‘And let them check the chimney's giant flame; for if I see one hearth-keeper alone, I will weave one curling streamer of fire and burn the roof and reduce all to ash; but the noble strain has not yet broken from me.’ These verses are no longer tragic but mock-tragic: the curling streamers, the spitting toward heaven, the making of Boreas a flute-player, and the rest of it. The phrasing is muddied, the imagery jangled rather than terrifying; and if you bring the several details up to the light, they fall away from the fearful into the despicable. Now if even in tragedy, a thing naturally pompous and admitting of bombast, an unmusical swelling is past forgiving, much less, I think, would it suit unfeigned prose. §1
On this account men laugh too at Gorgias of Leontini for writing ‘Xerxes the Persian Zeus’ and ‘living tombs are vultures,’ and at certain expressions in Callisthenes that are not lofty but airborne; and even more at Cleitarchus, a husk of a man, ever puffing in the words of Sophocles ‘on tiny pipes, but without the mouth-band.’ Such, too, are the writings of Amphicrates, of Hegesias, of Matris: thinking themselves often inspired, they are not in a true frenzy but only at play. §2
On the whole, swelling seems among the very hardest faults to guard against. By nature all who aim at grandeur, in flight from the charge of feebleness and dryness, somehow slide into this error, persuaded by the saying that ‘to fall short in great matters is yet a noble fault.’ §3
But bad swellings, in the body and in writing alike, are those that are bloated and false, the kind that drive us about into their opposite; for nothing, men say, is drier than a dropsical body. The puffy aims to overshoot the heights, but the puerile is its plain contrary, low and small-souled and indeed the most ignoble fault of all. What, then, is the puerile? Surely it is a pedant's notion, fussed into frigidity by overworking. Writers slip into this kind when they reach for the curious, the made-up, and above all the agreeable, and run aground on the trumpery and the affected. §4
Beside this lies a third species of fault, in passages of feeling, which Theodorus called parenthyrson, ‘false enthusiasm.’ It is passion ill-timed and empty, where no passion is needed, or immoderate where moderation is required. For some, as if drunk, are carried away into emotions no longer proper to the matter but personal and pedantic to themselves; then they make themselves indecent before audiences who feel nothing, and naturally so, since the writer is beside himself before hearers who are not. But the subject of pathos has its own place reserved for it elsewhere. §5