Boileau, in his introduction to his version of the ancient Treatise on
the Sublime, says that he is making no valueless present to his age. Not
valueless, to a generation which talks much about style and method in
literature, should be this new rendering of the noble fragment, long
attributed to Longinus, the Greek tutor and political adviser of
Zenobia. There is, indeed, a modern English version by Spurden,[1] but
that is now rare, and seldom comes into the market. Rare, too, is
Vaucher's critical essay (1854), which is unlucky, as the French and
English books both contain valuable disquisitions on the age of the
author of the Treatise. This excellent work has had curious fortunes. It
is never quoted nor referred to by any extant classical writer, and,
among the many books attributed by Suidas to Longinus, it is not
mentioned. Decidedly the old world has left no more noble relic of
criticism. Yet the date of the book is obscure, and it did not come into
the hands of the learned in modern Europe till Robertelli and Manutius
each published editions in 1544. From that time the Treatise has often
been printed, edited, translated; but opinion still floats undecided
about its origin and period. Does it belong to the age of Augustus, or
to the age of Aurelian? Is the author the historical Longinus--the
friend of Plotinus, the tutor of Porphyry, the victim of Aurelian,--or
have we here a work by an unknown hand more than two centuries earlier?
Manuscripts and traditions are here of little service. The oldest
manuscript, that of Paris, is regarded as the parent of the rest. It is
a small quarto of 414 pages, whereof 335 are occupied by the "Problems"
of Aristotle. Several leaves have been lost, hence the fragmentary
character of the essay. The Paris MS. has an index, first mentioning the
"Problems," and then +DIONUSIOU E LONGINOU PERI UPSOUS+, that is, "The
work of Dionysius, or of Longinus, about the Sublime."
[Footnote 1: Longmans, London, 1836.]
On this showing the transcriber of the MS. considered its authorship
dubious. Supposing that the author was Dionysius, which of the many
writers of that name was he? Again, if he was Longinus, how far does his
work tally with the characteristics ascribed to that late critic, and
peculiar to his age?
About this Longinus, while much is written, little is certainly known.
Was he a descendant of a freedman of one of the Cassii Longini, or of an
eastern family with a mixture of Greek and Roman blood? The author of
the Treatise avows himself a Greek, and apologises, as a Greek, for
attempting an estimate of Cicero. Longinus himself was the nephew and
heir of Fronto, a Syrian rhetorician of Emesa. Whether Longinus was born
there or not, and when he was born, are things uncertain. Porphyry, born
in 233 A.D., was his pupil: granting that Longinus was twenty years
Porphyry's senior, he must have come into the world about 213 A.D. He
travelled much, studied in many cities, and was the friend of the mystic
Neoplatonists, Plotinus and Ammonius. The former called him "a
philologist, not a philosopher." Porphyry shows us Longinus at a supper
where the plagiarisms of Greek writers are discussed--a topic dear to
trivial or spiteful mediocrity. He is best known by his death. As the
Greek secretary of Zenobia he inspired a haughty answer from the queen
to Aurelian, who therefore put him to death. Many rhetorical and
philosophic treatises are ascribed to him, whereof only fragments
survive. Did he write the Treatise on the Sublime? Modern students
prefer to believe that the famous essay is, if not by Plutarch, as some
hold, at least by some author of his age, the age of the early Caesars.
The arguments for depriving Longinus, Zenobia's tutor, of the credit of
the Treatise lie on the surface, and may be briefly stated. He addresses
his work as a letter to a friend, probably a Roman pupil, Terentianus,
with whom he has been reading a work on the Sublime by Caecilius. Now
Caecilius, a voluminous critic, certainly lived not later than Plutarch,
who speaks of him with a sneer. It is unlikely then that an author, two
centuries later, would make the old book of Caecilius the starting-point
of his own. He would probably have selected some recent or even
contemporary rhetorician. Once more, the writer of the Treatise of the
Sublime quotes no authors later than the Augustan period. Had he lived
as late as the historical Longinus he would surely have sought examples
of bad style, if not of good, from the works of the Silver Age. Perhaps
he would hardly have resisted the malicious pleasure of censuring the
failures among whom he lived. On the other hand, if he cites no late
author, no classical author cites him, in spite of the excellence of his
book. But we can hardly draw the inference that he was of late date from
this purely negative evidence.
