On Beauty; Three Discourses Delivered in the University of Edinburgh (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: manifestation of something absurd I and is not an absurdity always an incongruity?an aroia, as the Greek has very significantly termed it?an out-of-placedness ?a want of harmony between the thing and its environment ? This leads me to make a few remarks on the nature of the Comical, and the Humorous, and their place in a scientific classification of the elements of Beauty. THE LUDICROUS. Strictly speaking, the incongruous does not belong to the doctrine of the Beautiful at all; and it is only in a secondary way, from the manifold imperfection of all human things, and for the sake of variety also, it may be, that the Humorous finds a place in the temple of Apollo. There are nine Muses, as we know: of these, one, Melpomene, looks grave, and another, Polyhymnia, thoughtful, ?in the others, quiet cheerfulness and serene contemplation give the dominant expression; but there is no laughing Muse, even Thalia being kept in a tone of very tempered hilarity. Olympus, indeed, which was peopled by old Pelasgic men after the likeness of our terrestrial population had its Momus, whose ungracious function it was to expose incongruity where it existed, and (like petulant critics below) to imagine it where it did not exist. But he was a divinity of the very lowest class; and the ancient Boeotian theologer very significantly indicates his affinity, by making him the son oi Night, and the brother of Deceit and Strife, and other ill-favoured sisters.1 We must, therefore, consider 1 Hesiod, Theogony, i., 214. that, according to the beautiful mythology of the nicely sensitive Greeks, laughter was not a divine virtue of any potency; for though the lofty-pealing Father, and the golden-throned Hera, and the other supreme gods, amid the light festivities of a celestial banquet, might shake the st...