On the Sublime
nor for the greatest of our own contemporaries. Boileau so much
misconceived these lofty ideas that he regarded "Longinus's" judgment as
solely that "of good sense," and held that, in his time, "nothing was
good or bad till he had spoken." But there is far more than good sense,
there is high poetic imagination and moral greatness, in the criticism
of our author, who certainly would have rejected Boileau's compliment
when he selects Longinus as a literary dictator.
Indeed we almost grudge our author's choice of a subject. He who wrote
that "it was not in nature's plan for us, her children, to be base and
ignoble; no, she brought us into life as into some great field of
contest," should have had another field of contest than literary
criticism. It is almost a pity that we have to doubt the tradition,
according to which our author was Longinus, and, being but a
rhetorician, greatly dared and bravely died. Taking literature for his
theme, he wanders away into grammar, into considerations of tropes and
figures, plurals and singulars, trumpery mechanical pedantries, as we
think now, to whom grammar is no longer, as of old, "a new invented
game." Moreover, he has to give examples of the faults opposed to
sublimity, he has to dive into and search the bathos, to dally over
examples of the bombastic, the over-wrought, the puerile. These faults
are not the sins of "minds generous and aspiring," and we have them with
us always. The additions to Boileau's preface (Paris, 1772) contain
abundance of examples of faults from Voiture, Mascaron, Bossuet,
selected by M. de St. Marc, who no doubt found abundance of
entertainment in the chastising of these obvious affectations. It hardly
seems the proper work for an author like him who wrote the Treatise on
the Sublime. But it is tempting, even now, to give contemporary
instances of skill in the Art of Sinking--modern cases of bombast,
triviality, false rhetoric. "Speaking generally, it would seem that
bombast is one of the hardest things to avoid in writing," says an
author who himself avoids it so well. Bombast is the voice of sham
passion, the shadow of an insincere attitude. "Even the wretched phantom
who still bore the imperial title stooped to pay this ignominious
blackmail," cries bombast in Macaulay's _Lord Clive_. The picture of a
phantom who is not only a phantom but wretched, stooping to pay
blackmail which is not only blackmail but ignominious, may divert the
reader and remind him that the faults of the past are the faults of the
present. Again, "The desolate islands along the sea-coast, overgrown by
noxious vegetation, and swarming with deer and tigers"--do, what does
any one suppose, perform what forlorn part in the economy of the world?
Why, they "supply the cultivated districts with abundance of salt." It
is as comic as--
"And thou Dalhousie, thou great God of War,
Lieutenant-Colonel to the Earl of Mar."
Bombast "transcends the Sublime," and falls on the other side. Our
author gives more examples of puerility. "Slips of this sort are made by
those who, aiming at brilliancy, polish, and especially attractiveness,
are landed in paltriness and silly affectation." Some modern instances
we had chosen; the field of choice is large and richly fertile in those
blossoms. But the reader may be left to twine a garland of them for
himself; to select from contemporaries were invidious, and might provoke
retaliation. When our author censures Timaeus for saying that Alexander
took less time to annex Asia than Isocrates spent in writing an oration,
to bid the Greeks attack Persia, we know what he would have thought of
Macaulay's antithesis. He blames Xenophon for a poor pun, and Plato,
less justly, for mere figurative badinage. It would be an easy task to
ransack contemporaries, even great contemporaries, for similar failings,
for pomposity, for the florid, for sentences like processions of
intoxicated torch-bearers, for pedantic display of cheap erudition, for
misplaced flippancy, for nice derangement of epitaphs wherein no
adjective is used which is appropriate. With a library of cultivated
American novelists and uncultivated English romancers at hand, with our
own voluminous essays, and the essays and histories and "art criticisms"
of our neighbours to draw from, no student need lack examples of what is
wrong. He who writes, reflecting on his own innumerable sins, can but
beat his breast, cry _Mea Culpa_, and resist the temptation to beat the
breasts of his coevals. There are not many authors, there have never
been many, who did not need to turn over the treatise of the Sublime by
day and night.[6]
[Footnote 6: The examples of bombast used to be drawn as late as
Spurden's translation (1836), from Lee, from _Troilus and Cressida_,
and _The Taming of the Shrew_. Cowley and Crashaw furnished
instances of conceits; Waller, Young, and Hayley of frigidity;
and Darwin of affectation.
"What beaux and beauties crowd the gaudy groves,
And woo and win their _vegetable loves_"--
a phrase adopted--"vapid vegetable loves"--by the Laureate in
"The Talking Oak."]
