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trivial, or misjudged circumstances, can be overlooked by the reader ; they make only the difference of more or less: the gay, or pleasing emotion, which he has raised subsists still. But the case is quite different with the sublime. There, one trifling circumstance, one mean idea, is sufficient to destroy the whole charm. This is owing to the nature of the emotion aimed at by sublime description, which admits of no mediocrity, and cannot subsist in a middle state; but must either highly transport us, or, if unsuccessful in the execution, leave us greatly disgusted and displeased. We attempt to rise along with the writer; the imagination is awakened, and put upon the stretch; but it requires to be supported ; and if, in the midst of its efforts, you desert it unexpectedly, down it comes with a painful shock. When Milton, in his battle of the angels, describes them as tearing up the mountains, and throwing them at one another there are, in his description, as Mr. Addison has observed, no circumstances but what are properly sublime :

:

From their foundations loos'ning to and fro,

They pluck'd the seated hills, with all their load,
Rocks, waters, woods; and by the shaggy tops
Uplifting, bore them in their hands.-

Whereas Claudian, in a fragment upon the wars of the giants, has con-
trived to render this idea of their throwing the mountains, which is in
itself so grand, burlesque, and ridiculous; by this single circumstance, of
one of his giants with the mountain Ida upon his shoulders, and a river
which flowed from the mountain, running down along the giant's back,
he held it up in that posture. There is a description too in Virgil, which,
I think, is censurable; though more slightly in this respect. It is that
of the burning mountain Ætna; a subject certainly very proper to be
worked up by a poet into a sublime description :

-Horrificis juxta tonat Etna ruinis.
Interdumque atram prorumpit ad æthera nubem,
Turbine fumantem piceo, et candente favilla;
Attollitque globos flammarum, et sidera lambit.
Interdum scopulos, avulsaque viscera montis
Erigit eructans, liquefactaque saxa sub auras
Cum gemitu glomerat, fundoque exæstuat imo.*

ÆN. III, 571.

as

Here, after several magnificent images, the poet concludes with personifying the mountain under this figure, "eructans viscera cum gemitu," belching up its bowels with a groan; which, by likening the mountain to a sick or drunk person, degrades the majesty of the description. It is to no purpose to tell us, that the poet here alludes to the fable of the giant Enceladus lying under mount Etna; and that he supposes his motions and tossings to have occasioned the fiery eruptions. He intended the description of a sublime object; and the natural ideas, raised by a burning mountain, are infinitely more lofty, than the belchings of any gi

*The port capacious, and secure from wind,
Is to the foot of thundering Etna join'd.
By turns a pitchy cloud she rolls on high,
By turns hot embers from her entrails fly,

And flakes of mounting flames that lick the sky.

Oft from her bowels massy rocks are thrown,

And shiver'd by the force come piece-meal down.
Oft liquid lakes of burning sulphur flow,
Fed from the fiery springs that boil below.

DRYDEN.

In this translation of Dryden's the debasing circumstance to which I object in the original, is, with propriety, omitted.

ant, how huge soever. The debasing effect of the idea which is here presented, will appear in a stronger light, by seeing what figure it makes in a poem of Sir Richard Blackmore's, who, through a monstrous perversity of taste, had chosen this for the capital circumstance in his description, and thereby (as Dr. Arbuthnot humorously observes, in his treatise on the Art of Sinking) had represented the mountain as in a fit of the cholic.

Etna, and all the burning mountains find

Their kindled stores with inbred storms of wind
Blown up to rage, and roaring out complain,
As torn with inward gripes, and torturing pain;
Labouring, they cast their dreadful vomit round,
And with their melted bowels spread the ground.

Such instances show how much the sublime depends upon a just selection of circumstances; and with how great care every circumstance must be avoided, which by bordering in the least upon the mean, or even upon the gay or the trifling, alters the tone of the emotion.

If it shall be now inquired, what are the proper sources of the sublime? my answer is, that they are to be looked for every where in nature. It is not by hunting after tropes, and figures, and rhetorical assistances, that we can expect to produce it. No it stands clear, for the most part, of these laboured refinements of art. It must come unsought, if it comes at all; and be the natural offspring of a strong imagination. Est deus in nobis ; agitante calescimus illo.

Wherever a great and awful object is presented in nature, or a very magnanimous and exalted affection of the human mind is displayed; thence, if you can catch the impression strongly, and exhibit it warm and glowing, you may draw the sublime. These are its only proper sources. In judging of any striking beauty in composition, whether it is, or is not, to be referred to this class, we must attend to the nature of the emotion which it raises; and only, if it be of that elevating, solemn, and awful kind, which distinguishes this feeling, we can pro. nounce it sublime.

