_"From the Sublime to the Ridiculous is but a Step"_ (Vol. v., p.
100.).--In MR. BREEN'S interesting article entitled "Idées
Napoléoniennes" (p. 100.), is the following passage:
"It will be seen that the original saying has undergone a slight
modification, Longinus making the transition a gradual one,
κατ' ὀλίγον, while Blair, Payne, and Napoleon make it but
'a step.'"
Now there is nothing in the whole range of scholarship and philology
that requires more tender handling than the Greek preposition, unless it
be the prepositional adverb, which results from the combination of a
preposition with an adjective. I would not be so bold as to assert that
κατ' ὀλίγον does _not_ mean "gradually, by little and little." I
feel convinced that I have seen it so used before now; but I beg to
submit that in the powerful passage quoted from Longinus it can only
mean "_presently, at once, with little_" delay or interval. The purport
of the passage seems to be this:--[The instances which I have cited]
"exhibit rather a turbid diction, and a confused imagery, than a
striking and forcible discourse. For, take them one by one, and hold
them up to the light, and what first looked terrible shall _presently_
take its true colour, and appear contemptible."
Longinus had quoted certain turgid and empty attempts at a very high
rhetorical strain: he then in the passage before us condemns them for
their confusion both of thought and phrase; and says, that they won't
bear looking into _for a minute_ (κατ' ὀλίγον).
If these remarks are correct, I fear they must damage the parallelism so
industriously instituted by your correspondent; but if he will not be
offended, I shall not regret it: for I confess to some feeling of
jealousy in favour of modern forms of thought, and their claims to
originality. The field of thought is finite, and great minds have tilled
it before us; so that scarcely in its remotest corners shall you find a
patch of virgin soil, or a bud till now unseen. But originality is not
excluded for all that. He that culls a flower in the nineteenth century,
and has an eye for its beauty, is as _original_ an admirer as he who did
the same on the day of creation. And he who with quick perceptions
combines the thoughts which have arrested his attention, and with a
lively and apt expression, fresh and free from conventional formalism,
gives them out to another, that man may be called original. The opposite
of _originality_ is not _repetition_, but _imitation_. When, therefore,
we would prove that a writer is not original, it is not enough to
produce similar thoughts or phrases in older writers, unless our
instances are so numerous as to afford an appearance of systematic
copyism, or historical evidence of the fact of imitation be forthcoming
from some external source.