Chapter 33: Whether Excellence with Faults is Better than Faultless Mediocrity

Come, let us take a kind of prose-writer who is in reality pure and without reproof. Is it not worthwhile to investigate this problem in general terms-whether poems and speeches and writings which have greatness in some parts but are thoroughly mistaken in others are ever better than those which are moderate in correctness though everywhere sound and faultless? And, too (heaven knows), should the more numerous excellences in speeches and writings justifiably carry off first prizes or the greater ones? You see, these speculations belong to the subject of the sublime, and they ought to have a critical decision. 2. I know that transcendentally great natures are least pure-you see, what is precise in every detail runs the risk of pettiness, but in greatness, as in the very rich, there must actually be a kind of negligence. Perhaps it may even be necessary that though low and middle natures, because they run no risks and never commit themselves to the heights, remain for the most part without mistakes and safer, great things, liable to being unsafe, for this very reason come to greatness.

3. But, in fact, I am not ignorant of this second point, that by nature everything human is recognized more because of what is inferior in it, and that while the memory of mistakes is never effaced, the memory of fine things flows swiftly away. 4. And I myself have cited no few mistakes even in Homer and many others of the greatest writers, and although I am least of all satisfied with their stumblings, calling them not voluntary mistakes but rather oversights to which the writers were carried on account of careless­ ness, unknowingly, as it happened, and somehow at random, and because of the greatness of their natures, nevertheless I take it that the greater elements responsible for excellence over and over again win the vote for first prize, even if they are not on the same level in all points, because of their very greatness of mind-if not for the other reason. Surely, of course, Apollonius of Rhodes, in the Argonautica, is also without fault, and Theocritus in his pastorals (except for some extraneous material) comes out most luckily. Now wouldn’t you rather be Homer than Apollonius? 5. And what of this? Eratosthenes in his Erigone—a blameless little poem in all its parts—is he indeed a greater poet than Archilochus, who sweeps many things along in disorder, with his outburst of daemonic spirit, so hard to bring under rule? And what of this? In lyric poetry would you choose to be Bacchylides rather than Pindar, and in tragedy Ion of Chios rather than (heaven knows) Sophocles?—since Bacchylides and Ion are without fault and their works are everywhere smooth and finely written, while there are times when Pindar and Sophocles flame up impulsively and quench themselves irrationally and collapse most unluckily. Would any man in his senses esteem all of Ion’s drama, put together in the same place, as equal to one drama, the Oedipus?

Commentary

In reality: Longinus does not come to this unblemished author until c.h 34. The delay in naming him is partly rhetorical strategy, partly a philosophic need to discuss the general proposition before the particular example.

Caecilius himself found fault with the disposition of Lysias; Longinus will go him one better by taking Hyperides as his exemplar of the faultless style.

Perhaps the jokes that Longinus makes about Archilochus and his anomy (“rulelessness”) are a glancing reminder of Caecilius’ verdict on the “economy” of Lysias. If so, Longinus assumes a fairly great familiarity with the writings of Caecilius, who does appear often in Spengel’s index as an authority quoted by later rhetoricians.

correctness: as an ideal, ”correctness” is Augustan—Roman and English: the young Alexander Pope, seeking guidance from William Walsh, who had in turn sought guidance as a fledgling poet from Dryden, received this advice from Walsh, which may well stand as the paradigm of eighteenth century poetics (Pope’ account is in James M. Osborn’s edition of Joseph Spence, Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters of Books and Men [Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1968] 73):

He [Walsh] used to encourage me much, and used tell me, that there was one way left to excelling: for though we had several great poets, we never had one great poet that was correct; and he desired to make that my study and aim.

Critics in the eighteenth century recognized, of course, the relationship between correctness and genius. Addison, for example, in Spectator 160, discusses men of “natural” genius, “who by the mere strength of natural parts, and without any assistance of art of learning, have produced works that were the delight of their own times and the wonder of posterity.” Homer and the Bible, he says, “very much failed in, or, if you will… were much above the nicety and correctness of the moderns.” He gives as examples of such natural genius Pindar and Shakespeare. We need not, of course, take Addison’s examples literally: “without any assistance of art or learning” applies to neither author. Of Shakespeare, however, we may at least say what Jonson said, that his Greek and Latin training were small in comparison to the almost technical proficiency which Jonson owned.

