Chapter 6: Critical Decision

And it is possible, my friend, if among our first requirements we have a kind of pure knowledge and critical decision of what sublimity in truth is. It is surely difficult; decision about speeches and writings is the final result of much experiment. But no, in fact—to say something by way of pronouncement—it is not beyond our capacity to make a diagnosis of these matters from what follows in this essay.

Commentary

pure knowledge and critical decision: On the assumption that knowledge is free from fault, Longinus can ·call it “pure,” the same epithet used to des­cribe the style of Hyperides (33.1). There is a Stoic definition of “knowledge” (quoted almost verbatim by Philo [On the Preliminary Studies 144 ff.]): “an apprehension that is safe and sure, not to be faulted by logos” (Fragments, ed. von Arnim, l.73, 2.93 ff.). For the differ­ence between knowledge and “tech­nique,” see ch. 2, n. on technique.

Esthetic theory is not metaphysical knowledge, and so Longinus here qual­ifies his sentence with “a kind of.” Still, the claim made here is—from the point of view expressed by contemporary “cul­ tural relativists”-extreme: a) there is such a thing as “true sublimity”; b) we can reach a kind of “scientific” knowl­edge of it; c) the method for doing so is “critical decision.” Just what the details of the method are Longinus will con­ sider at length, starting in ch. 8.

From the Greek word here translated as “decision” we derive our words “critic” and “criticism.” Criticism as a separate literary activity arose late in antiquity, as it did also in English cul­ture; the sequence seems to be: I) the work of art and the artists; 2) the gram­marians or philologians (in the more pedantic sense of that much maligned word); 3) the literary critics, who see themselves as concerned not only with exegesis of the words and prosody but also with the whole conceptual and philosophic context of the work of art. The distinction in (3) was made in antiquity: for the references see Russell’s note ad lac.

There does not seem to have been a cult of criticism itself as an art form in antiquity: Longinus, though, would exemplify such criticism. In English culture, the treatment of criticism as a separate genre began with Pater and Wilde. For an early English statement of the job of the “grammarian” (i.e., critic), see Elyot’s The Book Named the Governor, where Elyot, following Quintilian Bk. I, esp. 8.13-21, says:

I name him a grammarian, by the authority of Quintilian, that speaking … elegantly, can ex­ pound good authors, expressing the invention and disposition of the matter, the style or form of excellence, explicating the figures as well of sentences as words, leav­ing nothing, person or place named by the author, undeclared or hid from his scholars (1.15).

Elyot corresponds to stage (2) listed above. Sidney’s Defence of Poesie, with its exalted justification of poetry itself and its brief analytic comments on the various genres, raises our expectation of what criticism might become; but Sid­ney’s attempt to reconcile neo-classical rules and divine inspiration is compli­cated by his mixing of Hellenic and Hebraic divine powers: either we have to grant him that the Christian God inspired Homer no less than Dante or question his theology, and either way the problems raised are at least as great as those solved. Longinus, with the more fluid theology of paganism, avoid­ ed this difficulty.

Modern criticism may be said to begin with Dryden, who, in the preface to his opera The State of Innocence, based on Paradise Lost, described it thus:

Criticism, as it was first instituted by Aristotle, was meant a standard of judging well; the chiefest part of which is to observe those excel­ lencies which should delight a reasonable reader.

It was thus that criticism developed in the eighteenth century: what it was like in the judgment of a non-professional can be seen in the summary given by Gibbon (see ch. 9, introductory note). In neo-classical criticism, even after it was infused with Longinian principles, the practice-especially in Pope and Johnson-was usually better than the theory.

