Caroline van Eck, ‘Longinus’s essay on the sublime and the

text © the authors 2006

Caroline van Eck, ‘Longinus’s essay on the sublime and the “Most Solemn and Awfull Appearance” of Hawksmoor’s churches’, The Georgian Group Journal, Vol. xV, 2006, pp. 1–7

According to still wide-spread prejudice, theEnglish did not produce any architectural

theory before the advent of neo-Palladianism after. No theory accounted for the idiosyncraticEnglish Baroque, distinguished by personal handlingof the classical style. For instance, Hawksmoorcovered the entire façade of St Mary Woolnoth withrustication, instead of limiting it to the ground floor,where it would otherwise have expressed strengthand the uncouth character of the users andinhabitants of such floors: soldiers, peasants andcraftsmen.Hawksmoor also enlarged normal andunobtrusive elements of the classical style so thatthey were not recognisable as building elements, butinstead came very close to abstract sculpture. Suchelements are no longer integrated and subordinatedinto a larger whole as the laws of classical designdictate. In St George-in-the-East the keystones,though outsized, still perform a structural functionby keeping the stones of the vault over the door inplace. But the giant keystones on the ground floor ofthe north façade of St George, Bloomsbury, have noconstructive function, because they do not keep avault in place. Through their size they transform thedoor frame into an abstract form, like Michelangelo’sMannerist extravaganzas in the Biblioteca Laurenziana.Hawksmoor’s work is also distinguished by what hecalled ‘Emminencys’, conspicuous towers and otherornaments on the roof-line, and his work in the Cityof London can now be recognised by the highlyindividual spires of the post-Fire churches.

Architectural historians have always found itdifficult to deal with this phase of British architecture.Sir John Summerson, still the most influentialhistorian of English architecture in this period,explained Hawksmoor’s plans as a visual conundrum.In Hawksmoor’s churches Summerson detected anunresolved conflict between Gothic dynamic axialityfor a Christian liturgical orientation on the one hand,and a classical, square and static plan on the other.

In Christ Church, Spitalfields, for instance, theunderlying square plan is marked by the four maincolumns in the aisle, which provide the visual andconstructional orientation point in an interior whichis otherwise axial. This way of looking at Hawksmoor’schurches was useful in drawing attention to onepuzzling aspect of their design; but it did not explainthat puzzle. It also suffers from the absence of anyindication that Hawksmoor or his contemporariesthought about their designs in such terms. Morerecently, Vaughan Hart has shown how elements orparts of Hawksmoor’s designs can be traced back toexamples in treatises or pattern books, but this doesnot explain his aesthetic either.

Summerson’s defence was that there is so littleseventeenth-century evidence of what architectsthought: there are no treatises, only a few scatteredremarks by Hawksmoor, Vanbrugh and Wren, andvery little contemporary comment, most of itunfavourable. But there is one treatise on compositionthat was widely translated and read in Britain duringthe entire seventeenth and eighteenth centuries –

T H E G E O R G I A N G R O U P � J O U R N A L V O L U M E X V

LONGINUS’S ESSAY ON THE SUBLIME ANDTHE ‘MOST SOLEMN AND AWFULL

APPEARANCE’ OF HAWKSMOOR’S CHURCHES

C A R O L I N E V A N E C K

composition and style be of relevance forunderstanding the idiosyncracies of Baroquearchitects like Hawksmoor? In the first place wehave abundant evidence, collected recently bySophie Ploeg, that many persons involved in themajor building programme of the English Baroquewere familiar with Longinus. A number of theCommissioners of the Fifty New Churches possessedone or more versions of Longinus or were closelyacquainted with one or more of his translators. AndVanbrugh, himself a Commissioner as well as a closeassociate of Hawksmoor, wrote a memorandum onchurch design that shows awareness of the Sublimeaesthetic. He recommended, for instance, that ‘theReverend look of a Temple it self [. . .] shou’d everhave the most Solemn and Awfull Appearance bothwithout and within, that is possible’.

Secondly, Longinus’s language uses visualimagery and even architectural metaphor to illustratehis points. This visuality is stressed and evenelaborated in the English translations whichVanbrugh and his circle may have known. That initself makes it a congenial document for architectsand those thinking about architectural design. Longinus defined the supreme quality of what

we now call the sublime in intensely visual terms.These have been somewhat obscured by the generalacceptance of Boileau’s translation as ‘le sublime’.But his English translations, more faithful to theoriginal, called it ‘the Height of Eloquence’, in itselfa visual metaphor. As John Hall put it, ‘Heightwhenever it seasonably breaks forth, bears down allbefore it like a whirlwind, and presently evidencesthe strength and ability of the speaker’. ‘Evidences’is also a visual term, etymologically derived fromvidere, to see. In the previous sentence he hadcompared the structure of a speech to the fabric ofarchitecture:

And when the vivacity of Invention, the harmony andorder of Disposition cannot be discerned out of one ortwo clauses, but difficultly make themselves appear agenerall Survey of the whole fabrick.

