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The Sublime
The Sublime
19 February 2007
The term “Romantic” describes a movement both philosophic and artistic, loosely
unified by a rejection of neo-classical aesthetic principles. Though the Romantics did not
always agree in the specifics of their aesthetic theories, nor did all of them move from
theory into practice, many of them found in the idea of the sublime an attractive
alternative to the strict rules and forms of the neo-classical era. The Romantics did not
create the idea of the sublime, or even share a common conception of it. However, the
fact that so many of the Romantic writers in Germany and England especially, but also in
France, approached the question of the sublime in their writings indicates how pervasive
As Samuel Monk shows in his seminal study The Sublime, theorizing on the
nature, causes and effects of sublimity was a popular pastime throughout the eighteenth
century, starting with the rediscovery of classical rhetorician Longinus. The exact
definition of “the sublime” changes from author to author, but most agree that sublimity
pleasure in the observer, a pleasure that has transcendent qualities. Though grand ideas in
the abstract could be sublime, the concept quickly became associated with nature: huge
mountains, wild landscapes, or terrific storms. Edmund Burke makes terror itself the
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essential element of the sublime experience (39), a focus mirrored by the growing interest
in the gothic novel in the last few decades of the eighteenth century.
concerned is the emphasis on the effect the sublime object has on the observer. Though
the theory came to rely more and more on the subjective response to sublimity,
sublimity “is not a quality residing in the object, but a state of mind awakened by an
object” (Monk 8). This move from objective to subjective is part of the general move
toward the emphasis on interior space which allowed Romanticism to come into being.
When Pierre Boileau translated Longinus into French in 1674 and popularized his
theory of the sublime, neo-classicism held the aesthetic sway throughout Europe, and was
especially strong in France. Boileau himself was a firm neo-classicist and did not seem
to have a problem reconciling Longinus’ sublime with his own focus on proper neo-
classical form—probably because Longinus focused much more on the sublime style as a
rhetorical device, rather than on the transcendent effect of the sublime. However, soon
the sublime became everything that was not neo-classical in style, yet had a powerful
emotional effect: “Beauty came to include, generally speaking those qualities and gentle
emotions that neo-classic art sought to embody; sublimity might contain anything else
that seemed susceptible of giving aesthetic pleasure provided that it was grand enough
and might conceivably ‘transport’” (Monk 55). Hence, the beautiful and the sublime
Romanticism, the emphasis shifted more and more away from neo-classical rules and
more toward an appreciation for the sublime, as mediated through individual perception.
Kant was not himself considered a Romantic, but his conception of the sublime as
appropriate to briefly consider his thoughts. He defined the sublime as that “which is
great beyond all comparison” (132) and that which is so powerful (as in nature) that “all
resistance would be completely futile” (144). For Kant, the sublime moment occurs
when the imagination encounters an object too vast to be comprehended and fails in the
attempt, yet reason overcomes the obstacle by recognizing the absurdity of trying to
comprehend the totality of the vast object and in that recognition, asserts itself as greater
than nature (Modiano 104). Thus, in contrast to Burke, whose sublime was in the
moment of terrible crisis itself, Kant’s sublime is in the resolution of the crisis, which
Samuel Taylor Coleridge begins his theory of the sublime with Kant, but does not
aesthetic theory which did not diametrically oppose man and nature. Coleridge’s
conception of the sublime denies the need for a moment of supreme crisis, and keeps at
bay the conflict between man and nature that both Kant and Friedrich Schiller saw as
essential to the sublime (Modiano 108, 114). For Coleridge, the sublime is a transcendent
experience, but not necessarily a terrifying one, and rather than seeing in the sublime
moment an assertion of human reason over nature, he sees an absorption of the individual
into the infinite. Referring to his sense of awe upon entering a Gothic cathedral, he says:
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“I am lost to the actualities that surround me, and my whole being expands into the
infinite; earth and air, nature and art, all swell up into eternity, and the only sensible
impression left is, ‘that I am nothing’” (qtd in Modiano 122). Rather than a denial of
greater than himself. Coleridge also found sublimity in nature, especially in vague forms
that suggest totality but do not express a visual whole (Modiano 115). However, nature
for Coleridge, and more so for his close friend William Wordsworth, was not a threat to
humanity, as it was for Kant and Schiller, but rather “appears as the medium through
Wordsworth is the epitome of the poetic sublime, and though he was not the eager
gained some knowledge of the Kantian view of sublimity through his association with
Coleridge (Modiano 129). Although Wordsworth’s preface to Lyrical Ballads does not
specifically refer to sublimity, it often hints at concepts associated with sublimity. The
reaction to a sublime experience, and his intent to “choose incidents and situations from
common life” and relate them in “language really used by men” and “at the same time, to
throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be
