|
|
| ME | WORK | CV | PLAY | FOOD | WORDS | FAMILY | LINKS |  | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
What piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god: the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals - and yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?
The translation into French of Longinus's treatise Peri Hupsous (c. first century A.D.) by Boileau in 1674 inaugurated one of the most important critical enquiries of the eighteenth-century, that into the sublime experience. Its causes, affects, ethics and aesthetics all began to be analysed in a tradition which stretches from John Dennis's The Advancement and Reformation of Modern Poetry (1701) to the twentieth-century analyses of, among others, Harold Bloom and Jean-François Lyotard. However, as Hamlet's famous speech shows us, the practice of sublime writing was well-established long before its modern theoretical framework came to be formulated, some parts of the Bible being an even older example of rhetorical sublimity. A common division drawn in the critical analysis of the sublime in this century has been between the Longinian 'rhetorical' sublime and the 'natural' sublime, the former using a primarily linguistic means of creating sublimity, the latter concentrating on certain objects of nature. However, as David Morris points out, the extent to which religious experience informs and even governs the essential nature of the sublime cannot be ignored, and in this sense the sublime seems to be of a more psychological nature. John Dennis argued in his Grounds of Criticism in Poetry (1704) that 'the greatest sublimity is to be derived from religious ideas' and if we consider that one of the most frequent tropes used to represent the sublime experience is that of elevation then it becomes clear that the prompt for sublimity as an aesthetic sensation may even be predicated by religious experience. That is, the sublime becomes an elevation of the human mind towards God, towards the 'infinite' possibilities represented by the Divine.
However, the relationship between the Divine and the sublime is by no means straightforward and throws up a theological paradox which may be illuminated by looking at Thomas Weiskel's definition of the sublime:
The essential claim of the sublime is that man can, in feeling and in speech, transcend the human.In a Christian framework the possibility that mortal man may be able to surpass the human is somewhat problematic since this logically leads to an erasure of the difference between the human and the divine. In Hamlet's words man becomes 'like a god'. I intend to explore this problematic relationship between the human subject and the religious sublime in connection with a group of poems known as the Graveyard poems specifically, Thomas Parnell's 'Night-Piece on Death' (1721), Edward Young's Night-Thoughts (1742-5), Robert Blair's 'The Grave' (1743) and Thomas Gray's 'Elegy written in a Country Churchyard' (1751).
The complicated theological background to the period in question witnessed considerable philosophical shifts in thinking, many of which originated in the seventeenth-century. The attack upon Anglican trinitarianism represented by Deism and its allies seems to have originated in the 1680s with Charles Blount but did not gather real intellectual momentum until the mid-1690s. Its origins may be traced back to the Cambridge Platonists who, following the tradition of Hooker and Erasmus, tried to remove the mysterious aspects of Christian doctrine, and championed the compatibility of revelation and reason. Such radical ideas met with a considerable backlash. The Deist, Socinianist and Arian threat to the Anglican church was that any rejection of revelation, even that of rendering it accessible to reason, posed a threat to the omnipotence of God, and as Charles Leslie claimed in his A Short and Easie Method with the Deists of 1698:
So closely is religion and government linked together, that the one supports the other, and corruption in a Christian government cannot come in, but by the corruption of religion, and overthrowing those principles which it teaches.However, by far the most important epistemological challenges to the prevailing order of Anglican thought were issued by John Locke (1632-1704) and Isaac Newton (1642-1737). Concerning Locke's theological contribution to the eighteenth-century, J. C. D. Clark remarks 'It seems likely that Locke's chief impact in eighteenth-century England was not to import contractarianism into politics, but Arianism into religion' following Locke's claims in his Essay that 'Reason must be our last judge and guide in everything' and that faith is merely an 'assent to any proposition'. The traditionally subservient and ignorant position of man within the Anglican theology was thus to become threatened. The impact of Isaac Newton, especially his Principia (1687) and Optiks (1704), inspired a vehement backlash against the demystification of the complexities of nature, and the challenge to such orthodox Christian doctrines as animism that the Newtonian system presented. Although Newton and the Boyle lecturers were consistent in their attempts to argue for the compatibility of a Newtonian natural philosophy and revealed religion, so-called 'anti-Newtonians' as John Hutchinson (1674-1737) and the later Oxford Hebraists sought to re-assert Divine enigma against the new epistemology of self-sufficient reason. The devotional poetry of Christopher Smart (1722-71), especially his Jubilate Agno written c.1758-63, may retrospectively be seen as a coherent albeit elaborate criticism of the Newtonian natural philosophy both theologically and scientifically. For example, Jubilate Agno (B220) clearly asserts the importance of Divine revelation when it declares that 'Newton is ignorant / for if a man consult not the WORD how should he / understand the WORK?-'. Such epistemological conflict between the Lockean-Newtonian championship of reason and the Anglican emphasis upon mystery and Divine revelation may lead us to agree with Clark in his argument that to consider eighteenth-century Britain as ruled by the imperative of Reason seems rather reductive.
