N CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND GIVEN IN 1891 BY HENRY WILLIAMS SAGE DATE DUE •J-wt^, ?F=fMM5 ■u r\ ~ ^^^^ ^— -- ,. ''' -' J. M^^^ IJiJ "K PPQ rfliJ i 1 1 \ \ GAYLORO PRINTIOINUJ.A. Cornell University Library N62 .B62 On beauty : olin 3 1924 030 652 238 Cornell University Library The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924030652238 DATE DUE naBifce& F IPte JUQHfl^: ^ ^ . %'- GAYLORD PRINTED tNU.S. A. ON BEAUTY: IHEEE DISCOUESES DELIVERED IN THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH. WITH AN EXPOSITION OF THE DOCTEINE Oi iSE BEAUTIFUL ACCOEWNG TO PLATO. JOHN STUAET BLACKIE, PEOFESaOR OP GREEK IN THE mTIVEESITT, AND OF ANCIENT LITERATURE TO THE ROYAL SCOTTISH ACADEMY, EDINBURGH. EDINBURGH: SUTHERLAND AND KNOX. LONDON : SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, AND CO. 1858. 3 A/ {FlYV: ■lURBAY AND GIBB, FKINTEBS, BDIKBUKGH. GEOEGE HAEYEY, E.S.A., ROBEET HOEN, ESQ., ADVOCATE, AND JOHN BEOWN, I.D., THESE PAGES, IN MEMORY OF PURE PLEASURES AND HAPPY HOURS, ARE DEDICATED BT THE ATJTHOE. TESTIMONIES OP THE WISE. To OS Seiou xecXou, aotpiv, dya^oii, xtxi itau on roiourou. O vaat KoiKau x.a,\ as/. — Plato. To KiiKiu in ftsyshi x.ai ra^ii kari. — Aristotle. 'Nee vera ilia parva vis Naturw quod unum hoc animal sentit quid sit ordo, quid sit quod decet, in factis dictisgue qui modus. Itaque eorum ipsorum quae adspectu sentiuntur nullum aliud animal Pvkhritudinem, venustatem, convenieniiam partium sentit.' — Cicero. ' Ibat animus mens per formas corporeas et pulchrum quod per se ipsum, aptum autem quod ad aliquid accommodatum deceret, definiebam et distinguebam et exemplis corporeis adstruebam.' — St AnonsTiNE. ' £!ivig wird Er each seyn der JEine der sick in Viele Theilt, und Einer jedoch ewig der Einzige bleibt ; • Eindet in einem die Vielen, empjindet die Vielen wie Einen, Und ihr habt den Beginn, habet das Ende der Kunst.' — Goethe. ' If there was nothing originally and intrinsically pleasing or beauti- fulf the associating principle would have no materials on whichit could operate.' — ^Ddgald Stewakt. ' Beauty is the harmony of objects begetting pleasure to the eye.' — Sib Chbistopheb Ween: - - / 'A thing of beauty is a joy for ever,' — Keats. ' Beauty, divinest attribute of things. How true is she!" — Mackat. ' The eternal and divine canons of loveliness.' — ^BuSKiir. vi TESTIMONIES OF THE WISE. " The science of beauty is based on a great harmonic law, which per- vades and governs the universe,^' — Hat. ' A starved man Exceeds a fat beast; we'll not barter, Sir, Tlie Beautiful for barley ! ' Let who says The souVs a clean white paper, rather say A palimpsest, a prophet's holograph Defiled, erased, and covered by a monk's. The Apocalypse by a Longus I pming on Which obscure text he may discern perhaps Some fair fine trace of what was written once ; Some off-stroke of an Alpha and Omega Expressing the old scripture .' ' '•'?* — Mb8 Beotvning. ' Gespeist mit der Anschauung der Wirklichkeit and belebt von der gottlichen Gute ireibt der Menschengeist das WaJrre und das Gute hen'or in entsprechender, verwirklichender Form. Diese Form ist das Schone.' — Bunsen. PREFACE. With regard to the origin 'of this book, and the shape in which it appears, a few explanations may seem necessary. About twenty-five years ago, after returning from a prolonged residence in Germany and Italy, and with my head full of pictures, statues, churches, and other beautiful objects, I naturally began to speculate on the subject of Beauty generally, and to attempt to reduce my multifarious observations to general principles. I still possess amongst my manuscripts a complete scheme of a large work on sesthetical philosophy, drawn out by me at that time. But, being convinced after- wards, that the British mind is remarkably intolerant of big books on theoretical subjects, I allowed the pro- jected work to drop, and contented myself with sketch- ing out a popular lecture on Beauty. This was first delivered at Aberdeen about sixteen or seventeen years ago, and has since been delivered with the same fund- amental idea indeed, but with many additions and modifications, in various places ; in Edinburgh, Glas- PREFACE. gow, Perth, Ben Rhydding, and elsewhere. The success which always attended this lecture, determined me to put it into a readable shape on some convenient occasion (for hitherto it had been only spoken from notes), and give it to the public. Accordingly, when about two years ago, I had occasion to discuss the philosophy of the Beautiful to my most advanced students, in illustration of a passage in Plato, a request was made to me by one of my hearers, to give the class a regular lecture on that subject. To this re- quest I at once consented ; and, the method of Uni- versity prelection which I used affording more scope for a full treatment of the subject, it turned out that the one popular lecture expanded into three Academi- cal ones. But neither were these three lectures wiit- ten out ; so that when I came to extend my original notes, with some necessary additions, a much larger amount of matter assumed an organic shape, than I at first contemplated. Add to this, that in the course of developing the subject for the press, I found that my leading principles, though originally elaborated with perfect independence of all authority ancient or modern, were substantially the same as Plato's ; and desirous that the essential doctrines which I had to set forth, should be presented to the public with all the weight of the greatest Greek authority on the subject, I determined, as an Appendix to my own views, to give a complete statement of the aasthetical philosophy of Plato. Such an attempt was recommended to me. PREFACE. ix ftirther, by its congruity with my own professional occupations, and, by the fact that, so far as I knew, nothing of the kind had hitherto proceeded from any Enghsh scholar. The general reader, of course, who is incurious about Plato, will consider that the " Three Discourses " are a work complete in thenaselves, and contain everything that, from my point of view, I con- sider essentially necessary for a general outline (and I attempt no more) of the great fundamental principles of aesthetics treated as a pure science. The relation of the doctrines maintained in this book to the general principles of British, and specially of Scottish philosophy, will be sufficiently evident from the concluding remarks of Discourse Third, and from various observations both in the text of the work and in the notes. There is, however, one name which does not appear in these pages, but which unquestion- ably has as high a claim to be mentioned as any that does appear — I mean SiK William Hamilton. For though that massy and architectural intellect no doubt belonged more to the class of scientifically con- structive minds, of which Aristotle is the type, than to those plastic, imaginative, and therefore essentially assthetical souls, which are represented by Plato, never- theless so comprehensive in every direction was his survey, so just his discrimination, and so vast his erudition, that he scarcely could have mapped out the philosophy of the human mind in the way he did, without having uttered some dictum, which should be PREFACE. sufficient to indicate his opinion of the sophistical school of half-thinkers on -^Esthetics, of whom Jeffrey and Alison were the representatives. Unfortunately, however, for the purposes of this work, that part of Sir "William's lectures, to which this subject belongs, has not yet appeared in print ; and, various causes having combined to hinder me from getting a sight of his MSS. till it was too late, I have thus been placed in the awkward position of having excluded from men- tion in these pages the only Scottish thinker, for whose opinions, on an aesthetical subject, I Jiad any real re- spect. For, to say the