Diving Deep into Bathos and Feeling Pity and Pathos

In my recent reading the word bathetic has come up several times. I cannot remember having seen it before, so had to look it up to see what it meant. It is not a misspelling of pathetic, although the two are related.

Bathetic and pathetic are forms of the words bathos and pathos. It will be easier to understand bathos once we have a good understanding of pathos.

Pathos is noun for the quality or power to evoke a feeling of pity or compassion. While it is often used of art, it also occurs in life. Pathetic is the adjective form, describing something that evokes pity or sympathy.

Pity is defined as sympathy or sorrow evoked by the suffering or distress of another, pitiful being the adjective form with an added definition that includes some sense of contempt or disparaging of the quality of the suffering. Pity came to English in the early 1200s from the Old French word pite, which they got from the Latin word pietatem meaning loyalty, duty or piety. (Yes, we get piety from the same word.) Old English had a word, mildheortness that meant mild-heartedness, and was, according to etymonline.com, a “loan-translation of Latin misericordia.” Etymonline also says that pity and piety were not fully distinguished from each other until the 1600s.

Pathetic is often used where pitiful is meant; it should not have a negative connotation but increasingly does. The difference between the two words is closing.

Pathos has been in use in English since the 1660s, coming over from the Greek word of the same spelling that means literally “what befalls one” according to etymonline.com. Pathos means suffering, feeling, emotion, calamity.” But the word pathetic arrived earlier, in the 1590s, from the Middle French word pathétique. Pathétique meant emotionally moving or stirring, and came from the Late Latin word patheticus, which came from the Greek word pathetikos meaning “subject to feeling, sensitive, capable of emotion.” Its root word, though had a sense of suffering that we find also in pathos. The conflation of pathetic and pitiful began in 1737.  

Bathos is pathos overdone or insincere, and anticlimax. It is trivialization or going from the sublime to the ridiculous (a phrase attributed in concept to Thomas Paine in The Age of Reason, 1793, but made popular by Napoleon, who reportedly uttered in 1812, the year he retreated from Moscow “From the sublime to the ridiculous there is only one step.”) According to britannica.com, bathos is an “unsuccessful, and therefore ludicrous, attempt to portray pathos in art, i.e., to evoke pity, sympathy, or sorrow. The term was first used in this sense by Alexander Pope in his treatise Peri Bathous; or, The Art of Sinking in Poetry (1728).” Etymonline pegs its arrival in English a year earlier, from the Greek word for depth: bathos but also attributes its introduction to Pope.

Britannica.com gives an example of bathos from the oeuvre of William Wordsworth, who tries to “arouse pity for the old huntsman in ‘Simon Lee’” with these words:

Few months of life has he in store

As he to you will tell,

For still, the more he works, the more

Do his weak ankles swell.

Sometimes the line between pathos and bathos is difficult to find. The line between pathetic and bathetic and pitiful is even more difficult to discern.