Chapter 110
The sublime: grandeur and awe in nature and art; what makes an object vast, terrible or elevating, as distinct from the beautiful.
356 passages · 141 principal · Covers the 49 volumes of primary texts
The sublime names a kind of experience more than a kind of object. It is the feeling raised by what is vast, terrible or elevating: the storm at sea, the mountain wall, the night sky, the voice from the whirlwind, the hero who will not yield. Elevation and the mind’s going beyond itself also enter into it. It is a great idea for these books because so many of them try to produce such feelings, and some try to explain them. The psalmist and the epic poet render it, and so do the mystic and the naturalist on the deck of the Beagle. Burke, Kant, Schiller, Wordsworth and Hugo try to say what it is. The idea also carries one standing question: is the sublime a property of things, a state of the body, or a power of the soul?
The fullest theory in the collection is Burke’s. Whatever excites ideas of pain, danger or terror is a source of the sublime, and it produces the strongest emotion the mind can feel. When the danger is held at a distance, the terror becomes delightful1,2. Such contemplation, Burke adds, swells the mind with a glorying sense of its own greatness, as Longinus had noticed in sublime passages3. From this he builds a sharp opposition. Beauty is what causes love4. The sublime dwells on great and terrible objects that compel admiration and submission, beauty on small and pleasing ones5. The sublime is vast, rugged, dark and massive, and rests on pain. The beautiful is small, smooth and light, and rests on pleasure6,7. Even where the two are found together they stay opposite, like black and white blended, and each weakens the other. Greatness, though, overrules beauty more than beauty softens greatness8,9. Burke carries the contrast into morals. Fortitude, justice and wisdom inspire distant reverence rather than love; Cato is sublime where Caesar is amiable10. Others draw the same line in other terms. Schiller sets an energetic beauty, which elevates through strength, against a gentle one11. Mazzini sets Byron, worshipper of the sublime and of force, against Goethe, seeker of harmony and repose12.
Burke then asks what in objects produces this effect. His answer is that all sublimity is a modification of power, and power is terrible because pain and force go with it13. Strength is sublime only when it is untamed. The bull, the war-horse and the wild ass qualify; useful, subservient strength is merely contemptible14,15. At its height, power brings the soul to astonishment, which suspends all its motions with a degree of horror. Admiration, reverence and respect are its lesser degrees16,17. The ocean, he argues, is grander than an equally vast plain because it is terrible18. Before God’s almighty power we shrink toward annihilation19. Obscurity heightens all of this. Darkness, ghosts and dim temples work on us more than clear sights do20. Milton’s shapeless Death is sublime to the last degree21, and clear ideas are little ideas22. Privations such as vacuity, solitude and silence are great because they are terrible, as in Virgil’s hell23,24. Vastness and infinity are further sources, and infinity is the truest test of the sublime, filling the mind with delightful horror25,26. So is the difficulty displayed in Stonehenge’s rude masses27, and so is the apparent disorder of the starry heaven28. Burke works down through the senses as well: blinding light and gloomy colours, the cataract’s roar, the sudden stroke of a clock at night, the cries of beasts, even stenches and bodily pain29,30,31,32,33,34,35.
His last step is physiological. Terror and pain both tense the nerves. Anything that strains the organs in the same way, as a vast object strains the eye, produces the sublime without real danger36,37,38. That is why uniformity matters: a colonnade of identical pillars sends repeated impulses into the eye, while variety relaxes it39,40. Against Locke, Burke holds that darkness is terrible by nature and not by association41,42. Still, he must ask how delight can arise from a terrible cause37. His answer, that it is a tranquillity tinged with terror, names the paradox more than it dissolves it.
The writers of travel and natural history test Burke’s categories against the world itself. Darwin, watching a storm over the Chonos islands, calls it an “ominous, sublime scene”43. Black mountains wrapped in cloud strike him as sublime where clear ranges are merely gay, much as Burke would predict44. He finds glaciers like frozen Niagaras, and towering ravines at nightfall sublime45,46. Dana calls an iceberg “true sublimity” because size, slow motion, thundering cracks and a little fear combine in it47. Helmholtz says travellers seek the Alpine ice for its sublimity, and that science deepens rather than dissolves admiration of its terrible desolation48,49. The poets turn the same scenes inward. Coleridge’s soul swells vast to Heaven before Mont Blanc50. Wordsworth’s youthful awe at cataract and rock matures into “a sense sublime” of a presence spread through all things51. Goethe’s Faust finds that storm and crashing pine reveal the depths of his own bosom52. The older literature had rendered such force without analysing it: Virgil’s cave of imprisoned winds and Neptune calming the sea53,54, Euripides’ wave “more than eyes could bear”55, Woolman’s sea set against the all-sufficiency of its Maker56.
Silence and desolation do as much as violence. Patagonian plains stir in Darwin an ill-defined pleasure and an “awful doubt”57. Primeval forests strike him as temples58. Earthquake-ruined towns are “awful yet interesting”59. But Darwin also records the limits. The sublime of the high Andes cannot last and soon becomes uninteresting60. Bare rock grows monotonous61. A flat horizon destroys the grandeur of a vast plain62. Dana adds that no picture captures an iceberg’s grandeur63. In these naturalists Burke’s psychology meets fatigue and the limits of description.