An extreme reaction to the challenge of rationalism was that of 'enthusiasm'. In her Enthusiasm: A Study in Semantic Change (1972) Susie Tucker outlines the OED definitions of enthusiasm as '(1) divine inspiration, which may manifest itself in both religion and poetry, (2) the delusion that one has such an inspiration, or a false claim to it, and (3) ardent zeal for any person, cause or principle.' Clearly, religious 'enthusiasm' was a definitely pejorative term. In his 1700 additions to his Essay Locke comments that 'enthusiasm would set up revelation without reason' and John Leland's opinion in his A View of the Principal Deistical Writers of 1754 is, in Tucker's words, that Deism rejects all revealed religion as 'imposture and enthusiasm'. 'Enthusiasm' is definitely not to be wholly identified with the Anglican establishment but it is clear from these criticisms that insofar as Deism and the Lockean philosophy of mind represented reason, 'enthusiasm' represented an alternative non-rational epistemology. Such an alternative, however, was not met with universal assent. Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) was one of many fierce critics of enthusiasm satirising it in his Mechanical Operation of the Spirit (1704) and in the character of Jack in A Tale of a Tub (1704).
The close relation between enthusiasm and the sublime, both being in some sense transcendent of the rational and even the human, may be illustrated by considering the similarity of imagery used in the technical descriptions of both affective experiences. In his Glossographia of 1656, for example, Thomas Blount considers enthusiasm as 'an inspiration, a ravishment of the spirit, divine motion, poetical fury' and Edward Phillips in the 1720 edition of The New World of Words (first published 1658) defines an enthusiast as 'one who pretends to be so inspired, or transported with imaginary Revelations.' The stock tropes of ravishment (reminiscent of Dennis's idea of the sublime as a 'pleasing rape') and transport used throughout eighteenth-century thought on the sublime here find an earlier currency in ethical treatments of enthusiasm. Indeed, so closely are the connotations of the two concepts related that one later finds debates over the affective potentials pertaining to the two categories in common. John Dennis frequently elides the two terms, claiming that 'The greatest enthusiastic terror then must needs be derived from religious ideas' and also that 'the greatest sublimity is to be derived from religious ideas.' (Italics mine). That the semantic amalgamation of the theologically pejorative 'enthusiasm' and the primarily artistic 'sublime' is so common is somewhat endemic of the fundamentally ethics-based thought of the period. Such pre-Kantian interdependence between art, ethics and theology must obviously inform any modern critical consideration of the sublime.
So what are the implications for the religious sublime of this semantic overlap with enthusiasm? Tucker remarks on the argument between classicists as to the meaning of the Greek root of enthusiasm, that is whether the basic word 'refers to God possessing Man or Man caught up into God'. Theologically, the distinction is obviously crucial. Enthusiasts were already seen to be in danger of succumbing to spiritual pride due to their belief that they enjoyed exclusive revelation from God and if, as the Greek root could suggest, enthusiasm may lead to an aggrandizement of man to a godlike level, the connection between the theological problem of enthusiasm and the aesthetic sublime forges an even stronger bond. Weiskel's definition of the sublime as a transcendence of the human is paralleled in certain aesthetic theories current in the early eighteenth-century. For example, in his Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews (1787) Robert Lowth compares the 'ecstatic impulse' of poetic genius to that of becoming 'the God of the moment', following what he claims to be the ancient expression of poetic enthusiasm as 'to be inspired, full of the God.' If we then turn to Longinus's ancient treatise on the sublime we may see this divine conception of the poet discussed more problematically. Longinus relates the sublime to the internal grandeur of man's soul, seeing the experience of sublimity as:
A constant emulation of whatever seems to approach nearer to divinity than himself. Hence it is, that the whole universe is not sufficient, for the extensive reach and piercing speculation of the human understanding.However, it is remarkable here that there seems to be a dual consciousness at work. Man is at once aware that 'himself' is not equal to 'divinity' but may only try and 'approach' it through artistic or religious experience, yet on a more phenomenological level his 'understanding' seems to have no limit, the 'whole universe' (which may be compared to divine infinity) is not 'sufficient' for its conceptual capacity. Thus it seems that a dialectic emerges between the major emphases of eighteenth-century theological speculation and the rationalist Enlightenment project, the Christian drive towards humility before God and the phenomenological drive for limitless 'understanding' of man's identity. So how is this destabilization of selfhood dealt with? I would argue that a part of the implicit solution is formulated within the thought of the sublime and hinges upon the relationship of power between man and God.
