The challenge of the sublime

From Burke's Philosophical Enquiry to British Romantic art

Hélène Ibata

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781526117427
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Kunst
• Subtopic: Kunstgeschichte

This book examines the links between the unprecedented visual inventiveness of the Romantic period in Britain and eighteenth-century theories of the sublime. Edmund Burke's Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), in particular, is shown to have directly or indirectly challenged visual artists to explore not just new themes, but also new compositional strategies and visual media such as panoramas and book illustrations, by arguing that the sublime was beyond the reach of painting. More significantly, it began to call into question mimetic representational models, causing artists to reflect about the presentation of the unpresentable and drawing attention to the process of artistic production itself, rather than the finished artwork.

PART I

From the Enquiry to the Academy

1

The Philosophical Enquiry, theories of the sublime and the sister arts tradition

In his authoritative bicentenary edition of Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, James T. Boulton wrote these introductory words:

Without exaggerating the wisdom of the Enquiry, one must rank it among the most important documents of its century. Besides painters, architects and a host of minor writers, such major figures as Johnson, Blake (despite his overt scorn for Burke’s ideas), Wordsworth, Hardy, Diderot, Lessing, and Kant felt its influence.¹

Since then, many assessments of eighteenth-century aesthetic theory have confirmed this appraisal, seeing in Burke’s treatise a crucial contribution to this emerging branch of philosophy. Most recently, Robert Doran, according to whom the Philosophical Enquiry ‘is one of the foundational texts of modern aesthetics’, has reasserted that Burke’s theory may be considered to ‘serve as a bridge between the empiricism of early eighteenth-century British criticism (Addison, Shaftsbury, Hutcheson) and the development of philosophical aesthetics in Germany in the latter half of the eighteenth century (Mendelssohn, Lessing, Kant)’.²

The present study similarly underlines the fundamental intellectual significance of the Enquiry, by highlighting its impact beyond aesthetic theory, on artistic practices. I intend to show to what extent and in which respects Burke’s treatise, by denying painting the ability to convey the sublime, heralded a crisis of representation that was to affect visual practices much beyond the eighteenth-century context. In order to understand the repercussions of the Enquiry on pictorial practices, however, it will be necessary to examine the theoretical context against which it stands. This requires assessing what it owed to the aesthetic discourse of its time, and in what ways it departed from previous theories of the sublime. It also means explaining why Burke’s theory, more than those of his predecessors or immediate contemporaries, challenged visual artists and called for a rethinking of visual representation.

In this chapter, I will scrutinise Burke’s views and their impact first of all by comparing his conception to that of thinkers he was especially indebted to, in particular Longinus and Joseph Addison, and to the prevailing discourse on art, which considered painting to be compatible with the sublime. This will allow me to underline the originality of Burke’s claims about the representational limitations of painting and to argue that his conception of the sublime undermined the sister arts tradition. The further artistic repercussions of the Enquiry will be the object of Chapter 2, which will foreground Burke’s original contribution to theories of representation, and the challenge that it raised by drawing attention to the tensions and inadequacies within artistic production itself.

From Longinus to Burke

While the Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful is often considered to be a groundbreaking work on aesthetics, it was far from being isolated within the context of Enlightenment aesthetic theory. As critics like Andrew Ashfield and Peter de Bolla have demonstrated, too much focus on Burke tends to obscure what was in fact a very complex and fertile debate: not only did aesthetic reflection come to the fore in the philosophical writings of the time, but many British Enlightenment thinkers included reflections on the sublime within their broader investigations of fields as diverse as human understanding, ethics, physiology or linguistics.³ What is more, it is important to acknowledge that Burke’s essay owed much to the work of predecessors, and especially to the Longinian tradition as it had developed in Britain since the beginning of the century.

Longinus’ Peri Hupsous (On the Sublime), a Greek treatise of the first or third century AD, had become known in Britain through Boileau’s French translation of it, in 1674.⁴ Although the treatise focused on the powerful effects of rhetoric and style, some marginal comments suggested a potentially much broader application of the notion of the sublime. Thus, Longinus had anticipated the possibility of a form of aesthetic appreciation that was mingled with a sense of danger and terror. Chapter X of Peri Hupsous, in particular, had praised Homer for his ability to choose ‘the most terrific circumstances’ ‘in his descriptions of tempests’ and for seeking the effect of terror, instead of focusing on poetic ornament.⁵ Longinus had equally examined the possibility of a ‘natural’ sublime, derived from awe-inspiring natural objects, of which he had suggested several examples:

[N]‌ature prompts us to admire, not the clearness and usefulness of a little stream, but the Nile, the Danube, the Rhine, and far beyond all the Ocean; not to turn our wandering eyes from the heavenly fires, though often darkened, to the little flame kindled by human hands, however pure and steady its light; not to think that tiny lamp more wondrous than the caverns of Aetna, from whose raging depths are hurled up stones and whole masses of rock, and torrents sometimes come pouring from earth’s centre of pure and living fire.⁶

