SOURCE: "Longinus and the Longinian Tradition in England," in The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in XVIII-Century England, The University of Michigan Press, 1960, pp. 10-28.

[In this essay, originally written in 1935, Monk discusses the rhetorical style and aesthetic claims of On the Sublime and briefly discusses its influence on the writings of eighteenth-century English authors.]

Any historical discussion of the sublime must take into account the fountain-head of all ideas on that subject—the pseudo-Longinian treatise, Peri Hupsous, known for over two centuries as Longinus, On the Sublime. In a sense, the study of the eighteenth-century sublime is the study of the Longinian tradition in England, although, as may be supposed, the student will be led far away from the Greek critic's views. Only by stretching the meaning of the term out of all conscience can Longinus's treatise be considered an essay on asthetic, but it is none the less true that it was in On the Sublime that the eighteenth century found ideas that motivated many of its children, important and unimportant, to attempt an analysis of the sources and the effects of sublimity, and it was out of the interest in this analysis that there began to emerge, early in the century, a concept that was truly, if rudimentarily, asthetic. Therefore, it becomes of some importance to look again at the treatise, and if possible to see it as the eighteenth century habitually saw it. We shall never entirely escape its influence as we progress through the century, for certain ideas implicit in it become fundamental in eighteenth-century theories and criticism, and the tendency of the writer of the period to seek support from the ancients will keep the name of Longinus alive until well after 1800.

Since this is true, a summary, however brief, of Peri Hupsous becomes necessary. The best edition and translation is that of Mr. W. Rhys Roberts, but to become familiar with the Longinian vocabulary of our period, it seems best to quote from the translation of William Smith, which appeared in 1739 and reached its fifth edition in 1800.¹ This was the standard translation during the period in which Longinus attained his greatest fame and influence.

Of course Longinus did not invent the rhetorical conception of the sublime style; it is older than his essay.² Although Aristotle did not draw a very clear distinction between the styles, his conception of language as pragmatic and dialectical or emotional implied styles suitable to each function. The idea that rhetoric is an instrument of emotional transport was dominant among the ancients, and the grand style, the purpose of which was to move, was an integral part of their rhetoric.

The three styles, familiar in the treatises on rhetoric of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, did not make their appearance until Roman times. They arose out of the threefold definition of the function of oratory—docere, conciliare, mover e—set forth in Cicero's De Oratore and Orator. Once Cicero had made this division, a style which was the tertium quid between the plain and the grand (the pragmatic and the emotional) inevitably came into being. The Ciceronian categories are gravis (grandis, vehemens), medius, and subtilis (tenuis), the great, the middle, and the plain. The important fact for us is that from its inception the grand style had as its purpose the awakening of emotion in the audience, for, as we shall see, this is the point of departure for the earliest eighteenth-century discussions of sublimity.

Other ancients wrote on the various styles. Demetrius finds that there are four sorts of style—the plain, the elevated, the elegant, and the forcible. The elevated is ornate, and is therefore diametrically opposed to the plain, with which it can never be united. Three ingredients, thought, diction, and appropriate composition, go to make up elevation.³ Dionysius of Halicarnassus uses the more customary tripartite division into the austere, the smooth (or florid), and the harmoniously blended. Of the austere, which corresponds to the great style, he says that it is rugged, and even frequently harsh. It uses stately rhythms and long words in order to effect its end, which is "to suggest nature rather than art, and to stir emotion rather than to reflect character."⁴ These ideas might have been developed to interesting conclusions, but Dionyslus is intent on discussing the best order of words, and therefore rests content with a brief treatment of the grand style. Quintilian, in the third chapter of his eighth book, while discussing ornament (the principal element in the grand style) definitely connects the idea of sublimity with the ornate and the pathetic.⁵

It is evident that Longinus is well within the tradition of ancient rhetoric when he treats the sublime style as emotive in purpose and as capable of being expressed both in ornamental and in simple language. The subject that he wrote on was an old question in rhetoric, and he might easily have repeated the old formulae and illustrated the old figures that were conventionally regarded as being conductive to sublimity; he might have done this and no more. But he was at the same time rhetorician and critic, and as a critic he saw more deeply into the nature of art than did most of his fellows. His critical intuitions found their way into his treatise, where they lay dormant until they became in a later age and among a modern race, an influence in criticism and asthetic theory.

Nevertheless, his treatment of the subject is primarily rhetorical; the essay is a discussion of style, and only incidentally does Longinus allow his deeper perceptions to find expression. He states that his intention is to show how the sublime in writing and in discourse (i.e., in literature and in oratory) may be attained, and in so doing it is natural and proper that he should devote much space to an analysis of the various figures of speech which were so important in ancient rhetoric. Fortunately, much of what he says on this subject need not delay us, for, however interested the eighteenth century may have been in rhetoric, it had nothing new to offer on the subject. The numerous treatises on oratory and rhetoric are almost without exception no more than summaries of Cicero, with Longinus and Quintilian thrown in, the whole perhaps plagiarized from the work of some Frenchman. With this static rhetoric we are in no way concerned. The abiding interest of Longinus for the eighteenth century, and consequently for us, lay in his conception of the sublime that underlies sublimity of style and that is an expression of a quality of mind and of experience. To write on the sublime style is to write on rhetoric; to write on sublimity is to write on aesthetic. The sublime style is a means to an end; sublimity is an end in itself. It is the latent asthetic aspect of Peri Hupsous that was Longinus's contribution to eighteenth-century thought, and it is with that aspect that this chapter deals.

