Introductory essay complete. From the text of Morley.

YOU know, my dear Terentianus, that when we perused Cecilius’s pamphlet “On the Sublime” together, we thought it below a subject of that magnitude, that it was entirely defective in its principal branches, and that its advantage to readers, which ought to be the principal aim of every writer, would prove very small. Besides, though in every scientific treatise two points are required: the first, that the nature of the subject treated of be fully explained; the second, I mean in order of writing, since in importance it is superior that directions be given how and by what methods the object sought may be attained: yet Cecilius, who brings ten thousand instances to show what the sublime is, as if his readers were ignorant of the matter, has somehow or other omitted, as unnecessary, the discipline that might enable us to raise our natural genius in any degree whatever to this sublime. But, perhaps, this writer is not so much to be blamed for his omissions as commended for the mere conception of the idea, and his earnest endeavors. You, indeed, have exhorted me also by all means to set down my thoughts on this sublime, on your own account; let us, then, consider whether anything can be drawn from my private studies, for the service of those who write for the world, or speak in public.

  But you, my friend, will give me your judgment on whatever I advance with that exactness which is due to truth, and that sincerity which is habitual to you. For well did the sage answer the question, “In what do we most resemble the gods?” when he replied, “In doing good and speaking truth.” But since I write, my friend, to you, who are thoroughly versed in polite learning, there will be little occasion to use many previous words in proving that the sublime is a certain excellence and perfection of language, and that the greatest writers, both in verse and prose, have by this alone obtained the prize of glory, and clothed their renown with immortality. For the grand not only persuades, but even transports an audience. And the admirable, by its astounding effect, is always more efficacious than that which merely persuades or delights; for in most cases it rests wholly with ourselves either to resist or yield to persuasion. But these, by the application of a sovereign power and irresistible might, get the ascendency over every hearer. Again, dexterity of invention, and good order and economy in composition, are not to be discerned from one or two passages, and sometimes hardly from the whole texture of a discourse; but the sublime, when uttered in good season, with the lightning’s force scatters all before it in an instant, and shows at once the might of genius in a single stroke. For in these, and truths like these, experimentally conversant as you are with them, you might, my dearest Terentianus, be the instructor of others yourself.

  But we ought not to advance before we clear the point whether or not there be any art in the sublime or the pathetic. For some are of opinion that they are altogether mistaken who would reduce it to the rules of art. “The sublime [say they] is born with us, and is not to be learned by precept. The only art to reach it is to have the power from Nature.” And, as they reason, the productions of Nature are deteriorated and altogether enervated by the emaciating effects of artistic rules.

  But I maintain that the contrary might easily appear, would they only reflect that, though Nature for the most part challenges a sovereign and uncontrollable power in the pathetic and sublime, yet she is not altogether lawless, but delights in a proper regulation. That again, though she is in every case the foundation, and the primary source, and original pattern of production, yet method is able to determine and adjust the measures, and discriminate the season in each thing, and moreover to teach the cultivation and use of them with the greatest degree of certainty. And further, that flights of grandeur are more exposed to danger when abandoned to themselves, without the aid of science, and having nothing to give them steadiness or equipoise, but left to blind impulse alone and untutored daring. For they often, indeed, want the spur, but they stand as frequently in need of the curb.

  Demosthenes somewhere judiciously observes that: “In common life success is the greatest good; that the next, and no less important, is conduct, without which the other must be unavoidably of short continuance.” Now the same may be asserted of composition, where Nature supplies the place of success, and art the place of conduct.

  But there is one consideration which deserves particular attention, for the very fact that there is anything in eloquence which depends upon Nature alone, could not be known without that light which we receive from art. If, therefore, as I said before, he who censures them that pursue such useful literary labors as this in which I am now engaged, would give due attention to these reflections, I believe he would no longer think an investigation of this nature superfluous or useless.

	“Let them the chimney’s flashing flames repel.
	Could but these eyes one lurking wretch arrest,
	I’d whirl aloft one streaming curl of flame,
	And into embers turn his crackling roof.
	But now a generous song I have not sounded.”

  Streaming curls of flame, spewing against heaven, and making Boreas a piper, with such-like expressions, are not tragical, but supertragical; for the diction is coarse and turbid, and the images are jumbled and tumultuous, and therefore cannot possibly adorn or raise the subject; and whenever carefully examined in the light, their show of being terrible gradually disappears, and they become contemptible and ridiculous. Tragedy will indeed, by its nature, admit of some pomp and grandiloquence, yet even in tragedy it is unpardonable to swell immoderately; much less allowable must it therefore be in prose writing, or those works which are founded in truth. Upon this account some expressions of Gorgias the Leontine are ridiculed, who styles Xerxes the Persian Jupiter, and calls vultures living sepulchres. Some expressions of Callisthenes deserve the same treatment, for they are not sublime, but inflated. And Clitarchus comes under this censure still more, who is like a tree all bark, and who blows, as Sophocles expresses it, “on small pipes, but without a mouthpiece.”

