Chapter 8: The Five Springs of Sublimity

But since there are, one may say, five kinds of springs most productive of sublimity of address (although capacity for speaking is a kind of common foundation for these five ideas, without which generally there is nothing)—first and most powerful is a solid thrust of conception, as we have defined in our pages on Xenophon; second is an intense and enthusias­tic emotion (these first two are for the most part self-bred constituents of sublimity, while those now left come also from technique); third is a sort of molding of figures, both figures of conception and those of style; in addition to these there is noble phrasing, the parts of which are the selection of words and the trope and “made up” elaboration of style; and the fifth spring responsible for greatness, which includes all before it, is the way things are put together in worth and loftiness—come, let us look to see for ourselves what is included in each of these, first saying only this, that of these five there are some which Caecilius left aside, as he left out emotion.

But if both of these, sublimity and emotion, actually were in his opinion one and were fundamentally together everywhere and grew together by nature, then he is thoroughly mistaken. You see, some emotions, standing far from sublim­ity, are actually found to be low, such as lamentation, pain, fright; and furthermore, there are many sublime passages without emotion, such as (in addition to tens of thousands of others) those exceedingly bold lines of the poet [i.e., Homer] about the Aloadae:

They both were eager to set Ossa on Olympus, on Ossa Pelion, shaker of woods, so that heaven might be pass­ able to them.

And there is the still greater line after these: And now they would have ended it.

3. For public speakers, of course, though encomia, ceremonial speeches, and “show” speeches have in all parts boldness and the sublime, for the most part they lack emotion, as a result of which public speakers who are full of emotion are least apt to write encomia, while those who do write encomia are least emotional. 4. Again, if Caecilius wholly considered it a rule that emotion never ended up in sublimity and, on this account, did not consider it worthy of mention, he was very much misled. You see, I would confidently lay it down as a definition that nothing is so great in address as noble emotion-there in the place where it must be-breathing out enthu­siastically as by a kind of madness and spirit which, as it were, made the speeches and writings oracularly Apollonian.

Commentary

five kinds of springs: in listing these five sources so numerically and baldly, Longinus is providing what some rhet­oricians called a separate part of the oration: the partitio or divisio. Most edi­tors take this five-fold division as “the plan of the book” as a whole, but it is really only an outline of the third sec­tion of the speech, the demonstration or proof; in Latin, the argumentatio. See Introduction.

sublimity of address: the phrase is one word in Greek; it is composed of the adjective “sublime” and the noun which means “marketplace,” that center of economic, social, and civic life, wherein the free citizens met to trade, converse, debate, and argue. The word, in its var­ious compounds, virtually always sug­gests a matter of civic discourse. Its use here at the beginning of ch. 8 reminds us of how much Longinus is concerned with political style, especially those “speeches and writings” which affect men’s conception of their own nature and greatness. Longinus uses the word again in the opening sentence of ch. 14, where he argues that it is necessary for Terentianus and himself, as well as for men in general, to ask themselves how Homer, or Plato, or Demosthenes, or Thucydides, would have said what we may wish to say. His list of exemplars covers the genres of epic, philosophy, political oratory, and history. When he uses the word for the third and last time in On the Sublime (34.4), it signifies one of the great virtues of Demosthenes, the most civic and political of these exem­plars. Although the Greek word does not appear to have acquired any special significance as a technical term in rhe­toric, it was used easily as a general synonym for literary excellence and sublimity (e.g., Philo, That the Worse is Wont to Attack the Better 79).

capacity for speaking: Longinus means what we call “natural ability,” which technique is to develop and enhance. He discusses the relationship of nature and technique-a common­ place in antiquity-in ch. 2.

ideas: Longinus uses the word “idea” five times; Russell observes that the use here in ch. 8 is without “any technical sense, philosophical or rhetorical,” and the observation holds true of all five uses. In the second century CE, Her­mogenes used the word in the title of his book On Ideas, in which he broke with the usual classification of styles into three kinds, together with their vicious counterparts.

The word in early Greek refers to the shape of a thing as distinct from such other properties as size or color. At least as early as Herodotus it was extended to signify “kind” or “sort”: it is connected with the root-verb “to see,” “to know,” “to understand.” Greek classified things according to their “look” (species)—as we tend to do—on the grounds that sight is the most important of the senses (Aristotle, Metaphysics 980a23-28).

