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The Sublime in Modern Philosophy Aesthetics Ethics and
Nature 1st Edition Emily Brady Digital Instant Download
Author(s): Emily Brady
ISBN(s): 9780521194143, 0521194148
Edition: 1
File Details: PDF, 3.66 MB
Year: 2013
Language: english
more information - www.cambridge.org/9780521194143
 The Sublime in Modern Philosophy
Aesthetics, Ethics, and Nature

In The Sublime in Modern Philosophy: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Nature, Emily Brady
takes a fresh look at the sublime and shows why it endures as a meaning-
ful concept in contemporary philosophy. In a reassessment of histori-
cal approaches, the first part of the book identifies the scope and value
of the sublime in eighteenth-century philosophy (with a focus on Kant),
nineteenth-century philosophy and Romanticism, and early wilderness aes-
thetics. The second part examines the sublime’s contemporary significance
through its relationship to the arts; its position with respect to other aesthetic
categories involving mixed or negative emotions, such as tragedy; and its
place in environmental aesthetics and ethics. Far from being an outmoded
concept, the sublime, Brady argues, is a distinctive aesthetic category which
reveals an important, if sometimes challenging, aesthetic-moral relationship
with the natural world.

Emily Brady is Professor of Environment and Philosophy at the Institute of

Geography and Environment and an Academic Associate in Philosophy at
the University of Edinburgh. Her research interests include environmen-
tal aesthetics (nature, art, cultural landscapes, and everyday life), envi-
ronmental ethics, Kant, and eighteenth-century philosophy. Brady is the
author of Aesthetics of the Natural Environment (2003) and the co-editor of
Aesthetic Concepts: Essays after Sibley (2001), Humans in the Land: The Ethics and
Aesthetics of the Cultural Landscape (2008), and Human-Environment Relations:
Transformative Values in Theory and Practice (2012). Brady has been a Laurance
S. Rockefeller Faculty Fellow at Princeton University’s Center for Human
Values and is a past president of the International Society for Environmental
Ethics.
In Memory of Ronald W. Hepburn
The Sublime in Modern Philosophy
Aesthetics, Ethics, and Nature

Emily Brady
University of Edinburgh
 32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, N Y 10013-2473, USA

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© Emily Brady 2013
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2013
Printed in the United States of America
A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data
Brady, Emily.
The sublime in modern philosophy : aesthetics, ethics, and nature / Emily Brady,
University of Edinburgh.
pagesâ•… cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-521-19414-3 (hardback)
1.╇ Sublime, The.╅ 2.╇ Aesthetics.╅ I.╇ Title.
BH301.S7B73â•… 2014
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ISBN 978-0-521-19414-3 Hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of

URLs for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication
and does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.
 Contents

List of Illustrations page vii

Acknowledgements ix

Introduction 1

PART I.╇ THE HISTORICAL SUBLIME

1 The Eighteenth-Century Sublime 11
Sublime Style: Longinus and Dennis 12
The Sublime, Aesthetic Qualities, and Objects 15
Sublimity in Mathematical Ideas, Religious Ideas, and
Moral Character 35
Sublime Emotions 40
Sublime Imagination 42
2 The Kantian Sublime I: Pre-Critical and Critical Work 47
Mendelssohn’s Sublime 48
Kant’s Pre-Critical Sublime 51
Kant’s Critical Sublime 55
3 The Kantian Sublime II: Nature and Morality 67
The Sublime as Self-Regarding 69
The Sublime and Aesthetic Appreciation 72
Natural Objects as Sublime 79
The Autonomy of the Aesthetic 84
Sublime Appreciation, Self, and Nature 86
4 The Romantic Sublime 90
The Sublime after Kant: Schiller and Schopenhauer 90
The Romantic Sublime 100

v
vi Contents

The North American Wilderness Aesthetic 108

From Historical Concept to Contemporary Problem 113

PART II.╇ THE CONTEMPORARY SUBLIME

5 Art and the Sublime 117
Against Artistic Sublimity 118
Scale 120
Formlessness 123
Wildness and Disorder 126
The Sublime Response: Emotions and Imagination 129
Sublime Metaphysics and Art 132
Sublimity, Architecture, and Land Art 142
6 Tragedy and the Sublime 148
The Paradox of Tragedy 150
The Paradox of the Sublime 154
A Joint Resolution? 161
7 The Sublime, Terrible Beauty, and Ugliness 166
Positioning the Sublime 167
Terrible Beauty 172
Ugliness 174
Negative Aesthetics and Meaningful Relations 179
8 The Environmental Sublime 183
The Historical Argument 183
The Metaphysical Argument 190
The Anthropocentric Argument 193
The Sublime and Environmental Ethics 200

Bibliography 207
Index 221
 Illustrations

1 Ansel Adams, Monolith, The Face of Half Dome, Yosemite

National Park, California, 1927 page 112
2 Frederic Church, Icebergs, 1861. Dallas Museum of Art 121
3 James Ward, Gordale Scar (A View of Gordale, in the
Manor of East Malham in Craven, Yorkshire, the Property
of Lord Ribblesdale),? 1812–1814, exhibited 1815.
Tate Britain 122
4 The Empire State Building, New York. Photo by the author 143

vii
 Acknowledgements

I first began thinking seriously about the sublime in the late 1990s, while
I was at Lancaster University. Some of the motivating ideas of this book
originated in conversations about Kant with my colleague there, Michael
Hammond, and I am grateful to him for encouraging me to formulate,
in particular, the beginnings of a key argument which now appears in
Chapter 3. I am indebted to several other people for very helpful dis-
cussions and correspondence about questions and issues in this book,
some of whom also commented on draft material: Simon Burton, Denis
Dumas, John Fisher, Paul Guyer, Nicole Hall-Elfick, Glenn Parsons,
Sandra Shapsay, James Shelley, Alison Stone, and Rachel Zuckert. I am
also grateful to anonymous reviewers for providing invaluable feedback
on the manuscript, as well as the encouragement I needed to complete
the project. Tim Costelloe kindly allowed me to read the manuscript
for a new edited collection, The Sublime: From Antiquity to the Present
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), prior to its publication.
Ryan Cook’s careful copyediting, as well as his critical comments, were
vital to me in preparing the final manuscript. Beatrice Rehl and Isabella
Vitti at Cambridge University Press provided steady and expert editorial
support and guidance.
I would like to acknowledge a grant from the National Endowment
for the Humanities to participate in the summer seminar ‘Scottish
Enlightenment Aesthetics and Beyond’ in St Andrews, organized by
Rachel Zuckert and Paul Guyer. This grant enabled me to work closely
with key texts from eighteenth-century aesthetic theory, and to bene-
fit from discussions with colleagues at the seminar. A grant from the
Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland enabled me to complete
portions of the manuscript while spending time as a Visiting Scholar at
the University of Pennsylvania, where Paul Guyer was my gracious host.

ix
x Acknowledgements

A Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Faculty Fellowship from the Center

for Human Values at Princeton University and research leave from the
University of Edinburgh made it possible to complete the second part
of the book. I am especially thankful to the Center’s staff, faculty, and
Fellows for providing an ideal place for thinking about aesthetics, eth-
ics, and environmental values.
Some chapters in the book use material from articles that I have pre-
viously published. Chapter 3 draws heavily on ‘Reassessing Aesthetic
Appreciation of Nature in the Kantian Sublime’, Journal of Aesthetic
Education 46:1, 2012, 91–109; Chapter 6 reworks material from ‘The
Sublime, Ugliness, and “Terrible Beauty” in Icelandic Landscapes’, in
Katrin Lund and Karl Benediktsson, eds., Conversations with Landscape
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010), 125–136; and Chapter 8 builds consider-
ably on ‘The Environmental Sublime’, in Timothy M. Costelloe, ed., The
Sublime: From Antiquity to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2012), 171–182. I thank the publishers for permission to reprint
this material or use it in a revised form.
I have presented material for the book to various conferences, includ-
ing the American Philosophical Association Pacific Division Meeting,
the American Society of Aesthetics Pacific Division Meeting, the
Ethics and Aesthetics of Architecture and Environment Conference,
the International Society of Aesthetics Annual Meeting, and the Tate
Contemporary Sublime Symposium, as well as to research seminars
at Auburn University, Franklin and Marshall College, the London
Aesthetics Forum, Nottingham University, Princeton Theological
Seminary, the University of Edinburgh, and the University of Ottawa.
I thank these various audiences for their criticisms and comments. I
am especially grateful to the British Society of Aesthetics for inviting
me to present a paper (an early version of Chapter 8) to its annual
conference, for a session in honour of Ronald W. Hepburn’s eightieth
birthday.
I have dedicated this book to the memory of Ronald W. Hepburn. His
philosophical ideas, style, and generous approach to the study of aesthet-
ics have deeply inspired me. Ronnie’s particular interest in the sublime
was relatively uncommon in philosophy but was not really unusual for
him, given his work on the overlaps and boundaries between aesthetics,
moral philosophy, and religion. Without the insights from our conver-
sations about the sublime, and his writings on aesthetics of nature, my
thinking on this topic would be seriously impoverished.
 Acknowledgements xi

I would also like to thank my family and friends for conversations

about this book and for sharing their own experiences of the sublime
with me. From memorable childhood days spent camping in Yosemite to
my more recent wanderings in the mountains of Scotland and the Lake
District, sublime places continue to have great meaning for me, and to
them I am perhaps most grateful.
 Introduction

The sublime is a massive concept. It has received attention from a range

of disciplines, from philosophy and psychology to literature, the arts,
and architecture. Its objects have been theorized as equally various,
from nature, moral character, and mathematical ideas to expressions
in literature, poetry, painting, music, and architecture. Reflections on
the concept span history, from classical and eighteenth-century theories
through to recent postmodern ideas. More than anything, this broad,
deep history is evidence of our enduring interest in the sublime. But it
also reveals a notion that, like other ‘big’ ideas, has perhaps become too
broad for its own good, losing its central meaning through its various
transformations over the centuries and from treatment by so many dif-
ferent perspectives.
These transformations have, for some, meant that the concept has
become too outmoded to be of any significance anymore, relegated to
the history of aesthetics (particularly Romanticism), while for ­others,
its more recent transformations have brought it so far from its earlier
meaning, celebrated in the eighteenth century, to render it largely
­unrecognizable.1 For example, Thomas Weiskel writes that ‘[t]he ­infinite
spaces are no longer astonishing; still less do they terrify. They pique
our curiosity, but we have lost the obsession, so fundamental to the
Romantic sublime, with natural infinitude.’2
1
James Elkins offers a useful discussion in ‘Against the Sublime’, in Roald Hoffman and
Iain Boyd Whyte, eds., Beyond the Infinite: The Sublime in Art and Science (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2011), 75–90. It is also notable that, in attempting to answer Guy
Sircello’s question of whether or not a theory of the sublime is possible, Jane Forsey
answers no. See Forsey, ‘Is a Theory of the Sublime Possible?’, Journal of Aesthetics and
Art Criticism 65:4, 2007, 381–389.
2
Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Limits of Transcendence
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 6.

1
2 The Sublime in Modern Philosophy

Given the great scope of the sublime, my project here is relatively

modest. I seek to reassess, and to some extent reclaim, the meaning of
the sublime as developed during its heyday in eighteenth-century aes-
thetic theory by the likes of Addison, Burke, Kant, and others, and mark
out its relevance for contemporary debates in philosophy, especially for
aesthetics. Why might such a project be of interest now? It might be
argued that the sublime is a relic best left alone, perhaps better replaced
with a concept carrying less weighty historical and metaphysical bag-
gage, such as ‘awe’ or ‘grandeur’. Another tack might be to claim that
the current, relatively liberal uses of the concept and its more diffuse
meanings, especially as postulated by postmodern approaches, are not
really a problem, after all. That is, the sublime has simply evolved into a
very different kind of being, perhaps for very good reasons.
To a philosopher interested in understanding our aesthetic experi-
ences of nature, art, and the everyday, as well as our use of aesthetic con-
cepts and distinctions between these concepts, both of these arguments
strike me as unpersuasive. For one thing, many of us continue to gawp at
great things in nature and beyond – the night sky, huge waterfalls, great
thunder and lightning storms, wide, deep canyons, skyscrapers, massive
dams, and so on. It is not difficult to use the concept meaningfully, still,
for a range of things having great size or power, and we can retain some
continuity in the objects to which it refers, even if our experiences of
sublimity are differently situated today. The edgy, risky feeling of this
type of aesthetic response cannot be relegated to landscape tastes of
the past, for we continue to seek out incredible, extraordinary places
and phenomena – and for many of us, some of them are more accessible
than ever before. In other words, the core meaning of the concept and
its paradigm cases, as developed in aesthetic theory in the past, still res-
onate today. If one accepts this, the sublime deserves a fresh look.
This book will develop arguments for this reassessment of the concept
in several ways, though with a particular focus. That focus is to address
a particular gap in interest in the sublime within the Anglo-American
tradition in philosophy. For while it has received recent attention in the
Continental tradition, for example, in the work of Jean-François Lyotard,
the sublime has largely disappeared from the scene in analytically ori-
ented philosophy, including aesthetics. Beauty once suffered a similar
fate, but it is now very much back on the aesthetic agenda. Although
the sublime is a less ubiquitous concept compared to beauty, I believe
there are good reasons to re-examine it, especially for its contribution
to understanding more negatively valenced forms of aesthetic response,
 Introduction 3

and for the distinctive ways in which imagination and emotion function
in response to greatness. In an attempt to distill the core meaning of
the sublime for contemporary debates, I shall argue that the natural
sublime is especially relevant. The reasons for this will become clear,
but they grow out of a range of influential theories from the eighteenth
century which largely focused on natural objects and phenomena.
Among these theories, the Kantian sublime stands out as the most
philosophically sophisticated and as having the greatest influence in
philosophy. It is also a theory that, on most interpretations, focuses
on nature widely understood – human and non-human nature. Given
emerging work on environmental aesthetics, the sublime is especially
relevant for extending and enriching these new discussions. Finally, the
natural sublime should also be of particular interest to environmental
ethics because of the ways it has been linked to both aesthetic and moral
value (via Kant). As I shall argue, the core meaning of the sublime, as
tied mainly to nature, presents a form of aesthetic experience which
engenders a distinctive aesthetic-moral relationship between humans
and the natural environment.
Even though the philosophical approach and aims of this book lean
more toward the analytic tradition in modern philosophy, the scope
of the topic and my treatment of it ought to find an audience within
the Continental tradition as well. In reviving the core meaning of the
sublime, my hope is to stir new interest in thinking about the concept
with regard to nature. This is something of a departure, as the notion
has mainly been applied to art within recent discussions in Continental
philosophy and to areas such as literary criticism and art theory. Indeed,
in this respect, my approach takes inspiration from the late Ronald
Hepburn, who, as a fellow aesthetician interested in the sublime, grace-
fully bridged the two philosophical traditions through his studies of a
range of concepts neglected by aesthetics.3
Let me make one further point about the scope of this study. Its
parameters are set by the subject matter which motivates its arguments,

