Oxford Lectures on Poetry. Andrew Bradley
which in reality confirm the rule; and I will mention only those which look the most formidable. They are cases where at first sight there seems to be not merely an inconsiderable amount of power or other greatness, but actually the negation of it. For example, the silence of night, or the sudden pause in a storm or in stormy music, or again the silence and movelessness of death, may undoubtedly be sublime; and how, it may be asked, can a mere absence of sound and motion be an exhibition of immense greatness? It cannot, I answer; but neither can it be sublime. If you apprehend the silence in these cases as a mere absence, no feeling of sublimity will arise in your mind; and if you do apprehend the silence as sublime, it is to you the sign of immense power, put forth or held in reserve. The ‘dead pause abrupt of mighty winds’ is the pause of mighty winds and not of gentle breezes; and it is not the absence of mighty winds, but their pause before they burst into renewed fury; or if their silence is not their will, it is a silence imposed on them by something mightier even than they. In either case there may be sublimity, but then there is the impression of immense power. In the same way the silence of night, when it seems sublime, is apprehended not as the absence but as the subdual of sound, – the stillness wrought by a power so mighty that at its touch all the restless noises of the day fall dumb, – or the brooding of an omnipotent peace over the world. And such a peace it is, an unassailable peace, that may make the face of death sublime, a stillness which is not moveless but immovable.20
At present, then, our result seems to stand firm. But another danger remains. Granted that in the sublime there is always some exceeding and overwhelming greatness, is that all there is? Is there not in every case some further characteristic? This question, premising that the phrase ‘overwhelming greatness’ contains important implications which have yet to be considered, I can only answer like the last. I do not find any other peculiarity that is always present. Several have been alleged, and one or two of these will be mentioned later, but none of them appears to show itself indubitably wherever sublimity is found. It is easy to give a much fuller account of the sublime if you include in it everything that impresses you in a sublime baby while you omit to consider Behemoth, or if you build upon Socrates and ignore Satan, or if you confine yourself to the sublime thunderstorm and forget the sublime rainbow or sunrise. But then your account will not answer to the instances you have ignored; and when you take them in you will have to pare it down until perhaps you end in a result like ours. At any rate we had better be content with it for the present, and turn to another aspect of the matter.21
So far, on the whole, we have been regarding the sublime object as if its sublimity were independent of our state of mind in feeling and apprehending it. Yet the adjective in the phrase ‘overwhelming greatness’ should at once suggest the truth that this state of mind is essential to sublimity. Let us now therefore look inward, and ask how this state differs from our state in perceiving or imagining what is graceful or ‘beautiful.’ Since Kant dealt with the subject, most writers who have thought about it have agreed that there is a decided difference, which I will try to describe broadly, and without pledging myself to the entire accuracy of the description.
When, on seeing or hearing something, we exclaim, How graceful! or How lovely! or How ‘beautiful’! there is in us an immediate outflow of pleasure, an unchecked expansion, a delightful sense of harmony between the thing and ourselves.
The air
Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself
Unto our gentle senses… The heaven’s breath
Smells wooingly here.
The thing wins us and draws us towards itself without resistance. Something in us hastens to meet it in sympathy or love. Our feeling, we may say, is entirely affirmative. For though it is not always untouched by pain (for the thing may have sadness in it),22 this touch of pain or sadness does not mean any disharmony between the thing and us, or involve any check in our acceptance of it.
In the case of sublimity, on the other hand, this acceptance does not seem to be so simple or immediate. There seem, in fact, to be two ‘aspects’ or stages in it.23 First – if only for a fraction of a second – there is a sense of being checked, or baffled, or even stupefied, or possibly even repelled or menaced, as though something were affecting us which we could not receive, or grasp, or stand up to. In certain cases we appear to shrink away from it, as though it thrust upon us a sense of our own feebleness or insignificance. This we may call by the convenient but too strong name of the negative stage. It is essential to sublimity; and nothing seems to correspond to it in our perception of loveliness or grace except sometimes a sense of surprise or wonder, which is wholly pleasant, and which does not necessarily qualify the lovely or graceful thing.