The word “idea” hovers between sig­nifying “genus” and “species” (see Ast’s Lexicon Platonicum) as well as the conception which the mind has of such things. In Hermogenes, the word means something like “modes”: there are, he says, seven “ideas” or “modes” of style. His late commentator, Maximus Planudes (Walz V.439), offers the following definition of the term “idea”: it is a “quality of logos which fits with both the underlying persons and facts in accordance with both conception and style…”

Longinus belongs neither to the school which treated style according to the triple classification of high, middle, and low, nor to the sevenfold classifica­tion of Hermogenes.

on Xenophon: nothing survives of Lon­ ginus’ work on Xenophon, who was much admired in antiquity. Xeno­phon’s clear, graceful Greek style would not in itself make him appealing to Longinus, who is derogatory of this virtue if not accompanied by other virtues (see chs. 33 and 34); it is, Russell argues, Xenophon’s “manly and honest temper” which appeals to him. We have no necessary reason to believe that Longinus found in Xenophon the qual­ity which he here praises-all that he says is that he discussed the matter in his book(s) on Xenophon. The plural per­ haps suggests a major work, and there are other testimonia to support the notion that Xenophon had the quality which Longin us specifies. Hermogenes, for example, in On Ideas (2.392) remarks that Xenophon has ideas which often attain greatness but adds that he pur­ifies and reduces them to simplicity by his style and diction. We may presume that Longinus, who is no less percep­tive than Hermogenes, saw the point.

Xenophon led both an active and contemplative life: he was a soldier of fortune and a follower of Socrates; his works include history, first-hand ac­counts of military campaigns (he was elected a general by the Greek mercenar­ies in Persia), household management, political theory, cavalry techniques and tactics, philosophy. In all of them he displays his practical abilities, for even his theorizing is solidly applicable to life. It is this quality of having his feet planted firmly on the ground, even when dealing with the abstruseness of philosophy, that Longinus seems to have in mind. Such is the assessment which Xenophon makes of himself (On Hunting 13.1-6). He is something like Dryden as compared with Shakespeare.

self-bred constituents: the phrase is var­iously translated: “natural endow­ments” (Havell), “innate components” (Roberts), “native-born constituents” (Prickard), “innate dispositions” (Grube), “sources native to man”(Ei­narson), “natural sources” (Russell: in his note he offers the fine gloss “natural means of production,” but admits that the interpretation is unusual), “innate elements” (Dorsch). The adjective “self­ bred, self-created” is regularly used in Greek of spring-fed rivers (LSJ); in Philo it is virtually a stock-epithet. Per­ haps we are to see a continuation of the metaphor started in the word “spring,” used at the beginning of the chapter.

while those left come also from tech­nique: the division of natural and artifi­cial is not a sharp and discrete one for Longinus; he concedes in the opening of the chapter that natural ability at speaking is the common foundation of all five categories. Such ability is pre­sumably not subject to technique at all. Thereafter come the five categories, the first two of which are inborn but which technique can develop; the last three can be attained by technique as well as by nature. In ch. 2, Longinus took pains to argue that those who believed in the maxim “poets are born, not made” were wrong. Such critics are still with us— the kind of person who, on being shown an explication or analysis used by great artists, will say, “but he didn’t have all that in mind; I mean, he was just a natural genius.” One of Longi­ nus’ principal aims in the book is to show precisely how art and nature work together and in what degree. Compare also Spenser (The Faerie Queene 11.xii.59):

One would have thought (so cunningly the rude
And scorned parts were mingled with the fine,)
That Nature had for wantonnes ensude
Art, and that Art at Nature did repine;
Sostriving each th’ other to undermine,
Each did the others worke more beautify;
So diff’ririg both in willes agree in fine:
So all agreed through sweet diver­sity
This gardin to adorne with all variety.