From the account which I have given of the nature of the sublime, it clearly follows, that it is an emotion which can never be long protracted. The mind, by no force of genius, can be kept, for any considerable time, so far raised above its common tone; but will, of course, relax into its ordinary situation. Neither are the abilities of

any human writer sufficient to supply a continued run of unmixed sublime conceptions. The utmost we can expect is, that this fire of imagination should sometimes flash upon us like lightning from heaven, and then disappear. In Homer and Milton, this effulgence of genius breaks forth more frequently, and with greater lustre, than in most authors. Shakspeare also rises often into the true sublime. But no author whatever is sublime throughout. Some, indeed, there are, who by a strength and dignity in their conceptions, and a current of high ideas that runs through their whole composition, preserve the reader's mind always in a tone nearly allied to the sublime; for which reason they may, in a limited sense, merit the name of continued sublime writers; and, in this class, we may justly place Demosthenes and Plato.

As for what is called the sublime style, it is, for the most part, a very bad one; and has no relation, whatever, to the real sublime. Persons are apt to imagine, that magnificent words, accumulated epithets, and

a certain swelling kind of expression, by rising above what is usual or vulgar, contributes to, or even forms, the sublime. Nothing can be more false. In all the instances of sublime writing, which I have given, nothing of this kind appears. "God said, let there be light, and there "was light." This is striking and sublime. But put it into what is commonly called the sublime style: "The sovereign arbiter of nature, "by the potent energy of a single word, commanded the light to exist ;" and, as Boileau has well observed, the style indeed is raised, but the thought is fallen. In general, in all good writing, the sublime lies in the thought, not in the words; and when the thought is truly noble, it will for the most part, clothe itself in a native dignity of language. The sublime, indeed, rejects mean, low, or trivial expressions; but it is, equally an enemy to such as are turgid. The main secret of being sublime, is to say great things in few and plain words. It will be found to hold, without exception, that the most sublime authors are the simplest in their style; and wherever you find a writer, who effects a more than ordinary pomp and parade of words, and is always endeavouring to magnify his subject by epithets, there you may immediately suspect, that feeble in sentiment, he is studying to support himself by mere expression.

The same unfavourable judgment we must pass on all that laboured apparatus with which some writers introduce a passage, or description, which they intend shall be sublime; calling on their readers to attend, invoking their muse, or breaking forth into general, unmeaning exclamations, concerning the greatness, terribleness, or majesty of the object, which they are to describe. Mr. Addison, in his Campaign, has fallen into an error of this kind, when about to describe the battle of Blenheim.

But! O my muse! what numbers wilt thou find To sing the furious troops in battle join'd? Methinks, I hear the drum's tumultuous sound, The victor's shouts, and dying groans, confound; &c. Introductions of this kind, are a forced attempt in a writer, to spur up himself, and his reader, when he finds his imagination flagging in vigour. It is like taking artificial spirits in order to supply the want of such as are natural. By this observation, however, I do not mean to pass a general censure on Mr. Addison's Campaign, which, in several places, is far from wanting merit; and in particular, the noted comparison of his hero to the angel who rides in the whirlwind and directs the storm, is a truly sublime image.

The faults opposite to the sublime are chiefly two: the frigid, and the bombast. The frigid consists in degrading an object or sentiment, which is sublime in itself, by our mean conception of it; or by our weak, low, and childish description of it. This betrays entire absence, or at least, great poverty of genius. Of this, there are abundance of examples, and these commented upon with much humour, in the Treatise on the Art of Sinking, in Dean Swift's works; the instances taken chiefly from Sir Richard Blackmore. One of these, I had occasion already to give in relation to mount Etna, and it were needless to produce any more. The bombast lies, in forcing an ordinary or trivial object out of its rank, and endeavouring to raise it into the sublime; or, in attempting to exalt a sublime object beyond all natural and reasonable bounds. Into this error, which is but too common, writers of genius may sometimes fall by unluckily losing sight of the true point of the sublime.

This is also called fustian, or rant. Shakspeare, a great but incorrect genius, is not unexceptionable here. Dryden and Lee, in their tragedies abound with it.

Thus far of the Sublime, of which I have treated fully, because it is so capital an excellency in fine writing, and because clear and precise ideas on this head are, as far as know, not to be met with in critical writers.

