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 surpasses 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 gods 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 analysis 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 Traité 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 constitute 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 Titus Livius enable the author of the Horaces to vividly represent to himself some of the scenes described, to seize their principal 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.