Chapter 3: Vices: Turgidity, Undergraduate Wit, Parenthyrson

…hold the mighty brilliance of the kiln. If I behold a single hearth-abider here,
I’ll thrust within one stormy-flowing tentacle Igniting and incinerating all the roof:
Not yet have I yelled out a noble melody.

These conceits—the “tentacles” and “skyward vomitings,” the making North Wind a flautist, and other things of this sort—can no longer be considered “tragic,” but something “beyond the tragic.” They are, rather than powerful, muddy in phrasing and turbulent in imagery, and if we should look clearly into the words and phrases, they will gradually become less frightening, and, instead, something which we sense is very much below us. In tragedy, which is by nature bold and admits bombastic mouthing, any turgidity that is not melodic is unforgivable; in speeches and writings that are true to nature, it will hardly tit at all. ::!. For this reason, Gorgias of Leontini is laughed at when he writes “Xerxes, the Zeus of the Persians” and “vultures, tombs with a soul”; and some of the conceits written by Callisthenes are not sublime, but high-flown, and this is still more the case with those of Cleitarchus, a worthless man who, as Sophocles puts it, blows “on a petite flute without a mouthpiece.” Arnphicrates, Hegesias, and Marris frequently believe they are exhibiting enthusiasm in their conceits, but there is no genuine Dionysiac frenzy: they are merely playing. 3. On the whole, it is likely that turgidity is one of the vices hardest to guard against. For those who commit themselves to great writing and flee the censure of being weak and dry are brought down naturally (I don’t understand how) into turgidity: they are persuaded by the maxim “Failure in a great enterprise is a noble mistake.” 4. But swellings and puffiness both in the human body and in speeches and writings are vicious and untrue to nature, and, as a consequence, place us in a situation opposite to that where we wish to be, for as they say, nothing is drier than a man with dropsy. Well, though turgid writing wishes to transcend sublimity, the vice of undergraduate wit is totally opposed to greatness: it is wholly low and petty-souled and is really a most ignoble vice. Now what is “undergraduate wit”? Is it not manifest that it is that collegian way of thinking which, by working overtime to please, terminates in false wit? Though writers desire what is “just too much” and elaborate and, most of all, what is blissfully pleasing, they lapse into this kind of vice and run aground on a listing and vicious emulation. 5. There lies before us, in addition, a third species of vice in emotional passages—what Theodorus used to call parenthyrson, which signifies either an emotion put in at just the wrong moment, at the very moment when there ought to be no emotion, or an immoderate emotion where there ought to be measured emotion. Some writers, you see, are often carried away, as if they were drunk, into displays of emotions that have nothing to do with their subject and are merely collegiate exhibitions; they are likely to perform in a fashion disfiguring to themselves and to display ecstasies before an audience which shares neither their feelings nor their ecstasies. We shall take up emotion, though, in another place.

Commentary

hold … melody: this incomplete pas­sage, which picks up at the end of a lacuna, is generally attributed to a lost play entitled Orithyia; whether it was written by Aeschylus or by the early Sophocles, in that period when, as he said, he was imitating Aeschylean bombast (Plutarch, Moralia 79b), is disputed. Russell canvasses the differ­ing arguments in his note. Longinus praises Sophocles for being the kind of genius who achieves great heights but who also falls and fails (see ch. 23, where he is bracketed with Pindar). Such a view is based, of course, on a knowledge of many more plays than we possess; our earliest Sophoclean play probably dates from a time when Sophocles was about 50. The Longinian view is far removed from that of Matthew Arnold, who viewed Sophocles as serene and calm, as one who “saw life steadily and saw it whole” (Sonnet, To a Friend). Plutarch, however, comments on Soph­oclean “unevenness” (“On Listening to Lectures” 45b). Hume (Essay 20, Of Simplicity and Refinement in Writing) remarks that Sophocles and Terence seem to have gone beyond the mean of perfection and to have been “guilty of some excess” in refinement.