But this first stage or aspect clearly does not by itself suffice for sublimity. To it there succeeds, it may be instantaneously or more gradually, another: a powerful reaction, a rush of self-expansion, or an uplifting, or a sense of being borne out of the self that was checked, or even of being carried away beyond all checks and limits. These feelings, even when the sublime thing might be called forbidding, menacing, or terrible, are always positive, – feelings of union with it; and, when its nature permits of this, they may amount to rapture or adoration. But the mark of the negation from which they have issued, the ‘smell of the fire,’ usually remains on them. The union, we may say perhaps, has required a self-surrender, and the rapture or adoration is often strongly tinged with awe.
Now, this peculiar doubleness in our apprehension of sublimity, this presence of two equally necessary stages or phases, a negative and a positive, seems to correspond with the peculiarity which we found in the sublime object when we were provisionally regarding it by itself. It is its overwhelming greatness which for a moment checks, baffles, subdues, even repels us or makes us feel our littleness, and which then, forcing its way into the imagination and emotions, distends or uplifts them to its own dimensions. We burst our own limits, go out to the sublime thing, identify ourselves ideally with it, and share its immense greatness. But if, and in so far as, we remain conscious of our difference from it, we still feel the insignificance of our actual selves, and our glory is mingled with awe or even with self-abasement.24
In writing thus I was endeavouring simply and without any arrière pensée to describe a mode of aesthetic experience. But it must have occurred to some of my hearers that the description recalls other kinds of experience. And if they find it accurate in the main, they will appreciate, even if they do not accept, the exalted claim which philosophers, in various forms, have made for the sublime. It awakes in us, they say, through the check or shock which it gives to our finitude, the consciousness of an infinite or absolute; and this is the reason of the kinship we feel between this particular mode of aesthetic experience on the one side, and, on the other, morality or religion. For there, by the denial of our merely finite or individual selves, we rise into union with the law which imposes on us an unconditional demand, or with the infinite source and end of our spiritual life.
These are ideas much too large to be considered now, and even later I can but touch on them. But the mere mention of them may carry us to the last enquiries with which we can deal. For it suggests this question: Supposing that high claim to be justified at all, can it really be made for all sublimity, or must it not be confined to the very highest forms? A similar question must be raised as to various other statements regarding the sublime; and I go on to speak of some of these.
(1) Burke asserted that the sublime is always founded on fear; indeed he considered this to be its distinguishing characteristic. Setting aside, then, the connection of this statement with Burke’s general doctrine (a doctrine impossible to accept), we may ask, Is it true that the ‘check’ administered by the sublime object is always one of fear? We must answer, first, that if this check is part of an aesthetic experience and not a mere preliminary to it, it can never be fear in the common meaning of that word, or what may be called practical or real fear. So far as we are practically afraid of a storm or a mountain, afraid, for instance, for ourselves as bodily beings in this particular spatial and temporal position, the storm or mountain is not sublime to us, it is simply terrible. That
The same principle applies to other cases. If, for example, the desolation of a landscape is felt to be sublime, it is so not as the mere negation of life, verdure, etc., but as their
The reader will remember that in one sense of the question, Is there no more in the sublime than overwhelming greatness? this question must of course be answered in the affirmative. Sublimity is a mode of beauty: the sublime is not the overwhelmingly great, it is the beautiful which has overwhelming greatness; and it affects us through its whole nature, not by mere greatness.
I am warning the reader against a mistake which may arise from the complexity of aesthetic experience. We may make a broad distinction between ‘glad’ and ‘sad’ modes of beauty; but that does not coincide with the distinction of modes with which we are concerned in this lecture. What is lovely or ‘beautiful’ may be glad or sad, and so may what is grand or sublime.
In what follows I have spoken as if the two were always successive stages, and as if these always came in the same order. It is easier to make the matter quickly clear by taking this view, which also seemed to answer to my own experience. But I do not wish to commit myself to an opinion on the point, which is of minor importance. What is essential is to recognise the presence of the two ‘aspects’ or ‘stages,’ and to see that both are requisite to sublimity.
‘Ich fühlte mich so klein, so gross,’ says Faust, remembering the vision of the Erdgeist, whom he addresses as ‘Erhabener Geist.’ He was at once overwhelmed and uplifted.