On the Sublime

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 – φαίνεταί μοι κῆνος ἴσος θεοῖσιν.

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.

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 2 writer’s intelligence and zeal in themselves, instead of blaming him for his omissions. 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 discerning7 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.

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, illumines8 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.

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 more passionate moods, while detesting all appearance of restraint, is not wont to show herself utterly wayward and reckless; and though in all cases the vital informing principle is derived from her, yet to determine the right degree and the right moment, and to contribute the precision of practice and experience, is the peculiar province of scientific method. The great passions, when left to their own blind and rash impulses without the control of reason, are in the same danger as a ship let drive at random without ballast. Often they need the spur, but sometimes also the curb. 3 The remark of Demosthenes with regard to human life in general, – that the greatest of all blessings is to be fortunate, but next to that and equal in importance is to be well advised, – for good fortune is utterly ruined by the absence of good counsel, – may be applied to literature, if we substitute genius for fortune, and art for counsel. Then, again (and this is the most important point of all), a writer can only learn from art when he is to abandon himself to the direction of his genius.9

These are the considerations which I submit to the unfavourable critic of such useful studies. Perhaps they may induce him to alter his opinion as to the vanity and idleness of our present investigations.

III

… “And let them check the stove’s long tongues of fire:For if I see one tenant of the hearth,I’ll thrust within one curling torrent flame,And bring that roof in ashes to the ground:But now not yet is sung my noble lay.”10

Such phrases cease to be tragic, and become burlesque, – I mean phrases like “curling torrent flames” and “vomiting to heaven,” and representing Boreas as a piper, and so on. Such expressions, and such images, produce an effect of confusion and obscurity, not of energy; and if each separately be examined under the light of criticism, what seemed terrible gradually sinks into absurdity. Since then, even in tragedy, where the natural dignity of the subject makes a swelling diction allowable, we cannot pardon a tasteless grandiloquence, how much more incongruous must it seem in sober prose! 2 Hence we laugh at those fine words of Gorgias of Leontini, such as “Xerxes the Persian Zeus” and “vultures, those living tombs,” and at certain conceits of Callisthenes which are high-flown rather than sublime, and at some in Cleitarchus more ludicrous still – a writer whose frothy style tempts us to travesty Sophocles and say, “He blows a little pipe, and blows it ill.” The same faults may be observed in Amphicrates and Hegesias and Matris, who in their frequent moments (as they think) of inspiration, instead of playing the genius are simply playing the fool.

3 Speaking generally, it would seem that bombast is one of the hardest things to avoid in writing. For all those writers who are ambitious of a lofty style, through dread of being convicted of feebleness and poverty of language, slide by a natural gradation into the opposite extreme. “Who fails in great endeavour, nobly fails,” is their creed. 4 Now bulk, when hollow and affected, is always objectionable, whether in material bodies or in writings, and in danger of producing on us an impression of littleness: “nothing,” it is said, “is drier than a man with the dropsy.”

The characteristic, then, of bombast is that it transcends the Sublime: but there is another fault diametrically opposed to grandeur: this is called puerility, and it is the failing of feeble and narrow minds, – indeed, the most ignoble of all vices in writing. By puerility we mean a pedantic habit of mind, which by over-elaboration ends in frigidity. Slips of this sort are made by those who, aiming at brilliancy, polish, and especially attractiveness, are landed in paltriness and silly affectation. 5 Closely associated with this is a third sort of vice, in dealing with the passions, which Theodorus used to call false sentiment, meaning by that an ill-timed and empty display of emotion, where no emotion is called for, or of greater emotion than the situation warrants. Thus we often see an author hurried by the tumult of his mind into tedious displays of mere personal feeling which has no connection with the subject. Yet how justly ridiculous must an author appear, whose most violent transports leave his readers quite cold! However, I will dismiss this subject, as I intend to devote a separate work to the treatment of the pathetic in writing.

The last of the faults which I mentioned is frequently observed in Timaeus – I mean the fault of frigidity. In other respects he is an able writer, and sometimes not unsuccessful in the loftier style; a man of wide knowledge, and full of ingenuity; a most bitter critic of the failings of others – but unhappily blind to his own. In his eagerness to be always striking out new thoughts he frequently falls into the most childish absurdities. 2 I will only instance one or two passages, as most of them have been pointed out by Caecilius. Wishing to say something very fine about Alexander the Great he speaks of him as a man “who annexed the whole of Asia in fewer years than Isocrates spent in writing his panegyric oration in which he urges the Greeks to make war on Persia.” How strange is the comparison of the “great Emathian conqueror” with an Athenian rhetorician! By this mode of reasoning it is plain that the Spartans were very inferior to Isocrates in courage, since it took them thirty years to conquer Messene, while he finished the composition of this harangue in ten. 3 Observe, too, his language on the Athenians taken in Sicily. “They paid the penalty for their impious outrage on Hermes in mutilating his statues; and the chief agent in their destruction was one who was descended on his father’s side from the injured deity – Hermocrates, son of Hermon.” I wonder, my dearest Terentian, how he omitted to say of the tyrant Dionysius that for his impiety towards Zeus and Herakles he was deprived of his power by Dion and Herakleides. 4 Yet why speak of Timaeus, when even men like Xenophon and Plato – the very demi-gods of literature – though they had sat at the feet of Socrates, sometimes forgot themselves in the pursuit of such paltry conceits. The former, in his account of the Spartan Polity, has these words: “Their voice you would no more hear than if they were of marble, their gaze is as immovable as if they were cast in bronze; you would deem them more modest than the very maidens in their eyes.”11 To speak of the pupils of the eye as “modest maidens” was a piece of absurdity becoming Amphicrates12 rather than Xenophon. And then what a strange delusion to suppose that modesty is always without exception expressed in the eye! whereas it is commonly said that there is nothing by which an impudent fellow betrays his character so much as by the expression of his eyes. Thus Achilles addresses Agamemnon in the Iliad as “drunkard, with eye of dog.”13 5 Timaeus, however, with that want of judgment which characterises plagiarists, could not leave to Xenophon the possession of even this piece of frigidity. In relating how Agathocles carried off his cousin, who was wedded to another man, from the festival of the unveiling, he asks, “Who could have done such a deed, unless he had harlots instead of maidens in his eyes?” 6 And Plato himself, elsewhere so supreme a master of style, meaning to describe certain recording tablets, says, “They shall write, and deposit in the temples memorials of cypress wood”;14 and again, “Then concerning walls, Megillus, I give my vote with Sparta that we should let them lie asleep within the ground, and not awaken them.”15 7 And Herodotus falls pretty much under the same censure, when he speaks of beautiful women as “tortures to the eye,”16 though here there is some excuse, as the speakers in this passage are drunken barbarians. Still, even from dramatic motives, such errors in taste should not be permitted to deface the pages of an immortal work.

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Longmans, London, 1836.

Etude Critique sur la traité du Sublime et les ecrits de Longin. Geneva.

See also M. Naudet, Journal des Savants, Mars 1838, and M. Egger, in the same Journal, May 1884.

Egger, Histoire de la Critique chez les Grecs, p. 426. Paris, 1887.

M. Anatole France.

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.”

Reading φιλοφρονέστατα καὶ ἀληθέστατα.

Reading διεφώτισεν.

Literally, “But the most important point of all is that the actual fact that there are some parts of literature which are in the power of natural genius alone, must be learnt from no other source than from art.”

Aeschylus in his lost Oreithyia.

Xen. de Rep. Laced. 3, 5.

C. iii. sect. 2.

Il. i. 225.

Plat. de Legg. v. 741, C.

Ib. vi. 778, D.

v. 18.

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