31. T. R. Henn, Longinus and English Criticism
This book is something much more exciting, and less utilitarian, than a history of the influence of Longinus on modern criticism. It is rather an attempt to relate his teaching to the ‘advanced’ criticism of the Cambridge Left Wing – the diagrammatic, psychological and ‘practical’ school. Mr Henn's task is to find parallels and equivalents by which the main conceptions of the De Sublimitate can be restated in terms acceptable to his skeptical and anti-romantic colleagues – a task, in some ways, analogous to that undertaken by the eighteenth century ‘imitators’ when they fitted passage after passage of Horace or Juvenal into the context of contemporary London. The work of transplanting is carried out by Mr Henn with much skill and judgement – witness his heroic and learned struggle with the 
σπερ νέφος passage on pp. 76 et seq. – and can always be followed with pleasure.
That we should always agree is not to be expected. I would disagree strongly with Mr Henn's view that the modern English sense of the word ‘sublime’ is a mere error. Surely it is rather a semantic development; the healthy linguistic tendency to differentiation taking over a word which, in Longinus, came dangerously near to meaning good writing of any sort whatever, and enriching our vocabulary by narrowing and deepening it till it means one only of the many kinds of excellence. I would even disagree with Mr Henn's statement that the modern meaning has necessarily theistic associations. Doubtless the fear of such associations explains the distaste of some contemporaries for the word – such distaste being a symptom of theophobia.
But I submit that their alarm is needless. Theism is ‘sublime’; but if anyone thinks ‘sublimity’ theistic, let him read Lucretius. Nor could I lean so heavily as Mr Henn does on the amorality of Longinus’ aesthetic theory. If Longinus does not put great art among the causes of virtue, he certainly puts virtue among the causes of great art. Μεγαλοφροσύνη is an ethical term, and his theory is ‘moral’, not after the fashion of the Elizabethans but after that of Ruskin. Such disagreements, however, go far to prove that this is a living and provocative book. I could wish that it had been longer. An almost parenthetic (and so to me quite revolutionary) suggestion on page 24 about Lucretius’ debt to Plato, tempts one to murmur tantamne rem tam negligenter! The doctrine (p. 148) that there is ‘so much that we can justify, not in relation to ultimates . . . but on the pragmatic basis of the art of living’, clamours for further development: in its present form it lies open to the nonsensical interpretation, ‘there are so many things one can approve as means without knowing the end’. But these, and all other difficulties, will perhaps be solved when Mr Henn gives us another book; and I, for one, hope that he will do so soon.
An unusually happy printers’ error on p. 122 commits Burke to the theory that ‘excessive litters’ are sublime.