John Baillie was perhaps the first theorist to consider the role of power in the sublime experience which first arises in section III of his Essay on the Sublime (1747). Baillie locates the sublime within a certain limitlessness, 'a vastly diffused being', and also emphasises the centrality of a reflective quality inherent in the sublime experience. The suggestion that 'the sublime of power is from its object being vast and immense' locates the sublime as a definitely human experience, its seemingly boundless aesthetic pleasure reflected back from the 'vast and immense' power of its object God. One might recall also that according to the book of Genesis, 'God created man in his own image' allowing us to infer that this reflective aspect to sublimity is in fact self-reflective. The contemplation of divinity thus becomes transformed into an essentially ego-driven experience, seeming to anticipate the Kantian formulation of the sublime as an inability of the imagination to provide an intuition of reason such as God. By locating the aesthetic power of sublimity within the human subject, such a reading of Baillie's analysis suggests a phenomenological desire for the sensation of limitlessness and omnipotence (orthodoxly reserved for the godhead) on the part of the human subject.
The profound theological and epistemological implications of this self-reflectivity were explored by Burke in Section V of his Enquiry. Burke goes further than Baillie to claim that he knows 'nothing sublime which is not some modification of power.' Following his examination of the sublime in terms of the pleasures attendant upon pain and terror, he argues that such emotions must necessarily be inflicted by a power in some way superior 'because we never submit to pain willingly', recalling the ambivalence associated above with Dennis's idea of the 'pleasing rape'. Both 'rape' and 'rapture' share the common Latin root of 'rapere' (to seize), reflecting the close relation of, on the one hand, the artistic and religious pleasure associated with rapture and, on the other, the morally pejorative connotations of the invasive rape. Of course, Dennis's phrase 'pleasing rape' sums up this ambivalence to great effect.
In common with the passage from Longinus which was considered above to reveal a certain conflict between the Christian drive for humility and the phenomenological drive for ever greater understanding, Burke's consideration of the position of man in relation to the deity reveals a similar ambivalence concerning the nature of human identity. While the Godhead far exceeds 'the bounds of our comprehensions' as an object of understanding, the human imagination is 'bound' by its own awareness of its phenomenological potential to 'ascend to these pure and intellectual ideas' of divinity until 'it becomes extremely hard to disentangle our idea of the cause and the effect'. Man and god become one subject, and it is this ascent towards subjectivity, towards the self rather than a divine object, which becomes problematic within the sphere of the poetic.
Christopher Smart considered himself not merely a poet, but 'scribe-evangelist' (Jubilate Agno, B327), a didactician whose mission was to become 'the Reviver of ADORATION amongst ENGLISH-MEN' (B332). As Harriet Guest remarks in A Form of Sound Words, the theological implications of occupying such a position were considered dubious. To consider one's poetic endeavour in terms of religious revelation, especially if that revelation is private, raises awkward issues of the theological relationship of man to God, at least in the conservative Christian climate of the early eighteenth century. For the enthusiastic poet, such as Smart or Young, it is the sublimity expressed through their writing and most importantly their location of that sublimity within the mortal mind (exemplified in their ability to experience private revelation) which creates such problems.