In the critical writings of Coleridge, we can see the Romantic attempt to adopt Longinus’ principle of intense emotion as the central and organic ele­ ment of art; Coleridge claims (Biogra­phia  Literaria, ch. 7) that he has invent­ed the word “intensify” (for a discussion of the neo-classic and Romantic views, see M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Criti­cal Tradition [New York: Oxford Uni­versity Press, 1953]). With Matthew Arnold, English criticism verges on what we call “cultural history”; Arnold said that literature was a “criticism of life” (in “Joubert,” Lectures and Essays in Criticism, ed. R. H. Super [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962, p. 209]), a metaphor which pro­ duces its striking effect by inverting the terms: where, in Elizabethan times, art was to hold the mirror up to nature (Hamlet 3.2), and where criticism was applied to art, now art becomes the crit­icism of that which engendered it and of which it is the reflection. Arnold wrote, “Literary criticism’s most important function is to try books as to the influence which they are calculated to have upon the general culture of single nations or of the world at large” (“The Bishop and the Philosopher,” Lectures and Essays in Criticism, p. 41).

The writings of T. S. Eliot and Robert Graves mark the beginnings of what is called “New Criticism”; today, offshoot movements dispute about ter­ minology, and methodology proliferates: Helen Gardner’s book The Busi­ ness of Criticism contains a summary of the modern movements from the point of view of a modern “historical” critic. Her definition embraces the notions of Longinus, Quintilian, Dryden, and Arnold:

The primary critical act is a judge­ment, the decision that a certain piece of writing has significance and value. It asserts a hold in some way upon my intellect, which entertains the propositions which it makes. It appeals through my senses and imagination to my capacity to recognize order and harmony and to be delighted by them. It appeals to my experience as a human being, to my con­ science and moral life.

the result of much experiment: the key word is “experiment,” though it is uni­ versally translated “experience.” The Greeks, however, carefully distinguish­ ed between “experiment (peira)”—an active testing—and “experience (em­peiria)”—acquaintance with. Part of the difficulty arises because English “experience” can cover both. Experi­mentation was the concern of the serious student, like Terentianus. The word “experience” indicates what comes to men from the normal and rather casual activities of life. Thus Dio Cassius (8.36.14) says of a speaker that he spoke out of his inborn sense and his “expe­rience of old age,” a context in which “experimentation” could not, of course, be used. The late rhetoricians used Aris­totelian distinctions of knowledge, tech­nique, and experience in order to defend rhetoric as a technique. Troilus the Sophist, for example (Rabe, pp. 44-45), leaning heavily on Aristotle (Metaphys­ics 98Ia5 ff.), says that experience is a rubbing or contact that enables us to observe how things work in a non­ theoretical and non-systematic way.

“Experiment,” however, is an attempt or trial, i.e., a deliberate testing. Hence, at the end of ch. 1, Longinus says that Terentianus could make many of the points from his own experimenting, that is, from his deliberate attempts to understand the whole by means of test­ing each of the parts systematically. John Doxopatres, a very late comment­ator on Apthonius (Rabe, p. 111), says that experiment is a form of under­standing, by means of parts. The con­text implies systematic analysis and hence experiment, not merely experience. Longinus himself conjoins “pure knowledge” and “critical decision” in this chapter as preliminaries to judg­ment.

When Longinus says that discrimi­nating judgment is the creation of long experiment, the word “experiment” signifies systematic and deliberate understanding of this kind. In Aristotelian terms, a man who had experience of literature could tell what was good but not why; a man who had engaged in experimentation would be on the way to telling why.

but no, in fact: a complex mixture of tones. If critical judgment comes only with much experiment, after years of reading and re-reading, to see whether a book “holds up” (as we say), then of what value is a critical essay? Longinus, with his usual witty awareness of him­ self, sees the point, and at once defends his “speech” on the sublime. To do so he uses the musing negative asserva­tion, “But no, in fact,” which in Greek shows the speaker to be aware that his previous statement is in need of some radical-though not destructive­ qualification.

diagnosis: what Longinus offers to teach is “diagnosis,” an English word simply transliterated from the Greek. As usual, Longinus exploits the nuances of his diction. By means of critical deci­sion, of judicious verification based on a diagnosis made in accordance with the principles which Longinus is about to lay down, a reader will be in a position to judge what is good and bad in speeches and writings.