On the Sublime | Page 4

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 précieux
and précieuses. 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'écrire trop bien," he might have said,
"c'est la pire manière qu'il y'ait d'écrire."[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