Jpse Pater, media nimborum in nocte, corascâ GEOL. I. Every circumstance in this noble description is the production of an imagination heated and astonished with the grandeur of the object. If there be any defect, it is in the words immediately following those I have quoted: "Ingeminant Austri, "et densissimus imber;" where the transition is made too hastily, I am afraid, from the preceding Sublime images, to a thick shower, and the blowing of the south wind; and shews how difficult it frequenlty is, to descend with grace, without seeming to fall. The high importance of the rule which I have been now giving, concerning the proper choice of circumstances, when description is meant to be Sublime, seems to me not to have been sufficiently attended to. It has, however, such a foundation in nature, as renders the least deflexion from it fatal. When a writer is aiming at the beautiful only, his descriptions may have improprieties in them, and yet be beautiful still. Some trivial, or misjudged circumstances, can be overlooked by the reader; they make only the difference of more or less; the gay, or pleasing emotion, which he has raised, subsists still. But the case is quite different with the Sublime. There, one trifling circumstance, one mean idea, is sufficient to destroy the whole charm. This is owing to the nature of the emotion aimed at by Sublime description, which admits of no mediocrity, and cannot subsist in a middle state; but must either highly transport us, or, if unsuccessful in the execution, leave us * The Father of the gods his glory shrouds, Involv'd in tempests, and a night of clouds ; And from the middle darkness flashing out, By fits he deals his fiery bolts about. Earth feels the motions of her angry God, Her entrails tremble, and her mountains nod, And flying beasts in forests seek abode. Deep horror seizes every human breast; Their pride is humbled, and their fears confest; While he, from high his rolling thunders throws, And fires the mountains with repeated blows; The rocks are from their old foundations rent, The winds redouble, and the rains augment. DRYDIN. greatly disgusted and displeased. We attempt to rise along with the writer; the imagination is awakened, and put upon the stretch; but it requires to be supported; and if, in the midst of its efforts, you desert it unexpectedly, down it comes with a painful shock. When Milton, in his battle of the angels, describes them as tearing up the mountains, and throwing them at one another: there are, in his description, as Mr. Addison has observed, no circumstances but what are properly, Sublime; From their foundations loos'ning to and fro, Whereas Claudian, in a fragment upon the wars of the giants, has contrived to render this idea of their throwing the mountains, which is in itself so grand, burlesque, and ridiculous; by this single circumstance, of one of his giants with the mountain Ida upon his shoulders, and a river which flowed from the mountain, running down along the giant's back, as he held it up in that posture. There is a description too in Virgil, which, I think, is censurable, though more slightly in this respect. It is that of the burning mountain Ætna; a subject certainly very proper to be worked up by a poet inte a Sublime description: ............... Horrificis juxta tonat Ætna ruinis. Interdumque atram prorumpit ad æthera nubem, Cum gemitu glomerat, fundoque exæstuat imo.* ÆN. III. 571. Here after several magnificent images, the poet concludes with personifying the mountain under this figure," eructans The port capacious, and secure from wild, By turns hot embers from ber entrails fly, And flakes of mounting flames that lick the sky. And shiver'd by the force, come piece-meal down. Oft liquid lakes of burning sulphur flow, Fed from the fiery springs that boil below. } DRYDEN. In this translation of Dryden's, the debasing circumstance to which I object in the original, is, with propriety, omitted. ❝viscera cum gemitu," belching up his bowels with a groan ; which, by likening the mountain to a sick or drunk person, degrades the majesty of the description. It is to no purpose to tell us, that the poet here alludes to the fable of the giant Enceladus lying under mount Etna; and that he supposes his motions and tossings to have occasioned the fiery eruptions. He intended the description of a Sublime object; and the natural ideas, raised by a burning mountain, are infinitely more lofty, than the belchings of a giant, how huge soever. The debasing effect of the idea which is here presented, will appear in a stronger light, by seeing what figure it makes in a poem of Sir Richard Blackmore's, who, through a monstrous perversity of taste, had chosen this for the capital circumstance in his description, and thereby (as Dr. Arbuthnot humourously ob- . serves, in his Treatise of the Art of Sinking) had represented the mountain as im a fit of the cholic. Ætna, and all the burning mountains find Their kindled stores with inbred storms of wind Such instances shew how much the Sublime depends upon. a just selection of circumstances; and with how great care every circumstance must be avoided, which, by bordering in the least upon the mean, or even upon the gay or the trifling, alters the