Chapter 39: Rhythm

The fifth of those constituents resulting in sublimity which we set forth at the beginning is still left for us, my best friend: what sort of thing arrangement is in speaking and writing. Having represented amply what I have to say on this subject in two works—as much as I could establish in theorizing—we may for the present put in only as much as provides a necessary basis, namely, that a fitting harmony is not only a kind of natural instrument for persuasion and pleasure in human beings, but it is also a wonderful one for achieving its effects with freedom and emotion.

You see, though, on the one hand, the flute instils certain kinds of emotion in the audience, so as to make it go out of its senses and become full of corybantic frenzy, and, placing in it a kind of rhythmic step, it makes it necessary for it to step to its beat and to assimilate itself (“even if it is altogether uncultivated”) to the melody, and though the sounds made by the lyre (heaven knows), while they express nothing by themselves, still, by the variation of their sonorities and by their beating against one another and by their mixing in concord, of ten cast, as you know, a wonderful spell—[3.] and surely these are images and bastard imitations of persua­ sion, not, as I said, legitimately bred works of human nature—do we not, on the other hand, take it that arrangement, being a kind of harmony of that language which grows naturally in human beings and fastens itself to our very soul, not just to our sense of hearing, exciting diversified ideas of words, conceptions, situations, finenesses, melodiousness, all coming into being at our creation and being reared up with us, and, simultaneously, by a varied mixing of sound, driving into the souls of those nearby the emotions which are stirring in the speaker, and over and over again making the hearers stand with him in communion, and making the greatnesses fit harmoniously together with the structuring of styles in speaking and writing, do we not then take it that by these very modes arrangement enchants us and at the same time on each occasion puts us in the mood for boldness and a sense of worth and sublimity and everything which it includes in itself, completely and really prevailing over our perceptiveness in every way? But even if it be madness to question things so agreed upon, experiment, you see, is an ample proof. 4. The concept which Demosthenes brings into his proposal is sublime—in my opinion—and is in reality wonderful:

This vote made the danger hanging over the city pass away like a cloud.

But this was voiced with a harmony not inferior to the perceptiveness. It was spoken, you see, generally in dactyllic rhythms, and these are what are most nobly bred and productive of greatness: for this reason we understand that the heroic measure is the finest meter. And the… since certainly, if you rearrange the words—wherever you want to—out of their peculiar places:

this vote, just like a cloud, made the danger hanging over the city pass away,
or if (heaven knows) you chop away one syllable only, made it pass away like a cloud,
you will understand how greatly a harmony resonates with sublimity.

You see, the very phrase “just like a cloud” begins with its first long rhythms, measured out with four metrical beats, but were one syllable taken out of the phrase—”like a cloud”—it at once de-heightens the greatness by the syn­ cope; furthermore, if you should stretch out the phrase:—made it pass away just as if a cloud—while it expresses the same thing, the same effect does not strike our ears, because the abruptness slips away with the lengthening of the long time- intervals and the sublimity slackens.

Commentary

The fifth: Longin us is about to analyze the last of his five constituents of sub­ limity (8.2), which, he said, included all the others: a synthesis which is charac­ terized by worth and loftiness. For all of his elaborate parentheses and seeming digressions and playfulness, he never loses sight of his outline, which lies beneath the flesh of his speech like a skeleton.

beginning: not, of course, at the begin­ ning of the book, but at the end of the second part of the speech, the exposi­ tion. This is followed by the demonstra­ tion or proof. An exposition has its own beginning, middle, and end (Julius Severianus, Halm, p. 357). The end of an exposition, of course, is to be subtly blended with the beginning of the next part (Fortunatianus, Halm, p. 113).

arrangement: elsewhere we have trans­ lated this (in Greek, synthesis) word as “the way things are set together,” a cir­ cumlocutory version which simply will not fit into the syntax of this chapter.

Since language is the only medium in which occur both artistic activity and the criticism of that activity, and since the Greeks were masters of both, we should expect to find in them the most minute analysis of the medium itself. Aristotle, both in the Poetics (1456bl9 ff.) and, more extensively, in his book On the Structure of Sentences, starts with the fundamental unit of language: the sound. His treatment is brief and clinical; for an aesthetic application of the elements we must tum to Dionysius of Halicarnassus, whose principal work is entitled On the Way to Set Words Together. In ch. 2, Dionysius says:

In the case of all the other arts which employ various materials and produce from them a compo­ site result—arts such as building, carpentry, embroidery, and the like—the faculties of composition are second in order of time to those of selection but are nevertheless of greater importance. Hence it must not be thought abnormal that the same principle obtains with respect to discourse. (tr. Rhys Roberts)