3
See, e.g., Hepburn’s ‘The Concept of the Sublime: Has It Any Relevance for Philosophy
Today?’, Dialectics and Humanism 1–2, 1988, 137–155; ‘Wonder’, in Wonder and Other
Essays (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1984), 131–154; and The Reach of the
Aesthetic: Collected Essays on Art and Nature (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001). Hepburn is
also well known for reviving interest in aesthetics of nature with his seminal article
‘Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty’, in Wonder and Other
Essays, first published in Bernard Williams and Alan Montefiore, eds., British Analytical
Philosophy (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), 285–310.
4 The Sublime in Modern Philosophy

which is to say that I begin with the sublime as a Western European con-
cept, trace its development mainly in that context, and rehabilitate it
within that philosophical framework. While my discussion will resonate
for other cultural traditions in philosophy, especially ideas relating to
the metaphysical component of sublimity, I will not address how the sub-
lime has been configured or reconfigured within comparative aesthet-
ics, for example, in Asian and South Asian traditions. As I wrote various
chapters of this book, it seemed to me as if each one could become a
book in itself. So, at least for these reasons, I have had to limit my study
to the heart of issues relevant to my main argument rather than pursue
what could be a very interesting cross-cultural study of the sublime.
The noun, ‘sublime’, originates in the Greek noun hupsos, or ‘height’,
while its Latin meaning is sublimis, or ‘elevated’, ‘uplifted’, ‘aloft’. Its
etymology stems from (probably) sub, ‘up to’, and limen, ‘lintel’.4 When
the term is attributed to things, it can mean that the thing in question is
high or lofty, but it can also mean that the response to certain properties
in objects involves a feeling of being elevated or uplifted. The sublime
thus involves a relation between the sublime thing and a particular aes-
thetic experience (or response) in the subject. In this respect, aesthetic
judgments of the sublime are like other kinds of aesthetic judgments.
Many philosophers would agree that aesthetic judgments are grounded
in the subject’s response to aesthetic properties and the pleasurable or
displeasurable (or mixed) feelings that arise in that response. But the
sublime’s distinctiveness lies, at least, in the way greatness makes us feel
overwhelmed, small, and insignificant in comparison, because we find it
so difficult to take in those qualities, while also feeling uplifted. Hence,
the sublime seems to be relational in an additional way because of this
comparative component, and thematizes the self’s relation to something
greater. It is this feature that gives way, in many theories, to some kind
of metaphysical aspect in the experience. As I proceed, I explore these
interesting features of the sublime, including this metaphysical quality.
The first part of this book is mainly historical, with the aim of pre-
senting key theories of the sublime from the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries and revealing their important contributions to understanding
the concept. I extract the sublime’s core meaning and paradigm cases,
drawing heavily from Kant, and show how the natural sublime became
increasingly significant as it formed a central theme of Romanticism. In

4
‘sublime, adj. and n.’. OED Online. March 2012. Oxford University Press. http://www.
oed.com/viewdictionaryentry/Entry/192766. Accessed 20/3/12.
 Introduction 5

these chapters, I ask: What constituted the objects of the sublime, and
how did nature emerge as its dominant subject matter? How do emotion
and imagination function in the sublime? Can the sublime be defended
against the claim that it involves self-aggrandizement? How are aes-
thetic value and moral value related in early theories of the ­concept?
The second part of this book develops the sublime’s core meaning and
considers its philosophical significance today by engaging it with issues
in aesthetics and, also, environmental thought. Questions guiding my
analysis include: Can the arts and architecture be sublime? What is dis-
tinctive about the sublime as a form of aesthetic value, and how is it
to be distinguished from other categories, especially more ‘difficult’
forms of aesthetic appreciation? What is the relevance of the metaphysi-
cal dimension of the sublime today? In what ways is the sublime relevant
to valuing the environment, both aesthetically and ethically?
I begin, in the first chapter, by tracing the concept chronologically
with respect to its subject matter, qualities, and objects during its heyday
in the eighteenth century. My attention is mainly to Britain, where the
sublime flourished in particular, and to ideas that preceded discussions
on the Continent by Kant and others. The main aim is to show that
although the sublime has its roots in literary style and rhetoric reaching
back to Longinus, philosophers brought the concept to the fore of aes-
thetic theory and opened it out to include a range of subject matter, with
nature becoming more and more central. The great variety of sublime
objects and phenomena are discussed in the theories of several major
figures, such as Addison, Gerard, Burke, and Alison. In examining both
theoretical and descriptive discourse, I draw out key aspects of the sub-
lime, namely, vastness and power, intense mixed emotions of anxious
excitement and astonishment, expanded imagination, and the role of
the self in relation to feelings of admiration.
Given the influence of Kant and his deeply philosophical theory of
the sublime, I devote two chapters to the subject. In Chapter 2, I dis-
cuss a notable influence on Kant’s work, Moses Mendelssohn, and then
turn to the pre-Critical and Critical phases of Kant’s theory, setting out
their main ideas and indicating how his theory is both indebted to but
also extends beyond the sublime as theorized in Britain. I show that
this theory, despite its metaphysical framework, provides a sophisticated
philosophical understanding of the concept as a distinctive and mean-
ingful aesthetic category – and one which requires less reconstruction
than some of Kant’s critics might argue. Following this lead, Chapter 3
addresses a major problem for the enduring significance of Kant’s theory,
6 The Sublime in Modern Philosophy

especially with respect to aesthetic appreciation of nature. Because Kant

appears to place more emphasis on the human mind and freedom as
sublime, this seems to leave much less room for attributing the sublime
to the external world. Rejecting this interpretation, I reassert the cen-
trality of natural objects and phenomena to his theory. With this new
interpretation in hand, I show how Kant extends core ideas of the con-
cept into new territory relating to nature and self, with an important
propaedeutic role with respect to morality.
Chapter 4 picks up where Kant left off, examining his important influ-
ence on two other German philosophers, Schiller and Schopenhauer,
and then Kant’s legacy in British Romanticism. During the nineteenth
century, the sublime attracted less interest in philosophy and aes-
thetic theory, but it enjoyed an important place in poetry, literature,
and the arts, and in the actual experience of landscape. I focus on the
Wordsworthian sublime and defend it against the objection that it is ulti-
mately self-regarding, overly humanistic, and ‘egotistical’. Drawing on
recent interpretations of Wordsworth from the perspective of ecocriti-
cism, I show how the humility and self-awareness of the sublime char-
acterize the human subject as part of nature, where nature is conceived
more holistically. This Romantic conception is then located, at the turn
of the century, in the more empirical and conservation-conscious sub-
lime of John Muir’s nature essays. Overall, these ideas indicate continu-
ity and development of the concept, especially with respect to nature, if
not lying squarely within philosophical discussions.
In the second part of this book, Chapters 5 through 8 re-engage phil-
osophical analysis of the sublime by addressing a set of topics which
establish its significance for contemporary debates. First, in Chapter 5,
I pause to consider what central meaning of the sublime emerges in
light of my historical discussion in earlier chapters. This core meaning,
outlined in terms of paradigm cases rather than a strict philosophical
definition, is explained through natural objects or phenomena having
qualities of great height or vastness or tremendous power which cause
an intense emotional response characterized by feelings of being over-
whelmed and somewhat anxious, though ultimately an experience
that feels exciting and pleasurable. With this core meaning in hand, I
then consider whether artworks can be sublime in this more ­‘original
sense’. Building upon a position held by some eighteenth-century theo-
rists, including Kant, I argue that the sublime in art is secondary, that
is, although artworks can depict, represent, convey, and express the
sublime, they cannot be sublime in and of themselves. I support this
 Introduction 7

argument with a set of reasons relating to size and scale, formlessness,

disorder and wildness, physical vulnerability, affect, and the metaphysi-
cal quality of the sublime. My discussion considers a range of cases, plus
a few exceptions, including some forms of land art and, from architec-
ture, skyscrapers.
The general aim of Chapters 6 and 7 is to distinguish the sublime
from neighbouring aesthetic categories and to carefully position it
relative to them, in order to show why it is still a distinctive aesthetic
concept. More specifically, I argue that the sublime belongs to a set of
categories which identify more difficult forms of aesthetic appreciation,
in contrast to what might be called ‘easy beauty’. In Chapter 6, I address
a familiar pairing from the history of aesthetics, the sublime and trag-
edy; however, by bringing in a discussion of the natural sublime, I give
this pairing a modern twist. Through an analysis and comparison of the
‘paradox of tragedy’ and the ‘paradox of the sublime’, I demonstrate
how each can illuminate the other and pave the way to resolving both.
I argue that, in fact, these paradoxes can be explained away if we rec-
ognize the complexity and value of more negative forms of aesthetic
experience, through the exercise of ‘negative emotions’ and their edify-
ing effects. Chapter 7 positions the sublime with respect to ‘grandeur’,
‘terrible beauty’, and ‘ugliness’. I build upon distinctions between the
sublime and the beautiful by considering the relationship of the sub-
lime to grandeur as an adjacent concept that is more positively valenced,
and I argue that experiences of grandeur lack the more mixed ‘negative
pleasure’ of the sublime. Turning to the more negative concepts of ter-
rible beauty and ugliness, I show that the sublime, while sharing some-
thing with them, is distinguished at least by its greatness in terms of
both scale and power. My argument for the value of more difficult forms
of aesthetic appreciation is given additional support by showing how
they expand and enrich our aesthetic interactions through uneasy – yet
meaningful – relationships with the natural world.
Given the rise of philosophical study on the environment in environ-
mental aesthetics and ethics, it is a logical step from reclaiming the nat-
ural sublime of the eighteenth century to considering its relevance to
discussions about the natural environment today. Chapter 8 thus com-
pletes my argument for the relevance of the sublime to contemporary
philosophy and solidifies my position that the main territory of the sub-
lime is the natural world. To carve out a new, environmental, sublime,
I defend the concept against claims that it is historically outmoded,
metaphysically suspect, and anthropocentric, drawing to some extent
8 The Sublime in Modern Philosophy

on arguments from preceding chapters. In particular, I point to ways

in which this more challenging, yet exciting, form of aesthetic apprecia-
tion feeds into a distinctive kind of aesthetic-moral relationship with the
environment. This type of appreciation is deeply comparative, as we feel
insignificant, humbled by the greatness of nature rather than masterful
over it. The admiration we feel in the sublime, as well as a perspectival
shift of self, can feed into new forms of self-knowledge and potentially
ground respect for nature, not in spite of, but very much because of
nature’s irresistible scale and power.
Our opportunities for experiencing sublimity are not common, yet
not rare either. Ranging from the amazing panorama of space on a clear
night to the rarer occurrence of seeing the magnificent full breach of a
great humpback whale, the extraordinary character of these experiences
explains the sublime’s singular effect. Our astonishment, felt through a
distinctive type of aesthetic response, is no small matter, deserving care-
ful consideration for locating a new role for the sublime as a concept
with aesthetic and moral significance for contemporary times.
 PART I

THE HISTORICAL SUBLIME

 1

The Eighteenth-Century Sublime

Theoretical discussion of the sublime reached a pinnacle in the ­eighteenth

century, when aesthetics, as a distinctive discipline, emerged in discussions
of the principles of taste by philosophers and other ­writers. Alongside
beauty, novelty, ugliness, and the picturesque, the sublime became a cen-
tral category of aesthetic value in both nature and art. Given the depth of
treatment the sublime enjoyed during this period, this chapter draws out
some of its main features from various theories and provides an essential
foundation for understanding the concept. To explore its development, I
trace the sublime chronologically with respect to its subject matter, quali-
ties, and objects. The immense popularity of the sublime in the eighteenth
century means that, in the space available here, I can address only the
writers most significant to philosophy. My attention is mainly to Britain,
where the sublime flourished in particular, and to those ideas preced-
ing discussions on the Continent by Kant and others. In later sections, I
will also consider some key themes that emerge from these accounts: the
non-material sublime, emotion and imagination, and the role of the self.
In his exploration of how a theory of the sublime is possible, Guy
Sircello draws useful distinctions between (1) the phenomenological
experience of the sublime (e,g., Wordsworth’s actual experience of
Mt Snowdon); (2) sublime discourse, or language that is immediately
descriptive or expressive of such experiences and that proceeds directly
from them (Wordsworth’s poetic expression of this experience in the
‘Prelude’); and (3) second-order discussions of the sublime, that is,
‘reflective or analytic discourse’ on the topic, as we find in various aes-
thetic theories.1 Because these aspects of the sublime can be difficult

1
Guy Sircello, ‘Is a Theory of the Sublime Possible?’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism,
51:4, 1993, 541–550, p. 542.