tone of the emotion. If it shall be now inquired, What are the proper sources of the Sublime? My answer is, That they are to be looked for every where in nature. It is not by hunting after tropes, and figures, and rhetorical assistances, that we can expect to produce it. No: it stands clear, for the most part, of these laboured refinements of art. It must come unsought, if it come at all; and be the natural offspring of a strong ima gination. Est Deus in nobis ; agitante calescimus illo. Wherever a great and awful object is presented in nature, or a very magnanimous and exalted affection of the human mind is displayed; thence, if you can catch the impression strongly, and exhibit it warm and glowing, you may draw the Sublime. These are its only proper sources. In judging of any striking beauty in composition, whether it is, or is not, to be referred to this class, we must attend to the nature of the emotion which it raises; and only, if it be of that elevating, solemn, and awful kind, which distinguishes this feeling, we can pronounce it Sublime. From the account which I have given of the nature of the Sublime, it clearly follows, that it is an emotion which can never be long protracted. The mind, by no force of genius, can be kept, for any considerable time, so far raised above its common tone; but will, of course, relax into its ordinary situation. Neither are the abilities of any human writer sufficient to supply a continued run of unmixed Sublime conceptions. The utmost we can expect is, that this fire of imagination should sometimes flash upon us like lightning from heaven, and then disappear. In Homer and Milton, this effulgence of genius breaks forth more frequently, and with greater lustre, than in most authors. Shakespeare also rises often into the true Sublime. But no author whatever is Sublime throughout. Some, indeed, there are, who, by a strength and dignity in their conceptions, and a current of high ideas that runs through the whole composition, preserve the reader's mind always in a tone nearly allied to the Sublime; for which reason they may, in a limited sense, merit the name of continued Sublime writers; and, in this class, we may justly place Demosthenes and Plato. As for what is called the Sublime style, it is, for the most part, a very bad one; and has no relation, whatever, to the real Sublime. Persons are apt to imagine, that magnificent words, accumulated epithets, and a certain swelling kind of expression, by rising above what is usual or vulgar, contributes to, or even forms, the Sublime. Nothing can be more false. In all the instances of Sublime Writing, which I have given, nothing of this kind appears. "God said, Let there be light, ' and there was light." This is striking and Sublime. But put it into what is commonly called the Sublime style: "The "Sovereign Arbiter of nature, by the potent energy of a single word, commanded the light to exist ;" and, as Boi leau has well observed, the style indeed is raised, but the thought is fallen. In general, in all good writing, the Sublime lies in the thought, not in the words; and when the thought is truly noble, it will for the most part, clothe itself in a native dignity of language. The Sublime, indeed, rejects mean, low, or trivial expressions; but it is equally an enemy to such as are turgid. The main secret of being Sublime, is to say great things in few and plain words. It would be found to hold, without exception, that the most Sublime authors are the simplest in their style; and wherever you find a writer, who affects a more than ordinary pomp and parade of words, and is always endeavouring to magnify his subject by epithets, there you may immediately suspect, that, feeble in sentiment, he is studying to support himself by mere expression. The same unfavourable judgment we must pass, on all that la boured apparatus with which some writers introduce a passage, or description, which they intend shall be Sublime; calling on their readers to attend, invoking their muse, or breaking fourth into general, unmeaning exclamations, concerning the greatness, terribleness, or majesty of the object, which they are to describe. Mr. Addison, in his Campaign, has fallen into an error of this kind, when about to describe the battle of Blenheim. But! O my Muse! what numbers wilt thou find To sing the furious troops in battle join'd? Methinks, I hear the drum's tumultuous sound, The victor's shouts, and dying groans, confound; &c. Introductions of this kind, are a forced attempt in a writer, to spur up himself, and his reader, when he finds his imagination flagging in vigour. It is like taking artificial spirits in order to supply the want of such as are natural. By this observation, however, I do not mean to pass a general censure on Mr. Addison's Campaign, which, in several places, is far from wanting merit; and in particular, the noted comparison of his hero to the angel who rides in the whirlwind and directs the storm, is a truly Sublime image. The faults opposite to the Sublime are chiefly two: the Frigid, and the Bombast. The Frigid consists, in degrading an object, or sentiment, which is Sublime in itself, by our mean conception of it; or by our weak, low, and childish description o' it. |