Chapter 32: Number and Use of Tropes
But concerning the number of metaphors, Caecilius is like a man who has set himself down with those who have set it as a rule that two or, at the most three are to be arranged in the same passage. Demosthenes, you see, is the norm in such matters: the right moment for their use comes when the emotions sweep themselves like a winter’s torrential flood and drag with them, as a necessity, a polymultiplicity of metaphors. He says:
2. Men, disgusting flatterers, each mutilating his father land, who drank away their freedom in toasts to Philip first and now to Alexander, measuring their happiness by their bellies and most shameless appetites, having overturned the liberty and freedom from despots which were, to the earlier Greeks, the norms and standards of what is good.
Here the animus of the public speaker against traitors occults the number of the tropes. 3. For this reason Aristotle and Theophrastus say that expres sions like “just as if” and “as it were” and “if one ought to say it in this manner” and “if one were to run the risk of speaking thus” are mollifiers of metaphors; their self-assessment, they say, is a cure for their audacity. 4. I too admit this view; all the same, I say what I said in dealing with figures, that intense emotion, put in at the right moment, and a nobly bred sublimity are a kind of appropriate cure for the number and audacity of metaphors because their rushing impulsiveness naturally sweeps and pushes everything before it—but, even more, they actually exact the asides as something necessary and do not allow the audience t.o have the leisure to scrutinize the number of metaphors because they become enthusiastic along with the speaker. 5. But, in fact, in addressing oneself to commonplaces, and in descriptions, nothing is so thoroughly expressive as continuous tropes, one after the other. By means of these, the anatomy of the human tabernacle is ceremoniously paraded in Xenophon, and is still more divinely painted in Plato. He says that the head is its acropolis, the neck is constructed like an isthmus between it and the chest, and the vertebrae he says underprop it like pivots; pleasure is for men a bait for vice; the tongue is what delivers opinions on taste; and the heart is a knot of veins and the spring of the blood as it is vigorously carried around, having been placed on duty in the guardhouse of the body; and his word for the courses of the passageways is alleys; “the gods,” he says, “having devised the idea of the lungs as an aid to the leaping of the heart in its expectation of powerful enemies and in its animus when it is worked up-since it is very fervent planted lungs in the body, for they are soft and bloodless and have cavities within, as a sort of cushion, so that the seething animus of a human being may leap and throb against something yielding and not be spoiled”; and the house of cravings he speaks of as the women’s quarters, that of the animus as the men’s quarters; in fact the spleen is the napkin of the inner parts, so that when it is filled with what has been purged from them, it develops into a great festering. “After this,” he says, “the gods canopied all the body with flesh, and the flesh was set up against things coming from outside as a defense, like felt”; and the blood, he said, was the pabulum of the flesh: “For the sake of nourishment,” he says, “they channelled it throughout the body, just as if cutting irrigation channels in gardens, so that as from an ongoing stream-the body being a narrow tunnel-the streams of the veins might flow.” And when our last day stands before us, the cables of the soul (as though the soul were a ship) are loosed, and the soul itself is let togo free. 6. These and tens of thousands of related ones are consistent; but what I have already cited is ample to show that tropes are great by nature and that metaphors contribute to sublimity and that emotional and expressive passages for the most part delight by means of these. 7. But certainly, that the use of tropes-as of all fine things in speeches and writings-over and over again falls into excess is now clear, even if I do not say it. On these grounds they even ridicule Plato, and him not least, as if he were of ten carried away by a kind of Dionysic revelry in his speeches and writings into harsh and undiluted metaphors and into alle gorical mouthings. He says:
It is not easy to think that a city ought to be mixed like a bowl of wine, where the maddened wine seethes once poured in, but when curtailed by another and sobering god, having taken on fine company, it produces a good and moderate drink.
You see, they say that speaking of water as a “sober god” and of mixing as “curtailing” is the mark of one who is in reality a poet, and not a sober one. 8. And turning his hands to such defects, Caecilius has actually had the overconfidence, in his prose account of Lysias, to use two uncritical emotions as he offers to explain that Lysias is in every way better than Plato. You see, though he loves Lysias as he does not even love himself, Caecilius still hates Plato in every way more than he loves Lysias. In fact he hates out of a love for contention, and what he has set down as premises are not, as he thought, agreed to. He thinks he is preferring a public speaker without mistakes and pure of defects to Plato, who was often thoroughly mistaken; but the matter was not at all like this, not even close to it.