11
12 Part I. The Historical Sublime

to separate, these distinctions will be helpful for analyzing the sublime

as it emerged as a concept in aesthetic theory. Some of the discussions
which follow fall into the category of sublime discourse and are thus
more descriptive than philosophical, while others are more critical.
Although my aim in this chapter is primarily to draw out key phil-
osophical themes, the immediately descriptive aspects of sublime dis-
course provide an essential backdrop to this task. This backdrop helps
to establish, through these historical accounts, the central place of
nature in the experience, discourse, and analysis of the sublime.

Sublime Style: Longinus and Dennis

The origins of the concept of the sublime are usually traced back to the
influential text Peri Hupsous, or On the Sublime, which has been attrib-
uted to the first-century Greek critic Longinus.2 Before this, discussions
of the ‘grand’ style or rhetorical styles which were intended to evoke
a strong emotional response could be found in Aristotle and others.
Longinus’s treatise is mainly concerned with rhetoric and ‘elevated’ lan-
guage, but he sets out many ideas and themes which were taken up by
later writers interested in the sublime in nature and art: how sublimity
is connected to the great and grand things; its elevating and expansive
effects on the mind; its association with strong expression and intense
emotional responses.
Longinus does not offer a clear definition of the sublime, referring to
it as ‘a certain eminence or perfection of language’, but he elaborates on
its sources, content, and character in ways that suggest an understand-
ing of the concept which transcends mere stylistic virtues. Thus, two key
sources of the sublime (in language) are said to be the ‘power of grand
conceptions’ and the ‘inspiration of vehement emotion’ (sect. 8, 181). As
evidence, Longinus cites several passages from the Odyssey, pointing to
Homer’s descriptions of the heroes and of the combat of the gods, and
to the dramatic statement that ‘the earth is split to its foundations, hell
itself laid bare, the whole universe sundered and turned upside down’
(sect. 9, 189). The sublimity of great or lofty language is immediately
tied to its effects on both the mind and the emotions: ‘For the true

2
Longinus, On the Sublime, trans. W. H. Fyfe, rev. Donald Russell (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1995). All page references are to this edition. Malcolm Heath
firmly establishes that the text is attributable to Longinus. See Heath, ‘Longinus and
the Ancient Sublime’, in Timothy M. Costelloe, ed., The Sublime: From Antiquity to the
Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 11–23.
 The Eighteenth-Century Sublime 13

sublime naturally elevates us: uplifted with a sense of proud exaltation,

we are filled with joy and pride, as if we had ourselves produced the very
thing heard’ (sect. 7, 179). This elevation of the mind and accompany-
ing feeling of pride, or a kind of admiration for one’s own capacities, is a
common theme in eighteenth-century accounts, and I return to it later.
Longinus also describes a natural tendency to admire great (and
large) things (sect. 35, 277). His point speaks to the novel character of
sublimity, and he clearly distinguishes it from more mundane or prac-
tical concerns. Besides the sublime content of poetry, we see specific
examples from external nature, which were to be repeated in many later
accounts of the sublime:
[T]he Nile, The Ister, The Rhine, or still much more, the ocean. . . . Nor
do we reckon any thing in nature more wonderful than the boiling fur-
naces of Etna, which cast up stones, and sometimes whole rocks, from their
labouring abyss, and pour out whole rivers of liquid and unmingled flame.
(sect. 35, 277)

Through his 1674 translation of Peri Hupsous into French, as well as

his own discussions, Nicolas Boileau is usually credited with bringing
Longinus’s sublime into British thought.3 At this stage, the sublime
remains strongly connected to language and style. Yet in his discus-
sion of Longinus’s influence, Samuel Monk argues that content was
also ­important.4 In this respect, we see the beginnings of connections
between sublimity and particular kinds of objects and qualities, paving
the way for something like an empirical sublime, that is, a sublime related
to features of objects rather than to stylistic features of discourse. With
this, we also see a sublime that would be developed explicitly within
aesthetic theory.
Writing at the turn of the century, John Dennis, influenced by
Longinus, moves the sublime forward, especially in terms of its subject

3
Marjorie Hope Nicolson argues against this common interpretation of how the sub-
lime first entered British thought. She claims that the Cambridge Platonists of the
seventeenth century, Henry More, for example, ‘reading their ideas of infinity into
a God of Plenitude, then reading them out again, transferred from God to Space to
Nature conceptions of majesty, grandeur, vastness in which both admiration and awe
were combined.’ See Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory:
The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite (Seattle: University of Washington Press,
2011), 143.
4
Samuel Monk, The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in Eighteenth-Century England (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960), 31. Also, Thomas Weiskel points to cen-
trality of the natural sublime even within the literary or rhetorical traditions of the
concept identified first with Longinus. See Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime, 12–16.
14 Part I. The Historical Sublime

matter. Here we find an expansion of the sublime which includes vari-

ous ideas expressed in poetry (e.g., in Milton) that evoke ‘enthusiasm’
or ‘enthusiastic passions’, that is, intense emotions which include admi-
ration, terror, and horror.5 Dennis gives an intriguing list of such poetic
images: ‘gods, demons, hell, spirits and souls of men, miracles, prodi-
gies, enchantments, witchcrafts, thunder, tempests, raging seas, inunda-
tions, torrents, earthquakes, volcanoes, monsters, serpents, lions, tigers,
fire, war, pestilence, famine, etc’.6 His list is in many ways characteris-
tic of the period, but it extends more broadly than contemporary ideas
of the sublime. Thus we find gods and human beings, their characters
and great actions, and see novel supernatural forces and events placed
alongside natural phenomena such as animals and natural disasters,
which were more familiar to contemporary readers. Dennis also appears
to have had some interest in the empirical sublime, that is, the sublime
of actual objects as they relate to poetic images, based on his descrip-
tion, in a letter, of the terror mixed with pleasure he experienced as he
travelled through the Alps:
[W]e walk’ed upon the very brink, in a literal sense, of Destruction;
one Stumble, and both Life and Carcass had been at once destroy’d.
The sense of all this produc’d different motions in me, viz., a delightful
Horror, a terrible Joy, and at the same time, that I was infinitely pleas’d,
I trembled.7

Although still writing within a largely literary and theological context,

Dennis clearly looks forward to a new emphasis on external nature,
as opposed to mere poetic images or representations thereof, which
is characteristic of many eighteenth-century theories of the sublime.
Additionally, Dennis’s work represents an increased emphasis on the
mixed emotions of the sublime, where a new taste for mountain land-
scapes is accompanied by both terror and joy.8 As we shall see, these new
theories turn to a consideration of sublime subject matter itself – an
empirical sublime if you will – rather than the style and rhetoric which
seek to capture that subject matter.

5
John Dennis, ‘From The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry (1704)’, in Andrew Ashfield
and Peter De Bolla, eds., The Sublime: A Reader in Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 35–39, p. 35.
6
Dennis, ‘From Grounds of Criticism’, 38.
7
Quoted in Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory, 277, from Appendix,
J. Dennis, Critical Works, ed. E. N. Hooker (Baltimore, 1939–1943), II, 380ff.
8
Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory, 279.
 The Eighteenth-Century Sublime 15

The Sublime, Aesthetic Qualities, and Objects

The influence of John Locke’s empiricism can be seen throughout
eighteenth-century British aesthetics. The senses are brought into prom-
inence, and the aesthetic sense, an internal sense, or ‘taste’, becomes
important for thinkers such as Francis Hutcheson, who will influence
subsequent aesthetic theories. This Lockean foundation makes actual
objects and their qualities central to many aesthetic theories, in strong
contrast to the metaphysical or theological ideas of beauty found in ear-
lier philosophical approaches.9 This influence is clear in discussions of
the sublime, as one of the principles of taste, and it is through a consid-
eration of sublime objects and qualities that we see a notable shift from
style to materiality.

Addison
Joseph Addison’s ‘On the Pleasures of the Imagination’ (1712),10 a series
of essays in The Spectator, presents the first developed theory of taste.
The essays were very influential on aesthetic theory, with an important
discussion of the sublime. Returning to earlier usage, Addison reserves
the term ‘sublime’ for style only, and he uses the term ‘great’ to refer
to what we would now more generally consider sublime. Monk suggests
that although influenced by Longinus, Addison was trying to move away
from his usage and toward a broader application of the sublime to also
encompass external objects. In doing so, Addison explicitly theorizes
the sublime independently of literature (though he uses the term ‘great’
to achieve this).11
For Addison, the aesthetic pleasures of taste are pleasures of the
imagination, where imagination is the power that engages with qualities
of external objects and produces pleasure through that engagement.
The objects of taste are external, material objects, and Addison focuses
primarily on our visual aesthetic experiences. We are said to experience
both primary and secondary pleasures, where the former refer to direct

9
See Dabney Townsend, ‘Lockean Aesthetics’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 49:4,
1991, 349–361; Peter Kivy, The Seventh Sense: Francis Hutcheson and Eighteenth-Century
Aesthetics, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003).
10
Joseph Addison, ‘On the Pleasures of the Imagination’, in Joseph Addison and Richard
Steele, The Spectator (London, 1712). All references to this series of essays are to this
edition and are identified by issue number.
11
Monk, The Sublime, 58.
16 Part I. The Historical Sublime

experiences of objects present to sight, and the latter to objects not pres-
ent to sight.
Within the primary pleasures, Addison draws a clear distinction
between the great (or grand), the novel (or uncommon), and the beauti-
ful. The great is associated not only with substantial ‘bulk’ but also with
‘the largeness of the whole view, considered as one entire piece’. Addison
begins with examples from nature: ‘prospects of open champaign coun-
try, a vast uncultivated desert, of huge heaps of mountains, high rocks
and precipices, or a wide expanse of waters’. These objects strike us with
a ‘rude kind of magnificence’, where we experience pleasure through
the imagination being ‘filled with an object’, an object that is ‘too big
for its capacity’. Our felt reaction is one of ‘pleasing astonishment’ and
a ‘delightful stillness and amazement’ (No. 412). The qualities identi-
fied by Addison relate to both mass and space: largeness, greatness,
immensity, vastness, magnificence through height, undetermined and
unbounded. Although Burke would more strongly theorize the distinc-
tion between the sublime and the beautiful, Addison’s distinction is one
that would be brought into many subsequent aesthetic theories.
By contrast, secondary pleasures derive from images of things not
currently present to sight and correspond, mainly, to artistic representa-
tions, for example, the great ideas and images in Homer’s work which
formed the primary focus of Longinus’s discussion. In this way, Addison
explains how greatness may be depicted or conveyed through artworks.
Interestingly, Addison’s aesthetic theory does not begin with art. As
Addison points out, ‘The Taste is not to conform to the Art, but the Art
to the Taste’ (The Spectator, No. 29, 1711). He also travelled through the
Alps, which certainly impressed him.12 However, he notes in passing his
first-hand experience of being ‘tossed’ by storms during sea voyages,
and this may provide a reason for his view that the sea or ocean – calm
and vast, or ‘worked up in a tempest’ – has one of the strongest effects
of greatness on the imagination (No. 489). Putting the ‘agreeable
­horror’ of greatness in nature before that of the arts and architecture,
he writes:
[F]or though they [works of art] may sometimes appear as beautiful or
strange, they can have nothing in them of that vastness and immensity,
which afford so great an entertainment to the mind of the beholder. . . .
There is something more bold and masterly in the rough careless strokes

12
Monk, The Sublime, 207. See Joseph Addison, Remarks on Several Parts of Italy (London,
1705).
 The Eighteenth-Century Sublime 17

of nature, than in the nice touches and embellishments of art. The beau-
ties of the most stately garden or palace lie in a narrow compass, the imagi-
nation immediately runs them over, and requires something else to gratify
her; but, in the wide fields of nature, the sight wanders up and down with-
out confinement, and is fed with an infinite variety of images, without any
certain stint or number. (No. 414)

In other passages, Addison contrasts the pleasant and designed beauty

of gardens with the greatness of wilder landscapes. The contrast here
is clear: between that which is ordered, designed, and formal and that
which is unbounded and disordered, in some sense. Also, the poet’s
imagination ought to have a grasp of nature, and in discussing The Iliad,
Addison picks out how imagination is struck by ‘a thousand savage pros-
pects’ (No. 414). When greatness in both art and nature come together,
where there is a ‘double principle’ of primary and secondary pleasures,
there is even greater pleasure than can be found in nature or art alone
(No. 414).
Addison’s theory is significant for several reasons. By exploring a spe-
cific aesthetic category that moves beyond style and applies directly to
material objects, it provides a much wider conception of the sublime.
Moreover, the sublime is clearly distinguished from the beautiful, and
the distinctive features of this type of aesthetic response are outlined,
along with its objects and their particular qualities. The objects of exter-
nal nature, rather than just poetic images and ideas, take on real impor-
tance, becoming central to understanding the effects of the sublime in
imagination.13 Finally, Addison establishes imagination as a key mental
power, with an active role in the experience of greatness.

