this; anyone who has experienced real fear for any length of time beyond the split-second will know how it commands your rapt and exclusive attention). So it would be impossible to appreciate the Sublime if one were, say, hanging by a handhold from a cliff-face. But if you came just near enough to a waterfall or a cliff-edge to suggest to your imagination the possibility of self-destruction, then you would feel a sublime rush. It was the suggestion of harm, melded with the knowledge that no harm was likely to come, which induced this delightful terror: the improbable parading as the possible. The English physician and philosopher David Hartley, writing in 1749, put it succinctly: ‘If there be a precipice, a cataract, a mountain of snow etc. in one part of the scene, the nascent ideas of fear and horror magnify and enliven all the other ideas, and by degrees pass into pleasures, by suggesting the security from pain.’
Burke’s smartly written treatise gave a verbal form and an intellectual respectability to the inchoate experiences which we saw John Dennis struggling to articulate seventy years earlier. Once Burke had coded the sublime – had provided a portfolio of words and ideasupon which the intellectual public at large could draw – it percolated quickly through the wider imagination. After
A Philosophical Enquiry
, no forest could be but dark and gloomy, no range of peaks but icy and majestic. Certain adjectives – sublime, awful, dreadful – became inseparably wedded to certain nouns – mountains, oceans, chasms. Philosophers and aestheticians across Europe turned their prodigious attentions to the question of the Sublime, and as a concept it began to sprawl in a suitably chaotic and ungovernable way across the neat partitions of classical aesthetics.
Burke didn’t originate the concept of the Sublime; it had been around since the Greek rhetorician Longinus wrote his treatise
Peri Hupsous
, or
On the Sublime,
in the third century AD, and interest in the Sublime had subsequently been reinvigorated by Boileau’s French translation of
Peri Hupsous
in 1674. But Longinus and his intellectual descendants had been concerned with the Sublime as a literary effect: how language, not landscape, could be lofty, grand or inspiring. What Burke did was to divert this pre-existent interest in grandness on to the experience of the eighteenth-century’s newest of pleasures, the natural landscape. His famous little book provided a new lens through which wilderness could be viewed and appreciated. He gave previously vague and undistinguished forms of awe a local habitation (oceans, deserts, mountains, ice-caps) and a name (the Sublime).
The eighteenth-century rage for the Sublime not only transformed the way people perceived and wrote about landscapes, but also the way they behaved around them. When previously wildernesses had been shunned, now they were sought out as arenas of intense experience: places you could be temporarily disconcerted, or presented with the illusion of menace. ‘I must have torrents, rocks, pines, dead forest, mountains, rugged paths to go up and down, precipices beside me to frighten me,’ remarked Jean-Jacques Rousseau in 1785, ‘for the odd thing about my liking for precipitous places is that they make me giddy, and I enjoy this giddiness greatly, provided that I am safelyplaced.’ The French writer Jacques Cambry would wait for violent sea storms to blow in to the Breton coast, before going to stand on the brink of a sea-cliff. ‘You think you can feel the earth quaking,’ he wrote ecstatically, ‘you flee instinctively; all your faculties are seized by a stunned feeling, fear, and inexplicable agitation.’
The Sublime provided a new impulse for eighteenth-century tourism. Instead of visiting the classical site, increasing numbers of tourists chose to spend their holidays tripping from cliff-top to glacier to volcano – from sublime sight to sublime sight. The ruins of mountains competed
Burke’s smartly written treatise gave a verbal form and an intellectual respectability to the inchoate experiences which we saw John Dennis struggling to articulate seventy years earlier. Once Burke had coded the sublime – had provided a portfolio of words and ideasupon which the intellectual public at large could draw – it percolated quickly through the wider imagination. After
A Philosophical Enquiry
, no forest could be but dark and gloomy, no range of peaks but icy and majestic. Certain adjectives – sublime, awful, dreadful – became inseparably wedded to certain nouns – mountains, oceans, chasms. Philosophers and aestheticians across Europe turned their prodigious attentions to the question of the Sublime, and as a concept it began to sprawl in a suitably chaotic and ungovernable way across the neat partitions of classical aesthetics.
Burke didn’t originate the concept of the Sublime; it had been around since the Greek rhetorician Longinus wrote his treatise
Peri Hupsous
, or
On the Sublime,
in the third century AD, and interest in the Sublime had subsequently been reinvigorated by Boileau’s French translation of
Peri Hupsous
in 1674. But Longinus and his intellectual descendants had been concerned with the Sublime as a literary effect: how language, not landscape, could be lofty, grand or inspiring. What Burke did was to divert this pre-existent interest in grandness on to the experience of the eighteenth-century’s newest of pleasures, the natural landscape. His famous little book provided a new lens through which wilderness could be viewed and appreciated. He gave previously vague and undistinguished forms of awe a local habitation (oceans, deserts, mountains, ice-caps) and a name (the Sublime).
The eighteenth-century rage for the Sublime not only transformed the way people perceived and wrote about landscapes, but also the way they behaved around them. When previously wildernesses had been shunned, now they were sought out as arenas of intense experience: places you could be temporarily disconcerted, or presented with the illusion of menace. ‘I must have torrents, rocks, pines, dead forest, mountains, rugged paths to go up and down, precipices beside me to frighten me,’ remarked Jean-Jacques Rousseau in 1785, ‘for the odd thing about my liking for precipitous places is that they make me giddy, and I enjoy this giddiness greatly, provided that I am safelyplaced.’ The French writer Jacques Cambry would wait for violent sea storms to blow in to the Breton coast, before going to stand on the brink of a sea-cliff. ‘You think you can feel the earth quaking,’ he wrote ecstatically, ‘you flee instinctively; all your faculties are seized by a stunned feeling, fear, and inexplicable agitation.’
The Sublime provided a new impulse for eighteenth-century tourism. Instead of visiting the classical site, increasing numbers of tourists chose to spend their holidays tripping from cliff-top to glacier to volcano – from sublime sight to sublime sight. The ruins of mountains competed
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