All the poems however do rely on solitary reflection and personal (rather than scholarly) knowledge as a means by which to communicate religious experience. Parnell's 'A Night-Piece on Death', for instance, opens with an explicit rejection of the wisdom of 'schoolmen and the sages' and seeks a 'readier path' to spiritual revelation. This rejection of established learning and the preference for solitude leads to an emphasis on the self rather than a concern for scriptural authority and so locates the poetic (and devotional) voice in a position of exclusive religious revelation, rather than humility. However, it is Young's Night-Thoughts in which the difficulties of the location of power become most apparent. While the other poems are far more consistently melancholic in character the poetic voice of Night-Thoughts expresses enthusiastic flights of sublimity throughout its nine nights. For instance, George Eliot was to echo the contemporary attitude towards religious enthusiasm a century later when she wrote of Night-Thoughts as an example of 'that impiety towards the present and the visible, which flies for its motives, its sanctities, and its religion, to the remote, the vague, and the unknown.' During Night-Thoughts, Young frequently blurs the boundaries between mortality and eternity due to the enthusiasm underlying his poetic expression. For instance, in Night III he considers the difference between 'A good Man and an Angel' as a 'thin [...] barrier' (lines 432-33) and later in Night IV regards the psychological potential of man as a 'tow'ring Summit lost beyond the Thought / Of Man, or Angel' (lines 336-7). The implication of such 'Passion', which Young vehemently defends in Night IV lines 629-50, becomes adulatory not of God, but of the human mind itself and of the 'thin' boundary between the phenomenological potentials of the human mind and divinity. Compared to Pope's injunction of his Essay on Man (1733-4) that man should 'presume not God to scan' as 'the proper study of mankind is man', Young's instruction in Night IX 'Divine contemplate, and become Divine' (line 1387) exemplifies the essential split between the enthusiastic mind and the Augustan sense of moderation. However, crucial to the sense of identity in Young's poem is a conflicting reaction to the sense of boundlessness that this enthusiastic contemplation of man's psychological powers creates, a fear of becoming 'lost' (III. 336) in the ecstasy of sublimity, recalling the ambivalence inherent in the etymology of 'rapture'. In Night II Young expresses trepidation at the proliferation of thought which accompanies the enthusiastic experience: 'Guard well thy Thought; our Thoughts are heard in Heaven.' (line 95). This impulse to restrain the thoughts spilling out is accompanied by a persistent moral taxonomy throughout the nine nights of the full poem. Such a dialectic between immeasurable enthusiasm and the desire to impose boundaries onto the sublime experience creates a destabilization in which the location of man's identity in relation to divine authority remains fundamentally ambiguous.
It is tempting to relate the reaction to this near paranoia concerning the propriety of locating the sublime experience within the mind of man to the saying 'What goes up, must come down.' It is Lord Kames's Elements of Criticism (1765) which first deals with the 'descent' which follows the sublime ascent, the summit of which he compares to the precarious position of standing on tip-toes. Almost concurrent with the identification with divinity which occurs during the sublime ascent comes a recognition of man's epistemological limitation in comparison, partly as a result of the Christian necessity for humility before God. We might consider Burke's claim that 'Some reflection, some comparing is necessary' within the context of the religious sublime. Although Kames does argue that in itself the 'descent [...] is for the most part pleasant' he does go on to comment that looking down becomes painful when the vision below is viewed from a great height, and in this connection he quotes from King Lear: 'How fearful / And dizzy 'tis, to cast one's eyes so low!' Kames thus concludes that the human mind 'unable to support itself in a strained elevation, falls often as from a height, and sinks below its ordinary tone.' When the mortal mind, 'lost' in sublime rapture, compares itself to its normal state of phenomenological limitation, it must indeed 'come down'.
Insofar as the sublime experience is religious, and even specifically devotional, it must always involve a consideration of the eternity and infinity of godhead, and as Burke argues, it must also entail 'some comparing' between man and god. In the Graveyard poems, such a comparison is an anxious one. While divinity is considered in terms of boundlessness, the human subject is consistently conceived as an unhappy contrast, limited by mortality and physicality. In this comparative sense, we might consider that humanist sublimity is not only theologically inappropriate but phenomenologically improbable. For example, a common trope in the poems is the figuring of human mortality as a limiting structure (in comparison to the infinity of god) through the concentration upon the eschatological aspect of death. In Parnell we find graves to be 'solemn heaps of fate' and death to be 'the last of things', while Blair concentrates quasi-Gothically on the grotesque physicality of death, evoking 'sculls and coffins, epitaphs and worms', and finds the body to be a 'clay tenement' imprisoning and limiting the transcendent potential of the soul. Gray focuses in a similarly gloomy way upon death as 'the inevitable hour', finding that the 'paths of glory' trod in mortal life can only 'lead but to the grave'. It is typical of the psychological instability in the poems (and perhaps even in the ambivalence of sublime rapture) that the desire to break free of boundaries coexists with a desire to instill them.
