Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

BEAUTIFUL AND SUBLIME
passage from a letter written by Abigail Adams to her son John Quincy Adams
on his voyage to France in 1779 almost perfectly characterizes the sublime:
These are the times in which a genius would wish to live. It is not in the
still calm of life, or the repose of a pacific station that great characters
are formed. The habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending
with difficulties. Great necessities call out great virtues. When a mind is
raised, and animated by scenes that engage the heart, then those qualities
which would otherwise lay dormant, wake into life and form the
character of the hero and the statesman. 4
The sublime names an experience; by 1759, when Burke published his Philosophical
Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, it was common also
to define the sublime’s sister concept, beauty, by reference to the emotions awakened
by natural phenomena or works of art, rather than—as earlier—by
characteristics (harmony and proportion) of the thing itself. I say “sister concept,”
because Burke differentiates the beautiful from the sublime in terms clearly identifying
them with the feminine and masculine poles of the modern gender system;
in this he only states more explicitly than usual the consensus of his period.
The features that, according to Burke, give rise to the experience of beauty
would still today likely be typed as “feminine”: smallness, smoothness, curviness,
delicacy, cleanliness, soft coloration, lack of resistance, quietness. 5 Similarly, the
properties of objects said to induce the sensation of sublimity are conventionally
“masculine”—vastness, roughness, jaggedness, heaviness, strong coloration, hardness,
loudness. 6 These two sets of characteristics are associated, respectively, with
the emotions of love and fear, which for Burke are responses to weakness and to
4 Quoted in David McCullough, John Adams (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001), p. 226.
5 Interestingly enough, “beauty” is a development from Latin bellum, which replaced pulchrum
during the Renaissance. This derives from bonellum, a diminutive of bonum applied originally only
to women and children. See Wladislaw Tatarkiewicz, A History of Six Ideas (The Hague: Nijhoff,
1980), p. 121.
6 Had Burke himself not unequivocally identified the sublime as masculine in nature, we could
cite John Cleland’s description of “the essential object of enjoyment,” as seen through the eyes
of Fanny Hill:
its prodigious size made me shrink again; yet I could not, without pleasure, behold,
and even ventur’d to feel, such a length, such a breadth of animated ivory! . . . then
the broad and bluish-casted incarnate of the head, and blue serpentines of its veins,
altogether composed the most striking assemblage of figure and colours in nature. In
short, it stood an object of terror and delight.
Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure [1749] (New York: Putnam, 1963), p. 85
To this may be compared not only Kant’s discovery of the sublime in the monstrous and the colossal,
but also his analysis of our feeling of the sublime as “a pleasure . . . produced by the feeling
of a momentary inhibition of the vital forces followed immediately by an outpouring of them
that is all the stronger.” Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, tr. Werner Pluhar (Indianapolis:
Hackett, 1987), pp. 109, 98.
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