sures. An easy chair is too confined in its scope to be an æsthetic object.

3. The muscular and sensual elements can be brought into art by being contemplated in the idea, in place of being enjoyed in the reality. A painter, or a poet, may depict a feast, and the picture may be viewed with pleasure. Seen at a distance, the objects of sensual delight can take on the æsthetic phase. They are no longer obnoxious to the disqualifying conditions above specified. In such a shape they do not minister to our necessities; their disagreeable accompaniments need not be admitted into the picture; and they are not restricted to the individual consumer.* So with the elements of wealth, power, dignity, and affection, which in their actuality want the liberal character of the true artistic delight; if we can only derive pleasure from the spectacle of them in the hands of the select number of their possessors, they become to us an enjoyment that can be shared by the general multitude. And it is really the fact, that mankind find a charm in contemplating the wealthy, the powerful, the elevated, the illustrious, and take an interest in seeing displays of strong affection wherein they have no part; accordingly such elements are adopted freely into artistic compositions, and attract the admiration of the throng of beholders. The gratification of the spectacle of sovereign dignity, has usually been stronger than the invidia of so much grandeur and distinction conferred upon a fellow-mortal ; and it is doubtful if history would retain half its interest with the majority, if royal and imperial actors were put aside.

These are the only general assignable conditions that I can seize upon to circumscribe the aesthetic pleasures. I cannot pretend to affirm that they include the circumstances that in every case constitute some pleasures as 'elevating' and refined, as distinguished from others that are sensual and 'degrading;' because, if from no other consideration, a mere arbitrary convention may sometimes make all the difference. The ideal representation of the sensual pleasures comes strictly under the province of Art, but, for prudential and moral reasons, is kept within certain limits, varying in different ages and countries.

PROBLEM OF THE BEAUTIFUL.

213

In

4. Ever since the dawn of philosophical speculation, the nature of the Beautiful has been a matter of discussion. the conversations of Socrates, and in the composed dialogues of Plato, this inquiry had a place side by side with others conducted in a kindred spirit, as into the Good, the Just, the Fit. Most of the inquirers laboured under a fallacy of misapprehension, rendering the discussion futile as regarded analytic results; they proceeded on the supposition, that some single thing could be found, entering as a common ingredient, into the whole class of things named beautiful. Now, excepting the feeling itself, which may be presumed to have a certain uniform character, from the circumstance of the employment of the same name to denote it throughout, there is no one thing common to all the objects of beauty. Had there been such, we should have known it in the course of two thousand years The search for the one common attribute has been an entire failure; like many other researches, conducted under the same mistaken impulse, for finding a great comprehensive unity in the causes of all natural phenomena. We are now led to recognise the doctrine of the 'plurality of causes' in our explanations of things; and the instances of this plurality are both numerous and familiar. Motion may be produced by a great variety of agents or prime movers-animal power, wind, water, steam, gunpowder, electricity, &c. The same is true of heat. The agents called useful or good, (hurtful or evil), to living beings are endless, and devoid of any other property in coinmon. Even such a limited effect as nervous stimulation we have seen, in the preceding chapter, to be operated by an exceedingly wide variety of agents physical and mental; and yet the effect itself is very much alike under them all. With such examples before us, it is not to be wondered at, that speculative men should have been unable to find any single and exclusive property inhering in all the things that give rise to the common impression, termed the beautiful*

'The word Beauty, and, I believe, the corresponding term in all languages whatever, is employed in a great variety of acceptations, which seem,

5. Sublimity, Beauty, Grace, Harmony, Melody, Ideality, Picturesqueness, Proportion, Order, Fitness, Keeping-though they do not all relate to the beautiful, are all involved in the

on a superficial view, to have very little connexion with each other; and among which it is not easy to trace the slightest shade of common or coincident meaning. It always, indeed, denotes something which gives not merely pleasure to the mind, but a certain refined species of pleasure, remote from those grosser indulgences which are common to us with the brutes; but it is not applicable universally in every case where such refined pleasures are received; being confined to those exclusively which form the proper objects of Intellectual Taste. We speak of beautiful colours, beautiful forms, beautiful picces of music: we speak also of the beauty of virtue; of the beauty of poetical composition; of the beauty of style in prose; of the beauty of a mathematical theorem; of the beauty of a philosophical discovery. On the other hand, we do not speak of beautiful tastes, or beautiful smells; nor do we apply this epithet to the agreeable softness, or smoothness, or warmth of tangible objects, considered solely in their relation to our sense of feeling. Still less would it be consistent with the common use of language, to speak of the beauty of high birth, of the beauty of a large fortune, or of the beauty of extensive renown.

'It has long been a favourite problem with philosophers, to ascertain the common quality or qualities which entitles a thing to the denomination of beautiful; but the success of their speculations has been so inconsiderable, that little can be inferred from them but the impossibility of the problem to which they have been directed.