Thus the boundless rapture of enthusiasm competes with the morbid limitations of melancholy throughout the experience of the religious sublime. Mortal man is potentially conceived as 'a gem of purest ray serene' imprisoned within 'dark unfathomed caves of ocean' (Gray, 'Elegy'), a being capable of experiencing and even generating sublimity yet while surrounded by the limitless 'ocean' of time, he is also imprisoned within the 'caves' of mortal life. Such a dichotomy reveals the experience of existence within the religious sublime to be fundamentally insecure, one might even say neurotic, as Young's Night-Thoughts illustrates most strongly of all the poems. For instance, even at the end of the poem, where the project of the conversion of Lorenzo is pursued by the consistent reiteration of the greatness of man and where the poetic language is persistently allowed to seek new heights of enthusiasm, Young constantly deflates the sense of human sublimity: 'WHY from yon Arch, [...] / Rushes OMNIPOTENCE? - To curb our Pride' (IX. 683, 687). Despite the conceptual strength (enhanced visually by its capitalisation) of 'OMNIPOTENCE', the reining in of the enthusiastic exaltation of man by the moralistic addition of 'Pride' leads to an extremely unstable impression of man's identity. Human existence is found to be at once 'Dust' and 'called to the Skies' (IX. 756).
Yet such ambivalence does not mean that a humanistic sublime is necessarily an oxymoron, to recall Weiskel's claim, since the dialectic created by the competition of enthusiasm and melancholy within the religious sublime prompts a new location of sublimity to be created within the feeling of melancholy. As Young puts it in Night II of Night-Thoughts, 'The Thought of Death, shall, like a God, inspire' (line 309). While we should be cautious of thinking of the early eighteenth-century sublime as on a teleological course towards the 'subjectivism of Kant', as Samuel Holt Monk saw it in his seminal study The Sublime: a Study of Critical Theories in XVIII-Century England (1960), both Longinus and Dennis make some consideration of the sublime as a process of self-reflection. In Section IX of his treatise, Longinus contemplates the sublime as 'an image reflected from the inward greatness of the soul' which Dennis later echoes in Remarks Upon a Book Entitled, Prince Arthur (1696) when he claims that the sublime causes the soul to be transported 'by the consciousness of its own excellence'. It is my contention that due to the dialectical relationship between melancholy and enthusiasm in the poems in question, and in Kames's later idea of the sublime fall, such 'greatness' comes to be derived from the melancholy mind, thus combining the pathological conditions of melancholy and enthusiasm into a new source of sublimity and artistic pleasure. As Pascal suggests 'Man's greatness comes from knowing he is wretched: [...] Thus it is wretched to know that one is wretched, but there is greatness in knowing one is wretched', and it is through this dialectic that the sublime is transformed from a devotional medium to an exploration of the self and the melancholy identity's creative capacities.
What we have identified as the egotistical and psychological nature of the religious sublime, and the morbid concerns of the poems themselves, suggests comparison with Freud's consideration of melancholy as analogous with mourning in Mourning and Melancholia (1917). Freud considers melancholia to result from a 'loss'. Yet crucially, and unlike the mourner, the melancholic's sense of loss apparently results from an 'unknown' object. Considering this apparent state of affairs further, Freud argues that in fact melancholia points to 'a loss in regard to [the][...] ego', observing that 'in the clinical picture of melancholia, dissatisfaction with the ego on moral grounds is the most outstanding feature.' As we have already considered, the dissatisfaction with the self is a central preoccupation within the Graveyard poems. It is this comparison between the human and the divine that we may relate to Freud's idea of the development of melancholy. He claims that in the melancholic 'one part of the ego sets itself over against the other, judges it critically, and, as it were, takes it as its object'. That is, due to 'a real slight or disappointment' coming from the loved object, the libido withdraws from this object and is displaced onto the ego which then identifies with the abandoned object. Thus 'an object-loss was transformed into an ego-loss and the conflict between the ego and the loved person into a cleavage between the critical activity of the ego and the ego as altered by identification.' Hence the melancholic's sense of self becomes split, one part remains in an authoritative, critical role, the other identifies with the lost object and becomes the focus of the former part's reproach.
