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ful, it is totally impossible, without practice and knowledge, to distinguish or feel what is excellent. The beauty or the truth of Titian's flesh-tint may be appreciated by all; but it is only to the artist, whose multiplied hours of toil have not reached the slightest resemblance of one of its tones, that its excellence is manifest.

$5. The pleasure

attendant on conquering difficulties is right.

Wherever, then, difficulty has been overcome, there is excellence and therefore, in order to prove

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a work excellent, we have only to prove the difficulty of its production: whether it be useful or beautiful is another question; its excellence depends on its difficulty alone. Nor is it a false or diseased taste which looks for the overcoming of difficulties, and has pleasure in it, even without any view to resultant good. It has been made part of our moral nature that we should have a pleasure in encountering and conquering opposition, for the sake of the struggle and the victory, not for the sake of any after result; and not only our own victory, but the perception of that of another, is in all cases the source of pure and ennobling pleasure. And if we often hear it said, and truly said, that an artist has erred by seeking rather to show his skill in overcoming technical difficulties, than to reach a great end, be it observed that he is only blamed because he has sought to conquer an inferior difficulty rather than a great one; for it is much easier to overcome technical difficulties than to reach a great end. Whenever the visible victory over difficulties is found painful or in false taste, it is owing to the preference of an inferior to a great difficulty, or to the false estimate of what is difficult and what is not. It is far more difficult to be simple than to be complicated; far more difficult to sacrifice skill and cease exertion in the proper place, than to expend both indiscriminately. We shall find, in the course of our investigation, that beauty and difficulty go together; and that they are only mean and paltry difficulties which it is wrong or contemptible to wrestle with. Be it remembered then-Power is never wasted. Whatever power has been employed, produces excellence in proportion to its own dignity and exertion; and the faculty of perceiving this exertion, and appreciating this dignity, is the faculty of perceiving excellence.

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CHAPTER IV.

OF IDEAS OF IMITATION.

I, in his lectures, and many other persons of equally accurate habits of thought, (among others, S. T. Coleake a distinction between imitation and copying, of representing the first as the legitimate function of ita- art-the latter as its corruption; but as such a any distinction is by no means warranted, or explained ommon meaning of the words themselves, it is not mprehend exactly in what sense they are used by those And though, reasoning from the context, I can unwhat ideas those words stand for in their minds, I low the terms to be properly used as symbols of those ich (especially in the case of the word Imitation) are gly complex, and totally different from what most peounderstand by the term. And by men of less accught, the word is used still more vaguely or falsely. For Burke (Treatise on the Sublime, part i. sect. 16) says, the object represented in poetry or painting is such as have no desire of seeing in the reality, then we may be its power in poetry or painting is owing to the power ion." In which case the real pleasure may be in what been just speaking of, the dexterity of the artist's rit may be in a beautiful or singular arrangement of ra thoughtful chiaroscuro, or in the pure beauty of orms which art forces on our notice, though we should observed them in the reality; and I conceive that none sources of pleasure are in any way expressed or intithe term "imitation."

there is one source of pleasure in works of art totally from all these, which I conceive to be properly and acexpressed by the word "imitation :" one which, though

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constantly confused in reasoning, because it is always associated in fact, with other means of pleasure, is totally separated from them in its nature, and is the real basis of whatever complicated or various meaning may be afterwards attached to the word in the minds of men.

§ 3. What is requisite to the

sense of imitation.

