CHAPTER FIFTH.

CONTINUATION OF THE SAME SUBJECT.

To the latitude in the use of the word beauty, of which I have been thus attempting to vindicate the propriety, it has been objected, both by Mr. Burke and Mr. Price, that it has a tendency to produce a confusion of ideas, and to give rise to ill-judged applications of the term. The inconveniencies, however, of which they complain, appear to me to have arisen entirely from their own inattention to a very important distinction among the various elements, or ingredients, which may enter into the composition of the Beautiful. Of these elements, there are some which are themselves intrinsically pleasing, without a reference to any thing else; there are others which please only in a state of combination. Thus there are certain colors which every person would pronounce to be pleasing, when presented singly to the eye; there are others, which, without possessing any such recommendation, produce a pleasing effect when happily assorted. The Beauty of the former may be said to be absolute or intrinsic; that of the latter to be only relative.

Numberless other instances might be mentioned of things that have only a relative beauty. This, indeed, is the case with most things which nature has destined to be only parts of some whole; and which, accordingly, are beautiful only in their proper places. A few years ago, it was not unusual to see a picture of a lady's eye in the possession of her friend or admirer; and there is a possibility that the effect might not be disagreeable to those whose memory was able to supply readily the rest of the features. To a stranger (if I may judge from my own feelings) it was scarcely less offensive than if it had been painted in the middle of her forehead.

In reasoning about the Beautiful, Mr. Burke confines

his attention, almost exclusively, to those elements of Beauty which are intrinsically pleasing, assuming it probably in his own mind, as self-evident, that Beauty, when exhibited in the works of nature, and in the compositions of art, is produced by a combination of these alone. If instead of following this synthetical process, he had begun with considering the beautiful in its more complicated forms, (the point of view unquestionably in which it is most interesting to a philosopher to examine it, when his aim is to illustrate its relation to the power of taste,) he could not have failed to have been led analytically to this distinction between the intrinsic and the relative beauties of its constituent elements, and to perceive that the one class is as essential as the other to the general result.

The same remark may be extended to that external sense from which the power of taste borrows its name; and to which, in a variety of respects, it will be found to bear a very close analogy. Among simple tastes, such as sweet, sour, bitter, hot, pungent, there are some which are intrinsically grateful; while others, which are not less necessary ingredients in some of our most delicious mixtures, are positively disagreeable in a separate state. At the head of the former class, sweet seems to be placed by universal consent; and accordingly it is called by Mr. Burke the beautiful of taste. In speaking, however, of those more refined and varied gratifications of the palate to which the arts of luxury minister, it is not to any one simple taste, but to mixtures, or compositions resulting from a skilful combination of them, that the epithet beautiful (supposing this new phraseology to be adopted) ought, according to strict analogy, to be applied. Agreeably to this view of the subject, sweet may be said to be intrinsically pleasing, and bitter to be relatively pleasing; while both are, in many cases, equally essential to those effects, which, in the art of cookery, correspond to that composite beauty, which it is the object of the painter and of the poet to create.

A great deal of what Mr. Price has so ingeniously observed with respect to the picturesque, is applicable to what I have here called relative beauties; and so far

as this is the case, instead of making the Picturesque a distinct genus from the Beautiful, it would certainly have been more logical to say, that the former is, in some cases, an important element in the composition of the latter. For my own part, I cannot conceive any principle whatever, on which we can reasonably refuse a place among the elements or constituents of beauty, to a class of qualities which are acknowledged, on all hands, to render what was formerly beautiful, more beautiful still.

