Part 3

When Dryden wrote his famous, indeed matchless, epigram upon the three great masters (or reputed masters) of the Epopee, he found himself at no loss to characterize the last of the triad--no matter what qualities he imputed to the first and the second, he knew himself safe in imputing them all to the third. The mighty modern had everything that his predecessors were ever _thought_ to have, as well as something beside.[5] So he expressed the surpassing grandeur of Milton, by saying that in him nature had embodied, by concentration as in one focus, whatever excellencies she had scattered separately amongst her earlier favourites. But, in strict regard to the facts, this is far from being a faithful statement of the relations between Milton and his elder brothers of the _Epos_: in sublimity, if that is what Dryden meant by 'loftiness of thought,' it is not so fair to class Milton with the greatest of poets, as to class him apart, retired from all others, sequestered, 'sole-sitting by the shores of old romance.' In other poets, in Dante for example, there may be rays, gleams, sudden coruscations, casual scintillations, of the sublime; but for any continuous and sustained blaze of the sublime, it is in vain to look for it, _except_ in Milton, making allowances (as before) for the inspired sublimities of Isaiah, Ezekiel, and of the great Evangelist's Revelations. As to Homer, no critic who writes from personal and _direct_ knowledge on the one hand, or who understands the value of words on the other, ever contended in any critical sense for sublimity, as a quality to which he had the slightest pretensions. What! not Longinus? If he did, it would have been of little consequence; for he had no field of comparison, as we, knowing no literature but one--whereas we have a range of seven or eight. But he did not: [Greek: To hypsêlon],[6] or the elevated, in the Longinian sense, expressed all, no matter of what origin, of what tendency, which gives a character of life and animation to composition--whatever raises it above the dead level of flat prosaic style. Emphasis, or what in an artist's sense gives _relief_ to a passage, causing it to stand forward, and in advance of what surrounds it--that is the predominating idea in the 'sublime' of Longinus. And this explains what otherwise has perplexed his modern interpreters--viz. that amongst the elements of his sublime, he ranks even the pathetic, _i. e._ (say they) what by connecting itself with the depressing passion of grief is the very counter-agent to the elevating affection of the sublime. True, most sapient sirs, my very worthy and approved good masters: but that very consideration should have taught you to look back, and reconsider your translation of the capital word [Greek: hypsos]. It was rather too late in the day, when you had waded half-seas over in your translation, to find out either that you yourselves were ignoramuses, or that your principal was an ass. 'Returning were as tedious as go o'er.' And any man might guess how you would settle such a dilemma. It is, according to you, a little oversight of your principal: '_humanum aliquid passus est._' We, on the other hand, affirm that, if an error at all on the part of Longinus, it is too monstrous for any man to have 'overlooked.' As long as he could see a pike-staff, he must have seen that. And, therefore, we revert to _our_ view of the case--viz. that it is yourselves who have committed the blunder, in translating by the Latin word _sublimis_[7] at all, but still more after it had received new determinations under modern usage.

[Footnote 5: The beauty of this famous epigram lies in the _form_ of the conception. The first had A; the second had B; and when nature, to furnish out a third, should have given him C, she found that A and B had already exhausted her cycle; and that she could distinguish her third great favourite only by giving him both A and B in combination. But the filling up of this outline is imperfect: for the A (_loftiness_) and the B (_majesty_) are one and the same quality, under different names.]

[Footnote 6: Because the Latin word _sublimis_ is applied to objects soaring upwards, or floating aloft, or at an aerial altitude, and because the word does _sometimes_ correspond to our idea of the sublime (in which the notion of height is united with the notion of moral grandeur), and because, in the excessive vagueness and lawless latitudinarianism of our common Greek Lexicons, the word [Greek: hypsos] is translated, _inter alia_, by [Greek: to] _sublime_, _sublimitas_, &c. Hence it has happened that the title of the little essay ascribed to Longinus, [Greek: Peri hypsous], is usually rendered into English, _Concerning the sublime_. But the idea of the Sublime, as defined, circumscribed, and circumstantiated, in English literature--an idea altogether of English growth--the _sublime byway of polar antithesis to the Beautiful_, had no existence amongst ancient critics; consequently it could have no expression. It is a great thought, a true thought, a demonstrable thought, that the Sublime, as thus ascertained, and in contraposition to the Beautiful, grew up on the basis of _sexual_ distinctions, the Sublime corresponding to the male, the Beautiful, its anti-pole, corresponding to the female. Behold! we show you a mystery.]

