On the Sublime. Lang Andrew
does little evil, and little good; that is, if to entertain for a moment delicate and curious minds is to do little good.” He does not rate his business so low as that. He admits that the inspiration comes from genius, from nature. But “an author can only learn from art when he is to abandon himself to the direction of his genius.” Nature must “burst out with a kind of fine madness and divine inspiration.” The madness must be fine. How can art aid it to this end? By knowledge of, by sympathy and emulation with, “the great poets and prose writers of the past.” By these we may be inspired, as the Pythoness by Apollo. From the genius of the past “an effluence breathes upon us.” The writer is not to imitate, but to keep before him the perfection of what has been done by the greatest poets. He is to look on them as beacons; he is to keep them as exemplars or ideals. He is to place them as judges of his work. “How would Homer, how would Demosthenes, have been affected by what I have written?” This is practical counsel, and even the most florid modern author, after polishing a paragraph, may tear it up when he has asked himself, “What would Addison have said about this eloquence of mine, or Sainte Beuve, or Mr. Matthew Arnold?” In this way what we call inspiration, that is the performance of the heated mind, perhaps working at its best, perhaps overstraining itself, and overstating its idea, might really be regulated. But they are few who consider so closely, fewer perhaps they who have the heart to cut out their own fine or refined things. Again, our author suggests another criterion. We are, as in Lamb’s phrase, “to write for antiquity,” with the souls of poets dead and gone for our judges. But we are also to write for the future, asking with what feelings posterity will read us – if it reads us at all. This is a good discipline. We know by practice what will hit some contemporary tastes; we know the measure of smartness, say, or the delicate flippancy, or the sentence with “a dying fall.” But one should also know that these are fancies of the hour – these and the touch of archaism, and the spinster-like and artificial precision, which seem to be points in some styles of the moment. Such reflections as our author bids us make, with a little self-respect added, may render our work less popular and effective, and certainly are not likely to carry it down to remote posterity. But all such reflections, and action in accordance with what they teach, are elements of literary self-respect. It is hard to be conscientious, especially hard for him who writes much, and of necessity, and for bread. But conscience is never to be obeyed with ease, though the ease grows with the obedience. The book attributed to Longinus will not have missed its mark if it reminds us that, in literature at least, for conscience there is yet a place, possibly even a reward, though that is unessential. By virtue of reasonings like these, and by insisting that nobility of style is, as it were, the bloom on nobility of soul, the Treatise on the Sublime becomes a tonic work, wholesome to be read by young authors and old. “It is natural in us to feel our souls lifted up by the true Sublime, and, conceiving a sort of generous exultation, to be filled with joy and pride, as though we had ourselves originated the ideas which we read.” Here speaks his natural disinterested greatness the author himself is here sublime, and teaches by example as well as precept, for few things are purer than a pure and ardent admiration. The critic is even confident enough to expect to find his own nobility in others, believing that what is truly Sublime “will always please, and please all readers.” And in this universal acceptance by the populace and the literate, by critics and creators, by young and old, he finds the true external canon of sublimity. The verdict lies not with contemporaries, but with the large public, not with the little set of dilettanti, but must be spoken by all. Such verdicts assign the crown to Shakespeare and Molière, to Homer and Cervantes; we should not clamorously anticipate this favourable judgment for Bryant or Emerson, 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
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
The examples of bombast used to be drawn as late as Spurden’s translation (1836), from Lee, from
a phrase adopted – “vapid vegetable loves” – by the Laureate in “The Talking Oak.”