Commentary
set himself down with: the verb is probably a kind of Platonic joke: there are critics, who, like Plato’s Lawgiver, “set it down as a rule” that two or three successive metaphors are all that can be allowed. A comparable joke today might be to refer to one of the influential and dogmatic schools of criticism-say the Chicago school or the New Critics-as “that academy” of critics, where “Aca demy” would be an allusion to the French Academy. Since Caecilius cen sured Plato (see above), the Platonic echo is amusing.
polymultiplicity: the original word is not classical Greek; Longinus uses it only here, and it would appear to indi cate with comic vehemence his disagreement with the “lawgivers” who allow “only two or, at most, three” suc cessive metaphors.
He says: from Demosthenes, On the Crown 296. When Hamlet soliloquizes (III.I)on whether to commit suicide, he moves from “slings and arrows” to a “sea of troubles”-but only captious critics object to the catachresis (violent metaphor) in “taking up arms against a sea of troubles,” for Hamlet’s despair sweeps along all who hear the speech.
occults: the Greek word, like the Eng lish verb “occult,” is a technical term in astronomy used to indicate what one body does when it eclipses another. It would itself appear to be a bold metaphor with no “mollifier.” (See below, note on mollifying.) But Dio Cassius (60.26) reports that an eclipse was ex pected to occur on Claudius’ birthday (45 A.D.) and that Claudius, in order to obviate any superstitious disturbance, issued a publicly scientific explanation of the phenomenon. In Dio’s lengthy citation of the explanation, a cognate of the verb “occult” appears. Such infor mation was, then, public and, perhaps, common knowledge by the middle of the first century A.D. For this reason it is possible that Longinus may not have felt the image a bold one.
tropes: see ch. 8, n. on figures. This is Longinus’ generic term for metaphors.
Aristotle and Theophrastus: we do not have in the extant works of Aristotle or Theophrastus any passage which makes this point specifically. Aristotle does lay down the general rule under which such a special point would come (Rhe toric 1408b2): “The remedy for every excess is well known: to censure oneself at the same time.”
mollifiers: the Greek word may itself be a metaphor, since it is used of things like the scraps fed to appease a dog’s hunger, of propitiatory offerings to the dead, of a soothing song, like a lullaby, and of someone who is a “darling” to another. As with the subtleties of Greek rhythm, so with the subtleties of Greek metaphor: why the Greeks and the Romans thought some metaphors so bold that devices for softening or molli fying them were needed is, at this point in our analyses of classical literature, impossible to say. As soon as indices to authors such as Plato and Aristotle are compiled, we can begin to tabulate the examples of each and study them to see whether there are patterns of usage.
If we inspect Longinus’ own use of such phrases, we find a definite tendency to use them with language of two kinds: (1) technical terms, words drawn from levels of discourse that are outside nor mal literate speech, e.g., “untreated wool” (15.5); a die or stamp used in minting (22.1 ); tattoo-marks or spots on skin (43.3); cracks in walls caused by cold (10.7); pegs or nails (41.3). Other uses are with paradoxical expressions (a vocal soul: 30.1) and with rare and poetic phrases “taken over by Apollo” (8.4 and 16.2).
On the other hand, as if to “show off” the point of this chapter, Longinus uses several bold expressions, or so we would judge, though of·course, we have no way of telling-with no qualifying phrases of any kind, e.g., “occults.”
Contemporary English is not so given to such formal mollifiers as “as it were,” “so to speak,” and “if I may venture to say,” for its addiction to metaphor is inherent. Poets, of course, are freer than public speakers: Aeschylean and Shake spearian images are often dense and even grotesque; nor can we imagine Donne saying
So, as ’twere, t’entergraftour hands
or
pictures-if I may put it this way-in oureye to get.
Dryden, in the preface to The State of Innocence, comments similarly on some lines of Cowley:
The valley, now, this monster seem’d to fill:
And we, methought, look’d up to him from our hill.