The author begins by stating that "the Sublime is a certain eminence or perfection of language,"⁶ but he hastens to described the effect of the sublime, which "not only persuades, but even throws an audience into transport.… In most cases it is wholly in our power, either to resist or yield to persuasion. But the Sublime, endued with strength irresistible, strikes home, and triumphs over every hearer."⁷ The test of the sublime is in its effect. "For the mind is naturally elevated by the true Sublime and so sensibly affected with its lively strokes, that it swells in transport and an inward pride, as if what was only heard had been the product of its own invention."⁸ This idea is important because it emphasizes the relation between the sublime and emotion; it transcends the realm of rhetoric and begins that analysis of the effect of sublime objects on the mind which is to lead later to an aesthetic concept of sublimity.

Energy enters into the Longinian sublime. "That… is grand and lofty,⁹ which the more we consider, the greater ideas we conceive of it; whose force we cannot possibly withstand; which immediately sinks deep, and makes such impressions on the mind as cannot be easily worn out or effaced." There follows a statement which must have been welcome to the neo-classicists, for it brought the sublime into close relationship with their own theory of art: "In a word, you may pronounce that sublime, beautiful and genuine, which always pleases, and takes equally with all sorts of men."¹⁰ Here is the quod ubique, quod semper of classical and neo-classical art.

Assuming that a natural ability to speak well must be a source of all sublime writing and discourse, Longinus enumerates five qualities that go to the creation of the sublime.

The first and most excellent of these is a boldness and grandeur in the Thoughts.… The second is call'd the Pathetic, or the power of raising the passions to a violent and even enthusiastic degree; and these two being genuine constituents of the Sublime, are the gifts of nature, whereas the other sorts depend in some measure upon art.¹¹

These are the gift of nature, and cannot be attained through the technique of rhetoric. And it was on these two sources that the eighteenth century was to fix its attention. The emphasis on great thought led Longinus and his followers into a consideration of the mind that creates a work of art; the emphasis on emotion, in the hands of English critics, developed into a study of the effect of a work on the perceiving mind.

The three remaining sources—"Figures of sentiment and language,"—"a noble and graceful manner of Expression," and "The Structure or composition of all the periods, in all possible dignity and grandeur"¹²—are rhetorical, and as such are of minor interest historically, although, as we shall see, the tradition of a sublime style survived for many centuries, and even long after sublimity came to be a matter of major importance. But once the sublime was isolated as a quality of art, having its source in the mind of the artist and arousing an intense emotion in the mind of the reader or spectator, emphasis naturally tended to center on the first two sources, which were considered to be independent of and even to transcend artistic skill.

The question of the pathetic receives little attention, since Longinus had devoted to it a separate essay, now lost. Although he admits that the grand and the pathetic do not include each other, since many passions are "vastly different from grandeur, and are in themselves of a low degree; as lamentation, sorrow, fear," and although he declares that many grand and lofty objects and ideas raise no passion whatever, he none the less avers that "nothing so much raises discourse, as a fine Pathos seasonably applied. It animates a whole performance with uncommon life and spirit, and gives mere words the force (as it were) of inspiration."¹³

These hints form the nucleus of much that was written and thought in the eighteenth century as to the relation of the sublime to the pathetic. Although Longinus does not consider emotion as absolutely necessary to sublimity, he nevertheless habitually associates the two, since the orator's task was to persuade by affecting the emotions of his audience as well as by convincing their reason. The presence of emotion in art is the point of departure for the eighteenth-century sublime, and indeed the study of art as the evoker of emotion is perhaps even more characteristic of the asthetic thought of the period than the study of the rules. The importance of Longinus's purely conventional and rhetorical ideas on the relation between the sublime and the pathetic becomes increasingly evident as the quantity of aesthetic speculation increases. The traditional view of the sublime as the strongly emotive quality of art, the sanction of a great Greek's authority for such a view, and the generally heterodox tastes of the British public and critics easily served to stretch the boundaries of the sublime far beyond the point which strictly neo-classic theory permitted. Longinus was to become the patron saint of much that is unclassical and unneoclassical, and eventually of much that is romantic, in eighteenth-century England.

A very few more of Longinus's remarks need be quoted, but these are of importance. A propos of elevation of thought, he declares: "the Sublime is an image reflected from the inward greatness of the soul. Hence it comes to pass, that a naked thought without words challenges admiration, and strikes by its grandeur."¹⁴ The silence of Ajax in the eleventh book of the Odyssey is given as an example of this kind of sublimity, an example that is repeated ad nauseum in the eighteenth century. Once again we notice the emphasis on the creative mind and its thoughts rather than on technique and style; this idea was to help Boileau formulate his theory of the difference between le sublime and le style sublime.¹⁵ It is in this connection that Longinus points out the sublimity of the Mosaic account of the creation.

In speaking of amplification—one of the rhetorical devices of the sublime style—Longinus expresses again, and very clearly, his conviction that sublimity in the last analysis is to be found in content rather than in the mode of expression.

But the orator must never forget this maxim, that in things however amplified there cannot be perfection, without a sentiment which is truly sublime, unless when we are to move compassion, or to make things appear vile and contemptible. But in all other methods of Amplification, if you take away the sublime meaning, you separate as it were the soul from the body.… Suiblimity consists in loftiness, and Amplification in number; whence the former is often visible in one single thought; the other cannot be discerned, but in a series and chain of thoughts rising one upon another.¹⁶

The implication here is that there is a real distinction to be drawn between content and style, "the soul and body" of art. We shall see how this conception fares at the hands of Boileau.

