On Sublimity…

Sublime Shakespeare. Let’s talk about Longinus, as rude and scary as that sounds. His name actually may have been Dionysius or Longinus, or Dionysius Longinus. Historians, working on the accepted method of establishing an author, are unsure as to which name is really his.

This argument could as easily been discussed in Sh’s time; as Longinus, whoever he was, is commenting on the Attic style of rhetoric, circa first century AD. It gives a spin to the old authorship question if you think of Shakespeare asking the question of who he was.

What is absolutely unquestionable is his writing. What you are about to read sums up the ethos of Shakespeare’s rhetorical trickery. Suggesting that he may have read Longinus, whose work was extant in his time, though not popular.

The 5 sources of Sublimity:

1) The power of conceiving Impressive thoughts.
2) Strong Emotion.
3) certain kinds of Figures of thought and speech
4) Nobility of Diction.
5) ‘Composition’, i.e. word-order, rhythm, euphony.

Sublimity is related to the older rhetorical concept of the ‘high’ style. (that’s funny to the coffeeshop shakespearean). The 3 styles of classical rhetoric were known as high, smooth, and slight. Rhetoric is a massive system of doctrine embracing content, arrangement and style. The recipe for each style consists of precepts for diction, sentence-structure, figures and rhythms. Also certain subject matter was appropriate to each style.

Longinus said,

‘ Copying is not enough; we must try to live, re-live, the mental life of the classics’. The crucial judgement is between sublimity and counterfeit imitations. This judgement can only be made by minds of a certain moral and intellectual quality. Do not despair. Training of judgement, imitation and imaginative effort can do much.

The right kind of person must be a product both of endowment and training. A variety of the philosopher’s ‘wise man’.
Someone who knows the really valuable from the sham,
his place as a citizen of the Cosmos,
his greatness and limitations,
his superiority to meanness and materialism.

The whole personality must take charge. Be bold and ingenious in thought, language, or metaphor. Justify it by the brilliance or tension of the emotional context created. The attraction of the novel thought, the pregnant remark, the bold metaphor founded on good sense, enlightened and serious thinking. The enemy is pedantry, frigidity, frivolity.

The argument is that greatness is a natural product, and does not come by teaching. The only art is to be born like that. On the other hand, these natural products are weakened by being reduced to the bare bones of a textbook instruction on how they do what they do.

Sublimity at the right moment tears up like a whirlwind and exhibits the orator’s power in a single blow. Persuasion on the other hand we can control. Experience in invention and the ability to order and arrange material cannot be detected in single passages; we appreciate them only when in the whole context.

Faults incident to the effort to achieve sublimity are turgidity, puerility, false emotion, frigidity, turbid diction and confused imagery. Sublimity is an eminence or excellence of discourse. It is how the greatest poets and prose writers give eternal life to their own fame and grandeur.

Grandeur produces ecstasy rather than persuasion in the hearer. The combination between wonder and astonishment ALWAYS proves superior to the merely persuasive and pleasant. Grandeur is particularly dangerous when left on its own, unaccompanied by knowledge, unsteadied, unballasted, abandoned to mere impulse and ignorant temerity.