truth, with regard not only to Jeffrey and Alison, but to Eeid, Stewart, and Brown, and the whole school of Scottish philosophers, I was content, many years, to remain altogether in ignorance of their sesthetical views, from an opinion early formed on presumptions, but found afterwards to be consistent with fact, that these men knew nothing, and from their point of view, could know nothing worth propounding on aesthetics as a pure science. But Hamilton was a man who, I knew, from many years' personal intimacy, which I count among the most honoured of my life, would either say nothing at all on the subject, or deliver himself like one who had the key of the position. I have accordingly, at the eleventh hour, got possession of two pieces of evidence, which, till the great work now under the hands of Professor Mansel and Mr Veitch, shall have appeared, will be sufficient to satisfy the public as to the views taken by Sir William Hamilton PREFACE. XI on the important province of mental philosophy, of which a rapid survey is taken in this work. The first piece of evidence is a statement made to me by Mr Veitch, who read the Professor's lectures for two years publicly, when Sir William was disabled, containing what this gentleman considers the substance of his sesthetical philosophy. ' Sir W. Hamilton reduces association to the rank of a secondary and enhancing principle in aesthetics, and regards the sesthetical emo- tions as specific in character, making them the con- comitants of the conjoint energies of the understanding proper, and the representative faculty as variously re- lated to each other.' The other piece of evidence is a letter written by Sir WiDiam Hamilton to Mr D. R. Hay of this city, so well known to the public as the friend of Sir Walter Scott, and the author of a series of very ingenious and original works on the geometri- cal element of the Beautifiil. An extract from this letter I now publish, with Mr Hay's permission : — ' 16 Gkeat King Street, March 5, 1849. ' Deak Sie — I return you many thanks for your very elegant volume, which is to me extremely interesting, as afibrdingan able contribution to what is the ancient, and, I conceive, the true theory of the beautiful. But though your doctrine coincides vnth the one prevalent through all antiquity, it appears to me quite independent and original in you, and I esteem it the more that it stands opposed to the hundred one-sided and exclusive views Xll PREFACE. prevalent in modem times. I have myself made large collections for the illustration and development of the ancient theory, which must be sought out from very recondite sources ; and I have no doubt that, were it fiilly evolved, and all other theories shown to be only partial conceptions of the one Catholic truth, we modem barbarians in art would be as harmonious as the ancients in speculation and in practice.' (Signed) ' W. Hamilton.' If any person thinks that I have used strong lan- guage in some parts of this work, when speaking of the shallow association theory so unfortunately connected with the philosophical reputation of this city, he may see that I am backed to the fullest extent by this high- est authority. I am quite wilhng, indeed, to do battle for eternal and immutable Beauty, altogether inde- pendently of any man's authority ; but I am not the less proud to lay my own thoughts on a long and fondly cherished theme before the public, under the ample shield of this Ajax. Edlnbubgh, 26tf r&ii/ koct kcavrov. otx ai TO kuvrov KotXhog kviiKaro yret^ai 'Ey£ffT«/fi)» rei ov^ii^ a.'A'hog' STTi yx^ TOW Tflt^oy xvrov ij^oiiou i^^vffafAsvot Syff/sjff/ sturov I'hxaKOVTxu^ — V. 47. ^ ' Ideas of beauty are among the noblest that can be presented to the human mind, invariably exalting and purifying it according to their degree ; and, it would appear, that we are intended by the Deity to be constantly under their influence, because there is not one single oliject iu nature which is not capable of conveying them, and which, to the rightly perceiving mind, does not present an incalculably greater number of beautiful than of deformed parts ; there being, in fact, scarcely anything in pure undiseased nature like positive deformity, but only degrees of beauty, or such slight and rai'e points of permitted contrast, as may render all around them more valuable by their opposition — spots of blackness in creation to make its colours felt.' — Ruskin, Modem Painters, Part i., sect. 1, u. 6. DISCOURSE THE FIRST. a public act of devout recognition to the Creator for having blessed earth with so much nobiHty; viewing the matter in this light we shall become more tolerant in our judgment, and learn to look upon the temple to the beautiful Philip, erected by a polytheistic people, as a monument no less natural, becoming, and graceful, than those raised by the admirers of British intellect to the poetic genius of a Burns, a Byron, and a Scott. To the Greeks Beauty was a divine thing, and worthy of a certain reverent admiration, akin to worship, as much as genius is felt to be by us ; and it is the main pur- pose of the present and the following discourses, to show that the judgment of the Greeks with regard to what we now, with a very base terminology, call ' matters of taste,' ^ was far more noble and true than that which ' ' The faculty by which we relish beautiful objects, seems more nearly allied to a feeling of a sejise than to a process of the under- standing.' — Blaik. Hence the new-fangled Gennan word, aesthelik (from amdmiSt sensation of any kind) ; but specially, in this case, signifying the science of the iimer sense, or perceptvm of objects contem- plated by a well-cultivated imagination. The term dates only from Baumgarten (1750), a German philosopher of the 'Wolfian school ; but the analogy on which it is formed is as old as Cicebo, whom Blair quotes : ' omnes enim tacito quodam sensu sine uUa arte uut ratione, quce sint in artibus ac ratiomhus recta et prava dyudicant.' — De Orat., iii. 50. That there is an internal sense by which we appreciate beauty, was, as is well known, taught by Hdtcheson in Glasgow more than a hnndred years ago, in his work entitled, • An Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue ;' to which phraseology there can be little serious objection, provided that by sense we understand, not a distinct /acM% of the mind (ac- cordii^ to the scholastic fashion of multiplying faculties), but only a function of the imagination, whereby it perceives beautiful forms and sounds, accompanied by a pleasurable emotion. Of the word aesthetics I am not at all fond, for three reasons : first, becaxise it is new-fangled ; second, because it is Greek, and a cause of trouble to the unlearned; third, because it is not particularly significant, and i ON BEAUTY, ]jrevails in many quarters among us modems, — in- finitely more worthy, in all respects, certainly, than that philosophy of the Beautiful, falsely so called, whose shallow sophisms were propounded with gracefiil dex- terity, and received with unthinking applause, in this literary metropolis of Scotland some fifty years ago. Scotland, in fact, to speak the plain truth, is a coun- tiy which, while it has much to be proud of, certainly cannot congratulate itself in any way on having excelled either in the theory or the practice of the Beautiftil. In these latter days, indeed, we have pro- requires explanation before it can be understood. NeTertheles^ the imijerfection of our language seems to render the adjective lesthetical necessary ; as, indeed, we have many derivatives from the Greek which we could easily replace with Saxon words, were it possible to use these in the adjectival form. Ferguson certainly has done wrong (^Historical Inquiry, 1849) in attempting to throw back this word which we took from the Germans with a super- induced meaning, into its original Greek position, meaning what > elates