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The concept was introduced into the criticism of literature and art by a Greek treatise Peri hupsous ("On the sublime"), attributed in the manuscript to Longinus and probably written in the first century A.D. AS defined by Longinus, the sublime is a quality that can occur in any type of discourse, whether poetry or prose. Whereas the effect of rhetoric on the hearer or reader of a discourse is persuasion, the effect of the sublime is "transport" (ekstasis)— it is that quality of a passage which "shatters the hearer's composure," exercises irresistible "domination" over him, and "scatters the subjects like a bolt of lightning." The source of the sublime lies in the capacities of the speaker or writer. Three of these capacities—the use of figurative language, nobility of expression, and elevated composition—are matters of art that can be acquired by practice; but two other, and more important, capacities, are largely innate: "loftiness of thought" and "strong and inspired passion." The ability to achieve sublimity is in itself enough to establish the transcendent genius of a writer, and expresses the nobility of the writer's character: "sublimity is the ring of greatness in the soul." Longinus' examples of sublime passages in poems range from the epics of Homer through the tragedies of Aeschylus to a love-lyric by Sappho; his examples in prose are taken from the writings of the philosopher Plato, the orator Demosthenes, and the historian Herodotus. Especially notable is his quotation, as a prime instance of sublimity, of the passage in the Book of Genesis written by "the lawgiver of the Jews": "And God said, 'Let there be light,' and there was light, 'Let there be land,' and there was land.".
Longinus' treatise exerted a persistent effect on literary criticism after it became widely known by way of a French translation by Boileau in 1674; eventually, it helped establish both the expressive theory of poetry and the critical method of impressionism. In the eighteenth century an important phenomenon was the shift in the location of the sublime from a quality of linguistic discourse that originates in the powers of a writer's mind, to a quality inherent in external objects, and above all in the scenes and occurrences of the natural world. Thus Edmund Burke's highly influential Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, published 1757, attributes the source of the sublime to whatever things are "in any sort terrible"—that is, to whatever is "fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger"—provided that the observer is in a situation of safety from danger, and so is able to experience what would otherwise be a painful terror as a "delightful horror." The qualities of objects conducive to sublime horror that Burke stresses are obscurity, immense power, and vastness in dimension or quantity. Burke's examples of the sublime include vast architectural structures, Milton's description of Satan in Paradise Lost, the description of the king's army in Shakespeare's 1 Henry IV, and natural phenomena; a sublime passion may be produced by "the noise of vast cataracts, raging storms, thunder or artillery," all of which evoke "a great and awful sensation in the mind.".
During the eighteenth century, tourists and landscape painters traveled to the English Lake Country and to the Alps in search of sublime scenery that was thrillingly vast, dark, wild, stormy, and ominous. Writers of what was called "the sublime ode," such as Thomas Gray and William Collins, sought to achieve effects of wildness and obscurity in their descriptive style and abrupt transitions, as well as to render the wildness, vastness, and obscurity of the sublime objects they described. Authors of Gothic novels exploited the sublimity of delightful horror both in the natural and architectural settings of their narratives and in the actions and events that they narrated. Samuel H. Monk, a pioneer historian of the sublime in the eighteenth century, cites as the "apotheosis" of the natural sublime the description of Simplón Pass in Wordsworth's The Prelude (1805), 4.554 ff.:The immeasurable height
Of woods decaying, never to be decayed,
The stationary blasts of waterfalls,
And everywhere along the hollow rent
Winds thwarting winds, bewildered and forlorn,
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,
Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light...
In an extended analysis of the sublime in his Critique of Judgment (1790),the philosopher Immanuel Kant divided the sublime objects specified by Burkeand other earlier theorists into two kinds: (1) the "mathematical sublime" encompassesthe sublime of magnitude—of vastness in size or seeming limitlessness or infinitude in number. (2) The "dynamic sublime" encompasses the objects conducive to terror at our seeming helplessness before the overwhelming power of nature, provided that the terror is rendered pleasurable by the safe situation of the observer. All of Kant's examples of sublimity are scenes and events in the natural world: "the immeasurable host" of starry systems such as the Milky Way, "shapeless mountain masses towering one above the other in wild disorder," "volcanoes in all their violence of destruction, hurricanes leaving desolation in their track, the boundless ocean rising with rebellious force, the high waterfall of some mighty river." Kant maintains, however, that the sublimity resides "not in the Object of nature" itself, but "only in the mind of the judging Subject" who contemplates the object. In a noted passage he describes the experience of sublimity as a rapid sequence of painful blockage and pleasurable release—"the feeling of a momentary check to the vital forces followed at once by a discharge all the more powerful." In the mathematical sublime, the mind is checked by its inadequacy to comprehend as a totality the boundlessness or seeming infinity of natural magnitudes, and in the dynamic sublime, it is checked by its helplessness before the seeming irresistibility of natural powers. But the mind then goes on to feel exultation at the recognition of its inherent capacity to think a totality in a way that transcends "every standard of sense/' or else at its discovery within ourselves of a capacity for resistance which "gives us courage to be able to measure ourselves against the seeming omnipotence of nature." In Kant's view, the ability to experience the sublime exemplifies on the one hand the limitations and weakness of finite humanity, but on the other hand its "preeminence over nature," even when confronted by the "immeasurability" of nature's magnitude and the "irresistibility" of its might.
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