Chapter 10: Selection

Come, now, let us see whether we have the other faculty capable of making speeches and writings sublime. Now, then, since in all things there are certain parts which are by nature fundamentally in session together with their material, we must come to be capable over and over again (and this capacity is responsible for sublimity) [1] of selecting from all that brings itself out to our attention what is just right and [2] of setting it together soas to make a unity, a kind of body. You see, the onedriveson the audience by the selection of the points to be taken up, the other by the densification of what has been selected. Sappho, for example, on each occasion takes from the attendant circumstances of life and from truth itself the emotional experiences which accompany erotically passionate mad­ ness. And where does she show her excellence? Where she is powerful at selecting the high points of these emotional experiences and their hypertensed moments and binds them with and to each other.

Seems to me that man to the gods is equal Who sits across from you near and hears Your sweet voice,
Laughter of love. ‘Tis a cause to flutter Heart within rib-cage; should I merely Behold you, the voice within me sounds No longer.
Yet, the tongue is broken; a gentle fire Runs beneath my flesh in a rush; seeing Leaves my eyes, my ears echo in a boom Of humming.
Sweat upon me pours, as a tremble seizes me
All over; I seem wanner than the pale green grass, To be near dying, lost in
A weakness.
All must be endured, since as a wretch…

Don’t you wonder at how, under the same emotional experience, she seeks out soul and body, hearing and tongue, sight and color, all departing as if they were someone else’s, and throughout the contrasts she simultane­ ously burns with cold and speaks irrational sense (you see, she is either frightened of death or within a little of being dead), so that in her appears not one kind but an intersection of emotions? Though all such things come to lovers, her taking the high points and putting them together into the same emotional experience have worked up the conspicuous quality of the poem. And this, I take it, is the same way in which the poet [Homer] chooses the most difficult moments of winter storms. 4. Though the poet of the Arimaspeia takes it that these lines are powerful:

This is a great and wondrous thing to our minds:
Men who dwell upon the watery ocean, away from dry\ land.
Wretched, they have onerous duties;
Holding their eyes towards the stars, they bend their hands to the ocean;
Holding their hands to the gods very often,
Making invocations as their minds are thrown to misery.

I take it as clear to everybody that what is said has more of the flowery than of the fearful. 5. How does Homer do it? One passage, you see, out of many, may be chosen:

He fell upon them just as a wave falls down on a swift ship,
Fierce, wind-nursed by masses of air, and the vessel is Hidden in ocean’s froth as an awful blast of a windstorm Roars on her high mast, and all her sailors quaking in spirit,
Desperate; out-of-under death they are barely carried.

6. Aratus also tried his hand at transferring this same thing: Barely he wards off death with a plank.

Notwithstanding this, he has made it petty and smooth rather than fright­ ening; he has gone beyond the limit of the danger by saying, “A plank wards off Hades.” Now, then, it does “ward off.” But the poet [Homer] never goes beyond the limit of what is powerful, but he gives a likeness of men just barely not killed by every wave. And in fact he made it necessary for prepositions which should not be set together to be set together, against nature, and he forced together with each other the words “out-of-under death,” torturing the verse into being similar to the emotion which befell the men; and by the constriction of the verse he has molded the emotion toa high pitch and has almost stamped his own idiom for danger into a form for his style: “they are brought out-of-under death.” 7. Not otherwise has Archilochus written about a shipwreck and Demosthenes in the announce­ ment [to the Athenians of their defeat], where he says: “It was, you know, evening “They purified, one might say, the best pieces and set them one on another according to their excellence, arranging throughout in the middle nothing bombastic or frigid or collegian. For these defects spoil the whole structure, just as the arrangement of great objects forms gaps or spaces when the parts are joined and loosely attached to each other.

Commentary

the other faculty: Longinus here uses the Greek word which means “the other of two.” Such a fine use reveals the extraordinary control which Longinus had over his material and organization; he is referring to his fivefold, two-part division in the first paragraph of ch. 8. There he had said that two sources of sublimity arose from nature: 1) a solid thrust of conception; 2) intense and enthusiastic emotion. The first of these was dealt with in ch. 9; now the second is taken up in the subsequent chapter, 10. Hence Longinus uses the word meaning “the other of two.”

in session together: From the Greek we derive the English word “sanhedrin”; it means literally “to sit together,” i.e., to hold a conference or meeting. By exten­ sion it refers to a set of unified elements. The word is a good example of a prob­ lem which plagues translators: was the metaphor contained in the root of this word petrified for Longinus or was he aware of it? Because Longinus likes puns and plays on words, and because he had an acute sense of distinctions in the meanings of compounds, we have assumed, as far as possible, that he was conscious of the root-meaning of the words which he chose, even at the risk of making him more conscious than he may have been. Good writers coming at the end of a great cultural period tend to have a highly developed sense of ety­ mology, although not all cultures pos­ sess the typographic devices to show that sense, such as we see in the follow­ ing passage from Thoreau (Walden, ch. I, ad fin.):

Not long since I was present at the auction of a deacon’s effects, for his life had not been ineffectual … as usual, a great proportion was trumpery which had begun to accumulate in his father’s day. Among the rest was a dried tape­ worm. And now, after lying half a century in his garret and other dust holes, these things were not burned; instead of a bonfire, or purifying destruction of them, there was an auction, or increas­ ing or them.