It is such destabilization of identity in terms of a dialectical conflict between the human and the divine, between melancholy and enthusiasm which creates the ambivalence at the core of sublime rapture in the Graveyard poems. Moreover, this destabilization has crucial implications for the groundings of human subjectivity as it is a reflection of the uncertainty as to the mortal possibilities of the mind of man, whether they are limited by his own subservient, mortal position, or whether they can be transcended through some generation of sublimity within the mortal mind. In The Spectator of June 23rd 1712, Addison remarks on the centrality of this feeling of absorption into boundlessness which, to him, is a governing principle of the sublime:
Our imagination loves to be filled with an object, or to grasp at any thing that is too big for its capacity. We are flung into a pleasing astonishment at such unbounded views, and feel a delightful stillness and amazement in the soul at the apprehension of them.Thus such engulfment of the subject by the unknown object may indeed be psychologically pleasurable. Freud suggests in Civilization and its Discontents that this engulfment, or 'oceanic feeling' is precisely that from which religious consolation is derived. He argues that the:
feeling of an indissoluble bond, of being at one with the external world as a whole [...] which might seek something like the restoration of limitless narcissism [...] sounds like a first attempt at a religious consolation, as though it were another way of disclaiming the danger which the ego recognizes as threatening it from the external world.Freud's argument has two conflicting strands: on the one hand the oneness with the universe is taken to be a religious consolation and a means of expressing devotion, yet on the other it is implied to be an ego-driven wish to create a self-sufficient existence, an attempt to disclaim the limitations of death. It is such an engulfment of the mind within the contemplation of a sublime object that Weiskel has called 'the romantic sublime'.
Yet the anxiety expressed through the feeling of engulfment can be a fundamentally intimidating experience. For Pascal, the sensation of self-annihilation before divine infinity (which Burke later related to the sublime experience) was filled not only with awe but also fear, a feeling that the self was threatened, for while the infinite could be taken to be proof of God's existence, as an unknowable entity, it could also be empty space. In response to this menacing experience of the sublime as a threat to self-identity, the drive to instill boundaries returns, witnessed for instance in the persistent attempt to apply moral and typological taxonomies to the aesthetic theory of the sublime. Thus John Baillie comments on the difficult yet (to him) necessary task of imposing limitations upon the sublime experience:
That the sublime no sooner presents itself than we are affected by it, I readily acknowledge; but that we generally form accurate and distinct ideas upon this subject, is by no means true; and although in itself perfectly distinct from either the pathetic, or figurative manner, yet it is often confounded with both. The genuine work therefore of criticism is to define the limits of each kind of writing, and to prescribe their proper distinctions.Although Baillie considers the problematic nature of the sublime in artistic rather than theological terms, a similar problem concerning the drive for boundaries arises. In wishing to position the sublime as a distinct genre in relation to 'the pathetic, or figurative manner', in wishing to 'define the limits of each kind of writing', Baillie touches upon an aesthetic problem of representation which governs the sublime: how may language represent what is beyond empirical experience? More importantly, this anxiety over representation relates to a similar problem of identity: if mortal man, phenomenologically limited by Lockean sensory experience, may not identify with the divine, how may he experience the sublime? To return to Hamlet, how may he be at once 'a man' and be capable of experiencing infinity 'like a god'? How is this dialectic between his own mortal limitations and the sublime possibilities he may reach towards to be resolved?