Addison then distinguishes—not necessarily in order of greatness—a second class of authors, who “formed themselves by rules and submitted the greatness of their natural talents to the corrections and restraints of art.” Among these he includes Plato, Aristotle, Vir­ gil, Cicero, Bacon, and Milton.

excellences: needless to say, the ancient rhetorical critics had a virtual “table” of excellences, and the lesser critics appar­ ently counted these up in the way nine­ teenth century German editors counted manuscripts.

For Aristotle (Rhetoric l 404bl), there is one primary excellence: lucidity (pro­ vided, of course, that the style is appro­ priate—neither too high nor too low­ to the subject). Later he takes up other virtues of good prose (Rhetoric 1407a 19 ff.). The first excellence is to write “good, pure Greek,” and this is done by

1. accurate use of connectives and particles
   1. the use of normal words, ones not large and general or vague
   2. avoidance of ambiguous terms
   3. accuracy in gender
   4. accuracy in number
2. The second excellence is “swelling,” a quality attainable by six means:
   1. descriptions instead of technical terms (i.e., periphrasis)
   2. use of metaphors and epithets, pro­ vided that they are not too poetical
   3. use of the plural for singular
   4. repetition of the definite article with each word
   5. asyndeton and polysyndeton
   6. allusion by means of negation, i.e., stating qualities not possessed by something
3. The third excellence of style is propri­ ety, that is, a proportioning of language to theme and speaker. The language should be suitable to the topic, charac­ teristic of the persona.
4. And the fourth excellence is rhythm: the style should be neither poetical nor unrhythmical.

These four generic excellences were, apparently, expanded and developed by Aristotle’s pupil Theophrastus; by the time of the later rhetorical critics, e.g., Dionysius of Halicarnassus, the list is divided into two parts: the first three, which are the excellence and the remain­ ing “epithetic” ones:

• good pure Greek
• lucidity
• conciseness
• vivid clarity
• characterization
• emotion
• strength
• persuasion
• pleasing touches
• greatness and wonder
• propriety

For Aristotle many of these would be classified as species under one on his four general excellences.

Although Longinus deals with all of these, he does so as a humanist, not as a tabulator.

pettiness...negligence: as Russell ob­ serves, the notion is the ideal of Greek social structure. Aristotle’s picture of the magnanimous man, in the Nicoma­ chean Ethics, or such a character as the urban and urbane father in Menander’s Dyscolus represent the ideal in different genres. For its comic counterpart, we may compare Petronius’ character of Trimalchio and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s picture of Jay Gatsby. Pope remarks on the charm of Horace’s “graceful negli­ gence” (Essay on Criticism 11.653).

low and middle natures: Longinus seems to be alluding, in a kind of joke, to the notion of the three styles: low, middle, great.

great things...come to be greatness: the passage seems to be a submerged allu­ sion to Plato (Republic 6.497D), and behind it lies the perennial conflict of two Greek ideals: always to excel and be above others (Iliad 6.208) versus the ideal of the mean, the via media, the middle and moderate way. Longinus will seek to escape this conflict between aesthetic and moral philosophy by ana­ lyzing the nature of man: see ch. 35 and the notes there. Plato is a case in point for Longinus: Platonic ethics do not stress any Achillean ideal of excellence, and yet Plato himself, by competing with Homer, achieved great excellence and so showed the way. The parallel passage from Dionysius of Halicarnas­ sus, cited by Russell (Letter to Pom­ peius 2) uses many of the same ideas and much the same language: Dionysius argues that Plato’s mistakes are a kind of correctness.

everything human: the idea, of course, is a commonplace: Russell quotes Cicero (The Orator 1.29): “nothing is so marked or so stable in perpetual memory as that in which you do something wrong.” We may append Marc Antony’s obser­ vation (Julius Caesar III.ii):

The evil that men do lives after them,
The good is oft interred with their bones.

The current chapter begins with two questions, corollary but distinct, which Longinus claims are the proper pro­ vince of criticism:

1. should greatness in literature, even when flawed, be considered better than what is moderate in felicities but uniformly correct?
2. should we give the prize to the larger number of felicities or to the greater ones?

