Chapter 39: Rhythm

The fifth of those constituents resulting in sublimity which we set forth at the beginning is still left for us, my best friend: what sort of thing arrangement is in speaking and writing. Having represented amply what I have to say on this subject in two works-as much as I could establish in theorizing-we may for the present put in only as much as provides a necessary basis, namely, that a fitting harmony is not only a kind of natural instrument for persuasion and pleasure in human beings, but it is also a wonderful one for achieving its effects with freedom and emotion.

2. You see, though, on the one hand, the flute instils certain kinds of emotion in the audience, so as to make it go out of its senses and become full of corybantic frenzy, and, placing in it a kind of rhythmic step, it makes it necessary for it to step to its beat and to assimilate itself (“even if it is altogether uncultivated”) to the melody, and though the sounds made by the lyre (heaven knows), while they express nothing by themselves, still, by the variation of their sonorities and by their beating against one another and by their mixing in concord, often cast, as you know, a wonderful spell—[3.] and surely these are images and bastard imitations of persuasion, not, as I said, legitimately bred works of human nature-do we not, on the other hand, take it that arrangement, being a kind of harmony of that language which grows naturally in human beings and fastens itself to our very soul, not just to our sense of hearing, exciting diversified ideas of words, conceptions, situations, finenesses, melodiousness, all coming into being at our creation and being reared up with us, and, simultaneously, by a varied mixing of sound, driving into the souls of those nearby the emotions which are stirring in the speaker, and over and over again making the hearers stand with him in communion, and making the greatnesses fit harmoniously together with the structuring of styles in speaking and writing, do we not then take it that by these very modes arrangement enchants us and at the same time on each occasion puts us in the mood for boldness and a sense of worth and sublimity and everything which it includes in itself, completely and really prevailing over our perceptiveness in every way? But even if it be madness to question things so agreed upon, experiment, you see, is an ample proof. 4. The concept which Demosthenes brings into his proposal is sublime—in my opinion—and is in reality wonderful:

This vote made the danger hanging over the city pass away like a cloud.

But this was voiced with a harmony not inferior to the perceptiveness. It was spoken, you see, generally in dactylic rhythms, and these are what are most nobly bred and productive of greatness: for this reason we understand that the heroic measure is the finest meter. And the… since certainly, if you rearrange the words—wherever you want to—out of their peculiar places:

this vote, just like a cloud, made the danger hanging over the city pass away,

or if (heaven knows) you chop away one syllable only,

made it pass away like a cloud,

you will understand how greatly a harmony resonates with sublimity. You see, the very phrase “just like a cloud” begins with its first long rhythms, measured out with four metrical beats, but were one syllable taken out of the phrase—”like a cloud”—it at once de-heightens the greatness by the syn­ cope; furthermore, if you should stretch out the phrase:

—made it pass away just as if a cloud—

while it expresses the same thing, the same effect does not strike our ears, because the abruptness slips away with the lengthening of the long time intervals and the sublimity slackens.