8/10/07 - English Literature - Romanticism and the Sublime

The Sublime
The idea of immense and breathtaking scenery was only developed in the seventeenth century. John Dennis wrote his account of his journey across the Alps in 1688: "I walk'd upon the very brink in a literal sense of Destruction ... The sense of all this produced in me ... a delightful Horrour, a terrible Joy and at the same time that I was infinitely pleased, I trembled." Note the oxymorons he uses. He contemplates his own destruction in a paradoxical sense, because it is in the sense of the infinite, of the unquantified. He suddenly has this sense of his own physical frailty. The idea of holidaying to see scenes and feel "delightful Horrour" became fashionable thereafter.

The feeling of experiencing mountains is known as the 'sublime'. The experience was thought to expand intellectual knowledge through feelings of astonishment, which had previously been undesirable, but which were at this time very much in vogue.

"Our imagination loves to be filled with an object, or to grasp at anything that is too big for its capacity. We are flung into a pleasing astonishment at such unbounded views, and feel a delightful stillness and amazement in the soul at the apprehension of them. The mind of man naturally hates everything that looks like a restraint upon it, and is apt to fancy itself under sort of confinement, when the sight is pent up in a arrow compass, and shortened on every side by the neighbourhood of walls or mountains. On the contrary, a spacious horizon is an image of liberty, where the eye has room to range abroad, to expatiate at large on the immensity of its views, and to lose itself amidst the variety of objects that offer themselves to its observation. Such wide and undetermined prospects are as pleasing to the fancy, as the speculations of eternity or infinitude are to the understanding. But if there be a beauty or uncommonness joined with this grandeur, as in a troubled ocean, a heaven adorned with stars and meteors, or a spacious landscape cut out into rivers, woods, rocks, and meadows, the pleasure still grows upon us, as it arises from more than a single principle."
[Addison, The Spectator (1712)]

The feeling of the sublime was much discussed and needed to be discussed, according to the middle class educated writers of magazines in the seventeenth century onwards.

Between Dennis and Addison (quoted above) a radically new way of seeing the world evolved. But it was also a new way of seeing oneself, and that was viewing oneself in the way that one views the world at large. The sublime was seen by Addison as a body of landscape and a way of quantifying the way our minds work when perceiving such landscapes.

Burke and Kant
Burke was famous for his anti-Revolutionary writings. He had the reputation of a traditionalist. But before he became a conservative he wrote a book about the sublime in 1757. He wrote that the sublime is a feeling produced from heightened fear or terror.

"The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. 1 In this case the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which employs it. Hence arises the great power of the sublime, that, far from being produced by them, it anticipates our reasonings, and hurries us on by an irresistible force. Astonishment, as I have said, is the effect of the sublime in its highest degree; the inferior effects are admiration, reverence, and respect."
[Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757)]

Note that there is an emphasis and repetition of the word "terror". There was also a large volume of Gothic novels around this time, which were then called 'tales of terror'. Burke writes a catalogue of things that produce a sensation of the sublime. He said that we only understand the world insofar as we sense and perceive it. We receive and change the world we see and give it back to the world. Our experience of the sublime is not rational or controllable; it suspends the motion of our mind. Astonishment came to be regarded as the highest degree of affectation of the sublime.

Burke makes a distinction between the sublime and the beautiful. They are presented as opposites. The sublime effected terror while beauty effected calm. However, the beautiful takes place in our mind just like the sublime. They are not polar opposites; there are differences between the experiences. The sublime is isolating and the resulting feelings of horror are not transferred to the rest of society. The beautiful is about recognising forms; it is about things we are able to contemplate and comprehend, while the sublime occurs when things are incomprehensible and uncontainable.

Immanuel Kant's is a more difficult theory of the sublime. He asked: how do we know things? What we know depends on how far we are able to know things. Experience is in itself temporal and spatial.

“The sublime--properly speaking--is not to be found in objects of nature; rather, it is found in each of us, called forth by contemplation of nature or ideas.”
[Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790)]

The sublime is therefore a form of experience; but it also extends our capacity for experience. It occurs when we encounter something limitless or overwhelming, something absolutely great. The sublime is part of our ability to reason. Our inability to conceive of something so great means that we feel the limits of our imagination, and when we feel this we recognise that we can conceive of infinity. So our mind becomes free and capacious, which is an almost paradoxical effect. It is an insight into the “supersensible substrate”.

