sensation of the agreeable, and taste no longer has a law. If a person
says to me, in the presence of the Apollo Belvidere, that he feels
nothing more agreeable than in presence of any other statue, that it
does not please him at all, that he does not feel its beauty, I cannot
dispute his impression; but if this person thence concludes that the
Apollo is not beautiful, I proudly contradict him, and declare that he
is deceived. Good taste is distinguished from bad taste; but what does
this distinction signify, if the judgment of the beautiful is resolved
into a sensation? You say to me that I have no taste. What does that
mean? Have I not senses like you? Does not the object which you admire
act upon me as well as upon you? Is not the impression which I feel as
real as that which you feel? Whence comes it, then, that you are
right,--you who only give expression to the impression which you feel,
and that I am wrong,--I who do precisely the same thing? Is it because
those who feel like you are more numerous than those who feel like me?
But here the number of voices means nothing? The beautiful being defined
as that which produces on the senses an agreeable impression, a thing
that pleases a single man, though it were frightfully ugly in the eyes
of all the rest of the human race, must, nevertheless, and very
legitimately, be called beautiful by him who receives from it an
agreeable impression, for, so far as he is concerned, it satisfies the
definition. There is, then, no true beauty; there are only relative and
changing beauties, beauties of circumstance, custom, fashion, and all
these beauties, however different, will have a right to the same
respect, provided they meet sensibilities to which they are agreeable.
And as there is nothing in this world, in the infinite diversity of our
dispositions, which may not please some one, there will be nothing that
is not beautiful; or, to speak more truly, there will be nothing either
beautiful or ugly, and the Hottentot Venus will equal the Venus de
Medici. The absurdity of the consequences demonstrates the absurdity of
the principle. But there is only one means of escaping these
consequences, which is to repudiate the principle, and recognize the
judgment of the beautiful as an absolute judgment, and, as such,
entirely different from sensation.
Finally, and this is the last rock of empiricism, is there in us only
the idea of an imperfect and finite beauty, and while we are admiring
the real beauties that nature furnishes, are we not elevating ourselves
to the idea of a superior beauty, which Plato, with great excellence of
expression, calls the Idea of the beautiful, which, after him, all men
of delicate taste, all true artists call the Ideal? If we establish
decrees in the beauty of things, is it not because we compare them,
often without noticing it, with this ideal, which is to us the measure
and rule of all our judgments in regard to particular beauties? How
could this idea of absolute beauty enveloped in all our judgments on the
beautiful,--how could this ideal beauty, which it is impossible for us
not to conceive, be revealed to us by sensation, by a faculty variable
and relative like the objects that it perceives?
The philosophy which deduces all our ideas from the senses falls to the
ground, then, before the idea of the beautiful. It remains to see
whether this idea can be better explained by means of sentiment, which
is different from sensation, which so nearly resembles reason that good
judges have often taken it for reason, and have made it the principle of
the idea of the beautiful as well as that of the good. It is already a
progress, without doubt, to go from sensation to sentiment, and
Hutcheson and Smith[100] are in our eyes very different philosophers
from Condillac and Helvetius;[101] but we believe that we have
sufficiently established[102] that, in confounding sentiment with
reason, we deprive it of its foundation and rule, that sentiment,
particular and variable in its nature, different to different men, and
in each man continually changing, cannot be sufficient for itself.
Nevertheless, if sentiment is not a principle, it is a true and
important fact, and, after having distinguished it well from reason, we
ourselves proceed to elevate it far above sensation, and elucidate the
important part it plays in the perception of beauty.
Place yourself before an object of nature, wherein men recognize beauty,
and observe what takes place within you at the sight of this object. Is
it not certain that, at the same time that you judge that it is
beautiful, you also feel its beauty, that is to say, that you experience
at the sight of it a delightful emotion, and that you are attracted
towards this object by a sentiment of sympathy and love? In other cases
you judge otherwise, and feel an opposite sentiment. Aversion
accompanies the judgment of the ugly, as love accompanies the judgment
of the beautiful. And this sentiment is awakened not only in presence of
the objects of nature: all objects, whatever they may be, that we judge
to be ugly or beautiful, have the power to excite in us this sentiment.
