" in reference to it. Whenever
anything looks like what it is not, the resemblance being so great as
_nearly_ to deceive, we feel a kind of pleasurable surprise, an
agreeable excitement of mind, exactly the same in its nature as that
which we receive from juggling. Whenever we perceive this in something
produced by art, that is to say, whenever the work is seen to resemble
something which we know it is not, we receive what I call an idea of
imitation. _Why_ such ideas are pleasing, it would be out of our present
purpose to inquire; we only know that there is no man who does not feel
pleasure in his animal nature from gentle surprise, and that such
surprise can be excited in no more distinct manner than by the evidence
that a thing is not what it appears to be.[4] Now two things are
requisite to our complete and more pleasurable perception of this:
first, that the resemblance be so perfect as to amount to a deception;
secondly, that there be some means of proving at the same moment that it
_is_ a deception. The most perfect ideas and pleasures of imitation are,
therefore, when one sense is contradicted by another, both bearing as
positive evidence on the subject as each is capable of alone; as when
the eye says a thing is round, and the finger says it is flat; they are,
therefore, never felt in so high a degree as in painting, where
appearance of projection, roughness, hair, velvet, etc., are given with
a smooth surface, or in wax-work, where the first evidence of the senses
is perpetually contradicted by their experience; but the moment we come
to marble, our definition checks us, for a marble figure does not look
like what it is not: it looks like marble, and like the form of a man,
but then it _is_ marble, and it _is_ the form of a man. It does not look
like a man, which it is not, but like the form of a man, which it is.
Form is form, _bona fide_ and actual, whether in marble or in
flesh--not an imitation or resemblance of form, but real form. The chalk
outline of the bough of a tree on paper, is not an imitation; it looks
like chalk and paper--not like wood, and that which it suggests to the
mind is not properly said to be _like_ the form of a bough, it _is_ the
form of a bough. Now, then, we see the limits of an idea of imitation;
it extends only to the sensation of trickery and deception occasioned by
a thing's intentionally seeming different from what it is; and the
degree of the pleasure depends on the degree of d