nally measured the
strength to be overcome." For the word strength use difficulty, and we
should say that, to the unpractised, the difficulties must always
appear greatest. He gives, as illustration, "Titian's flesh tint;" it
may be possible that, by some felicitous invention, some new
technicality of his art, Titian might have produced this excellence,
and to him there would have been no such great measurement of the
difficulty or strength to be overcome; while the admirer of the work,
ignorant of the happy means, fancies the exertion of powers which were
not exerted. In his chapter on "Ideas of Imitation," he imagines that
Fuseli and Coleridge falsely apply the term imitation, making "a
distinction between imitation and copying, representing the first as
the legitimate function of art--the latter as its corruption." Yet we
think he comes pretty much to the same conclusion. In like manner, he
seems to disagree with Burke in a passage which he quotes, but in
reality he agrees with him; for surely the "power of the imitation" is
but a power of the "jugglery," to be sensible of which, if we
understand him, is necessary to our sense of imitation. "When the
object," says Burke, "represented in poetry or painting is such as we
could have no desire of seeing in the reality, then we may be sure
that its power in poetry or painting is owing to the power of
_imitation_." "We may," says our author, "be sure of the contrary; for
if the object be undesirable in itself, the closer the imitation the
less will be the pleasure." Certainly not; for Burke of course
implied, and included in his sense of imitation, that it should be
consistent with a knowledge in the spectator, that a certain trick of
art was put upon him. And our author says the same--"Whenever the work
is seen to resemble something which we know it is not, we receive what
I call an idea of imitation." Again--"Now, two things are requisite to
our complete and most pleasurable perception of this: first, that the
resemblance be so perfect as to amount to deception; secondly, that
there be some means of proving at the same moment that it _is_ a
deception." He justly considers "the pleasures resulting from
imitation the most contemptible that can be received from art." He
thus happily illustrates his meaning--"We may consider tears as a
result of agony or of art, whichever we please, but not of both at the
same moment. If we are surprised by them as an attainment of the one,