to the senses. For this purpose we have no use for a Greek ex- pression, having the English word sensuous (distinguished from sen- sual), sanctioned by Milton and Coleridge. Either we must retain (psthetical, with its modern Germanized meaning, or reject it alto- gether. This latter course has been taken with his usual intre- pidity by Mr Euskin (Modem Painters, Part iii., sect. 1, chap. 1); but in proposing a substitute he has been singularly unfortunate. ' The faculty by which we perceive and appreciate ideas of beauty,' siiYs he, ' by being called cesthetic, is degraded to a mere operation ot sense, or perhaps worse, of custom; so that the arts which appeal 10 it sink into mere amusement, ministers to morbid sensibilities, ticklers and fanners of the soul's sleep.' And, on this ground, which is certainly an exaggeration standing on a merely etymological basis, he proposes to substitute the term theoretic. But the original meaning of this word also is neither more nor less than perceptive, with special reference to perception by the eye ; and the derivative meaning, contemplative, speculative, or meditative, as opposed toprac- tiail, does not necessarily involve any of those strong moral feel- ings, the existence of which Mr Uuskin considers as so essentially DISCOURSE THE FIRST. 5 duced a few very reputable painters, and seem in the fair way, with God's blessing, of producing more ; but we seem to have adopted painting rather as one of the needfiil decorations of social life, in this age of fair show and smooth refinement, than as a great gospel of the imaginative faculty which we felt ourselves under a sacred obligation to preach. If there be more in it, I thank God; and no doubt there is a greal deal more in the hearts of some devoted individual artists ; but, as a people, I feel quite assured that we can in no wise be said to breathe the living breath of Beauty, in interwoven with the perception of Beauty. Coining a term, in ac- cordance with his o^vn strong language in chapter II., he might with more propriety have called the sense of heauty ethical than THEOEETIOAL. I thoroughly agree with him, that the highest aesthe- tical culture can never exist without high moral culture ; hut I think that in this, and in other places of his very valuable works, he shows a tendency to confound two distinct domains in a manner that leads sometimes to positive error, and at other times to gro- tesque exaggeration. Another objection to the word theoretic, ks Mr Ruskin employs it, is, that it has already a well-defined mean- ing in the English language ; referring, as it does, merely to scien- tific spectilation, and utterly divorced from emotions of any kind, whether moral or ossthetical. The German ATischauung is a term of abstract philosophy, which, so far as Englishmen understand it, they express by intuition ; and if Mr Ruskin feels that he cannot conscientiously use a word of such low etymology as cestketics, he had much better use the word intuitional than theoretical, though the one be in fact only the Latin for what the other says in Greek. I am afraid, however, it vrill be in vain to fight against the com- bined forces of custom and convenience in matters of this kind. I use the adjective cesthetical occasionally, merely because I can find no other word to suit the grammatical analogies of my sentence ; and ViecHER, in his great work entitled, JEsthetik, oder Wissen- schaft des SchSnen (3 vols. 8vo, Leipzig, 1846), says, 'the word ais- thetics has now got prescription in its fav5ur, and is at least harmless, as being quite freed from the idea of " sensuous," which originally belonged to it.' C ON BEAUTY. the same sense in which that expression might, with- out metaphor, have been used of the ancient Greeks. We are in many respects, I fear, a very utilitarian, a very vulgar, and a very Gothic race. Nor, indeed, is this surprising, seeing that, over and above the material- izing influences of the love of money, natural to a mer- cantile people, and the harshness of mind engendered by the habit of political partisanship, we, in this part of the island, possess a church polity — the extreme form of naked Protestantism — which, starting from the violence of popular image-breaking, has ever maintained a cha- racter of bigoted hostility, of morbid jealousy, or of boor- ish indiflFerence to all the softening influences and the graceful witcheries of the Fine Arts — a polity which for- mally established that unnatural divorcebetween Beauty and Faith, which can never be made without robbing the arts of their noblest soul, and devotion of no small charm.' With the Greeks the very reverse was the case. Their religion, like all polytheism, being merely a pictorial personation of the most striking powers of nature and of the human soul, and created altogether by the devout working of the imagination, could never come into an attitude of hostility to any purely imagina- tive art ; but did rather, by its very nature, constantly incite and stimulate the exercise of that devout plastic ' There is no contradiction between the sentiments here advanced with regard to Preshyterianism, and those expressed by me in an- other place on the murder of Archbishop Sharp. That homicide was justifiable, because provoked by a violent attack on the conscience of the Scottish people by the King of England ; but the remarks in the text apply only to the general qualities of certain forms of church polity as bearing on intellectual culture. In this view, there cannot be the slightest doubt that the abolition of the Episcopate in Scotland, without providing any surrogate for the capabilities of intellectual culture inherent in that form of government, was a gi'eat mistake. DISCOURSE THE FIRST. 7 faculty which the one-eyed sternness of certain forms of monotheism pitilessly denounces. Monotheism, indeed, in every shape, however much it must recommend it- self to the mere reason and the cognitive understand- ing, makes no appeal to that faculty of our nature which delights in the various play of ever-shifting and ever-beautifiil forms ; and the consequence plainly is, that every religion which preaches only one God, when pushed to that extreme towards which the nar- rowness of the human mind is always driving it, will either, with a jealous zeal, pass a universal interdict against the witching language of fair forms, or at least carefully circumscribe its activity within the bounds of what is distinctly and tangibly human. The direct and natural tendency of the highest spiritual truth, that God is a spirit, as vulgarly conceived, certainly never can be to encourage those who beheve it to the creation of sensuous forms that bear any approach to what is characteristically called divine; and though Christianity does in no wise expressly forbid the prac- tice of the fine arts, it confines its soul-stirring appeals so exclusively to the conscience, and plants everything human and sensuous at such an infinite distance from what is divine, that we need not be at all surprised when we stumble on the plain historical fact, that the most intimate union of the religion of Christ with the arts of representation, took place in an age and in a country where the native tendencies of the Christian faith were neutrahzed by a strong admixture of the out- ward pomp and ceremonial of heathenism. Xot less significant is the other historical fact which we find in modem Protestantism as the counterpart of medieval Eomanism; for just in proportion as Christianity, de- 8 ON BEAUTY. • nuded of its Popish decorations, has been brought back to all the bareness of its primitive simplicity, do we find that it casts a very shy regard on the arts vehich represent forms of superhuman Beauty, and has even gone so far, here in Scotland, as to look upon the deco- ration of the walls of Christian churches with the deeds of Christian saints and heroes as a profanation and a sin.