this acceptance does not seem to be so simple or immediate. There seem, in fact, to be two ‘aspects’ or stages in it.10 First—if only for a fraction of a second—there is a sense of being checked, or baffled, or even stupefied, or possibly even repelled or menaced, as though something were affecting us which we could not receive, or grasp, or stand up to. 52 In certain cases we appear to shrink away from it, as though it thrust upon us a sense of our own feebleness or insignificance. This we may call by the convenient but too strong name of the negative stage. It is essential to sublimity; and nothing seems to correspond to it in our perception of loveliness or grace except sometimes a sense of surprise or wonder, which is wholly pleasant, and which does not necessarily qualify the lovely or graceful thing. 10 52 But this first stage or aspect clearly does not by itself suffice for sublimity. To it there succeeds, it may be instantaneously or more gradually, another: a powerful reaction, a rush of self-expansion, or an uplifting, or a sense of being borne out of the self that was checked, or even of being carried away beyond all checks and limits. These feelings, even when the sublime thing might be called forbidding, menacing, or terrible, are always positive,—feelings of union with it; and, when its nature permits of this, they may amount to rapture or adoration. But the mark of the negation from which they have issued, the ‘smell of the fire,’ usually remains on them. The union, we may say perhaps, has required a self-surrender, and the rapture or adoration is often strongly tinged with awe. Now, this peculiar doubleness in our apprehension of sublimity, this presence of two equally necessary stages or phases, a negative and a positive, seems to correspond with the peculiarity which we found in the sublime object when we were provisionally regarding it by itself. It is its overwhelming greatness which for a moment checks, baffles, subdues, even repels us or makes us feel our littleness, and which then, forcing its way into the imagination and emotions, distends or uplifts them to its own dimensions. We burst our own limits, go out to the sublime thing, identify ourselves ideally with it, and share its immense greatness. But if, and in so far as, we remain conscious of our difference from it, we 53 still feel the insignificance of our actual selves, and our glory is mingled with awe or even with self-abasement.11 53 11
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