presented to the mind in an unusual way” (264) suggest that a central purpose of
Wordsworth’s poetic dogma was to sublimate the ordinary by filtering it through a new
point of view, conveniently enough, his own. In Wordsworth’s hands, the sublime
becomes more intensely subjective than ever before, leading many to use the term
“egotistical sublime” when speaking about his poetry. According to Monk, by the time
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the sublime meets the Romantic, the “individual becomes of primary importance; his
interpretation of what the artist perceives” (155). Certainly this is true of Wordsworth,
Up until the early 1800s, nearly every theory of the sublime had carefully
separated the beautiful from the sublime. Coleridge, following Herder, connected the two
subjective quality in a way very similar to Kant. However, he subtly changes the
relationship between them by arguing that any object may become the occasion of
sublimity through metaphor and symbolism: “The circle is a beautiful figure in itself; it
becomes sublime, when I contemplate eternity under that figure—the Beautiful is the
perfection, the sublime the suspension, of the comparing power” (qtd in Modiano 118). It
is perhaps a sign of the waning influence of neo-classicism that Coleridge was able to
formulate his theory of sublimity such that the sublime becomes a transcendent beauty
theorizing on the sublime was done in England and Germany, since, as Monk points out
multiple times, French writers tended to be a bit skeptical of the sublime and its rejection
France could explain why Romanticism in France lagged some twenty or thirty years
1
Note especially such passages as lines 93-112 of “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey”
(Poems 360) and the craggy cliff incident found in The Prelude I:373-429 (Prelude 24-25).
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behind England and Germany. However, the Frenchman Victor Hugo would fully negate
neo-classicism in his work, which seeks to combine the sublime with the grotesque, a
goal which requires a slight redefinition of terms. In the early eighteenth-century, the
terrible sublime that became the gothic novel could be associated with ugliness,
monstrosity, and even the grotesque, in opposition to the perfectly formed and
symmetrical neo-classical ideal of beauty. Yet when Hugo uses the terms “sublime” and
“grotesque” he means them to be opposite, but opposites that must be brought together in
order to create true art. In his Preface to the play Oliver Cromwell, he states that the
poetry of the modern age is the drama, that the “characteristic of the drama is the real”
and that “the real results from the natural combination of two types, the sublime and the
grotesque, which meet in the drama, even as they do in life and in the creation. For true
poetry, complete poetry, consists in the harmony of contraries” (47). Hugo never
differentiates “beautiful” and “sublime” in the Preface, but treats them as synonyms.
Paris, as Hugo links the grotesque Quasimodo both to the sublime occupation of ringing
the huge church bells at the vast cathedral of Notre-Dame and to the novel’s symbol of
the sublime, the gypsy Esmerelda. The union of these two contrary figures is emphasized
in the final lines of the novel as Quasimodo’s misshapen skeleton is found holding
Esmerelda’s remains after her execution (505). Though the symbolism is less clear,
Kathryn Grossman suggests that Les Misérables also contains the juxtaposition of the
sublime and the grotesque, as Jean Valjean successfully unites his criminal past and his
honorable present (13), whereas Javert’s failure to comprehend such a union leads to
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confusion and suicide (95). Valjean’s sublime moment comes when the priest Bienvenu
His conscience considered in turn these two men placed before it, the
bishop and Jean Valjean. Anything less than the first would have failed to
soften the second. By one of those singular effects peculiar to this kind of
ecstasy, as his reverie continued, the bishop grew larger and more
resplendent to his eyes; Jean Valjean shrank and faded away. For one
Valjean transcends his past and unites metaphorically with the bishop, and he is a
changed man after this experience. Javert, on the other hand, is unable to cope with
Valjean’s transformation:
Until now all that he had above him had been to his eyes a smooth, simple,
limpid surface; nothing unknown there, nothing obscure; nothing that was
shut in, all foreseen; authority was a plane; no fall in it, no dizziness in
In the characters of Valjean and Javert, Hugo has shown the need of the neo-
classical to embrace the Romantic. He was no lover of the rules set down by neo-
classical writers: “Let us speak out boldly. […] Let us take the hammer to their theories
and systems and treatises. Let us tear down the old stucco-work which conceals the
façade of art!” (Preface 68). In the passage quoted above, Javert is clearly rule-bound,
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unable to accept values outside of his frame of reference. Valjean, on the other hand,
Though the sublime is not a uniquely Romantic concept, it paved the way for
Germany to Coleridge and Wordsworth in England took the theories cultivated earlier in
the century by Burke, Kant, and others and formed them into the basis for much of their
own self-expression. And appropriately enough, Hugo modified both German and
unwittingly one hundred and fifty years earlier by Boileau and his translation of
Bibliography
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Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. S.T. Coleridge Collected Works v. 7-8: Biographica Literaria.
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