Longinus’s On the sublime. The attribution to thethird-century Cassius Longinus was in fact a guessmade in Byzantine times, but followed by Boileauand later by Gibbon. The manuscript refers once toDionysius Longinus, and once to Dionysius orLonginus. The other Byzantine guess was the first-century Dionysius of Halicarnassus, andchronological hints in the text suggest at least thatthis was the right date.His treatise was translatedinto French by Boileau in , but one Englishtranslation and a number of Latin and Greekeditions had been published in England earlier. Evenbefore these had appeared, Longinus was quoted byGeorge Chapman, the translator of Homer, in his OnTranslating and Defending Homer of , andLonginus’s treatise had been included in Milton’sideal curriculum for the Christian poet in –. The first English translation was by John Hall

(–), a Cambridge-educated pamphlet writerfor Cromwell. He died attempting to cure his obesityby eating pebbles, while working on a translation ofProcopius’s Buildings. His translation of Longinus,published in , is stylistically the best, and has apreface in which he calls eloquence

. . . a distilling our notions into a Quintessence orforming all our thoughts in a Cone, and smiting withthe Point . . . ‘tis Empire wholly commanding, yetnever to be commanded.

Four other English translations followed Boileau’s,but all preceded Burke’s famous treatise on thesublime. The first was an anonymous Essay on theSublime. Translated from the Greek of DionysiusLonginus Cassius, the Rhetorician. Compar’d withthe French of the sieur Despreaux-Boileau, publishedin Oxford in . In the same year John Pulteney’swas published in London. Leonard Wellsted’sDionysius Longinus’ Treatise on the Sublime.Translated from the Greek, was published in .William Smith’s Dionysius Longinus On the Sublime,saw the light in London in .Why would a late classical treatise on prose

L O N G I N U S ’ S E S S A Y O N T H E S U B L I M E


And, to obtain a sense of the degree to which theseearly English translations stress and elaborateLonginus’s visual metaphors, I will also quote thestandard modern translation by D.A. Russell:

The combination and variety of its sounds convey thespeaker’s emotions to the minds of those around himand make the hearers share them. It fits great thoughtsinto a coherent structure by the way in which it buildsup patterns of words.

Longinus also offered an approach to compositiondifferent to the architectural treatises of theRenaissance, but not so different to Hawksmoor’s.Whereas Summerson’s analysis and Hart’scomparisons and parallels can only account for someof the elements of Hawksmoor’s buildings, Longinus’sadvice accounts for his handling of them, for instancehis oversizing them or using them out of theirstructural context. None of the architectural treatises,neither Vitruvius, nor his Renaissance successors,Alberti, Serlio, Palladio and Vignola, offer advice oncomposition. What they offer instead is instructionin the correct handling of the classical orders, theornaments derived from them and their dimensionsand proportions; and they offer more general ruleson how to give proportion to a building. They startfrom the parts of a building, for instance the basicmodule that will relate all proportions to each other,and they do not often discuss the composition of abuilding as a whole. These instructions are helpfulwhen analysing Palladio’s or Bramante’s buildings,which obey their rules. But they are not much usewhen dealing with Hawksmoor’s buildings, in whichindividual elements are not strange, but theirhandling and combination with other elements areidiosyncratic.However, Longinus (and indeed the entire

classical rhetorical tradition) offered a definition ofcomposition, concepts with which to achieve andanalyse it, and often used architectural comparisonsto illustrate it. Cicero’s and Quintilian’s concept ofcomposition was used by Alberti, but in his treatise

Similarly he evoked the overwhelming effect of sublimeeloquence by comparing it with the light of the sun:

For see how like a small gleam approach’t by the sunin its full lustre presently disappears, so the sophistryof rhetoric is wholly overshadowed, being socircumfused and covered by Height. Not unlike this isan observation we find in pictures; for after that Linesare drawn upon a plain and colours laid on andshadowed and enlivened, thrust in the light [that]projects a pleasant brightnesse, which is so much themore visible by how much you nearer approach it:even so Heights and Passions of speech neighbouringto our souls, as knit thereunto by a straight allyance,outshine the figures, and only stand in sight,overshadowing their art and clouding it in obscurity.

This use of visual analogy also extends to Longinus’sviews on life in general. Life is a theatre, in whichman is both a spectator and a performer. In thewords of the anonymous translation of :

. . . Nature has not design’d Man to be a Creature of alow Rank, of an ignoble Standard, but has given him Life,and brought him into the world, as unto a great Theatre,like a curious Observer of all that passes in it; and notonly so, but on this mighty stage, to be an high-spiritedactor, breathing after nothing but glory and renown.

