Part 8 (2/2)
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 circ.u.mstances 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 pa.s.sionate. 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 n.o.bis, 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 pa.s.sion. 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 pa.s.sengers 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 partic.i.p.ates 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 enn.o.ble 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 n.o.ble creature is desire tempered by an exquisite and delicate sentiment, and is sometimes even replaced by a disinterested wors.h.i.+p. 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 surpa.s.ses 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 G.o.ds 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 a.n.a.lysis 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 const.i.tute 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 t.i.tus Livius enable the author of the _Horaces_ to vividly represent to himself some of the scenes described, to seize their princ.i.p.al 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.
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