An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Taste, and of the Origin of our Ideas of Beauty, etc. | Page 9

rules can teach, and the highest sentiment that rules can teach, exact
beauty, the two extremes of the vrai reel and the vrai ideal. Grace
seems, as it were, to hang between the influence of both; the irregular

sublime giving character and relief to the negative and determined
qualities of beauty; and beauty, i.e. truth, confining within due bounds
the eccentric qualities of sublimity, forming, both to sight and in idea,
orderly variety, the waving line, neither straight nor crooked. The
waving line is the symbol, or memento, as I may say, of grace,
wherever it is seen in whatever form, animate or inanimate; and may be
justly styled the line of taste or grace!
The 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