Chapter 41: Agitated Rhythms

And nothing makes so much for pettiness in sublime things as a perverted and agitated rhythm in speeches and writings, such as that which pyrrhics and trochees and dichorees produces, falling out finally in a dance rhythm. You see, all that is over-rhythmical appears cute and of a petty grace and most lacking in emotion, superficially popular because of its consistency; 2. and the worst of it is that just as little odes drag the audience away from the content and force their audience’s attention on themselves, so those things spoken over-rhythmically present to the hearers not the emotion of the speech and writing, but the rhythm, so that since they know beforehand what cadences are coming, they keep time with those speaking-and, anticipating the beat, produce it ahead of time—as if in a kind of chorus. 3. And similarly, what lies too close together and is syncopated into petty brief syllables also lacking in greatness and, as it were, bound together by dowels along their staccato harshness.

Commentary

Longinus has throughout stressed “greatness,” the obvious converse of which is “pettiness.” Hence pettiness is the topic of this and the two succeeding chapters, as Longinus shows what happens to greatness when it is chop­ ped, minced, agitated, syncopated, trun­ cated, in both sound and sense. The chapters are both a natural part of his argument and a prelude to the great argument of the last chapter, in which dwarfed and stunted souls are contrasted with free and noble growth. Of course, Longinus is not arguing in favor of “native woodnotes wild” as opposed to an art that is “cabin’d, cribb’d, and confin’d”; his point is that nobility and freedom are obtainable only by art fully and properly understood and not abused.

The contents of this chapter and the next have no real counterparts in Eng­ lish; since Sir Thomas Browne, no major English prose-writer has system­ atically manipulated the “cadences” or “clausulae” -the closing phrases of clauses-in order to sustain a pattern of musical effect. Furthermore, because we read silently, there is little incentive for an author to work at the euphony of his style. On this score, in comparison with the ancients, we have only the most fleeting impressions of the music in prose. Even our so-called “poetic prose” and “prose-poems” do not exploit the linguistic device taken up here. The following two English passages will indi­ cate something of the effect, although the sustained alliteration of the first would not be found in such excess in ancient literature:

But not for the default of unpreach­ ing prelates, methinks I could guess what might be said for excusing them: they are so troubled with lordly living, they be so placed in palaces, couched in courts, ruffling in their rents, dancing in their dominions, pampering their paunches like a monk that maketh his jubilee, munching in their mangers, and moiling in their gay manors and mansions, and so troubled with loit­ ering in their lordships, that they cannot attend it. – Bishop Hugh Latimer Sermon on the Ploughers

Latimer has here used as his basic meter the unit —— e.g., “pampering their paunches” and “munching in their mangers,” to which he adds the slight variations —— (e.g.,”ruffling in their rents”) and —— e.g., “loitering in their lordships”).

And He beheld a house that was of marble and had fair pillars of mar­ ble before it. The pillars were hung with garlands, and within and with­ out there were torches of cedar…And behind her came slowly, as a hunter, a young man who wore a cloak of two colours. Now the face of the woman was as the fair face of an idol, and the eyes of the young man were bright with lust. – Oscar Wilde, “The Doer of the Good,” from The House of Pomegranates

Here Wilde is imitating, rather pallidly and crudely, the rhythms of the King James Version of the Bible. The basic rhythm is that of the title of the piece. “Doer of the Good” —— Note the phrases “marble before”; “pillars were hung”; “entered the house.” The second rhythm is the same but with an extra short foot added: ——. For example, “pillars of marble,” “torches of cedar,” “behind her came slowly,” “face of the woman,” “face of an idol.”

pyrrhics and trochees and dichorees: A pyrrhic is a metrical unit consisting of two short beats or syllables (); Dionysius of Halicarnassus (On Composition 17) says that it is neither appropriate for greatness nor impressive. The trochee consists of a long followed by a short syllable (), which could be resolved into three shorts (); in its resolved form it is called a “choree” or “tribrach”; Dionysius says that it is low, unimpressive, ignoble, and nothing noble can be made out of it. The last metrical unit mentioned by Longinus is “dichoree,” or two “chorees”; this could be be either ——, or, when resolved, . If the simple “choree” was as bad as Dionysius said, the doubling of it must compound the ill. Rhys Roberts suggests that a line quoted by Marius Victorinus, Ars Grammatica (3.1), gives the agitated effect in Latin: id agite peragite celeriter.

