Sublimity in the 18th century

자료: google books, the sublime by Philip Shaw

2.1. Rhetoric and Revelation

Longinus' treatise came to the attention of a select number of English readers in the late 17th century via the influential French translation and commentary of Despréaux Boileau(see Brody 1958). Although the Latin text had been available since 1554, and was translated into English as early as 1652(see Monk 1935; rpt 1960: 20), it was not until the mid-1740s, following the widespread success of William Smith's 1739 edition(reprinted in Longinus 1975), that the concept of the sublime reached a wider public. In this chapter we will see how Longinus is taken up in British writing of the early 18th century. We will look, in particular, at the work of five influential theorists: Thomas Burner, John Dennis, Joseph Addison, Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, and John Baillie.

Before we proceed to assess the nature and extent of Longinus' influence on English audiences, however, we should consider the precautionary remarks of the American critic Marjorie Hope Nicolson:

When the critics who have considered the problem distinguish between two 'Sublimes', they give priority, chronologically and qualitatively, to a rhetorical Sublime[the Longinian sublime]. ... If they consider the natural Sublime(the Sublime in external Nature), they tend to classify it as 'a degraded form of Longinianism,' following upon the rhetorical theory, but debasing it, 'showing itself in an excessive emotion for natural objects in the external world'. (1959: 29-30).

A critical distinction lies at the heart of Hope Nicolson's thesis. Whereas the 'rhetorical Sublime' focuses on the grand or elevated as an aspect of language, the 'natural Sublime' regards sublimity as a quality inherent in the external world. Theorists of the natural sublime, in other words, are engaged on a quest for the origins of the sublime. Rhetorical theory, however, is not averse to such speculation. According to Longinus, althought rhetoric is the primary determinate of the sublime, it is nature that seeds the idea of greatness in man, and that inclines us to admire the grandeur of the Nile, the Rhine, or still more the ocean (1965: 42).

When Longinus is taken up in the Christian tradition, attention shifts from nature to the divine. Mountains, for example, are sublime because their grandeur manifests the glory of God. But whether the origins of sublimity are located in the external world or in the divine, the desire for origins is in itself significant. Why does the discourse of sublimity encourage this desire? Central to Longinus' treatise is a concern with the concealment of language. For the sublime to arise, and for it to be sustained, speech must appear natural and unmotivated; the sublime must hide its slavish dependence on words. Longinus' recourse to nature is an attempt therefore to ascribe an extra-linguistic origin to the sublime. As I suggested in the previous chapter, early Christian writers make similar claims for the sublime: a worldly figure, yet conveying a sense of divine truth, beyond the veil of words.

2.2. Burnet: ^Sacred Theory^

The desire to efface the material nature of human experience, in particular its dependence on the stuff of language, is thus key to our understanding of the sublime. To understand this point let us look first of all at an example of the so-called natural sublime, Thomas Burnet's ^The Sacred Theory of the Earth^. Originally composed in Latin between 1680 and 1689 and then translated into English in a much-expanded version from 1684 to 1689, the interest of the ^Sacred Theory^ comes from its daring revision of conventional 17th-century attitudes to nature, as conveyed in these lines from the poet Andrew Marvell:

Here learn ye Mountains more unjust,

Which to abrupter greatness thrust,

That do with your hook-shouldered height

The Earth deform and Heaven fright,

For whose excrescence ill design'd,

Nature must a new Center find,

Learn here those humble steps to tread,

Which to securer Glory lead.

('Upon the Hill and Grove at Bill-borow', lines 9-16; Marvell 1952)

Mountains, in Marvell's vision are 'unjust', 'hook-shouldered' excrescences, which threaten to 'deform' the balance of the earth. As Hope Nicolson comments, there is nothing unusual about this vision. 17th-century nature poetry celebrated the serene, charming, and lovely rather than majestic, wild, and irregular (1959: 37). A smooth, well-ordered garden, offering ease and delight to the spectator, was preferable to the brooding intensity of the mountain crag.

When Burnet looks at the grand in naturem however, he records a markedly different response:

The greatest Objects of Nature are, methinks, the most pleasing to behold; and next to the Great Concave of the Heavens, and those boundless Regions where the Stars inhabit, there is nothing that I look upon with more Pleasure than the wide Sea and the Mountains of the Earth. There is something august and stately in the Air of these things, that inspires the Mind with great Thoughts and Passions; we do naturally, upon such Occasions, think of God and his Greatness: And whatsoever hath but the Shadow and Appearance of the INFINITE, as all Things have that are too big for our Comprehension, they fill and overbear the Mind with their Excess, and cast it into a pleasing kind of Stupor and Admiration. (^Sacred Theory^, 1776 edition; quoted in Hope Nicolson 1959: 214)