Romanticism: A Very Short Introduction by Michael Ferber

Author:Michael Ferber [Ferber, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780199568918
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2010-12-15T06:00:00+00:00

The sublime

Earlier we met Wordsworth’s phrase ‘a sense sublime / Of something far more deeply interfused’ in his poem ‘Tintern Abbey’. The idea of ‘the sublime’ gained currency in the 18th century as a category that applies both to writing – it was used to translate the ancient Greek word hypsos (‘loftiness’) in Longinus’ treatise on literary style – and to such natural objects as mountains, seas, and waterfalls, as well as to such states of mind as Wordsworth’s ‘sense’. It was often contrasted with ‘the beautiful’, which was taken as a gentle, serene, often feminine quality, appropriate to rolling hills, fertile valleys, and well-tended estates; the sublime arouses terror at the vastness and power of wild, ungovernable nature. This terror, however, is terror at a distance, where the viewer is safe enough to contemplate it rather than flee. In his Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), Immanuel Kant named tall cliffs, towering thunder clouds, volcanoes, hurricanes, ‘the boundless ocean set into a rage’, lofty waterfalls, and the like as overwhelming compared to our puny powers.

But the sight of them only becomes all the more attractive the more fearful it is, as long as we find ourselves in safety, and we gladly call these objects sublime [German erhaben] because they elevate the strength of our soul above its usual level … [and] give us the courage to measure ourselves against the apparent all-powerfulness of nature.

(tr. Guyer and Matthews)

Sublime nature calls forth the sublime in our soul. To return to our Christian triangle: after the removal of God, who was the ultimate sublime power, we rediscover his sublimity in nature, which is no longer necessarily seen as his creation, and in our own mind that responds to it. Sometimes, indeed, nature at its most sublime can seem like a mind itself, as it does in Wordsworth’s great passage about the crossing of the Alps in The Prelude (1805), where

The torrents shooting from the clear blue sky,

The rocks that muttered close upon our ears –

Black drizzling crags that spake by the wayside

As if a voice were in them – the sick sight

And giddy prospect of the raving stream,

The unfettered clouds and region of the heavens,

Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light,

Were all like workings of one mind[.]

At a comparable moment atop Mount Snowdon near the end of the poem, the scene presents ‘the perfect image of a mighty Mind’. With the same vision, Shelley cries to the steep valley of the Arve below Mont Blanc; ‘Dizzy Ravine! And when I gaze on thee / I seem as in a trance sublime and strange / To muse on my own separate phantasy, / My own, my human mind’ (‘Mont Blanc’, 1817). More often, striking scenes of natural grandeur seem to speak eloquently to an attentive soul, as we saw in poems by Coleridge, Schlegel, Nerval, and others. The Russian poet Baratynsky stands before the vertiginous height of a great waterfall, ‘And my heart seems to understand / Your wordless utterance’ (‘The Waterfall’, 1821).

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