Two utterances extremely important for the eighteenth-century were the praise of an erring and irregular genius as opposed to a mediocrity that attains correctness by merely following rules, and the recognition of sublimity in nature. Of the first, Longinus says:

I readily allow, that writers of a lofty and tow'ring genius are by no means pure and correct, since whatever is neat and accurate throughout, must be exceedingly liable to flatness. In the Sublime, as in great affluence of fortune, some minuter articles will unavoidably escape observation.… And for this reason I give it as my real opinion, that the great and noble flights, tho' they cannot every where boast an equality of perfection, yet they ought to carry off the prize, by the sole merit of their own intrinsic grandeur.¹⁷

These statements helped to support the method of criticism that weighed beauties against faults.¹⁸ Horace had expressed the same idea less vividly in Ars Poetica, 11. 347-365, and the combined influence of the two critics was sufficient to inculcate the idea that great beauties can atone for small faults. Thus the emphasis of all the better critics of the eighteenth century falls on the discovery of beauties rather than the condemning of irregularities, and in England at any rate criticism by rules early began to fall into disrepute, and criticism by taste to come into vogue, for had not Longinus himself shown that true genius transcends the rules?

Great Wits sometimes may gloriously offend,
And rise to faults true critics dare not mend;
From vulgar bounds with brave disorder part
And snatch a grace beyond the reach of art,
Which, without passing thro' the judgment,
 gains
The heart, and all its ends at once attains.¹⁹

Addison, for example, obviously represents this method of criticism. His critique of Paradise Lost, despite the strong Aristotelian influence, is written throughout in the beauties-and-faults manner. Almost with the exactness of an accountant, he records Milton's beauties and his faults, credit and debit, and finally strikes a balance that leaves the poet rich in reputation. In Spectator 291, he speaks with displeasure of those critics who judge by "a few general rules extracted out of the French authors," and proceeds:

A true Critick ought to dwell rather upon Excellencies than Imperfections, to discover the concealed Beauties of a writer, and communicate to the world such things as are worth their Observation.…

And that Longinus is not far from his mind when he makes this statement is shown by his subsequent apology for the fact that he must point out some of Milton's faults:

I must also observe with Longinis, that the Productions of a great Genius, with many Lapses and Inadvertencies, are infinitely preferable to the works of an inferior kind of Author, which are scrupulously exact and conformable to all the rules of correct writing.²⁰

It was this idea of Longinus that was to become the basis of so much liberal critical thought in eighteenth-century England. The theory of original genius as developed by Young and Duff, the decline in the power of the rules and the rise of a realization of the validity of the individual impression, and the association of the sublime with these ideas—all of this is attributable in some degree to Longinus.

The other important idea is the discussion of sublimity in external nature, and the deduction, from man's ability to enjoy and to be moved by natural grandeur, of an innate greatness in human nature that instinctively responds to greatness in the external world. We shall see in a later chapter that at the time when Longinus was introduced into England by Boileau, there was little enthusiasm for natural sublimities, and there can be little doubt that Peri Hupsous played a small part in increasing the chorus of praise that the eighteenth century came to sing in honor of the wilder aspects of the external world. The passage in question is much too long to be quoted in full, but a summary will doubtless suffice to recall it to mind.

Man, says Longinus, was not created to be "a grov'ling and ungenerous animal," but was placed in this world to pursue glory. For this purpose nature planted in his soul an invincible love of grandeur, and a desire to emulate whatever seems to approach nearer to divinity than himself. "Hence it is, that the whole universe is not sufficient, for the extensive reach and piercing speculation of the human understanding. It passes the bounds of the material world, and launches forth at pleasure into endless space." Nature impels us to admire not a small river "that ministers to our necessities," but the Nile, the Ister, and the Rhine; likewise the sun and the stars "surprise" us, and Aetna in eruption commands our wonder.²¹

This summary has intentionally emphasized certain thoughts out of proportion to the amount of space that they occupy in Peri Hupsous. The greater part of the essay is concerned with style and the tricks of rhetoric. But from our point of view the ideas here quoted have importance. They form the starting point for the development of the eighteenth-century sublime. Much was read into them—doubtless much more than Longinus meant—and much was taken from them, and some of them were to survive throughout our period.

The story of Longinus in England, his neglect in the seventeenth century, and his sudden rise to fame in the eighteenth, is known in a general way to most students of the criticism of that period. Rosenberg has demonstrated the enormous popularity of the Greek critic in the eighteenth century, and has taken a backward glance at the criticism of the seventeenth century;²² but he has not made it his business to consider the history of the word sublimity before Boileau's translation in 1674 started the sublime on its long career as an aesthetic concept. We shall do so briefly, since the results are almost purely negative.

The first edition of Longinus appeared in 1554 at Basle. Franciscus Robertello was the editor. This was followed in the next year by the edition of Paulus Manutius, published at Venice. The third and last edition of the sixteenth century was that of Franciscus Portus, published at Geneva in 1569. In 1572 there appeared the first translation from the Greek—the Latin version of Pagano, published at Venice.²³ One would expect to find in England during the last half of the sixteenth century some traces of the interest that was being manifested in Longinus by Continental humanists, but one looks for them in vain.

Of course the three styles of Latin thetoric had been known and practiced throughout the middle ages. This is no occasion for a disquisition on medieval rhetoric, and we need not multiply illustrations. A poet so learned as Chaucer certainly knew his rhetoric. It will be recalled that he wrote of the "heigh style."²⁴ The use of the word high in this metaphorical sense might seem to suggest the Greek hupsos, but there can hardly be any connection with Longinus. There is no doubt that Chaucer means no more than the ornate, rhetorical style, "your termes, your colours, and your figures," the genus grande of the Romans.²⁵ Spenser uses sublime only once and then in the sense of "proud."²⁶ He too knew the "lofty style,"²⁷ but there is no hint that he or his circle had any interest in the conception of the sublime as Longinus discusses it.

The earliest example of the use of sublime in connection with style listed in the N.E.D. is from A. Day's English Secretorie, 1586. He says:

We do find three sorts [sc, of the style of epistles] … to have bene generally commended. Sublime, the highest and stateliest maner, and loftiest deliverance of any thing that may be, expressing the heroical and mighty actions of Kings.

