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the imagination, that in nature we are not pleased with them, nor ever consider them as beautiful. Yet in the pictures of Rembrandt, Ostade, Teniers, and Fyt, the imitations of them are unquestionably beautiful and pleasing to all mankind; and as these painters are remarkable for the fidelity of their imitations, whatever visible qualities existed in the objects must appear in their copies of them: but, in these copies, the mind perceives only the visible qualities; whereas, in the originals, it perceived others less agreeable united with them. Painters, indeed, and persons much conversant with painting, often feel pleasure in viewing the objects themselves: but this is from a principle of association, which will be hereafter explained.

19. A great authority, I know, denies that the imitations of such objects can ever produce "beautiful, that is, lovely pictures;" and if beautiful is thus limited to the sense of lovely, I may perhaps not think the point worth contesting; though, even with this arbitrary and unexampled limitation, I can produce at least equal authority in support of a contrary opinion.

"D'un pinceau delicat, l'artifice agréable

Du plus affreux objet, fait un objet aimable†.”

• Price's Dialog.

† Boileau, Art Poetique, c. iii.

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Of Sight.

The same great authority had before admittedthat 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 above mentioned, 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 above mentioned, should discover it to be insipid, as he has done; and to remedy this defect, he proposes that a

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certain portion of the quality, which he calls picturesqueness, should be mixt with it, in Of Sight. 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.

2s. 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 re-
spective opinions. The one makes beauty to
consist in smooth and undulating surfaces, flow-
ing 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, propor-
tions, and colours are appropriated to particu-
lar 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.

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