Vary the circumstances as much as you please, place me before an
admirable edifice or before a beautiful landscape; represent to my mind
the great discoveries of Descartes and Newton, the exploits of the
great Conde, the virtue of St. Vincent de Paul; elevate me still higher;
awaken in me the obscure and too much forgotten idea of the infinite
being; whatever you do, as often as you give birth within me to the idea
of the beautiful, you give me an internal and exquisite joy, always
followed by a sentiment of love for the object that caused it.
The more beautiful the object is, the more lively is the joy which it
gives the soul, and the more profound is the love without being
passionate. In admiration judgment rules, but animated by sentiment. Is
admiration increased to the degree of impressing upon the soul an
emotion, an ardor that seems to exceed the limits of human nature? this
state of the soul is called enthusiasm:
"Est Deus in nobis, agitante calescimus illo."
The philosophy of sensation explains sentiment, as well as the idea of
the beautiful, only by changing its nature. It confounds it with
agreeable sensation, and, consequently, for it the love of beauty can be
nothing but desire. There is no theory more contradicted by facts.
What is desire? It is an emotion of the soul which has, for its avowed
or secret end, possession. Admiration is in its nature respectful,
whilst desire tends to profane its object.
Desire is the offspring of need. It supposes, then, in him who
experiences it, a want, a defect, and, to a certain point, suffering.
The sentiment of the beautiful is to itself its own satisfaction.
Desire is burning, impetuous, sad. The sentiment of the beautiful, free
from all desire, and always without fear, elevates and warms the soul,
and may transport it even to enthusiasm, without making it know the
troubles of passion. The artist sees only the beautiful where the
sensual man sees only the alluring and the frightful. On a vessel tossed
by a tempest, while the passengers tremble at the sight of the
threatening waves, and at the sound of the thunder that breaks over
their heads, the artist remains absorbed in the contemplation of the
sublime spectacle. Vernet has himself lashed to the mast in order to
contemplate for a longer time the storm in its majestic and terrible
beauty. When he knows fear, when he participates in the common feeling,
the artist vanishes, there no more remains any thing but the man.
The sentiment of the beautiful is so far from being desire, that each
excludes the other. Let me take a common example. Before a table loaded
with meats and delicious wines, the desire of enjoyment is awakened, but
not the sentiment of the beautiful. Suppose that if, instead of thinking
of the pleasures which all these things spread before my eyes promise
me, I only take notice of the manner in which they are arranged and set
upon the table, and the order of the feast, the sentiment of the
beautiful might in some degree be produced; but surely this will be
neither the need nor the desire of appropriating this symmetry, this
order.
It is the property of beauty not to irritate and inflame desire, but to
purify and ennoble it. The more beautiful a woman is,--I do not mean
that common and gross beauty which Reubens in vain animates with his
brilliant coloring, but that ideal beauty which antiquity and Raphael
understood so well,--the more, at the sight of this noble creature is
desire tempered by an exquisite and delicate sentiment, and is sometimes
even replaced by a disinterested worship. If the Venus of the Capitol,
or the Saint Cecilia, excites in you sensual desires, you are not made
to feel the beautiful. So the true artist addresses himself less to the
senses than to the soul; in painting beauty he only seeks to awaken in
us sentiment; and when he has carried this sentiment as far as
enthusiasm, he has obtained the last triumph of art.
The sentiment of the beautiful is, therefore, a special sentiment, as
the idea of the beautiful is a simple idea. But is this sentiment, one
in itself, manifested only in a single way, and applied only to a single
kind of beauty? Here again--here, as always--let us interrogate
experience.
When we have before our eyes an object whose forms are perfectly
determined, and the whole easy to embrace,--a beautiful flower, a
beautiful statue, an antique temple of moderate size,--each of our
faculties attaches itself to this object, and rests upon it with an
unalloyed satisfaction. Our senses easily perceive its details; our
reason seizes the happy harmony of all its parts. Should this object
disappear, we can distinctly represent it to ourselves, so precise and
fixed are its forms. The soul in this contemplation feels again a sweet
and tranquil joy, a sort of efflorescence.
