CHAP.

I.

with terrific lightnings, sound, fear, anger, and pursuing flames mixed up in the work*. But the poet never meant to produce a picture; blime and

but merely to express, in the enthusiastic lan-
guage of poetry, which gives corporeal form
and local existence to every thing, those ener-
getic powers, which operate in this dreadful
engine of divine wrath. The materials of the
girdle of Venus are still more remote from any
thing like visible imagery:

ενθ ενι μεν φιλότης, εν δ' ίμερος, εν δ' οαριστύς,
παρφασις ήτ' εκλεψε νοον πυκα περ φρονεοντων.

But they are embodied energies or powers, which are of the same nature as the personified energies before treated of; and as such, there is no obscurity or indistinctness whatever in them; nor, indeed, are the expressions of Homer or Virgil, in any instance, either obscure or indistinct, though those of Milton are in many: clearness and distinctness are, on the contrary, the peculiar characteristics of the former,

Non tantum ut dici videantur, sed fieri res.

83. Obscurity and indistinctness are merely degrees of privation in the images of thought, as well as in those of vision; and if we allow them to be efficient causes of the sublime, we

* See Sublime and Beautiful. P. V. f. v.

Of the Su

Pathetic.

CHAP.
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Of the Su

blime and Pathetic.

shall necessarily come to the same conclusion as the celebrated line of Dryden led to,

My wound's so great because it is small;

to which was replied,

Then 'twould be greater, were it none at all. For if a certain degree of want of light and clearness produce a comparative degree of sublimity, it necessarily follows that a total want of them would produce the superlative degree of it; and to this conclusion the author of the Inquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful boldly and confidently advances: for he not only makes utter darkness to be an active and efficient cause of the sublime, by its physical operation on the organ of vision*; but he also makes utter nonsense to be an equally active and efficient cause, by the influence which habit has given to certain words and combinations of words upon the imagination and the passions; though the words themselves, at the time of exciting the sentiment, convey no ideas whatever to the mind; their operation being by a certain contagion of passion, which certain modes of speech mark in the writer, and communicate to the reader t.

84. I readily agree with this author in giving every possible degree of credit to enthusiastic

and impassioned modes of speech. They are the great vehicles of sympathy-the sole ineans of conveying warm and animated sentiments from one mind to another: since that, which is not expressed with all the energetic glow of real ecstasy, will never excite any ecstatic feelings in the reader:

Si vis me flere, dolendum est

Primum ipsi tibi:

and the same maxim may be extended to all expressions of serious or vehement passion. The sentiment must rise full from the source, and flow strong through the current, or its contagion will never communicate itself to those whom it approaches. This glowing energy of language, appropriated always to the sentiments which it is meant to express, is the very essence of poetry, and that which gives it all its power over the soul. Strip it of this, by transposing or changing the words, and its most glowing and animated effusions will become torpid and lifeless;-as unlike to what they were, as the skeleton of Helen to the beauty, that set the world in arms. But are ideas, therefore, of no importance?-or can this contagion of passion be communicated by any other means, than through the ideas conveyed or excited by the expressions, which communicate it? I say conveyed or excited; because I am aware that a

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Of the Sublime and Pathetic.

CHAP. 1.

Of the Su

single idea conveyed may excite trains of many others, upon the principle of association: but blime and there must necessarily be some idea conveyed ; Pathetic. for, in mind as in body, nothing can come

from nothing, and every effect will be proportioned to its cause; so that, in proportion as the idea conveyed is clear and energetic, and expressed with force and propriety, will be its power in exciting others. Mental feelings can only arise from mental perceptions, and, consequently, every new mode or increased degree of the one must be preceded by a new mode or increased extension of the other. Nonsense can no more be sublime, than darkness or vacuity can be ponderous or elastic; and to controvert either position is, in some measure, to participate in its extravagance; nor should I presume to do it, did I not every day see the fatal effects of this seducing author's theories on the taste of the public; not only in England, but on the continent, particularly in Germany, where nonsense seems to have become the order of the day. In England, it has been, in a great measure, confined to harlequin farces, pantomime plays, and romances in prose; for, except Fingal and Temora, I know of no entire poem written upon the principles of the Sublime and Beautiful; and had these been published as the works of their real author, or as the productions of the eighteenth century, they would

have been consigned at once to the neglect and oblivion, into which they have sunk since the imposture has been detected, and from which another poem of the same kind, which the author did publish in his own name, never emerged *. As the works of an ancient bard, discovered after the lapse of so many ages, in a remote corner of the world, amidst a rude and ignorant people, national vanity joined with antiquarian prejudice in extolling them; and, as they were found admirably to accord with these new principles of taste, every thing being, in the words of the comedy, finely confused and alarmingly obscure, the critics of the North exulted in having at length found, in an original work of one of their own countrymen, instances of the true sublime, which they had in vain sought for in the tamer productions of the Greek and Roman poets; with whom, these

Versus inopes rerum, nugæque canoræ

* See a very able dissertation annexed to Mr. Laing's History of Scotland, in which is contained a full account and complete exposition of this most impudent imposture; in which some names of higher rank and respectability in literature than that of James Macpherson appear to have been concerned, so far at least as wilful mispri sion of fraud can implicate them.

+ See Lord Kaims, Blair, Gerrard, &c. &c. particularly the first, who has opposed parallel passages from Fingal, and Pope's Homer, (for he went no higher) to each other, and invariably given the preference to the former..

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Of the Sublime and Pathetic.