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 fit at all. 2. 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.” Amphicrates, Hegesias, and Matris 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 an 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.