In ch. 6, Dionysius takes up the analogy of building and elaborates it. As the builder must study the nature and con­ dition of his materials, improve them where he can and work with them where he cannot, so must the writer do. The building-blocks of literature are words, but they are not literally atoms, for they can be altered by dialectical spellings, cases, tenses, moods, voices, genders, plurals, singulars, and so forth. These units must, after being modified according to their nature and the builder’s plans, be set together. The letters make the words, the words make phrases, the phrases make clauses, the clauses make sentences, and so forth. Dionysius devotes his book primarily to the first two items in this list: the letters and the words. Demetrius, in his book On the Structure of Sentences, deals with the larger units, the phrases, the clauses, and the sentences. Rhetoric as a whole was concerned with the entire group.

The procedure follows the pattern of Greek education (25):

When we are taught to read, first we learn the names of the letters, then their forms and their values, then in due course syllables and their modifications, and finally words and their properties. (tr. Rhys Roberts)

A subject so complicated deserves its own treatment, and as Longinus is about to say, he has dealt with it separ­ ately. What we have in the next four chapters is a quick survey of the subject: its basis and some examples: taken as a unit, chs. 39-43 are themselves a separ­ ate “speech” which follows the same four-part form as the larger “speech” in which it is embedded.

fitting harmony: the word “fitting harmony” is in English most closely associated with music, but it is far more generic in Greek; if any metaphorical sense be intended, it comes from carpen­ try. As Rhys Roberts observes (in the glossary to his edition of Dionysius’ On Composition), Greek carpenters pre­ ferred dovetailing to nails. To convey this multiple set of nuances, we have used the phrase “fitting harmony.”

with freedom: many editors emend “with freedom” to “greatness of ad­ dress,” but there is strong evidence that the ms. tradition is correct. In 21.2, Longinus compares clauses linked by connectives to runners whose limbs are shackled: the connectives take away the “freedom” of the sentence to “run” and destroy the effect of having been let loose from a catapult. Both “freedom” and “instrument” are conjoined here in the crux-passage as well.

Dionysius of Halicarnassus (On Composition 22) confirms both the literary use of “free” and its intimate connection with the arrangement of the “austere” style:

In its clauses it pursues…impres­ sive and stately rhythms and tries to make its clauses not parallel in structure or sound, nor slaves to a rigid sequence, but noble, bril­ liant, and free. It wishes them to suggest nature rather than art, and to stir emotion rather than to reflect character. (tr. Rhys Roberts; italics ours)

It is better to take these as separate quali­ ties which may be attained by an expert at arrangement.

You see: this sentence consumes about 190 words in Greek; partly as is normal and partly because of the compound words in the original, which often take several English words to render, there are about 300 words in the English ver­ sion. All translators thus far have ob­ served Russell’s dictum: “the complex must, of course, be broken up.” We have, however, endeavored to keep the original syntax. Longinus wishes to demonstrate the point he has just made about arrangement: as if in epideictic bravura, he casts his enormous sentence into the form of a question consisting of two balanced clauses, “on the one hand,” “on the other hand.” The two clauses draw a negative analogy between music and writing based on the fact that arrangement—composition—exists in both. Yet despite the parallel form of the two kinds of composition, there is an essential difference in the nature of the material used in each: the notes of music have no meaning in themselves, whereas words do.

The musical part of the analogy is itself twofold: first the flute, which pro­ duces single notes; then the lyre, which produces chords. The verbal part of the analogy takes these up in inverse order, so that we have a chiastic arrangement. So, too, the effects peculiar to each instrument have their chiastic analogue in the clause “on the other hand.” The sentence as a whole is a splendid expla­ nation and demonstration of Longin us’ argument—that arrangement is a kind of harmony plus meaning.

The next few notes comment on par­ ticular parts of the sentence.

corybantic. . .step: the flute was the instrument especially used in emotional and orgiastic rites, along with the drum: so Plato (Republic 398C ff.) and Aristo­ tle (Politics 134la21). “Corybantic” is not an honorific term in Longinus (see ch. 5), who uses it as a synonym for “Dionysiac” to show the kind of “gut­ response” which certain kinds of music evoke, e.g., contemporary “rock-and­ roll.”

The word “step” is to music what a foot is to meter, but the two dictions often overlap. About no part of Greek literary studies do we speak with less confidence and authority than the rela­ tionship between music and poetry: we cannot yet really scan much of Pindar and Simonides or choruses from Greek tragedy, and we have lost virtually all of Greek music, although some highly technical discussions of both meter and musical theory have survived. Analysis of Longinus’ remarks in the next five chapters must, then, be highly tentative. We do know, however, that certain rhythms used in speech-writing were so well known that audiences could and did predict them: in ch. 41, for example, Longinus says that audiences some­ times stamped their feet, like a chorus, to keep step with the predictable rhythm used by the orator.

