CHAP.
V.

Of Sight.

The same great authority had before admitted that the picturesque, which renders such objects pleasing in pictures, is that which painting can, and sculpture cannot express *; and what is that but 'colour, and its gradations of light and shade, or distinctness and indistinctness?

20. The beauty of those whimsical and extravagant paintings, called, from the subterraneous apartments in Rome, where the first specimens of them were found, grottesque, has never, I believe, been questioned: the brilliance and variety of the tints having afforded pleasure to every eye; and the airy lightness, and playful elegance of the forms, to every imagination, that has been acquainted with them. Yet, were we to meet with such extravagant and disproportioned buildings in reality; or such monstrous combinations of human, animal, and vegetable forms in nature, our understandings would revolt at them, and we should turn from them with scorn and disgust: but, in judging of the imitative representations of them, we do not consult our understandings, but merely our senses and imaginations; and to them they are pleasing and beautiful.

21. I am aware that I am here laying myself open to the cavils of a captious adversary; who

Essays: Preface to Vol. II. p. xiv,

may accuse me of calling the tattered rags and filth of a beggar, or the extravagant monsters of grottesque beautiful, because I assert that they contain beautiful variations of tint or light and shadow: but he may, with equal justice, accuse me of calling a dunghill sweet, because I assert that it contains sugar; and that the sugar, when separated from the dross, will be of the same quality as that extracted from the cane. In the same manner, the beautiful tints and lights and shadows, when separated, in the imitation, from the disagreeable qualities, with which they were united, are as truly beautiful as if they had never been united with any such qualities. Properly, those substances only can be called sweet, in which the qualities of sweetness predominate; and those only beautiful, in which the qualities of beauty predominate: but, if there be any means, as those abovementioned, of separating the subordinate sweet and beautiful qualities from those of a contrary kind, there can be no reason why they should be less sweet or less beautiful when separated, than if they had never been mixt.

22. The natural consequence of confining beauty to smoothness or undulation, either of form or colour, is, that a person of such just taste and feeling, as my friend abovementioned, should discover it to be insipid, as he has done : and to remedy this defect, he proposes that a

CHAP. V.

Of Sight..

certain portion of the quality, which he calls picturesqueness, should be mixt with it, in order to give it the proper relish. Of the word Picturesque, I shall have more to say in another chapter; and, therefore, shall only observe, at present, that whosoever thinks beauty insipid, and conceives that the addition of any other quality is requisite to make it pleasing, has only involved himself in a confusion of terms, by attaching to the word beauty those ideas, which the rest of mankind attach to the word insipidity; and those, which the rest of mankind attach to the word beauty, to this nameless amalgamation, which he conceives to be an improvement of it. The difference is merely a difference of words, which three fourths of those, that have arisen in metaphysics and moral philosophy, as well as in religion, have been; and as long as the disputes concerning them are confined to the shedding of ink, and do not extend to the shedding of blood, they afford a very innocent amusement to the several disputants, of which I am now enjoying the benefit.

23. A very remarkable difference of this kind subsisted between the late President of the Royal Academy *, and the author of the Inquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful, which it

Sir Joshua Reynolds.

is peculiarly pleasant to recall upon the present occasion, because it never cooled the warmth of that friendship, which remained unabated and uninterrupted between those two illustrious persons till death separated them; though both appealed to the public in favour of their respective opinions. The one makes beauty to consist in smooth and undulating surfaces, flowing lines, and colours that are analogous to them*; while the other maintains that beauty does not consist in any particular forms, lines, or colours, but is merely the result of habitual association; by which particular forms, proportions, and colours are appropriated to particular kinds and species, the individuals of which appear beautiful, or ugly, accordingly as they are respectively conformable or adverse to our ideas of the perfection of those particular forms; which ideas have arisen in the mind from a general and comparative view of the whole kind, class, or species t. It will readily appear that these two great critics differ so widely merely from attaching different meanings to the word beauty; which, the one confines to the sensible, and the other to the intellectual qualities of things; both equally departing from that general use of the term, which is the only just criterion of propriety in speech.

Sublime and Beautiful, Part III. + Idler, No. 8.

CHAP.

V.

Of Sight.

CHAP, v.

Of Sight.

24. The doctrines of the former concerning beauty have been classed and defined under six distinct heads by the most eminent and distinguished of his disciples; and thus illustrated by a well-known example; which, if it prove nothing else, shows at least to what a degree the most discerning mind may be occasionally deprived even of the ordinary powers of perception by the fascinations of a favourite sys

tem.

.

"No building," says Mr. Price, "is more "universally admired for its beauty than the temple of the Sibyl at Tivoli. Let us then "consider what are the qualities of beauty "according to Mr. Burke, and how far they "apply to beautiful buildings in general, and "to that in particular. Those qualities are, I. "to be comparatively small: II. to be smooth: "III. to have a variety in the direction of the

parts: but, IV. to have those parts melted, as "it were, into each other: V. to be of a de"licate frame, without any remarkable appear"ance of strength: VI. to have the colour "clear and bright, but not very strong and

glaring. The temple I have just inentioned, “has, I think, as much of those chief principles of general beauty, as the particular principles of architecture will allow of: it is "circular, surrounded by columns detached "from the body of the building; it is light and

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