For the rest of ch. 33, Longinus pro­ ceeds to answer question #1; question #2 he reserves for ch. 34. Hence, when he reaches his conclusion in the passage now under analysis, he maintains that flawed greatness is better than mere uni­ form perfection on a lower level of intensity, and that greatness, even though flawed, should receive the first prize simply because it comes from a “great nature”—”even if not for the other reason,” i.e., even if not on the principle that the greater felicities should win the first prize rather than the greater number. Throughout ch. 33, the emphasis is on nature and the natural alliance of literary greatness to natural sources. He is working his way up to the grand assertion of nature’s superiority, and the sanction it gives to human nature that imitates it, in ch. 35.

the other reason: i.e., that the greater excellences should win the first prize rather than the greater number.

Apollonius of Rhodes… also: the word “also” shows how carefully Longinus has formulated his argument: at the beginning of the chapter he had said that he was going to discuss a really faultless prose-writer; he then takes up the general proposition—whether faultless mediocrity or flawed greatness be superior—in the course of which he introduces various writers as examples. The first example listed is a poet: hence the word “also,” for the principle enunciated will apply to both poetry and prose, although Longinus is, in general, more concerned with prose. For him, as for Quintilian, poetry is primar­ ily useful as a means of educating the orator.

Apollonius of Rhodes was a poet, critic, and rhetorician. He flourished in the early second century bce, especially at Rhodes (where Cicero later studied). Originally a pupil of Callimachus—the T. S. Eliot of antiquity—he later broke with the elaborate, ornate, allusive, and symbolic poetry of his master and tried to re-create epic. He became librarian at Alexandria, the great scholarly center of antiquity. His epic, unfinished, dealt with Jason and Medea and the voyage of the Argonauts; although Homeric in intent and style and diction, it was strongly influenced by Euripides and by later theories of rhetoric, and in turn influenced Virgil, particularly in the exploitation of emotion and passionate love. It was of his attempted epic that his old teacher Callimachus coined the famous epigram, mega biblion, mega kakon: a big book is a big evil. Callima­ chus spawned a school of poets who specialized in the cameo epic or epyl­ lion. Russell cites Quintilian’s judg­ ment on Apollonius’ poetry (20.2.54): “a work not to be despised because of a certain mediocrity.”

pastorals...Theocritus: the word for “pastoral” is “bucolic,” not “eclogue,” a word which, in Longinus, refers to the “selection of words.” Theocritus also writes poems which are not pastoral, and-in some poems­ has prefatory sections which are ad­ dressed to contemporaries, e.g., his med­ ical friend in Idylls 11 and 13. Longinus, then, must be referring to those places in the pastoral poems where Theocritus drops his bucolic personae and speaks in his own right. It was necessary for him to specify these exceptions, for oth­ erwise critics who were pro-Caecilius could have complained that he had not chosen faultless examples, as he claimed lo be doing at the beginning of the chapter and as he repeals here.

Theocritus flourished in the third century bce he is most closely asso­ ciated with Sicily, where he seems to have invented the genre known as “pas­ toral.” These bucolilc idylls are dra­ matic and mimetic versions of ordinary life, especially among country people, made perfect by the usual Greek habit of idealization. Of course, the subject mat­ ter itself precluded situations which would allow for sublimity: pastoral stresses characterization and the weaker emotions.

Eratosthenes in his Erigone: the poem survives only in fragments; it is aetio­ logical in nature, that is, it seeks to explain some ancient customs by means of a versified myth laden with recondite allusions and fraught with rare, difficult, and hghly “poetical” words, a la Callimachus or some of Catullus’ longer poems. The genre, which has no real counterpart in English poetry, was the favorite form for the Alexandrian poets, of whom Eratosthenes was one. Head of the library at Alexandria, Eratosthenes was a polymath: he wrote on astron­ omy, geography, geometry, philosophy, history, and grammar-a rich set of resources for his recondite verse. None of his work survives except in frag­ ments. His nicknames were “Beta” and “Pentathlos” because, his enemies said, he was never “Alpha” (i.e., first) in anything.