Again, he describes, in a very interesting and earnest manner, the
characteristics of his own period (Translation, pp. 82-86). Why, he is
asked, has genius become so rare? There are many clever men, but scarce
any highly exalted and wide-reaching genius. Has eloquence died with
liberty? "We have learned the lesson of a benignant despotism, and have
never tasted freedom." The author answers that it is easy and
characteristic of men to blame the present times. Genius may have been
corrupted, not by a world-wide peace, but by love of gain and pleasure,
passions so strong that "I fear, for such men as we are it is better to
serve than to be free. If our appetites were let loose altogether
against our neighbours, they would be like wild beasts uncaged, and
bring a deluge of calamity on the whole civilised world." Melancholy
words, and appropriate to our own age, when cleverness is almost
universal, and genius rare indeed, and the choice between liberty and
servitude hard to make, were the choice within our power.
But these words assuredly apply closely to the peaceful period of
Augustus, when Virgil and Horace "praising their tyrant sang," not to
the confused age of the historical Longinus. Much has been said of the
allusion to "the Lawgiver of the Jews" as "no ordinary person," but that
remark might have been made by a heathen acquainted with the Septuagint,
at either of the disputed dates. On the other hand, our author (Section
XIII) quotes the critical ideas of "Ammonius and his school," as to the
debt of Plato to Homer. Now the historical Longinus was a friend of the
Neoplatonist teacher (not writer), Ammonius Saccas. If we could be sure
that the Ammonius of the Treatise was this Ammonius, the question would
be settled in favour of the late date. Our author would be that Longinus
who inspired Zenobia to resist Aurelian, and who perished under his
revenge. But Ammonius is not a very uncommon name, and we have no reason
to suppose that the Neoplatonist Ammonius busied himself with the
literary criticism of Homer and Plato. There was, among others, an
Egyptian Ammonius, the tutor of Plutarch.
These are the mass of the arguments on both sides. M. Egger sums them up
thus: "After carefully examining the tradition of the MSS., and the one
very late testimony in favour of Longinus, I hesitated for long as to
the date of this precious work. In 1854 M. Vaucher[2] inclined me to
believe that Plutarch was the author.[3] All seems to concur towards the
opinion that, if not Plutarch, at least one of his contemporaries wrote
the most original Greek essay in its kind since the _Rhetoric_ and
_Poetic_ of Aristotle."[4]
[Footnote 2: _Etude Critique sur la traite du Sublime et les ecrits
de Longin._ Geneva.]
[Footnote 3: See also M. Naudet, _Journal des Savants_, Mars 1838,
and M. Egger, in the same Journal, May 1884.]
[Footnote 4: Egger, _Histoire de la Critique chez les Grecs_,
p. 426. Paris, 1887.]
We may, on the whole, agree that the nobility of the author's thought,
his habit of quoting nothing more recent than the Augustan age, and his
description of his own time, which seems so pertinent to that epoch,
mark him as its child rather than as a great critic lost among the
_somnia Pythagorea_ of the Neoplatonists. On the other hand, if the
author be a man of high heart and courage, as he seems, so was that
martyr of independence, Longinus. Not without scruple, then, can we
deprive Zenobia's tutor of the glory attached so long to his name.
Whatever its date, and whoever its author may be, the Treatise is
fragmentary. The lost parts may very probably contain the secret of its
period and authorship. The writer, at the request of his friend,
Terentianus, and dissatisfied with the essay of Caecilius, sets about
examining the nature of the Sublime in poetry and oratory. To the latter
he assigns, as is natural, much more literary importance than we do, in
an age when there is so little oratory of literary merit, and so much
popular rant. The subject of sublimity must naturally have attracted a
writer whose own moral nature was pure and lofty, who was inclined to
discover in moral qualities the true foundation of the highest literary
merit. Even in his opening words he strikes the keynote of his own
disposition, where he approves the saying that "the points in which we
resemble the divine nature are benevolence and love of truth." Earlier
or later born, he must have lived in the midst of literary activity,
curious, eager, occupied with petty questions and petty quarrels,
concerned, as men in the best times are not very greatly concerned, with
questions of technique and detail. Cut off from politics, people found
in composition a field for their activity. We can readily fancy what
literature becomes when not only its born children, but the minor
busybodies whose natural place is politics, excluded from these, pour
into the study of letters. Love of notoriety, vague activity, fantastic
indolence, we may be sure, were working their will in the sacred close
of the Muses. There were literary sets, jealousies, recitations of new
poems; there was a world of amateurs, if there were no papers and
paragraphs. To this world the author speaks like a voice from the older
and graver age of Greece. If he lived late, we can imagine that he did
not quote contemporaries, not because he did not know them, but because
he estimated them correctly. He may have suffered, as we suffer, from
critics who, of all the world's literature, know only "the last thing
out," and who take that as a standard for the past, to them unfamiliar,
and for the hidden future. As we are told that excellence is not of the
great past, but of the present, not in the classical masters, but in
modern Muscovites, Portuguese, or American young women, so the author of
the Treatise may have been troubled by Asiatic eloquence, now long
forgotten, by names of which not a shadow survives. He, on the other
hand, has a right to be heard because he has practised a long
familiarity with what is old and good. His mind has ever been in contact
with masterpieces, as the mind of a critic should be, as the mind of a
reviewer seldom is, for the reviewer has to hurry up and down inspecting
new literary adventurers. Not among their experiments will he find a
touchstone of excellence, a test of greatness, and that test will seldom
be applied to contemporary performances. What is the test, after all, of
the Sublime, by which our author means the truly great, the best and
most passionate thoughts, nature's high and rare inspirations, expressed
in the best chosen words? He replies that "a just judgment of style is
the final fruit of long experience." "Much has he travelled in the
realms of gold."
