The opening passage as to Cæcilius, though it has tempted some into perilous hypothetic reconstructions of that critic’s |Detailed Criticism: The opening.| possible teaching, really comes to little more than this—that Longinus, like most of us, was not exactly satisfied with another man’s handling of his favourite subject. And, curiously enough, the only specific fault that he here finds—namely, that his predecessor, while illustrating the nature of the Sublime amply, neglected to discuss the means of reaching it—rather recoils on himself. For there can be little doubt that the weakest part of the Περὶ Ὕψους is its discussion of “sources.” But the great phrase, already more than once referred to, as to transport or ecstasy, not persuasion, lifts us at once—itself transports us—into a region entirely different from that of all preceding Rhetorics, without at the same time giving any reason to fear loss of touch with the common ground and common-sense. For nothing can be saner than the handling, in the second chapter, of that aporia concerning nature and art, genius and painstaking, which has not infrequently been the cause of anything but sane writing.
After the gap, however, we come to one of the passages recently glanced at, and mentioned or to be mentioned so |The stricture on the Orithyia.| often elsewhere, which warn us as to difference of view. The passage, supposed to be, as we said, Æschylean and from the Orithyia, is no doubt at rather more than “concert-pitch.” It is Marlowe rather than Shakespeare; yet Shakespeare himself has come near to it in Lear and elsewhere, and one line at least—
μίαν παρείρας πλεκτάνην χειμάρῥοον—
is a really splendid piece of metre and phrase, worthy, high-pitched as it is, of the author of the Oresteia and the Prometheus at his very best. So, too, the much-enduring Gorgias would hardly have received very severe reprehension from any but the extremest precisians of modern criticism, at its most starched time, for calling vultures “living tombs.” But the horror of the Greeks on the one hand for anything extravagant, bizarre, out of measure, on the other for the slightest approach in serious work to the unbecoming, the unpleasantly suggestive, makes Longinus here a very little prudish. And his general remarks are excellent, especially in reference to τὸ παρένθυρσον, which I have ventured to interpret, not quite in accordance with the general rendering, “the poking in of the thyrsus at the wrong time,” the affectation of Bacchanalian fury where no fury need be.
But we still have the same warning in the chapter on Frigidity, coupled with another—that, perhaps, as sometimes happens, Longinus' sense of humour was not quite |Frigidity.| equal to his sense of sublimity, and yet another—that the historic sense, so late developed everywhere, was, perhaps, not very strong in him. We, at least, should give Timæus the benefit of a doubt, as to the presence of a certain not inexcusable irony in the comparison (in which, for instance, neither Swift nor Carlyle would have hesitated to indulge) of the times taken by Alexander to conquer Asia and by Isocrates to write the Panegyric. On the other hand, he seems to forget the date of Timæus when he finds the μικροχαρές, the paltrily funny, in the historian’s connection of the Athenian Hermocopidæ and their punishment by Hermocrates, the son of Hermon. There is no reason why Timæus should not have been quite serious, though in the third century after Christ, and even in the first, the allusion might seem either a tasteless freethinking jest or a silly piece of superstition.
But by far the most interesting thing in this context is Longinus' irreconcilable objection to a fanciful metaphor |The “maidens in the eyes.”| which, as it happens most oddly, was, with a very slight variation, an equal pet of the Greeks of the great age and of our own Elizabethans. Every reader of the latter knows the phrase, “to look babies in the eyes” of the beloved—that is to say, to keep the face so close to hers that the little reflections of the gazer in the pupils of her eyes are discernible. The Greek term for these little images, and the pupils that mirrored them, was slightly different—it was κόραι, maidens. And as, from the famous quarrel scene in Homer downwards, the eyes were always, in Greek literature, the seat of modesty or of impudence, the combination suggested, not merely to Timæus but even to Xenophon, a play of words, “more modest than the maidens in their eyes,” or conversely, as where Timæus, speaking of the lawless lust of Agathocles, says that he must have had “harlots” (πόρνας), not “maidens” (κόρας), in his eyes. And Longinus is even more angry or sad with Xenophon than with Timæus, as expecting more propriety from him.
But whether we agree with him in detail or not, the inestimable passage, on the mere quest and craze for novelty, which |The canon “Quod semper.”| follows, more than reconciles us, as well as the other great saying in cap. vi. as to the “late-born” character of the judgment of style, and that in the next as to the canon of Sublimity being the effect produced unaltered in altered circumstances and cases. When we read these things we feel that literary criticism is at last fully constituted,—that it wants nothing more save greater variety, quantity, and continuance of literary creation, upon which to exercise itself.
No nervous check or chill need be caused by the tolerably certain fact that more than one hole may be picked in the |The sources of sublimity.| subsequent classification of the sources[[228]] of ὕψος. These attempts at an over-methodical classification (it has been said before) are always full of snares and pitfalls to the critic. Especially do they tempt him to the sin of arguing in a circle. It cannot be denied that in every one of the five divisions (except, perhaps, the valuable vindication of the quality of Passion) there is some treacherous word or other, which is a mere synonym of “sublime.” Thus in the first we have ἁδρεπήβολον, mastery of the ἅδρον, a curious word, the nearest equivalent of which in English is, perhaps, “stout” or “full-bodied,” as we apply these terms to wine; in the fourth γενναία, “noble,” which is only “sublime” in disguise; and in the fifth εν δε φαει και ολεσσον, of which much the same may be said.
Any suggestion, however, of paralogism which might arise from this and be confirmed by the curious introduction in the third of the Figures, as if they were machines for automatic sublime-coining, must be dispelled by the remarks on Passion of the right kind as tending to sublimity, and by the special stress laid on the primary necessity of μεγαλοφροσύνη, whereof ὕψος itself is the mere ἀπήχημα or echo. Unfortunately here, as so often, the gap comes just in the most important place.
When the cloud lifts, however, we find ourselves in one of the most interesting passages of the whole, the selection of “sublime” passages from Homer. A little superfluous matter about Homer’s “impiety” (the old, the respectable, Platonic mistake) occurs; but it matters not, especially in face of the two praises of the “Let there be light” of the Jewish legislator, “no chance comer,” and of the great ἐν δὲ φάει καὶ ὄλεσσον of Ajax, the mere juxtaposition of which once more shows what a critic we have got in our hands.