[Footnote 7: No word has ever given so much trouble to modern critics as this very word (now under discussion) of the _sublime_. To those who have little Greek and _no_ Latin, it is necessary in the first place that we should state what are the most obvious elements of the word. According to the noble army of etymologists, they are these two Latin words--_sub_, under, and _limus_, mud. Oh! gemini! who would have thought of groping for the sublime in such a situation as that?--unless, indeed, it were that writer cited by Mr. Coleridge, and just now referred to by ourselves, who complains of frivolous modern readers, as not being able to raise and sequester their thoughts to the abstract consideration of dung. Hence it has followed, that most people have quarrelled with the etymology. "Whereupon the late Dr. Parr, of pedantic memory, wrote a huge letter to Mr. Dugald Stewart, but the marrow of which lies in a nutshell, especially being rather hollow within. The learned doctor, in the first folio, grapples with the word _sub_, which, says he, comes from the Greek--so much is clear--but from what Greek, Bezonian? The thoughtless world, says he, trace it to [Greek: hypo] (hypo), sub, _i. e._ under; but I, Ego, Samuel Parr, the Birmingham doctor, trace it to [Greek: hyper] (hyper), super, _i. e._ above; between which the difference is not less than between a chestnut horse and a horse-chestnut. To this learned Parrian dissertation on mud, there cannot be much reasonably to object, except its length in the first place; and, secondly, that we ourselves exceedingly doubt the common interpretation of _limus_. Most unquestionably, if the sublime is to be brought into any relation at all to mud, we shall all be of one mind--that it must be found _above_. But to us it appears--that when the true modern idea of mud was in view, _limus_ was not the word used. Cicero, for instance, when he wishes to call Piso 'filth, mud,' &c. calls him _Cænum_: and, in general, _limus_ seems to have involved the notion of something adhesive, and rather to express _plaister_, or artificially prepared cement, &c., than that of filth or impure depositions. Accordingly, our own definition differs from the Parrian, or Birmingham definition; and may, nevertheless, be a Birmingham definition also. Not having room to defend it, for the present we forbear to state it.]

Now, therefore, after this explanation, recurring to the Longinian critiques upon Homer, it will avail any idolator of Homer but little, it will affect us not much, to mention that Longinus makes frequent reference to the _Iliad_, as the great source of the sublime--

'A quo, ceu fonte perenni, Vatum Pieriis ora rigantur aquis';

for, as respected Grecian poets, and as respected _his_ sense of the word, it cannot be denied that Homer was such. He was the great well-head of inspiration to the Pagan poets of after times, who, however (_as a body_), moved in the narrowest circle that has ever yet confined the natural freedom of the poetic mind. But, in conceding this, let it not be forgotten how much we concede--we concede as much as Longinus demanded; that is, that Homer furnished an ideal or model of fluent narration, picturesque description, and the first outlines of what could be called characteristic delineations of persons. Accordingly, uninventive Greece--for we maintain loudly that Greece, in her poets, _was_ uninventive and sterile beyond the example of other nations--received, as a traditional inheritance, the characters of the Paladins of the Troad.[8] Achilles is always the all-accomplished and supreme amongst these Paladins, the Orlando of ancient romance; Agamemnon, for ever the Charlemagne; Ajax, for ever the sullen, imperturbable, columnar champion, the Mandricardo, the _Bergen-op-Zoom_ of his faction, and corresponding to our modern 'Chicken' in the pugilistic ring, who was so called (as the books of the Fancy say) because he was a 'glutton'; and a 'glutton' in this sense--that he would take any amount of cramming (_i. e._ any possible quantum of 'milling,' or 'punishment'). Ulysses, again, is uniformly, no matter whether in the solemnities of the tragic scene, or the festivities of the Ovidian romance, the same shy cock, but also sly cock, with the least thought of a white feather in his plumage; Diomed is the same unmeaning double of every other hero, just as Rinaldo is with respect to his greater cousin, Orlando; and so of Teucer, Meriones, Idomeneus, and the other less-marked characters. The Greek drama took up these traditional characters, and sometimes deepened, saddened, exalted the features--as Sophocles, for instance, does with his 'Ajax Flagellifer'--Ajax the knouter of sheep--where, by the way, the remorse and penitential grief of Ajax for his own self-degradation, and the depth of his affliction for the triumph which he had afforded to his enemies--taken in connection with the tender fears of his wife, Tecmessa, for the fate to which his gloomy despair was too manifestly driving him; her own conscious desolation, and the orphan weakness of her son, in the event which she too fearfully anticipates--the final suicide of Ajax; the brotherly affection of Teucer to the widow and the young son of the hero, together with the unlooked-for sympathy of Ulysses, who, instead of exulting in the ruin of his antagonist, mourns over it with generous tears--compose a situation, and a succession of situations, not equalled in the Greek tragedy; and, in that instance, we see an effort, rare in Grecian poetry, of conquest achieved by idealisation over a mean incident--viz. the hallucination of brain in Ajax, by which he mistakes the sheep for his Grecian enemies, ties them up for flagellation, and scourges them as periodically as if he were a critical reviewer. But really, in one extremity of this madness, where he fixes upon an old ram for Agamemnon, as the leader of the flock, the [Greek: anax andrôn Agamemnôn], there is an extravagance of the ludicrous against which, though not exhibited scenically, but simply narrated, no solemnity of pathos could avail; even in narration, the violation of tragical dignity is insufferable, and is as much worse than the hyper-tragic horrors of _Titus Andronicus_ (a play which is usually printed, without reason, amongst those of Shakspeare) as absolute farce or contradiction of all pathos must inevitably be a worse indecorum than physical horrors which simply outrage it by excess. Let us not, therefore, hear of the judgment displayed upon the Grecian stage, when even Sophocles, the chief master of dramatic economy and scenical propriety, could thus err by an aberration so far transcending the most memorable violation of stage decorum which has ever been charged upon the English drama.

