The merit of diction is to be clear and not commonplace. The clearest diction is that made up of ordinary words, but it is commonplace.
An example is the poetry of Cleophon and of Sthenelus. Footnote 1A tragedian whom Aristophanes ridicules for the insipidity of his diction.
That which employs unfamiliar words is dignified and outside the common usage. By unfamiliar
I mean a rare word, a metaphor, a lengthening, Footnote 2See preceding chapter 19. and anything beyond the ordinary use.
But if a poet writes entirely in such words, the result will be either a riddle or jargon; if made up of metaphors, a riddle and if of rare words, jargon.
The essence of a riddle consists in describing a fact by an impossible combination of words. By merely combining the ordinary names of things this cannot be done, but it is made possible by combining metaphors. For instance, I saw a man weld bronze upon a man with fire,
and so on. Footnote 3The answer is a cupping-bowl. This was a bronze vessel which was applied to the body at the place at which a small incision had been made. Heated lint was placed in the bowl of it and the reduction of air-pressure thus caused a strong flow of blood. For this form of riddle cf. Out of the strong came forth sweetness.
A medley of rare words is jargon.
We need then a sort of mixture of the two. For the one kind will save the diction from being prosaic and commonplace, the rare word, for example, and the metaphor and the ornament,
whereas the ordinary words give clarity.
A considerable aid to clarity and distinction are the lengthening and abbreviation and alteration of words. Being otherwise than in the ordinary form and thus unusual, these will produce the effect of distinction, and clarity will be preserved by retaining part of the usual form.
Those critics are therefore wrong who censure this manner of idiom and poke fun at the poet, as did the elder Eucleides Footnote 4A critic of this name wrote on the drama, but his date is uncertain. who said it was easy to write poetry, granted the right to lengthen syllables at will. He had made a burlesque in this very style:
Ἐ̄πῐχᾰ́|ρη̄ν εἶ̄δο̆ν Μᾰρᾰ|θω̄νᾰ́δε̆ | βᾱδῑ|ζο̄ντᾰ
οῡ̓κ ᾱ̓́ν | γ̆' ε̆ρᾰ́με̆νος το̄ν | ἐκεῑ́νοῡ ε̆λλε̆́βο̆ρο̄ν.
Footnote 5In Homer we find short vowels lengthened by position,
but, whereas Homer uses the licence sparingly, Eucleides raised a laugh by overdoing it and writing in parody such hexameters as those here quoted. A modern parallel may illustrate this. The poet Stephen Phillips employed to excess the licence whihc allows a clash between the natural accent and the metrical ictus, and Mr. Owen Seaman, for the express purpose of raising a laugh,
parodied the trick by carrying it to further excess and wrote in blank verse, She a milliner was and her brothers Dynamiters.
Now to make an obtrusive use of this licence is ridiculous;
but moderation is a requisite common to all kinds of writing. The same effect could be got by using metaphors and rare words and the rest unsuitably for the express purpose of raising a laugh.
What a difference is made by the proper use of such licence may be seen in epic poetry, if you substitute in the verse the ordinary forms.
Take a rare word or metaphor or any of the others and substitute the ordinary word; the truth of our contention will then be obvious.For instance, Aeschylus and Euripides wrote the same iambic line with the change of one word only, a rare word in place of one made ordinary by custom, yet the one line seems beautiful and the other trivial. Aeschylus in the Philoctetes wrote, The ulcer eats the flesh of this my foot,
and Euripides instead of eats
put feasts upon.
Or take I that am small, of no account nor goodly;
suppose one were to read the line substituting the ordinary words,
I that am little and weak and ugly.
Or compare
He set a stool unseemly and a table small.
with
He set a shabby stool and a little table,
or the sea-shore is roaring
with the sea-shore is shrieking.
Footnote 6Similarly we might use ordinary
words instead of those which Keats chose so carefully and speak of wonderful windows abutting on to a dangerous sea-shore in a dreary, mysterious country.
Ariphrades Footnote 7Unknown. again made fun of the tragedians because they employ phrases which no one would use in conversation, like δωμάτων ἄπο
instead of ἀπὸ δωμάτων and their σέθεν
and ἐγὼ δέ νιν
and Ἀχιλλέως πέρι
for περὶ Ἀχιλλέως, and so on.
All that sort of thing, not being in the ordinary form, gives distinction to the diction, which was what he failed to understand.
It is a great thing to make a proper use of each of the elements mentioned, and of double words and rare words too, but by far the greatest thing is the use of metaphor.
That alone cannot be learnt; it is the token of genius. For the right use of metaphor means an eye for resemblances. Footnote 8i.e., the power of detecting identity in difference
which distinguishes also both the philosopher and the scientist.
Of the various kinds of words the double forms are most suited for dithyrambs, rare words for heroic verse and metaphors for iambics.
And indeed in heroic verse they are all useful; but since iambic verse is largely an imitation of speech, only those nouns are suitable which might be used in talking. These are the ordinary word, metaphor, and ornament.
Now concerning tragedy and the art of representing life in action, what we have said already must suffice.