Both the conviction that terror could be a source of intense aesthetic appreciation and the quest for sources of transcendence in nature were to become central to eighteenth-century British aesthetics, which gradually shifted away from a purely ‘rhetorical’ sublime to expand on these originally minor aspects. More generally, British critics and philosophers noted that Longinus conceived of the sublime not just as a rhetorical mode but as derived from a powerful natural ‘yearning for all that is great, all that is diviner than ourselves’.⁷ They consequently saw in it the basis for a broader aesthetic experience, a form of ecstatic elevation, in which the mind was carried beyond its limits when confronted with what exceeded it, for example the divine or the grand spectacles of nature.⁸ In other words, they conflated Longinus’ reflections on rhetoric with their own emerging attraction for wild nature and for powerful affects that exceeded, or at least preceded, the grasp of reason. In the process, they freed the concept of the sublime from a mainly rhetorical anchoring, and began to explore its causes and effects. Soon, the Lockean epistemological model of mental and emotional experiences that were originally derived from sense perceptions of the object world was to provide a method to connect the grandeur and power of nature to sublime affect, and to trace the mental mechanisms that led from one to the other.

One of the first expressions of this new sensibility and of the interest in the ‘natural sublime’ could be found in Thomas Burnet’s Telluris Theoria Sacra, or Sacred Theory of the Earth (1680–89). This theological-geological history of the earth claimed that the originally smooth and beautiful forms of the globe had been marred by the Deluge, and that mountains, river beds and seas were great ‘Ruins’ of that original perfection. Even though it lamented the loss of original beauty and order, it elicited an intense, violent and yet not unpleasant experience from the contrast between the power and perfection of the divine on the one hand, and the limitations and deformities of fallen nature on the other. As Marjorie Hope Nicolson has shown, while Burnet saw mountains and the ocean as frightening expressions of a sinful nature, he could not help being impressed, ‘“rapt” and “ravished” by the vast, the grand, the majestic’.⁹ This tension made him one of the first writers to suggest that a form of aesthetic pleasure could be derived from the apparently chaotic forms of nature, because of their intimation of an ungraspable vastness. Almost at the same time as Burnet criticised the ruined forms of mountains, he admitted that their immensity could be the source of an overwhelming form of aesthetic pleasure, in which the mind was no longer in control:

The greatest objects of Nature are, methinks, the most pleasing to behold; and next to the Great Concave of the Heavens, and those boundless Regions where the Stars inhabit, there is nothing that I look upon with more Pleasure than the wide Sea and the Mountains of the Earth. There is something august and stately in the Air of these things, that inspires the Mind with great Thoughts and Passions; we do naturally, upon such Occasions, think of God and his Greatness: And whatsoever hath but the Shadow and Appearance of INFINITE, as all Things have that are too big for our Comprehension, they fill and overbear the Mind with their Excess, and cast it into a pleasing kind of Stupor and Admiration.¹⁰

The encounter between Longinus and British criticism explicitly took place in the writings of John Dennis and Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third Earl of Shaftesbury. Dennis, who properly introduced the Longinian concept of the sublime into English literary criticism, also felt the need to explore the subjective responses connected to it,¹¹ and to transpose this experience to the encounter with wild nature. His definition of a natural sublime and of its effect on individual emotions benefited from Burnet’s input, which among other things allowed him to outline the paradox of a delight mixed with terror.¹² His descriptions of his encounter with the Alps were the first to delineate the psychological experience of conflicting emotions which was to become central to Burke’s theory. In the journal entry describing his arrival into Savoy, he alluded to ‘a delightful Horror, a terrible Joy’. And his discovery of Mont Cenis allowed him to argue for the aesthetic potential of powerful, disturbing feelings:

I am delighted, ’tis true at the prospect of Hills and Valleys, of flowry Meads, and murmuring Streams, yet it is a delight that is consistent with Reason … But transporting Pleasures follow’d the sight of the Alpes, and what unusual Transports think you were those, that were mingled with horrours, and sometimes almost with despair?¹³

In these reflections, Dennis was distinguishing clearly between two types of aesthetic experience: the delight caused by beautiful nature, which was a rational form of experience, and the terrifying exaltation derived from wild and vast scenery, in other words the natural sublime, which suggested the possibility of an irrationalist aesthetics. This distinction was to have a lasting influence in British aesthetic thought.

Dennis’s contemporary, Shaftesbury, found it more difficult...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Plates
• Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I From the Enquiry to the Academy
• Part II Beyond the ‘narrow limits of painting’
• Part III Relocating the sublime: Blake, Turner and creative endeavour
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index
• Plates