Baillie and Gerard

In its enumeration of the objects and qualities of the sublime, John
Baillie’s An Essay on the Sublime (1747),14 offers a detailed account which
further develops and defends the centrality of the natural world.
Continuing the increased emphasis on the natural world, Baillie begins
with the sublime in nature and supports this approach by noting that the
13
Around the same time, Theocles, in Shaftesbury’s The Moralists, displays an enthusias-
tic response to nature, including sublime scenes. See Anthony Ashley Cooper (Third
Earl of Shaftesbury), ‘The Moralists’, Part II, in Lawrence E. Klein, ed., Characteristics of
Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999 [1711]),
V.III.1, p. 298.
14
John Baillie, An Essay on the Sublime (London, 1747). All page references are to this
edition.
18 Part I. The Historical Sublime

sublime features of poetry and painting are commonly descriptions or

representations of what is found in nature. In this respect, his approach
is empirical, where direct sensory experience of material objects causes
the expansion of the mind. He further remarks that a proper under-
standing of the concept should begin with an inquiry into qualities
which are found sublime, offering this definition:

Hence comes the name of sublime to every thing which thus raises the
mind to fits of greatness, and disposes it to soar above her mother earth;
hence arises that exultation and pride which the mind ever feels from the
consciousness of its own vastness – that object can only be justly called
sublime, which in some degrees disposes the mind to this enlargement of
itself, and gives her a lofty conception of her own powers. (sect. I, 4)

The sublime is a function of the magnitude of objects, where only vast

or large objects are capable of ‘filling the soul’ – the Nile, the Danube,
vast oceans, high mountains, the heavens, and so on. The variety and
beauty of ‘small scenes’ may be pleasurable, but they are incapable of
producing such sublime feeling (sect. I, 5).
Two additional features of objects are identified by Baillie in order
to ‘perfect’ the sublime: uniformity and uncommonness. Thus, Baillie
seems to be bringing uniformity, which had been a key characteristic of
the beautiful for many philosophers, into his understanding of the sub-
lime. In a passage reminiscent of Hutcheson, he argues that the object
of the sublime must remain uniform and cannot be broken up:

Thus when the eye loses the vast ocean, the imagination having nothing
to arrest it, catches up the scene and extends the prospect to immensity,
which it could by no means do, were the uniform surface broke by innu-
merable little islands scattered up and down. (sect. II, 9–10)

Hence, the imagination’s expansion – the sublime’s power to ‘fill the

soul’ – seems to depend upon an equally expansive, uninterrupted mag-
nitude, and the phenomenological character of sublime experience is
explained by reference to an empirically available feature of the objects
concerned.
Uncommonness, by contrast, is novelty brought into the context of the
sublime. Consequently, as something becomes more and more familiar,
the effects of the sublime diminish. This notion suggests that there can
be degrees of sublime experience, which Baillie then explicitly discusses
in relation to both the differences between the minds of various subjects
and the different experiences which may be undergone by one and the
same subject at distinct times. Different minds, he claims, have different
 The Eighteenth-Century Sublime 19

kinds of foci, and some are naturally more able to take in the sublime.
Even then, the reaction of any given mind is not always as expected, ‘for
when the soul flags and is depressed, the vastest object is incapable of
raising her’, while at other times, when ‘the pulse beats high,’ ‘[the soul]
throws herself into grand prospects, and the magnificence of nature’
(sect. II, 13). In this way Baillie demonstrates the eighteenth-century
concern to relate aesthetic pleasure to features of both subject and
object, and his account is valuable for reflecting on the sources of sub-
lime feeling, as well as on the varying capacities and contexts of the
experiencing subject.
Sublimity in nature is something like the ‘original’ sublime for Baillie,
and his account goes on to consider a range of other sublime objects,
from sublime passions to art and architecture. In keeping with the pri-
macy of the natural world, the latter objects become sublime largely
through secondary processes of mental association. Thus, while archi-
tecture and the arts do not seem to be in themselves sublime, buildings
may become sublime through associations with ‘great riches, power and
grandeur’ (sect. V, 36).15 Likewise, painting is sublime only through rep-
resentation of sublime events or passions, and:
Landscape painting may likewise partake of the sublime; such as repre-
senting mountains, etc. which shows how little objects by an apt connec-
tion may affect us with this passion: for the space of a yard of canvas, by
only representing the figure and colour of a mountain, shall fill the mind
with nearly as great an idea as the mountain itself. (sect. V, 38)

This passage supports the idea that the sublime begins with nature, and
although Baillie is not as explicit as Addison on this point, it also sug-
gests that the natural sublime has a greater affect on us. Thus, Baillie’s
approach is significant for representing the period’s clear break with the
Longinian tradition of defining the sublime in terms of style. Although
his theory is more descriptive than philosophical, its method functions
to clearly highlight the range of aesthetic and non-aesthetic qualities of
sublime phenomena.
Baillie’s views are reflected in the more sophisticated aesthetic theory
of Alexander Gerard, in his An Essay on Taste (1759).16 Gerard’s approach
draws on ideas from both the internal sense theorists (Shaftesbury,

15
Cf. Joseph Priestley, ‘Lecture XX: Of the Sublime’, in ‘From A Course of Lectures on
Oratory and Criticism (1777)’, in Ashfield and De Bolla, The Sublime, 119–123, p. 121.
16
Alexander Gerard, An Essay on Taste (London, 1759). All page references are to this
edition.
20 Part I. The Historical Sublime

Hutcheson) and the philosophers who emphasize imagination and asso-

ciation, such as Addison and Hume. Taste is an internal sense, whose
perceptions arise directly from sensations, but the pleasures of taste
arise through imagination by acts of association.17 The pleasure associ-
ated with the sublime arises from an expansion and enlivening of imagi-
nation as it is challenged to take in immensity or vastness, and in turn,
we experience a sense of our own ‘lofty’ capacities (I.2., 14).
Objects are sublime if they possess quantity and simplicity together,
which harks back to Baillie’s magnitude and uniformity. Immensity of
uninterrupted space, without limits and without being broken up, char-
acterize sublime objects: ‘A variety of clouds, diversifying the face of
the heavens, may add to their beauty, but must detract from their gran-
deur’ (I.2.,15). The objects of the sublime reflect Baillie’s list, ranging
from nature (the Alps, the Nile, oceans, and so on) to the passions and
the arts. In his more general aesthetic theory, Gerard is broad-minded,
beginning not with nature or the arts in particular, but with a range of
things, nature, scientific discoveries, the arts, and architecture (I.1., 6).
To this ongoing discourse, Gerard adds a theory of association,
explaining its operation in the sublime response, and signalling Hume’s
ideas. Gerard writes:
But in order to comprehend the whole extent of the sublime, it is proper
to take notice that objects, which do not themselves possess that quality,
may nevertheless acquire it, by association with such as do. It is the nature
of association to unite different ideas so closely, that they become in a
manner one. . . . Whenever, then, any object uniformly and constantly
introduces into the mind the idea of another that is grand, it will, by its
connection with the latter, be itself rendered grand. (I.2., 20)

On the face of it, this passage suggests that a wide range of objects can
be sublime for Gerard, and he broadens the category in ways that might
seem to stretch the original notion beyond recognition. But, on a more
favourable interpretation, which would in fact be consistent with the
known influence of both Baillie and Hume on Gerard, we may under-
stand these cases not as originally sublime, but as ‘examples of grandeur
produced by association’ (I.2., 20). After all, Gerard’s examples include
ideas, moral character, objects that are venerated, and ‘things remote in
time’, where he footnotes Hume’s account of the temporal sublime (I.2.,
21–22n). Gerard’s rendering of the distinction is useful, for it provides

17
James Shelley, ‘18th Century British Aesthetics’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
2006. Accessed 12/3/12.
 The Eighteenth-Century Sublime 21

a clear explanation of the difference between an object that possesses

material qualities of the sublime (e.g., the mass and height of moun-
tains) and things that do not literally possess such qualities (e.g., lofty
ideas or great character, objects which lack extension). It is not clear that
he ascribes more value to the original sublime, but because material
qualities in nature provide the main reference point for acts of associa-
tion, nature plays an essential role.
The upshot is that the sublimity of nature is, in this sense, prior to
that of art. However, it appears that art can still be ‘fully sublime’, on
Gerard’s view, through association, with the artist’s ‘exciting ideas of
sublime objects’ in the spectator.18 Imitative art achieves this through
the ‘exactness of the imitation to form ideas and conceive images of
sublime originals’ (I.2., 22). Gerard points out that the effects of art
can sometimes be nearly as strong as our responses to the actual objects
depicted:
Thought is a less intense energy than sense: yet ideas especially when
lively, never fail to be contemplated with some degree of the same emo-
tion, which attends their original sensation; and often yield almost equal
pleasure to the reflex senses, when impressed upon the mind by a skilful
imitation. (I.2., 22)

Additionally, Gerard remarks that style is important to achieving sub-

lime effects, as something can be depicted as great through certain
techniques. Thus,
chiefly those performances are grand, which either by the artful disposi-
tion of colours, light, and shade, represent sublime natural objects, and
suggest ideas of them; or by the expressiveness of those features and atti-
tudes of the figures, lead us to conceive of sublime passions operating in
the originals. (I.2., 23–24)

Gerard also makes the interesting point that even small paintings can
evoke sublimity – the canvas which captures sublime objects, and so
gives rise to sublime experiences through association, need not be itself
large.
Like imitative art, architecture is mainly sublime through association
(columns suggest strength; the building itself suggests the magnificence
of its owner), although Gerard leaves some room for it to be sublime
simply through greatness of size and bulk. Palaces and pyramids possess

18
See Rachel Zuckert, ‘The Associative Sublime: Gerard, Kames, Alison and Stewart,’ in
Costelloe, The Sublime: From Antiquity to the Present, 64–76.
22 Part I. The Historical Sublime

magnitudes comparable to those found in naturally sublime objects,

and can consequently evoke similar reactions, even if ‘no edifice is equal
in quantity to many works of nature’ (I.2., 23). His account of music is
fairly thin, but he does bring out three clear points. First, the length
of music contributes to the work’s having some effect of amplitude on
the listener. Presumably, Gerard means that long compositions have a
kind of grandeur in themselves; perhaps some great symphony or ora-
tory would count here. Second, the ‘gravity of the notes’, that is, their
profundity, expands the mind. Third, music that is imitative of sublime
‘passions or objects’ evokes these feelings in the listener (I.2., 29), which
is consistent with his remarks about art and sublime emotions.
Finally, continuing the trend away from the tradition of sublime style,
Gerard says little about language.19 Poetry is sublime by association,
specifically through the images and ideas of sublimity evoked in the
mind of the reader. As it is more nuanced, Gerard’s theory represents
the maturity of the sublime in reflective discourse, falling squarely
within philosophical discussions of taste. Yet with Baillie’s influence, it
also puts real emphasis on the sublime’s considerable range of subject
matter. There is also a strong role for imagination, given the stress on
association. As we shall see, however, the direction taken by Gerard
contrasts with Burke’s approach, which is in some ways a study in sub-
lime emotion.

Burke
The first edition of Gerard’s An Essay on Taste was published two years
after the first edition of Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the
Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757),20 so by the sec-
ond edition of the Enquiry (1759), Burke would have been familiar with
Gerard’s text. Burke is a major figure in the history of the sublime –
indeed, any book on the sublime which focused on its history would
devote a separate chapter to Burke’s theory, given the extensive atten-
tion to it in the Enquiry. Here, I set out how Burke defines the sublime
and its objects and qualities; I return to other aspects of his theory, espe-
cially emotion, in a later section.