Let us consider, on the other hand, an object with vague and indefinite
forms, which may nevertheless be very beautiful: the impression which we
experience is without doubt a pleasure still, but it is a pleasure of a
different order. This object does not call forth all our powers like the
first. Reason conceives it, but the senses do not perceive the whole of
it, and imagination does not distinctly represent it to itself. The
senses and the imagination try in vain to attain its last limits; our
faculties are enlarged, are inflated, thus to speak, in order to embrace
it, but it escapes and surpasses them. The pleasure that we feel comes
from the very magnitude of the object; but, at the same time, this
magnitude produces in us I know not what melancholy sentiment, because
it is disproportionate to us. At the sight of the starry heavens, of the
vast sea, of gigantic mountains, admiration is mingled with sadness.
These objects, in reality finite, like the world itself, seem to us
infinite, in our want of power to comprehend their immensity, and,
resembling what is truly without bounds, they awaken in us the idea of
the infinite, that idea which at once elevates and confounds our
intelligence. The corresponding sentiment which the soul experiences is
an austere pleasure.
In order to render the difference which we wish to mark more
perceptible, examples may be multiplied. Are you affected in the same
way at the sight of a meadow, variegated in its rather limited
dimensions, whose extent the eye can easily take in, and at the aspect
of an inaccessible mountain, at the foot of which the ocean breaks? Do
the sweet light of day and a melodious voice produce upon you the same
effect as darkness and silence? In the intellectual and moral order, are
you moved in the same way when a rich and good man opens his purse to
the indigent, and when a magnanimous man gives hospitality to his enemy,
and saves him at the peril of his own life? Take some light poetry in
which measure, spirit, and grace, everywhere predominate; take an ode,
and especially an epistle of Horace, or some small verses of Voltaire,
and compare them with the Iliad, or those immense Indian poems that are
filled with marvellous events, wherein the highest metaphysics are
united to recitals by turns graceful or pathetic, those poems that have
more than two hundred thousand verses, whose personages are gods or
symbolic beings; and see whether the impressions that you experience
will be the same. As a last example, suppose, on the one hand, a writer
who, with two or three strokes of the pen, sketches an analysis of
intelligence, agreeable and simple, but without depth, and, on the
other, a philosopher who engages in a long labor in order to arrive at
the most rigorous decomposition of the faculty of knowing, and unfolds
to you a long chain of principles and consequences,--read the _Traite
des Sensations_ and _the Critique of Pure Reason_, and, even leaving out
of the account the truth and the falsehood they may contain, with
reference solely to the beautiful, compare your impressions.
These are, then, two very different sentiments; different names have
also been given them: one has been more particularly called the
sentiment of the beautiful, the other that of the sublime.
In order to complete the study of the different faculties that enter
into the perception of beauty, after reason and sentiment, it remains to
us to speak of a faculty not less necessary, which animates them and
vivifies them,--imagination.
When sensation, judgment, and sentiment have been produced by the
occasion of an external object, they are reproduced even in the absence
of this object; this is memory.
Memory is double:--not only do I remember that I have been in the
presence of a certain object, but I represent to myself this absent
object as it was, as I have seen, felt, and judged it:--the remembrance
is then an image. In this last case, memory has been called by some
philosophers imaginative memory. Such is the foundation of imagination;
but imagination is something more still.
The mind, applying itself to the images furnished by memory, decomposes
them, chooses between their different traits, and forms of them new
images. Without this new power, imagination would be captive in the
circle of memory.
The gift of being strongly affected by objects and reproducing their
absent or vanished images, and the power of modifying these images so as
to compose of them new ones,--do they fully constitute what men call
imagination? No, or at least, if these are indeed the proper elements of
imagination, there must be something else added, to wit, the sentiment
of the beautiful in all its degrees. By this means is a great
imagination preserved and kindled. Did the careful reading of Titus
Livius enable the author of the _Horaces_ to vividly represent to
himself some of the scenes described, to seize their principal traits
and combine them happily? From the outset, sentiment, love of the
beautiful, especially of the morally beautiful, were requisite; there
was required that great heart whence sprang the word of the ancient
Horace.