This shows clearly enough the use of the Latin term sublimitas to express the same idea that lies behind Chaucer's "heigh style" and Spenser's "lofty style." A new term has been applied to an old idea, but a conception of the sublime is as yet unborn. Apparently Longinus was of no importance to the sixteenth-century critics and poets. Mr. Gregory Smith is able to dismiss his influence in one short sentence: "From Longinus little or nothing has been borrowed."²⁸ There is no mention of his name in this period, or indeed for many years to come.

In 1612, appeared the second Latin translation of Peri Hupsos, by Gabriel de Petra. Rosenberg regards this version as the first real advance in the growth of Longinus's reputation. But it was not until 1636 that Gerard Langbaine translated the treatise into Latin and brought out at Oxford the first version made by an Englishman and printed at an English press. Although we have no evidence of the growth of interest in Longinus in the years preceding 1636, it is not unreasonable to conclude that Langbaine's translation was evoked by some sort of demand for a new Latin rendering of the treatise; but the critical writings of this period are still devoid of Longinian influence. Clark declares: "None of the Elizabethan or Jacobean critics (not even Ben Jonson) mention his [Longinus's] name or show any trace of his influence."²⁹ My own investigations have given me no reason to modify this statement.

In 1652 there appeared the first translation of Longinus into English; it was made by John Hall, and was entitled, Peri Hupsons, or Dionysius Longinus of the Height of Eloquence rendred out of the originall by J. H. Esq. Hall is the earliest of the moderns to show that he understood Longinus's purpose. In the dedication, he formulates for the first time in English the idea of the sublime.

It must therefore have somewhat I cannot tell how divine in it, for it depends not of the single amassing or embroidery of words, there must be in it, excellent knowledge of Man, deep and studied acquaintance with the passions, a man must not onely know very perfectly the agitation of his own mind, but be sure and conversant in those of others.… And yet all this, without somewhat which I cannot expresse, is but the smallest part that goes to the building up of such a prodigy, there must be somewhat Ethereal, somewhat above man, much of a soul separate, that must animate all this, and breath [sic] into it a fire to make it both warm and shine.³⁰

Hall is decidedly on the way to stating a conception of the sublime similar to that formulated later by Boileau, but he does not get beyond this fumbling and groping definition, and his words seem not to have provoked speculation on the subject.

One might reasonably hope to find a noticeable increase in reference to Longinus from this time. Ninety-eight years had passed since the editio princeps had been printed; in the meantime several editions had appeared, and both a Latin and an English translation were in existence. But the time had not yet come for Longinus to gain the ear of the critical world, and we find his name mentioned seldom.³¹ Milton himself, with all of his interest in the ancients, seems not to have felt Longinus's charm. In his essay "Of Education," he mentions Longinus as one of the teachers of "a graceful and ornate rhetoric," but that is all.³² It is a strange paradox that the most sublime of English poets should not have caught from Longinus the suggestion of the sublime as the expression of ultimate values in art, beyond the reach of rhetoric and her handmaidens, the rules, He did not; and it was left to the propounders of an adolescent aesthetic in the next century to find in John Milton's poems, not a "graceful and ornate rhetoric," but the supreme illustration of whatever particular type of the sublime they advocated.

This seems to have been the state of Longinus and the sublime in England until after 1674. He was known, but was not often quoted, and he had not yet become an authority.³³Sublime was known and used as an adjective, signifying physical or metaphorical height, and the lofty or sublime style continued purely in the realm of rhetoric. The substantive sublime in its aesthetic connotation had not yet come into use. Our own investigations bear out Rosenberg's statement that between 1612 and 1674 Longinus and all that Longinus was later to stand for meant little enough.³⁴

In his Dictionary (1755), Johnson defines the substantive sublime as "the grand or lofty style," and adds, "The sublime is a Gallicism, but now naturalized." In this sentence he epitomizes the history of that phase of criticism which we are discussing. The sublime came to England from France in Boileau's translation of Longinus (1674)—came with a certain accretion of asthetic concepts that it had gathered from Boileau's Preface. It will be recalled that John Hall had translated Peri Hupsous as "the Height of Eloquence"; likewise Pulteney, the second translator of the treatise into English, adopted the title, A Treatise of the Loftiness or Elegancy of Speech, even though he translated not from the Greek but from Boileau's version. It was an anonymous translator who, in 1698, first translated hupsos by the Latin and Romance derivative, sublime,³⁵ although, as we shall see, the word was by that time established in critical usage.³⁶

Boileau's translation was the turning point of Longinus's reputation in England and France. By the end of the century the two English translations referred to above had appeared, and as the next chapter will show, the sublime had become a subject of speculation. There is no reason to labor the proof of Longinus's subsequent popularity in England. Rosenberg has treated the subject at length, but it needs no dissertation come from Germany to convince even a casual reader of the criticism of the period that Longinus was a presence not to be put by.

The bibliographical evidence of his vogue is interesting. Two editions of the Greek text were brought out during the eighteenth century, and were many times reprinted. The one was by J. Hudson, published at Oxford in 1710, the other was that of Z. Pearce (London, 1724). Rosenberg gives the following list of the years in which editions of Peri Hupsous were printed: 1710, 1718, 1724, 1730, 1732, 1733, 1743, 1751, 1752, 1762, 1763, 1773, 1778, 1789.³⁷ This is an extraordinary number especially when we remember that Welsted's and Smith's translations appeared in 1712 and 1739, respectively; the first was reprinted with the translator's complete works in 1789, and the second reached its fourth edition in 1770.³⁸ Moreover, Boileau's version went through eighteen editions in France, copies of which surely reached England, and there were three translations of Boileau's translation in the editions of his complete works which were englished in 1711-13, 1736, and 1752.³⁹ It should not be overlooked that most of this interest in Longinus is concentrated in the first half of the century.⁴⁰ Only five of the fourteen printings mentioned by Rosenberg appeared after 1752; the third edition of Smith's version is dated 1752, along with the last complete edition of the translation of Boileau's works. In France, after 1747, Boileau's translation had only two editions.

