Art, the Sublime and ...

David Lindsay (1876- 1945) the Scottish speculative fiction author whose first book A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS was called by Colin Wilson "the greatest imaginative work of the twentieth century,” crafted many axioms. I have gathered a few of his sayings on the sublime and art.


In the State, in languages, in Art, and in morality, the most settled laws give way in the long run to nature; all actions slope downward towards freedom.

A man must acquire freedom, emotionally, intellectually and personally; but when free, he is only half-way to wisdom; he must now learn suffering and humiliation. And this signifies that he must renounce a great part of the freedom he has won.

For anyone without creative intellect, true culture is impossible; the reason is that he must by his inability to think for himself, defer to the authority of some other man, thereby shutting himself off from numerous other sides of thought.

If there were a Devil, of his inventions ennui might be the one on which he would chiefly pride himself.

Man must unite himself to something. In solitude, to the unseen world, resulting in the Sublime; in society, to his fellow-men, resulting in the vulgar. Tolstoy's touchstone of Art therefore proves to be diametrically opposite to the fact. The use of Art lies not in its power of uniting men, but in its efforts to disunite them. The noblest art will produce in us disgust at the presence of our fellow-creatures; and the best artists are those who love solitude.

Just as complementary colours joined together form white light, so by the prism of individuality, the Sublime is split into Pleasure and Pain. This is why any strong emotional feeling includes both exaltation and grief. It also renders Schopenhauer's question unnecessary, which is positive and negative, of pleasure and pain. Pain must not be regarded as expiation, education, or anything of the sort, but as the indivisible companion of pleasure; just as after staring intently at red, we then see green. And in experiencing sublime feelings, we discover both elements, because both must be present.

Emotions belong to Individuality. The Sublime is an undivided complex; this feeling is most perceptible in the higher grades of music. We do not then feel single emotions but a swelling Whole, which we cannot analyse for ourselves. The Sublime is thus like Light, the emotions like colours.

The individualising principle is not the cause of the anti-sublime, but the attempt to escape from the anti-sublime towards freedom. This attempt is known biologically as variety.

Unity is chaos. Things separate in their nature are forced to live and act together. A resulting existence is secured, but this existence is false and painful; and to escape from it, the component parts seek wrong openings.

From the preceding paragraph, it will be seen that a true ethical system will endeavour to promulgate variety of life; activity, objectivity, and intelligence, as opposed to soul-deadening tradition, formalism and meek stupidity.

The Sublime is not a theory, but a terrible fact, which stands above and behind the world, and governs all its manifestations.

To those who realise the Sublime, a beautiful person is only a living corpse; for an individual is only a branch lopped off from the Eternal, and is already dying.

So-called morbid ideas - death, ghosts, the spirit-world, etc. - correspond to nothing real. It is the Sublime life calling us, which our individualistic nature mistranslates in this fashion.

Harmony, symmetry, rhythm, and numbers, imply internal relationship. When this relationship is rudely interrupted by a force from outside, reality itself.