Let us be well understood. We do not say that sentiment is imagination,
we say that it is the source whence imagination derives its inspirations
and becomes productive. If men are so different in regard to
imagination, it is because some are cold in presence of objects, cold in
the representations which they preserve of them, cold also in the
combinations which they form of them, whilst others, endowed with a
particular sensibility, are vividly moved by the first impressions of
objects, preserve strong recollections of them, and carry into the
exercise of all their faculties this same force of emotion. Take away
sentiment and all else is inanimate; let it manifest itself, and every
thing receives warmth, color, and life.
It is then impossible to limit imagination, as the word seems to demand,
to images properly so called, and to ideas that are related to physical
objects. To remember sounds, to choose between them, to combine them in
order to draw from them new effects,--does not this belong to
imagination, although sound is not an image? The true musician does not
possess less imagination than the painter. Imagination is conceded to
the poet when he retraces the images of nature; will this same faculty
be refused him when he retraces sentiments? But, besides images and
sentiments, does not the poet employ the high thoughts of justice,
liberty, virtue, in a word, moral ideas? Will it be said that in moral
paintings, in pictures of the intimate life of the soul, either graceful
or energetic, there is no imagination?
You see what is the extent of imagination: it has no limits, it is
applied to all things. Its distinctive character is that of deeply
moving the soul in the presence of a beautiful object, or by its
remembrance alone, or even by the idea alone of an imaginary object. It
is recognized by the sign that it produces, by the aid of its
representations, the same impression as, and even an impression more
vivid than, nature by the aid of real objects. If beauty, absent and
dreamed of, does not affect you as much as, and more than, present
beauty, you may have a thousand other gifts,--that of imagination has
been refused you.
In the eyes of imagination, the real world languishes in comparison with
its own fictions. One may feel that imagination is his master by the
_ennui_ that real and present things give him. The phantoms of imagination
have a vagueness, an indefiniteness of form, which moves a thousand
times more than the clearness and distinctness of actual perceptions.
And then, unless we are wholly mad,--and passion does not always render
this service,--it is very difficult to see reality otherwise than as it
is not, that is to say, very imperfectly. On the other hand, one makes
of an image what he wishes, unconsciously metamorphoses it, embellishes
it to his own liking. There is at the bottom of the human soul an
infinite power of feeling and loving to which the entire world does not
answer, still less a single one of its creatures, however charming. All
mortal beauty, viewed near by, does not suffice for this insatiable
power which it excites and cannot satisfy. But from afar, its effects
disappear or are diminished, shades are mingled and confounded in the
clear-obscure of memory and dream, and the objects please more because
they are less determinate. The peculiarity of men of imagination is,
that they represent men and things otherwise than as they are, and that
they have a passion for such fantastic images. Those that are called
positive men, are men without imagination, who perceive only what they
see, and deal with reality as it is instead of transforming it. They
have, in general, more reason than sentiment; they may be seriously,
profoundly honest; they will never be either poets or artists. What
makes the poet or artist is, with a foundation of good sense and
reason--without which all the rest is useless--a sensitive, even a
passionate heart; above all, a vivid, a powerful imagination.
If sentiment acts upon imagination, we see that imagination returns with
usury to sentiment what it gives.
This pure and ardent passion, this worship of beauty that makes the
great artist, can be found only in a man of imagination. In fact, the
sentiment of the beautiful may be awakened in each one of us before any
beautiful object; but, when this object has disappeared, if its image
does not subsist vivaciously retraced, the sentiment which it for a
moment excited is little by little effaced; it may be revived at the
sight of another object, but only to be extinguished again,--always
dying to be born again at hazard; not being nourished, increased,
exalted by the vivacious and continuous reproduction of its object in
the imagination, it wants that inspiring power, without which there is
no artist, no poet.