^ The consequence is, that in lands where extreme Protestantism is professed, the fine arts being thrust violently out of the house of God, are driven to seek refuge in the private parlour or in the public saloon ; and the noble arts of jfainting and sculpture, prevented from consecrating themselves to what is sacred, are glad to obtain a meagre svibsistence by ministering to personal vanity and social pomp. In this view, we cannot but admit, if we are honest, that the ancient Greeks stood far a^-head of the point where the modem Britons now stand. Amid the multifarious errors of their crude and puerile theology, against which the lofty soul of Plato so indignantly protested, these an- cients had at least this one good thing to set against the many good things in which our Christian superior- ity consists, that, if their religion was less divine than ours, their painting and sculpture, and even the trivial garniture of their daily life, was more religious. If ' It deserves to be noticed, however, as a remarkable sign of the times, that in the restoration of the Old Greyfriars Church in this city— a church hallowed by so many memorials of the Covenanting age — not only have painted glass windows of a motley variety of pattern been introduced, but one of these windows also contains a portrait of George Buchanan, the great literary saint of the Refor- mation. Our venerable Camerons and Pedens, two hundred years ago, would certainly have looked on such a fashion of church de- coration as opening a large door to the revival of the Homan Ca- tholic worship of saints. DISCOURSE THE FIRST. 9 • they had less morality in their temples, they had more devotion in their pictured porticoes and ia their statued streets. To them, religion, whatever might be its faults — and they are certainly neither few nor faint — ^never wore a grim and forbidding aspect. The message which their priests and hierophants had to deUver from their gods, however scant always, and oftentimes ambiguous, was not wont to be marred by studied savagery and the harsh defiance of all grace in the person of its messengers. Where a golden- locked and a lute-playing Apollo was worshipped, the worshippers were not apt to be deluded into the superstitious imagination that the only style of praise from mortal men in which the Supreme Being can de- light, is the dismal fiinereal drone of a crude psalmody, removed at the greatest possible distance from everj' natural expression of joy and jubilation. To them, painting and sculpture were not arts invented merely or mainly for the purpose of enabling a rich huntsman to ornament the vestibule of his mountain-lodge with groups of wild beasts, or that his fair lady might look upon herself painted with her favourite parrot on her shoulder ; but that our small experience of all that is glorious and beautifnl in poor, shrivelled, and crippled humanity, might, through the genius of a Phidias and an Alcamenes, be enriched and refreshed by the daily contemplation of perfect hmnan joy in an Apollo, per- fect human love in an Aphrodite, and perfect practical wisdom in a Minerva. Where such materials were obvious and exuberant, art could never become de- graded, till faith dwindled and became extinct ; nay, even after faith had died, and a Lucian might make wanton sport with those forms of awful loveliness which 10 ON BEAUTY. a Homer revered, such was the vitality of that most beautiful of all mythologies, that the slumbering piety of many was blown into a flame by the mere stimulus of their imaginations; and the heroic young Emperor JuUan was certainly not a solitary example of a talented and well-educated ancient, at a time when Hellenism was no longer possible, who cleaved to the dynasty of departing Olympians from the strong faith of a poetic instinct that such gods were too beautiful to be false. I now proceed to attempt a philosophical analysis and scientific classification of the main elements of the Beautiful in nature and art ; from which, when clearly stated, it will be distinctly perceived, by any man capable of reflecting on such subjects, that the founda- tions of eternal truth, in so-called matters of taste, are laid as firmly in the nature of the human mind, and of every conceivable mind, as the first principles of moral and mathematical science ; and that the obligation to beautify the earth, and to make it lovely with cunning works of ingenious device, depends fundamentallv on a di^ane sanction as imperative, wherever possible, as that wliich accompanied the primal blessing, ' Be fruit- ful, and multiply, and replenish tlie earth, and subdue it." In what does Beauty consist '? Not in one element, or in one power, or in one proportion, but in many elements, powers, and proportions, sometimes com- bined together, and presented to the observer in such a state of fair entanglement, that when he is most en- raptured by the vision, precisely then he finds it most difficult to explain the cause of his delight.' We 1 ' Philosophers have made many just obsen'ations on the subject of Beauty ; but, from the love of simplicity, have reduced it to fewer DISCOURSE THE FIRST. U shall commence, therefore, with what is most simple — with the imiversal and all-prevaUing principle, without which the world were no world, and God the creator only of confusion, — I mean the principle of OEDEK. It is undoubted that the world is a system of well- ordered parts (a x6e,u>og, ordering, or garniture, as the earhest Greeks, with a fine perception, named it), and being well-ordered, it is beautiM ; and this beauti- ftd order being perceived in stable bodies occupying space, is called symmetry ; while in bodies that move through space, it is called measttbe, or khythji. If any man can open his eyes, and find in the system of things of which we are a part, only a struggle of bhnd forces accidentally stumbhng into propriety, I can only say that he is drunk, and that the bewilderment of his perceptive faculties proceeds not from the • nature of the spectacle, but from the sick fiunes which infest the brain of the spectator. I break a lump of confiised and inorganic rock, and within the purple hollow I behold a bright array of well-beveUed, cun- ningly-edged crystals, which, when minutely examined by a scientific instrument, present forms of as acctirate delineation as ever were projected from the postulates principles than the nature of the thing will permit, haying had in their eyes some particular kinds of Beauty, while they overlooked others.' — ^Beid (Essay -riii., On Taste in General). A most import- ant observation, not only in reference to the philosophy of taste, but to all sorts of philosophizing. So Buskin : ' The difficulty of reasoning on Beauty arises chiefly from the ambiguity of the word, which stands in diiferent people's minds for totally different sensations.' — Modem Painters, Part III., sect, i., u. iii. 12 ON BEAUTY. of a mathematician. Do you find nothing here, in this lowest platform of organized existence, that can lay a sure foimdation for your sesthetical philosophy ? I do. The nice order or symmetry of those lucid cubes or prisms, I call Beauty ; and the all-plastic mind that can alone produce that order, and is every- where producing it, within and around us, I call GoD. This is the old philosophy of Moses, Anaxagoras, and Plato ; and it is a perfectly sufficient philosophy for every well-constituted mind. As, out of a lump of shapeless clay, only the hand of the wise potter could mould the shapely vase, so only a wise aboriginal artificer (whom Plato called &ri/iiovpy6g) could, out of mere chaos and crudity, body forth that beautiful harmony of things, whereof human nature is the crown. The simplest element of Beauty, therefore, is OKDEE ; and the ultimate cause of Beauty is the di- vine MIND.