CHAP. Of the Su blime and Pathetic. shall necessarily come to the same conclusion as the celebrated line of Dryden led to, My wound's so great because it is small; to which was replied, Then 'twould be greater, were it none at all. For if a certain degree of want of light and clearness produce a comparative degree of sublimity, it necessarily follows that a total want of them would produce the superlative degree of it; and to this conclusion the author of the Inquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful boldly and confidently advances: for he not only makes utter darkness to be an active and efficient cause of the sublime, by its physical operation on the organ of vision*; but he also makes utter nonsense to be an equally active and efficient cause, by the influence which habit has given to certain words and combinations. of words upon the imagination and the passions; though the words themselves, at the time of exciting the sentiment, convey no ideas whatever to the mind; their operation being by a certain contagion of passion, which certain modes of speech mark in the writer, and communicate to the reader †. 84. I readily agree with this author in giving every possible degree of credit to enthusiastic + P. V. * P. IV. f. xv. and impassioned modes of speech. They are the great vehicles of sympathy-the sole means of conveying warm and animated sentiments from one mind to another: since that, which is not expressed with all the energetic glow of real ecstasy, will never excite any ecstatic feelings in the reader: of Si vis me flere, dolendum est Primum ipsi tibi: and the same maxim may be extended to all expressions of serious or vehement passion. The sentiment must rise full from the source, and flow strong through the current, or its contagion will never communicate itself to those whom it approaches. This glowing energy of language, appropriated always to the sentiments which it is meant to express, is the very essence poetry, and that which gives it all its power over the soul. Strip it of this, by transposing or changing the words, and its most glowing and animated effusions will become torpid and lifeless;-as unlike to what they were, as the skeleton of Helen to the beauty, that set the world in arms. But are ideas, therefore, of no importance?-or can this contagion of passion be communicated by any other means, than through the ideas conveyed or excited by the expressions, which communicate it? I say conveyed or excited; because I am aware that a CHAP. I. Of the Sublime and Pathetic. 1 CHAP. Of the Su single idea conveyed may excite trains of many others, upon the principle of association: but blime and there must necessarily be some idea conveyed; Pathetic. for, in mind as in body, nothing can come from nothing, and every effect will be propor- only arise from mental perceptions, and, con- another poem have been consigned at once to the neglect and oblivion, into which they have sunk since the imposture has been detected, and from which of the same kind, which the author did publish in his own name, never emerged *. As the works of an ancient bard, discovered after the lapse of so many ages, in a remote corner of the world, amidst a rude and ignorant people, national vanity joined with antiquarian prejudice in extolling them; and, as they were found admirably to accord with these new principles of taste, every thing being, in the words. of the comedy, finely confused and alarmingly obscure, the critics of the North exulted in having at length found, in an original work of one of their own countrymen, instances of the true sublime, which they had in vain sought for in the tamer productions of the Greek and Roman poets; with whom, these Versus inopes rerum, nugæque canoræ * See a very able dissertation annexed to Mr. Laing's History of Scotland, in which is contained a full account and complete exposition of this most impudent imposture; in which some names of higher rank and respectability in literature than that of James Macpherson appear to have been concerned, so far at least as wilful mispri sion of fraud can implicate them. † See Lord Kaims, Blair, Gerrard, &c. &c. particularly the first, who has opposed parallel passages from Fingal, and Pope's Homer, (for he went no higher) to each other, and invariably given the preference to the former. CHAP. I. Of the Su blime and Pathetic. CHAP. Of the Su were never in much repute*; notwithstanding that the author of the Inquiry into the Sublime blime and and Beautiful found so admirable a specimen of them in one of the most admired passages of their most faultless poet. Pathetic. 85. Their fundamental maxim was, that sound sense or intelligence was the only just principle of good writing of any kind; Scribendi recte sapere est et principium et fons +. and the more clearly and distinctly this was expressed the better. Without it, all the impassioned modes of speech, of which the above-mentioned author speaks ‡, are nothing but sonorous jargon-the froth and tinsel of rhetoric, which raise expectation only to disappoint it. What is it, that makes the impassioned language of Achilles, Macbeth, and Othello so interesting, but the strong sense and energy of mind that beams through it? No orator nor logician ever reasoned more strongly, εκ αν αληθες ύψος ειη, μεχρι μονης της ακοής σωζόμενον. LONGIN. f. vii. + "Est eloquentiæ, sicut reliquarum, fundamentum sapientia." Cic. Orator. c. 70. vol. i. 610. Subl. and Beaut. "Quid est enim tam furiosum, quam verborum vel optimorum atque ornatissimorum sonitus inanis, nulla subjecta sententia nec scientia." Cic. de Orator. i. c. 12. "Prima est eloquentiæ virtus perspicuitas. "Erit ergo obscurior etiam, quo quisque deterior." QUINTIL. Instit. lib. ii. c. iii. |