Tennyson produces something of the effect in Locksley Hall (105):

But the jingling of the guinea helps the hurt that Honour feels.

A few other examples:

• In babble and revel and wine. Tennyson, Maud (22.5)
• Is nothing but Tennyson thinly arrayed. Austin DobsonThe Ballad of Imitation(19)
• singer of Persephone Oscar Wilde, Theocritus (I)

Although Joyce was deliberately striv­ ing for the effect, a few lines from Anna Livia Plurabelle (Finnegans Wake, Bk. I, ch. 8) exemplify the vice:

Can’t hear with the waters of. The chittering waters of. Flittering bats… Beside the rivering waters of, hitherandthithering waters of.

little odes: a diminutive in Greek; the word is used by Arrian (Epictetus 3.23.2) to suggest the kind of thing we call “poetic prose” and “prose-poem.”

beat…chorus: Aristotle (Rhetoric 1408b2 I) says that “the style ought not to be either in meter or without rhyme: the first lacks persuasiveness and simul­ taneously distracts us, for it makes us pay attention to the similarity of the cadence when it comes up again,” and he compares it to a game in which children know when to chime in with the refrain.

Demetrius (15) says that public speakers who continuously used sym­ metrical periods waver and sway like those who are tipsy, and the audience sometimes, foreseeing the rhythmic end of the period, shouts it out before he gets there. The chorus, of course, danced as it sang; hence there would be a strong alliance of verbal and dance rhythms. Russell cites Aristides (34[50]), who says that in his day public speakers virtually sang their speeches as if they were odes; he, too, comments on the sort of rhyth­ mic sway, like that of one drunk, pro­ duced in the courtroom by such chant­ ing and intoning.

We have no comparable effect in English (see introductory note to this chapter), but rhymes are certainly pre­ dictable, as Pope parodies in Essay on Criticism (11.348-53):

While they ring round the same unvaried chimes,
With sure return of still expected rhymes;
Where’er you find “the cooling western breeze,”
In the next line, it “whispers through the trees”:
If crystal streams “with pleasing murmurs creep”:
The reader’s threatened (not in vain) with “sleep.”

And of course, we have learned to expect certain idioms, diction, tones of voice, and even rhythms in certain scenes and situations; in political speeches, “soap operas” and ‘melodramas” we often nudge one another before a speech and say, “Here comes the old tear-jerker again.”

petty brief syllables...staccato harsh­ ness: Longin us imitates the effect in his Greek. English produces a clipped stac­ cato effect by monosyllables, whereas in Greek it is possible to use polysyllabic words. English has no comparable ef­ fect, partly because we do not have the complex simultaneity of pitch accent, stress accent, and quantitative vowels which Greek possesses. Hamlet’s line (III.iv) perhaps suggests, even though monosyllabic, something of the effect:

I’ll lug the guts into the neighbor room.

And one could construct English phrases which would serve as illustra­ tions, e.g., “ecclesiastically skeletonized imbecillity.” Henn (pp. 74-87) has some good passages and even a chart to con­ vey the ideas of this and the next two chapters.

The metaphors of this closing pas­ sage are complex, for Longinus seems simultaneously to be using images drawn from building, ship-building and from medicine. The hard staccato syllables are put too close together, even in one word, and the result is like pieces of stone, hard wood, or bones chipped out and held together by dowels or mor­ tise and tenon. A dowel is a wood peg used both in wall-building and in ancient ship-building to hold two stones or pieces of plank from slipping; one of its cognates signified a surgical instru• ment for chipping bone. Lastly, the word translated “staccato”—used only this one time in Longinus—signifies an incision made by a surgical instrument, a gouged-out area in stone, and the steps in a flight of stairs. The root of the word is the same as “syncope” and “syncopated.” It has been impossible to translate the sustained double meta­ phor, but readers should try to keep both in mind, for Longin us moves back and forth between them, and sometimes combines them, through these chapters. Demetrius and Dionysius make exten­ sive use of metaphors drawn from building; to this Longinus adds medi­ cal metaphors because of his concern for the organic vitality of art.