figures: inspection of the ancient rhe­torical handbooks reveals widely differ­ent attempts to define and distinguish “figure of speech” from “trope.” Phoi­bammon, in his book On Figures (Spengel III.44), begins with a sum­mary of previous definitions, continues with the legitimate objections which can be lodged against each, and con­cludes with a definition of his own: he quotes the definition given by Caecilius, which resembles that given by Longi­ nus quite closely: a figure is a turning of thought or style toward what is not natural. Both Phoibammon and Cocon­drius (Spengel III.230-1) agree that the “trope” affects an individual word, the “figure of speech” affects several words, that is, the “trope” is a matter of diction, the “figure” a matter of syntax. Such is the way that Dryden, for example, understood the distinction (Preface to The State of Innocence): speaking of “poetic license,” he said, “if this licence be included in a single word, it admits to tropes, if in a sentence or proposition, of figures.”

Demetrius (On the Structure of Sen­tences 263-271) lists the following kinds of figures, with examples: praeteritio, aposiopesis, prosopopoeia, repetition, anaphora (of which asyndeton and homoeoteleuton are subdivisions), climax.

Addison, in Tatler 163, has a very amusing account of an interview with a young, and not very good, poet, in which he and the poet analyze the latest creation of the poet’s in terms of rhetor­ical figures. In Tatler 114, Addison justly praises Milton’s use of figures and “turns” in the great speech by Eve, “With thee conversing … ” (Paradise Lost IV.639-55). A study of the two pas­sages will reveal exactly how much figures can contribute to sublimity and emotion. Cf. John Illo on “The Rhe­toric of Malcolm X” in Columbia Forum 9 (Spring, 1966): 5-12.

conception: “Roughly speaking, fig­ures of speech [i.e., style] are those which do not affect the substance of what is said and are destroyed by mere changes of grammar or word-order; such are anastrophe, asyndeton, homo­eoptoton. Figures of thought [i.e., con­ception], on the other hand, depend not on details of expression but on the way in which the thought is cast; rhetorical question and aposiopesis are examples of this class. The distinction is not at all a clear one: see Quntillian, 9.1.10 ff.” A fine note by Russell, though the ancient critics did not always observe the distinc­tion.

English examples of figures of style may be found easily in Spenser’s Shep­herd’s Calendar and in E. K.’s glosses thereon. For example:

I love thilke lasse, (alas! why do I love?)
And am forlorne, (alas! why am I lorne?)
(January 61-2)

The glossator remarks, “A pretty epanorthosis in these two verses, and withal a paranomasia …”Changing the posi­tion of “alas” will not change the sense but will destroy the clever rhetoric. If, however, we look at Antony’s speeches to the mob in Julius Caesar (III.ii), we shall find many examples of figures of conception. For example:

But here’s a parchment with the seal of Caesar—
I found it in his closet—’tis his will.

Here the force of the parenthetical “I found it in his closet” is powerful, for it suggests an intimacy between Antony and Caesar that justifies his taking up the cause of the dead man. The force would be reduced but not altered by transposing the clause in the sentence.

style: the Greek word (Lexis) is the fourth of Aristotle’s six qualitative parts of tragedy (Poetics 1450bl3): Lexis, he says, is the interpretation through wording and has the same power in both poetry and prose. The parts of Lexis are listed in Poetics 1456b20 ff.: element, syllable, connective, noun, verb, article, case, and logos. In Rhe­toric 1403b6 ff., we find an extended discussion of Lexis as one of the three principal parts that make up the busi­ness of speaking: thought, in the form of providing proofs; Lexis; and the ar­ ranging of the parts of speech as a whole, e.g., introduction, peroration, etc. The first, thought, involves the facts; the second, lexis, involves express­ing the facts in sentences constructed for clarity and appropriateness to the subject-matter (1404b1-4). Longinus follows the same distinction, although he substitutes “conception” for “thought”; the root of both terms is the same. Yet he narrows the significance, for he restricts it to the moulding of figures; the choice of words (diction) is a separate entry.

selection of words and the trope and “made up” elaboration of style: here, in ch. 8, Longinus lists two subdivi­sions of “phrasing”: I) the selection of words; 2a) the trope; 2b) a “made up” elaboration of style. Thus, in good writing, sometimes the mere choice of the right word (le mot juste) will be enough. Examples in English are common (the italicized words are the perfect ones):