A word more on another faculty, which is not a simple faculty, but a
happy combination of those which have just been mentioned,--taste, so
ill treated, so arbitrarily limited in all theories.
If, after having heard a beautiful poetical or musical work, admired a
statue or a picture, you are able to recall what your senses have
perceived, to see again the absent picture, to hear again the sounds
that no longer exist; in a word, if you have imagination, you possess
one of the conditions without which there is no true taste. In fact, in
order to relish the works of imagination, is it not necessary to have
taste? Do we not need, in order to feel an author, not to equal him,
without doubt, but to resemble him in some degree? Will not a man of
sensible, but dry and austere mind, like Le Batteux or Condillac, be
insensible to the happy darings of genius, and will he not carry into
criticism a narrow severity, a reason very little reasonable--since he
does not comprehend all the parts of human nature,--an intolerance that
mutilates and blemishes art while thinking to purify it?
On the other hand, imagination does not suffice for the appreciation of
beauty. Moreover, that vivacity of imagination so precious to taste,
when it is somewhat restrained, produces, when it rules, only a very
imperfect taste, which, not having reason for a basis, carelessly
judges, runs the risk of misunderstanding the greatest beauty,--beauty
that is regulated. Unity in composition, harmony of all the parts, just
proportion of details, skilful combination of effects, discrimination,
sobriety, measure, are so many merits it will little feel, and will not
put in their place. Imagination has doubtless much to do with works of
art; but, in fine, it is not every thing. Is it only imagination that
makes the _Polyeucte_ and the _Misanthrope_, two incomparable marvels?
Is there not, also, in the profound simplicity of plan, in the measured
development of action, in the sustained truth of characters, a superior
reason, different from imagination which furnishes the superior colors,
and from sensibility that gives the passion?
Besides imagination and reason, the man of taste ought to possess an
enlightened but ardent love of beauty; he must take delight in meeting
it, must search for it, must summon it. To comprehend and demonstrate
that a thing is not beautiful, is an ordinary pleasure, an ungrateful
task; but to discern a beautiful thing, to be penetrated with its
beauty, to make it evident, and make others participate in our
sentiment, is an exquisite joy, a generous task. Admiration is, for him
who feels it, at once a happiness and an honor. It is a happiness to
feel deeply what is beautiful; it is an honor to know how to recognize
it. Admiration is the sign of an elevated reason served by a noble
heart. It is above a small criticism, that is skeptical and powerless;
but it is the soul of a large criticism, a criticism that is productive:
it is, thus to speak, the divine part of taste.
After having spoken of taste which appreciates beauty, shall we say
nothing of genius which makes it live again? Genius is nothing else than
taste in action, that is to say, the three powers of taste carried to
their culmination, and armed with a new and mysterious power, the power
of execution. But we are already entering upon the domain of art. Let us
wait, we shall soon find art again and the genius that accompanies it.
FOOTNOTES:
[96] Except the estimable _Essay on the Beautiful_, by P. Andre, a
disciple of Malebranche, whose life was considerably prolonged into the
eighteenth century. On P. Andre, see 3d Series, vol. iii., _Modern
Philosophy_, p. 207, 516.
[97] See in the works of Diderot, _Pensees sur la Sculpture, les
Salons_, etc.
[98] See 1st Series, vol. iv., explained and estimated, the theories of
Hutcheson and Reid.
[99] The theory of Kant is found in the _Critique of Judgment_, and in
the _Observations_ on the _Sentiment of the Beautiful and the Sublime_.
See the excellent translation made by M. Barny, 2 vols., 1846.
[100] On Hutcheson and Smith, their merits and defects, the part of
truth and the part of error, which their philosophy contains, see the
detailed lectures which we have devoted to them, 1st Series, vol. iv.
[101] See the exposition and refutation of the doctrine of Condillac and
Helvetius, _Ibid._, vol. iii.
[102] See lecture 5, in this vol.
LECTURE VII.
THE BEAUTIFUL IN OBJECTS.