The speaker in the passage quoted seems to be Boreas, the North Wind; according to the myth, Erectheus refused to give his daughter Orithyia to Boreas in marriage, whereupon Boreas carried her away. Lacking the whole quota­tion, and a precise context, we cannot state with certainty whether the phrase “hearth-abider” refers to a person or, perhaps, an ember in the fire. Seen. on bold below.

tentacles … flautist: Longinus singles out some details from his original quo­tation, which we have lost because of a lacuna in the ms., e.g., “skyward vomit­ings.” In imagining the North Wind as a flute-player, Longinus refers to the traditional Greek view that the lyre was the instrument for gentlemen, since the flute required the player to disfigure his face by huffing and puffing. A Greek myth tells us that Athena, having tried the flute and the lyre, spurned the flute because it made her look grotesque.

beyond the tragic: the word also means “to be mock-tragic.” Presumably the author of the fragment was not parody­ing the tragic style but failed to reach it because he went beyond it and ran con­trary to it. The following examples from English literature will help illus­trate the vice:

Hamlet quotes from a (supposed) old tragedy to the players:

Head to foot Now is he total gules, horridly tricked
With blood of fathers, mothers, daughters, sons
Baked and impasted with the par­ ching streets
That lend a tyrannous and damned light
To their lord’s murder. Roasted in wrath and fire,
And thus o’er sized with coagulate gore,
With eyes like carbuncles, the hel­lish Pyrrhus
Old grandsire Priam seeks. (II.ii)

The passage may be contrasted with a similar one, from Macbeth:

Now o’er the one-half world
Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse
The curtain’d sleep. Witchcraft celebrates
Pale Hecate’s offerings, and with­ered murder,
Alarum’d by his sentinel, the wolf,
Whose howl ‘s his watch, thus with his stealthy pace,
Like Tarquin’s ravishing strides,
towards his design Moves like a ghost. (II.i)

Shakespeare’s lyric narratives, especially Venus and Adonis, have much of this “paratragic” style.

• Dryden and Lee, Oedipus (l.i):

Dreadful indeed! Blood, and a king’s blood too!
And such a king’s, and by his sub­ject shed!
(Else why this curse on Thebes?
No wonder then
If monsters, wars, and plagues revenge such crimes!
If heaven be just, its whole artil­lery,
All must be emptied on us: Not one bolt
Shall err from Thebes; but more be called for, more;
New-moulded thunder of a larger size;
Driven by whole Jove. What, touch anointed power!
Then, Gods, beware; Jove would himself be next
Could you but reach him, too,

• Melville, Moby Dick, Ch. XCIII, “The Castaway”:

The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the un­ warped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever- juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of the waters heaved the colossal orbs.

(The passage is explicable in allegorical terms; see Longinus 9.7 for insertion of allegorical justifications of Homeric pas­ sages and n. on allegory in Ch. 9 for an example of a modern allegorical inter­pretation.

• Although the poem Apostroph was rejected by Whitman, it is too tempting not to quote the opening lines:

0mater! 0 fils!
0brood continental!
0flowers of the prairies!
0space boundless! 0him mighty products! of
O you teeming cities! 0 son invincible, turbulent, proud!
0 race of the future! 0 women!
0 fathers! 0 you men of passion and the storm!
0 native powers only! 0 beauty!
0yourself! 0God! 0divine average!

Beside this rhapsodic catalogue, Shel­ ley’s famous “O World! 0 Life! 0 Time!” is pallid and jejune. The true parallel for Whitman is Marcus Aurelius—in his youthful and rhetori­ cal days—who in a letter to his rhetori­ cal teacher Fronto exclaimed over Pli­ ny’s Panegyricus:

0 elegantia! 0 lepos! 0 venustas!
0 verbal O nitor! 0 argutiae!
0 charites! 0 askesis! 0 omnia!

• Tennyson, Maud: A Monodrama (144-9):

For the drift of the Maker is dark, an Isis hid by the veil.
Who knows the ways of the world, how God will bring them about?
Our planet is one, the suns are many, the world is wide.
Shall I weep if a Poland fall? Shall I shriek if a Hungary fail?
Or an infant civilization be ruled with a rod or a knout?
I have not made the world, and He that made it will guide.

