At the end of the eighteenth century, writers such as Kant and Burke subdivided the aesthetic realm (which had previously been inclusively called beauty) into two realms, the sublime and the beautiful. Kant’s early work, the Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, gives so straightforward a list that it can be recited, nearly verbatim, as a shorthand, even though it does not convey the many complications of Kant’s own later writing on the subject, nor of the important writings following it. In the newly subdivided aesthetic realm, the sublime is male and the beautiful is female. The sublime is English, Spanish, and German; the beautiful is French and Italian. The sublime resides in mountains, Milton’s Hell, and tall oaks in a sacred grove; the beautiful resides in flowers and Elysian meadows. The sublime is night, the beautiful day. “The sublime moves” (one becomes “earnest . . . rigid . . . astonished”). “Beauty charms.” The sublime is dusk, “disdain for the world . . . eternity”; the beautiful is lively gaiety and cheer. The sublime is great; the beautiful “can also be small.” The sublime is simple; the beautiful is multiple. The sublime is principled, noble, righteous; the beautiful is compassionate and good-hearted.
— Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just, pp.83-4.