On the Sublime | Page 7

Waller, Young, and Hayley of frigidity; and Darwin of
affectation. "What beaux and beauties crowd the gaudy groves, And
woo and win their vegetable loves"-- a phrase adopted--"vapid
vegetable loves"--by the Laureate in "The Talking Oak."]
As a literary critic of Homer our author is most interesting even in his
errors. He compares the poet of the Odyssey to the sunset: the Iliad is
noonday work, the Odyssey is touched with the glow of evening--the
softness and the shadows. "Old age naturally leans," like childhood,
"towards the fabulous." The tide has flowed back, and left dim bulks of
things on the long shadowy sands. Yet he makes an exception, oddly
enough, in favour of the story of the Cyclops, which really is the most
fabulous and crude of the fairy tales in the first and greatest of
romances. The Slaying of the Wooers, that admirable fight, worthy of a
saga, he thinks too improbable, and one of the "trifles into which
second childhood is apt to be betrayed." He fancies that the aged
Homer had "lost his power of depicting the passions"; in fact, he is

hardly a competent or sympathetic critic of the Odyssey. Perhaps he
had lived among Romans till he lost his sense of humour; perhaps he
never had any to lose. On the other hand, he preserved for us that
inestimable and not to be translated fragment of Sappho--+phainetai
moi kênos isos theoisin+.
It is curious to find him contrasting Apollonius Rhodius as faultless,
with Homer as great but faulty. The "faultlessness" of Apollonius is not
his merit, for he is often tedious, and he has little skill in selection;
moreover, he is deliberately antiquarian, if not pedantic. His true merit
is in his original and, as we think, modern telling of a love tale--pure,
passionate, and tender, the first in known literature. Medea is often
sublime, and always touching. But it is not on these merits that our
author lingers; he loves only the highest literature, and, though he finds
spots on the sun and faults in Homer, he condones them as oversights
passed in the poet's "contempt of little things."
Such for us to-day are the lessons of Longinus. He traces dignity and
fire of style to dignity and fire of soul. He detects and denounces the
very faults of which, in each other, all writers are conscious, and which
he brings home to ourselves. He proclaims the essential merits of
conviction, and of selection. He sets before us the noblest examples of
the past, most welcome in a straining age which tries already to live in
the future. He admonishes and he inspires. He knows the "marvellous
power and enthralling charm of appropriate and striking words"
without dropping into mere word-tasting. "Beautiful words are the very
light of thought," he says, but does not maunder about the "colour" of
words, in the style of the decadence. And then he "leaves this
generation to its fate," and calmly turns himself to the work that lies
nearest his hand.
To us he is as much a moral as a literary teacher. We admire that
Roman greatness of soul in a Greek, and the character of this unknown
man, who carried the soul of a poet, the heart of a hero under the gown
of a professor. He was one of those whom books cannot debilitate, nor
a life of study incapacitate for the study of life.
A. L.

I
1 The treatise of Caecilius on the Sublime, when, as you remember, my
dear Terentian, we examined it together, seemed to us to be beneath the
dignity of the whole subject, to fail entirely in seizing the salient points,
and to offer little profit (which should be the principal aim of every
writer) for the trouble of its perusal. There are two things essential to a
technical treatise: the first is to define the subject; the second (I mean
second in order, as it is by much the first in importance) to point out
how and by what methods we may become masters of it ourselves. And
yet Caecilius, while wasting his efforts in a thousand illustrations of the
nature of the Sublime, as though here we were quite in the dark,
somehow passes by as immaterial the question how we might be able to
exalt our own genius to a certain degree of progress in sublimity.
However, perhaps it would be fairer to commend this writer's
intelligence and zeal in themselves, instead of blaming him for his
omissions.
2 And since you have bidden me also to put together, if only for your
entertainment, a few notes on the subject of the Sublime, let me see if
there is anything in my speculations which promises advantage to men
of affairs. In you, dear friend--such is my confidence