[Footnote 8: There is a difficulty in assigning any term as comprehensive enough to describe the Grecian heroes and their antagonists, who fought at Troy. The seven chieftains against Thebes are described sufficiently as Theban captains; but, to say _Trojan_ chieftains, would express only the heroes of one side; _Grecian_, again, would be liable to that fault equally, and to another far greater, of being under no limitation as to time. This difficulty must explain and (if it can) justify our collective phrase of the Paladins of the Troad.]

From Homer, therefore, were left, as a bequest to all future poets, the romantic adventures which grow, as so many collateral dependencies,

'From the tale of Troy divine';

and from Homer was derived also the discrimination of the leading characters, which, after all, were but coarsely and rudely discriminated; at least, for the majority. In one instance only we acknowledge an exception. We have heard a great modern poet dwelling with real and not counterfeit enthusiasm upon the character (or rather upon the general picture, as made up both of character and position), which the course of the _Iliad_ assigns gradually to Achilles. The view which he took of this impersonation of human grandeur, combining all gifts of intellect and of body, matchless speed, strength, inevitable eye, courage, and the immortal beauty of a god, being also, by his birth-right, half-divine, and consecrated to the imagination by his fatal interweaving with the destinies of Troy, and to the heart by the early death which to _his own knowledge_[9] impended over his magnificent career, and so abruptly shut up its vista--the view, we say, which our friend took of the presiding character throughout the _Iliad_, who is introduced to us in the very first line, and who is only eclipsed for seventeen books, to emerge upon us with more awful lustre;--the view which he took was--that Achilles, and Achilles only, in the Grecian poetry, was a great idea--an idealised creation; and we remember that in this respect he compared the Homeric Achilles with the Angelica of Ariosto. Her only he regarded as an idealisation in the _Orlando Furioso_. And certainly in the luxury and excess of her all-conquering beauty, which drew after her from 'ultimate Cathay' to the camps of the baptised in France, and back again, from the palace of Charlemagne, drew half the Paladins, and 'half Spain militant,' to the portals of the rising sun; that sovereign beauty which (to say nothing of kings and princes withered by her frowns) ruined for a time the most princely of all the Paladins, the supreme Orlando, crazed him with scorn,

'And robbed him of his noble wits outright'--

in all this, we must acknowledge a glorification of power not unlike that of Achilles:--

'Irresistible Pelides, whom, unarm'd, No strength of man or wild beast could withstand; Who tore the lion as the lion tears the kid; Ran on embattl'd armies clad in iron; And, weaponless himself, Made arms ridiculous, useless the forgery Of brazen shield and spear, the hammer'd cuirass, Chalybean temper'd steel, and frock of mail, Adamantéan proof; But safest he who stood aloof, When insupportably his foot advanced Spurned them to death by troops. The bold Priamides Fled from his lion ramp; old warriors turn'd Their plated backs under his heel, Or, groveling, soil'd their crested helmets in the dust.'

These are the words of Milton in describing that 'heroic Nazarete,' 'God's champion'--

'Promis'd by heavenly message twice descending';

heralded, like Pelides,

'By an angel of his birth, Who from his father's field Rode up in flames after his message told';

these are the celestial words which describe the celestial prowess of the Hebrew monomachist, the irresistible Sampson; and are hardly less applicable to the 'champion paramount' of Greece confederate.

[Footnote 9: 'To his own knowledge'--see, for proof of this, the gloomy serenity of his answer to his dying victim, when, predicting his approaching end:--

'Enough; I know my fate: to die--to see no more My much-lov'd parents, and my native shore,' &c. &c.]

