The heights of style are such passages as please always and please all.
(i) The heights of authorship are seen in eminence and excellence of words. Experience in subject-matter (inventio) and cogency of order (dispositio) are effects of the whole; but the orator’s power flashes in his happy moments of style (elocutio). (ii) Nor because we see genius here are we to think that style is beyond art. (iii, iv) [Contrast] the turgid, the pretty, the frigid, (v) faults arising from the search for novelties. (vi) Though judgment of style is the final fruit of much experience, we must attempt definition of heightening. (vii) Count those passages wholly beautiful and true instances of the heights of style which please always and please all.
The first source of height in style is intellectual power of conception.
(viii) Of such heightening (1) the first and strongest source is intellectual power of conception; (2) the second, emotion. These are native; the remaining three are acquired: (3) handling of figures, (4) noble diction, and (5), what includes the other two, sentence movement (compositio). (ix) The force of the first (i.e., conception), and also its waning, we feel in Homer, whose Odyssey lapses into narrative from the dramatic power of the Iliad. (x) The realization of this first source in actual composition means compression, the bringing together of significances with no insignificances to interrupt. (xi) Oratorical amplification, which is complementary to this, of itself never rises to the heights. (xii) Heightening of style is single and intensive, as in poetry or in the orations of Demosthenes; amplification is iterative and extensive, as in Plato or Cicero. (xiii) Plato, however, shows the way to mastery—imitation, (xiv) a way which even we may follow.
The second source is emotion. (This is not treated here in its place as a separate section, but is implied throughout what follows.)
The third source is handling of figures.
(xv) For weight, grandeur, and energy the right language is imagery. In oratory the purpose of this typically is intellectual; in poetry, emotional; but oratory too may use it for emotional effect. [xvi-xxix. Discussion of figures.] (xxx-xxxi) Beautiful words are essentially the light of thought; and homely words have their expressiveness. (xxxii) Abundance of figurative language may proceed from emotion and kindle it. Even extended and detailed metaphor may be stimulating.
The fourth source, noble diction, means more than constant excellence.
(xxxiii) Better eminence with some faults than a lower plane without them: Homer than Apollonius, Archilochus than Eratosthenes, Pindar than Bacchylides, Sophocles than Ion, (xxxiv) Demosthenes than Hyperides, (xxxv) Plato than Lysias, and, in general, force than elegance. (xxxvi) But though the achievement due to art is typically that of the lower plane, the success of never failing, the assurance of technical mastery, still this does not make art the less important. [xxxvii-xxxviii. Further on figures: metaphor, hyperbole.]
The fifth source is sentence movement (compositio).
(xxxxix) The fifth of the elements that combine to give height is compositio. Having already in two other treatises gone exhaustively into the theory of compositio, I will treat it here only in general. The pervasive emotional effect of rhythm need only be insisted on; it is too evident to require proof. (xl) That it is separately distinguishable as a cause of heightening can be seen in many authors, most strikingly in Euripides, who is a poet rather of compositio than of thought. (xli-xlii) Conversely, a wrong rhythm may drag down or distract, (xliii) as may also a descriptive detail that interrupts or jars.
That orators rarely attain the heights of style means that they live unworthily.
(xliv) Why have we now few authors that reach the heights? Is the cause political, the decay of democracy? Rather it is moral; it is our materialism.
Compared with the orderly a priori progress of Dionysius, this treatment seems at once less systematic; and though the manuscripts show gaps, some apparently of considerable length, we have enough of the treatise to conclude that the whole was rather suggestive than logically divided and consecutive. But through it all runs the controlling idea that the higher reaches of style are, in cause and in effect, imaginative. Discussing oratory, the author is all the while drawing instances from poetry; and this means more than in the treatise of Dionysius. The scope is larger. Not only does he range far beyond compositio, which occupies only five of his chapters; he is looking in general less to technic and more to motive. What lifts the orator, and makes him lift his hearers, is first intellectual power of conception, then emotional power of sympathy. These are the springs. They work out in imaginative diction and rhythmical pace; but that few orators lift us by these means is due fundamentally to a general lack of idealism.
The contribution, then, of this unknown critic consists in illuminating the bearing of poetic on rhetoric, the importance of imaginative realization even for purposes of persuasion. The distinction between rhetoric and poetic he never blurs; in fact he contrasts the two explicitly; but he brings out, more clearly than any other ancient author, their interdependence.