^ There are, indeed, many things in the world that seem to us to have no order, and are yet beautiful — towering clouds, drifting snows, racing billows, etc., of which presently ; but it requires no microscope to discern that, despite these immense fields where apparent irregularity and even lawlessness prevail, the great law of all cosmical existence is order; in fact, existence everywhere becomes elevated, and culminates only in proportion as the order which inheres in it becomes more cunning,, more complex, and more complete. The plant also has its symmetry; ' ' To account for the existence and phenomena of either nature or the soul, a Creator, a supreme Lawgiver, must be acknowledged. If there be, as it appears there is, a responsiveness and agreement between them, this only proves the unity or sameness of the Creator of both.' — Macvicak, Philosophy of the Beautiful, chap. ii. DISCOURSE THE FIRST. 13 the mystic numbers of old Pythagoras seem visibly in- carnated in the white and purple crowns of the many- flowered earth. Even a child may be taught with his fingers to count this mystery; but the skilful botanist, in what does his science consist, if not in the more complete and accomplished apprehension of this most beautiful and delightful order that reigns everywhere supreme in the wide kingdom of green leaves and many-coloured blossoms 1 Take again Man, or any animal. What makes the bony and the fleshy frame- work of every living creature so beautiful 1 There are other elements of personal beauty, no doubt; but the foundation of all is symmetry — the most complete and admirable symmetry. The ancients felt this so truly, that they habitually used the word which expresses form (jjjopf'h, forma) to signify Beauty generally. Let us imagine any, the plainest human being, suddenly shaken out of the propriety of his bodily compactness, and we shall presently be aware what a potent ele- ment of essential beauty belongs to the organization even of those persons whom we are accustomed to think most ugly. Suppose a face with a contorted forehead — a nose not in the middle of the countenance — one eye not in the same line with the other, and squinting to boot — a big wry mouth, with huge tusky teeth projecting in all directions — a warty chin, a goi- tred neck, a twisted spine, rheumatic joints, carious bones, and dropsical limbs ; — conceive one-half of our double body, now so wonderfully harmonious, shifted (as the strata of the earth have sometimes been) out of its natural relations to the other half, — and thus you will see plainly enough how the well-ordered relation of the various parts of our bodily frame does in fact U ON BEAUTY. constitute the necessary substratum of all the other elements of Beauty, that, being superadded, shall complete its attractiveness. So everywhere in nature order is at once the foundation of all actual, and the condition of all possible existence.^ Even the dis- solution of the grave is but the resolution of atoms that have their own cunningly-proportioned constitu- tion, and fly away, eager to put forth in some new sphere their strange capabilities of curiously-calculated combination. We begin to find, when we look into the matter, that even the very sands of the desert are numbered, and that the airy columns into which they are rolled by the fitful Simoom, if not themselves sub- ject to an organic control, are at least as much the ministers of a plan, as the dust which is swept from the stage of a theatre before the appearance of the actors. So much for the divine order which, reigning everywhere, constitutes so great a part of the beauty of nature. Let us now look at the works of man ; for- man, as the Stoics well expressed it, is ' the contem- plator and the imitator of the world ;'^ that is, accord- ing to our present argument, the contemplator and 1 ' Glauhe mir was in der Welt Gexetz und Sitie wir nennen, 1st auf so leichten Sand nicht wie du wahnest 'erbaut ; Alles ist Ordnung und Mass ; sonst konnt esja nimmer bestehen. Sieh sur das Wachsende Kraut, sich nur der Thiere Geschlechi. Immer ein Ghichgewicht mussjedes der Wesen erhalten ; Die Elemente sogar Wasxir, und Feuer und Luft.' Knebel. ' CiCEKO, Natura Beorum, ii. 14. Ruskin says a fine thing also (Modern Painters, Part ii., sect, i., c. 4), when in a similar rein he says, ' The preacher and the painter are both commentators on in- finity.' Yes, and hence the great imperfections of the works of both ; for when the finite comments on the infinite, there must always be something very inadequate. DISCOURSE THE FIRST. 15 the imitator of order. Take Architecture. Xo art is naturally less of a fine art than this. It is the creation of pure necessity. When the rude Troglo- dytic fathers of our race could not find a cave, natu- rally prepared, for shelter against sun or storm, they built a hut. It was the most simple thing in the world. A few stems of trees, with lopped branches, as well as the rude instruments of primitive art might allow, were stuck into the ground in a circle, and made to lean against one another at the upper end, so as to form a cone. This rude framework was then covered with skins of wild beasts, or turf, or twisted osiers, or all the three ; and a hole being left somewhere for entrance and exit, the house was made. A house certainly ! but how different from those stately piles of nicely-hewn and richly-de- corated stone that line the streets of our modern European capitals ! And wherein lies the difference ? What principle of our nature was it that, out of those rude and frail beginnings, educed the stabUity of the Doric column, the commodity of the weU-Hghted saloon, the grace of the richly-decorated pediment V The principle of improvement and progression, no doubt, generally ; but this included among other elements, specially the love of symmetry in external forms innate in the human soul, so that, mider favour- able circumstances (there being no absolute necessity anywhere in the development of our nature), in pro- portion as human dwellings increased in the most im- portant qualities of commodity and stabihty, they increased also in elegance, in fair proportions, in beauty, ' ' Architecture hath three conditions : cominodit}-, firmness, and delight.' — Sir Henry Wotton, quoted by Gaebett. 16 ON BEAUTY. in magnificence.' Man may most comprehensively be defined a being capable of conceiving an Ideal, and of devoting his whole energies, year after year, and age after age, to its realization ; and the realization of this ideal is the creation of a fair order in the little world shaped by human activity, just as the great scheme of nature, man included, is the result of a similar plastic energy on the part of the Great Spirit. Take an- other, and the most popular of all the arts whose direct object it is to create a beautiful organism. Poetry is this art ; the organism which it creates is the ^yell-jointed structure of intelligent discourse, in the harmoniously elaborated procession of significant sounds. Poetry is, like architecture, a product in the first place of mere necessity ; for if speech be neces- sary in a £i*ee and social being, in order that mutual understanding and joint action may be possible, poetry may justly be looked upon as speech elevated into Beauty,^ even as the Parthenon and St Peter's are the culminations of the first rude huts of the Troglo- dyte. And yet, so essential is it to the human being ' Gakbett goes much further than I do, and states broadly, ' The rudest huts erected by savage nations present on their exterior some evidence of unnecessary design, some regularity or symmetry not required for their internal purposes.'