“Step” also has a technical meaning in rhetoric: a clause which connects the protasis and apodosis in an introduc­ tion. Since Longinus is dealing with arrangement, which includes all the other elements that make for sublimity, and since his long sentence is a recapitu­ lation from start to finish of his whole work, and since this chapter is itself a miniature speech with all its parts, he may be playing on this sense of the word.

assimilate: the substantival form of the word is used by Plato to indicate man’s supreme aim: to become similar to God (Theaetetus l 76B). In both Plato and later Greek rhetorical theory the word is a generic term denoting “similitude” or “likeness”; its species are numerous (e.g., parable, likeness, example, etc.). Longin us here is referring to the identifi­ cation made by those listening to orgi­ astic music between themselves and the basic animal rhythms.

“even if it is altogether uncultivated”: a famous quotation from Euripides (Sthenoboea—a lost play—fr. 663, Nauck); Aristophanes, Plato, and Plu­ tarch all cite it (see Russell’s note for the citations). Longinus starts with the lowest sense of rhythm in man, that which is, literally, “without music.” As usual, he exploits even what Russell calls a “very hackneyed quotation in­ deed” in his own way, for he is punning on the root of the word, which refers both to music and the Muses (see ch. 38 for a similar pun). Orgiastic music is, of course, “uncultivated.”

express...by themselves: musical notes have no “meaning,” either naturally or by convention, whether taken separ­ ately or in chords. Words, on the other hand, do have meaning, at least by con­ vention, as Aristotle shows in On the Structure of Sentences (16c), where he says that they are “symbols” of the emo­ tions common in the human soul. In the Rhetoric (l404a2I), he says that words are imitations, since the voice is the most imitative of all man’s parts. The lyre is a “step” above the flute, for it can strike chords as well as single notes and achieve a kind of arrangement and “variation”; hence it is closer to speeches and writings, to logos. But it lacks the essential element of meaning and hence is only a “spell.”

spell: because “spells” are verbal, Lon­ ginus can use the word with singular aptness here as his brief hierarchy of musical instruments approaches closer and closer to the power of language. Music for the Greeks was a form of imitation: see Aristotle (Poetics 1447al5 ff.), who says that most music for the flute and the lyre is imitative, although it employs only rhythm and fitting harmony. It conspicuously lacks speech.

persuasion: Longinus uses the word “persuasion” as his symbol for the tele­ ological order of the cosmos: man’s purpose is to imitate the hierarchical order of the heavens by means of the political institutions which man estab­ lishes on earth, for such is his true “assimilation” to the gods (see above and ch. 35). Persuasion operates by speech, as the famous logos-hymn of Isocrates expressed and as Isocrates re­ stated with comparable eloquence in his Panegyric (47-50): speech is what distinguishes man from the rest of the animals; liberal education is manifest most conspicuously in speech; Athens has become the teacher of logos to the rest of Greece, and made the name “Greek” refer not to a race but to intelli­ gence and perceptiveness. What Isa­ crates says here is what all Greek culture says, explicitly or implicitly, and his words are still the most magnificent phrasing ever given to the idea which is the essence of western civilization. Only by logos can we persuade ourselves and others to action.

For Isocrates, politics was the essen­ tial and highest mode of man’s being; therefore he set himself to influencing directly the politics of Greece. Plato and Aristotle, although concerned vitally with the theory of politics, made either no direct attempts to influence it or abortive ones. It is no accident that Longinus’ hero-the hero of all rhetor­ ical theorists-is Demosthenes, who even more than Isocrates directly affected political life, for he delivered his own speeches, in which he showed perfect mastery of political logos, whereas Isa­ crates only taught others how to deliver speeches.

Speech, then, is at once the product of nature, the distinguishing characteristic of human nature, and the means by which the essence of human nature­ the soul-is moved. Music is mimetic but not truly so, for nature is a cosmos with order and meaning; that order and that meaning cannot be imitated by music.

communion: a favorite word among the neo-Platonists (LSJ). Longinus is referring to that sense of unity which comes over a crowd when a great orator speaks.

madness: the huge sentence preceding is now over; it is almost an incredible joke for Longinus to speak of the “madness of going through this difficult passage,” especially since the principles and premises are “agreed upon.” Read­ ers who have struggled through our translation will be in a better position both to appreciate the joke and to sym­ pathize with Terentianus.

his proposal: the reference is to a speech by Demosthenes (On the Crown 188), in which Athens, alarmed by Philip’s steady advance, voted to prepare for war and to make an alliance with Thebes. Russell remarks that the text is spurious here. The passage is nevertheless a splendid example of Longinus’ theory about dramatic circumstance.

heroic measure: i.e., the hexameter, the “stateliest measure ever wielded by the lips of man,” as Tennyson describes it in his poem To Virgil. He is, of course, following Aristotle, who uses the same. words of it in the Poetics ( l459b34): “the heroic is the stateliest and most swelling of the meters.” Tennyson is saying, then, that Virgil know how to “wield” this measure, not that his hexameters were statelier than Homer’s.