As a literary critic of Homer our author is most interesting even in his
errors. He compares the poet of the _Odyssey_ to the sunset: the _Iliad_
is noonday work, the _Odyssey_ is touched with the glow of evening--the
softness and the shadows. "Old age naturally leans," like childhood,
"towards the fabulous." The tide has flowed back, and left dim bulks of
things on the long shadowy sands. Yet he makes an exception, oddly
enough, in favour of the story of the Cyclops, which really is the most
fabulous and crude of the fairy tales in the first and greatest of
romances. The Slaying of the Wooers, that admirable fight, worthy of a
saga, he thinks too improbable, and one of the "trifles into which
second childhood is apt to be betrayed." He fancies that the aged Homer
had "lost his power of depicting the passions"; in fact, he is hardly a
competent or sympathetic critic of the _Odyssey_. Perhaps he had lived
among Romans till he lost his sense of humour; perhaps he never had any
to lose. On the other hand, he preserved for us that inestimable and not
to be translated fragment of Sappho--+phainetai moi kênos isos
theoisin+.
It is curious to find him contrasting Apollonius Rhodius as faultless,
with Homer as great but faulty. The "faultlessness" of Apollonius is
not his merit, for he is often tedious, and he has little skill in
selection; moreover, he is deliberately antiquarian, if not pedantic.
His true merit is in his original and, as we think, modern telling of a
love tale--pure, passionate, and tender, the first in known literature.
Medea is often sublime, and always touching. But it is not on these
merits that our author lingers; he loves only the highest literature,
and, though he finds spots on the sun and faults in Homer, he condones
them as oversights passed in the poet's "contempt of little things."
Such for us to-day are the lessons of Longinus. He traces dignity and
fire of style to dignity and fire of soul. He detects and denounces the
very faults of which, in each other, all writers are conscious, and
which he brings home to ourselves. He proclaims the essential merits of
conviction, and of selection. He sets before us the noblest examples of
the past, most welcome in a straining age which tries already to live in
the future. He admonishes and he inspires. He knows the "marvellous
power and enthralling charm of appropriate and striking words" without
dropping into mere word-tasting. "Beautiful words are the very light of
thought," he says, but does not maunder about the "colour" of words, in
the style of the decadence. And then he "leaves this generation to its
fate," and calmly turns himself to the work that lies nearest his hand.
To us he is as much a moral as a literary teacher. We admire that Roman
greatness of soul in a Greek, and the character of this unknown man, who
carried the soul of a poet, the heart of a hero under the gown of a
professor. He was one of those whom books cannot debilitate, nor a life
of study incapacitate for the study of life.
A. L.
I
1
The treatise of Caecilius on the Sublime, when, as you remember, my dear
Terentian, we examined it together, seemed to us to be beneath the
dignity of the whole subject, to fail entirely in seizing the salient
points, and to offer little profit (which should be the principal aim of
every writer) for the trouble of its perusal. There are two things
essential to a technical treatise: the first is to define the subject;
the second (I mean second in order, as it is by much the first in
importance) to point out how and by what methods we may become masters
of it ourselves. And yet Caecilius, while wasting his efforts in a
thousand illustrations of the nature of the Sublime, as though here we
were quite in the dark, somehow passes by as immaterial the question how
we might be able to exalt our own genius to a certain degree of progress
in sublimity. However, perhaps it would be fairer to commend this
writer's intelligence and zeal in themselves, instead of blaming him for
his omissions.
2
And since you have bidden me also to put together, if only for your
entertainment, a few notes on the subject of the Sublime, let me see if
there is anything in my speculations which promises advantage to men of
affairs. In you, dear friend--such is my confidence in your abilities,
and such the part which becomes you--I look for a sympathising and
discerning[1] critic of the several parts of my treatise. For that was a
just remark of his who pronounced that the points in which we resemble
the divine nature are benevolence and love of truth.
[Footnote 1: Reading +philophronestata kai alêthestata+.]
3
As I am addressing a person so accomplished in literature, I need only
state, without enlarging further on the matter, that the Sublime,
wherever it occurs, consists in a certain loftiness and excellence of
language, and that it is by this, and this only, that the greatest poets
and prose-writers have gained eminence, and won themselves a lasting
place in the Temple of Fame.
4
A lofty passage does not convince the reason of the reader, but takes
him out of himself. That which is admirable ever confounds our judgment,
and eclipses that which is merely reasonable or agreeable. To believe or
not is usually in our own power; but the Sublime, acting with an
imperious and irresistible force, sways every reader whether he will or
no. Skill in invention, lucid arrangement and disposition of facts, are
appreciated not by one passage, or by two, but gradually manifest
themselves in the general structure of a work; but a sublime thought, if
happily timed, illumines[2] an entire subject with the vividness of a
lightning-flash, and exhibits the whole power of the orator in a moment
of time. Your own experience, I am sure, my dearest Terentian, would
enable you to illustrate these and similar points of doctrine.
[Footnote 2: Reading +diephôtisen+.]
II
The first question which presents itself for solution is whether there
is any art which can teach sublimity or loftiness in writing. For some
hold generally that there is mere delusion in attempting to reduce such
subjects to technical rules. "The Sublime," they tell us, "is born in a
man, and not to be acquired by instruction; genius is the only master
who can teach it. The vigorous products of nature" (such is their view)
"are weakened and in every respect debased, when robbed of their flesh
and blood by frigid technicalities."
2
But I maintain that the truth can be shown to stand otherwise in this
matter. Let us look at the case in this way; Nature in her loftier and