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 visi ble 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. CHAP. V. Of Sight. CHAP. 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? ima 20. The beauty of those whimsical and extravagant paintings, called, from the subterraneous apartinents 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 gination, 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 may accuse me of calling the tattered 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 10 CHAP. Of Sight. CHAP. V. 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. 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. |