Hyperbole

“ Small pedants thrive and statisticians creep on like an army of ants; the fiery nimble spirits that can turn mere words into so many soaring coloured balloons are departing from the world; if it were not for the poets, the Sporting Press and Mrs. What’s-her-name’s publishers, the hyperbole would be almost unknown to our generation. ”

“ It is true that a man may rant it and roar it with the best, may try to scale Parnassus as the Titans did Olympus and pile up gigantic image upon image, and yet be no poet; but it is equally true to say that all great poets have shown the same love of amazing hyperboles. Those extraordinary persons who hate a swelling image, a genial exaggeration, who distrust the hyperbole, may read their Shakespeare (though I doubt it) but they cannot read him with constant pleasure. ”

“ Hyperbole is an exaggerated form of statement, and is used to magnify or diminish an object. It is quite natural, under the impulse of strong emotion or imagination, to use exaggerated statements, and frequently it serves to lend piquancy and force to style. ”

“ To this the lovers of hyperbole reply, that virtue cannot be drawn too beautiful, nor vice too deformed, in order to excite in us an ambition of imitating the one, and a horror at the thoughts of becoming any way like the other. ”

“ The man and his exploits and his tutelary deities are mixed and blended in one invariable association. The marvellous too is very much like a snowball: it grows as it rolls downward, till the little nucleus of truth which began its descent from the summit is hidden in the accumulation of superinduced hyperbole. ”

“ Have the modesty to suppose that others know a thing or two as well as yourselves. The scraps of facts which may lie scattered among the profusion of your hyperbolisms may be old acquaintances of your hearers. Let them speak for themselves in their own artless, ingenuous way, and take their own chance of [Pg 132] success to whatever branch of the lovely family of truth they may belong.
“Hyperbole is a fault of no trivial importance in conversation. Carried, as it generally is, to such an extent, it is nothing more nor less than equivalent to lying. ”

“ Here we have humour, pathos, passion, vehemence, a rush of feeling and emotion not always under restraint, and apt to run into exaggeration and hyperbole—characteristics which enter largely into the mental and spiritual organisation of the people. ”

“ For the last century, and perhaps longer, the language of hyperbole has been but too common about our dramatists, and I have known more than one case in which the extravagant praise bestowed upon them has, when students have come to the works themselves, had a very disastrous effect of disappointment. ”

“ Any one of these innovations would, we are told, "shake the social structure to its base," "reduce society to chaos," "subvert the foundations of morality," "make life intolerable," "confound the order of nature," etc. These various locutions are, no doubt, of the nature of hyperbole ”

“ Yet we have persevered in the practice astonishingly, until it may be said that hyperbole is the favorite form of public utterance on almost any subject among a large class of individuals, in the expectation that only a certain percentage will not understand that the speaker or writer is not strictly in earnest. In this manner the virtuous and the patriotic are enabled to give free vent to their emotions and to set their fellow-citizens and themselves highest among the people of the earth without other expenditure than words, resolutions, or empty laws. ”

“ From these premisses, one would not expect the following conclusion, the only reason he can find for justifying this figure of speech. “Conceditur enim amplius dicere, quia dici quantum est, non potest: meliusque ultra quam citra stat oratio.” (We are indulged to say more than enough, because we cannot say enough; and it is better to be over than under) . In the name of wonder, why this slight and childish reason, when immediately before he had made it evident, that the hyperbole is founded on human nature? ”

“ If you possess any shred of humor, charm, insight, sympathy, idealism, so-called,—above all, idealism,—and if you are cursed with any sense of form and unity, and feel that a story ought to have a beginning and an end, and be about something in the mean time,—why, trample on all this as you would on so many snakes,' I should say to him. 'Get it fixed firmly in your dull mind that life is dreary and meaningless, or has but a material meaning, if you like, and that sound fiction must behave accordingly. ”

“ The further our literary inquiries are extended here, the more vast and stupendous is the scene which opens to us; at the same time, that the true and false, the sublime and the puerile, wisdom and absurdity, are so intermixed, that, at every step, we have to smile at folly, while we admire and acknowledge the philosophical truth, though couched in obscure allegory and puerile fable. ”

“ As I was going to say, knowledge which comes to a man with any particular sweep or scope is in the very nature of things dramatic. If the minds of two men expressing opinions in the dark could be flashed on a canvas, if there could be such a thing as a composite photograph of an opinion—a biograph of it,—it would prove to be, with nine men out of ten, a dissolving view of faces. The unspoken sides of thought are all dramatic. ”

“ And so, when we come across some particularly popular word like reason in eighteenth-century literature, we are sometimes tempted to lay down the book, while imagination goes groping vainly round the impenetrable fringe of that mysterious no-man’s-land which lies between words and their meanings. ”

“ The book itself, in fact, is little else than a mass of 'suggestions,' humane, unprejudiced, guided by the truest feeling for the facts of human nature, but disconnected, tentative, dubious, and interrogative to such a degree that the reader fairly craves a sharp-cut and decisive formula, even a false one, to give emphasis and relief to the style. ”

“ Look on now to maturer years; does fiction then lose its influence? Have we not often found the moral truth, or the moral quality, which, in its abstract nature, has scarcely been apprehended by us, startling us into attention, fixing itself with powerful grasp on all our faculties, when clothed in its developed attributes,—when embodied in a real character? ”

“ Wit lashes external appearances, or cunningly exchanges single foibles into character; humor glides into the heart of its object, looks lovingly upon the infirmities it attacks, and represents the whole man. ”

“ But wit, abstracted from its effects upon the hearer, may be more rigorously and philosophically considered as a kind of discordia concors; a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike. Of wit, thus defined, they have more than enough. The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions; their learning instructs, and their subtlety surprises; but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought, and though he sometimes admires, is seldom pleased. ”