In the poems themselves, the experience of self-annihilation in the face of infinity meets with a similar drive for boundaries and definition. However, the location of infinity is equated with precisely that unknowable and boundless 'gulph' (Night-Thoughts, IV. 721) of death, and the problem of representing death in experiential terms comes to reveal an anxiety surrounding the sublime experience of boundlessness itself. For example, 'The Grave' is dominated by a sense of asymbolia which highlights the difficulty of representing the unknowable, the poet speaking as a solitary voice in the 'gloom' of night, and the grave itself, as an emblem of death, being 'a space we blush to name'. Such asymbolia is also considered as a certain human unwillingness to confront the unknown, a refusal to cast one's eyes so low (to paraphrase King Lear) thus associating death with negation and a sense of loss. The poet himself wishes to 'hear no more' on the gloomy subject which preoccupies him, and as in Night-Thoughts the space of death is consistently figured as an asymbolic 'gulph'. In Night- Thoughts the anxiety generated through such asymbolia and the inability to define the phenomenological limits of human potential is expressed in Night IV as the concurrent drive for and fundamental impossibility of naming God, of delimiting the boundaries of divinity: 'What then art Thou? by what Name shall I call Thee?' (IV. 596). Bearing in mind the self-reflective aspect to the sublime, the ability to categorize human identity depends upon the possibility of defining both its creator and ruler. Such existential equivocation may be illustrated by an extract from Night-Thoughts:
my Hopes and FearsThe 'Hopes and Fears' of man's phenomenological potential are 'a fathomless Abyss' which is at once dreaded and desired, at once located in the sphere of divine alterity and also 'mine'. The drive to instill boundaries upon the 'gulph' of the sublime experience is expressed as both a desire to delimit divinity and also a desire for self-knowledge of what is 'mine' (the human) in relation to the divine, what phenomenological possibilities the human identity may locate as its own.
Start up alarm'd, and o'er life's narrow Verge
Look down - on what? a fathomless Abyss,
A dread Eternity! how surely mine!
And can Eternity belong to me,
Poor Pensioner on the bottom of an Hour? (I. 61-6)
As a result, the sublime experience becomes a drive for self-discovery, an attempt to locate man's subjective position in relation to the asymbolic infinity of death and the divine: as Young has it, the melancholic poet is pushed to ask 'What then am I, who sorrow for myself?' (I. 288-95). As Freud suggested in Mourning and Melancholia, the melancholic's condition is caused by the identification with the unknown object, and it is such sublime identification which is pursued in the Graveyard poems through the rapture of melancholy feeling and the limitless potential of the human imagination. The 'without doubt enjoyable' consolation found within the exploration of melancholy 'darkness' (Night-Thoughts V. 128) as a sublime, affective experience is prompted precisely by the realisation of man's limitations in comparison to the unknown object of divinity, and the self-knowledge of human limitation that such a drive for boundaries permits allows the poetic eye to be driven inward upon the 'supreme' human subject itself:
Darkness has more Divinity for me;Similarly in 'The Grave' we find that death 'with blunt truth acquaints us with what we are' and night is transformed into a medium for divine praise and the exploration of the imagination. It is the very unknowable limitlessness of night which the poetic voice finally embraces as both a self-reflective expression of the phenomenological potential of the imagination, and as an 'awful' (Blair) indication of the overarching mystery of divinity. Thus in Night-Thoughts we find a wish to be freed 'from Earth's Inclosure, from the Sun's / Contracted Circle' (IX. 588-9), a desire to transcend the mortal limitations of the physical (and visible). Crucially, such transcendence is seen to be available via the human imagination itself since 'Amid life's pains, abasements, emptiness' the soul itself can 'comfort, elevate and fill' the asymbolic space between the human and the divine (Night-Thoughts, VI. 574-5). Similarly, in 'A Night-Piece on Death' 'sense' may be transcended by the 'soul', figured as a 'glittering sun'. The 'chains' of mortality are thus removed, both by Christian faith and by confidence in the human mind to surpass the limits of empirical knowledge and 'mingle with the blaze of day'. In The Grave consolation is found in the ability of the imagination to 'chase' the ascent of Christ into the heavens so that the mortal limitations of the physical become transcended in 'a new elegance of form'. The human subject must 'Think [...] what it is to die' (Parnell), or as Blair has it 'learn to die', in order to discover the affective capabilities of melancholy which invite 'the passing tribute of a sigh' (Gray). The melancholy 'Thought of Death' becomes a godlike inspiration for the enthusiasm of the imagination, and what was once feared due to its eschatological limitation upon human potential becomes transformed into an aesthetic experience of transcendence.
