The sublime: does it arise from terror, as Burke argued, or from grandeur and elevation of conception?

Hugh Blair, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

Sublimity is the effect of grandeur — vastness, power, elevation of thought — and terror is one occasional source among several, not the principle.1 In writing it arises from a great conception expressed with simplicity and force, and it is destroyed by ornament.234

Sources

  1. I distinguish these two things from one another, the gran- deur of the objects themselves when they are presented to the eye, and the description of that grandeur in discourse or writing; though most critics, inaccurately Ithink, blend them together; and I con- sider grandeur and sublimity as terms synonymous, or nearly so.
    Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres
  2. The descriptions of the Deity, in them, are wonderfully noble; both from the grandeur of the ob- ject and the manner of representing it What an assemblage, for instance, of awful and sublime ideas is presented to us, in that pas- sage of the xviiith psalm, where an appearance of the Almighty is described: " In my distress I called upon the Lord; he heard my "voice out of his temple, an-J my cry came before him.
    Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres
  3. Helmets are cleft on " high: blood bursts, and smoke around. As the troubled noise " of the ocean when roll the waves on high; as the last peal of the " thunder of heaven; such is the noise of battle. The groan of " the people spreads over the hills.
    Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres
  4. Let winds and seas, loud wars at freedom wage, And waste upon themselves their empty rage; A stronger, mightier demon is thy friend, Thou, and thy bark, on Caesar's fate depend. Tbou stand'st amaa'd to view this dreadful scene, Andwonder'st what the gods and fortune mean;. But artfully their bounties thus they raise, And from my danger arrogate new praise Amidst the fears of death they bid me Hva.
    Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres

Where the argument is made

  • Lectures III-IV (sublimity in objects and in writing), and the Ossianic examples throughout

How the argument was received

Argued against Burke, courteously and without naming him at every turn.