This remarkable interest in Longinus is symbolic of the power that he exercised over the minds of eighteenth-century Englishmen. Pope's eulogy in the Essay on Criticism, 1711, in which Longinus is praised as being "himself the great Sublime he draws" (a cliche echoed from Boileau),⁴¹ is an expression of contemporary as well as personal opinion. Rosenberg's dissertation mentions fifty-nine authors who show a knowledge of Longinus, and the list is far from being complete. Early in the century the author of Peri Hupsous had become the delight of the critics, as well as of the wits and would-be critics. As early as 1679, for that matter, in A True Widow, Shadwell had satirized the sublime as a cant phrase. Young Maggot, the conventional "Inns-of-Court Man who neglects his law and runs mad after wit," says of a play:

I saw it Scene by Scene … it breaks well, the Protasis good, the Catastasis excellent; there's no Episode, but the Catastrophe is admirable; I lent him [the author] that, and the Love Parts, and the Songs. There are a great many Sublimes, that are very Poetical.⁴²

Young Maggot reminds us of that member of the Club which is described in the second Spectator, who belonged to the Inner Temple, and knew more of Aristotle and Longinus than of Littleton and Coke.

In 1712, Steele could refer to the distinction between the true and the false sublime quite as if Boileau's ideas were then general property;⁴³ and in the same year Welsted published his translation, and in the Remarks which accompanied it, linked the names of Shakespeare and Milton to the increasingly popular word sublime, an early example of how Longinus served to supply reasons to justify tastes that were natural to Englishmen.⁴⁴

Keen satire on the critical terms popular with the wits is found in James Ralph's The Touchstone, 1728. He says:

These Gentlemen [criticasters], at the Expense of much Labour and Birch, are whipp'd at School into bad Translations, false Latin and dull Themes; from thence they run the Gantlope through all the pedantick Forms of an University-Education; There they grow familiar with the Title-Pages of Antient and modern Authors, and will talk of Aristotle, Longinus, Horace, Scaliger, Rapin, Bossu, Dacier, as freely, as if bosom Acquaintance. Their Mouths are fill'd with the Fable, the Moral, Catastrophe, Unity, Probability, Poetick Justice, true Sublime, Bombast, Simplicity, Magnificance, and all the critical Jargon, which is learn'd in a quarter of an Hour, and serves to talk of one's whole Life after.⁴⁵

The sublime was evidently frequently mentioned at the coffee houses, since Pope felt safe in using Peri Hupsous as the medium for his attack on the dunces preparatory to the publication of the Dunciad. The delicious parody of Longinus, Peri Bathous, or the Art of Sinking in Poetry, 1728, presupposes a familiarity with the treatise on the part of the town, and bears out other pieces of evidence that indicate that Longinus had come into his own.⁴⁶

Swift had his fling at the sham critics in his On Poetry: a Rhapsody, 1733. He advises the youth who is bent on becoming a man of letters despite his native dullness to take up criticism, not poetry. The passage is too long to quote in full, but "our modern critic's jargon" is set forth in detail. The Dean concludes:

A forward Critick often dupes us
With sham Quotations Peri Hupsous:
And if we have not read Longinus,
Will magisterially out-shine us.
Then lest with Greek he over-run ye,
Procure the Book for Love or Money,
Translated from Boileau 's Translation,
And quote Quotation on Quotation.⁴⁷

Longinus had evidently become the victim of a cult, and as the object of a constant lip-service he must have become a bore to the serious men of letters. Charles Lamotte was able to speak of him, in 1730, as one "whose Authority will be thought unexceptionable,"⁴⁸ and when any critic attains such fame he is a legitimate object of satire.

Though Longinus probably reached the height of his fame at about 1738, he nevertheless had to face no sudden decline in popularity and prominence. The interest in sublimity which emanated from his treatise kept his name alive, even after the sublime had grown into a concept far different from that found in Peri Hupsous. Rosenberg has given an incomplete, but a competent, account of Longinus's reputation. Longinus's name was on every one's tongue, and his influence in unexpected places. For example, Turnbull called in Longinus when he wrote on the theory of painting in 1740; Hurd in 1751, considered Longinus, together with Bouhours and Addison, "the most eminent, at least the most popular" of critics, and he found Longinus the "most instructive" of the three.⁴⁹ Longinus's voice was heard in the liberal criticism of Young and Duff, in whose discussions of original genius the Greek becomes a true enemy of the rules, and an ardent advocate of the licenses that inspired and untutored genius takes.⁵⁰ Smith's translation and Pearce's edition were used as school books in 1766;⁵¹ young and earnest Mr. Gibbon read through Peri Hupsous in the autumn of 1762, and found it "valuable," "worthy of the best and freest days of Athens," pleasing, and astonishing.⁵² As late as 1774 Mrs. Elizabeth Carter read Longinus because she "thought one must read Longinus," but gained little pleasure from following the fashion.⁵³ John Lanson thought that he could take a knowledge of Longinus for granted when he delivered his lectures to the students of Trinity College, Dublin, and a few years later the general interest in Longinus justified the publication of Greene's dull commentary on Peri Hupsous.⁵⁴ John Ogilvie declared in 1774 that Longinus has preoccupied the province of the sublime, and that he is universally read and admired by readers of even the smallest classical knowledge.⁵⁵