— (jRurfimentory Treatise nn Architecture, London, 1850.) If this be actually a fact, it strengthens my argument. I have been much delighted with this book ; and am glad to see that FERcnsoN, in his late great work, calls it ' a work that contains more information and more common sense criti- cism on Architecture than any in our language.' ^ Ferguson, in his Historical Inquiry into the Principles of Beauty in Art (London 1849), has stated the general pro- position, 'All that is beautiful or high in art, is merely an elaboration and refinement of what is fundamentally a useful and a necessary art' (p. 96), and has tabulated the ditFerent arts accord- DISCOURSE THE FIRST. 17 to attempt the realization of his innate idea of Beauty, that there is no nation, however savage, that has not its war-songs, and its sacrificial hymns, and various other structures of harmoniously-ordered speech. For poetry differs from prose essentially only in this, that it is divided into a series of equal processions of vocal harmony, and curiously-balanced masses : what are called poetical ideas, and metaphors, being found every- where almost as readily in prose. Why, then, if men could express their ideas not only distinctly, but mag- nificently, without the artificial structure of measured verses and stanzas, did they, among all nations, never- theless studiously prefer this more elaborate method for expressing not only their wildest joy and theu- keenest sorrow, but the results of their severest medi- tation and profoundest thought ? Plainly because a dehght in the creation of well-ordered artificial structures is an essential element of human nature. Art, in fact, is our nature, as some one aptly answered to Rousseau ; or, as might be said, looking deeper. Art is merely the conforming ourselves, by the free use of intellectual emotion, to the laws of necessary abori- ginal harmony which are inherent in the constitution of the universe. A man who makes a pipe and plays upon it, is merely submitting the free and irregular blast of breath from his lungs to certain cunningly-propor- tioned laws, that regulate the vibratory motions of air ingly in several interesting tables. That this principle is correct, there can be no doubt ; and it may afford a valuable hint to all practisers of the fine arts, always to think they are on dan- gerous ground when they find themselves separated from the original root out of which they grew.— See Dr Mac Vicar's obser- vations on the use of the rhomboidal element in Architecture, Philosophy of the Beautiful, 1855, pp. 73 and 83, B W ON BEAUTY. confined in measured spaces, in pre-ordained agree- ment with the structure of the human ear. We can no more refuse to seek delight in rhythm and the well- ordered march of sweet sounds, than we can refuse to experience jileasure fi-om a well-regulated pulse, and a pair of finely-playing lungs. AVe are healthy and happy in proportion as all oar functions act harmo- niously ; we are human, and elevated above the brute, just in proportion as we ran subject everything that comes within the scope of our living action to an ideal law and order, of which we carry the prophecy in our bosom, and behold the divine pattern in the whole scheme of the universe. I have now shown, by familiar illustrations both from nature and art, that one of the most fundamental and generally traceable elements of Beauty in objects is OTiT^KK. But on what does order depend, and the pleasure we derive from the recognition or produc- tion of a symmetrical arrangement, or a well-calcu- lated proportion of parts ! The answer to this ques- tion also I have already sufficiently indicated. It depends on the presence and on the action of jiind. i\Iind, in fact, does not, and cannot, exist and mani- fest its existence in any way but either receptively by the recognition, or projectively by the production of order. Let us look at this gi-eat fundamental prin- ciple somewhat more in detail. 'V'Mien a child comes forth from the darkness of the womb, and begins to open its eyes upon this various and grandly-marshalled whole of things, which we call the World, it at first sees nothing but a luminous confnsion, in the midst of which the little blue orb, wliich is henceforth to be the medium of its communication with outwai-d things, DISCOURSE THE FIRST. 19 wanders and floats about like a mote in the sunbeam, the slave of all those potent impressions of which it is one day to be the recognised critic and the lord. Anon it begins to fix its gaze, and to distinguish objects, and to perform that function which we call vision. Now, what is the meaning of this fixation and this distinguishing ? Is it not that the soul of the infant creature, which had been lying previously in a state of stupor, being now brought under the influence of the strong stimuli of the fresh new world, gradually awakes and asserts itself, and concentrates its nascent energy, and goes out, so to speak, into a little field of conquest, and begins to survey the ground of its fature operations, and comprehends first some promuient feature of the landscape, and then by dwelling upon it, and laying hold of it with the fangs of perceptiveness for a continued period, does, by fi:equent repetition of such acts, at length become the master and the dis- poser of the whole situation ? Here, therefore, we see that the very first act of the exhibition of new- awakened intellect, consists in bringing order out of confusion, by submitting the various materials of shape and colour, which the outward world presents, to the lordship and control of a discriminating soul. Take now the case of adult intellect, and observe in what the difierence between vulgar observation and a scientifically-trained eye consists. A smart young gentleman, with a silver-headed cane m his hand and a cigar in his mouth, comes jauntily into a flower- garden. What does the creature seel He is not over-curious about the flowers, you may imagine ; for he is occupied with nothing in creation at the present moment, seriously, but his own person : all he sees is 20 ON BEAUTY. great patches of purple, and white, and yellow, shaped into various crowns and bells, enveloped in green, swaying before the breeze and glistering in the sun,— a beautiful spectacle, no doubt, and agreeable even to him ; but if you interrogate him, you will soon come to the end of his knowledge of the wonderfully rich world of growing and blossoming things; and you will discover also, not without sadness, that, while he knows httle of the beauty of vegetable forms and colours, he cares less. In fact, he knows nothing more than what, by the constitution of a perceptive being, he is absolutely forced to know ; beyond that, all is chaos and confusion to him, as much as to the babe unborn. He has not yet learned to fix his eyes on any object in nature beyond the mere unavoidable reception of surface-impressions. For every purpose of nice and scientific observation, he has eyes but sees not. He looks about with open orbs, and walks like a wakeful person through the broad day of reality; but, like a sleep-walker, whose eyes are open while theu' sense is shut, he sees nothing all the while with any intensity, but his own vain imaginations and over- weening conceits.' Contrast with this person a scien- tific botanist. He also walks in the flower-garden; but he walks, not like a listless stranger, but like a king among hereditary subjects, whose character he intimately knows, and whose welfare it is life's busi- ' Read Mr Knskin's admirable chapter (Modern Painters, Part !l., sect, i., 0. 2), entitled, That the truth op natuke is not to BE DISCERNED BT THE UNEDUCATED SENSES. HuME (Standard of Taste} has some excellent observations to the same eft'ect, proving why ' a true judge in the fine arts is observed, even in the most polished ages, to be so rare a character.' DISCOURSE THE FIRST. 