• Thomas Carlyle, from Past and Present (IV.4):

Difficult? Yes, it will be difficult. The short-fibre cotton; that too was difficult. The waste cotton­ shrub, long useless, disobedient, as the thistle by the wayside,— have ye not conquered it; made it into beautiful bandana webs; white woven shirts for men; bright­ tinted air-garments wherein flit goddesses? Ye have shivered moun­tains asunder, made the hard iron pliant to you as soft putty; the Forest-giants, Marsh-jotuns bear sheaves of golden grain; Aegir the Sea-demon himself stretches his back for a sleek highway to you, and on Firehorses and Windhorses ye career ….

• D. H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent, Ch. 7, “The Plaza”:

The sound sounded in the inner­ most far-off place of the human core, the ever-present, where there is neither hope nor emotion, but passion sits with folded wings on tree of shadow.

Like fate, like doom. Faith is the Tree of Life itself, inevitable, and the apples are upon us, like the apples of the eye, the apples of the chin, the apples of the heart, the apples of the breast, the apple of the belly, with its deep core, the apples of the loins, the apples of the knees, the little, side-by-side apples of the toes. What do change and evolution matter? We are the Tree with the fruit forever upon it. And we are faith forever. Ver­ bum Sap.

• F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (the closing passage):

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter­ tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. … And one fine morning-So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.(The seeming ellipsis is Fitzgerald’s.)

• William Faulkner, A Fable (Random House: New York, 1954), the chap­ter entitled “Tomorrow,” pp. 407-08; it is also a specimen of the long and ram­bling Faulknerian sentence (see ch. I, n. I):

In time there would be a vast towered chapel, an ossuary, vis­ible for miles across the Heights like the faintly futuristic effigy of a gigantic gray goose or an igua­nodon created out of gray stone not by a sculptor but by expert masons—a long tremendous nave enclosed by niches in each of which a light would bum always, the entrance to each arched with the carven names taken not from identity discs but from regimental lists since there would be nothing to match them with—squatting over the vast deep pit into which the now clean inextricable ano­nymous bones of what had been man, men, would be shoveled and sealed; facing it would be the slope white with the orderly parade of Christian crosses bearing the names and regimental designa­tions of the bones which could be identified; and beyond it, that other slope ranked not with crosses but with rounded headstones set faintly but intractably oblique to face where Mecca was, set with a consistent and almost formal awry­ness and carved in cryptic and indecipherable hieroglyph be­ cause the bones here had been identifiable too which had since been men come this far from their hot sun and sand, this far from home and all familiar things, to make this last sacrifice in the northern rain and mud and cold, for what cause unless their lead­ers, ignorant too, could have ex­plained some of it, a little of it to them in their own tongue.

Falkner’s sentence is some 260 words, longer than the opening sentence of Longinus (over 100 words); its syntax towards the end leaves something to be desired.

Addison’s remarks (Spectator 39) are worth noting: English poets have succeeded much better in the style than in the sentiments of their tragedies…In the ancient tragedies, and indeed in those of Corneille and Racine, though the expressions are very great, it is thought that bears them up and swells them… The reader, after the perusal of a scene, [should] consider the naked thought of every speech in it, when divested of all its· tragic ornaments… When our thoughts are great and just, they are often obscured by the sounding phrases, hard meta­phors, and forced expressions in which they are clothed.

muddy and turbulent: the word “muddy,” although used metaphori­cally by Philo and Dio Cassius, does not seem to have been applied in Greek to style; Longinus may therefore be par­ odying the vice censured by his own diction.

bold: this word has been variously translated: e.g., “pompous” (Prickard); “dignified” (Grube); “majestic” (Dorsch); “magniloquent” (Russell); “grand” (Russell); “stately” (Roberts). It is one of the several Greek critical terms drawn from the human body, and its root-meaning is “bulk,” “mass,” “body,” “size.” The word can be ap­plied to distentions of any kind, e.g., a heap of ashes, a child in the womb, the extent of a city, an Epicurean atom, the volume of a note or voice. As a critical term, it could be either honorific or pejorative: for example, here in this sentence, it describes a good quality of tragedy; in 3.4, it is classified as “vi­cious” and is coupled with “puffed up.”

