... "And let them check the stove's long tongues of fire:
For if I see one tenant of the hearth,
I'll thrust within one curling torrent flame,
And bring that roof in ashes to the ground:
But now not yet is sung my noble lay."[1]
Such phrases cease to be tragic, and become burlesque,--I mean phrases
like "curling torrent flames" and "vomiting to heaven," and representing
Boreas as a piper, and so on. Such expressions, and such images, produce
an effect of confusion and obscurity, not of energy; and if each
separately be examined under the light of criticism, what seemed
terrible gradually sinks into absurdity. Since then, even in tragedy,
where the natural dignity of the subject makes a swelling diction
allowable, we cannot pardon a tasteless grandiloquence, how much more
incongruous must it seem in sober prose!
[Footnote 1: Aeschylus in his lost _Oreithyia_.]
2
Hence we laugh at those fine words of Gorgias of Leontini, such as
"Xerxes the Persian Zeus" and "vultures, those living tombs," and at
certain conceits of Callisthenes which are high-flown rather than
sublime, and at some in Cleitarchus more ludicrous still--a writer whose
frothy style tempts us to travesty Sophocles and say, "He blows a little
pipe, and blows it ill." The same faults may be observed in Amphicrates
and Hegesias and Matris, who in their frequent moments (as they think)
of inspiration, instead of playing the genius are simply playing the
fool.
3
Speaking generally, it would seem that bombast is one of the hardest
things to avoid in writing. For all those writers who are ambitious of a
lofty style, through dread of being convicted of feebleness and poverty
of language, slide by a natural gradation into the opposite extreme.
"Who fails in great endeavour, nobly fails," is their creed.
4
Now bulk, when hollow and affected, is always objectionable, whether in
material bodies or in writings, and in danger of producing on us an
impression of littleness: "nothing," it is said, "is drier than a man
with the dropsy."
The characteristic, then, of bombast is that it transcends the Sublime:
but there is another fault diametrically opposed to grandeur: this is
called puerility, and it is the failing of feeble and narrow
minds,--indeed, the most ignoble of all vices in writing. By puerility
we mean a pedantic habit of mind, which by over-elaboration ends in
frigidity. Slips of this sort are made by those who, aiming at
brilliancy, polish, and especially attractiveness, are landed in
paltriness and silly affectation.
5
Closely associated with this is a third sort of vice, in dealing with
the passions, which Theodorus used to call false sentiment, meaning by
that an ill-timed and empty display of emotion, where no emotion is
called for, or of greater emotion than the situation warrants. Thus we
often see an author hurried by the tumult of his mind into tedious
displays of mere personal feeling which has no connection with the
subject. Yet how justly ridiculous must an author appear, whose most
violent transports leave his readers quite cold! However, I will dismiss
this subject, as I intend to devote a separate work to the treatment of
the pathetic in writing.