I wish to point out this distinct source of pleasure clearly at once, and only to use the word "imitation" in reference to it. § 2. Real meaning Whenever anything looks like what it is not, of the term. the resemblance being so great as nearly to deceive, we feel a kind of pleasurable surprise, an agreeable excitement of mind, exactly the same in its nature as that which we receive from juggling. Whenever we perceive this in something produced by art, that is to say, whenever the work is seen to resemble something which we know it is not, we receive what I call an idea of imitation. Why such ideas are pleasing, it would be out of our present purpose to inquire; we only know that there is no man who does not feel pleasure in his animal nature from gentle surprise, and that such surprise can be excited in no more distinct manner than by the evidence that a thing is not what it appears to be.* Now two things are requisite to our complete and more pleasurable perception of this first, that the resemblance be so perfect as to amount to a deception; secondly, that there be some means of proving at the same moment that it is a deception. The most perfect ideas and pleasures of imitation are, therefore, when one sense is contradicted by another, both bearing as positive evidence on the subject as each is capable of alone; as when the eye says a thing is round, and the finger says it is flat; they are, therefore, never felt in so high a degree as in painting, where appearance of projection, roughness, hair, velvet, etc., are given with a smooth surface, or in wax-work, where the first evidence of the senses is perpetually contradicted by their experience; but the moment we come to marble, our definition checks us, for a marble figure does not look like what it is not it looks like marble, and like the form of a man, but then it is marble, and it is the form of a man. It does not look like a man, which it is not, but like the form of a man, which it is. Form is form, bona fide and * συλλογισμός έττιγ, ὅτι τοῦτο ἐκεῖνο — Arist. Rhet. 1, 11, 28.

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vhether in marble or in flesh-not an imitation or nce of form, but real form. The chalk outline of the f a tree on paper, is not an imitation; it looks like d paper-not like wood, and that which it suggests to is not properly said to be like the form of a bough, it rm of a bough. Now, then, we see the limits of an nitation; it extends only to the sensation of trickery eption occasioned by a thing's intentionally seeming from what it is; and the degree of the pleasure depends legree of difference and the perfection of the resemnot on the nature of the thing resembled. The simple in the imitation would be precisely of the same degree, curacy could be equal.) whether the subject of it were › or his horse. There are other collateral sources of which are necessarily associated with this, but that the pleasure which depends on the imitation is the

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Ideas of imitation, then, act by producing the mimi simple pleasure of surprise, and that not of surthat prise in its higher sense and function, but of the mean and paltry surprise which is felt in jugglery. eas and pleasures are the most contemptible which can ed from art; first, because it is necessary to their enthat the mind should reject the impression and address ing represented, and fix itself only upon the reflection s not what it seems to be. All high or noble emotion ght are thus rendered physically impossible, while the ults in what is very like a strictly sensual pleasure. We sider tears as a result of agony or of art, whichever we ut not of both at the same moment. If we are sur

y them as an attainment of the one, it is impossible we hoved by them as a sign of the other.

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Ideas of imitation are contemptible in the secemp- ond place, because not only do they preclude the spectator from enjoying inherent beauty in the but they can only be received from mean and paltry , because it is impossible to imitate anything really We can "paint a cat or a fiddle, so that they look as if I take them up ;" but we cannot imitate the ocean, or

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§ 6. Imitation is

cause it is easy.

the Alps. We can imitate fruit, but not a tree; flowers, but not a pasture; cut-glass, but not the rainbow. All pictures in which deceptive powers of imitation are displayed are therefore either of contemptible subjects, or have the imitation shown in contemptible parts of them, bits of dress, jewels, furniture, etc. Thirdly, these ideas are contemptible, because contemptible be- no ideas of power are associated with them; to the ignorant, imitation, indeed, seems difficult, and its success praiseworthy, but even they can by no possibility see more in the artist than they do in a juggler, who arrives at a strange end by means with which they are unacquainted. To the instructed, the juggler is by far the more respectable artist of the two, for they know sleight of hand to be an art of immensely more difficult acquirement, and to imply more ingenuity in the artist than a power of deceptive imitation in painting, which requires nothing more for its attainment than a true eye, a steady hand, and moderate industry-qualities which in no degree separate the imitative artist from a watch-maker, pinmaker, or any other neat-handed artificer. These remarks do not apply to the art of the Diorama, or the stage, where the pleasure is not dependent on the imitation, but is the same which we should receive from nature herself, only far inferior in degree. It is a noble pleasure; but we shall see in the course of our investigation, both that it is inferior to that which we receive when there is no deception at all, and why it is so.

§ 7. Recapitulation.

Whenever then in future, I speak of ideas of imitation, I wish to be understood to mean the immediate and present perception that something produced by art is not what it seems to be. I prefer saying "that it is not what it seems to be," to saying "that it seems to be what it is not," because we perceive at once what it seems to be, and the idea of imitation, and the consequent pleasure, result from the subsequent perception of its being something else-flat, for instance, when we thought it was round.

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