19
Cf. Monk, The Sublime, 112.
20
Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the
Beautiful, ed. J. T. Boulton (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968
[2nd ed., 1759]). All page references are to this edition.
 The Eighteenth-Century Sublime 23

In terms of the history of aesthetic theory, the first thing to note about
Burke is his sharp distinction between the beautiful and the sublime:
For sublime objects are vast in their dimensions, beautiful ones compara-
tively small; beauty should be smooth, and polished; the great, rugged and
negligent; beauty should shun the right line, yet deviate from it insensibly;
the great in many cases loves the right line, and when it deviates, it often
makes a strong deviation; beauty should not be obscure; the great ought to
be dark and gloomy; beauty should be light and delicate; the great ought
to be solid, and even massive. (124)

This distinction is stronger than that found in previous writers not only
because it is so explicit, with equal attention given to each category,
but also because Burke takes novelty to be much less important, and
thus makes this distinction, and each category within it, even more sub-
stantial. Moreover, Burke is particularly adamant about the emotional
importance of the sublime, arguing that it is the strongest of our pas-
sions, and thus is stronger in affect than the beautiful.
Burke’s general aesthetic theory is based on the passions of pleasure
and pain, and these are in turn linked to the ends of society or the
ends of self-preservation. On each side are desirable and undesirable
passions. Hence, the societal passion of love is excited by the beautiful,
while the self-preservative passions are linked to pain and danger, with
terror of an immediate or ‘simple’ kind being linked to an undesirable
passion of self-preservation. However, ‘at certain distances, and with cer-
tain modifications’, when we are not immediately affected by pain and
danger but merely have some idea of them, we experience a kind of
delight mixed with terror (40). That which excites this particular kind
of feeling, Burke claims, is sublime.
Accordingly, the source of the Burkean sublime is terrible objects,
or that which is ‘fitted in any sort to excite ideas of pain and danger’,
and the feeling evoked by the sublime is the strongest we are capable of
experiencing (39). The strongest form of this feeling is ‘astonishment’,
which ‘is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended,
with some degree of horror’ and a desirable passion of self-preservation.
In lesser degrees, in which the sublime produces ‘inferior effects’, we
find awe, admiration, reverence, and respect (57, 136). In the state of
astonishment, however, ‘the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that
it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object
which employs it’ (39).
Burke’s account certainly echoes earlier ones, but we immediately
see that he presents a more troubled, violent sublime, where a cluster
24 Part I. The Historical Sublime

of negative, heart-stopping emotions – fear, terror, astonishment – are

involved, in contrast to the more sedate sublime of the earlier theories.
Monk links this fascination with terror to the literature of Burke’s day,
where terror and horror were common themes in poetry, with grave-
yards, the supernatural, ruins, decay, and so on providing key tropes.
On the same note, Monk cites James Thomson’s The Seasons, with its
lengthy passages about the strong forces of nature – plagues, volcanoes,
sharks, and tigers.21 But another motivation behind Burke’s emphasis
on the terrible can be seen in the way that it forcefully draws out the
contrast between the sublime and the beautiful. Acknowledging more
pleasurable qualities in the sublime would only muddy a division that is
very clear to Burke.
The detailed theory of the subjective passions underpinning Burke’s
sublime is matched by an equally detailed examination of its objec-
tive sources in particular qualities: terror, obscurity, power, privation,
vastness, infinity, succession and uniformity, difficulty, magnificence,
light, colour, sound and loudness, cries of animals, bitters and stenches,
and pain. Some of these will be familiar, but it is notable that Burke
extends the sensory modalities associated with the sublime to include
both smells and tastes. Also, we can see from the list that Burke carves
out a new direction for the sublime, as a fully fledged philosophi-
cal and psychological study in aesthetics which begins with a strong
emphasis on our emotions and the physical effects of the sublime. As
such, its starting point is the qualities of the sublime and our emo-
tions, moving further away from earlier preoccupations and look-
ing forward to even more thoroughly philosophical accounts such
as Kant’s.
I will not discuss all of the qualities from Burke’s list, but rather
pick only a few which stand out as particularly original. On these
lines, Burke begins with terror because he sees it as the ‘ruling prin-
ciple of the ­sublime’ (58) and accordingly takes it to supplant magni-
tude, which played this governing role in earlier theories. Hence, we

21
Monk, The Sublime, 88. Boulton notes that Thomson’s work is important for linking
the sublime with terror (see Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, editor’s introduction, p. lvi).
Also, given revolutionary events of the time, some writers have discussed links between
Burke’s aesthetic sublime and a political sublime with terror as a central feature. See
also ‘From the Picturesque to the Political’, the introduction to part 4 of Ashfield and
De Bolla, The Sublime, 267; Tom Furniss, Edmund Burke’s Aesthetic Ideology (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1993); and Philip Shaw, The Sublime (London: Routledge,
2006), 63ff.
 The Eighteenth-Century Sublime 25

find Burke arguing, against theories such as Gerard’s, that even small
things – ­‘serpents and poisonous animals of almost all kinds’ (57) – can
be terrible, and thus sublime. Another innovation is the centrality of
‘obscurity’, which covers a range of qualities opposed to clarity: dark-
ness, uncertainty, confusion, as well as things that have these qualities:
ghosts, goblins, death, infinity, eternity. These things, Burke argues,
are sublime because they challenge our ability to form clear ideas, a
contention which he supports with reference to Milton’s description
of Satan in Paradise Lost: ‘The mind is hurried out of itself, by a cloud
of great and confused images; which affect because they are crowded
and confused. For separate them, and you lose much of their greatness’
(62). In later sections, this same obscurity is linked to other qualities.
In magnificence, for example, the sheer number, ‘apparent disorder’,
and confusion of the stars in the night sky evoke a sense of grandeur
and a ‘sort of infinity’ (78). Obscurity also finds a place in non-extended
things in Burke’s discussion of colour. More specifically, the extremes of
light are sublime – the sun, a crack of lightning, or light that is so bright
it obscures everything else. Darkness, though, owing to its obscuring
power, has a stronger effect than does forms of light. Dark and gloomy
colours, cloudy skies, and night skies all show a propensity to the sub-
lime compared to bright or cheerful colours (82).
Burke also gives explicit attention to power, which played a more
implicit role in earlier approaches: ‘I know of nothing sublime which
is not some modification of power’ (64). This notion of power involves
something superior to us, and the idea of its strength and violence brings
about an experience of the sublime. Here, Burke’s choice of illustrative
examples is curious, proceeding with a contrast between the lack of sub-
limity in domesticated animals and the sublimity of their wild counter-
parts. Thus, while an ox or a horse is certainly strong and useful, neither
is sublime. A bull, on the other hand, has a different class of strength,
‘often very destructive, seldom . . . of any use in business’, as is a feral
horse, ‘whose neck is cloathed with thunder, the glory of whose nostrils is terrible,
who swalloweth the ground with fierceness and rage, neither believeth that it is
the sound of the trumpet’ (65–66).22 In this respect, usefulness is opposed
to the sublime, with wild animals appearing to have greater aesthetic
value insofar as they are incapable of being under our control, and thus
are able to evoke stronger emotions: ‘it comes upon us in the gloomy

22
From Job 39:19, 39:20, 39:24. Boulton notes that Burke has misquoted the passage
(Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, 13n., 66).
26 Part I. The Historical Sublime

forest, and in the howling wilderness, in the form of the lion, the tiger,
the panther, or rhinoceros’ (66). Burke also notes how these animals,
including fierce wolves, rather than domesticated dogs, are frequently
used in sublime descriptions.
Vastness, which relates to dimensions and quantity, is an important
cause of the sublime. Burke, giving a nod to earlier views, points out
that this fact is fairly obvious, but he also notes that little has been said
about which modes of vastness have the strongest effect. Here, as in
Baillie, we see that there are clear degrees of the sublime; for example,
a position of looking down from a high mountain has a stronger effect
than when one is looking up at it. Interestingly, Burke also clarifies how
extremely small things can have the same sublime effect as vast things,
in particular, microscopic creatures, where the senses and imagination
struggle to take in the ‘still diminishing scale of existence’ (72). Burke is
now referring to the effect of infinity, where we experience the ‘delight-
ful horror’ of the sublime not through encountering actual infinity, but
in things that seem to be infinite. This effect arises because we are not
able to take in the ‘bounds of many things’, and imagination ‘meets no
check’ (73). Succession and uniformity of parts ground this effect in
the ‘artificial infinite’ (rotundas, temples, cathedrals), where we move
from one part to the next and where those parts have a quality of uni-
formity, without interruption by anything (such as angles) which might
check imagination’s expansion (74–75). These ideas clearly prefigure
Kant’s mathematical sublime and his notion of imagination expanding
as ‘it advances to infinity’.23 In relation to buildings, Burke also discusses
the importance of great dimensions, and in the case of Stonehenge,
‘difficulty’, where ‘those huge rude masses of stone, set on end, and
piled each on the other, turn the mind on the immense force necessary
for such a work’ (77). This description is comparable to the sublime in
nature, with rocks piled high, except here the effect is from the huge
labour required to construct such a place.
After a discussion of colour, Burke turns to qualities experienced
through other senses, namely, hearing, smelling, and tasting. He does
not explicitly connect sound to music; rather, he treats sound as an
independent quality that may attach to different kinds of things, the

23
Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Paul Guyer
and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000 [1790]), §26, 5:254.
Hereafter CPJ. All page references are to this edition (and to the Academy edition as
provided by this Cambridge edition).
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
 "Been a sailor or soldier, haven't you?"

"Sailor, sir. I done twelve year in the navy."

"Did you?" Carstairs looked at him, thoughtfully. "I've got an uncle in

the navy."

"What name did you say, sir?"

"Carstairs."

"Carstairs, I knows him. Commander Carstairs. I was with him in the

'Mediterranean.' Nice bloke he was. You ask him if he remembers Bounce,
sir, Algernon Edward Bounce, A.B., light-weight champion boxer of the
Mediterranean Fleet. He was there when I won it at Malta."

The man's manner was exceedingly civil and respectful, but there was
something about it that kept irresistibly before your mind all the time that
he was an independent unit, a man. After twelve years of the sternest
discipline in the world this man was as free as the air he breathed, there was
no sign of servility. The thought passed through Carstairs' mind, as he
looked at him, that this breed, truly, never could be slaves.

"I'll ask him when I see him. So you're a boxer, are you?"

"Yes, sir. Light weight, though I ought to go middle; eleven stone two
pounds, that's my weight. I can get down to ten, but I ain't comfortable,
though I 'ave a done it."

Carstairs measured him with his eyes. He seemed very little over five
feet. Later on, he ascertained that he was exactly five feet three inches.

"I see. Just wipe over that brass work, will you?"

With remarkable alacrity, and a peculiarly prompt and decisive manner,

the man saluted and set about his work.

Carstairs watched him in silence for some minutes, struck more than
ever by the appropriateness of his name; he marvelled too at the singularity
of his chief. In all that clean and bright engine room there was only that one
bit of obscure brass work uncleaned, and the chief had spotted it. "An
acutely observant man, evidently," Carstairs meditated.

Later on in the evening, the chief assistant dropped in. He was a big,
heavily-built man with a well-shaped, massive head and handsome, even
features with general indication of great strength—mental, moral, and
physical; the sort of man many women go into ecstasies over: the element
of the brute seemed fairly strong in him. To Carstairs' critical eyes and slow,
careful scrutiny, he appeared, however, somewhat flabby. He stood behind
Carstairs on the switchboard and watched him parallel machines.

Now the process known as "paralleling" or "synchronizing" alternating

current dynamos or "alternators" is somewhat critical; the operator has to
watch two voltmeters and get their reading exactly alike; he also has to
watch two lamps (now usually supplanted by a small voltmeter) which
grow dull and bright more or less quickly, from perhaps sixty times a
minute to ten or twelve times per minute, as the engine drivers slowly vary
the speed of the engines. When the voltmeters are reading alike, and during
the small fraction of a minute when the lamps are at their brightest, the
operator has to close a fairly ponderous switch; if he is too late or too early,
but particularly if he is too late, there are unpleasant consequences: the
machines groan and shriek with an awe-inspiring sound, keeping it up very
often for a considerable time; all the lamps on the system surge badly, and
the needle of every instrument on the switchboard does a little war dance on
its own, till the machines settle down. Sometimes the consequences of a
"bad shot" are even more dire. There once appeared in one of the technical
journals a pathetic little poem about a pupil's "first shot," how "he gazed
severely at the voltmeters," and "looked sternly at the lamps," then he "took
a howler," and "switched out again," "wished he hadn't," "Plugged in again
and—bolted." In a similar journal there was another sort of prose poem,
too, written in mediæval English which finished up a long tale of woe thus:
"He taketh a flying shot and shutteth down ye station."

This was the operation then (in which every man needs all his wits and
some more than they possess) in which Carstairs was engaged at a critical
period of the load (for be it remembered the time available is always strictly
limited) when the chief assistant stood behind him. He remained calm and
impassive, as behoved his countenance, for some time, then, just when the
phases were beginning to get longer, and Carstairs took hold of the switch
handle in readiness to plug in; the chief assistant stepped excitedly up
behind him. "Now! Be careful! Watch your volts! There! There! You might
have had that one! Look out, here she comes! Watch your volts, man, watch
your volts!"

Carstairs felt like knocking him down, he missed two good phases that
he might have taken, then he "plugged in" rather early. The machines
groaned a little, but soon settled down.

"Too soon! Too soon!" the chief assistant said,

In angry silence Carstairs turned and signalled the engine driver to

speed up the machine. The chief assistant left the board, and went out
without further comment.