It strikes Thought inward, it drives back the Soul
To settle on Herself, our Point supreme! (Night-Thoughts, V. 128-30)
However, this derivation of affective experience from a non-rational source has radical artistic and theological implications in relation to the prevailing Augustan epistemology based upon Lockean empiricism. Locke's analysis of language in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding considered words as a God-given social system, claiming that they had meaning 'as signs of internal conceptions, [...] as marks for the ideas' within the speakers mind. Crucially, such 'ideas' are derived from empirical experience 'either from sensible objects without, or what we feel within ourselves, from the inward workings of our own spirits, of which we are conscious to ourselves within' (italics mine). Thus words seem to translate to things. Yet the experience of the sublime necessarily challenges such an empirical view of language. In Burke's words 'We yield to sympathy, what we refuse to description'. The sublime, in its very nature as an unrepresentable, unknowable affective experience, implies that it is a sensation beyond the boundaries of empirical portrayal, beyond the descriptive capabilities of language itself. In turn, this implication must have ramifications for the Lockean epistemology based on sensory experience alone. If the human mind is capable of sublimity, and this is beyond representation in empirical terms, human knowledge must necessarily be composed of the non-rational as well as the rational. Of course, it is necessary to emphasise that the artistic endeavour to communicate intuition and emotion was not invented by the sublime writers and theorists of this time. However, the challenge to the Augustan values of moderation which Dennis's idea of 'Passions', and the popularity of a Longinian vocabulary of rapture, enthusiasm and transport represented, contributed to an undeniable questioning of the domination of such formalism not solely in artistic but also in more general experiential terms. Thus Young comments that reason alone is merely the 'root' (IV. 751) of human experience, and that empiricism alone is an inadequate basis for the 'storm' of artistic feeling:
Reason sleepsIn terms of the 'meaning' of identity, of what it felt like to be a human subject, the aesthetics of sublimity presented a considerable challenge to Lockean empiricism. As Guest remarks of the poetic self, such a challenge expressed 'a redefinition of the "self" of the poet to express personal experience [...] its capacity to speak for universal "unbounded Desires".'
Or gazes, like an Idiot, unconcern'd,
Nor comprehends the meaning of the Storm. (V. 554-6)
It is such a challenge to the epistemological imperative of reason in respect to which I would locate the Graveyard poems's use of the melancholy voice. Furthermore, it is in this period that the conception of melancholy begins to develop as a psychological and affective analysis of an individual's subjective response to their existence as mortals. Melancholy comes to be considered as an artistic resource of the imagination. Such a radical (albeit marginal) shift in perspective was, of course, not unaccompanied by a certain trepidation. Just as the sublime experience of limitlessness itself was met with ambivalence, so was the unknowable area of the imagination met with a drive to delimit and define. In the British intellectual tradition there remains throughout the eighteenth century a consistent reluctance to abandon the interconnections between artistic judgment and ethical prescription, despite the Kantian project of disinterestedness postulated in his Critique of Judgment (1790). This trembling joy (to paraphrase Burke) surrounding the imagination may be illustrated by the figure of the astronomer in Johnson's Rasselas (1759) who offers an example of the recognition of the alarming power of the synthetic imagination, of its capacity to contribute to 'knowledge' and its ability to inflict a feeling of 'calamity'.
Yet despite this ambivalence towards the imagination which persists throughout the eighteenth century, the consequences that the sublime experience had for both aesthetics and for epistemology in the period remain considerable. Lyotard goes so far as to suggest that it is in the name of the sublime 'that the destiny of classical poetics was hazarded and lost [...] and that romanticism, in other words, modernity, triumphed.' While this teleological analysis of the sublime in terms of the romantic advent of Kantian subjectivity is perhaps somewhat ambitious, the formulation of melancholy as a prompt for artistic experience that comes to be expressed in the Graveyard poems may have its impact traced to Keats's Ode on Melancholy (1820) where melancholy 'dwells with Beauty'. The anxious ambivalence expressed at the hands of the sublime experience in the Graveyard poems prompted a new consideration of the nature of human identity, and the aesthetic and theological implications of such a move offered a striking challenge to the Augustan Age of Reason.
| ME | WORK | CV | PLAY | FOOD | WORDS | FAMILY | LINKS | | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||