perception of grace seems not to be intirely new nor intirely familiar to us; but is, as it were, what we have had a presentiment of in the mind, without examining it, and which the graceful object, or action, &c. calls forth to our view. Being so much our own idea, we like to behold it, to dwell upon it; and yet, not being a familiar idea, it creates a pleasing mild degree of admiration.
Grace seems half celestial; for all the virtues accompany, indeed compose, the perception; for none, I imagine, can have a perception of grace that has none of the charms of virtue.
The sentiment of grace, caused by the motion of beauty, music, poetry, beneficence, compassion, &c. may be ranked as the highest intellectual pleasure the mind is capable of perceiving, and brings with it a sort of undetermined consciousness of the delicacy of our own perceptions in making the discovery, a degree of that glorying that Longinus observes always accompanies the perception of the sublime.
You can no more define grace than you can happiness. The mind cannot so stedfastly behold it as to investigate its real properties. Grace is indeed the point of happiness in the ideal region, both because it arises spontaneously, without effort, &c. and because it seems partly within our own power, and partly without it.
As common sense, in my fundamental circle, seems diffusive truth, so grace, in my ideal circle, seems diffusive sublimity; every perception of the former seems to be tinged, as it were, with the colour of the latter.
Section 4. Sublimity.
Where pure grace ends, the awe of the sublime begins, composed of the influence of pain, of pleasure, of grace, and deformity, playing into each other, that the mind is unable to determine which to call it, pain, pleasure, or terror. Without a conjunction of these powers there could be no sublimity.
Those only who have passed through the degrees, _common sense, truth_ and grace, i.e. the sentiment of grace, can have a sentiment of sublimity. It is the mild admiration of grace raised to wonder and _astonishment_; to a sentiment of power out of our power to produce or control. Grace must have been as familiar to the intellect, in order to discover sublimity, as common sense in the common region must have been to the discovery of truth and beauty. In fine, genius, or taste, which is the sentiment of grace, and which I have called the common sense of the ideal region, can alone discover the true sublime.
It is a pinnacle of beatitude bordering upon horror, deformity, madness! an eminence from whence the mind, that dares to look farther, is lost! It seems to stand, or rather to waver, between certainty and uncertainty, between security and destruction. It is the point of terror, of undetermined fear, of undetermined power!
The idea of the supreme Being is, I imagine, in every breast, from the clown to the greatest philosopher, his point of sublimity!
CHAPTER II.
On the ORIGIN of our IDEAS of BEAUTY.
In proportion as the principles of beauty exist in the common form, undetermined to the common eye, so do they exist in common sense, undetermined to the common mind. It is cultivation that calls them into view, gives them a determined form, creates the object, and the perception, that
'Truth and good are one, And beauty dwells in them, and they in her.' AKENSIDE.
But, though all truth resolves into one truth, one beauty, one good, as all colours resolve into one light; though the scientifical intellectual colours, classes, or leading principles of science, the physical, the moral, the metaphysical, &c. &c. resolve into intellectual light, beauty, or good; it is, I imagine, the moral truth, that is the characteristic truth of beauty: for, were we to analyse the pleasing emotions we feel at the sight of beauty, we should, I imagine, find them composed of our most refined moral affections; and hence the universal interesting charm of beauty. And, as those affections refine by culture, hence the different degrees of the sentiments which beauty creates in the rustic, and in the man of taste. The former perceives only the physical charm of beauty, the freshness of colour, the bloom of youth, &c. but, to the man of taste, the physical pleases only through the medium of the moral: _the body charms because the soul is seen_; beauty, in his breast, is the source from whence endless streams of fair ideas flow, extending throughout the whole region of taste, no object of which but is more or less related to the principles of human beauty. But taste, though a subject almost inseparable from that of beauty, I must forbear to enlarge upon in this chapter, as I propose to make it the particular subject of my next.
It is but at that period, at
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