This visualisation often specifically takes on anarchitectural character, for instance when Longinusdiscusses composition:

What then may we not say of composition? Which is theHarmony of Speech, the use whereof is natural to man?Which does not only strike the ear, but penetrates themind, which masters up such different words, thoughts,things, and Elegancies suitable to the affections of thesoul, which by a Mixture and Variety of pleasingsounds, crept into the mind, does create in him whohears them, the same passions that the Author himselfhas; and which [rests] upon this stately pile of wordswhich the noble Structure of loftinesse . . .

Compare Hall’s version:

… by mixing and moulding their sounds disposes thepassion of the speaker, and infects all near him, and byall this adding magnificence to the structure of words,and raizing them up to glory and majesty.



Longinus makes the similarity between prosecomposition and architectural design even morestrongly:

But these men . . . choosing the most illustrious thingsthat have been said, and knitting them according totheir severall worths into one piece, produc’d nothingthat was swelling, unbecoming or Pedantick. For suchthings infect the whole like washes, but great Buildingsare raised up by the correspondence of parts onetowards another.

There is one passage in Longinus on sublime

on painting, De Pictura of . Quintilian, in anoften quoted passage, alluded to architecture toillustrate dispositio, or what subsequently was calledcomposition:

But just as it is not sufficient for those who are erectinga building merely to collect stone and timber and otherbuilding materials, but skilled masons are required toarrange and place them, so in speaking, howeverabundant the matter may be, it will merely form aconfused heap unless arrangement [dispositio] beemployed to reduce it to order and give it connectionand firmness of structure.



Fig. . NicholasHawksmoor,St Anne Limehouse,London (–).Sophie Ploeg.

[…] What they [Homer, Sappho and Demosthenes]have done is to clean up, as it were, the very best of themain points, and to fit them together, allowing nothingaffected or undignified or pedantic to intervene. Thesethings ruin the whole, by introducing, as it were, gapsand crevices into masses which are built together,walled in by their mutual relationships.

This immediately recalls the careful ordering ofconflicting façades in St Anne Limehouse (Fig. ), asSophie Ploeg has shown, or the abrupt transitionsand close massing of St Mary Woolnoth (Fig. ).

composition that directly brings to mind Hawksmoor’sarchitectural composition. Longinus definedcomposition as the union of conflicting orcontradictory elements. Here is his analysis of adescription of Odysseus’ shipwreck in the Iliad.

Moreover, by forcing into an abnormal unionprepositions not usually compounded he [Homer] hastortured his language into conformity with theimpending disaster, magnificently figured the disasterby the compression of his language, and almoststamped on the diction the precise form of the danger.



Fig. . St Mary,Woolnoth(–).Anonymous th-centuryphotograph.

issue that Longinus which addresses in his treatise.Like so many rhetorical handbooks and treatises, itoffers strategies and precepts of invention – how tocompose a speech, how to move and persuade theaudience, which figures of speech to use, and so on.At the same time, these function also as strategies ofinterpretation for the reader, the public or thebeholder. Longinus tells us how to achieve thesublime in our writings, in particular by his adviceon composition, uniting the discordant, for instance,or the abrupt; but he does so by showing us theeffects of sublime speech and poetry on the reader.In this consideration of the effects of composition onthe public, he came very close to what we know ofHawksmoor’s design practice. Hawksmoor wasevidently interested in the effect of a building on thespectator. In his mature work he often addedcoloured flaps that would allow the viewer to form anidea of the different appearances a building couldtake on under varying conditions of day light.This is also shown by one of his earliest

drawings, for St Mary’s, Warwick, in which hesignificantly departs from seventeenth-centurypractice in showing his design by means of drawingsof the ground plan and façade in an orthogonalrepresentation.Orthogonal projection waspreferred to linear perspective because it allows theexact calculation of all dimensions. It shows abuilding as actually approached—frontally; whereaslinear perspective shows it from one particular angle,a necessarily individual perspective. Hawksmoorchose not the traditional, strongly mathematical andanalytical techniques of orthogonal projection andlinear perspective, but a view of the whole touchedby the sun, creating light and shadow, projectionsand recesses, clear and obscure parts. Just as aspectator would view the façade as a whole on aparticular day, just so Longinus tells us in a passagethat caused his English translators to indulge inflights of visual metaphor: the blazing light of thesublime obscures the minor eloquence of isolatedfigures of speech.

