There is a dwarfish size of men and women,which is almost constantly so gross and massive in comparison of their height,that they present us with a very disagreeable image.But should a man be found not above two or three feet high,supposing such a person to have all the parts of his body of a delicacy suitable to such a size,and otherwise endued with the common qualities of other beautiful bodies,I am pretty well convinced that a person of such a stature might be considered as beautiful;might be the object of love;might give us very pleasing ideas on viewing him.The only thing which could possibly interpose to check our pleasure is,that such creatures,however formed,are unusual,and are often therefore considered as something monstrous.The large and gigantic,though very compatible with the sublime,is contrary to the beautiful.It is impossible to suppose a giant the object of love.
When we let our imagination loose in romance,the ideas we naturally annex to that size are those of tyranny,cruelty,injustice,and everything horrid and abominable.We paint the giant ravaging the country,plundering the innocent traveller,and afterwards gorged with his half-living flesh:such are Polyphemus,Cacus,and others,who make so great a figure in romances and heroic poems.The event we attend to with the greatest satisfaction is their defeat and death.I do not remember,in all that multitude of deaths with which the Iliad is filled,that the fall of any man,remarkable for his great stature and strength,touches us with pity;nor does it appear that the author,so well read in human nature,ever intended it should.It is Simoisius,in the soft bloom of youth,torn from his parents,who tremble for a courage so ill suited to his strength;it is another hurried by war from the new embraces of his bride,young,and fair,and a novice to the field,who melts us by his untimely fate.
Achilles,in spite of the many qualities of beauty which Homer has bestowed on his outward form,and the many great virtues with which he has adorned his mind,can never make us love him.It may be observed,that Homer has given the Trojans,whose fate he has designed to excite our compassion,infinitely more of the amiable,social virtues than he has distributed among his Greeks.With regard to the Trojans,the passion he chooses to raise is pity;pity is a passion founded on love;and these lesser,and if I may say domestic virtues,are certainly the most amiable.But he has made the Greeks far their superiors in the politic and military virtues.The councils of Priam are weak;
the arms of Hector comparatively feeble;his courage far below that of Achilles.Yet we love Priam more than Agamemnon,and Hector more than his conqueror Achilles.Admiration is the passion which Homer would excite in favour of the Greeks,and he has done it by bestowing on them the virtues which have little to do with love.This short digression is perhaps not wholly beside our purpose,where our business is to show,that objects of great dimensions are incompatible with beauty,the more incompatible as they are greater;whereas the small,if ever they fail of beauty,this failure is not to be attributed to their size.
XXV
Of Colour With regard to colour,the disquisition is almost infinite:but I conceive the principles laid down in the beginning of this part are sufficient to account for the effects of them all,as well as for the agreeable effects of transparent bodies,whether fluid or solid.Suppose I look at a bottle of muddy liquor,of a blue or red colour;the blue or red rays cannot pass clearly to the eye,but are suddenly and unequally stopped by the intervention of little opaque bodies,which without preparation change the idea,and change it too into one disgreeable in its own nature,conformably to the principles laid down in sect.
24.But when the ray passes without such opposition through the glass or liquor,when the glass or liquor is quite transparent,the light is sometimes softened in the passage,which makes it more agreeable even as light;and the liquor reflecting all the rays of its proper colour evenly,it has such an effect on the eye,as smooth opaque bodies have on the eye and touch.So that the pleasure here is compounded of the softness of the transmitted,and the evenness of the reflected light.This pleasure may be heightened by the common principles in other things,if the shape of the glass which holds the transparent liquor be so judiciously varied,as to present the colour gradually and interchangeably,weakened and strengthened with all the variety which judgment in affairs of this nature shall suggest.On a review of all that has been said of the effects as well as the causes of both,it will appear,that the sublime and beautiful are built on principles very different,and that their affections are as different:the great has terror for its basis;which,when it is modified,causes that emotion in the mind which I have called astonishment;the beautiful is founded on mere positive pleasure,and excites in the soul that feeling which is called love.Their causes have made the subject of this fourth part.