  Amphicrates, Hegesias, and Matris, may all be taxed with the same imperfections; for often when, in their own opinion, they are all divine, what they imagine to be inspiration proves empty froth.

  Upon the whole, bombast seems to be amongst those faults which are most difficult to be avoided; for all who are naturally inclined to aim at grandeur, in shunning the censure of impotence and phlegm, are somehow or other hurried into this fault, being persuaded that

“In great attempts ’tis glorious ev’n to fall.”

But tumors in writing, like those in the human body, are certain disorders. Empty and veiled over with superficial greatness, they only delude, and work effects contrary to those for which they were designed. “Nothing,” according to the old saying, “is drier than a person distempered with a dropsy.”

  Now this swollen and puffed-up style endeavors to go beyond the true sublime, whereas puerilities are directly opposite to it. They are altogether low and groveling, meanly and faintly expressed, and, in a word, are the most ungenerous and unpardonable errors that an author can be guilty of.

  But what do we mean by a puerility? Why, it is certainly no more than a schoolboy’s thought, which by too eager a pursuit of elegance, becomes dry and insipid. And those persons commonly fail in this particular who, by an ill-managed zeal for that which is out of the common way, high-wrought, and, above all, sweet, run into trumpery and affected expressions.

  To these may be added a third sort of imperfection in the pathetic, which Theodorus has named the Parenthyrse, or an ill-timed emotion. It is an attempt to work upon the passions, where there is no need of pathos; or some excess, where moderation is requisite. For some authors, as if from the effects of intoxication, fall into passionate expressions, which bear no relation at all to their subject, but are whims of their own, or borrowed from the schools. The consequence is, as might be expected, that they meet with nothing but contempt and derision from their unmoved audience,—transported themselves, whilst their hearers are calm and unexcited. But I have reserved the pathetic for another place.

  Timæus abounds very much in the Frigid, the other vice I mentioned—a writer, it is true, sufficiently skilled in other points, and who sometimes reaches the genuine sublime. He was also a person of great erudition and fertility of thought, but extreme to mark the imperfections of others, and utterly blind to his own, though a fond desire of new thoughts and uncommon turns has often plunged him into shameful puerilities. The truth of these assertions I shall confirm by one or two instances alone, since Cecilius has anticipated me in most of them.

  When he commends Alexander the Great, he tells us “that he conquered all Asia in fewer years than it took Isocrates to compose his panegyric on the Persian War.” A wonderful parallel indeed, between the conqueror of the world and a professor of rhetoric! By your method of computation, Timæus, the Lacedæmonians fall vastly short of Isocrates in prowess, for they spent thirty years in the siege of Messene, he only ten in writing that panegyric.

  But how does he inveigh against those Athenians who were made prisoners after the defeat in Sicily, “Guilty [says he] of sacrilege against Hermes, and having defaced his images, they now suffered a just retribution, and chiefly at the hands of Hermocrates, the son of Hermon, who was paternally descended from the injured deity.” Really, my Terentianus, I am surprised that he has not written of Dionysius the tyrant, “that, for his heinous impiety towards Jupiter (or Dia) and Hercules (Heraclea), he was dethroned by Dion and Heraclides.”

  Why should I dwell any longer upon Timæus, when even the very heroes of good writing, Xenophon and Plato, though educated in the school of Socrates, sometimes forget themselves, and transgress through an affectation of such pretty flourishes? The former, in his “Polity of the Lacedæmonians,” speaks thus: “They observe an uninterrupted silence, and keep their eyes as fixed and unmoved as if they were so many statues of stone or brass. You might with reason think them more modest than the virgins in their eyes.” Amphicrates might, perhaps, be allowed to use the term “modest virgins” for the pupils of the eyes; but what an indecency is it in the great Xenophon! And what a strange persuasion, that the pupils of the eyes should be in general the seats of modesty, when impudence is nowhere more visible than in the eyes of some! Homer, for instance, says of an impertinent person:—

“Drunkard! thou dog in eye!”

  Timæus, as if he had found a booty, could not pass by even this insipid turn of Xenophon without appropriating it. Accordingly he speaks thus of Agathocles: “He ravished his own cousin though married to another person, and on the very day when she was first seen by her husband without a veil,—a crime of which none but he who had prostitutes, not virgins, in his eyes could be guilty.” Neither is the otherwise divine Plato to be acquitted of this failing, when he says, for instance, “After they are written, they deposit in the temples these cypress memorials,” meaning the tables of the laws. And in another passage, “As to the walls, Megillus, I would join in the opinion of Sparta, to let them sleep supine on the earth, and not to rouse them up.” Neither does an expression of Herodotus fall short of it, when he calls beautiful women “the pains of the eye,” though this, indeed, may admit of some excuse, since in his history it is spoken by drunken barbarians. But it is not good to incur the ridicule of posterity for a low conception, though uttered by such characters as these.

