II.vi.Tradition, Class, and Sympathy of the Other
Here is another example.This is from a section entitled “Examples that WORDS may affect without raising IMAGES”:
Here is not one word said of the particulars of her beauty; nothing which can in the least help us to any precise idea of her person; but yet we are much more touched by this manner of mentioning her than by these long and labored descriptions of Helen, whether handed down by tradition, or formed by fancy, which are to be met with in some authors.(Burke 1958:172)
Parsimony in verbal descriptions is counterbalanced through the very mentioning of Homer in a dismissive gesture.“Tradition”or “fancy”are obtainable through an access to the classical “long and labored descriptions of Helen,”the study of which is open only to “such people rather than ‘proletarians’ who spoke and wrote a type of educated language,”as art historian Ernest Gombrich observes(Gombrich 10).Or like Burke himself, who had chances to adore the queen in person:
It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then the dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision.I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in, —glittering like the morning-star, full of life, and splendor, and joy.(Burke 1890:84)
This explains why the “contagion of passions,”the transfusion of “passions from one breast to another”“often capable of grafting a delight on wretchedness, misery, and death itself”—which are the sources of the sublime—are either classical or empirical.The beggars in the eighteenth-century London streets, whose activity remained illegal and subject to a wide range of punishments[97], probably would not have an affective and epistemological existence.It is similar to the relational economy of shame in Aristotle’s On Rhetoric, in which a slave is merely a vehicle of emotion, but not an origin or end[98].They may be among those sympathized subjects, with whose distresses one obtains a sense of delight:
[T]here is no spectacle we so eagerly pursue, as that of some uncommon and grievous calamity ....The delight we have in such things, hinders us from shunning scenes of misery; and the pain we feel, prompts us to relieve ourselves in relieving those who suffer.(Burke 1958:46)
This touches upon an important trope in the eighteenth-century aesthetics, which is the relation of the sublime to the pathetic[99].It is also significantly reflected in the relation Burke establishes between selfpreservation, pain, and the sublime:
Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling ....When danger or pain presses too near, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible; but at certain distances, and with certain modifications, they may be, and they are delightful, as we every day experience.(39-40)(https://www.daowen.com)
For Burke, pain and danger, sickness and death are ideas that give rise to the strongest passions—of which we are capable—and can be a source of pleasure leading to the sublime.If the keystone of Burke’s aesthetic is emotion, terror would be the foundation of his theory of the sublime.It is significant to observe that it was Burke
who converted the early taste for terror into an aesthetic system and who passed it on with great emphasis to the last decades of the century, during which it was used and enjoyed in literature, painting, and the appreciation of natural scenery.(Monk 1960:87)[100]
This aesthetic theory is not upon complete sympathetic substitution.Instead, distance is necessary to ensure an imaginative bridging of it through a sympathetic positioning—the double movement of the gaze of sympathetic power—that repeats and adapts the effective paradox of a sympathetic relation[101].As Steven Bruhm argues:
The history of pain ...is in many ways a history of looking; it is a narrative of watching a pained object while occupying a contradictory space both within and outside the object.And within that narrative is a multitude of discourses that mediate the way a culture, or indeed an individual, experiences pain at any given time or place.(Bruhm xx)
It is in this way that Burke, in an instance that has achieved a certain currency lately, exemplifies a morbid celebration of England and Englishness:
Perhaps it may appear on inquiry that blackness and darkness are in some degree painful by their natural operation, independent of any associations whatsoever.I must observe, that the ideas of darkness and blackness are much the same; and they differ only in this, that blackness is a more confined idea.Mr.Cheselden has given us a very curious story of a boy, who had been born blind, and continued so until he was thirteen or fourteen years old; he was then couched fora cataract, by which operation he received his sight.Among many remarkable particulars that attended his first perceptions and judgments on visual objects, it gave him great uneasiness; and that some time after, upon accidentally seeing a negro woman, he was struck with great horror at the sight.The horror, in this case, can scarcely be supposed to arise from any association.The boy appears by the account to have been particularly observing and sensible for one of his age; and therefore it is probable, if the great uneasiness he felt at the first sight of black had arisen from its connexion with any other disagreeable ideas, he would have observed and mentioned it.(Burke 1958:144)
Blackness is associated with darkness, which creates an “independent”occasion of distancing and experiencing gothic horror[102].E.J.Clery finds an interesting instance of the late eighteenth-century gothic horror, which is Horace Walpole’s enormous armored hand blocking the passage up the staircase.In that scene, the “dead hand of the past weighing on the present”would be “embodied”in the figures of spirits and supernatural forces, which haunt the living[103].A parallel case in Burke is that this cataract instance offers such a congenial relation to aesthetic distance and the spectacle through a racially and gendered “other”haunting English perceptions and judgments on visual objects.It is a figurative expression of a English sense of power in(im)possibility of sympathy.