The beautiful and the picturesque

Another aesthetic concept floating around at Austen's time was the picturesque. Again, picturesque is a deep concept but at the simplest level you can get a grasp on it by asking what makes a good picture. I may have a beautiful Oak tree on my front lawn but only certain angles and framings and light conditions will make it picturesque.

I said a bit about picturesque when discussing Northanger Abbey and there will be a lot more to say as I go through Sense and Sensibility. For now though, I just want to say that in Austen the contrast is never between beautiful and the sublime; the contrast is always between the beautiful and the picturesque.

You might think of the picturesque as a sort of half-way stop to the sublime. It has power rather than inspiring love but it doesn't have the sort of quasi-religious power that the sublime might be said to have. As the Romantic era went on that quasi-religious power became a sort of ersatz religion.

Another way of thinking about the picturesque is to think of Pemberley. Remember how Elizabeth Bennett is supposed to go to the lake district with her aunt and uncle? The lake district one of the parts of England that inspired thoughts of the sublime. In the end, they take a shorter voyage to Derbyshire and visit Pemberley under the mistaken notion that Darcy is not there.

And what sort of moral character goes with people whose taste is built around a contrast between the beautiful and the picturesque? We'll see. But for now, back to Tyler Cowen and stories tomorrow.