See also Appendix B, “Metaphor in Longin us.”

selecting: Longin us holds that the very material from which the artist made a selection had its own organic whole­ ness; we may contrast this view with that implied, say, in Johnson’s descrip­ tion of the artist’s work (Rambler 23):

uniting heterogeneous ideas, di­ gesting independent hints, and collecting into one point the sev­ eral rays of borrowed lights emit­ ted often with contrary directions.

the one ... the other: “The one” refers to the power of selection, discussed in the opening sentence; “the other” refers to “setting things together.” The word “densification” has three main senses: I) scientific: of meteorological phenomena, like clouds and ice; a subsidiary medical use denotes the beating of the pulse; 2) military: close order, especially of the phalanx; 3) logical and rhetorical: of thought or style which is condensed, tight, compact. As the verb “drives on” has both military and medical connota­ tions, it is not clear which image Lon­ ginus intends. The word “intersection,” used below also, has both medical and military meanings; consequently it cannot be used to determine the image.

Sappho, for example: Had Longinus done nothing more than quote this poem, we should be indebted to him, for it is the only manuscript of the poem we have, and one of only two extensive quotations from Sappho preserved for us. Its fame in antiquity was great: Catullus translated it (51), Plutarch alludes to it three times. The quotation in the Greek manuscript is written out as if it were prose, as are the other poeti­ cal quotations. Although we have trans­ lated the last line, the sense can only be approximate, since the text is corrupt here. Any wordiness which the reader finds in the translation comes from the need to convey the dramatic situation: often a single Greek word must be trans­ lated by a phrase. The poetess is watch­ ing a tête-à-tête between a girl whom she loves and a young man; the girl has called the young man to her and made him sit down in front of her.

under the same emotional experience: The phrase refers to the unity of repres­ entation achieved by Sappho from her selection of details: starting with mate­ rial which consisted of parts, some of which had a fundamental relationship to the material, Sappho selected those parts which had two characteristics: one, an everyday and general universal­ ity; two, the power to make themselves conspicuous. These she assembled into a whole that was purer and more intense than the whole made by the parts in their relationship to the original mate­ rial. Longinus has no noun for his phrase “under the same”; some critics, e.g., Russell, supply “moment,” but we have preferred “emotional experience.”

intersection: The Greek word, from which we derive “Synod,” is also used of two hostile armies meeting, of national assemblies, of a constriction in the throat, of an astronomical conjunction. The root is the word for “road, way,” to which has been added the prefix “with, together.” It suggests a place where roads come together and where many people congregate. Since Sappho com­ bines disparate senses and even opposite sensations, the word is singularly apt; it picks up the image of a joint “session” used above.

the Arimaspeia: Traditionally ascribed to Aristeas of Proconesus, whom Hero­ dotus places in the seventh century. Some scholars have believed these lines really to have been written in a much later period; see Russell for a summary of the arguments. Aristeas disappeared from his hometown for seven years; when he returned, he claimed to have traveled in Siberia and to the land of the Hyperboreans. As Russell observes, the lines quoted by Longinus really des­ cribe not a storm but the “permanent discomforts” of those who sail on the seas. Ancient writers are full of an admiring and awful horror of sailing.

flowery: The Greek word is used of flowers, froth or scum on the sea, and choice passages in literature (it is one of the roots of our word “anthology”); Longin us is probably playing with all these meanings, for in comparison to Homer’s storm he finds the poem of Aristeas no more than some whitecaps.

one passage: Iliad 15-624-28. The pas­ sage is one of two successive images.for Hector as he attacks the Greek camp; in the one following, he is compared to a lion. In the first, the Greeks are com­ pared, like Oedipus in Sophocles (Oedipus at Colonus 1211-48), to a crag on which the sea-waters break in vain. Like all the passages quoted from Homer, this one gains from a know­ ledge of the context.

