On the Sublime | Page 6

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;