21 ness to promote. In his mind's eye he has marshalled and arranged the flowery trihes into their natural com- panies; he knows their relationships and their affini- ties; he has numbered the delicately cut segments of their starry petals, and watched the unfolding of their leafy sheaths and whorls as a mother watches the de- velopment of a fine character in her favourite child. By what faculty does he do this? By the same faculty that enabled hiin, when sprawling in his nurse's lap on the first days of his extrar-uterine existence, to dis- tinguish a stripe of purple colour from green, and a crimson curtain from a white and lucid glass window. His soul, now firmer, gathers up its strength to make a more important conquest in the beautiful world of outward sense. He will know now, not only that a tree is not a green knoll, and that a lily shows a dif- ferent complexion from a rose; but he will penetrate into the inner camp of the lovely armies of things that grow, and speak to them man by man, and name their chief captains and their mighty men, and live with them and love them. He will know how one tree differs from another tree, and one white-starred floweret from another, not only in outward glory, but in its whole nature, character, and destiny. And he achieves this great work by the innate mission which mind, and mind only, can claim, to marshal and mus- ter an infinity of details under the dominancy of a great hierarchy, so to speak, of commanding ideas.^ - From this point of view may be most easily understood what has been said by a recent writer; 'Beauty is never a unit, it is plural.'— Poetics. By F. S. Dallas. London, 1852. A book full of ingenuity and elegance, which no lover of the gentle art of rhym- ing would wish to leave unread. 22 ON BEAUTY. These commanding ideas, in the case of the vegetable world, form tribes, and families, and genera, and spe- cies, and great laws of vegetable growth; and they are recognised with joy by the devout scientific inquirer, lording it over them by the native supremacy of a thinking soul, precisely because they are the product of one great Supreme Soul, which embraces both the observed and the observer, under certain eternal and necessary t3rpes of all existence. In fact, if we will consider for a moment what order means, we shall see that it could not possibly exist otherwise than by the action of a living principle of uxitt, which shall cause the multifarious parts of which an ordered whole is composed to submit themselves to the disposal of a Law, which, in respect of them, acts with the authority of an absolute lord.* If it be proposed, for instance, 1 Hence the two separate heads of Order and CoNGRriTY, dis- cussed in this chapter, are treated hy Mr Ruskin (vol. ii.) under the title, Unity; which he subdivides into three kinds — unity of sub- jection, unity of sequence, and unity of membership. On this sub- ject his remarks are both Just and brilliant. But I cannot see why he has given a separate chapter to Symmetry : calling this type, according to his favourite play with ethical analogies, the type of divinejustice,w}ii[e unity is typical of the dirine comprehensiveness. For the divine comprehensiveness, which binds diverse things together by a common relationship of whatever kind, is no less distinctly mani- fested in binding the different atoms of the same material together under tjie relationship of mere similarity of disposition in space ; and if justice be that virtue which 'gives to every man his own,' it is as much typified in giving to the body of every animal a head corresponding to its size, as in placing the different pillars of ii peristyle Greek temple at regular distances from one another. It is characteristic of Mr Euskin's mind, moreover, that in classifv- ing the diiferent elements of Beauty, he commences not with wh.it is most easy, but with what is most difficult, viz., Infinity, or the type of divine Incomprehensibility; of which, in the next discourse. DISCODRSE THE FIRST. 23 oat of any given congeries of amorphous matter to separate a mass in the form of a perfect sphere, this can only be done by an intelligent force, — ^that is to say, a mind acting either from without, so as to sepa- rate a spherical lump by external section, or from within, as nodules and concretions are formed, by a concentric action round a given point, within a given circumference. A blind or unintelligent force could in nowise produce a perfect spherical form in either of these ways ; for every impulse that goes to the produc- tion of the result must be calculated, and that with the most minute and curious niceness, before a figure of such cunning relations of every part to the whole, and to one central part, could be produced. Calcula- tion can only come from a calculator; government can only come from a governor; and every operation, how- ever regular, always implies an operator. A watch may seem to a superficial observer to move itself; but it was made bv a watchmaker, and is regulated by a machinery of which the watchmaker has the controL The bits of brass, and silver, and steel, of which a watch is composed, could no more make themselves into a watch, than a case of letters — to use an old com- parison of Cicero's ' — ^when thrown out on the floor, could by the blind tossings of a million of experi- ments form themselves into a book. In both cases, the multiplicity of the material which is to receive an ordered arrangement, must submit to receive a stamp from the unity of that energetic, imperial, and plastic force which we call Mind, before any ordered product can step fi)rtlu The man who imagines that the Doric ' De Natwra DfoT>im. IL 24 ON BEACTY. columns of the Partbenon cauld have jumped into their present position, with all those nicely-calculated proportions which they are known to possess, without the agency of what we call Mind, as distinguished from matter, is mad. This is the common argument of natural theologians, — an argument which no imper- tinent bungling of shallow teleologists can ever rob of its native and invincible force; but mad, in plain verity, scarcely less is he, who can look on the fair pro- portions of that pillared shrine, and believe that the pleasure which he receives from beholding it proceeds fundamentally from any less radical cause than that delight which intellect, worldng by the recognition of order, naturally receives from its perfectly presented sensuous manifestation. It is thus evident, I hope, that the foundations of the philosophy of taste lie, with the deep roots of all moral, metaphysical, and mathematical ideas, in the very essential nature of the human soul, and of the divine mind with which it is our privilege to claim kindred. If it be true that the three angles of a tri- angle are equal to two right angles, and if it be impos- sible for a person who has contemplated the relations of the parts of a trilinear figure, to imagine that this truth should be reversed, no less impossible is it for a person endowed with moral feelings, to imagine that selfishness should be in any possible world superior to love, or for a person capable of being pleasantly moved by beautiful objects, to imagine the possibility of a state of things, where the imagination should find its natural food in distortion, and mind rejoice in the contemplation of chaos. An element of complete and universal chaos is so contrary to the nature of mind. DISCOCKSE THE FIKST. 25 that, if we could suppose ourselves to be enveloped by such, it would drive the strongest-headed man mad * in less than a week. It is even wrong — as some persons do, though it sounds pious — to say that the laws of Beauty ultimately depend on the will of God, and be- yond this, that no explanation of them ought to be asked or expected.