Summary of the Theory of the Sublime
1. The sublime in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century tends to have to do with views or representations of nature. But what is most important is the way the experience of the sublime takes place in the mind. Although certain natural features (vast mountains, deep gorges, empty vistas, obscure skies) tend to evoke the sublime, it does not reside in them.

2. The sublime is a way of talking about our attraction to experiences that are not immediately thought of as pleasant: fear, privation, loneliness.

3. The sublime has to do with overwhelming experiences that we cannot organise or contain. Both Burke and Kant draw a distinction between the sublime, and another aesthetic experience, the Beautiful. In contrast with the sublime, the Beautiful is a matter of identifying forms. It is a calm, pleasing experience.

4. Although the sublime is a human experience, it is not something that happens through logical rationality. In fact it requires the ‘failure’ of our usual faculties of perception and apprehension.

5. For Kant, the sublime is evidence of the freedom of the human subject. The fact that we can sense the limits of the imagination is credit to this.

The Sublime in Literature
We find the terms of the sublime in Ossian.

"Autumn is dark on the mountains; grey mist rests on the hills. The whirlwind is heard on the heath. Dark rolls the river thro’ the narrow plain. A tree stands alone on the hill, and marks the grave of Connal. The leaves whirl round with the wind, and strew the grave of the dead. At times are seen here the ghosts of the deceased, when the musing hunter alone stalks slowly over the heath. Appear in thy armour of light, thou ghost of the mighty Connal! Shine, near thy tomb, Crimora! like a moon-beam from a cloud.

Who can reach the source of thy race, O Connal? and who recount thy Fathers? Thy family grew like an oak on the mountain, which meeteth the wind with its lofty head. But now it is torn from the earth. Who shall supply the place of Connal?"
[Macpherson, Fragments of Ancient Poetry]

The darkness, obscurity, the forces of nature, loneliness, privation and ghosts all make this a sublime landscape. The passage enacts the sublime in our minds.

Humans are moved by the thought of death. Shelley uses this in his poetry.

"Dizzy Ravine! and when I gaze on thee
I seem as in a trance sublime and strange
To muse on my own separate fantasy,
My own, my human mind, which passively
Now renders and receives fast influencings,
Holding an unremitting interchange
With the clear universe of things around;
One legion of wild thoughts, whose wandering wings
Now float above thy darkness, and now rest
Where that or thou art no unbidden guest,
In the still cave of the witch Poesy,
Seeking among the shadows that pass by
Ghosts of all things that are, some shade of thee,
Some phantom, some faint image; till the breast
From which they fled recalls them, thou art there!"
[Percy Shelley, ‘Mont Blanc’]

The setting is a deep ravine, one of the categories for the sublime according to Burke. Note the word "dizzy": the sublime takes place in the mind of the speaker, not in nature. The words "strange", "unfamiliar" and "solitude" all evoke the sublime; it makes you think of the relationship between your own mind and the universe, and that thought underlines the great creative power of the mind.

Wordsworth's Prelude is also in part set in the Alps.

"Imagination--here the Power so called
Through sad incompetence of human speech,
That awful Power rose from the mind's abyss
Like an unfathered vapour that enwraps,
At once, some lonely traveller. I was lost;
Halted without an effort to break through;
But to my conscious soul I now can say--"
I recognise thy glory:" in such strength
Of usurpation, when the light of sense
Goes out, but with a flash that has revealed
The invisible world, doth greatness make abode,
There harbours; whether we be young or old,
Our destiny, our being's heart and home,
Is with infinitude, and only there;
With hope it is, hope that can never die,
Effort, and expectation, and desire,
And something evermore about to be."
[William Wordsworth, The Prelude Book VI]

Wordsworth realises that the sublime is not in nature but in the mind, and is disappointed that he did not feel it. After realising this, though, he experiences the sublime. His poetry is irrational, "cut free from referential ballad." The "light of sense", or rationality, went out of his mind and he suddenly felt his mind expand. His language tries to expand also: there is the sense of infinity entering the mind. The rational mind is not as essential or desirable as at first it seemed; there is something beyond the rational mind.