"Does that ass always play the mountebank behind a chap when he's
paralleling?" Carstairs asked his junior.

"Sometimes, he gets fits now and again: Fitsgerald, the chap that's just
left, turned round and cursed him one day. I nearly fell off the board with
laughing. Old Robinson looked at me. 'What the devil are you laughing at?'
he said. I might have got your job if it hadn't been for that. Fitsgerald got
the sack over it."

"Apparently I shouldn't have missed much," Carstairs said as he went

away.

When he got home at about half-past twelve, Darwen was sitting up for
him. "How did you get on?" he asked, with his genial smile.

"Oh, first-class." They sat down to supper. "Took rather a howler,

paralleling six and seven. That ass Robinson was jigging about like a
monkey-on-stick behind me, telling me what to do. Next time I shall stand
aside and ask if he'd prefer to do it himself."
 "Don't do that, old chap, he's a malice-bearing beast. Funks always are!
Don't take any notice of him. Forget him, or send him away; ask if he'd
mind watching the drivers, as they brought her down too quick, or
something, last time."

Carstairs was silent.

"Fitsgerald got the sack for cursing him over the same thing. He was a
red-headed chap. We were talking about Robinson's unpleasant ways (he'd
had a go at me the day before). I said he wanted a good cursing to cure him
of it, and I'm blowed if Fitz didn't curse him about a couple of days later."
Darwen's eyes seemed to flicker with an uncanny sort of light, his voice
dropped into a reflective tone. "Threatened to chuck him over the handrail if
he didn't go off the switchboard. Hasty chaps those red-headed fellows are.
We had a chap at school—what school were you at, Carstairs?"

"Cheltenham."

"Were you? I was at Clifton, went to Faraday House, after."

Pushing back his chair, Darwen, got up and went to the piano, he played
some very slow, soft music, slow and soothing, it breathed the breath of
peace into Carstairs' troubled soul.

"Robinson is only a fool," Darwen said over his shoulder. "I feel rather
sorry for him—hasn't got the heart of a mouse—gets in a frightful stew
when he's got to parallel himself—he's not a bad-hearted chap—done me
one or two rather good turns."

"I thought he was alright too, at other times." Carstairs felt the spirit of
peace stirring within him.

"It's kinder to him to let him drift, he doesn't mean anything—can't help
himself—nervous, you know. I just smile at him."

"Suppose that is the best way. I'll have a shot next time, anyway. Made
me rather ratty to-night."
 Darwen played for some time in silence. "Chief come in at all?" he
asked, at length.

"Yes. Came in and groused about a bit of brass work being dirty."

"That's like the chief. He'll never express an opinion on anything except
its external appearance; very safe man, the chief, extremely safe, but stupid:
he'll fail, not through what he does, but what he leaves undone." He ceased
speaking, but the music went on slowly welling out, breathing good will
and trust to all mankind. It died slowly away leaving the tired listener in a
blissful state of rest. Darwen got up and looked at him with sparkling,
observant eyes.

"Good-night, old chap. I'm going to bed."

Carstairs arose slowly from the big, easy chair, "Wish I could play like
you, Darwen."

The rest of the week passed (at the works) with singular uneventfulness,
in fact never afterwards did Carstairs have such an uneventful week on load
shift; but all the same the memory of his first week on shift by himself
remained always clear and distinct above all other experiences; never
afterwards did he feel the delightful thrill of responsibility, of excitement, of
awe almost, as he walked round the engine room and boiler house
surveying the men and plant, for those first few days, and felt that for eight
hours he was monarch of all he surveyed; with all the other men far out of
call, spreading out in different parts of the town, reading their papers, at the
theatre or music halls, while he was responsible for the lightening of their
darkness, and the safe keeping of the men and plant around him. In after life
he often reflected that the princely salary of £104 per annum was singularly
inadequate for the kingly nature of his office; but the greengrocers, the
doctors, and publicans thought it was remarkably good for a man who spent
most of his time walking about with his hands in his pockets. These works
had been making a financial loss of from £100 to £2000 every year since
they started, with the exception of one year, when, by careful manipulation
of the accounts, they managed to show a profit of £20, which, under the
expert examination of a proper accountant, would probably have been
converted to a loss of £500.
 Darwen watched the finances with a keen interest. He was very
chummy with Robinson; they studied the reports of the various stations
together with great earnestness. "A loss or a profit doesn't matter much to a
corporation as long as they have continuity of supply." Darwen laid it down
as a law, and Robinson heartily agreed. That axiom was only a half truth,
but the foundation of all municipal work is only a half truth, so it did not
matter much.

Robinson was very proud. "We never have the lights out here," he said.
And Darwen smiled approval. "That's so," he agreed, and on his shift he
took care that it always should be so; he had every engine in the place
warmed up, ready for instant use, and two boilers always lighted up and
under pressure in case of necessity. Robinson approved of his method, and
the chief—the chief grumbled about the boiler house being dirty, but on
Darwen's shift it was cleaner and more tidy than on any other shift; also the
engine room was brighter and more spotless, so much and so persistently
so, in fact, that the cautious chief was drawn out of his shell to express a
decided opinion to the chairman of the electricity committee (who remarked
on it). "Yes," the chief said, with a little flicker of enthusiasm, "that man
Darwen is decidedly the best engineer I've ever had." Which remark was
not overlooked by the chairman, a doctor, a large man with a large imposing
black beard, who had been struck, as who could fail to be, by the
remarkable beauty of face and form and general impression of intelligence
of the athletic young engineer.

It was not very long after Darwen had observed the chief and chairman
in conversation and looking pointedly at him, that he developed certain
symptoms which, in his opinion, necessitated medical advice. Common
sense, he explained to Carstairs, pointed out the chairman as the man to go
to.

The doctor recognized him at once. "Hullo!" he said, looking him over
with distinct approval, for Darwen's winning, frank smile captivated him at
once. "Has the electricity got on your system?" The doctor was a jovial,
hearty man.

Darwen laughed. He showed precisely the right amount of amusement

at the joke, then, shortly and precisely, he stated (almost verbatim from a
medical book he had looked up in the reference library) the symptoms of a
more or less minor complaint.

Recognizing it at once, "I'll soon put that right for you," the doctor said,
in his hearty, jovial way. His extensive practice was largely due to his jovial
manner; he appreciated the clear and precise statement of the symptoms.

"It's nothing serious then, doctor?"

"Oh, no!—no! It might have been, of course, if you'd let it go on."

"Ah! that's just it; it's the same with an engine, you know, 'a stitch in
time.' I like to get expert advice at the start."

This was business from the doctor's point of view. He became serious.
"Most true," he said. "Still, people will aggravate their complaints by so-
called home treatments."

"The penny-wise policy, doctor, the results of combined ignorance and

meanness."

"I wonder," Darwen said, later on, as he poured the contents of a

medicine bottle down the bathroom waste pipe, "I wonder what in thunder
this is, a sort of elixir of life served out to most people for most complaints
at a varying price. Funny what stuff people will pour down their necks."

Some hours later, as they sat facing each other in their big easy chairs,
Darwen said: "Didn't you say your guv'nor was a parson, Carstairs?"

"Yes. Why?"

"Because the time has arrived to trot him out."

"What do you mean?" Carstairs flushed rather angrily.

"I have not got a guv'nor," Darwen observed, sadly; "haven't any
recollection of my guv'nor. He went down with the Peninsula coming home
from Australia. He was a mining engineer."
 Carstairs was softened. "Hard lines," he said, and there was much
sympathy in his tone.

"It is," Darwen agreed. "A guv'nor helps one so much. I want you to get
your guv'nor to come down and stay with us for a few days. What College
was he at?"

"Christ Church, Oxford."

"Then it's almost a cert he'll bump up against some one he knows down
here, some other parson, or somebody. I want to get into the chairman's
crowd, he's churchwarden at St James'. I'm going there."

Carstairs removed his pipe slowly from his lips and stared more or less
blankly. It was the limit of surprise he allowed himself ever to express.

"Yes, and I'm joining St James' Gym. and the Conservative Club.
Robinson has introduced me to one or two rather decent people, too;
Robinson belongs here, you know. To-morrow you and I are going to sign
on for a dancing class; Robinson's people put me on to it; Robinson doesn't
dance. I'm pretty good, and you'll be good with practice. Every fit man can
dance well with practice."

Carstairs puffed silently at his pipe for some minutes. "Will the
dividends on dancing, gymnastics, church-going, etc., pan out better than
working?" he asked at length.

"Do you think you are getting the full value of your present stock of
knowledge?"

"Not by chalks, but one never does."

"I beg to differ; some men get paid considerably over the value of their
knowledge."

"Perhaps you're correct," Carstairs admitted, after a pause.

"Well, I want to join the happy band. Shove your knowledge forward,
having due regard to the manner of your doing so, that it does not defeat its
own ends. And that is wisdom; you're paid for the combined product of
your knowledge and your wisdom. Wisdom is the most scarce, the most
valuable, and the most difficult to acquire: it is the knowledge of the use of
knowledge. Do you see?"

"They bear the relation to each other of theory and practice in

engineering."

"Not quite. Theory is an effort of the imagination, either a spontaneous

effort of your own, based on known facts, or an assimilation of the results
of other men's practice as recorded by them in books. The sources of error
are twofold; the limits of your own imagination, your own conception of the
other man's description, and the limit of the other man's gift of expression
and explanation. Practice is your own conception and remembrance of what
you yourself have personally experienced. Both are knowledge; wisdom is
distinct from either."

Carstairs smiled. "Well, it's your wisdom I doubt, not your knowledge. I
mean to say, that my application of my knowledge to my conception of
your application of your knowledge, as expressed by you in the present
discussion, leads me to doubt the accuracy of your application of your
knowledge to the case under discussion. The possible sources of error being
in my imagination or your expression, and as my imagination is a fixed
quantity, unless you can improve your expression, I shall fail to coincide
with you. How's that?"

"That's very good." Darwen took a deep breath and laughed. "Let me
have another shot. Who gets the most money, the successful professor or the
successful business man?"

"The successful business man."

"Hear, hear! That's because he's selling wisdom, while the professor is
selling knowledge."

"I disagree, on two points. Number one, the business man sells
necessities, boots for instance; the professor sells luxuries, quaternions, for
instance." Carstairs paused and quoted, "'What I like about quaternions, sir,
is that they can't be put to any base utilitarian purpose.'"

"Quaternions, my dear chap——"

"Half a minute! Number two, the business man sells knowledge of men
and affairs as opposed to the professor's knowledge of things only."

"The Lord has delivered you into my hands, Carstairs."

"I saw it as soon as I'd spoken."

"Well, let us acquire knowledge of men and affairs, instead of merely of

things—engines."

"I admit that my conception of——"

"Chuck it."

"Well, you've made a good point."

"You're Harveyized steel, Carstairs, and it gives me immense

satisfaction to see that I'm making some impression on you. Well, you may
go on grinding away all your life, and if nobody knows of the knowledge
you possess, you'll never get paid for it."

"But I will show it by the application of it in my work. The chief is

bound to see it."

"Not a ha'porth, my boy. And if he does, the chances are that he'll
depreciate it in the eyes of the world, or get you the sack, because he'll be
afraid of you."

"I admit the probability of those possibilities."

"As an engineer you must never forget the interdependence of parts: as

a successful man you must never overlook the interdependence of
everything in nature. Smile at men as if you were overjoyed to see them and
they'll give you anything, as long as it's not their own property."
 "Hear, hear!"

"Our object in life is to persuade the councillors to dole us out an extra

dose of the ratepayers' money."

"I admit the correctness of the conclusion."

"Then let us, with all circumspection, smile on the councillors and their
wives and daughters, particularly the daughters."

"Nothing would please me more, provided the daughters reciprocate the

smile."

"They'll do that alright, old chap, if you only do it the right way. The
most potent force in nature is the love of women; it behoves us as engineers
to utilize this force. There is nothing much that a woman in love won't do,
and there is even less that she won't make the poor fool, who imagines she
is in love with him, do."

"It's supposed to be specially dangerous to run two girls in parallel."

"You may take it as proved that, 'In the same town and on the same side
of it, there cannot be two girls in love with the same man, etc.' All the same,
the idea of it is rather fascinating." Darwen's eyes sparkled.

"We are wandering from the point."

"Quite so. Are you going to get your guv'nor down?"

"Look here. Have you got any money?"

"Well, I'm not absolutely stony."

"Then lend me two quid and I'll go home for a week-end and bring him
back."

Darwen fished out his purse with a smile. "The seeds of wisdom are in
you, I perceive," he said.
 Suddenly the strains of music were wafted in to them through the open
window. "What in thunder is that?" Darwen asked, getting up with a
puzzled look and gazing out into the street. "By Jove, it's a kid with a mouth
organ, looks like a gipsy kid."

With a serious face Carstairs got up and looked out of the window too.
The boy was looking directly up at the window; as soon as he caught sight
of Carstairs, he changed his tune abruptly.

"What's that tune, Darwen? I seem to know it."

"That's 'The Gipsy's Warning.' The kid plays very well, too, for an
instrument like that. I thought it was a violin for a minute."

They stood up at the window and watched. The boy played the same
thing twice over, then he played a Scotch tune. Then he opened the gate and
walking across the little lawn stood under the window and touched his cap.