But it is not on this ground alone that I object to Mr. Price's language. The meaning he has annexed to the word picturesque seems to me to be equally exceptionable with the limited and arbitrary notion concerning the beautiful, which he has adopted from Mr. Burke. In both cases, he has departed widely from established use; and in consequence of this, when he comes to compare, according to his peculiar definitions, the picturesque and the beautiful together, he has given to many observations, equally just and refined, an air of paradox, which might have been easily avoided, by employing a more cautious phraseology. In justification of this criticism, it is necessary to introduce here a few remarks on the different acceptations in which the epithet picturesque has been hitherto understood in this country, since it was naturalized by the authority of our classical writers.*

And first, as to the oldest and most general use of the word; it seems to me an unquestionable proposition, That if this is to be appealed to as the standard of propriety, the word does not refer immediately to landscapes, or to any visible objects, but to verbal description. It means that graphical power by which poetry and eloquence produce effects on the mind analogous to those of a picture. Thus every person would naturally apply the epithet to the following description of a thunderstorm in Thomson's Seasons:

"Black from the stroke above, the mountain-pine,

A leaning shattered trunk, stands scathed to heaven,
The talk of future ages; and below,

A lifeless group the blasted cattle lie:

See Note (T.)

Here the soft flocks, with that same harmless look
They wore alive, and ruminating still

In fancy's eye; and there the frowning bull
And ox half raised."

To prevent, however, any misapprehensions of my meaning, it is proper to add, that, in speaking of the graphical power of poetry and eloquence, I would not be understood to limit that epithet (according to its etymology) to objects of Sight; but to extend it to all those details, of whatever kind, by a happy selection of which the imagination may be forcibly impressed. In the following sentence, Dr. Warton applies the word picturesque (and I think with the most exact propriety) to a passage of Thomson, where it is somewhat curious, that every circumstance mentioned recalls some impression upon the Ear alone.

"How full," says Warton, " how particular and picturesque, is this assemblage of circumstances, that attend a very keen frost in a night of winter!"

"Loud rings the frozen earth and hard reflects
A double noise; while at his evening watch,
The village dog deters the nightly thief:
The heifer lows; the distant waterfall
Swells in the breeze; and with the hasty tread
Of traveller, the hollow-sounding plain

Shakes from afar."

This use of the word picturesque is analogous to the common signification of other words which have a similar termination, and are borrowed from the Italian, through the medium of the French. The word arabesque, for example, expresses something which is executed in the style of the Arabians; moresque, something in the style of the Moors; and grotesque, something bearing a resemblance to certain whimsical paintings found in a grotto, or subterraneous apartment at Rome. In like manner, picturesque properly means what is done in the style and with the spirit of a painter; and it was thus, if I am not much mistaken, that the word was commonly employed, when it was first adopted in England. Agreeably to the same idea, the Persians, it is said, distinguish the different degrees of descriptive power in different writers, by calling them painters or sculptors:

in allusion to which practice, the title of a sculptor-poet has been bestowed by a very ingenious critic on Lucretius, in consequence of the singularly bold relief which he gives to his images.*

Of late years, since a taste for landscape-painting came to be fashionable in this island, the word picturesque has been frequently employed to denote those combinations or groups or attitudes of objects, that are fitted for the purposes of the painter. It is in this sense that the word is used by Mr. Gilpin in his Observations on Picturesque Beauty; and I am inclined to think, that it is in this sense it is now most commonly understood, in speaking of natural scenery, or of the works of the architect.

I do not object to this employment of the word, (although I certainly think it an innovation) for it conveys a clear and definite idea, and one for which there was no appropriate expression in our language. Nor do I see any impropriety in connecting the words Picturesque and Beauty together; for although an object may be beautiful without being picturesque, or picturesque without being beautiful, yet there is not any inconsistency or incompatibility in the ideas. On the contrary, it is only when the two qualities are united, that landscapepainting produces its highest effect.†

According to Mr. Price, the phrase Picturesque Beauty is little better than a contradiction in terms; but although this may be the case in the arbitrary interpretation he has given to both these words, there is certainly no contradiction in the expression, if we employ Beauty in its ordinary sense, and Picturesque in the sense very distinctly stated in Mr. Gilpin's definition.I

The same remark may be extended to the Sublime; between which and the Beautiful, there certainly does not exist that incongruity which most English writers

* Dr. Warton, Essay on the Genius of Pope, Vol. II. p. 165.

See Note (U.)

Mr. Price himself appears to be sensible of this, from the parenthesis in the following sentence: "There is nothing more ill judged, or more likely to create confusion, (if we agree with Mr. Burke in his idea of beauty,) than the joining of it to the picturesque, and calling the character by the title of Picturesque Beauty.”— (Page 42.)