The words seemed and methought have mollified the figure. Crevecoeur (Letter 8) writes “the market-place, which is (if I may be allowed the expression) the coffee-house of the town.” In contem porary writing, the devices most com monly used to mollify a piece of techni cal jargon or a bold metaphor or a colloquialism are the quotation mark or italic type. For example:
- “I remember how I suddenly drop ped, sank upon the edge of the bed from the force of the idea that he must know how he really, as they say, ‘had’ me.” Henry James, The Turn of the Screw, ch. 11; James also uses the phrase “as they say.”
- In the field of seventeenth-century studies, conceptions as to what was ‘the climate of opinion’ or ‘world picture’ have not provided … Helen Gardner, The Business of Criticism, p. 147.
- It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not fright ened, the face of a man who is gener ously angry-in other words… George Orwell, Charles Dickens. Section Six Orwell’s little additional phrase “in other words” may be a kind of mollifier.
self-assessment. ..audacity: the re ference is to estimating one’s own tax liability; the mollifier is, so to speak, the tax on the metaphor. Longinus adds also a medical metaphor to his sentence, in the word “cure.”
asides: the term was used earlier (22.4) in the discussion of transpositions. It denotes what we call an “aside,” a remark “thrown in by the way,” sud denly and informally, as if the speaker’s 1 mind saw an immediate point as he was speaking and uttered it under the pres sure of the insight. Such a device takes the audience into the speaker’s confi dence, as if he were willing to allow those who heard him to enter the work shop of his mind to “see how he does it.” The Greek term suggests actions and words that are bold, almost reckless— our phrase “saying whatever is on the mind”—and thus indicates the immediacy of emotion.
do not allow the audience: Hume (Es say XIII, Of Eloquence) simply para phrases this passage, for by the middle of the eighteenth century Longinian doctrines were as much a part and par cel of educated minds as Darwinian or Freudian doctrines are in us:
The [the ancient orators] hurried away with such a torrent of the sublime and the pathetic that they left their hearers no leisure to per ceive the artifice by which they were deceived. Nay, to consider the matter aright, they Were not deceived by any artifice. The ora tor, by the force of his own genius and eloquence, first inflamed him self with anger, indignation, pity, sorrow; and then communicated these impetuous movements to his audience.
See ch. 39, n. on communion.
human tabernacle: cf. Thoreat., Wal den (ch. “Higher Laws”):
Every man is the builder of a tem ple, called his body, to the god he worships, after a style purely his own, nor can he get off by ham mering marble instead. We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our flesh and blood and bones. Any nobleness begins at once to refine a man’s features, any meanness or sensuality to imbrute them.
ceremoniously: in the manner of a ceremonial or “pomp” or epideictic speech.
in Xenophon: from Memorabilia 1.4.5ff. This is a famous example of teleolog ical anatomizing, influential through out antiquity and the Renaissance. Rus sell cites the references to modern schol arship on the subject. Lactantius (On the Workmanship of God) works out the image extensively, as do Phineas Fletch (The Purple Island), Francis Quarles (Divine Frances 1.42 “On the Body of Man”) and Spenser in The Faerie Queene (II.ix.20 ff.). A passage from Spenser will show an allegorical treatment of the idea; in stanza 32, Spenser treats the excremental system of the body in a way which would have merited praise from Longinus for its elegant discretion:
But all the liquor, which was foul and waste,
Not good nor serviceable elles for aught,
They in another great round vessel placed,
Till by a conduit pipe it thence were brought.
And all the rest that noyous was and nought,
By secret ways, that none might it espy,
Was close conveyed and to the back gate brought,
That cleped was Port Esquiline, whereby
It was avoided quite and thrown out privily.