To translate the Greek term we have used the English “bold,” which etymo­logically signified “well-filled,” a “heap,” what is “blown up” and “puffed” and which also conveys the sense of demanding attention by its expanding and thrusting bulk.

mouthing: equivalent to our “ranting and raving,” the sort of thing Hamlet cautions the players against (II.ii). Addison, in Spectator 40, discusses “rants” as one of the “false beauties” of English tragedy.

turgidity that is not melodic: “melodic” may refer, in the Greek, to lyric. Since some branches of ancient lyric were even more extravagant in their diction and effects than tragedy (e.g., dithy­ramb, from which tragedy in part deve­loped), Longinus may be using the phrase deliberately to suggest the kind of turgidity which came to be associated with such lyric, especially later dithy­ramb.

How closely some critics followed Longinus, in both terminology and analysis, can be seen in this passage from John Dennis, the most avowed defender of Longinus in the eighteenth century. He was even burlesqued on the stage under the name “Sir Tremendous Longinus.”

There is a way of deviating from nature, by bombast, or tumour, which soars above nature, and enlarges images beyond their real bulk; by affection, which forsakes nature in quest of something un­ suitable; and by imbecility, which degrades nature by faintness and diminution, by obscuring its appearances, and weakening its effects. Johnson quotes this passage in his life of Addison; it can be found in the edi­tion of John Dennis edited by E. N. Hooker, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1939-1943).

speeches and writings that are true to nature: the phrase echoes Virgil’s verae voces (true voices) in Aeneid 1.409. The term “true to nature” is almost syn­onymous with “lifelike” or even “realis­ tic,” whether good or bad, ideal or base. Aristotle uses “true to nature” only once in the Poetics, at l 455a32, where he advises the poet to feel what his charac­ters are feeling, for the poet who makes himself angry will be angry and dram­atize anger “most true to nature.” D. W. Lucas, in his edition of the Poetics (Cla­rendon Press: Oxford, 1968), collects several fine passages from modern authors illustrating this practice. Plato uses “true to nature” to mean “ideal,” i.e., in accordance with the world of being, when he speaks of “the city that is true to nature” (Republic 372E); in the Timaeus (26E), he distinguishes between a “moulded myth” and “an account that is true to nature,” which he specifies as giving not simply the main points but the actual details just as they were heard, i.e., a dramatically natural re-presentation. Longinus uses “true to nature” only one other time (7.4). See ch. 7.4, n. on “true to nature which … to all men.”

Gorgias of Leontini: Gorgias stands as the most famous and most spectacular representative of rhetoric in the bad sense. A native of Sicily, the home of rhetorical technique, he came to Athens with his new art and made a sensational impression. His influence on morality can be gauged by the fact that Plato wrote one of his most brilliant dia­logues, the Gorgias, against him. Gor­gias’ prose exploits all the vices inherent in the highly inflected and highly syn­ tactic Greek language; Larue Van Hook has attempted to convey some sense of the Gorgianic style in an English trans­lation of The Encomium of Helen, one paragraph of which we append here:

But if by violence she [Helen] was defeated and unlaw­fully she was treated and to her injustice was meted, clearly her violator as a terrifer was importu­nate, while she, translated and violated, was unfortunate. There­fore, the barbarian who verbally, legally, actually attempted the bar­barous attempt, should meet with verbal accusation, legal reproba­tion, and actual condemnation. For Helen, who was violated, and from her fatherland separated, and from her friends segregated, should justly meet with commiseration rather than with defamation. For he was the victor and she was the victim. It is just, therefore, to sympathize with the latter and anathematize the former.

