er
would produce a touch of fear; it would be a practical passion, or if
it could by chance be objectified enough to become aesthetic, it
would merely make the object hateful and repulsive, like a
mangled corpse. The object is sublime when we forget our danger,
when we escape from ourselves altogether, and live as it were in
the object itself, energizing in imitation of its movement, and
saying, "Be thou me, impetuous one!" This passage into the object,
to live its life, is indeed a characteristic of all perfect contemplation.
But when in thus translating ourselves we rise and play a higher
personage, feeling the exhilaration of a life freer and wilder than
our own, then the experience is one of sublimity. The emotion
comes not from the situation we observe, but from the powers we
conceive; we fail to sympathize with the struggling sailors because
we sympathize too much with the wind and waves. And this
mystical cruelty can extend even to ourselves; we can so feel the
fascination of the cosmic forces that engulf us as to take a fierce
joy in the thought of our own destruction. We can identify
ourselves with the abstractest essence of reality, and, raised to that
height, despise the human accidents of our own nature. Lord, we
say, though thou slay me, yet will I trust in thee. The sense of
suffering disappears in the sense of life and the imagination
overwhelms the understanding.

_The comic._

Sec. 61. Something analogous takes place in the other spheres where
an aesthetic value seems to arise out of suggestions of evil, in the
comic, namely, and the grotesque. But here the translation of our
sympathies is partial, and we are carried away from ourselves only
to become smaller. The larger humanity, which cannot be absorbed,
remains ready to contradict the absurdity of our fiction. The
excellence of comedy lies in the invitation to wander along some
by-path of the fancy, among scenes not essentially impossible, but
not to be actually enacted by us on account of the fixed
circumstances of our lives. If the picture is agreeable, we allow
ourselves to dream it true. We forget its relations; we forbid the
eye to wander beyond the frame of the stage, or the conventions of
the fiction. We indulge an illusion which deepens our sense of the
essential pleasantness of things.

So far, there is nothing in comedy that is not delightful, except,
perhaps, the moment when it is over. But fiction, like all error or
abstraction, is