Abstract
The tradition of eighteenth-century criticism that concerned itself with the sublime in art was neo-classical in origin, and derived from an anonymous Greek rhetorical treatise of the first century called Perì hýpsous, attributed by convention to ‘Longinus’. Edmund Burke refers directly, though with evident reservation, to the ‘incomparable discourse upon a part of this subject’ by ‘Longinus’ in the 1757 preface to the Philosophical Enquiry. A considerable weight of textual evidence indicates that the principal influence on Burke’s thinking about the sublime was not Perì hýpsous, however, but the didactic poem De Rerum Natura by the Epicurean philosopher Lucretius. This chapter investigates the significance of a conspicuous allusion to Lucretius’s poem that reoccurs in Burke’s definitions of the sublime. The allusion is related in turn to two major excerpts from De Rerum Natura that Burke comments upon directly in the second edition of the Philosophical Enquiry. It is also related to the five important passages from the early books of John Milton’s Paradise Lost that Burke reads as illustrations of the sublime. The pattern of Lucretian allusion in Paradise Lost is well established in Milton scholarship, and it is striking that the passages Burke chooses feature two Lucretian themes – first, the physiological impressions made by light on the human eye; and second, the nature of the infinite void in which Lucretius’s universe of atoms is poised. The intelligence with which Burke extends this web of literary correspondence in his own readings of Milton and Lucretius indicates a deep engagement with Christian Epicureanism in his early thought.
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Notes
- 1.
See for example Neal Wood, “The Aesthetic Dimension of Burke’s Political Thought,” Journal of British Studies 4 (1964): 41–64; see also Burleigh Taylor Wilkins, The Problem of Burke’s Political Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 119–51, and James K. Chandler, Wordsworth’s Second Nature: A Study of the Poetry and Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 64–77.
- 2.
See Francis Canavan, The Political Reason of Edmund Burke (Durham: Duke University Press, 1960), 40–1; F.P. Lock, Edmund Burke, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1998–2006), 118–24.
- 3.
In the early stages of his career Burke was conscious that any opportunities for advancement he enjoyed ‘have been owing to some small degree of literary reputation’, and his unusual decision in 1775 to start publishing his parliamentary speeches as pamphlets shows how important his identity as a literary man remained to him; Burke to William Gerard Hamilton, March 1763, The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, ed. Thomas W. Copeland, 10 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958–1978), cited hereafter as Corr. i.165; cf. ibid., i.184.
- 4.
Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France: A Critical Edition, ed. J. C. D. Clark (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), hereafter cited as Burke, Reflections, [241], quoting Horace, De Arte Poetica, ll. 99–100.
- 5.
Burke, Reflections, (70–1).
- 6.
Burke told Edmond Malone that the treatise dated back to undergraduate exercises, and that he was ‘6 or 7 years employed on it’; if his claim in the 1757 preface that it was ‘4 years since this enquiry was finished’ is true, it makes my speculation plausible; Sir James Prior, The Life of Edmund Malone (London, 1860), 154; cf. Corr. viii.364 no.7.
- 7.
Corr. i.89.
- 8.
Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. J.T. Boulton (London: Routledge, 1957), cited hereafter as PE ii.iii.59, ii.iv.61–62, iii.xxv.122, v.vii.174–75; ii.xiv.80; for major quotations I will cite part and section numbers to the PE in roman numerals.
- 9.
PE i.xix.53.
- 10.
PE 34, 38, 64, 143, 158, 171–72; 12, 23, 60, 69, 173; 63, 65–66, 67, 68–69, 79.
- 11.
A summary of early scholarship on Milton and Lucretius is William B. Hunter, “Lucretius,” in A Milton Encyclopedia, ed. William B. Hunter, 9 vols. (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1978–1983), v.38–39; more recent treatments include Philip Hardie, “The Presence of Lucretius in Paradise Lost,” Milton Quarterly 29 (1995): 13–24; and John Leonard, “Milton, Lucretius, and ‘the Void Profound of Unessential Night,’” in Living Texts: Interpreting Milton, ed. Charles W. Durham and Kristin A. Pruitt (Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press, 2000), 198–217.
- 12.
It is significant that the second and most substantial of Burke’s two direct references to Longinus (PE ii.xvii.51) is absorbed into a passage on ‘Ambition’ that seems to paraphrase the egoistic ethics of the seventeenth-century Epicureans like the early Hobbes; see Christopher Tilmouth, Passion’s Triumph Over Reason: A History of the Moral Imagination from Spenser to Rochester (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 221–30, 274–80.