Archilochus: Archilochus, like all the poets whom Longinus praises in this paragraph, lived in the “great” period of Greek literature, that is the fifth cen­ tury B.C. and earlier; those whom he censures are almost all Alexandrian poets. It is a tribute to Longinus’ taste that the world has seen fit to agree with him unanimously, a confirmation of his “test of time.” Only fragments of Archilochus (seventh century bce sur­ vive; he was famous for his invectives and for his dithyrambs, poems at least in part improvised under the inspira­ tion of Dionysus or his surrogate, wine.

rule: Longinus uses this word only here (except for two instances where he is referring to titles of books-Plato’s Laws in 29.1 and the Pentateuch in 9.9). His use corresponds exactly with Dem­ osthenes’ observation—a favorite citation in Hermogenes—that “rule” (no­ mos in Greek) is common and arranged (i.e., orderly) and the same for all men, whereas nature is unarranged (i.e., not orderly) and individual. The notion, which is traceable to Aristotle and Theo­ phrastus, simultaneously confirms and denies Longinus’ theory of nature as expressed in ch. 2—that nature is at once beyond human “rule” and yet a “rule” unto herself. The word nomos is best translated as “rule,” a word which in English covers both man-made con­ ventions and “unwritten laws,” e.g., the length of a football field and the rule that one may not change the rules in the middle of the game. Awareness of this overlapping meaning of nomos makes the famous line of Pindar’s clear: “Nomos” is the king of all. For the history of the word “nomos,” see Mar­ tin Ostwald, Nomos and the Begin­ nings of Athenian Democracy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969).

Bacchylides: until the end of the nine­ teen th century only fragments of Bacchylides survived; then a papyrus containing many of his complete poems was discovered. He lived in the fifth cen­ tury bc and was a nephew of Simon­ ides, one of the greatest of Greek lyric poets. Simonides was noted for his chis­ eled control of emotion and grandeur; in his nephew the chiseled emotion remained but the grandeur was lost. Both poets were rivals of Pindar. Lon­ ginus praised Simonides earlier (15.7); perhaps he loads his case a little here by using Bacchylides as his example.

Pindar: it is impossible to convey any sense of Pindar’s greatness in transla­ tion or in criticism. Although only one kind of his poems survives in any completion—his victory odes on Olympic athletes—even in his strange cryptic and gnomic majesty, his dense and original imagery, his extra­ ordinary power to invest the simplest situation or thought with significant blaze and shine vividly. Numerous English poets from Cowley on have tried to imitate or translate him; all have ended in the kind of language which Longinus censures in ch. 3. He lived in the early fifth century bce, was a contemporary of Aeschylus, whom he strongly resembles, was aristocratic in taste and politics: Plato admired him. Pindar’s Greek is extremely difficult and he violates, at one time or another,every rule for “excellence” in literary style.

Dionysius of Halicarnassus groups Pindar with Empedocles, Aeschylus, Thucydides, and Antiphone (On Com­ position 22) and summarizes the “aus­ tere” style which such writers exemplify as: diverse in figures, sparing of connec­ tives, disdainful of transitions, of a great nature, outspoken, without prettiness, and having an archaic patina.

Ion of Chios: a tragedian of mid fifth century, bce; none of his work survives except in fragments. He also wrote prose works on the history and nature of tragedy.

smooth: the word is associated with the middle of the so-called three styles; Aris­ totle used the word to describe the hair­ less smoothness of spiders; by extension it came to denote what is dainty, neat, subtle. Even when classical sculpture displays tension and agony, as in the famous statue of Laocoon, the medium itself imposes a restraint and smooth­ ness.

As with style, so with the nature of the artist; the idea is perhaps the origin of Buffon’s famous dictum, “The style is the man,” although the idea can also be traced back through several other ancient sources as well, e.g.:

• Plato (Republic 400D) says that the “turn of style… follows the character of the soul.”
• Demetrius (295): “every man imi­ tates himself with pleasure.”
• Dionysius of Halicarnassus (Roman Antiquities 1.1): “Words are the likeness of the soul.”
• Philostratus, Life of Apollonius (3.41): of a piece of writing “ar­ ranged impressively and in accor­ dance with the ring of the man.”

The notion appears in Burton’s Anat­ omy of Melancholy (The prefatory Democritus to the Reader): “It is most true, stylus virum arguit—our style betrays us.”

Sophocles: we are not used to seeing Sophocles classified as a rough genius, full of ups and downs, although Plu­ tarch too comments on his unevenness (On Listening to Lectures 45b).

flame up: Longinus’ use of fire-imagery recalls his comparison of Demosthenes and Cicero (ch. 12) and looks forward both to the comparison of Demosthenes and Hyperides (the truly faultless prose­ writer promised at the beginning of the chapter) and to the famous image of Mt. Aetna.

the Oedipus: like Aristotle, and the world in general, Longinus ranks the Oedipus Rex as the greatest of tragedies.