Chapter 42: Excessive Syncopation

And of course excessive use of syncope in phrasing makes sublimity pettier; you see, greatness is maimed whenever it is cramped into too short a space. Now understand this to be said not of what ought to be constrained, but of what is totally constrained and cut up into bits: syncope, you see, curtails the thought, but conciseness directs it. And furthermore, it is clear that a length unsuitable to the occasions, like a corpse that is stretched out, calls up the lifeless spirits.

Commentary

syncope: the last chapter discussed ex­ cessive syncope in words; here Longi­ nus takes up excessive syncope in phras­ ing, that is, the longer units of style which express thought. As Demetrius says (44), a sudden dropping off into silence on a short clause makes the impressiveness of the speech sink into smallness, even if the thought is appro­ priately great, and the words, too.

pettier: both a medical and rhetorical term signifying the opposite of devel­ opment or growth. In rhetoric, it is the equivalent of litotes, a belittling of something by understating its value.

maimed: the word picks up the nexus of medical metaphors. Here Longinus uses a word that suggests a defect caused either by mutilation or by birth. Such deprivation or maiming-the word also means “to castrate”-takes the man­ hood and life out of a work. There is no passage in the book which better illus­ trates Longinus’ principle of criticism than this, for he finds that sublimity can be either enhanced or lessened even in the lowliest of syllables.

cut up into bits: one word in Greek, composed of eight syllables, full of letter “k,” and with six of them short. It is characteristic of Longinus’ wit to have a great long word both imitate the vice he is discussing and also mean “mince.”

that is stretched out...spirits: the cli­ max of Longinus’ medical metaphors. As in ch. 41 he had dealt with both the excess and deficiency of choppiness in words, so here he deals with excess and deficiency in choppiness of phrase. Like the poems of Swinburne—especially those which combine mellifluous dic­ tion with excessively long lines— stretched-out language attenuates and eviscerates the soul as well as the body of the thought. The word “stretched-out” refers to a corpse laid out for death. The word “calls up” refers particularly to summoning the spirits or ghosts of the dead from the underworld. “Length” denotes “height of stature” in a human being.

Demetrius (42) quotes a line of Greek prose consisting of eight long syllables in a row as exceeding the measure of prose: Roberts translates it “This land, our land, reached now by me,” which catches some of the effect. Dionysius (ch. 17) quotes some lines from Euripides’ Hecuba (163-64) which have six­ teen long syllables in a row—but here, of course, the device works, since poetry allows such excess.

For an example of a felicitous com­ bining of long and short syllables, see Hamlet’s speech to the players (III.ii):

Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue. But if you mouth it, as many of your players do, I had as lief the town crier spoke my lines.