This, therefore, this unique conception, with what power they might, later Greek poets adopted; and the other Homeric characters they transplanted somewhat monotonously, but at times, we are willing to admit, and have already admitted, improving and solemnizing the original epic portraits when brought upon the stage. But all this extent of obligation amongst later poets of Greece to Homer serves less to argue his opulence than their penury. And if, quitting the one great blazing jewel, the Urim and Thummim of the _Iliad_, you descend to individual passages of poetic effect; and if amongst these a fancy should seize you of asking for a specimen of the _Sublime_ in particular, what is it that you are offered by the critics? Nothing that we remember beyond one single passage, in which the god Neptune is described in a steeple chase, and 'making play' at a terrific pace. And certainly enough is exhibited of the old boy's hoofs, and their spanking qualities, to warrant our backing him against a railroad for a rump and dozen; but, after all, there is nothing to grow frisky about, as Longinus does, who gets up the steam of a blue-stocking enthusiasm, and boils us a regular gallop of ranting, in which, like the conceited snipe[10] upon the Liverpool railroad, he thinks himself to run a match with Sampson; and, whilst affecting to admire Homer, is manifestly squinting at the reader to see how far he admires his own flourish of admiration; and, in the very agony of his frosty raptures, is quite at leisure to look out for a little private traffic of rapture on his own account. But it won't do; this old critical posture-master (whom, if Aurelian hanged, surely he knew what he was about) may as well put up his rapture pipes, and (as Lear says) 'not squiny' at us; for let us ask Master Longinus, in what earthly respect do these great strides of Neptune exceed Jack with his seven-league boots? Let him answer that, if he can. We hold that Jack has the advantage. Or, again look at the Koran: does any man but a foolish Oriental think that passage sublime where Mahomet describes the divine pen? It is, says he, made of mother-of-pearl; so much for the 'raw material,' as the economists say. But now for the size: it can hardly be called a 'portable' pen at all events, for we are told that it is so tall of its age, that an Arabian 'thoroughbred horse would require 500 years for galloping down the slit to the nib. Now this Arabic sublime is _in this instance_ quite a kin brother to the Homeric.

[Footnote 10: On the memorable inaugural day of the Liverpool railroad, when Mr. Huskisson met with so sad a fate, a snipe or a plover tried a race with Sampson, one of the engines. The race continued neck and neck for about six miles, after which, the snipe finding itself likely to come off second best, found it convenient to wheel off, at a turn of the road, into the solitudes of Chat Moss.]

However, it is likely that we shall here be reminded of our own challenge to the Longinian word [Greek: hypsêlon] as not at all corresponding, or even alluding to the modern word sublime. But in this instance, the distinction will not much avail that critic--for no matter by what particular _word_ he may convey his sense of its quality, clear it is, by his way of illustrating its peculiar merit, that, in his opinion, these huge strides of Neptune's have something supernaturally grand about them. But, waiving this solitary instance in Homer of the sublime, according to his idolatrous critics--of the pseudo sublime according to ourselves--in all other cases where Longinus, or any other Greek writer has cited Homer as the great exemplary model of [Greek: hypsos] in composition, we are to understand him according to the Grecian sense of that word. He must then be supposed to praise Homer, not so much for any ideal grandeur either of thought, image, or situation, as in a general sense for his animated style of narration, for the variety and spirited effect with which he relieves the direct formal narration in his own person by dialogue between the subjects of his narration, thus ventriloquising and throwing his own voice as often as he can into the surrounding objects--or again for the similes and allusive pictures by which he points emphasis to a situation or interest to a person.

Now then we have it: when you describe Homer, or when you hear him described as a lively picturesque old boy [by the way, why does everybody speak of Homer as old?], full of life, and animation, and movement, then you say (or you hear say) what is true, and not much more than what is true. Only about that word picturesque we demur a little: as a chirurgeon, he certainly _is_ picturesque; for Howship upon gunshot wounds is a joke to him when he lectures upon _traumacy_, if we may presume to coin that word, or upon traumatic philosophy (as Mr. M'Culloch says so grandly, Economic Science). But, apart from this, we cannot allow that simply to say [Greek: Zakunthos nemoessa], woody Zacynthus, is any better argument of picturesqueness than Stony Stratford, or Harrow on the Hill. Be assured, reader, that the Homeric age was not ripe for the picturesque. _Price on the Picturesque_, or, _Gilpin on Forest Scenery_, would both have been sent post-haste to Bedlam in those days; or perhaps Homer himself would have tied a millstone about their necks, and have sunk them as public nuisances by woody Zante. Besides, it puts almost an extinguisher on any little twinkling of the picturesque that might have flared up at times from this or that suggestion, when each individual had his own regular epithet stereotyped to his name like a brass plate upon a door: Hector, the tamer of horses; Achilles, the swift of foot; the ox-eyed, respectable Juno. Some of the 'big uns,' it is true, had a dress and an undress suit of epithets: as for instance, Hector was also [Greek: korythaiolos], Hector with the tossing or the variegated plumes. Achilles again was [Greek: dios] or divine. But still the range was small, and the monotony was dire.