Perhaps, however, Longinus would have censured “privily” as “undergrad uate humor” and false wit. (The pas sage is quoted from the edition by Robert Kellogg and Oliver Steele [New York: Odyssey Press, 1965]).
in Plato: in the Timaeus 65C-85C. Longin us has paraphrased and abridged heavily. We have put in quotation marks only those words which seem to be the ones Platlo himself used.
lungs: Aristotle rejects the explanation, with an apparent allusion to the Pla tonic passage, in The History of Ani mals 669al4 ff. The “leaping” and “throbbing” of the heart, says Aristotle, is restricted almost exclusively to man, for he is virtually the only animal who experiences both prospect and expecta lion.
channels in gardens: the Platonic image, cited here in a long series of direct and submerged quotations, turned up earlier, in ch. 13. Aristotle adopts the image and works it out at clinical length in The History of Animals 668a11 ff.
harsh: a word associated with the aus tere and rough style, especially that of Thucydides (see Russell for citation). “Harsh” modifies “style,” which in Greek (Lexis) covers both “style” and “diction.” Perhaps Longinus’ use of the word helps explains why Johnson cen- sured the “diction” of Lycidas as “harsh” (Lives of the Poets, Milton). For Longinus, the fourth of his five elements of sublimity (ch. 8) was “phrasing,” which consisted both of “the choice of words” and Lexis (diction and style).
undiluted: the word refers to the drink ing of wine undiluted by water; such wine naturally led quickly to intoxica tion or “dionysic revelry.” In view of the coming quotation, Longinus’ metaphor is apt; it is, perhaps, still another exemplification of the vice under discussion.
He says: from the Laws, 773C-D. We, too, would classify this as a conceit, and a grotesque one, for the image calls attention to itself. One may say of such passages what Johnson said of the Metaphysical poets (Lives of the Poets: Cowley):
In the mass of materials which ingenious absurdity has thrown together, genuine wit and useful knowledge may be sometimes found, buried perhaps in gross ness of expression, but useful to those who know their value; and such as, when they are expanded to perspicuity, and polished to elegance, may give luster to works that have more propriety though less copiousness of sentiment.
No passage in Johnson, or in the eight eenth century, so betrays the absorbed influence of Longinus as the opening pages describing the general character istics of the Metaphysical poets.
actually: The point is that Caecilius cannot find anything more than defects of this trivial sort and still has the nerve to rate Lysias higher than Plato. After such a splendid and sublime example of continuous metaphors, such as Longi nus just paraphrased in Plato’s anat omy of the human tabernacle, a defect like this is minor. And minor blem ishes, as Longinus keeps saying, and as he will discuss in the next three chap ters, are not enough to lessen the great ness of true sublimity.
prose account of Lysias: we do not know what work this was; Russell thinks it was a separate treatise. Photius (cited by Russell) summarizes what Caecilius said: that Lysias’ economy was not up to his originality.
two uncritical emotions: Russell re marks: “translators hedge here”; the phrase is difficult. The renderings: “blind impulses of passion” (Roberts); “mixing up two different feelings” (Prickard); “two uncritical passions” (Grube); “given way without discrimi nation to two emotions” (Russell); “two uncritical impulses” (Dorsch). The two emotions are made clear in what fol lows: love for himself and Lysias, hate for Plato. With “uncritical,” Longinus probably has in mind a pun on this uncritical critic Caecilius, who is prey to his emotions-the very subject he omitted from his “prose-piece” on the sublime.
love of contention: the only other time Longinus uses this expression is of Plato (13.4), whom he described as “too much a lover of contention” with Homer. But where this vice led Plato to success, it leads Caecilius to uncritical judgements.
set down as premises: Caecilius, says Longinus, had “uncritical emotions” for his real premises; on the basis of these, it appears, he undertook to cen sure Plato and exalt Lysias in the cus tomary critical terms of rhetoric. Lon ginus has, in his long parenthesis on figures, analyzed and exhibited the proper way to apply the technical ter minology; in specifying the “uncritical emotions” which were Caecilius’ real premises and principles, he is hinting at true ones. These he will take up in ch. 35. In between, as a second parenthesis, he puts a comparison of Hyperides and Demosthenes, in order to show how criticism based on the technical terms alone should be conducted. How strong ly he felt on the point can be seen in the sentence which concludes this chapter: “but the matter is not at all like this, not even close to it.”
pure: although Longinus is often a Platonist, he is not scrupulously so; purity is not, for him, a supreme virtue. See ch. 35.
