The last of the faults which I mentioned is frequently observed in
Timaeus--I mean the fault of frigidity. In other respects he is an able
writer, and sometimes not unsuccessful in the loftier style; a man of
wide knowledge, and full of ingenuity; a most bitter critic of the
failings of others--but unhappily blind to his own. In his eagerness to
be always striking out new thoughts he frequently falls into the most
childish absurdities.
2
I will only instance one or two passages, as most of them have been
pointed out by Caecilius. Wishing to say something very fine about
Alexander the Great he speaks of him as a man "who annexed the whole of
Asia in fewer years than Isocrates spent in writing his panegyric
oration in which he urges the Greeks to make war on Persia." How strange
is the comparison of the "great Emathian conqueror" with an Athenian
rhetorician! By this mode of reasoning it is plain that the Spartans
were very inferior to Isocrates in courage, since it took them thirty
years to conquer Messene, while he finished the composition of this
harangue in ten.
3
Observe, too, his language on the Athenians taken in Sicily. "They paid
the penalty for their impious outrage on Hermes in mutilating his
statues; and the chief agent in their destruction was one who was
descended on his father's side from the injured deity--Hermocrates, son
of Hermon." I wonder, my dearest Terentian, how he omitted to say of the
tyrant Dionysius that for his impiety towards Zeus and Herakles he was
deprived of his power by Dion and Herakleides.
4
Yet why speak of Timaeus, when even men like Xenophon and Plato--the
very demi-gods of literature--though they had sat at the feet of
Socrates, sometimes forgot themselves in the pursuit of such paltry
conceits. The former, in his account of the Spartan Polity, has these
words: "Their voice you would no more hear than if they were of marble,
their gaze is as immovable as if they were cast in bronze; you would
deem them more modest than the very maidens in their eyes."[1] To speak
of the pupils of the eye as "modest maidens" was a piece of absurdity
becoming Amphicrates[2] rather than Xenophon. And then what a strange
delusion to suppose that modesty is always without exception expressed
in the eye! whereas it is commonly said that there is nothing by which
an impudent fellow betrays his character so much as by the expression of
his eyes. Thus Achilles addresses Agamemnon in the _Iliad_ as "drunkard,
with eye of dog."[3]
[Footnote 1: _Xen. de Rep. Laced._ 3, 5.]
[Footnote 2: C. iii. sect. 2.]
[Footnote 3: _Il._ i. 225.]
5
Timaeus, however, with that want of judgment which characterises
plagiarists, could not leave to Xenophon the possession of even this
piece of frigidity. In relating how Agathocles carried off his cousin,
who was wedded to another man, from the festival of the unveiling, he
asks, "Who could have done such a deed, unless he had harlots instead of
maidens in his eyes?"
6
And Plato himself, elsewhere so supreme a master of style, meaning to
describe certain recording tablets, says, "They shall write, and deposit
in the temples memorials of cypress wood";[4] and again, "Then
concerning walls, Megillus, I give my vote with Sparta that we should
let them lie asleep within the ground, and not awaken them."[5]
[Footnote 4: _Plat. de Legg._ v. 741, C.]
[Footnote 5: _Ib._ vi. 778, D.]
7
And Herodotus falls pretty much under the same censure, when he speaks
of beautiful women as "tortures to the eye,"[6] though here there is
some excuse, as the speakers in this passage are drunken barbarians.
Still, even from dramatic motives, such errors in taste should not be
permitted to deface the pages of an immortal work.
[Footnote 6: v. 18.]
V
Now all these glaring improprieties of language may be traced to one
common root--the pursuit of novelty in thought. It is this that has
turned the brain of nearly all the learned world of to-day. Human
blessings and human ills commonly flow from the same source: and, to
apply this principle to literature, those ornaments of style, those
sublime and delightful images, which contribute to success, are the
foundation and the origin, not only of excellence, but also of failure.
It is thus with the figures called transitions, and hyperboles, and the
use of plurals for singulars. I shall show presently the dangers which
they seem to involve. Our next task, therefore, must be to propose and
to settle the question how we may avoid the faults of style related to
sublimity.