Even if we allow for the fact that Greek takes this kind of pyrotechnical asso­nance and rhyme and balance more naturally than English, the effect of the Greek is peculiarly striking. Here is the opening of Lyly’s Euphues: The Analomy of Wit, an Elizabethan attempt to produce similar effects:

There dwelt in Athens a young gentleman of great patrimony, and so comely a personage that it was doubted whether he were more bound to Nature for the lin­eaments of his person, or to For­ tune for the increase of his posses­sions. But Nature, impatient of comparisons, and as it were dis­daining a companion or copartner in her working, added to this comeliness of his body such a sharp capacity of mind that not only she proved Fortune counter­feit, but was half of that opinion that she herself was only current. This young gallant, of more wit than wealth, and yet of more wealth than wisdom, seeing him­ self inferior to none in pleasant conceits, thought himself super­ ior to all in honest conditions, insomuch that he deemed himself so and to all things, that he gave himself almost to nothing but practising of those things com­ monly which are incident to these sharp wits, fine phrases, smooth quipping, merry taunting, using jesting without mean and abus­ing mirth without measure.

Lyly’s prose exploits most of the devices in Gorgias—-though not rhyme, for which he substitutes a heavy allitera­tion coupled with a subtle distinction in the meanings of words; his clauses are longer and their balance not so emphas­ized. The passage cited by Longinus comes from Gorgias’ Funeral Oration, an extensive fragment of which survives (Diels-Kranz 6).

Zeus of the Persians: probably an echo of Herodotus 7.56; as Russell remarks in his notes, “Persian ruler-cult shocked the Greeks very much in the fifth cen­tury.”

tombs with a soul: Russell’s note is a miniature study in comparative litera­ ture on this famous conceit, which turns up in Aeschylus, Sophocles, Ennius, Lucretius, Spenser, and Shake­speare. The ancient rhetorician-critic Hermogenes specifies the vice of the image as an “excess beyond the mean in an attempt to be impressive” (Spengel 2.292), a point which becomes the basis of Johnson’s censure of the metaphysi­cal poets. In a wry aside, Hermogenes says that those who use such conceits are worthy to be buried in them. For Longinian influence on Johnson, see J. Crossett, “Did Johnson Mean ‘Para­physical’?”, Boston University Studies in English 4(1960):121-24.

Callisthenes: the nephew of Aristotle, wrote a history of Alexander the Great, whom he accompanied during the in­vasion of Asia; a few fragments of his writings survive.

Cleitarchus: an Hellenistic historian, of whom, as the Oxford Classical Dic­tionary says, no ancient author speaks well. Demetrius (304) singles out an example of Cleitarchus’ false wit. Des­cribing a wasp, Cleitarchus said, “it battens on and ravages mountains and wings its way toward the hollow oaks.”

without a mouthpiece: the quotation does not survive except in a different form in Cicero (Ad Atticum 2.16.2). The mouthpiece was a device for governing sound; a flute without one would be loud and shrill all the time.

Amphicrates, Hegesias, and Matris: We know almost nothing of Amphicrates except that he lived in the first century BCE and was an historian. Hegesias lived in the third century BCE and was also an historian; a few fragments sur­vive. He is harshly treated by the ancient critics. He was the particular bête noire of Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who (On Composition 4) calls him ignoble, effeminate, addicted to petty felicities, and “the high priest” of this nonsensical style. In ch. 18, Dionysius expostu­lates at the badness of Hegesias’ style; he quotes a passage from his history and comments on it acidly. Cicero (Orator 226) says that Hegesias perversely avoids short, striking phrases and “hops about,” cutting his style into minute fragments. Of the Hellenistic poet Matris we know almost nothing. See Russell’s note for details and refer­ences.

enthusiasm: generally a pejorative word in Longinus but not always. When enthusiasm is associated with favored writers, like Xenophon, or with the god Apollo, Longinus always approves of it. Such writers, of course, could exercise sound critical judgment, the result of technique, whereas Amphicrates and the others like him could not tell gen­uine from spurious enthusiasm. The term “enthusiasm” is highly pejorative in the eighteenth century; it is primarily a social virtue nowadays. Nietzsche used the dichotomy of Apollonian and Dio­nysiac enthusiasm as the basis for his youthful but influential work The Birth of Tragedy.