First, he precludes any undue separation of thought from emotion by making conception, in Homer as well as in Demosthenes, intellectual. His word νόησις reminds one that Aristotle conversely brings rhetoric into poetic by making thought, διάνοια,[2] one of the elements of tragedy. Then further he shows throughout that style at its height, in Demosthenes as well as in Homer, is imaginative realization, that where we feel ὕψος, sublimitas, even in the field of rhetoric, we find the typical language of poetic. Such passages, he says in his first chapter, do not merely persuade us; they carry us out of ourselves.
This is clearest in chapters x-xv, which show how power of conception works out in the typical movement (x) of poetic, then (xi-xiv) in that of rhetoric, and then (xv) in their common ground of diction. These chapters, the core of the treatise, confirm by artistic divination the philosophical analysis of Aristotle, and range beyond diction into composition. How, he inquires, are we to lift oratory to the heights? Even as Sappho, he answers, makes us in a single poem feel love; that is, by selecting those characteristic actions which are most salient and gathering them into a single body. “Do you not marvel how she seeks to gather soul and body into one, hearing and tongue, eyes and mien, all dispersed and strangers before?”[3] Poetry gives us the truth of life by bringing into organic continuity what is revealing and significant. What life disperses and interrupts, poetry focuses and brings into emotional sequence and momentum. Its essential processes are to realize these saliences imaginatively and to unify them. “It is survey of the high points, and composition (σύνταξις) for unity.”[4] A simple modern instance is Browning’s “Meeting at Night.”
This, the treatise goes on (xi-xii), is the typical method of poetic. The parallel (σύνεδρος) method of rhetoric is the converse; it is amplification. Poetry suggests in a flash; oratory iterates and enlarges. The one is intensive; the other, extensive. The one is compressed; the other, cumulative. Now none of the many and well-known means of amplification is self-sufficient. They all fall short without what we have called heightening. True, amplification and height of style may seem (xii) to amount to the same thing, since the object of both is by definition to invest the subject with greatness; but they differ in method.
Height means direct lift (δίαρμα); amplification implies multitude. Therefore the former is often in a single idea (νόημα), whereas the latter always implies quantity and abundance.... So Cicero differs from Demosthenes in grand passages. The [force of the] one is in sheer height; of the other, in volume.... The fire of the one is like lightning ... of the other, like a conflagration.[5]
So much for height as proceeding from the whole conception and movement. To return now to diction:
Weight, grandeur, and energy are furthermore most readily achieved by images (φαντασίαι), or, as some call them, bodyings-forth.... [By these terms are meant] specifically those cases in which, moved by enthusiasm and passion, you seem to see the things of which you speak, and to put them under the eyes of your hearers. As imagery means one thing with the orators and another with the poets, you must have observed that with the latter its function is vivid suggestion; with the former, precision.[6] Nevertheless both uses of imagery appeal to emotion. [Euripides in a passage quoted from Orestes, 255] saw the Furies himself, and what was imaged in his mind he almost compelled his hearers to see. [In another passage, from the lost Phaëthon] would you not say that the soul of the writer mounts the car with the driver, takes the risk with him, and with the horses has wings?[7]
Imaginative diction, then, is not primarily a trick of words; it is a visualizing habit of thought. It is sympathetic insight, even to the extent of feeling with Phaëthon’s horses their wings.
[In poetry imagery may even range beyond what is convincing;] but in oratory it is always best when it holds to reality and verisimilitude (ἔμπρακτον καὶ ἐνάληθες).... What, then, can the image do in oratory? Much else, doubtless, it can add to speeches in energy and emotion; but infused into arguments drawn directly from facts it not only persuades the hearer, but also makes him its slave. [Instances from Demosthenes and Hyperides] While he is arguing from the facts, the orator has expressed them in images. He has given his very premise (λῆμμα) a force beyond persuasion. As by a law of nature, in all such cases we always hear the stronger. So we are drawn away from the argumentative [value] to that which is imaginatively striking, in which the facts [as mere evidence] disappear in excess of light.[8]
Imaginative realization of facts, the author is saying, which is essentially poetic, has its use also in rhetoric. That use is normally intellectual, for precision, for making an idea luminous. But there is a further use that is emotional. Besides making ideas clear, imagery in oratory, as well as in poetry, makes facts live. Thus it is not merely stylistic beauty; it has its function at the very base of oratory, in the subject-matter, in the very facts. Make the audience visualize these facts, see them, hear them, live in them by imagination, and you have done something more effective than marshaling them as evidence and urging your inferences. By the imaginative illusion of actuality the audience is not merely convinced; it is captured. In such passages, rather than in reasoning, oratory reaches its heights.[9]
The following chapters (xvi-xxxviii) on figures, carrying into detail the fundamental principle of imaginative realization, are handled less originally and less suggestively than the principle itself. Perhaps we are the less patient with the details of imagery because we have been made to see vividly the scope of imagination. Classification of imagery, which seems inevitably to produce the most tedious chapters in rhetorics, lacks for us moderns what is most characteristic of this ardent and original spirit, constructive suggestion. But at least he abstains from carrying it into minute analysis. Even these his most technical chapters are illuminated by that genius for appreciation which brought together one of the most significant of all collections of literary models. His own style, too, flashes in memorable sentences:
A figure seems best when it is not noticed as a figure (xvii).
