Chapter 30: Selection of Words

Since, certainly, the conception of a speech and writing and its phrasing are often thoroughly blended, each into the other, let us see also whether anything about phrasing has been left out for us to deal with. Now, though the selection of the most important words wonderfully stirs and enchants those who hear them, and though it is the highest practice in all public speakers and prose-writers, by itself enabling speeches and writings to flower in greatness, with (all at the same time) fineness, patina, weightiness, strength, power, and, besides, a kind of luster, just as we find in the finest statues, setting, as it were, a kind of vocal soul in things—perhaps, for those who understand, it may be superfluous to go through all this. Fine words, you see, are thought’s own light. 2. But, of course, a bold diction is not useful everywhere, since to place great and impressive words around petty matters would appear to be just like putting a tragic mask on an infant child, except that in poetry and hist. ..

(a lacuna of about 4 leaves [about 8 pages or 8%] occurs here)

Commentary

Here, in ch. 30, Longinus is tying the first part of his fivefold division (8.1) together with the fourth part: concep­ tion and phrasing. Although concep­ tion can exist without speech, it cannot of course exist without words: even in the famous example of Ajax’s silence we had to be told that he was silent in some kind of diction.

Because conception and phrasing are so interlaced, Longinus has necessarily discussed parts of phrasing already, e.g., periphrasis (lit., “phrasing around”). It was probably this etymological word­ play that Jed him to close the parenthe­ sis on figures with a discussion of periphrasis. The opening sentence of ch. 30, then, is a casually and intricately graceful “ploy” or transition from fig­ ures to phrasing, and with his custom­ ary pretence of academic diffidence Longinus suggests that there may be nothing more to say even as he promises that there is much more.

For some of the later authors of rhe­ torical handbooks “phrasing” is a com­ prehensive term for the combination of diction and syntax (see Spengel 1.458; II.507; III.191). It is thus like our Eng­ lish derivative “phrase” as in “Didn’t he phrase that beautifully?” In 8.1, Longi­ n us had listed it as the fourth of the parts which make up sublimity: a noble phrasing, the parts of which are 1) the selection of words and 2) the turn of mannerism and “made up elaboration” of “style.” Style, for Longinus, is really style of diction. Diction is a subdivision of phrasing. It is these two he is about to discuss.

Now, though the selection: this sen­ tence is a subtle example of praeteritio, that is, calling attention to something by saying that you are not going to mention it. Longinus, characteristically, defers to his reader’s superiority while displaying his own. The points made are all important and need to be made; they are at once commonplaces and yet phrased with an intricate art and a combination of original and traditional diction that make it both “superfluous” and “not superfluous” to go through­ even for those who know. Platonism glints throughout the passage like the luster that comes from old words, espe­ cially in the phrase “setting a kind of vocal soul in things.”

flower: Longinus here presents a pretty picture: the rare old poetic words will bloom along the rows of lines in the text like blossoms in a garden. The use of the word is an example of itself.

patina: the Greek word means, literally, “good dirt” and refers to that mellow luster which age lends to certain kinds of surfaces. When transferred to the crit­ ical vocabulary of literature, it suggests the quality of archaic or “old world” charm which we find in writers of a bygone period. Hence a later writer may, by selecting words characteristic of that period, transfer some of that patina to his own style. Signs reading “Ye Olde English Tea Shoppe” are feeble attempts to acquire this quality. Spenser was well aware of the value to be acquired from old words, both in theory and practice: in the epistle to Gabriel Harvey by Spenser’s learned (and imaginary?) friend E. K. we read:

the which, of many things which in him be straunge, I know will seeme the straungest, the words them selves being so auncient. .. And firste of the wordes to speake, I graunt they be something hard, and of most men unused, yet both English, and also used to most excellent authors and most fam­ ous poetes.

There follows a long and elaborate defence of the “Chaucerisms.” Spenser did not know Longinus, but he found parallel justifications in Cicero. When Lang, Leaf, and Myers did their famous translation of Homer in the nineteenth century, they turned both to the Bible and to Malory for much of their style of diction.

Fine words. . .thought’s own light: Longinus follows his long and com­ plex sentence with a short and epi­ grammatic one, couched memorably in a metaphor, like the comparable line in 9.1: “Sublimity is the resonance of a great mind.” There is, as Russell and Einarson observe (following Immisch) probably an allusion to the supposed etymology of “voice (phone)” as com­ ing from “light of thought (phos nou).” One might almost construct a meta­ phorical climax or sorites: fine words are the lustrous voice of thought; the lustrous voice of thought is the reso­ nance of a great mind; the resonance of a great mind is sublimity. Once again Longinus links what came before the parenthesis on figures with what comes after, both in the parallel metaphors and in the Platonic allusions to the birth of ideas (“pregnancy” in 9.1; the implanting of a “vocal soul” in 30.1).

The image “light of thought” appears in the Art of Rhetoric by Cassius Lon­ ginus (Spengel 1.304): concepts and arguments are like that light which reveals to the judges the persuasiveness of the proof.

infant child: we use “infant child” be­ cause in English “infant” suggests new­ born babies, whereas the Greek word can be used of slightly older children, like the French enfant. The image is a common one: Russell lists the various parallels from Philodemus, Quintilian, and Lucian.

hist: The Greek ms. breaks off just after the “Iota,” but it seems clear that the word “history” was intended. For extreme examples of dressing minor material in the trappings and suits of over-poetic diction, see Lucian’s Lexiphanes or—in English—Oscar Wilde’s poem The Sphinx; Wilde went about among his friends for days col­ lecting rare and unusual words to put into the poem. A specimen will show the result (69-72):

Whose wings, like strange trans­ parent talc, rose high above his hawk-faced head,
Painted with silver and with red and ribbed with rods of Oreichalch?
Or did huge Apis from his car leap down and lay before your feet
Big blossoms of the honey-sweet and honey-coloured nenuphar?

Swinburne’s self-parody (Nephelidia) contains specimens of the vice:

From the depths of a dreamy decline of the dawn through a notable nimbus of nebulous moonshine…Bathed in the balms of bea­ tified bliss, beatific itself by beatitude’s breath…
Made meek as a mother whose bosom-beats bound with the bliss-bringing bulk of a balm­ breathing baby.

But even major poets are often guilty of diction which does not ring true as they strive to intensify their emotions and moods. Here, for example, is a passage from Keats’ Lamia (155-63):

A deep volcanian yellow took the place
Of all her milder-mooned body’s grace;
And, as the lava ravishes the mead…
she was undressed Of all her sapphires, greens, and amethysts,
And rubious-argent. ..

In addition to the spurious diction of “volcanian,” “milder-mooned,” “rav­ ishes,” and “rubious-argent,” we may apply another Longinian criterion: having made “sapphire,” “green,” and “amethyst” all poetic plurals, even Keats balked at pluralizing “rubious-argent.”