There is no direct evidence that Hawksmoor orVanbrugh had read Longinus. But the introductionof Longinus to seventeenth-century Britain offered anew way of thinking about art, and in particularcomposition. Formerly relations between poetry andthe visual arts had been conceived mainly in terms ofut pictura poesis. The availability of Longinusacquainted readers with another relationshipbetween the visual arts and poetry, presentingcomposition in visual and verbal terms on the onehand, and, on the other, defining the sublime itself invisual terms. The translations of Longinus also introduced a

novel aesthetic concept : the sublime. The concept isdiscernible in Milton’s Paradise Lost, but beforethe English translations of Longinus the sublimeaesthetic was not part of the English architecturalvocabulary. Vanbrugh’s plea for solemn and awefulappearances in church design may be heir to atradition of appreciating Gothic for its sombre,imposing grandeur, but it had not been used in thecontext of classical church design before Longinuswas reintroduced. His treatise inspired an aestheticunlike those of Alberti or Palladio, who had stressedharmony, simplicity, clarity and perspicuity.Longinus, and in his wake Vanbrugh and Hawksmoor,appreciated the intricate, the difficult, the dark andthe aweful. Architecture, as Sir Christopher Wrenwould put it, ‘aims at eternity’. It should impressthe beholder and inspire awe.In this interest in the impact of buildings on their

beholders British writing on architecture of theseventeenth century is unique. Continental writing,and in particular the Renaissance architecturaltreatises, concentrates on the architectural objectitself. But Vanbrugh and Hawksmoor are concernedwith the impression a building makes on thespectator. The memorandum which Vanbrugh wrotefor the Fifty New Churches Commission stressed theimportance of a solemn and awful appearance, notthe intrinsic qualities of the buildings themselves.The effect of a text on the reader is precisely the



Hall, op. cit., lxxi. Longinus, ‘On the Sublime’, , , in Russell andWinterbottom, op. cit., .

Quintilian, Institutio oratoria [On the Education ofthe Orator], translated by H.E. Butler, Cambridge(Mass.) and London, –, VII, Proeemium,–.

Hall, op. cit., xxiv. Longinus, On the Sublime, translated by W.H. Fyfe,revised by D. Russell, Cambridge (Mass.) andLondon, , Section X, –.

Sophie Ploeg, ‘Staged Experiences: the churchdesigns of Nicholas Hawksmoor’, in: Caroline A.van Eck and Edward Winters (eds.), Dealing withthe Visual. Art History, Aesthetics and VisualCulture, Aldershot, , –.

There are four aspects of the relations betweenMilton’s poem and Hawksmoor’s building: thesublime subject matter of the epic (when Drydenand Addison called Milton ‘sublime’ they had thisin mind); sublime style (e.g. the use of abrupt anddaring juxtapositions, something shared by bothartists, and very prominent in Satan’s speeches);the effect of the sublime on the reader or viewer(achieved by Milton’s vivid descriptions and larger-than-life subject, again something for which we canfind parallels in Hawksmoor’s inflation of classicalelements); and the role of architecture in ParadiseLost.

Sir Christopher Wren, ‘Tract I’, in Lydia Soo (ed.),Wren’s ‘Tracts’ on Architecture and Other Writings,Cambridge and New York, , .

Van Eck, op. cit., in particular ‘The Nature ofArchitecture’ and ‘Architecture and the Other Arts’,–, –, – and .

Kerry Downes, Hawksmoor, London, , .

A C K N O W L E D G E M E N T S

I am very grateful to the Dutch Foundation ofScientific Research (NWO) for their support of theresearch on which this essay is based, and to SophiePloeg for her photograph and for allowing me to usematerial from her unpublished PhD thesis.

N O T E S

A pun that can only be made in Dutch: ‘onbehouwen’ John Summerson, Georgian London,Harmondsworth, [], –.

Vaughan Hart, Nicholas Hawksmoor. RebuildingAncient Wonders, New Haven and London, ,–.

D.A. Russell and M. Winterbottom (eds.), AncientLiterary Criticism. The principal texts in newtranslations, Oxford, , –.

John Hall, Peri hupsous, Or, Dionysius Longinuson the Height of Eloquence. Rendered out of theOriginall by J.H., London [n.p.], .

Sophie Ploeg, Staged Experiences. Architecture andRhetoric in the Architecture and Theory of Sir HenryWotton, Nicholas Hawksmoor and Sir John Vanbrugh,PhD thesis, University of Groningen, .

Caroline A. van Eck (ed.), British ArchitecturalTheory –: an anthology of texts, Aldershot,, –, ‘Mr Van-Brugg’s Proposals aboutBuilding ye New Churches’ ().

Hall, op. cit., iii. Idem.

Ibid., xl. [Anonymous], An Essay on the Sublime. Translated

from the Greek of Dionysius Longinus Cassius, theRhetorician, Oxford, , .

[John Pulteney], A Treatise of the Loftiness orElegancy of Speech. Written originally in Greek ...and now translated out of French by Mr J.P.,London, [], .



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Caroline van Eck, ‘Longinus’s essay on the sublime and the