EDMUND BURKE’S essay on the “Sublime and Beautiful” shows everywhere the unmistakable inspiration of the genius which made him one of the greatest men of modern times. It is sometimes criticized as unscientific by those who subject its theories of the beautiful to severe analysis, but it is equally safe to assert that from the time of Longinus to the close of the nineteenth century, every attempt made to define “the efficient causes of the Sublime and Beautiful” is, in the nature of things, a failure, being in its essence a part of the impossibility of limiting the Absolute and defining the Infinite. “When I say I intend to inquire into the efficient cause of Sublimity and Beauty,” writes Burke, “I would not be understood to say that I can come to the ultimate cause. I do not pretend that I shall ever be able to explain why certain affections of the body produce such a distinct emotion of mind, and no other; or why the body is at all affected by the mind, or the mind by the body. A little thought will show this to be impossible.”

  What Burke did undertake was to examine into the relations between emotion due to sensation and the operations of the higher intellect. If he does not demonstrate a single proposition, we need not concern ourselves with his failure, nor need we regret it. Burke at his best is no more logical than Shakespeare. His essay on the “Sublime and Beautiful” is as much a work of genius as “The Tempest,” but “The Tempest” proves nothing, except that there is such a reality as genius capable of “taking hold on the skirts of the infinite.” When the vibratory theory of light and of force, operating in co-relation with light and heat through the whole universe, is so well defined that the relations between color and music, tone and light, the melody of a poem and the spectrum of a rainbow, can be clearly defined, the mind which insists on scientific definition will be better prepared to define Burke’s failures. In the meantime, we have the privilege of studying the operation of his great intellect in the essay he intended to make its master work,—an essay nowhere unworthy of the genius which shows at once its modesty and its power in the conclusion that “the great chain of causes, which links one to another, even to the throne of God himself, can never be unraveled by any industry of ours.”

  Burke was born in Dublin, January 12th, 1729. After graduating from Trinity College, Dublin, he studied law and began the work as a writer which would have made him famous even if he had not found opportunity to develop his genius for oratory. From the time he made his first speech in Parliament in 1766 until he had achieved his great triumph in the impeachment of Warren Hastings, it became more and more apparent that the English-speaking world had in him its greatest orator. That eminence is still his, nor does it seem likely that he will ever be supplanted. His most noted writings beside the essay on the “Sublime and Beautiful” (A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 1756), are his “Reflections on the Revolution in France” (1790), his “Thoughts on the Causes of the Present Discontents” (1770), and his “Letters on a Regicide Peace” (1796–97). He died at Beaconsfield, England, July 8th, 1797.