What is hurried and roughened by emotion, if you smooth out to a level by conjunctions, loses its spur and fire (xxi).
Beautiful words are essentially the very light of thought (xxx).
Occasional oratory (ἐπιδεικτικός) being recognized by the ancients as the most literary of the three fields,[10] one might expect this treatise to dwell on it especially. But the author’s object is not special; it is general. This and the contagion of his enthusiasm have made his book, ever since its recovery in the Renaissance,[11] a powerful influence. Its promotive quality sets it above the schematic analysis of even so discerning a critic as Dionysius. Milton must have felt in it his own creative attitude toward reading. Nor does it need to dwell on the school of Isocrates when its own most characteristic passages have themselves the very mood and method of occasional oratory.
What, then, did those immortals see who reached at the greatest things in writing and scorned unvarying nicety? Besides many other things, this, that nature meant us men to be no low species nor ignoble; but leading us, as into a great pageant, into life and the whole order of things, to be spectators of all that she shows and contestants eager for honor, she implanted forthwith in our souls invincible passion for all that is permanently great and in our eyes more divine.[12]
Where has been more nobly expressed the mainspring of interest in literature? Great authors satisfy our longing to enter the human scene fully, to experience vicariously and to share in imagination passions and deeds greater than those of our every day. They touch the heights of style who know the heights of life. To bring oratory into this company is at once to claim for it literary height and to insist on the relation of rhetoric to morality. The moral implications of rhetoric are stressed again in the last chapter (xliv) that remains. Aristotle had recognized them explicitly. St. Augustine, at the end of the ancient world, must reaffirm them for Christian preaching. But against the sophistic that had always threatened this ideal no antidote is more effective than the great unknown’s sense of mission.
Aristotle’s theory of rhetoric determines its function. Cicero dignifies even its conventional tasks as training for leadership. Quintilian surveys it as a comprehensive pedagogy. Dionysius analyzes its art. But the great unknown moves us to share that art ourselves.
FOOT-NOTES:
[1] The edition of W. Rhys Roberts (Cambridge, 1899; second edition, 1907), bearing this traditional title, has, besides text and translation, an introduction on the authorship, contents, and character, and several valuable appendices: A. textual; B. linguistic (beginning this scholar’s collation of Greek rhetorical terms); C. literary (with a table of contents and a list of quotations located and arranged alphabetically by authors); D. bibliographical.
Other modern English translations are: by H. L. Havell, with an introduction by Andrew Lang (London, 1890; reprinted by Lane Cooper in Theories of Style, New York, 1907); by A. O. Prickard, with a brief introductory essay on the authorship and character, a digest by chapters, and four appendices: I. Specimen Passages Translated from Greek Writers of the Roman Empire on Literary Criticism; II. The Treatise on Sublimity and Latin Critics; III. Passages Translated from Bishop Lowth’s Oxford Lectures on Hebrew Poetry; IV. Additional Note on Paraphones.
[2] Poetic, 1450 a.
[3] x.
[4] xi, at the end. The ἐκεῖνο of this parenthesis in xi refers to x.
[5] xii. A similar comparison is made by Quintilian, X. i. 106.
[6] In English the familiar contrast is between Shakspere’s figures and Bacon’s.
[7] xv.
[8] xv.
[9] The bearing of delivery on this, of the art of the actor on the art of the orator, is glanced at in the opening chapter of Aristotle’s Rhetoric, Book III (see above, page 24), a meager passage illumined by this doctrine of the Great Unknown.
[11] See the bibliography in the edition of Rhys Roberts.
[12] xxxv. Beside this may be set for contrast the bitter satire of Lucian’s Rhetorum præceptor, which declares the practical equipment for success in oratory to be effrontery, a loud voice, a store of strange words, stock allusions, and sheer gab.