In proportion therefore to the value, constancy, and efficiency of this
influence, we must be modest and cautious in the pronouncing of positive
opinions on the subject of beauty. For every one of us has peculiar
sources of enjoyment necessarily opened to him in certain scenes and
things, sources which are sealed to others, and we must be wary on the
one hand, of confounding these in ourselves with ultimate conclusions of
taste, and so forcing them upon all as authoritative, and on the other
of supposing that the enjoyments of others which we cannot share are
shallow or unwarrantable, because incommunicable. I fear, for instance,
that in the former portion of this work I may have attributed too much
community and authority to certain affections of my own for scenery
inducing emotions of wild, impetuous, and enthusiastic characters, and
too little to those which I perceive in others for things peaceful,
humble, meditative, and solemn. So also between youth and age there will
be found differences of seeking, which are not wrong, nor of false
choice in either, but of different temperament, the youth sympathizing
more with the gladness, fulness, and magnificence of things, and the
gray hairs with their completion, sufficiency and repose. And so,
neither condemning the delights of others, nor altogether distrustful of
our own, we must advance, as we live on, from what is brilliant to what
is pure, and from what is promised to what is fulfilled, and from what
is our strength to what is our crown, only observing in all things how
that which is indeed wrong, and to be cut up from the root, is dislike,
and not affection. For by the very nature of these beautiful qualities,
which I have defined to be the signature of God upon his works, it is
evident that in whatever we altogether dislike, we see not all; that the
keenness of our vision is to be tested by the expansiveness of our love,
and that as far as the influence of association has voice in the
question, though it is indeed possible that the inevitable painfulness
of an object, for which we can render no sufficient reason, may be owing
to its recalling of a sorrow, it is more probably dependent on its
accusation of a crime.
CHAPTER V.
OF TYPICAL BEAUTY:--FIRST, OF INFINITY, OR THE TYPE OF DIVINE
INCOMPREHENSIBILITY.
Sec. 1. Impossibility of adequately treating the subject.
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