by art. What pleasure, (I mean pleasure of imitation,) can the mind experience, when it is in no wise apprised of the imitation it beholds? What do we enjoy in such a work? We shall be answered, nature. But the pleasure derived from nature is one thing, that from imitation another. The pleasure that a landscape painting occasions is other than that the landscape itself would afford in nature; what renders the pretended art of landscape gardening as little art as it is possible to be is, that it presents as much reality as possible. Now it cannot claim to be at once reality and imitation. I would have it understood why I insist on the unimitative or rather anti-imitative character of this art of forming gardens. I have no wish to deny the gratifications it yields, or to dispute about the kind of skill it requires. Those two points go for nothing in investigating the nature of imitation. But I could find no example better adapted to render evident, by force of contrast, what imitation ought to be in order to constitute imitation, the kind of pleasure by which it must be recognized, and the error of those, who, with a perverted desire to render the image identical with its model, seek to exchange, as much as possible, the effect of resemblance for that of reality, and set the material illusion of the senses, above that more immaterial of the mind. CHAPTER XVII. THE RESULT OF THE PRECEDING FACTS AND NOTIONS LEADS TO A KNOWLEDGE OF WHAT OUGHT TO BE THE TRUE END OF IMITATION. In bringing this first part to a close, I cannot avoid warning the reader anew against the erroneous construction to which the preceding chapter is liable. It is very important that the conclusion therein arrived at, which will form the groundwork of the ensuing Part, should leave no ambiguity in the mind. As in treating of imitation I propose only to consider it abstractedly, that is, under a general and theoretical, and not a limited and practical point of view, the words I may employ should be understood only as in a sense related to the nature of an abstract theory, that is, one which generalizes ideas. Thus it should be thoroughly understood that I here apply the word imitation theoretically in an active sense, or one signifying imitative power, and not as meaning a work of art or the object imitated. I also employ, in a general sense, the word model, which, more especially in the language of the schools of art, is said of the individual thing or person imitated. It will, on the contrary, have been observed that, consistently with the spirit of this theory, I understand by model, that portion of the kingdom of nature, whether moral or physical, which exclusively constitutes the imitative province of a single art. A similar sense and a like general acceptation should be applied to that kind of distance between the model and its imitative process, the relative proportions of which for every art have been determined in the foregoing chapter. It must ap- 1 pear clearly enough that this intellectual distance is wholly different in kind from that which, for instance, is discoverable between a badly executed portrait and its original, and which is denominated want of resemblance. Provided there existed the slightest wish to misapprehend the sense which, in this theory, is attached to the words in question, it were easy enough to draw the conclusion that, as the merit of a work of imitation consists in its non-resemblance, the merit of a representation of a man would be that it might be taken for the trunk of a tree. Thus by applying one set of ideas to the consideration of those of another, by viewing a gene ralized in the light of a particular object, and neglecting the signification the author had attached to his terms and phrases, one would be liable to pervert the most simple theory by a series of blunders, to render its very perspicuity obscure, and deduce from it consequences the most absurd and ridiculous. I trust then that he who may have followed out this theory concerning the nature of imitation, in its premises, its deductions, and its application, will clearly perceive that resemblance by means of identity or the repetition of reality by reality, is the antagonist principle of the pleasure of imitation, as well when that notion is taken in the absolute sense of error, as when it is applied to works conceived or executed in the spirit of this method; and that, hence, a work produced on the above named principle, or in the spirit of it, will only be calculated to please the rude instinct, or will be incapable of affording any other pleasure than that which is limited to the senses. Nor will it be less clear that the principle of resemblance by means of an image, which reproduces a thing in some other, heretofore established as an essential element of true imitation, must be that of a kind of pleasure opposed to the before > named, seeing that we enjoy imitation so much the more, in proportion as the judgment and the understanding have more appositions to make, (that is, a greater amount of objects to bring to and set by one another), and as those objects are farther removed from each other. Such being the case it must, as a necessary consequence, follow, alike from the elementary idea of imitation, from the facts that have been deduced from it relative to the properties of every art, and from the analysis of the mind in its mode of enjoying, that the artist should, in every form of composition, look far less to the material effects of that mechanical action, which is more especially addressed to the instinct or physical sense, than to the superior effect of that intellectual action, which extends the power of art far beyond the limits of its matter, and of physical impressions. Since it is acknowledged that each of these two modes of imitating has its particular amount of pleasure, and since we are compelled to admit that the pleasure increases or diminishes, both in the arts considered by themselves, and in every work of art, according to the greater or less distance separating the model from the process by which it is imitated, the elements of reality from those of the image, and the effect produced from the means or instruments by which it was produced; it is necessary that, in every form of composition, the pleasure of the judgment and the understanding be preferred before that of the senses. Pleasure then is to be regarded as the object < |