for counsel. Then, again (and
this is the most important point of all), a writer can only learn from
art when he is to abandon himself to the direction of his genius.[1]

[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.

III

... "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.

4
Now bulk, when