Such general and widespread fame, however, did not keep asthetic speculation subservient to Longinus. It was rather as a critic than as a guide to aesthetic that Longinus was powerful. Speculation soon outgrew Peri Hupsous, which indeed is the point of departure rather than the guiding influence of theories of the sublime, especially after the middle of the century. Silvain had early complained that the Greek critic did not give a clear idea of the sublime,⁵⁶ and a similar dissatisfaction was felt by all the more important theorizers. Burke simply did not discuss Longinus; Blair and Beattie complained of the dominatingly rhetorical character of Peri Hupsous;⁵⁷ and these are typical cases. Occasionally, as in the case of Stack,⁵⁸ Longinus found his defenders. As late as the first decade of the nineteenth century, so advanced a thinker as Richard Payne Knight could quote Longinus against Burke, as though he considered the Greek a weightier authority.⁵⁹ But despite the popularity of Longinus, and despite the reputation of Peri Hupsous among critics, speculation grew more and more purely asthetic, and, so far as the sublime is concerned, Longinus's influence decreased as the century drew to a close. In 1829 it was possible for James Mill to speak with contempt of a work that had been one of the chief influences on the critical thought of the eighteenth century, and that was the source of the sort of speculation in which Mill himself was indulging when he condemned Longinus.⁶⁰

It is not difficult to explain the fact that Longinus rose to so lofty a position in the eighteenth century, after his neglect during the preceding age. Hans Hecht, reviewing Rosenberg's dissertation, offers as a reason the ease with which Peri Hupsous could be employed in the interest of either side in the controversy of the Ancients and the Moderns, and the fact that Longinus offered a reputable authority for a love of such irregular writers as Shakespeare, Milton, and Spenser.⁶¹

Longinus did ride into fame on the crest of the controversary between the Ancients and the Moderns, as we shall see in the next chapter. He became an ally of either party, used now to defend the ancients, now to champion original and untutored genius. He is moderate, urbane, and eloquent, and his moderation discouraged dogmatism, his eloquence stirred enthusiasm, and he was sufficiently liberal in his opinions to appeal to eighteenth-century modernism. His high seriousness, his moral point of view, his insistance that the great poet is the good man, would be understood and valued in an age whose esthetic had not yet divorced itself from the ethical point of view. In the last section of his treatise, Longinus accounts for the decline of genius in his age on the grounds that liberty no longer existed, and that only in a state of freedom can great art be produced—an opinion that would naturally commend itself to the English in an age when they complacently contrasted their own constitutional monarchy with the despotism that prevailed on the Continent, and when they prided themselves on the prevalence of individual liberty in the body politic. Moreover, Longinus's essay must have seemed a complement to the more analytical criticism of Aristotle and Horace, and must have been welcome, as Gibbon suggested, because of its impressioniatic and interpretive quality.

Finally, it may be said that Longinus was not needed in the seventeenth century, and that he had. a very definite function to fulfil in the early years of the eighteenth century. An age that produced poets so different as Ben Jonson and Donne, Herrick and Crashaw, Carew and Herbert, Milton and Cowley, surely had no need for a theoretical defence of individualism in art. But when, shortly after the Restoration, the reaction against the decadent Donne tradition set in, and when, England after her experiment in political liberty, settled down to enjoy a comfortable and urbane enlightenment under a constitutional monarchy, the tendency was to regiment taste and the art of poetry under the rules which sought to control in the interest of neo-classicism.

But the English genius was never comfortable in the borrowed garments cut to the pattern of the rules. Despite the stand made by various poets and critics in their defence, clarity and correctness were exotic growths on English soil. There was an instinctive and uneasy feeling that the true destiny of English letters lay with Shakespeare and not with Horace and Boileau, and even when, say from 1660 to 1740, the ideas of neo-classicism were dominant, it is dangerous for the student to generalize as to the tastes and theories of the age. Of course no age is unanimous in its tastes, and romanticism and classicism of one variety or another always exist side by side. The study of eighteenth-century criticism is in fact the study of the increasingly rapid disintegration of the neo-classical standards, and the re-emerging of a freer, more individualistic, and consequently more native theory of art. Longinus is not the cause of this disintegration, but it is none the less true that during the century Peri Hupsous was a sort of locus classicus for that type of critical thought which sought to combat and destroy the rules.

The case of Samuel Cobb is indicative of the process which united Longinus with those spirits who wished to justify the conception that the greatest art can be produced only by native genius expressing itself after its own manner, rather than in the tradition of Horace and Boileau. His was not a voice crying in the wilderness; he was no lone romanticist foretelling the advent of a Byron, but he was representative of the protest against the overemphasis of the rules, a protest that became vocal very early indeed, that, in fact, was never silent. And his use of Longinus is typical of the practice of those modifiers of the neo-classical tradition who contributed to its transformation as the century drew to a close. His language and ideas are very closely akin to those of Young more than fifty years later.

To study to be correct, he says in his A Discourse on Criticism, and the Liberty of Writing, 1707, "enervates the Vigour of the Mind, slackens the Spirits, and cramps the Genius of a Free Writer. He who creeps by the Shore, may shelter himself from a Storm, but is likely to make few Discoveries: …" The rules are "leading strings" to be laid aside by a mature genius in the interest of the expression of "a free generous, and manly Spirit." He concludes: "Let a Man follow the Talent that Nature has furnish'd him with, and his own Observation has improv'd, we may hope to see Inventions in all Arts, which may dispute Superiority with the best of the Athenian and Roman Excellencies."⁶²

These statements are made on the authority of Longinus, and in protest against "a slavish Bigotry to the Ancients." In principle there is little here that Pope and Addison would not have agreed with; their own statements on the subject differ only in degree of emphasis. The importance of Cobb's Discourse for us is that it offers concrete evidence as to the promptness with which the ideas of Longinus were assimilated, and the ease with which they joined in the protest of the liberal criticism against a type of literature in essence foreign to the national tradition. Longinus came into favor because he could fill a need; he alone of the ancients could be used to support the idea of "the liberty of writing."