Carstairs put his hand in his pocket and pulled out sixpence. "Wait a
minute," he said to the boy. He went downstairs and spoke to him. "Do you
come from Scotland?"

"Yes, sir; I seen you there. Sam's down here and he's after you." He
turned and went out into the road again and disappeared.

Carstairs looked after him with a troubled frown, then he returned to the
sitting-room.

Darwen looked at him with observant, surprised eyes. "Did you know
that kid?" he asked.

"No, but he knew me. I once had a row with a gipsy in Scotland;
flattened him out, broke his leg; he's been after me ever since. That kid
came to tell me he's in this town now. Next pay day I shall invest in a young
bull dog."

Carstairs sat down again in the big easy chair and gazed at nothing. His
thoughts were far away; he had no doubt who had sent the gipsy boy to
warn him. "The most potent force, the love of women." Good God! and
what of the love of men? A gipsy girl. It was quite impossible.

Then Darwen played—pleading, soothing music—and Carstairs told

him the whole story.

"You'll have to remove that gipsy, that Sam—in self-defence, mind, of

course. And the girl—you couldn't marry a gipsy, of course, but it's not
necessary."

And Carstairs listened in silence.

CHAPTER IX

Time passed, and although Carstairs kept a good look out, he saw
nothing of Sam, the gipsy; he bought a substantial ash walking stick which
he kept constantly by him. On the night shift he tackled Bounce, the ex-
sailor. "Can you fence?"

"Yes, sir, I'm very good at fencing."

Carstairs smiled, but he knew all the same that it was a simple statement
of the truth without any affected modesty or blatant boasting. "I'll bring
down a couple of sticks, and you can give me a little instruction if you
will."

"I shall be very pleased, sir."

He had a manner all his own of making even this simple statement; it
suggested an equality of manhood while admitting an inferiority of station;
every word and action showed a confident, self-contained, self-respecting
man.
 So in the wee sma' hours of the morning, when everyone else was in
bed, Carstairs and Bounce fenced with single sticks in a clear space in the
engine room. They got very chummy over these contests. Carstairs had
frequently had long yarns with Bounce before in the quietness of the night
watch, but now as they smote each other good and hard (for they wore
neither helmets, jackets, nor aprons) and Carstairs smiled and Bounce
grinned like a merry imp, and occasionally apologized for an "extra stiff
un," they seemed to draw very close together, so much so, that one night
Carstairs told him the tale of Sam the gipsy.

Bounce shook his head seriously. "Gipsies is nasty blokes," he

observed, pondering deeply. "Some good fighting men amongst 'em, too."
He pondered again. "I should think now that a bit of boxing would be more
useful to you than fencing. Or—have you got a pistol?"

"Yes, and a set of gloves. I'll bring them both down to-morrow."

Next night Bounce's eyes scintillated light as he fingered the well-made

brown leather boxing gloves, and examined the beautiful little American
target revolver. "This is fancy," he said, in regard to the latter. "It wouldn't
stop a man, though."

"Depends where you hit him," suggested Carstairs.

"That's true, sir."

They retired to a secluded corner of the boiler house, and Bounce

fastened a piece of board on the wall and stuck three tin tacks in it, then he
drew back as far as the dimensions of the place would admit, which was
about fifteen yards. "Shall I have first shot, sir?" he asked.

Carstairs handed him the revolver, and then a box of cartridges. He

loaded, then raised his arm, and, taking a fairly long sight at the board,
fired. "That's a miss," he observed. "I'll get a bit of chalk."

Stepping up to the board, Carstairs saw that he had missed the head of a
tin tack by about a sixteenth of an inch.
 Bounce returned from the engine room with a piece of chalk and
whitened over the heads of the tin tacks. "I ain't had a shot with a revolver
for two years, or more," he observed, apologetically. Then he took another
shot and burst the head of one tin tack; his next shot bent the second tin tack
over on one side. The third shot drove the remaining tack right home.
"There you are, sir," he said, with some pride, handing Carstairs the
revolver.

"Look here, Bounce! Is there anything much in the way of offence and
defence that you can't do?" Carstairs asked with open admiration.

"Well, I don't think there is very much, sir. I've fired everything up to a
six-inch gun, over that I ain't quite sure. Mind, I have afired a twelve-inch,
but I ain't quite sure. A twelve-inch takes some handling, see." He stood up
very straight, looking Carstairs steadily in the eyes as he made this simple
statement.

Then they boxed, and the applicability of his surname struck Carstairs
more than ever; he seemed literally to bounce out of the way, just when
Carstairs was going to hit him, and he bounced in again with singular
directness and precision immediately Carstairs had missed him. Every night
for the rest of the week they boxed for half an hour at a time, and Carstairs,
with his clear head and steady nerves, soon began to make progress.

"What you wants, principally, is to hit hard, an' quick an' straight."
Bounce laid it down as a law, and suiting his own actions accordingly, he
bounced in and hit Carstairs in the eye, so that it afterwards turned a lively
shade of deep, blue-black.

Bounce apologized, then he grinned like a healthy fiend. "It do show

up," he observed, "but a black eye ain't near so painful as a good un on the
nose."

Carstairs smiled too. "Oh! it doesn't matter in the least," he said. "It's
part of the game. Unfortunately I'm going home to see my people to-
morrow." He gazed at it thoughtfully in the looking-glass in the lavatory.
"The guv'nor'll understand, but the mater——"
 "I knows, sir."

Next day Carstairs went home to the little vicarage of Chilcombe, and
on his way to the station he caught sight of a rough-looking man in well-
worn gaiters, a fur cap and a heavy coat with big poacher's pockets, limping
down a side street. Carstairs felt angry. "That's the swine," he said, to
himself. Then a sudden surge of pity overwhelmed him. "Poor devil! he
does limp."

He got a seat in the corner of an empty third-class carriage and opened a

paper he had purchased, but he did not read, he thought of the rough-
looking man with the limp, of the beautiful girl in Scotland and Darwen—
the three seemed inextricably mixed up, somehow. "Darwen's a skunk," he
said, but that was the only definite conclusion at which he could arrive.

Meanwhile the train hurried him homewards, and very soon he arrived
at the main line junction, and changed into the crawling local. He had
written to say which train he would arrive by, and as the train drew up at the
pretty country station, he saw the tall, black-garbed figure of his father on
the platform. They shook hands solemnly, and eyes so much like his own
beamed approval and pleasure as the strong brown cricketer's hand gripped
his. Suddenly they sobered down into a look half amusement, half pain, as
they rested on the discoloured skin (by careful doctoring reduced to a bright
yellow) round his eye.

"What's the matter with the eye, Jack?"

"Oh, that's boxing."

"Ah!" It was a sigh of relief and distinct approval.

"Yes; a man at the works, engine driver, you know, ex-sailor, light-
weight champion of the Mediterranean Fleet, he's coaching me."

"Ah, very good, excellent sport. Suppose you don't lose your temper?"

"Oh, no! Not with Bounce." He laughed. "How's the mater and all the
rest of them?"
 "Your mother's very well, very well indeed. Phillip is going on very
well in India."

"Got a rise yet?"

"Rise?—er—no. In fact, you're doing the best of any, so far. Mrs

Bevengton was inquiring about you; she and Bessie are coming over to tea
to-morrow." He shot a sudden, keen glance at his son. "Very nice girl,
Bessie, extremely nice."

"That's so," Jack admitted.

"Have you seen anything more of your gipsy maiden?" There was a note
of anxiety in his father's voice.

"Yes; seen her once for a few minutes."

"Ah!" It seemed as if Jack had explained something, some obscure

point.

"Her fancy man flattened me out."

"Flattened you out?"

"Hit me on the back of the head with a stick."

"Nothing very serious, I suppose; still it's a pity you got mixed up with
those people."

"Yes; the girl came down next night with another stick to flatten out her
fancy man." Unconsciously there was a note of pride in Jack's voice.

"Dear me, what terrible people! It's a very great pity you got mixed up
with them at all—a very great pity."

"Yes, it is a pity," Jack agreed. He seemed so pensive that his father

regarded him in some concern.
 "Many young men entirely wreck their lives by these youthful
entanglements," he said. "Those sort of girls, who appear beautiful and
fascinating at your age, usually strike one as coarse and outré a few years
later."

"That's very possible," Jack admitted, and he smiled as though a weight

had been lifted off his mind.

They turned in at the big double gates.

"By the way, there is—er—no necessity to mention that little affair to
your mother. Women brood over these things, and build up all sorts of
vague horrors and possibilities of their own."

"Quite so," Jack admitted, very soberly, so that his father glanced
quickly at him again. But they were at the house and there was no time for
further questioning.

Jack's mother noticed his discoloured eye at once. "Oh, Jack, whatever
have you been doing?"

"Only boxing, mother."

"I wish you'd be more careful; you're so violent. I'm sure cricket and
lawn tennis are much nicer."

"They're nice enough, mater, but not nearly so useful."

There was a seriousness in the way he said it that made both father and
mother look at him sharply. "Useful?"

He smiled, his calm, easy smile. "I mean to say, stokers and so on
sometimes get abusive, you know, and in the interests of real peace it is best
to know how to flatten 'em out if necessary."

"I wish Jack, you wouldn't use such slangy expressions."

"Very sorry, mater."

 But his father's keen, blue eyes continued to watch him steadily, and
after Mrs Carstairs had gone to bed, he stayed down for half an hour
chatting with his son. "I suppose," he said, "there is no possibility of those
gipsies molesting you further?"

Jack shrugged his shoulders. "Can't say," he drawled. "I left them in
Scotland."

"They wander, these people, you know."

"That's true; however, there is always the police, you know." Jack was
very unconcerned. "By the way, guv'nor, could you come back and stay
with me for a few days? Another fellow and myself are digging together,
you know. He's a jolly decent sort; opens his mouth rather wide at times,
says more than he means, you know, but he's a good sort. Got me my job, as
a matter of fact. He wants you to come too. Wants to get to know some
decent people; he's a dancing man and that sort of thing. Thinks you'll
probably bump up against some one you know, give us a lift in our jobs
besides making things more pleasant. You understand."

The Reverend Carstairs' shrewd eyes twinkled merrily. "You want to

utilize your old father, eh? What about this young man's father?"

"He hasn't got one; drowned at sea when he was a kid."

"Ah!" The grey eyes softened into sympathy at once. "Of course I'll
come. It's quite the right view to take; young men cast adrift in a strange
town usually get acquainted with quite the wrong people. Southville?
Southville? Ah, yes. I think the vicar of St James' there is an old Christ
Church man. Let me see." He got up and reached down a book of reference.
"Here we are. Southville, St James. Yes! Moorhouse. Ah! I thought so. He
was not exactly a chum, but a friend. I've no doubt he'll be pleased to see
me. What is your friend like?"

"Oh, about the same as myself, but exceedingly handsome, striking, you
know. Sort of chap you turn round to look at. Very dark, almost Italian
looking."
 "Ah! You ought to be able to make things very pleasant for yourselves
down there. I'll go back with you on Monday." His father stood up.

"Thanks very much. Shall I turn out the light?"

"Thanks, if you will. Good night."

So Jack turned in once more in the old familiar bed in the old familiar
room at the corner of the house, with windows overlooking a wide sweep of
the rolling Cotswold Hills.

Next morning after church he met Mrs Bevengton and Bessie; she
coloured slightly as she shook hands with him, and her dimples sprang into
prominent evidence in a smile that expressed more than pleasure.

Jack regarded her thoughtfully, with very great pleasure too. She
seemed the personification of beauty, not so much in the physical as the
moral sense; as he walked by her side slowly down the brown-gravel path
in the warm light of an autumn sun, countless little incidents of his
childhood's days returned to him, bearing a fuller and a newer meaning; this
girl had always been clean, clean as it is understood in England, honest and
unspiteful, she never cheated. When he parted at the gate it was with a
distinct sense of pleasure that he was to meet her again in the afternoon. She
laughed, a jolly, happy laugh, when he explained the discolouration of his
eye.

Mrs Carstairs and Mrs Bevengton coming behind had observed them
with mutual approval: "Don't you think Bessie's improved?" Jack's mother
said to him as they walked home together.

"She's better looking if that's what you mean, otherwise she was always
a jolly decent girl."

"Yes, there are not many girls like her."

"In that, mater, your opinion should be of considerably more value than
mine, I haven't met very many girls."
 "You're getting old enough to think about these things now."

"Yes, mater, to think about them."

About three o'clock in the afternoon, Dr and Mrs Bevengton and Bessie
arrived. After half an hour's exchange of family greetings, Jack and Bessie
went out into the garden, leaving the old people indoors.

"Shall we go for a stroll through Cleeve woods?" Jack asked, presently.

"Yes, I haven't been there for a long time."

Cleeve woods were the private property of Lady Cleeve, but Jack and
Bessie were privileged persons, allowed to trespass whenever they liked.
They wandered along the well-known paths, going very slowly; every tree
and bush held its own secret for them, recalling each its own little tragedy
or comedy of their early lives.

Bessie stopped in front of a tall pine tree. "Do you remember when you
climbed up there and took the kestrel's eggs?"