“ The wonder of the book is its superior intelligence. In the menstruum of this man's wit, the past and the present ages, and their religions, politics and modes of thinking, are dissolved into archetypes and ideas. ”

“ The superior character of truth and seriousness, in the matter and substance of the best poetry, is inseparable from the superiority of diction and movement marking its style and manner. The two superiorities are closely related, and are in steadfast proportion one to the other. So far as high poetic truth and seriousness are wanting to a poet’s matter and substance, so far also, we may be sure, will a high poetic stamp of diction and movement be wanting to his style and manner. ”

“ Thus the Hyperbolist stands on either side of truth, and takes from or adds to, according to the temper of his mind and the object he wishes to accomplish. On whichever side he stand his talk is alike blamable.
Let me, in conclusion, caution my readers, and especially my young readers, against the formation and practice of this intemperate habit in talking. It is of no service to truth. It does no good to you or others, but harm. It will grow upon you, and may end in the habit of absolute false speaking. ”

“ No great expenditure of wit is needed to make fun of the maxim that Being and Nothing are the same, or rather to adduce absurdities which, it is erroneously asserted, are the consequences and illustrations of that maxim. ”

“ If, however, the thought of a writer takes fire, and instead of the cold, unimpassioned phraseology of the logician, glowing images crowd up, and phrases tipped with fire, then figurative language best suits the thought,—indeed, it is the thought. ”

“ I notice in all things a curious duality, a right side and a wrong side. Confusion is the wrong side of order, misery of happiness, falsehood of truth, evil of good; and it seems to me that novel-reading, which can be a vice, I know, may also be made a virtue. ”

“ We find this a strange and even a ridiculous spectacle, the men who had prided themselves on their common sense and reasonableness, whose literature had sparkled with wit and epigram, blubbering and crying like great children ”

“ What then is the design of this singular and mysterious power, in connexion with this sad and unaccountable nature—so often the theme of eulogy and lament—of lofty, long, and desperate satire, among men? The best answer, we think, is rendered in the influence, where operation is open to every one who thinks, observes, reasons, acts, among his fellows.—To enter into particular definitions here, would be needless as well as wearisome. The general effect upon man, as a sentient and moral being, must be the point to which our simple remarks and reasons must be confined. ”

“ Whilst common sense looks at things or visible nature as real and final facts, poetry, or the imagination which dictates it, is a second sight, looking through these, and using them as types or words for thoughts which they signify. ”

“ In the justifying of the paradox, in the extricating of the real truth from the apparent falsehood of the statement, in the answer to the appeal made here to the imagination,—an appeal and challenge which, unless it be responded to, the proverb must remain unintelligible to us,—in all this there is a process of mental activity, oftentimes so rapidly exercised as scarcely to be perceptible, yet not the less carried on with a pleasurable excitement. ”

“ It is also proper to add, that there may be Wit in a Picture, Landscape, or in any Prospect, where a gay unexpected Assemblage of similar, or opposite Objects, is presented.
Judgment, is the Faculty of discerning the various Dimensions, and Differences, of Subjects.
Invention is the Faculty of finding out new Assortments, and Combinations, of Ideas.
Humour is any whimsical Oddity or Foible, appearing in the Temper or Conduct of a Person in real Life. ”

“ With the nations above mentioned, on the contrary, we have a vision of life gushing forth [13] in a flood which, even where the emotions are in other respects at rest, is ever intent upon expatiation, and owing to this expressly volitional effort of the will is dominated by an intelligence which at one time is visible in abrupt parentheses, at another in subtle generalization, at another in the playful conjunction of its sallies of wit and humour. ”

“ All beauties of language, all flights of poetry, all particular scenes and speeches, powerful and impressive as they may be, are merely subordinate. No character, how exquisitely or elaborately soever conceived and finished, is drawn for itself ”

“ Understand us—we mean what we say: we say book-men, we say theorists; and, if humor prompts, it may add contemptuous epithets to the terms. We may say, if we choose, mere book-men, mad theorists, or dreamy philosophers, and still the proposition would be true. ”

“ Statement, method, imagery, selection, tenacity of memory, power of dealing with facts, of illuminating them, of sinking them by ridicule or by diversion of the mind, rapid generalization, humor, pathos, are keys which the orator holds; and yet these fine gifts are not eloquence, and do often hinder a man’s attainment of it. ”

“ It is the fashion to say that the characteristic of the literature of the last century was shallow clearness, the expression of obvious thoughts in obvious, though highly finished language; it is the fashion to retort upon our own generation that its tendency is to over-thinking and over-expression, a constant search for thoughts which shall not he obvious and words which shall be above the level of received conventionality. ”

“ And at moments when he is narrating their exploits, and can forget his elaborate argumentations and refrain from bits of deliberate bombast, the style becomes graphic in the higher sense of a much-abused word, and we confess that we are listening to genuine eloquence. ”

“ The four faculties in question seem to me all of their class; but when either fancy or humour is expressed to gain an end, is pointed at a purpose — whenever either becomes objective in place of subjective, then it becomes, also, pure wit or sarcasm, just as the purpose is benevolent or malevolent. ”

“ And all sorts of things that inevitably mar the tense illusion which is the aim of the short story—the introduction, for example, of the author’s personality—any comment that seems to admit that, after all, fiction is fiction, a change in manner between part and part, burlesque, parody, invective, all such things are not necessarily wrong in the novel. ”

“ Every page furnishes instances of that intensifying of expression, where some happy word conveys a whole train of ideas condensed into a single luminous point—words so new, so full of meaning, yet so unforced and natural, that the rudest mind intuitively perceives their meaning, and yet which no study could improve or imitate. ”