But the Longinus who is of value for this study is really the creation of Boileau, who called Peri Hupsous to the attention of his contemporaries, and who initiated speculation on the nature of the sublime in his Preface and in his Reflexions. The sublime that came into existence in 1674 was the offspring of two minds so startlingly unlike as those of the Greek critic and the author of L 'Art Poetique. To that sublime we turn in the following chapter.

Notes

¹Dionysius Longinus on the Sublime, translated from the Greek, by William Smith, D.D. The Fourth Edition Corrected and Improved. London, 1770.

² See G. L. Hendrickson, "The Origin and Meaning of the Ancient Characters of Style," American Journal of Philology, XXVI (1905), 249-290, to which I am indebted, as well as to the introduction to W. Rhys Roberts' edition of Demetrius, On Style (London, 1927). For a brief discussion of the whole matter see C. S. Baldwin's Ancient Rhetoric and Poetic (New York, 1924), pp. 56-58.

³On Style, pp. 323-325.

⁴ Dionysius of Halicarnassus, On Literary Composition, ed. W. Rhys Roberts (London, 1910), pp. 211-213.

⁵ Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, tr. H. E. Butler (London and New York, 1922), Loeb Classical Library, 111, 211, 213, and 215.

⁶On the Sublime, p. 3.

⁷Ibid., pp. 3, 4.

⁸Ibid., p. 21.

⁹ Observe the synonyms that Smith uses for sublime.

¹⁰On the Sublime, pp. 21, 22.

¹¹Ibid., pp. 23, 24.—Perhaps it is necessary to call attention to the fact that in all eighteenth-century critical writings the term pathetic is used in its generic sense of "producing an effect upon the emotions," not necessarily the tender emotions. In his Cyclopedia, 1727, Ephraim Chambers defines the word as "something that relates to the passions; and particularly that is proper to awake, or excite them." Bailey's Dictionarium Britannicum, 1721, gives a similar definition, and adds that "pathetick Musick" is "very moving, expressive, passionate, capable of exciting pity, compassion, anger, or the like passions." This definition shows the broad application of the term. Parnell, in his Essay on the Different Stiles of Poetry (London, 1713), p. 21, distinguishes two sorts of pathetic:

Here all the Passions, for their greater sway,
In all the Pow'r of Words themselves array;
And hence the soft Pathetick gently charms,
And hence the Bolder fills the Breast with
  Arms.

Johnson does not record the modern specialized meaning of the term, but shortly after the publication of the Dictionary Owen Ruffhead defines it as "a term usually confined to such ideas, as raise in us an emotion of pity." Life of Pope (London, 1769), p. 339.

¹²Ibid., pp. 24, 25.

¹³Ibid., 25-27.

¹⁴Ibid., pp. 28, 29.

¹⁵ See Chapter 11.

¹⁶On the Sublime, pp. 62 and 63.

¹⁷Ibid., pp. 136, 137; and 138.

¹⁸ For helpful discussions of Longinus as a liberalizing factor in eighteenth-century critical thought see A. F. Clark, Boileau and the French Classical Critics in England (Paris, 1925), pp. 391-393; and H. G. Paul, John Dennis. His Life and Criticism (New York, 1911), pp. 124, 125.

¹⁹ A. Pope, "An Essay on Criticism," I, 152-157. Works, 11, 43. For the relation of Pope to Longinus, see Austen Warren, Pope as a Critic and Humanist (1929), pp. 11-13.

²⁰The Spectator, ed. H. Morley (London, 1891), II, 298 and 299. See also Number 592.

²¹On the Sublime, pp. 145-147.—

Mighty rivers, the heavenly bodies, and volcanoes played a part in eighteenth-century sublimities. They awakened admiration and wonder in the breasts of man and woman before the century ended. In view of this fact it is worth noticing that when the sublime was given to England it was already associated with the external world, as well as with literature and with rhetoric. Especially interesting, in the light of Kant's theory, is the idea that the human understanding seeks to transcend the material world and to grasp infinity, and that the appreciation of sublimity is a token of the spiritual greatness of man. Is it not this idea which Kant expresses in his more technical language and which is, of course modified by his own philosophical system? At any rate the sublime at its very inception points inward to the mind and soul of man, and the eighteenth century will modify after its own fashion this rhetorical passage in which deep is said to cry unto deep.

²² A. Rosenberg, Longinus in England bis zur Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts (Weimar and Berlin, 1917).

²³ For information as to the early editions of Longinus, I am indebted to Rosenberg's dissertation, pp. 1-19, and to Roberts' Longinus on the Sublime (Cambridge, 1899), App. D, pp. 247-261.

²⁴Canterbury Tales, E, 18, 41, 1148.

²⁵ For an excellent description and discussion of the three styles of discourse inherited by the middle ages from ancient rhetoric, see C. S. Baldwin's Medieval Rhetoric and Poetic (New York, 1928), pp. 67-72. "The third, or great style," says Mr. Baldwin, "whether it be elegant or not, has for its distinguishing quality the force of emotional appeal" (p. 70). Thus in preaching and in oratory, the ancient sublime style survived. In poetic it became more concerned with questions of ornate forn. For rhetoric in Chaucer's poetry, see Baldwin, pp. 284-301, and J. M. Manly's Chaucer and the Rhetoricians, Warton Lecture on Poetry, XVII (London, 1926), passim.

²⁶Faerie Queene, V, VIII, 30, 4.

²⁷Ruines of Rome, XXV, 13, 14.

²⁸ Gregory Smith, Elizabethan Critical Essays (Oxford, 1904), 1, lxxiv. See also D. L. Clark, Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance (New York, 1922), pp. 62 and 67, where the same conclusion is reached.

²⁹Boileau and the French Classical Critics in England, p. 368.