"I remember curly-haired 'Fatty,' and Jim down below keeping 'cave,' in
case the keeper came."

The dimples burst out anew. "I was a fatty then, wasn't I? You came
down all the way without a word. I knew you'd got eggs by the careful way
you were watching your pockets. I thought it was only a magpie's, then you
glanced round like a burglar and just showed one eye over the top of your
pocket, I knew it was a hawk's because it was red."

"A kestrel is a falcon, Bessie, not a hawk. You said, 'O-oh,' under your
breath, and Jim whispered 'what is it?' Jim never could tell one egg from
another."

"We all felt like desperate poachers and crept out of the wood in
breathless haste, and you blew them under the chestnut tree on your lawn."

Jack looked at her with a sudden admiration.

 "You were always a pal and full of pluck," he said. "When I was up old
Giles' apple tree and he came out with his dog, Jim bolted like a rabbit, but
you stayed behind like a brick and waited for me."

"Yes, I remember, my knees were knocking together with fright."

"Oh, you crammer, you threw an apple at the dog."

Bessie laughed. "Old Giles was a good sort. He knew who we were
right enough, but he never told father."

Talking thus they strolled on till they came out on the trimmed laurels
and well-kept lawn that surrounded Lady Cleeve's house. Jack stopped. "I
expect the footman will come out and ask impertinent questions if we go
over the lawn, won't he?"

"Oh, no! he knows me very well."

Still they stopped for some time admiring the house and the well-kept
grounds. It was just getting dusk and lights were already beginning to
appear in some of the windows of the big old house. "I should like to own a
place like this some day," Jack said. He stepped on to the lawn. "By Jove!
these lawns are grand, aren't they? Do you remember that time I was on
holidays from Cheltenham, when they gave a sort of tea fight to the whole
village? And the yokels were playing kiss-in-ring on the lawn?"

Bessie coloured a good red and looked down at the smooth carpet-like
grass, poking aimlessly with the point of her umbrella. They were fairly
close to the house. Suddenly one of the near windows sprang into a glare of
light, showing up everything within with great distinctness. A female
servant, in cap and apron, was lighting the gas. Her profile showed clear
and distinct against the light.

"Oh! there's that new maid who's just come to the Hall. Don't you think
she's remarkably handsome, Jack?"

Carstairs looked up, the girl in the room turned, so that the light was full
on her face, and every feature was distinct: the blood seemed to bound in
his veins, he was astonished at the thrill he felt.

It was some seconds, perhaps a minute, before he answered, then it was

a very slow drawl. "Yes, exceedingly handsome."

Then they went home almost in silence, for Carstairs had recognized in
Lady Cleeve's new housemaid, his gipsy girl from Scotland.
 CHAPTER X

Early on the Monday morning the Reverend Hugh and his son Jack
entrained for Southville. Jack was pre-occupied with some deep thought,
and his father noticed it.

"Sorry to leave the old place, Jack?"

"Er—yes. Nothing touches this place for me."

"You must get to know some nice people at Southville."

Jack pulled himself together; he had been gazing earnestly at Lady

Cleeve's house nestling in among the pine trees; the slope of a hill suddenly
shut out the view, and Jack turned to his father with attention undivided.
"You know I'm not so keen on the people as the work, but Darwen seems to
think that in municipal work you can't get on at all without friends."

The parson's eyes lighted up with approval as he listened to his son.

"Work is the thing that makes life enjoyable, but you must have friends, you
know."

Jack was silent for some time. "It seems a rotten state of things," he
observed at length, and his father laughed aloud.

Darwen was on shift when they arrived, but Jack took his father to their
diggings, and very soon after Darwen came in; his handsome face lighted
up with a beaming smile as he shook hands with the Reverend Hugh. "I
say," he said, "I should have known you for Jack's father if I had met you in
the street alone."

The old parson smiled with approval as his shrewd grey eyes took in a
complete impression of face and form and expression. He succumbed at
once to the charming manner and charming personality of the tall, clean-
looking young engineer. "Wholesome, athletic, happy-go-lucky, but
intelligent," was his mental summing up. Such were the sort of friends he
expected his son to make; he looked from one to the other with keen
approval. They pushed forward the easiest chair and plied him with
cushions and tobacco. They took him back to his own college days.

"You fellows seem very comfortable here," he said.

"Not bad," they agreed.

He smiled. "It was always 'not bad,'" he said. "Hullo!" he glanced along
the backs of the books on the shelf at his side. "Tennyson, Keats, Dante,
Shelley, 'Hamlet,' 'Julius Cæsar,' 'Barrack Room Ballads,' 'The Prince'! I
didn't know you had a fancy for poetry, Jack."

"Not guilty! Those are Darwen's." Jack was stretched out, six feet of
muscularity, full length on a slender-looking couch. He puffed slowly at his
pipe. "Those are mine"—he pointed to a shelf on the other side.

His father glanced along the backs of them, reading the names aloud.
"'Dynamo, Electric Machinery,' h-m, bulky volume that! 'Manual of the
Steam Engine'; 'The Steam Engine,' h-m, three volumes. 'Polyphase
Currents,' ah! 'Text Book of Heat,' 'Theoretical Chemistry,' 'Trigonometry,'
'Integral Calculus,' 'Differential Calculus' (Todhunter). That's mine, I think.
I thought Edwards was the man on the Calculus nowadays."

"Ye-es, Darwen's got him somewhere. I prefer Todhunter, leaves more

to the imagination, you know."

"Ah, the imagination. Quite so."

"Seems to me the limit of a man's possibility in anything is the limit of

his imagination."

"And his control of it, Jack."

"Exactly."

Darwen had his chair tilted back wards, blowing clouds of smoke
vertically upwards to the ceiling. He spoke slowly between the puffs.
"Carstairs—Jack, has got no soul above machines, inanimate lumps of iron;
the hum of a smoothly running engine is the only poetry that appeals to
him, so it does to me, but I like a change; little bits of Shelley, little drops of
Kipling——"

"I admit that 'M'Andrews' Hymn' is a real poem."

"Shut up! You reek of the engine room. I like a change. Variety is the
soul of amusement." He dropped his chair on to its front legs again and
looked at Jack's father. "Hasn't some one said that?" he asked.

"I really couldn't say, perhaps so." He smiled with amusement.

Darwen looked at him steadily, thoughtfully, for a moment. "Do you

know I think there's a touch of the Dago in me—or perhaps it's Celt. Do you
think I'm Irish?"

"My dear boy, you should know that best."

"That's so! English, the mater says, pure English, but I don't know. I'm a
bit of a rogue, you know; the instinct of dishonesty is very strong at times."

The Reverend Hugh laughed, and Darwen jumped up. "I'll play you a
tune, if you'll stand it," he said. He sat down and played, wandering on from
one thing to another, ever and anon glancing at the old vicar, then he got up.
"Does that bore you?" he asked.

"Bore me? My dear fellow, you are an accomplished musician."

He flushed slightly with pleasure. "I like music. Let's have a trot round
the town and show your guv'nor the sights, Carstairs."

"The guv'nor knows the vicar of St James."

"Does he? By Jove! that's good."

So they went avisiting.

The Reverend Moorhouse was short and very broad, he had more the
legal than the clerical type of face; an old international Rugby footballer,
the impress of the game was still strong on him, vigorous, keen, bluff. It
was evident he was pleased to see his old friend, he said so, and invited all
three of them to dinner the next night.

The dinner was good; Mrs Moorhouse was plain, stout, chatty, and
exceedingly kind; the Misses Moorhouse, two of them, were tall, athletic,
and pretty. They talked about hockey and tennis and swimming; the two
young men were charmed. Carstairs was quite vivacious, Darwen seemed to
scintillate; Mrs Moorhouse watched him with approving eyes, and later on,
when he played and sang with the elder Miss Moorhouse, she took
possession of him; crossing the room she sat down beside him. "You must
come and help us at the church," she said.

"I shall be delighted," he answered, with real pleasure shining in his

eyes.

The vicar's wife was business-like and decisive, she fastened him down
by compact and contract at once.

Altogether it was a merry and delightful evening, and when they at

length departed it was in a particularly bright and happy mood. They
walked back; it was not very far and a beautiful starry night; there was a
tinge of frost in the air; Jack Carstairs threw his chest out and took a deep
gulp of the fresh, crisp air.

"I believe these little diversions do improve one's form, you know, I feel
like a sprint." He looked up and down the long silent street of semi-
detached, shrubbery-enclosed villas. As he looked back his face suddenly
hardened into a fierce look of anger, his mouth shut like a steel trap, and his
grey eyes took on a cold, steely glitter; for just as he glanced round, a
rough-looking man, carrying a big stick had limped past a lamp light on the
other side of the road. Carstairs said no word, but there was an abruptness
in his manner that attracted his father's attention.

"What's the matter, Jack?" He glanced round and Darwen followed suit,
but the man was now in the shade and hardly noticeable.

"Nothing," he answered, staring straight ahead; but out of the corner of

his eye he caught a meaning look from Darwen, and in response jerked his
head ever so slightly backwards and to one side.

Promptly Darwen dropped back to do up his bootlace. A few seconds

later, the man with the limp, who had crossed the road and was now directly
behind them, quickened his pace and limped past. Carstairs stopped and
faced round as the limping step drew near, but the man's face was averted
and he went on without a word or sign; some way ahead they saw that he
was joined by another man, hitherto unobserved, who, without any word of
greeting, stepped out of the shadow and walked along with him; he seemed
exceptionally short, but his hands hung down below his knees—probably a
hunchback.

"Those men are after no good," the Reverend Hugh observed.

"No. I expect not. There have been several burglaries round here lately."

Darwen held out his walking-stick. "Do you notice the sticks we carry?
Guaranteed to kill at one smite." He laughed lightly. Something of the spirit
of the party returned to them, and they went home more or less lighthearted.

After the old vicar was safely in bed, Darwen went along to Jack's
bedroom. He was half expected; he sat down on a chair while Carstairs
stretched himself, half undressed, on the bed.

"That was Sam?" Darwen asked.

"Yes, I'm sure of it! Don't know who the other chap is, seems as if he's
rounding up a gang. What do you think of putting the police on it?"

"Don't see how you can! Anyhow the scandal of it, if there was an
exposure, would wreck your rosy prospects in this town. A young man with
a fancy for spending his nights in the woods with charming gipsy maidens
is not the sort that the wife of the vicar of St James can allow to associate
with her daughters."

Carstairs swore volubly. "Do you know she's got a slavey's job at Lady
Cleeve's, the local big bug's at home."
 "Did she know where you lived?"

"Yes, I told her."

"You were a fool."

"I don't know." Carstairs was very thoughtful. "Damn it, she knocks
spots off any girl I've seen yet. She's improving, too."

Darwen's eyes glistened. "I like playing with fire myself," he said.

"It's our job," Carstairs answered, cynically. "We're paid to do it."

"It is damn rotten for you, I admit. Have you got a revolver?"

"Yes."

"Oh! but that's no good either, you mustn't attract attention in that way. I
tell you what, we'll set a trap and collar the brute. You'll have to be the bait.
And—say Bounce and I, we ought to be able to effect a capture."

"That's so, but what then?"

"Oh, anything. Bribery, threats, or we might shanghai the beast off to

Australia."

Carstairs was dubious. "They'll give it a rest for a bit now. He's as
cunning as a fox, that gipsy, he knows I recognized him. Damn him! I'd
have hit him over the head with my stick as he passed if the guv'nor hadn't
been there."

"Well, anyway, shall we call in Bounce? You've already told him the
story, haven't you?"

"Yes. Bounce's great idea is a heavy right on the jaw. 'Get in close and
hit hard,'" he said.

"That's very sound, too. After your guv'nor's gone, we'll hold a council
of war. Bounce may have some reliable pals. Good night, old chap, keep
your pecker up."

"Thanks. It's jolly good of you to lend me a hand over a rotten business
like this."

"That's alright. As I observed before, I like playing with fire."

"Well, I hope you won't get burnt over this. Good night."

"Good night."

Next day the old vicar went back to his flock again leaving a cordial
invitation for Darwen to come and see them. Jack saw him off.

"A very fine young fellow that. I'm glad you've made friends with him."

"Yes! he's a jolly good sort," Jack answered, enthusiastically, having

fresh in his memory Darwen's offer of assistance.

The same night, Carstairs, Bounce, and Darwen held a council of war in
the shift engineer's office. "What we wants to do," Bounce said, "is to find
out what 'e wants. If it's murder 'e's after, we'll shanghai 'im, if it's only a
row, we'll give 'im that, but the first thing to do is to capture 'im."

Carstairs sat on the side of the table puffing slowly at his pipe. "Thanks
very much for the suggestion and offer of assistance, Bounce, but I don't
want to shanghai him, I only want to get a fair show, also I don't mind
giving him a fair show if that will satisfy him."

The Quixotic strain of the Englishman was coming out in him. They
observed him in wonder. "Giving him a fair show?" they queried in a
breath.

He drawled very slowly. "I mean to say," he said, "I broke his leg. I beat
him once, but I had some assistance; if he fancies he can give me a licking
fair and square, I don't mind giving him a trial, provided, of course, that that
is really what is worrying him, you understand."
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