Burke adds, indeed: “But then I imagine we shall be much mistaken if we attribute any considerable part of our satisfaction in tragedy to the consideration that tragedy is a deceit, and its representations no realities. [We seek no satisfaction of the kind: we know it to be a deceit throughout!] The nearer it approaches the reality, and the farther it removes us from all idea of fiction, the more perfect is its power.”
The nearest possible approach to reality, is only necessary to the success of fiction, to the pleasure of imagination. He himself has said: “Imitated distress is never so perfect, but we can perceive it is imitation!” Again, therefore, here is only Burke’s characteristic confusion of ideas.
My own doctrine on this subject is already obvious from the remarks made on others. We never cease to know that tragic representation is a mere deception; our reason is never imposed upon; our imagination is alone engaged; we are perfectly conscious that it is so; and we have all the sensibility, fine feeling, and generosity of pity, as well as the satisfaction of being thereby raised wonderfully in our own esteem, at the small cost of three shillings!
It is not a little curious, that this should not have been evident to those who have written so much about it. Dr. Campbell, alone, has approached it. “So great,” he says, “is the anomaly which sometimes displays itself in human characters, that it is not impossible to find persons who are quickly made to cry at seeing a tragedy, or reading a romance, which they know to be fictions, and yet are both inattentive and unfeeling in respect of the actual objects of compassion who live in their neighborhood, and are daily under their eye.... Men may be of a selfish, contracted, and even avaricious disposition, who are not what we should denominate hard-hearted, or unsusceptible of sympathetic feeling. Such will gladly enjoy the luxury of pity (as Hawkesworth terms it) when it nowise interferes with their more powerful passions; that is, when it comes unaccompanied with a demand upon their pockets.”—This should have led him to the simple truth, and should have prevented his framing the most confused, unintelligible, and worthless hypothesis upon this subject.
CHAPTER VII.
ANATOMICAL AND PHYSIOLOGICAL PRINCIPLES.
To any inquiry respecting the beauty of woman, the replies are, in general, various, inconsistent, or contradictory. The assertion might, therefore, appear to be true, that, even under the same climate, beauty is not always the same.
Our vague perceptions, however, and our vague expressions respecting beauty, will be found to be, in a great measure, owing to the inaccuracy of our mode of examining it, and, in some measure, to the imperfect nomenclature which we possess for describing it.