What is vivacity?

George Campbell, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

George Campbell answers

Vivacity, as I treat it in the Philosophy of Rhetoric — that work which attempts to ground every precept of the orator's art in the actual constitution of the human mind — is the quality of style by which discourse is adapted to please the imagination and, through the imagination, to awaken and fix attention.1 It is not mere liveliness in the loose sense; it is a technical property, and its sources are three: the choice of words, their number, and their arrangement.2

The governing principle is resemblance. Language, being composed of signs, stands at a remove from the things it represents; vivacity is the degree to which expression closes that distance, making an absent thing act upon the mind with something of the force of a present one.3 The most immediate instrument for this is specificity in the proper terms chosen — the more particular and determinate a word in its signification, the more the mind fastens on a definite object rather than a vague abstraction.4

Tropes carry the work further. Among them, the most powerful for vivacity are those which substitute the animate for the lifeless — which attribute life, perception, passion, or design to what has none of these.5 Thomson's valley that relents to the reflected ray, or the hedge that is conscious of what passes near it: the energy of such expressions comes entirely from those two words, which lend to insensible matter the quality of a sentient being.6

The imagination is more strongly seized by things animate than by things senseless, for the same reason it is more seized by things sensible than by things merely intelligible. Now, vivacity of style must be distinguished from vivacity as Mr Hume employs the term — that is, the liveliness of an idea taken as the criterion of belief. I do not say belief consisteth in the liveliness of our ideas, and that doctrine I regard as erroneous.7

What is true, and worth holding firmly, is that belief commonly enlivens our ideas, and that lively ideas have a stronger influence than faint ones to induce belief — but these two facts fall well short of identity.8 The ideas raised by Sophocles or Shakespeare are incomparably more vivid than those produced by a cold but faithful historiographer; yet I credit the languid narrative of the latter and believe not a sentence of the tragedies.9

Vivacity of expression, then, serves the imagination and through it the passions; it is not itself the measure of truth, and a rhetoric that confounds the two has lost its footing on both sides.

Sources

  1. By vivacity of expression, resemblance is attained, as far as language can contribute to the attainment... I begin with vivacity, whose nature (though perhaps the word is rarely used in a signification so extensive) will be best understood by considering the several principles from which it arises.
    The Philosophy of Rhetoric
  2. There are three things in a style on which its vivacity depends, the choice of words, their number, and their arrangement.
    The Philosophy of Rhetoric
  3. By vivacity of expression, resemblance is attained, as far as language can contribute to the attainment.
    The Philosophy of Rhetoric
  4. Nothing can contribute more to enliven the expression than that all the words employed be as particular and determinate in their signification as will suit with the nature and the scope of the discourse.
    The Philosophy of Rhetoric
  5. things animate awaken greater attention, and make a stronger impression on the mind, than things senseless. It is for this reason that the quality of which I am treating hath come to be termed vivacity, or liveliness of style.
    The Philosophy of Rhetoric
  6. Who sees not how much of their energy these quotations owe to the two words relents and conscious?
    The Philosophy of Rhetoric
  7. I will not say with a late subtile metaphysician, that 'Belief consisteth in the liveliness of our ideas.' That this doctrine is erroneous, it would be quite foreign to my purpose to attempt here to evince.
    The Philosophy of Rhetoric
  8. Thus much, however, is indubitable, that belief commonly enlivens our ideas, and that lively ideas have a stronger influence than faint ideas to induce belief.
    The Philosophy of Rhetoric
  9. The ideas raised in my mind by the Œdipus Tyrannus of Sophocles, or the Lear of Shakespeare, are incomparably more lively than those excited by a cold but faithful historiographer. Yet I may give full credit to the languid narrative of the latter, though I believe not a single sentence in those tragedies.
    The Philosophy of Rhetoric