Oxford Lectures on Poetry. Andrew Bradley
poetry. Sometimes, again, the object (e. g. time or the heavens) is apprehended, not indeed as the Infinite, but still as infinite or immeasurable. But how are we to say that a sublime lion or mountain, or Satan or Lady Macbeth, is apprehended as the Infinite, or as infinite, or (usually) as even an expression of the Infinite? And how are we to say that the greatness of most sublime objects is apprehended as incomparable or immeasurable? It is only failure to observe these distinctions that leads to errors like one recorded in Coleridge’s Table-talk (July 25, 1832): ‘Could you ever discover anything sublime, in our sense of the word, in the classic Greek literature? I never could. Sublimity is Hebrew by birth.’
This reply, however, though sound so far as it goes, does not settle the question raised. It may still be maintained that sublimity in all cases, and even when we have no idea of infinity before us, does represent the inadequacy of all finite forms to express the infinite. And it is unfortunately impossible for us to deal fully with this contention. It would carry us into the region of metaphysics; and, while believing that no theory of the sublime can be complete which stops short of that region, I am aiming in this lecture at no such theory, but only at a result which may hold good without regard to further developments. All that I can do is to add a few words on the question whether, going beyond the adjective ‘exceeding’ or ‘overwhelming,’ we can say that the sublime is the beautiful which has immeasurable, incomparable, or infinite greatness. And the answer which I suggest and will go on to explain may be put thus: the greatness is only sometimes immeasurable, but it is always unmeasured.
We cannot apprehend an object as sublime while we apprehend it as comparably, measurably, or finitely great. Let the thing be what it may – physical, vital, or spiritual – the moment we say to ourselves, ‘It is very great, but I know how great,’ or ‘It is very great, but something else is as great or greater,’ at that moment it has ceased to be sublime. Outside the consciousness of its sublimity we may be perfectly well aware that a thing is limited, measurable, equal or inferior to something else. But then we are not finding it sublime. And when we are so finding it, we are absorbed in its greatness, and have no thought either of the limits of that or of its equality or inferiority to anything else. The lion of whom we are thinking, ‘An elephant could kill him,’ is no sublime lion. The Falls of Schaffhausen are sublime when you are lost in astonishment at them, but not when you are saying to yourself ‘What must Niagara be!’ This seems indubitable, and hence we may say that, in one sense, all sublimity has unmeasured greatness, and that no greatness is sublime which we apprehend as finite.
But the absence of a consciousness of measure or finitude is one thing; the presence of a consciousness of immeasurableness or infinity is another. The first belongs to all sublimity, the second only to one kind of it, – to that where we attempt to measure, or find limits to, the greatness of the thing. If we make this attempt, as when we try in imagination to number the stars or to find an end to time, then it is essential to sublimity that we should fail, and so fail that the idea of immeasurability or endlessness emerges. In like manner, if we compare things, nothing will appear sublime whose greatness is surpassed or even equalled by that of something else; and, if this process of comparison is pursued, in the end nothing will be found sublime except the absolute totality (however it may be imagined). And this kind of sublimity, which arises from attempts to measure or compare, is often exceedingly striking. But it is only one kind. For it is an entire delusion – though a very common one in theories of the sublime – to suppose that we must attempt to measure or compare. On the contrary, in the majority of cases our impression of overwhelming greatness is accompanied neither by any idea that this greatness has a measure, nor by the idea that it is immeasurable or infinite.26
It will not do, then, to lay it down that the sublime is the beautiful which has immeasurable, incomparable, or infinite greatness. But I suggest that, after the explanations given, we may conveniently use the adjective ‘unmeasured,’ so long as we remember that this means one thing where we do not measure at all, and another thing where we try to measure and fail. And, this being so, it seems that we may say that all sublimity, and not only that in which the idea of infinite greatness or of the Infinite emerges, is an image of infinity; for in all, through a certain check or limitation and the overcoming of it, we reach the perception or the imaginative idea of something which, on the one hand, has a positive nature, and, on the other, is either not determined as finite or is determined as infinite. But we must not add that this makes the sublime superior to the ‘beautiful.’ For the ‘beautiful’ too, though in a different way, is an image of infinity. In ‘beauty,’ as we said, that which appears in a sensuous form seems to rest in that form, to be wholly embodied in it; it shows no tendency to pass beyond it, and intimates no reserve of force that might strain or break it. So that the ‘beautiful’ thing is a whole complete in itself, and in moments when beauty fills our souls we know what Wordsworth meant when he said ‘the least of things seemed infinite,’ though each thing, being but one of many, must from another point of view, here suppressed, be finite. ‘Beauty,’ then, we may perhaps say, is the image of the total presence of the Infinite within any limits it may choose to assume; sublimity the image of its boundlessness, and of its rejection of any pretension to independence or absoluteness on the part of its finite forms; the one the image of its immanence, the other of its transcendence.
Within an hour I could attempt no more than an outline of our subject. That is inevitable; and so is another defect, which I regret more. In analysing any kind of aesthetic experience we have to begin by disentangling the threads that meet in it; and when we can only make a beginning, no time is left for the further task of showing how they are interwoven. We distinguish, for example, one kind of sublimity from another, and we must do so; but in the actual experience, the single instance, these kinds often melt together. I take one case of this. Trying to overlook the field in which sublimity appears, we say that there is a sublimity of inorganic things, and of things vital, and of things spiritual, and that these kinds differ. And this is true; and perhaps it is also true that sometimes we experience one of these kinds, so to say, quite pure and unmixed with others. But it is not always, perhaps not usually so. More frequently kind mingles with kind, and we mutilate the experience when we name it after one of them. In life the imagination, touched at one point, tingles all over and responds at all points. It is offered an impression of physical or vital greatness, but at once it brings from the other end of its world reminiscences of quite another order, and fuses the impression with them. Or an appeal is made to the sense of spiritual greatness, but there rises before the imagination a vision with the outlines and hues of material Nature. Offer it a sunset – a mere collection of coloured lines and spots – and they become to it regrets and hopes and longings too deep for tears. Tell it of souls made perfect in bliss, and it sees an immeasurable rose, or city-walls that flash with the light of all the gems on earth. The truth that a sparrow and a mountain are different, and that Socrates is not Satan, interests it but little. What it cares for is the truth that, when they are sublime, they are all the same; for each becomes infinite, and it feels in each its own infinity.
1903.
I add here a few remarks on some points which it was not convenient to discuss in the lecture.
1. We have seen that in the apprehension of sublimity we do not always employ comparison or attempt to measure. To feel a thing overwhelmingly great it is not necessary to have before the mind either the idea of something less great, or any standard of greatness. To argue that this must be necessary because ‘great’ means nothing except as opposed to ‘small,’ is like arguing that I cannot have a perception of pride without thinking of humility.
This point seems to me quite clear. But a question remains. If we go below consciousness, what is it that happens in us? The apprehension of sublimity implies that we have received an exceedingly strong impression. This as a matter of fact must mean an impression very much stronger than something else; and this something else must be, so to say, a standard with which the impression is unconsciously compared. What then is it?
Stated in the most general terms, it must apparently be the usual or average strength of impressions.
But this unconscious standard takes particular
To avoid complication I have passed by the case where we compare the sublime thing with another thing and find it much greater without finding it immeasurably great. Here the greatness, it appears to me, is still unmeasured. That is to say, we do not attempt to determine its amount, and if we did we should lose the impression of sublimity. We may
I am far from being satisfied with the ideas imperfectly expressed in the first and third of these Notes, but they require more consideration than I can give to them during the printing of the Second Edition. The reader is requested to take them as mere suggestions.