a noble mistake: Longinus seems to have felt about this tiresome palliation somewhat as Dionysius of Halicarnas­ sus felt about those who always cited Agathon’s paradoxically practical obser­vation, that it is likely for many un­ikely things to happen (Letter to Ammaeus 1.8). The idea probably de­rives from such sources as that paradox­ical phrase, in the Nicomachean Ethics (l 146a18-19), in which Aristotle says that Neoptolemus displays a “good intemperance,” and from Sophocles’ famous paradox to describe Antigone’s action as a “holy evil” (Antigone 74). Our modern equivalents for the maxim

Longinus quotes are the Emersonian maxim, “Hitch your wagon to a star” and the almost proverbial “Aim high.” The counterpart is the proverb, “A miss is as good as a mile.”

drier than a man with dropsy: “Dropsy causes thirst; and moralists used it as an analogue of covetousness or insatiable greed” (Russell). The image of dropsy picks up the charge of “feeble dryness” and continues the image of “boldness” or “swelling” (see above, n. on bold).

Demetrius (On Style 4) says that clauses which are too short produce the so-called “dry” or “arid” style—e.g., “Life is short, art is long, time is fleet­ing.” Bacon, in the early versions of his Essays, writes this way, and many of these short sentences are imbedded in the later versions. The vice—we would call it “bald” and even “dull” and “mechanical”—may result from dic­tion, composition, or imagery; Deme­trius (236-39) takes these up. Longinus uses the word for “dry” only twice, both times in this chapter; since he is con­cerned with the high, sublime, full­-blooded, and vigorous style, he does not spend much time on the low, dull, dry, feeble, bloodless style.

undergraduate wit: the vice refers to a certain verbal dexterity which is cor­rupt; students writing in this style are entranced with high-flown language, with jingles and puns, with deliberately mixed levels of diction intended to shock, with arch overwriting, and with a desire to “show off.” Their metaphors tend to become mixed and far-fetched.

Osric’s speech, in Hamlet (V.ii) and Hamlet’s parody thereof exemplify the vice:

Osric: Sir, here is newly come to court Laertes-believe me, an absolute gentleman, full of most excellent differences, of very soft society and great showing. In­ deed, to speak feelingly of him, he is the card or calendar of gen­ try for you shall find in him the continent of what part a gen­ leman would see.

Hamlet: Sir, his definement suf­fers no perdition in you, though I know to define him inventorially would dizzy the arithmetic of memory, and yet but yaw neither, in respect of his quick sail. But in the verity of extolment, I take him to be a soul of great article, and his infusion of such dearth and rare­ ness as, to make true diction of him, his semblable is his mirror, and who else would trace him, his umbrage….

Or, to take a modern instance, the prose of columnist Tom Wolfe, The Kandy­ Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New York, 1963, rep. 1965), p. 22:

And now around the eyes he looks like an aging Chinese savant, but he is wearing a white tuxedo and powder-blue leather boots and playing his sad old Western violin with an electric cord plugged in it for a group called The Country Gentleman. And there is Ben Blue, looking like a waxwork exhibit of vaudeville, doffing his straw skimmer to reveal the sculptural qualities of his skull. And down at the Flamingo cocktail lounge­—Ella Fitzgerald is in the main room—there is Harry James, look­ ing old and pudgy in one of those toy Italian-style show-biz suits. And the Ink Spots are at the New Frontier and Louis Prima is at the Sahara, and the old parties are see­ing it all, roaring through the dawn into the next day, until the sun seems like a par lamp fading in and out. The casinos, the bars, the liquor stores are open every minute of every day, like a sempi­ternal wading pool for the child­ hood ego.

