2. There is absolutely no evidence against the authorship of Longinus, only a set of presumptions, most of which are sheer opinion, and carry no weight except as such. Moreover, no plausible competitor has even been hinted at. I hope it is not illiberal to say that the suggestion of Plutarch, which was made by Vaucher, and has met with some favour, carries with it irresistible evidence that the persons who make it know little about criticism. No two things could possibly be more different than the amiable ethical knack of the author of the Moralia, and the intense literary gift of the author of the Περὶ Ὕψους.
Another of the “Academic questions” connected with the book, however, is of more literary importance, and that is its |“Sublimity.”| proper designation in the modern languages. There has been a consensus of the best authorities of late years, even though they may not agree on other points, that “The Sublime” is a far from happy translation of ὕψος. Not only has “Sublime” in the modern languages, and especially in English, a signification too much specialised, but the specialisation is partly in the wrong direction. No one, for instance, who uses English correctly, however great his enthusiasm for the magnificent Sapphic ode which Longinus has had the well-deserved good fortune to preserve to us, would call it exactly sublime,[[218]] there being, in the English connotation of that word, an element of calmness, or at any rate (for a storm may be sublime) of mastery, which is absent here. And so in other cases; “Sublime” being more especially unfortunate in bringing out (what no doubt remains to some extent in any case) the inadequateness and tautology of the attempts to define the sources of ὕψος. Hall, the seventeenth-century translator, avoided these difficulties by a simple rendering, “the height of eloquence,” which is more than literally exact, though it is neither elegant nor handy. Nor is there perhaps any single word that is not open to almost as many objections as Sublime itself. So that (and again this is the common conclusion) it is well to keep it, with a very careful preliminary explanation that the Longinian Sublime is not sublimity in its narrower sense, but all that quality, or combination of qualities, which creates enthusiasm in literature, all that gives consummateness to it, all that deserves the highest critical encomium either in prose or poetry.
Few persons, however, whom the gods have made critical will care to spend much time in limine over the authorship, |Quality and contents of the treatise.| the date,[[219]] the title, and the other beggarly elements in respect to this astonishing treatise. Incomplete as it is—and its incompleteness is as evident as that of the Poetics, and probably not much less substantial—difficult as are some of its terms, deprived as we are in some cases of the power of appreciating its citations fully, through our ignorance of their context, puzzled as we may even be now and then by that radical difference in taste and view-point, that “great gulf fixed,” which sometimes, though only sometimes, does interpose itself between modern and ancient,—no student of criticism, hardly one would think any fairly educated and intelligent man, can read a dozen lines of the book without finding himself in a new world, as he compares it with even the best of his earlier critical masters. He is in the presence of a man who has accidentally far greater advantages of field than Aristotle, essentially far more powerful genius, and an intenser appreciation of literature, than Dionysius or Quintilian. And probably the first thought—not of the student, who will be prepared for it, but of the fairly educated man who knows something of Pope and Boileau and the rest of them—will be, “How on earth did this book come to be quoted as an authority by a school like that of the ‘classical’ critics of the seventeenth-eighteenth century, whose every principle almost, whose general opinions certainly, it seems to have been designedly written to crush, conclude, and quell?” Of this more hereafter. Let us begin, as in former important cases, by a short abstract of the actual contents of the book.
The author commences by addressing a young friend or pupil, a certain Postumius (Terentianus or Florentianus?), on the inefficiency of the Treatise on the Sublime by a certain Cæcilius.[[220]] In endeavouring to provide something more satisfactory, especially as to the sources of Sublimity, he premises little more in the shape of definition than that it is “a certain consummateness and eminence” of words, completing this with the remark (the first epoch-making one of the treatise) that the effect of such things is “not persuasion but transport,”[[221]] not the result of skill, pains, and arrangement, but something which, “opportunely out-flung,”[[222]] carries everything before it. But can it be taught? Is it not innate? The doubt implies a fallacy. Nature is necessary, but it must be guided and helped by art. Then comes a gap, a specially annoying one, since the farther shore lands us in the midst of an unfavourable criticism of a passage supposed to come from the lost Orithyia of Æschylus, which is succeeded by, or grouped with, other specimens of the false sublime, bombast, tumidity, and the parenthurson.[[223]] Next we pass to “frigidity,” a term which Longinus uses with a slightly different connotation from Aristotle’s, applying it chiefly to what he thinks undue flings and quips and conceits. These particular strictures are, in Chapter V., generalised off into a brief but admirable censure of the quest for mere novelty, of that “horror of the obvious” which bad taste at all times has taken for a virtue. To cure this and other faults, there is nothing for it but to make for the true Sublime, hard as it may be. For (again a memorable and epoch-making saying) “the judgment of words is the latest begotten fruit of many an attempt.”[[224]]
The first canon of sublimity is not unlike the famous Quod Semper, &c. If a thing does not transport at all, it is certainly not Sublime. If its transporting power fails with repetition, with submission to different but still competent judges, it is not sublime. When men different in habits, lives, aims, ages, speech, agree about it, then no mistake is possible.
