Beauty in woman: analysed and classified : with a critical view of the hypotheses of the most eminent writers, painters, and sculptors / by Alexander Walker.

  • Alexander Walker
Date:
1892
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Beauty in woman: analysed and classified : with a critical view of the hypotheses of the most eminent writers, painters, and sculptors / by Alexander Walker. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    considered. This and similar errors, as already said, have greatly obscured this subject, and have led Burke and others so to modify and qualify their doctrines, as to take from them all precision and certainty. Hence, in one place, Burke says, “ As, in the ani- mal world, and in a good measure in the vegetable world likewise, the qualities that constitute heauty may possibly be united to things of greater dimensions [that is, littleness may he united with bigness !]; when they are so united they constitute a species something different both from the sublime and beauti- ful, which I have before called. Fine.” So also he says, “ Ugliness I imagine likewise to be consistent enough with an idea of the sublime. But I would by no means insinuate that ugliness of itself is a sublime idea, unless united with such qualities as excite a strong terror.” Here, he confounds sublimity with terror, as do Blair and other writers, when they say that “ exact proportion of parts, though it enters often into the beautiful, is much disregarded in the sublime.” It is a fact, that exactly in proportion as ughness is substituted for heauty in vast objects, is sublimity taken away, until at last it is utterly lost in the terrible. Even Blair shows that sublimity may exist without terror or pain. “ The proper sensation of sublimity appears,” he observes, “to be distinguishable from the sensation of either of these, and, on several occasions, to he entirely separated from them. In- many grand objects, there is no coincidence with terror at all; as in the magnificent prospect of wide extended plains, and of the starry firmament; or in