Observe, for example, the disparate dic­tion of “show-biz” and “sempiternal.” The Greek word for “undergraduate wit” refers specifically to that of a per­son between the ages of 14 and 21.

opposed to: the classification is Aris­totelian: the mean defined by the ex­tremes. Sublimity is the mean, swelling is the excess, and “undergraduate wit” is the deficiency. Longinus is generally considered a Platonist, but he is Aris­totelian in his terminology and metho­dology, Platonic in spirit.

collegian: from the Greek word we derive “school.” English adjectives de­rived from “school” (e.g., “schoolboy­ish) make the age-group too young. Longinus is thinking of young men between the ages of 14 and 2 I. ”Collegian” and “collegiate” convey this sense best in English: the smart-alecky nature of those called “college-kids,” who seek to show off their newly-learned sophis­tication. Ancient Greece had its share of precocious geniuses: for example, Menander was writing prize-winning comedies at the age of 18, and the rheto­rician Hermogenes was winning com­ petitions for impromptu speaking in his middle teens.

working overtime to please: this is the quality of one of the “characters” por­trayed by Theophrastus (10.63) and sig­nifies the assumption and pretentious­ness which arises out of good-will, when, out of benevolence, one claims more than he can perform. Menander, in the Dyscolus (836), has a striking use and dramatic exemplification of this word: “Your working overtime to please does you credit” (see E. W. Handley’s edition of the Dyscolus for the text, where the term is a plausible emenda­tion [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965]).

false wit: the standard translation for this term is “frigidity,” which is not, however, a part of contemporary Eng­lish critical vocabulary. Literally, the Greek word means “coldness” and is applied to snow, air, dead things; by extension it is applied to a cold-hearted person, and then to one who is “flat, lifeless, insipid” (LSJ). By a further extension it is used to denote a literary vice characterized by polysyllabic com­ pounds, eccentric or excessively poetic choice of adjectives, otiose and inap­propriate adjectives, and far-fetched met­aphors (see Aristotle, Rhetoric l 450b35 ff). Theophrastus, Aristotle’s pupil, de­ fines it as “being hyperbolic beyond the description appropriate to a subject” (cited by Demetrius, On Style, 114). The term is analyzed finely by Addison in the Spectator papers, notably nos. 61 and 62. In the latter he writes:

As true Wit generally consists in this Resemblance an<l Congruity of Ideas, false Wit chiefly consists in the Resemblance and Congruity sometimes of single Letters, as in Anagrams, Chronograms, Lipo­grams, and Acrosticks: Sometimes of Syllables, as in Ecchos and Doggerel Rhymes: Sometimes of Words, as in Puns and Quibbles; and sometimes of whole Senten­ces or Poems, cast into the Figure of Eggs, Axes, or Altars.

We have ancient poems of this kind; Herbert wrote one in the form of wings (Easter-wings) and one in the form of an altar (The Altar); his poem Heaven is an echo-poem; we quote the opening four lines;

0 who will show me those delights on high:

Echo. I.

Thou Echo, thou an mortall, all men know.

Echo. No.

The Elizabethan poet, Sir John Davies, wrote a series of 26 poems (Hymns to Astraea), each of which was an acrostic such that the opening letters of each line spelled out “Elisabeth Regina.” Dylan Thomas has employed the device in our own day: see his poem Vision and Prayer in Collected Poems ([Dent: Lon­don, 1964], p. 137).

Many fine examples of “false wit” can be found in The Stuffed Owl: An Anthology of Bad Verse, ed. D. B. Wyndham Lewis and Charles Lee (]. M. Dent: London and Toronto, 1930); we quote from Samuel Carter (p. 197) describing London’s sewer-system:

Magnificent, too, is the system of drains,
Exceeding the far-spoken won­ ders of old:
So lengthen’d and vast in its branches and chains,
That Labyrinths pass like a tale that is told:
The sewers gigantic, like multi­ plied veins,
Beneath the whole city their windings unfold,
Disgorging the source of plagues, scourges, and pains,
Which visit those cities to cleanli­ ness cold.
Well did the ancient proverb lay down this important text,
That Cleanliness for human weal to godliness is next.