Aratus: Aratus (third century B.C.) wrote an astronomical poem entitled Phenomena; it was highly popular in antiquity; Cicero, among others, translated it, and there are many ancient commentaries. The line quoted by Lon­ gin us is 299.

likeness: The Greek word is “icon,” from which we get our word “icono­ graphy.” Aristotle simply classifies icon, by which he means what we call a simile, as a metaphor differing in the way it is introduced (Rhetoric 1410b17).

form: A grammatical pun, and one which Longinus is fond of (e.g., 12.2). IL is duplicable in English, for the Greek word, like the English “form,” has many senses. Originally the Greek word means “to blow, strike”; then lo “im­ print”; then “impression”; then “mould” or “matrix” or “form”; then “exact replica”; then “form” in general, and in particular, a grammatical form: the word is used by Plato to mean “archetypal form,” as in Longinus 13.1. The root of the Greek of the word here translated “idiom” refers to that which is private, peculiar, personal. Longinus says that Homer has taken his private idiom and made it into a public (gram­ matical) form.

Archilochus: A Greek poet of the eighth and seventh centuries B.C.; his work survives only in fragments. We do not know just what passage Longinus al­ ludes to.

“It was, we know, evening “:The passage was so well known that Longi­ nus could simply quote the opening words. Demosthenes (On the Crown 18.169) describes the effect on Athens of news that Philip had seized Elateia. The Greek rhetorician Hermogenes, in his book On Ideas (Spengel 11.349), cites this passage and one also from the poet Archilochus in discussing the effect of trochaic rhythms and short clauses, effects which, he says, are also common in tragedy. Even in translation, Demos­ thenes’ alternation of short and longer sentences and clauses is noticeable, as well as a marvelous power of continu­ ous narrative, achieved through a selec­ tion of dramatic details and designed to make the audience relive an experience which Demosthenes begins by noting that his audience remembers.

purified: The word, which contains the root catharsis, was used by Plato (Re­ public 365D) to show what a sculptor does as he “polishes up” his statue. Longinus is preparing for the great metaphor with which closes this chap­ ter. See below.

in the middle: The phrase “in the mid­ dle” refers to the military tactic em­ ployed by Agamemnon, in which weak­ lings and cowards are stationed between wings composed of braver men, so that they can be bolstered and prevented from fleeing. Ancient critics also use the image, for the term is a technical one in rhetoric-one of the “figures of speech” (see note on figures in ch. 8). Herodian, in his On Figures (Spengel IIl.95), shows it to be something like a dramati­ cally placed parenthetical interjection; e.g., Marc Antony’s lines (Julius Caesar III.ii):

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

… or collegian: A description of the artistic process: the artist must select the “eminent” and “universal particulars” and “what stands out” which naturally inhere in the subject matter, strip them of accidental accretions, and then com­ bine them. Failure to clean away any rough edges will result in unsightly gaps, as Longinus is about to say in his closing image.

For the eighteenth century’s view of the artistic process, see Imlac’s justly famous speech in ch. 10 of Johnson’s Rasselas:

… the province of poetry is to describe Nature and Passion, which are always the same … no kind of knowledge was to be over­ looked … mountains and deserts.. . every tree of the forest and flower in the valley … the crags of the rock and the pinnacles of the palace … To a poet nothing can be useless … The business of a poet … is to examine, not the individual, but the species; to re­ mark general properties and large appearances: he does not number the streaks of the tulip, or describe the different shades in the verdure of the forest. He is to exhibit in his portraits of nature such promi­ nent and striking features, as recall the original to every mind … he must … observe the power of all the passions in all their combina­ tions … and rise to general and transcendental truths, which will always be the same … contemn the applause of his own time, and commit his claims to the justice of posterity … by incessant practice, familiarize to himself every deli­ cacy of speech and grace of har­ mony. (Italics ours]

Editors of Johnson have remarked on the similarities of this passage to Burke’s recently published Enquiry Into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful; the debt of Burke to Lon­ gin us is easily demonstrable: see Samuel Monk’s book The Sublime.

For these defects: The sentence is notor­ iously hard to read, and it was made so deliberately by the author, for Longinus is here doing what he so often does— imitating in his own prose the vice or virtue which he is discussing. A transla­ tion of the highly metaphorical sen­ tence ought to make the following points clear: certain kinds of defects ruin the unity of style; these defects are comparable to gaps and spaces in what was intended to be an architectural uni- ty; a metaphorical example of such a structure is the kind of wall built hur­ riedly in wartime, in which the indi­ vidual stones used do not fit neatly together, with the result that the wall has gaps and openings and its pans are attached loosely and temporarily.

We have rendered the sentence rather freely in the translation. A more literal version will enable the reader to check the relationship between the syntax and argument point by point

The[defects], you see, damage Lhe whole, even as great things pro­ duce gaps or spaces when they are being arranged [in the manner of stones used in] a wall built by allies [in wartime which are joined] by a temporary attach­ ment to one another.