On Eloquence
September 25, 2022
Laurence Sterne by Louis Carrogis; 1762
FROM the works of Laurence Sterne (quoted here):
“THERE are two kinds of eloquence; one scarcely merits the name. It consists in a fixed number of periods, arranged and measured, and of artificial figures, brilliant with words and pretension. This eloquence dazzles, but does not enlighten the understanding. Admired and affected by the half-learned, whose judgment is as false as their taste is vitiated, it is entirely stranger to the sacred writers. If it was always considered as beneath the great men of all ages, with how much more reason must it appear unworthy of those writers whom the spirit of eternal wisdom animates in their watchings, and who ought to attain that strength, that majesty, that simplicity, which man alone never attains!
“The other sort of eloquence is entirely opposed to that I have just censured, and it truly characterizes the Holy Scriptures. Its excellence is not derived from a laboured and far-fetched elocution, but from a wonderful mixture of simplicity and majesty :—a double character so difficult to unite, that we very rarely find it in compositions purely human. The holy pages are not charged with superfluous and affected ornaments. The Divine Being having been pleased to condescend to speak our language to bring us the light of the revelation, has pleased to endow it with those natural and graceful turns which must penetrate the soul.
“The greatest writers of antiquity, either Greek or Latin, lose much of the grace of their style when translated literally into our modern languages. The famous apparition of Jupiter, in the first book of Homer, his pompous description of a tempest, his Neptune shaking the earth and opening it to its centre, the beauty of the horses of his Pallas,—all those passages, in a word, admired from age to age, wither and disappear almost entirely in the Latin version. Read the translations of Sophocles, of Theocritus, do we find anything more than some slight vestiges of the graces which charmed us in the originals? We conclude that pomp of expression, softness of numbers, and a musical phrase, constitute the greater part of the beauties of our classical authors, whilst those of the Holy Scriptures consist in the greatness of the things themselves rather than in that of the words. The ideas contained therein are so elevated in their nature, that they must of necessity appear sublime in their modest apparel: they shine through the weakest and most literal versions of the Bible.” What eloquence can be more worthy serious minds and Christian people ?