The number of vices contained in this one stanza would virtually illustrate most of those discussed by Longinus.

what is blissfully pleasing: Longinus uses here a highly poetic word rather than his usual term; the word itself, then, is an example of what he is warn­ ing writers to avoid. Perhaps we could approximate the effect by some such high-flown verbiage as “blissful de­light.”

left aground on a listing and vicious emulation: it is best to discuss these terms separately.

Left aground: here begins a nautical metaphor. The Greek word is also used by Dio Cassius metaphorically when he suggests one of the alternative explanations for the shift in Tiberias’ character: either he was a hypocrite, or “his good nature drifted away.” Writers fall into the vice by affecting “too much,” by being too audacious; they are like the unballasted ships, lacking the pilot’s knowledge (see ch. 2.2, where Longinus introduced nautical imagery). Thus Polybius describes a ship that was too eager to attack and so “ran aground” (Histories 1.20.15).

listing: Longinus’ image is of a ship which has run aground; such a ship lists sharply to one side. The term picks up the nautical metaphor.

vicious emulation: what we call “affectation” in the bad sense. Lucian, in his essay “On Dancing” (82), defines the vice thus: transgressing the measure of imitation and stretching beyond what is necessary. It may work in any direc­tion, e.g., if it be necessary to display what is big, he—like Bottom in A Mid­ summer Night’s Dream—who is infect­ed with the vice makes the thing extra­ordinarily big; if what is necessary be soft and tender, the vice turns into effeminacy; and so forth. As an exam­ple, Lucian describes a particular dancer, imitating the madness of Ajax, so far transgressed the bounds of dramatic propriety that he came down into the audience and disturbed some of its members. Lucian makes it clear that his guilt is like that of the bad actor des­cribed by Hamlet, one who would “tear a passion to tatters” because he “imitates humanity so abominably.” Demetrius (On Style 136) draws the following analogy: “false wit” is to “the appropriately great” as “vicious emulation” is to the “smooth” or “elegant” style. Here the word corresponds to what we might call “preciosity” or perhaps “man­nerism.” In 239, however, Demetrius makes it clear that the distinction drawn in the analogy is his own refinement, and that “vicious emulation” was, at that time, being used to signify “false wit.” Demetrius (239) says that the vice existed both in the pretentiously swollen style and in the “dry” or “arid” style; Donatus (Life of Virgil 44), the very late commentator on Virgil, reports that in the early days of Augustus it was argued that the vice could manifest itself also in common words, where it was hard to detect. Whatever its popularity as a term, by the time of Hermogenes (second century CE) the word has not only lost its sting but even has become a legiti­mate rhetorical device: see Hermogenes, On Invention 4.179 (pp. 202 ff. Rabe), where he finds examples even in Homer! This late adaptation of the word as a neutral technical term is perhaps a piece of evidence to support an early date for Longinus. A commentator on Hermo­ genes (Walz VIII.625) actually classifies the vice as a “rhetorical figure.”

Theodorus: the reference is probably to Theodorus of Gadara, a tutor of Tibe­rius. If Longinus did have Theodorus of Gadara in mind, and not some other Theodorus of whom we know nothing, the identification is crucial for helping Lo date the work. On Theodorus and the dating of Longinus see Dating.

parenthyrson: transliterated from the Greek; the word literally means “going beyond a thyrsus,” that is, one of the implements associated with Dionysiac revels. The lexicons cite only this pas­ sage; the word was apparently coined by Theodorus.

disfiguring: the root of the word is “figure,” the regular rhetorical term used for an inversion of normal patterns of speech (see ch. 16, n. on figures). Longinus is probably punning on this sense, both here and in 43.6.

ecstatic … who are not: in Greek there is a jingly wordplay not duplicable in English: the words for “ecstatic” and “those who are not ecstatic” are forms of the verb, differing only by one letter. As usual, Longinus is exemplifying the literary device under analysis in the analysis itself. Dionysius of Halicarnas­sus, in his book On Composition (14), discusses the sounds of the Greek alpha­ bet and their place in literature.