And the: there is a small lacuna of sev­ eral words.

their peculiar places: Longinus does not quote his source exactly. It is un­ likely, since we are not likely ever to know how ancient Greek was pro­ nounced, that we can appreciate the point that Longinus makes here and in the rest of the chapter, except by rough analogies with English. Here, for ex­ ample, is a sentence from William Butler Yeats’ musical prose, in which he describes how he came to write his poem The Lake Isle of Innisfree:

From the sudden remembrance came my poem Innisfree, my first lyric with anything in its rhythm of my own music.
from The Trembling of a Veil

If we transfer the closing phrase “of my own music,” with its three long vowels in a row to its more idiomatic position, before the three short vowels of “in its rhythm,” we will destroy the music of the passage and, to that extent, lessen the impact of the sense. Instead of closing with a sequence of long vowels, the sentence will end with four short vowels.

Or, to take another example:

I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and seeks her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immor­ tal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.
Milton, Areopagitica

If we transfer the- closing five words anywhere else in the sentence, once again we destroy the arrangement.

you will understand: a few modern examples will help make this point dramatically clear. Compare Burns’ line 0 my love’s like a red,’ red rose, with this re-writing of it:

My love is like a red, red rose.

In the first, the rhythm makes us.empha­ size “love” and “red, red rose”; in the second, the word “like” receives an equal emphasis and thus directs the attention away from the poet’s feeling for the girl lo the comparison itself. Or, leave the word “the” out of the second verse of Psalm 23 (KJV):

He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.

If you do, the metrical balance of “in green pastures” and “the still waters” will be destroyed.

de-heightens...syncope: the verb “de­ heighten” means originally in Greek “to cut off the prow or beak of a ship”; by extension it means “to mutilate by culling off the hands and feet,” “to amputate.” Longinus uses it here partly for its own punning sense and partly for the pun which he is preparing (see next note). The word “syncope” is transliter­ ated from the Greek, “a cutting up into small pieces”; then, by extension, “a culling off.” In grammar, both Greek and English, it signifies a reduction in the number of syllables in a word by cutting out one or more letters, e.g., “over” lo “o’er.” Compare the English derivative “syncopation” in music.

We may take Patrick Henry’s famous saying, “Give me liberty or give me death”; insert the word “my” before “liberty” or “death” and see how the rhythm and the tone are destroyed. Or add “unto” after “like” in the opening sentence of Bacon’s essay Of Suspicion:

Suspicions amongst thoughts are like bats amongst birds…

Such an addition destroys the crispness and abruptness both of the comparison itself and of the rhythm produced by the four monosyllables “thoughts are like bats”; it lessens the impact of the caesu­ ral effect of the two cola: “suspicions amongst thoughts” and “are like bats amongst birds”; it reduces the power of the alliteration “bats” and “birds,” which contributes to the abrupt rhythm of the sentence; and it diminishes the stress produced by the contrasting poly­ syllable “suspicions” and the monosyl­ lable “bats” by making the voice rise on “like unto.” Compare the two versions of Bums’ line in the preceding note.

abruptness… sublimity: the set of word­ plays which began with “steps long” reaches it climax in the closing words of the paragraph. In the word “abrupt­ ness,” Longin us recalls his earlier use of the term (12.4), where he was compar­ ing Demosthenesand Cicero. Both there and here the word is closely connected with “sublimity” and ascribed to Dem­ osthenes. It is possible, here in ch. 39, to take “abruptness” as a noun and the subject of the sentence (as we have construed it) or as an adjective modify­ ing “sublimity.” If construed thesecond way, the passage would read:

the abrupt sublimity slips away with the lengthening of the long time intervals and slackens.

The root of the Greek word “abrupt” is one of several Greek verbs for “cut”; hence the phrase could be translated “the cut-off” or “chopped-off sublim­ ity.” Were it not for the pejorative asso­ ciations of the word, English “choppy” could be used.

The word “length” is used techni­ cally in prosody to signify a long sylla­ ble; such long syllables contributed to solemnity and impressiveness and sub­ limity, as both Dionysius of Halicar­ nassus (On Composition 17) and Demetrius (183) point out.