Cosmic vastness raises a different question. Montaigne would have us see kingdoms shrink to points before Nature’s majesty, so that we learn the true proportion of greatness64,65. Pascal takes the thought further. Man is lost between the infinitely great and the infinitely small66,67,68. Yet he is above the universe that crushes him, because he thinks69. Here vastness humbles the body and at the same moment exalts the mind, a reversal Burke’s physiology does not reach. Burke does grant that extreme minuteness amazes like infinity25. Browne prefers wonder at small creatures to the vulgar amazement at whales70. Darwin ends the Origin by finding “grandeur in this view of life” in the endless forms produced by fixed law71.
The divine sublime is the oldest strand. In Job, Elihu’s thunder and ice and God’s whirlwind questions overwhelm comprehension72,73. The Psalms show the Lord’s voice breaking the cedars and his might above the roaring floods74,75,76. The Dies Irae renders judgment as a “king of awful splendour”77. Burke draws his highest instances from such texts78,22, and so in his account the Bible both renders the sublime and furnishes its theory. Mystical vision adds the sublime of excessive light. Arjuna is blinded by a splendour of a thousand suns and begs to see the bearable human form again79,80,81. Augustine trembles before the unchanging Light82. Dante’s memory fails at the supreme vision83. Thomas à Kempis says no eye can endure the divine glory84. Pascal and Rousseau describe the soul reduced to nothing and delighting in its own annihilation85,86. Milton’s Adam, dazzled by the colloquy “sublime,” sinks into sleep87. Not all agree that such awe ennobles. Pope traces religion itself to terror before thunder88. Schiller distinguishes a fear of sheer power, which abases, from veneration of the holy, which elevates89. Emerson moves the divine sublime inward, as a shudder of awe and delight at the influx of the soul90.
Pagan literature has its own numinous dread: the Bacchic earthquake91, the Sibyl’s cave92, Virgil’s Tartarus93, and the Arcadians trembling at arms flashing in a clear sky94. Milton’s Hell and Satan became the canonical modern instance. They show colossal bulk and a burning lake95, and the war in Heaven as overwhelming spectacle96. Burke judges the Satan supremely sublime97. Bagehot finds in him a certain infinitude98. De Quincey’s Sorrows are named “Sublime Goddesses”99.
Hugo turns the sublime from a feeling into a principle of composition. Modern Christian poetry, he argues, must join the sublime and the grotesque, and their union marks romantic art off from classical100,101. The sublime is the soul purified by Christian morality, the grotesque the human beast102. The grotesque heightens the sublime, as Dante’s hell makes his Paradise more sublime, while sublime laid upon sublime lacks contrast103. Drama, for Hugo, is the two joined104,105. Burke thought mixture weakens. Hugo thinks it purifies. The disagreement turns on whether one judges a single impression or a whole work.
A further movement relocates sublimity from things to the soul. Kant finds sublimity in the moral command, and it shines more clearly the more inclination opposes it106. It lies in the maxim’s independence of every interested motive107, and it belongs to the person as legislator of the law he obeys108. Emerson places the sublime in man’s moral nature, “where are the resources of astonishment and power,” and says it is this perception that makes the hills sublime109,110. Schiller describes terror before formless force overcome when the mind gives it form111. Whitman places the grandeur of storms and wrecks in the soul’s mastery over terror112. Longfellow finds it sublime to suffer and be strong113, and Haskell sees “sublime heroism” in the dying at Gettysburg114. Others lower the sublime’s address altogether. Burns calls the fireside “the true pathos and sublime of human life”115. Emerson finds a sublime presence in humble things116. Landor finds it in a grain of dust117. Wordsworth warns that daily cares leave readers unprepared for the sublime118.
In style the question is the old one of true against false elevation. Pliny praises the orator who thunders and sweeps all before him, and holds that eloquence must tread the precipice’s brink119,120. He also asks where loftiness turns into exaggeration121. Dryden separates Virgil’s genuine sublimity from swollen fustian122. Fielding says the true sublime requires real greatness of sentiment, not pompous words123. Poe denies that a poem’s bulk can do what a mountain’s magnitude does124. On poetry Burke and Wordsworth agree that the sublime works through the indefinite. For Burke, words move us without clear images, as in Virgil’s thundering forge and Milton’s “universe of Death”125,126. For Wordsworth, imagination gives vastness by the illimitable, not by measurement127, and it demands an active reader128. Lamb draws the consequence for the stage. Lear’s storm and Macbeth’s witches are sublime when read and diminished when acted129,130,131. Shelley calls Lear among the sublimest tragedies132.
Architecture translates Burke’s principles into practice. Sublime buildings should be gloomy and pass sharply from light to dark133. Grandeur requires uniformity, and mere vastness betrays low imagination134,135. More’s Utopians build their temples dim to gather the mind in awe136. Emerson ranks Pyramids and cathedrals, made by love and terror, with the Andes137.
Several questions remain open across these pages. One is whether the sublime is terror at a safe distance, as Burke holds, or the soul’s discovery of its own superiority, as Pascal, Kant and Schiller hold. Another is whether it degrades by abasement or elevates by veneration, and whether beauty and the grotesque destroy it or perfect it. A last is whether it lives in mountains and storms, or, as Emerson and Burns suggest, in the dust and at the fireside. Burke’s question of how delight can arise from a terrible cause37 is the one that runs through all the others, and no author in the collection settles it.
Introductory essay written by Claude Opus 5.5 from the outline and the notes on every passage below; quotations are checked against this edition.
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