- 13.
Francis Bacon, The Essays, or Counsels Civil and Moral, ed. Brian Vickers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 4.
- 14.
David Hume, Essays Moral, Political and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1985), 138.
- 15.
For a Cambridge Epicurean on the absurdity of describing infinity in terms of human mensuration, see Edmund Law, An Enquiry into the Ideas of Space, Time, Immensity and Eternity (Cambridge, 1734), 95–129; for Burke on the illusion of infinity, see PE ii.viii.73; for Lucretius on optical illusions and simulacra see DRN iv.33–469 and passim.
- 16.
Michael Kearney, a university classmate of Burke’s, to Edmond Malone, 12 January 1799, Bodl. MS Malone 39, f.23, reporting that Burke “always answered remarkably well on Locke”; quoted by F.P. Lock, Edmund Burke, i.93.
- 17.
Locke’s opinion that for humans good is pleasure and pain is evil is stated most simply in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), II.xxviii.5, 351; for Locke’s hedonism in an Epicurean context, see Catherine Wilson, Epicureanism at the Origins of Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 207–16.
- 18.
With a punctilious footnote at [PE i.iii.34] he reminds the reader that Locke, by contrast, viewed pain and pleasure as mutually exclusive, and yet linked by a sort of causal contiguity, so that the removal of pain is itself a source of pleasure, and vice versa.
- 19.
Locke, Essay, II.xxi.62, 274–75; for the importance of the category of “uneasiness” see ibid., II.xxi.32, 251ff.
- 20.
Some similar distinction between pleasure and delight is perhaps implied by Locke at Essay II.xxi.43, 259.
- 21.
For a similar idiom cf. Corr. i. 78–79, “a melting tenderness tinged with sorrow”.
- 22.
PE i.v.37–38.
- 23.
Locke, Essay, II.xx.5, 230; cf. Thomas Hobbes, The Elements of the Law, Natural and Politic, ed. J. C. A. Gaskin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), “Human Nature,” IX.i, 51, where he argues that velleity is not a distinct class of pseudo-appetite.
- 24.
The works of the most prominent British Epicureans of the seventeenth century, Walter Charleton (for example Epicurus’ Morals: Collected and faithfully Englished, 1659) and Thomas Stanley (The History of Philosophy, the third and last volume, 1660), are not represented in Burke’s library catalogue, but accounts of modern Epicureanism were available to him in several volumes that he did own, for example “Reflexions sur la doctrine d’Epicure,” in the Ouevres of Charles de St. Evremond (item 471), Bayle’s article ‘Épicure’ in his Dictionaire (item 177), Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees (item 509), Montaigne’s essay ‘De L’Experience’ in the Essaies (item 309), or Abraham Cowley’s essay ‘Of Liberty’, in Bishop Sprat’s edition of his Works (item 208).
- 25.
“Epikouros Menoikei Charein,” in Epicurus: The Extant Remains, ed. Cyril Bailey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926), 80–93; see Howard Jones, The Epicurean Tradition (London: Routledge, 1989), 166–185, 198ff.; Catherine Wilson, Epicureanism at the Origins of Modernity, passim.; and Rochard Kroll, The Material World: Literate Culture in the Restoration and Early Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 85–111.
- 26.
Chareleton, “Apologie for Epicurus,” in Epicurus’s Morals, 22 [V.i.xi].
- 27.
Ibid., 26, corresponding with “Epikouros Menoikei Charein” ll.129.5–130.5; for Charleton and the French Epicurean tradition see Lindsay Sharp, “Walter Charleton’s Early Life, 1620–1659, and Relationship to Natural Philosophy in Mid-Seventeenth-Century England,” Annals of Science 30 (1973): 311–40; see also R. H. Kargon, “Walter Charleton, Robert Boyle, and the Acceptance of Epicurean Atomism in England,” Isis, 55 (1964): 184–92.
- 28.
De Rerum Natura iii.28–30.
- 29.
For the common milieu of Longinus and Lucretius see James I. Porter, “Lucretius and the Poetics of the Void,” in Le Jardin Romain: Epicurisme et Poésie à Rome. Mélanges offerts à Mayotte Bollack, ed. A. Monet (Villeneuve d’Ascq: Presses de l’Université Charles-de-Gaulle, 2003), 197–226.
- 30.
