sublime, the

sublime, the, an idea associated with religious awe, vastness, natural magnificence, and strong emotion which fascinated 18th-cent. literary critics and aestheticians. Its development marks the movement away from the clarity of neo-classicism towards Romanticism, with its emphasis on feeling and imagination; it was connected with the concept of original genius which soared fearlessly above the rules. Sublimity in rhetoric and poetry was first analysed in an anonymous Greek work, On the Sublime, attributed to Longinus. The concept was elaborated by many writers, including Addison, Dennis, Hume, Burke, and R. Blair and the discussion spread from literature to other areas. The most widely read work was Burke's Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). Burke put a new emphasis on terror; he saw the sublime as a category distinct from beauty. With the former he associated obscurity, power, darkness, solitude, and vastness and with the latter smoothness, delicacy, smallness, and light. These varied ideas were brought together, and discussed with greater philosophical rigour, by Kant in the Critique of Judgement (1790). Burke's theory stimulated a passion for terror that culminated in the Gothic tales of A. Radcliffe and the macabre paintings, crowded with monsters and ghosts, of Barry, Mortimer, and Fuseli. The cult drew strength from Macpherson's Ossianic poems; Ossian took his place beside Homer and Milton as one of the great poets of the sublime, whose works were frequently illustrated by painters. The sublime of terror kindled the enthusiasm for wild scenery and cosmic grandeur already apparent in the writings of Addison and Shaftesbury, and of E. Young and James Thomson. Many writers making the Grand Tour dwelt on the sublimity of the Alps: they contrasted them with the pictures of Salvator Rosa, whose stormy landscapes provided a pattern for 18th-cent. descriptions of savage nature. By the 1760s travellers sought out the exhilarating perils of the rushing torrent, the remote mountain peak, and the gloomy forest. Many published their impressions in ‘Tours’, and sublimity became a fashion, pandered to by the dramatic storms shown by de Loutherbourg's Ediophusikon, a small theatre with lantern slides, and later by John Martin's vast panoramas of cosmic disaster.

The Romantic poets rejected the categories of 18th-cent. theorists and yet these writers on the sublime were moving, albeit clumsily, towards that sense of the mystery of natural forces that is so powerful in the poetry of Byron, Shelley, and Wordsworth, and in the paintings of Turner.