Before concluding this lecture, there is one observation which I choose to make at this time; I shall make it once for all, and hope it will be afterward remembered. It is with respect to the instances of faults, or rather blemishes and imperfections, which, as I have done in this lecture, I shall hereafter continue to take, when I can, from writers of reputation. I have not the least intention thereby to disparage their character in the general. I shall have other occasions of doing equal justice to their beauties. But it is no reflection on any human performance, that it is not absolutely perfect. The task would be much easier for me, to collect instances of faults from bad writers. But they would draw no attention, when quoted from books which nobody reads. And I conceive, that the method which I follow, will contribute more to make the best authors be read with pleasure, when one properly distinguishes their beauties from their faults; and is led to imitate and admire only what is worthy of imitation and admiration.

LECTURE V.

BEAUTY, AND OTHER PLEASURES OF TASTE.

As sublimity constitutes a particular character of composition, and forms one of the highest excellencies of eloquence and of poetry, it was proper to treat of it at some length. It will not be necessary to discuss so particularly all the other pleasures that arise from taste, as some of them have less relation to our main subject. On beauty only I shall make several observations, both as the subject is curious, and as it tends to improve taste, and to discover the foundation of several of the graces of description and of poetry.*

Beauty, next to sublimity, affords, beyond doubt, the highest pleasure to the imagination. The emotion which it raises, is very distinguishable from that of sublimity. It is of a calmer kind; more gentle and soothing; does not elevate the mind so much, but produces an agreeable serenity. Sublimity raises a feeling, too violent, as I showed, to be lasting; the pleasure arising from beauty admits of longer continuance. It extends also to a much greater variety of objects than sublimity; to a variety indeed so great, that the feelings which beautiful objects produce, differ considerably, not in degree only, but also in kind, from one another. Hence, no word in the language is used in a more vague signification than beauty. It is applied to almost every external object that pleases the eye, or the

See Hutchinson's Inquiry concerning Beauty and Virtue. Gerard on Taste, chap. iii. Inquiry into the Origin of the Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Elements of Criticism, chap. iii. Spectator, vol. vi. Essay on the Pleasures of Taste.

ear; to a great number of the graces of writing; to many dispositions of the mind nay, to several objects of mere abstract science. We talk currently of a beautiful tree or flower; a beautiful poem; a beautiful character; and a beautiful theorem in mathematics.

Hence we may easily perceive, that, among so great a variety of objects, to find out some one quality in which they all agree, and which is the foundation of that agreeable sensation they all raise, must be a very difficult, if not, more probably, a vain attempt. Objects denominated beautiful, are so different, as to please, not in virtue of any one quality common to them all, but by means of several different principles in buman nature. The agreeable emotion which they all raise, is somewhat of the same nature; and therefore, has the common name of beauty given to it; but it is raised by different causes.

Hypotheses, however, have been framed by ingenious men, for assigning the fundamental quality of beauty in all objects. In particular, uniformity amidst variety, has been insisted on as this fundamental quality. For the beauty of many figures, I admit that this accounts in a satisfactory manner. But when we endeavour to apply this principle to beautiful objects of some other kind, as to colour, for instance, or motion, we shall soon find that it has no place. And even in external figured objects it does not hold, that their beauty is in proportion to their mixture of variety with uniformity; seeing many please us as highly beautiful, which have almost no variety at all, and others, which are various to a degree of intricacy. Laying systems of this kind, therefore, aside, what I now propose is, to give an enumeration of several of those classes of objects in which beauty most remarkably appears; and to point out, as far as I can, the separate principles of beauty in each of them.

Colour affords, perhaps, the simplest instance of beauty, and therefore the fittest to begin with. Here, neither variety, nor uniformity, nor any other principle that I know, can be assigned, as the foundation of beauty. We can refer it to no other cause but the structure of the eye, which determines us to receive certain modifications of the rays of light with more pleasure than others. And we see accordingly, that, as the organ of sensation varies in different persons, they have their different favourite colours. It is probable, that association of ideas has influence, in some cases, on the pleasure which we receive from colours. Green, for instance, may appear more beautiful, by being connected in our ideas with rural prospects and scenes; white, with innocence; blue, with the serenity of the sky. Independent of associations of this kind, all that we can further observe concerning colours is, that those chosen for beauty are, generally, delicate, rather than glaring. Such are those paintings with which nature hath ornamented some of her works, and which art strives in vain to imitate; as the feathers of several kinds of birds, the leaves of flowers, and the fine variation of colours exhibited by the sky at the rising and setting of the sun. These present to us the highest instances of the beauty of colouring; and have accordingly been the favourite subjects of poetical description in all countries.

From colour we proceed to figure, which opens to us forms of beauty more complex and diversified. Regularity first occurs to be noticed as a source of beauty. By a regular figure, is meant, one which we perceive to be formed according to some certain rule, and not left arbitrary or loose, in the construction of its parts. Thus, a circle, a square, a triangle, or a hexagon, please the eye, by their regularity, as beautiful

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