For a classic account of how the New Science departs from the Aristotelian system in which “a certain natural element naturally strives upwards, and another naturally strives downwards… [while] ‘up’ and ‘down’ possess their own fixed constitutions, their own specific physis,” see Ernest Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, trans. Mario Domandi (1963; Meneola: Dover Publications, 2000), 182; for the modern Epicurean attack on Aristotle’s physics see Lynn Sumida Joy, Gassendi the Atomist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 35–40, at 39.
- 31.
See Michael Lapidge, “Stoic Cosmology,” in The Stoics, ed. John M. Rist (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 161–85; for its contrast with Epicurean cosmology, see Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century: From the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 37–39; the locus classicus for the Stoic sublime is Seneca, Moral Epistles, 41.
- 32.
Longinus on the Sublime, trans. W. H. Fyfe, rev. D. Russell, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 185.
- 33.
PE i.xvii. 50–1; quoting Longinus on the Sublime, 179.
- 34.
The Critical Works of John Dennis, ed. Edward Niles Hooker, 2 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1939), i.250–1.
- 35.
Dennis, Critical Works, ii. 380; the passage is discussed by Marjorie Hope Nicholson in Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite (New York: Cornell University Press, 1963), 279.
- 36.
“Lucretius: Beginning of the Second Book,” ll. 1–4, 24–27, in The Poems of John Dryden, ed. Paul Hammond et al., 5 vols. (Longman: 1995–2005), ii. 312–14, trans. DRN ii. 1–4, 20–24.
- 37.
As Hammond notes l. 25 is Dryden’s addition (or rather transferal from DRN i. 76–77); for the reading of ‘nullas’ (rather than the conventional ‘multas’) in DRN ii. 22; see Paul Hammond, “The Integrity of Dryden’s Lucretius,” MLR 78 (1983): 1–23, at 6–9.
- 38.
PE i.xv.48.
- 39.
PE v.vi.172, quoting DRN i. 62–67 “When man’s life lay for all to see foully grovelling upon the ground, crushed beneath the weight of Superstition, which displayed her head from the regions of heaven, lowering over mortals with horrible aspect”.
- 40.
David Hume, “Natural History of Religion,” Four Dissertations (1757), 91, n.‘c’; cf. Ralph Cudworth, The True Intellectual System of the Universe, 2 vols., ed. Thomas Birch (1678; 2 ed., 1743), i.84; Edward Stillingfleet, Origines Sacrae: or, A Rational Account of the Grounds of Christian Faith (1662), 365.
- 41.
For a visual assessment of the image by a critic sometimes posited as an influence on Burke (see PE lxix–lxx), see Joseph Spence, who compares it with similar classical images of Ceres, Polymetis: or, an Enquiry concerning the Agreement between the Works of the Roman Poets, and the Remains of the Antient Artists (1747; 2nd ed. corrected, 1755), 103–4.
- 42.
Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, IV.ii.63–66 and IX.ii.40; see Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text (Oxford, 1979), 27–34, 130–34, and Linda Galyon, “Puttenham’s Enargeia and Energeia: New Twists for Old Terms,” Philological Quarterly 60 (1981): 29–40.
- 43.
Paradise Lost, book i, ll. 589–99.
- 44.
Joseph Addison, The Spectator no. 303, ed. Donald Bond (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965) iii.86; John Dennis, “Remarks on a Book Entituled, Prince Arthur,” The Critical Works of John Dennis, I, 107; the passage was also cited in a note to Smith’s translation of Longinus, 131; Writings and Speeches iii, 497; Writings and Speeches ix, 151.
- 45.
Jonathan Richardson, An Essay on the Theory of Painting (2nd ed., enlarg’d and corrected, 1725), “Of the Sublime,” 226–65, at 242.
- 46.
PE ii.xiv.80–1.
- 47.
Cf. a standard contemporary account of these difficulties by the Oxford theologian, John Ellis, The Knowledge of Divine Things from Revelation, not from Reason or Nature (1743), esp. 94–95.
- 48.
Lucretius, De Rerum, III.363–64.
- 49.
Lucretius, De Rerum, IV. 324–31; on Lucretius and the scientific sublime see James I. Porter, “Lucretius and the Sublime,” in Cambridge Companion to Lucretius, 167–84, at 169–72.
- 50.
PE ii.v.68.
- 51.
PE ii.viii.73.
- 52.
Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), I.i.5, 23–26.
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Bullard, P. (2012). Edmund Burke Among the Poets: Milton, Lucretius and the Philosophical Enquiry . In: Vermeir, K., Funk Deckard, M. (eds) The Science of Sensibility: Reading Burke's Philosophical Enquiry. International Archives of the History of Ideas / Archives internationales d'histoire des idées, vol 206. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2102-9_12
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