"The speculations which have given occasion to these remarks have evidently originated in a prejudice which has descended to modern times from the scholastic ages; that when a word admits of a variety of significations, these different significations must all be species of the same genus; and must consequently include some essential idea common to every individual to which the generic term can be applied.

'Of this principle, which has been an abundant source of obscurity and mystery in the different sciences, it would be easy to expose the unsoundness and futility; but, on the present occasion, I shall only remind my readers of the absurdities into which it led the Aristotelians on the subject of causation --the ambiguity of the word, which in the Greek language corresponds to the English word cause, having suggested to them the vain attempt of tracing the common idea which, in the case of any effect, belongs to the efficient, to the matter, to the form, and to the end. The idle generalities we meet with in other philosophers, about the ideas of the good, the fit, and the becoming, have taken their rise from the same undue influence of popular epithets on the speculations of the learned.

Socrates, whose plain good sense appears in this, as in various other

NAMES FOR AESTHETIC QUALITIES.

215

circle of pleasures now before us; and it is quite obvious that no one fact can run through this variety of designations. There must be a great multitude of agents operating to produce these different impressions, which are related to one another, only by attaching in common to the æsthetic class of compositions. Doubtless, several of these names may be employed to mean the same thing, being, in fact, partially synonymous terms; as Beauty and Grace,-Proportion, Fitness, and Keeping; but hardly any two terms are synonymous throughout, and there are distinct conceptions implied in Sublimity, Beauty, Picturesqueness, Fitness, and the Ludicrous.

The objects described in these various phrases may occur spontaneously in nature; as, for example, wild and impressive scenery; they may spring up incidental to other effects, as when the contests of nations, carried on for self-protection or supremacy, produce grand and stirring spectacles to the unconcerned beholders, or to after ages; or when the structures, raised for pure utility, rise to grandeur from their mere

instances, to have fortified his understanding to a wonderful degree against the metaphysical subtleties which misled his successors, was evidently apprised fully of the justness of the foregoing remarks—if any reliance can be placed on the account given by Xenophon of his conversation with Aristippus about the Good and the Beautiful. Aristippus, we are told, having asked him "if he knew anything that was good ?" "Do you ask me," said Socrates, "if I know anything good for a fever, or for an inflammation in the eyes, or as a preservative against a famine ?"

""By no means," returned the other.

"Nay, then," replied Socrates, "if you ask me concerning a good which is good for nothing, I know of none such; nor yet do I desire to know it." 'Aristippus still urging him, "But do you know," said he, "anything beautiful?"

""A great many," returned Socrates.

"Are these all like to one another ?"

"Far from it, Aristippus; there is a very considerable difference between them."

"“But how," said Aristippus, "can beauty differ from beauty?' -Stewart On the Beautiful, Part I. Chap. 1.

⚫ The illustration from the Aristotelian notions of Causation is not in point, for these various names designate really different aspects of the relation of cause and effect, or of pre-requisite condition, conceived in a certain manner.

magnitude, as a ship of war, or a vast building; and lastly, they may be expressly produced for their own sake, in which case we have a class of Fine Arts, a profession of Artists, and an education of people generally in elegance and taste.

6. It will be apparent, therefore, that I contemplate treating of this subject, not with a view to establish any one comprehensive generalization, but to indicate a certain number of distinct and co-ordinate groups, into which the details appear capable of being thrown. With the utmost desire to generalize the common attributes wherever they occur, I see no likelihood of carrying this to the point of including all the objects now referred to, in even a small number of generalities. In a highly-wrought poem or romance-an Iliad, a Macbeth, a Don Quixote, or a novel of Scott, Bulwer, or Balzac-the mind is touched at a great many points, and yet harmoniously ; and it would not be good, either for mental science or for criticism, to attempt to fuse the various stimulants, assembled in one of those compositions, under some supposed generality.

Throughout the whole of the preceding exposition in this and my former volume, I have been in the habit of adverting to the employment in Art of the various elements passed in review the sensations, the intellectual associations, and the special emotions. The first thing to be done here, therefore, is to collect these various allusions, and see how far they will go to exhaust the catalogue of æsthetic effects.

7. As the pure muscular feelings, and the sensations of organic life, taste, smell, and touch, do not belong to Art, unless as conceived in idea, we must start from the sense of Hearing. All the pleasant varieties of sounds may enter into artistic compositions, as in music. Some sounds are characterized as sweet; others are loud and strong, which, within limits, is also an agreeable property. The voluminous sounds are pleasant in a more unqualified manner. The pitch of sound is the basis of musical harmony. The waxing and waning of sounds is an effect particularly impressive. All these qualities are concerned in producing pleasure of the