And he is particularly earnest in condemning the practice of allotting a Figure to every affection of the mind—a practice certainly absurd enough, though no very unnatural consequence of the constitution of “figures” as real things.[[394]]
He himself, however, is by no means stingy of accepted Tropes and Figures, though he treats them, with his usual common-sense, as names, not things. The first place, in his discussion and enumeration of the matter, is occupied as usual by Metaphor, a mode of speech so prevailing in both senses that, here at least, no objection can be made to its constitution into a quasi-entity. He calls it “the most frequent and by far the most beautiful,” points out, of course, that it is only Simile in another and shorter form, and illustrates its kinds by examples in the best critical style. He specifies these kinds; but once more not to distinguish for the mere sake o£ distinguishing. In fact, here as elsewhere, we may notice that Quintilian, half unconsciously, stops short at the points where Rhetoric parts company with literary criticism, and becomes mere pseudo-science. From Metaphor he goes, treating them in the same way, as with all the tropes and figures that he mentions, to Synecdoche, Metonymy, Hypallage; and has some good remarks on the fine but real distinctions between the indulgences in these flights and sleights which are, and those which are not, permissible to the orator, whom he practically identifies with the prose-writer by contrasting him with the poet. Antonomasia, which is of the same family, follows, and then a rather disappointing treatment of Onomatopœia. One sees here the Roman, and the late Roman, but also the yearner after better things, in the observation that “this, which the Greeks thought one of the greatest excellences, is scarcely allowed us.” “We do not dare to form a new word,” he says, and tells us that even the formation of such words, on strict analogy of others, was scarcely ventured on,[[395]] and that the inability to compound, which has so notoriously manifested itself later in her greatest daughter, was beginning to appear in Latin. In short, Latin had reached a stationary state—the state of the nation qui cesse de prendre, if not quite of that qui commence à rendre. It had to become the picturesque and delightful, if perhaps too much crossed and blended, Low Latin of the Dark and Middle Ages before it could recover itself.
Catachresis, Metalepsis, the ornamental and “perpetual” epithet follow; and then we come to the fruitful subject of Allegory.
Quintilian is perhaps not exactly the writer from whom we should expect a thoroughly satisfactory treatment of this great subject—a subject which, far more than metaphor, escapes the state of a mere rhetorical ticket, and challenges that of a real literary quality or kind. Although it is unjust to represent him as merely conversant in details and afraid to rise, a certain timidity serves as the Nemesis of his common-sense. Besides, his materials were not favourable: the great allegorical style of Plato had long passed, not to be revived; the magnificent exuberance of mediæval fancy in this kind was far in the future; the exercises which Quintilian had before him were either mere phrases in the poets, tedious didactic things in the philosophers, or such easy examples as Horace’s “O navis,” which he quotes. We have therefore no such handling of the matter as we might have had from Longinus. And when we are told that the most ornamental kind of writing by far is that in which the three figures—simile, metaphor, and allegory—are mixed, we seem to see the worst side of Rhetoric as we seldom do in Quintilian. Once more there arises the picture of a dismal sort of library-laboratory, with bottles and drawers full of ready cold-drawn or ready short-cut figures—of the literary dispenser, with his apron on and his balance adjusted, taking a handful of this, two ounces of that, three drachms of the other, and compounding a draught or a pill to be exhibited in the forum, or the lecture-room, or the courts of justice, as the case may be. But he recovers himself soon, if only by the dry fashion in which he observes that, if anybody does not know it, the Greeks call certain kinds of allegory sarcasm, asteism, antiphrasis, and parœmia, to which it may be well to add mycterism,[[396]] a kind of derision which is dissembled, but not altogether concealed—as very neatly by M. Fabius Quintilianus in the passage before us.
Periphrasis, Hyperbaton, Hyperbole close the chapter, and the book, and Quintilian shines on the latter, while at the end he refers to his lost dialogue On the Causes of the Corruption of Eloquence, one of the things of its kind which we must regret most.