³⁰ See the Dedication to the Lord Commissioner Whitelock.

³¹ Thomas Blount quotes from Hall's version, and refers to Longinus occasionally. See The Academy of Eloquence (London, 1653), pp. 47 and 65. But his own Glossographia (1656), and Phillips's A New World of English Words (1658), define sublime simply as "height."

³²The Prose Works of John Milton, ed. J. A. St. John (London, 1848), III, 473, 474.

³³ Rosenberg (p. 7) points out Davenant's borrowing from Longinus the statement that Homer's gods are like men (Preface to Gondibert, 1650, Spingarn, II, 2), but it is a matter of no importance here.

³⁴Longinus in England, p. 7.

³⁵ The translations in question are: A Treatise of the Loftiness or Elegancy of Speech. Written originally in Greek by Longinus; and now translated out of the French by Mr. J P. London, 1680; and An Essay on Sublime: Translated from the Greek of Dionysius Longinus Cassius the Rhetorician. Compared with the French of Sieur Despreaux Boileau. Oxford, 1698.

³⁶ For the history of hupsos see Roberts, pp. 209, 210. The word has a variety of meanings, even in Longinus's essay. Roberts gives "elevation," "dignity," "grandeur," "eloquence" as the most important variations. The Latin words used to translate Peri Hupsous have been de grandi sive sublimi orationis genere, de sublimi genere dicendi, de sublimitate. The French naturally adopted the Latin word, which in turn, through Boileau's influence, drove out the native English loftiness or height.

³⁷ Rosenberg, p. 9.

³⁸ W. T. Lowndes, The Bibliographer's Manual of English Literature (London, 1865), III, I, 1395.

³⁹Boileau and the French Classical Critics in England, p. 370.

⁴⁰ Two other translations are lost to us. One was by Edmund Smith, whose life Dr. Johnson wrote; the other was by the Rev. Mr. McCarthy of Dublin. For a discussion of these versions, see Rosenberg, pp. 12-15.

⁴¹ Boileau, (Euvres Compltes, ed. A. Ch. Gidel (Paris, 1873), III, 437.

⁴²Works of Thomas Shadwell (London, 1720), III, 122. The passage is quoted in the N.E.D.

⁴³Spectator, 350, April 11, 1712.

⁴⁴The Works of Dionysius Longinus on the Sublime, etc., tr. Leonard Welsted (London, 1712), pp. 145; 146; 147; 151; 154; 156; 160.

⁴⁵ [James Ralph], The Touchstone, etc. (London, 1728), p. 161.

⁴⁶ In his unpublished dissertation, Alexander Pope's Art of Sinking in Poetry (Princeton, 1932) Dr. Archibald Hart has made a thorough study of Pope's satire. He points out the close relation of Peri Bathous to Boileau's translation of Longinus.

⁴⁷ [Jonathan Swift], On Poetry: A Rhapsody (London, 1733), p. 16.—Satire on the use of the sublime as a cant term of the pseudo-critic continued at least into the 1750's. The word is a favorite with Dick Minim, the honest dullard of Johnson's creation, who established his fame as a critic by becoming an echo of coffee-house critiques. "Sometimes he is sunk in despair, and perceives false delicacy gaining ground, and sometimes brightens his countenance with a gleam of hope and predicts the revival of the true sublime." Idler, 61, Works (Oxford, 1825), IV, 330.

⁴⁸ Charles Lamotte, An Essay upon Poetry and Painting (London, 1730), p. 7.

⁴⁹ George Turnbull, A Treatise on Ancient Painting (London, 1740), pp. 76; 83; 84:etc.—Q. Horatii Flacci, Epistola ad Augustum, ed. Richard Hurd (London, 1751), pp. 99 and 101.

⁵⁰ [Edward Young], Conjectures on Original Composition (London, 1759). [W. Duff], An Essay on Original Genius (London, 1769).

⁵¹ "A Catalogue of the School Books Now in General Use," A Complete Catalogue of Modern Books (London, 1766), pp. 91 and 92.

⁵² Edward Gibbon, Journal, ed. D. M. Low (London, 1929), pp. 138, 139; 142. Gibbon has indicated clearly one reason for Longinus's success with the eighteenth-century mind. He says that hitherto he had known but two methods of criticizing a book—to analyze its beauties and to exclaim. "Longinus," he says, "has shown me a third. He tells me his own feelings upon reading it; and tells them with such energy, that he communicates them" (p. 155).

⁵³ Elizabeth Carter, Letters to Mrs. Montagu, ed. Rev. Montagu Pennington (London, 1817), II, 273.

⁵⁴ John Lanson, Lectures Concerning Oratory, Second Edition (Dublin, 1759), p. 59. [Richard Burnaby Greene], Critical Essays (London, 1770). Greene did not express a new or a singular idea when he said that Longinus was "the best of the ancients" (p. ii).

⁵⁵ John Ogilvie, Philosophical and Critical Observations on the Nature, Character, and Various Specimens of Composition (London, 1774), II, 161.

⁵⁶ Silvain, Traite du Sublime (Paris, 1732), p. 2.

⁵⁷ Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (London, 1783), 1, 59.—James Beattie, "Illustrations on Sublimity," Dissertations Moral and Critical (London, 1783), p. 605.

⁵⁸ Richard Stack, "An Essay on Sublimity of Writing," Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy (Dublin, 1787), I, 19-26.

⁵⁹ Richard Payne Knight, An Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste, The Second Edition (London, 1805), p. 376.

⁶⁰ James Mill, Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind (London, 1829), II, 192.

⁶¹Beiblatt zur Anglia, XXXI (1920), 163.

⁶² Samuel Cobb, Poems on Several Occasions (London, 1710), The Third Edition. The pages of the Discourse are not numbered.