Chapter 33: Whether Excellence with Faults is Better than Faultless Mediocrity
Come, let us take a kind of prose-writer who is in reality pure and without reproof. Is it not worthwhile to investigate this problem in general terms-whether poems and speeches and writings which have greatness in some parts but are thoroughly mistaken in others are ever better than those which are moderate in correctness though everywhere sound and faultless? And, too (heaven knows), should the more numerous excellences in speeches and writings justifiably carry off first prizes or the greater ones? You see, these speculations belong to the subject of the sublime, and they ought to have a critical decision. 2. I know that transcendentally great natures are least pure-you see, what is precise in every detail runs the risk of pettiness, but in greatness, as in the very rich, there must actually be a kind of negligence. Perhaps it may even be necessary that though low and middle natures, because they run no risks and never commit themselves to the heights, remain for the most part without mistakes and safer, great things, liable to being unsafe, for this very reason come to greatness.
3. But, in fact, I am not ignorant of this second point, that by nature everything human is recognized more because of what is inferior in it, and that while the memory of mistakes is never effaced, the memory of fine things flows swiftly away. 4. And I myself have cited no few mistakes even in Homer and many others of the greatest writers, and although I am least of all satisfied with their stumblings, calling them not voluntary mistakes but rather oversights to which the writers were carried on account of careless ness, unknowingly, as it happened, and somehow at random, and because of the greatness of their natures, nevertheless I take it that the greater elements responsible for excellence over and over again win the vote for first prize, even if they are not on the same level in all points, because of their very greatness of mind-if not for the other reason. Surely, of course, Apollonius of Rhodes, in the Argonautica, is also without fault, and Theocritus in his pastorals (except for some extraneous material) comes out most luckily. Now wouldn’t you rather be Homer than Apollonius? 5. And what of this? Eratosthenes in his Erigone-a blameless little poem in all its parts is he indeed a greater poet than Archilochus, who sweeps many things along in disorder, with his outburst of daemonic. spirit, so hard to bring under rule? And what of this?
In lyric poetry would you choose to be Bacchylides rather than Pindar, and in tragedy Ion of Chios rather than (heaven knows) Sophoclcs?—since Bacchylides and Ion are without fault and their works arc everywhere smooth and finely written, while there are times when Pindar and Sophocles flame up impulsively and quench themselves irrationally and collapse most unluckily. Would any man in his senses esteem all of Ion’s drama, put together in the same place, as equal to one drama, the Oedipus?