The Ninth book opens with the distinction between Trope and Figure,[[397]] and with some general remarks on the latter word which illustrate rather amusingly the Delilah-effect of it on those who use it. We should not have been sorry to have had that treatise of Apollodorus which Quintilian seems only to have known through Cæcilius (the writer on the Sublime), and in which the author by no means frivolously argued that, in the common sense of Figure, everything is a figure, and the enumeration of figures is impossible and useless. We should have thanked Time for sparing that other of the Homeromastix, in which Zoilus, with better sense apparently than when he talked of matters too high for him, limited the word Figure to a phrase, in which the apparent or first meaning is different from the second or real. And Quintilian himself, when he comes to the distinction between Figures of Thought and Figures of Speech, illustrates (whether purposely or not it is difficult to say) the purely childish side of the matter, by remarking that in one of the Verrines, jamjam and liberum are figures of speech. For, as the commentators have gravely worked it out, jamjam is a Palillogia or repetition, and liberum, contracted from libeirum, is an instance of Syncope. Verily, one exclaims, there is much to be said for Apollodorus! And when he further observes that the greatest power of Figures is to render oratory attractive, one feels inclined to say, “The figure is nothing, and the power of making figures is less; but there are attractive qualities in oratory, and you may ticket them as figures, within moderation, as you like.”
But it would be a delusion to suppose Quintilian himself deluded. Immediately after the passage just quoted comes his Declaration of Independence in regard to the Greek nomenclature, a fresh observation in the same key “to exhibit anger or grief, or any other passion in literature, is not of itself to be figurative, though one may use figures in the expression,” and—after two quotations from Cicero, in which crowds of figures are introduced and named—a distinct, though gentle, hint that, much as he admires Cicero, he thinks him too prodigal here.
Two long chapters, the second and third of the Ninth Book, contain Quintilian’s own survey of figures as distinguished from tropes, and as divided into figures of thought and speech respectively. He opens the first division with Interrogation—the rhetorical interrogation, of course; he goes on to Anticipation (prolepsis in a sense different from the usual one); Feigned Doubt, Communication,[[398]] Feigned Passion, Prosopopeia, Apostrophe, Hypotyposis, and then regains more open and higher ground for a time with the great figure of Irony, of which, however, he makes relatively as little as of Allegory. Aposiopesis, Ethopœia, and Emphasis follow, with something to which he gives no definite name, but which approaches Parable. After this he becomes rather technically forensic, and winds up with a shower of names of the verbal hair-splitting kind.
Verbal figures—"Figures of Speech" proper—begin, after some general remarks, by examples which seem to bring us back to the old conclusion that “everything is a figure,” and which are sometimes barely intelligible, as where Sthenelus sciens pugnæ, which seems to us a most ordinary expression, is said to show two figures combined.[[399]] The Figures themselves, where named distinctly, range from such familiar things as Parenthesis and Climax to more technical ones in Epanodos[[400]] and Paradiastole.[[401]] Others, familiar and less familiar, follow, but at last Quintilian grows impatient, and after plumply denying that Paromologia[[402]] and Parasiopesis[[403]] are figures at all, declares roundly that he shall pay no attention to authors who have made no end of mere term-seeking, and have classed arguments among Figures. And he winds up the whole with a weighty caution against abusing even those Figures which he has admitted. Of such abuse, almost all times, whether they have been devoted to nominated Figures or not, leave more than sufficient record: but it can never have been more tempting or more frequent than when the process of peppering style with the contents of a certified chemist’s shop of Figures was almost prescribed by the orthodox curriculum of literary education.
The connection, however, with strictly literary criticism becomes closer still in the following (fourth) chapter of the Ninth |Composition.| Book, which, together with the surveys of literature in the Tenth and Twelfth, is the “place” of Quintilian for our subject. For it deals directly with Composition, in the higher sense of attention to style, and before very long we see that what is immediately uppermost in Quintilian’s mind at the moment is the order of the words, and the consequent rhythmical effect. He spends, after a fashion pardonable to the professional declaimer and teacher of rhetoric, some time on general remarks, rebutting the silly talk, common then as now, about the superiority of natural to artificial eloquence, the frippery of style, and the like. And then he mounts the battle-horse of all true critics, the argument from alteration of arrangement of words, adding, truly enough, that the more beautiful the sentence which is thus distorted, the worse will the distortion seem. He turns to an interesting and quite relevant historical digression on the lateness of deliberate style, and on its differences, narrowing these for the present to two, “loose” and “firm,” by which it would appear that he does not mean the usual contrast of “loose” and “periodic,” but merely that between irregular conversational style and set speech. Then, noting the technical divisions of phrases, clauses, and sentences, he considers the order of words, and (being a Latin) of course urges the conclusion of the sentence with a verb, where possible, and perstringes certain sentences of Mæcenas, a notedly “precious” writer, in which we can only dimly perceive the offence.