  Now all such instances of the mean and poor in composition take their rise from the same original; I mean that eager pursuit of uncommon turns of thought, which most infatuates the writers of the present age, for our excellences and defects flow from the same common source. So that those elegant, sublime, and sweet expressions, which contribute so much to success in writing, are frequently made the causes and foundations of opposite failures. This is manifest in hyperboles and plurals; but the danger attending an injudicious use of these figures I shall exhibit in the sequel of this work. At present it is incumbent upon me to inquire by what means we may be enabled to avoid those vices which border so near upon, and are so easily blended with, the true sublime.

  And this may be, if we first of all gain a thorough and critical insight into the nature of the true sublime, which, however, is by no means an easy acquisition. For to pass a right judgment upon composition is the last result of long experience. Not but that a power of distinguishing in these things may perhaps be acquired by attending to some such precepts as I am about to deliver.

  It should be understood, my dearest friend, that as in the affairs of life nothing great which it is magnanimous to despise—as, for example, riches, honors, titles, crowns, and whatever is varnished over with an imposing exterior—can ever be regarded as worthy of preference in the opinion of a wise man, since to think lightly of such things is no ordinary excellence; for certainly the persons who have ability sufficient to acquire, but scorn them, are more admired than those who actually possess them—much in the same way also must we judge in respect of the sublime, both in poetry and prose. We must carefully examine whether some things be not tricked out with this seeming grandeur, this imposing exterior of varnish laid on thickly, which, when examined, would be found a mere delusion, meriting the contempt rather than the admiration of a truly great mind; for, somehow or other, the soul is naturally elevated by the true sublime, and, lifted up with exultation, is filled with transport and inward pride, as if what was only heard had been the product of its own invention.

  He, therefore, who has a competent share of natural and acquired taste, may easily discover the value of any performance from often hearing it. If he find that it does not transport his soul, or exalt his thoughts—that it does not leave in his mind matter for more enlarged reflection than the mere sounds of the words convey, but that on attentive examination its dignity lessens and declines—he may conclude that whatever pierces no deeper than the ears can never be the true sublime. For that is truly grand and lofty, which the more we consider the greater ideas we conceive of it; whose force is hard, or, rather, impossible to withstand; which sinks deep, and makes such impressions on the mind as cannot be easily worn out or effaced. In a word, you may pronounce that sublime to be commendable and genuine, which pleases all sorts of men at all times. For when persons of different pursuits, habits of life, tastes, ages, principles, agree in the same joint approbation of any performance, then this union of assent, this combination of so many different judgments, stamps a high and indisputable value on that performance which meets with such general applause.

  Now there are, if I may so express it, five very copious sources of the sublime, if we presuppose a talent for speaking as a common foundation for these five sorts; and, indeed, without it anything whatever will avail but little:—

  1.  The first and most potent of these is a felicitous boldness in the thoughts, as I have laid down in my essay on Xenophon.

  2.  The second is a capacity of intense and enthusiastic passion; and these two constituents of the sublime are for the most part the immediate gifts of nature, whereas the remaining sources depend also upon art.

  3.  The third consists in a skillful molding of figures; which are twofold of sentiment and language.

  4.  The fourth is a noble and graceful manner of expression, which is not only to select significant and elegant words, but also to adorn the style and embellish it by the assistance of tropes.

  5.  The fifth source of the sublime, which embraces all the preceding, is to construct the periods with all possible dignity and grandeur.

  I proceed next to consider what is comprehended in each of these sources; but must first observe that, of the five, Cecilius, among other defects, has wholly omitted the pathetic. Now, if he thought that the grand and pathetic, as one and the same thing, were always found together, and were naturally inseparable, he was under a mistake. For some passions are far removed from grandeur and are in themselves of a lowly character; as pity, grief, fear; and, on the contrary, there are many things grand and lofty without any passion; as, among a thousand instances, we may see, from what the poet has said, with such exceeding boldness of the Aloides:—

	“To raise
	Huge Ossa on Olympus’ top they strove,
	And place on Ossa Pelion with its grove;
	That heaven itself, thus climbed, might be assailed.”

  But the sublimity of what he afterwards adds is yet greater:—

“Nor would success their bold attempts have failed,” etc.

  Among the orators also, all panegyrics and orations composed for pomp and show may be sublime in every way, but yet are for the most part void of passion. Whence those orators who excel in the pathetic scarcely ever succeed as panegyrists; and those whose talents lie chiefly in panegyric are very seldom able in affecting the passions. But, on the other hand, if Cecilius was of opinion that the pathetic did not contribute to the sublime, and on that account judged it not worth mentioning, he is guilty of an unpardonable error. For I might confidently aver that nothing so much raises discourse as a fine pathos seasonably applied. For it is this that causes it to breathe forth an energy and fire, resembling the intensity of madness and divine instinct, and inspires it in a manner with the present god.