The sources of Sublimity are next defined as five in number: Command of strong and manly thought; Vehement and enthusiastic passion—these are congenital; Skilfulness with Figures; Nobility of phrase; Dignified and elevated ordonnance.[[225]] These, after a rebuke of some length to Cæcilius for omitting Passion, he proceeds to discuss seriatim. The ἁδρεπήβολον, which he now calls “great-naturedness,”[[226]] holds the first place in value as in order, and examples of it, and of the failure to reach it, are given from many writers, Homer and “the Legislator of the Jews” being specially praised. This laudation leads to one of the best known and most interesting passages of the whole book, a short criticism and comparison of the Iliad and the Odyssey, whereon, as on other things in this abstract, more hereafter. The interest certainly does not sink with the quotation from Sappho, whether we agree or not (again vide post) that the source of its charm is “the selection and composition of her details.” Other typical passages are then cited and criticised.
We next come to Amplification,—almost the first evidence in the treatise, and not a fatal one, of the numbing power of “Figures.” Longinus takes occasion by it for many illuminative animadversions, not merely on Homer, but on Plato, Herodotus, Demosthenes, and Thucydides, whom (it is very satisfactory to observe) he includes among those who have “sublimity.” This handling of Figures, professedly eclectic, is fertile in such animadversions in regard to others besides Amplification—Hyperbata, Polyptota, Antimetathesis, and others still—with especial attention to Periphrasis, to his praise of which the eighteenth century perhaps attended without due attention to his cautions.
Then comes another of the flashes of light. Dismissing the figures, he turns to diction in itself, and has a wonderful passage on it, culminating in the dictum, “For beautiful words are in deed and in fact the very light of the spirit,”[[227]]—the Declaration of Independence and the “Let there be light” at once of Literary Criticism.
Here the Enemy seems to have thought that he was getting too good, for another and greater gap occurs, and when we are allowed to read again, we are back among the Figures and dealing with Metaphor—the criticism of examples, however, being still illuminative. It leads him, moreover, to another of his nugget-grounds, the discussion on “Faultlessness,” which introduces some especially valuable parallels—Apollonius and Homer, Bacchylides and Pindar, Ion and Sophocles, Hyperides and Demosthenes, Lysias and Plato. Then we pass to the figure Hyperbole after a gap, and then to ordonnance and arrangement, with a passage, valuable but, like all similar passages in the ancient critics, difficult, on rhythm. After this a section on μικρότης—“littleness,” “triviality”—leads abruptly to the close, which is not the close, and which, after some extremely interesting remarks on the ethical and other conditions of the time, ends with an unfulfilled promise of treating the subject of the Passions. The loss of this is perhaps more to be regretted than the loss of any other single tractate of the kind in antiquity. It might have been, and possibly was, only a freshening up of the usual rhetorical commonplaces about the “colours of good and evil,” and the probable disposition of the hearer or reader. But it might also, and from Longinus’s handling of the other stock subject of the Figures it is much more likely to, have been something mainly, if not wholly, new: in fact, something that to this day we have not got—an analysis of the direct appeals of literature to the primary emotions of the soul.
In considering this inestimable book, it is hardly possible to exaggerate the importance of these early words of it to which attention has been drawn above. The yoke of “persuasion” has at last been broken from the neck of the critic. He does not consider literature as something which will help a man to carry an assembly with him, to persuade a jury, to gain a declamation prize. He does indeed still mention the listener rather than the reader; but that is partly tradition, partly a consequence of the still existing prevalence of recitation or reading aloud. Further, it is sufficiently evident that the critic |Preliminary Retrospect.| has come to regard literature as a whole, and is not distracted by supposed requirements of “invention” on the part of the poet, of “persuasion” on the part of the orator, and so forth. He looks at the true and only test of literary greatness—the “transport,” the absorption of the reader. And he sees as no one, so far as we know, saw before him (except Dionysius for a moment and “in a glass darkly”), as Dante was the only man after him to see for a millennium and much more, that the beautiful words, the “mots rayonnants,” are at least a main means whereby this effect is produced. Instead of style and its criticism being dismissed, or admitted at best with impatience as something φορτικόν, we have that gravest and truest judgment of the latter as the latest-born offspring of many a painful endeavour. Far is it indeed from him to stick to the word only: his remarks on novelty, his peroration (not intended as such, but so coming to us), and many other things, are proof of that. But in the main his criticism is of the pure æsthetic kind, and of the best of that kind. It will not delay us too much to examine it a little more in detail.