Herein it is that painting and many other agreeable arts have laid one of the principal foundations of their power.And since,by its influence on our manners and our passions,it is of such great consequence,I shall here venture to lay down a rule,which may inform us with a good degree of certainty when we are to attribute the power of the arts to imitation,or to our pleasure in the skill of the imitator merely,and when to sympathy,or some other cause in conjunction with it.When the object represented in poetry or painting is such as we could have no desire of seeing in the reality,then I may be sure that its power in poetry or painting is owing to the power of imitation,and to no cause operating in the thing itself.So it is with most of the pieces which the painters call still-life.In these a cottage,a dunghill,the meanest and most ordinary utensils of the kitchen,are capable of giving us pleasure.But when the object of the painting or poem is such as we should run to see if real,let it affect us with what odd sort of sense it will,we may rely upon it,that the power of the poem or picture is more owing to the nature of the thing itself than to the mere effect of imitation,or to a consideration of the skill of the imitator,however excellent.Aristotle has spoken so much and so boldly upon the force of imitation in his Poetics,that it makes any further discourse upon this subject the less necessary.
XVII
Ambition Although imitation is one of the great instruments used by Providence in bringing our nature towards its perfection,yet if men gave themselves up to imitation entirely,and each followed the other,and so on in an eternal circle,it is easy to see that there never could be any improvement amongst them.
Men must remain as brutes do,the same at the end that they are at this day,and that they were in the beginning of the world.To prevent this,God has planted in man a sense of ambition,and a satisfaction arising from the contemplation of his excelling his fellows in something deemed valuable amongst them.
It is this passion that drives men to all the ways we see in use of signalizing themselves,and that tends to make whatever excites in a man the idea of this distinction so very pleasant.It has been so strong as to make very miserable men take comfort,that they were supreme in misery;and certain it is,that,where we cannot distinguish ourselves by something excellent,we begin to take a complacency in some singular infirmities,follies,or defects of one kind or other.It is on this principle that flattery is so prevalent;for flattery is no more than what raises in a man's mind an idea of a preference which he has not.Now,whatever,either on good or upon bad grounds,tends to raise a man in his own opinion,produces a sort of swelling and triumph,that is extremely grateful to the human mind;and this swelling is never more perceived,nor operates with more force,than when without danger we are conversant with terrible objects;the mind always claiming to itself some part of the dignity and importance of the things which it contemplates.
Hence proceeds what Longinus has observed of that glorying sense of inward greatness,that always fills the reader of such passages in poets and orators as are sublime;it is what every man must have felt in himself upon such occasions.
XVIII
The Recapitulation To draw the whole of what has been said into a few distinct points:-The passions which belong to self-preservation turn on pain and danger;they are simply painful when their causes immediately affect us;they are delightful when we have an idea of pain and danger,without being actually in such circumstances;this delight I have not called pleasure,because it turns on pain,and because it is different enough from any idea of positive pleasure.
Whatever excites this delight,I call sublime.The passions belonging to self-preservation are the strongest of all the passions.
The second head to which the passions are referred with relation to their final cause,is society.There are two sorts of societies.The first is,the society of sex.The passion belonging to this is called love,and it contains a mixture of lust;its object is the beauty of women.The other is the great society with man and all other animals.The passion subservient to this is called likewise love,but it has no mixture of lust,and its object is beauty;which is a name I shall apply to all such qualities in things as induce in us a sense of affection and tenderness,or some other passion the most nearly resembling these.
The passion of love has its rise in positive pleasure;it is,like all things which grow out of pleasure,capable of being mixed with a mode of uneasiness,that is,when an idea of its object is excited in the mind with an idea at the same time of having irretrievably lost it.This mixed sense of pleasure I have not called pain,because it turns upon actual pleasure,and because it is,both in its cause and in most of its effects,of a nature altogether different.
