2 For an exhibition of feeling has then most effect on an audience when it appears to flow naturally from the occasion, not to have been laboured by the art of the speaker; and this device of questioning and replying to himself reproduces the moment of passion. For as a sudden question addressed to an individual will sometimes startle him into a reply which is an unguarded expression of his genuine sentiments, so the figure of question and interrogation blinds the judgment of an audience, and deceives them into a belief that what is really the result of labour in every detail has been struck out of the speaker by the inspiration of the moment.
There is one passage in Herodotus which is generally credited with extraordinary sublimity....
... The removal of connecting particles gives a quick rush and “torrent rapture” to a passage, the writer appearing to be actually almost left behind by his own words. There is an example in Xenophon: “Clashing their shields together they pushed, they fought, they slew, they fell.”[1] And the words of Eurylochus in the _Odyssey_--
“We passed at thy command the woodland’s shade; We found a stately hall built in a mountain glade.”[2]
Words thus severed from one another without the intervention of stops give a lively impression of one who through distress of mind at once halts and hurries in his speech. And this is what Homer has expressed by using the figure _Asyndeton_.
But nothing is so conducive to energy as a combination of different figures, when two or three uniting their resources mutually contribute to the vigour, the cogency, and the beauty of a speech. So Demosthenes in his speech against Meidias repeats the same words and breaks up his sentences in one lively descriptive passage: “He who receives a blow is hurt in many ways which he could not even describe to another, by gesture, by look, by tone.”
2 Then, to vary the movement of his speech, and prevent it from standing still (for stillness produces rest, but passion requires a certain disorder of language, imitating the agitation and commotion of the soul), he at once dashes off in another direction, breaking up his words again, and repeating them in a different form, “by gesture, by look, by tone--when insult, when hatred, is added to violence, when he is struck with the fist, when he is struck as a slave!” By such means the orator imitates the action of Meidias, dealing blow upon blow on the minds of his judges. Immediately after like a hurricane he makes a fresh attack: “When he is struck with the fist, when he is struck in the face; this is what moves, this is what maddens a man, unless he is inured to outrage; no one could describe all this so as to bring home to his hearers its bitterness.”[1] You see how he preserves, by continual variation, the intrinsic force of these repetitions and broken clauses, so that his order seems irregular, and conversely his irregularity acquires a certain measure of order.