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120 THEORIES OF STYLE IN LITERATURE
XV
The dignity, grandeur, and energy of a style largely depend
on a proper employment of images, a term which I prefer
to that usually given.* The term image in its most general
acceptation includes every thought, howsoever presented,
which issues in speech. But the term is now generally confined
to those cases when he who is speaking, by reason of
the rapt and excited state of his feelings, imagines himself
to see what he is
talking about, and produces a similar
illusion in his hearers. Poets and orators both employ
images, but with a very different object, as you are well
aware. The poetical image
is
designed to astound; the oratorical
image to give perspicuity. Both, however, seek to
work on the emotions.
" Mother, I pray thee, set not thou upon me
Those maids with bloody face and serpent hair:
"
See, see, they come, they're here, they spring upon me !
f
And again
"Ah, ah, she'll slay me !
whither shall I fly?
"
\
The poet when he wrote like this saw the Erinyes with his
own eyes, and he almost compels his readers to see them
too. Euripides found his chief delight in the labor of
giving tragic expression to these two passions of madness
and love, showing here a real mastery which I cannot think
he exhibited elsewhere. Still, he is
by no means diffident in
venturing on other fields of the imagination. His genius
was far from being of the highest order, but by taking pains
he often raises himself to a tragic, elevation. In his sublimer
moments he generally reminds us of Homer's description
of the lion
* eldu\oiroitai, "fictions of the imagination," Hickie.
f Eur. Orest. 255. J Iph. Taur. 291.