found
in contemplating it has but been the greater. Finally, by the last
operation which we have made, we have diminished the terror which its
sight occasioned, and the pleasure has diminished as much. We have
diminished subjectively the idea of its height, whether by dividing the
attention of the spectator between several objects, or in giving to the
eyes, by means of these smaller mountains, placed near to the large one,
a measure by which to master the height of the mountain all the more
easily. The great and the terrible can therefore be of themselves in
certain cases a source of aesthetic pleasure.

There is not in the Greek mythology a more terrible, and at the same time
more hideous, picture than the Furies, or Erinyes, quitting the infernal
regions to throw themselves in the pursuit of a criminal. Their faces
frightfully contracted and grimacing, their fleshless bodies, their heads
covered with serpents in the place of hair--revolt our senses as much as
they offend our taste. However, when these monsters are represented to
us in the pursuit of Orestes, the murderer of his mother, when they are
shown to us brandishing the torches in their hands, and chasing their
prey, without peace or truce, from country to country, until at last, the
anger of justice being appeased, they engulf themselves in the abyss of
the infernal regions; then we pause before the picture with a horror
mixed with pleasure. But not only the remorse of a criminal which is
personified by the Furies, even his unrighteous acts nay, the real
perpetration of a crime, are able to please us in a work of art. Medea,
in the Greek tragedy; Clytemnestra, who takes the life of her husband;
Orestes, who kills his mother, fill our soul with horror and with
pleasure. Even in real life, indifferent and even repulsive or frightful
objects begin to interest us the moment that they approach the monstrous
or the terrible. An altogether vulgar and insignificant man will begin
to please us the moment that a violent passion, which indeed in no way
upraises his personal value, makes him an object of fear and terror, in
the same way that a vulgar, meaningless object becomes to us the source
of aesthetic pleasure the instant we have enlarged it to the point where
it threatens to overstep our comprehension. An ugly man is made still
more ugly by passion, and nevertheless it is in bursts of this passion,
provided that it turns to the terrible and not to the ridiculous, th