The word "style" has become a weariness to think upon; so much is said,
so much is printed about the art of expression, about methods, tricks,
and turns; so many people, without any long experience, set up to be
judges of style, on the strength of having admired two or three modern
and often rather fantastic writers. About our author, however, we know
that his experience has been long, and of the best, that he does not
speak from a hasty acquaintance with a few contemporary _precieux_ and
_precieuses_. The bad writing of his time he traces, as much of our own
may be traced, to "the pursuit of novelty in thought," or rather in
expression. "It is this that has turned the brain of nearly all our
learned world to-day." "Gardons nous d'ecrire trop bien," he might have
said, "c'est la pire maniere qu'il y'ait d'ecrire."[5]
[Footnote 5: M. Anatole France.]
The Sublime, with which he concerns himself, is "a certain loftiness and
excellence of language," which "takes the reader out of himself.... The
Sublime, acting with an imperious and irresistible force, sways every
reader whether he will or no." In its own sphere the Sublime does what
"natural magic" does in the poetical rendering of nature, and perhaps in
the same scarcely-to-be-analysed fashion. Whether this art can be taught
or not is a question which the author treats with modesty. Then, as now,
people were denying (and not unjustly) that this art can be taught by
rule. The author does not go so far as to say that Criticism, "unlike
Justice, 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 Moliere, 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]
[Footnote 6: The examples of bombast used to be drawn as late as
Spurden's translation (1836), from Lee, from _Troilus and Cressida_,
and _The Taming of the Shrew_. Cowley and Crashaw furnished
instances of conceits; Waller, Young, and Hayley of frigidity;
and Darwin of affectation.
"What beaux and beauties crowd the gaudy groves,
And woo and win their _vegetable loves_"--
a phrase adopted--"vapid vegetable loves"--by the Laureate in
"The Talking Oak."]
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 admirable fight, worthy of a
saga, he thinks too improbable, and one of the "trifles into which
second childhood is apt to be betrayed." He fancies that the aged Homer
had "lost his power of depicting the passions"; in fact, he is hardly a
competent or sympathetic critic of the _Odyssey_. Perhaps he had lived
among Romans till he lost his sense of humour; perhaps he never had any
to lose. On the other hand, he preserved for us that inestimable and not
to be translated fragment of Sappho--+phainetai moi kenos isos
theoisin+.
It is curious to find him contrasting Apollonius Rhodius as faultless,
with Homer as great but faulty. The "faultlessness" of Apollonius is
not his merit, for he is often tedious, and he has little skill in
selection; moreover, he is deliberately antiquarian, if not pedantic.
His true merit is in his original and, as we think, modern telling of a
love tale--pure, passionate, and tender, the first in known literature.
Medea is often sublime, and always touching. But it is not on these
merits that our author lingers; he loves only the highest literature,
and, though he finds spots on the sun and faults in Homer, he condones
them as oversights passed in the poet's "contempt of little things."
Such for us to-day are the lessons of Longinus. He traces dignity and
fire of style to dignity and fire of soul. He detects and denounces the
very faults of which, in each other, all writers are conscious, and
which he brings home to ourselves. He proclaims the essential merits of
conviction, and of selection. He sets before us the noblest examples of
the past, most welcome in a straining age which tries already to live in
the future. He admonishes and he inspires. He knows the "marvellous
power and enthralling charm of appropriate and striking words" without
dropping into mere word-tasting. "Beautiful words are the very light of
thought," he says, but does not maunder about the "colour" of words, in
the style of the decadence. And then he "leaves this generation to its
fate," and calmly turns himself to the work that lies nearest his hand.
To us he is as much a moral as a literary teacher. We admire that Roman
greatness of soul in a Greek, and the character of this unknown man, who
carried the soul of a poet, the heart of a hero under the gown of a
professor. He was one of those whom books cannot debilitate, nor a life
of study incapacitate for the study of life.