[Footnote 1: Literally, “But the most important point of all is that the actual fact that there are some parts of literature which are in the power of natural genius alone, must be learnt from no other source than from art.”]
These are the considerations which I submit to the unfavourable critic of such useful studies. Perhaps they may induce him to alter his opinion as to the vanity and idleness of our present investigations.
... “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.