^ They depend not upon the will of God — for that phrase seems to imply something arbitrary — but upon the essential nature of God. If God be Jlind, the proto-plastic noDg of Anaxagoras, — and we assert and beheve that He is ilind, only be- cause nothing less than an intelligent cause can ex- plain the existence of an intelligent effect, — then, to suppose Him delighting in confusion and chaos, and not in order and symmetry, would be to suppose Him ' HtnccHESON, living under the influence of Locke's essentially unideal philosophy, does not take the high Platonic ground main- tained in these discourses ; but in his chapter (sect. 6) on the Uni- versality of the Taste of Beauty among Men, he appeals to experience, and asks, ' Did ever any man make choice of a trapezium, or any irregular cnrve, for the plan of his house, without necessity, or some great motive of convenience ? Among all the fantastic modes of dress, none was ever quite void of uniformity, if it were only in the resemblance of the two-sides of the same robe, and in some general aptitude to the human form.' ' ' Why we receive pleasure from some forms and colours, and not from others, is no more to be asked or answered, than why we like sugar, and dislike wormwood. The utmost subtlety of investi- gation will only lead us to ultimate instincts and principles of hu- man nature, for which no further reason can be given than the SINGLE WILI, OF THE DeITT THAT WE SHALL BE SO CREATED.' KusKiN, Modern Painters, Part I., sect, i., chap. vi. Hutcheson has the same doctrine, sect. v. Plato nowhere uses this language ; but while he ascribes the immortality of the inferior gods to the sove- reign wiU (/SoilXjiff/f) of the Supreme God (Timaeus, 41 B.), always speaks of Order and Beauty as things essentially inherent in the Divine nature. 2f. ON BEAUTY. capable of becoming that, the recognised contrars' of which is the firm postulate on which the human mind rears its indubitable faith in His existence. As the fountain of all light, He cannot rejoice in darkness ; as the most positive substratum of everything that is, He can in nowise delight in nullity and negation ; as the grand originator and conservator of all system — as the holder together of all that is loose, and the sus- tainer of things that are ready to fall — He can in no case find pleasure in disorder, and rejoice in discord. In a word, the fundamental laws of Beauty are as eternal and immutable as the attributes of the Divine Mind. God Himself cannot change them ; for that were to walk out of His own perfections, and to dis- robe Himself of His essential glory.^ But you may ask now, wherein does the perception of order by a man of taste differ from the recognition of the same great cosmical quality by a man of science, by a philosopher, by a preacher of moral purity, or bv a social reformer ? This is a simple matter. These varieties are but different sides of the same thing — different functions of one faculty. The human mind is essentially one, but it can act and be affected in different ways, so, however, as under every modification ' If any person of timid piety — and there are many such in Scot- land — thinks this language bold, or even rash, I can only say, that the unwillingness of Hutcheson, and other modem Lockists, to admit those great fundamental traths of cosmical order in the Divine mind, which Plato and Ai-istotle never conceived the possi- bility of questioning, appears to me a phenomenon of intellectual cowardice, frigidity, or priggishness, in this Christian age and country, not a little humiliating. It is as if modem philosophy and science had started with the determination of having as little to do as possible with a theology of the universe. DISCOURSE THE FIRST. 27 to manifest those primary quaKties without which mind could not exist, and cannot even be conceived. Now, when mind, whose characteristic faculty always'is to subject what is various and manifold to the absolute domination of its own simple unity, — when this mind asserts, or manifests itself as a mere knowing power, the order in the recognition of which it dehghts is called science, and the discemer of that order is a man of science. In the apostohc man, again, and the preacher, the principle of order inherent in the mind is ener- getically asserted in the domain of passion and voli- tion, and action as the product of these two. The self-judging mind here takes the form of what is called conscience ; and a well-ordered hfe is the result of a strong conscience holding rule over the passions and actions, according to their natural relations of sub- ordination and harmony. So it is with the philo- sopher, the social reformer, and every other variety of the human being, as thinker or actor, — the innate principle of order, without which mind is not mind, and reason becomes madness, manifesting itself under a different phasis, according to the difference of sphere in which its power is put forth, and the different apph- cations of its rich capability. What, then, is the speci- alty in the case of what with the Germans, for want of a better epithet, we must call the sesthetical action of intellect ? Plainly the mind in this case has to do with concrete wholes, originally insinuated by means of the inlets of the external senses, but acted upon and moulded by the imagination (which is a sort of inner and more intellectual sense), so as to receive from it a new, and in the case of the fine arts gene- rally, a more perfect type ; and these types of well- .'8 ON BEADTT. ordered form and colour, being entertained by the mind, produce an emotion of serene pleasure and complete satisfaction — an emotion capable of being intensified to the highest degree, when the fair figures contemplated by the eye of the mind are bodied forth, and made to walk out into the external world, fi-om which their first hints were originally taken, and per- manently located in brass, in marble, or on the surface of a firmly compacted wall. Imagination in this case, not unders'tanding or conscience, is the ruling func- tion ; and it acts, not by analysing dead bodies to know their elements, but by marshalling them into living groups, to enjoy their excellence and to admire their effects. Hence the very remarkable opposition and antipathy which has ever been remarked between the artistic and the scientific mind. They both work in the same element of Order, but in opposite direc- tions, and with contrary aims. The one probes and dissects, and interrogates and tortures the secret order of things established by God, that he may know what is true; the other unites and combines the grand outlines of the most significant parts of the same order, only that he may create a new and beautiful order of things for himself, and exercise the function of a god in his own world, though it be only an imaginary one. Besides imagination, there is in every sesthetical per- ception, as we have said, also an emotional element ; but there is nothing so peculiar or distinctive in this as to require special analysis ; ' for in fact man is every- ' This analysis, however, has been made, at considerable length, by Alison, in Essays on Taste (I., chap, ii., sect. 2), in whose theory of subjective association it was in fact the most prominent thing. 'Jfhe results of such an analysis, in his bauds, have been DISCOURSE THE FIRST. 29 where as much an emotional as a rational creature ; even the mathematician, who lives amid a world of cold and lifeless abstractions, having his ecstatic moments, and his ivprixtx. !^ A merely scientific man, like Cavendish, as he is represented by Wilson, is a monster. So far of Order. But, as involved in this notion, I must now mention separately, the idea of totality. A symmetrical object is not merely symmetrical : it is one; it is a whole; it is a well-ordered whole. In order that symmetry of parts maybe taken cognizance of by the intellect, the parts cannot be indefinite or infinite ;^ they must be marked off by a beginning and an end ; iand, in order that the beginning and .the end may have a definite relation to the whole, there is also an- other point necessary to a complete whole ; viz., the rather to exhibit, in curious detail, the occasional yariations to which «sthetical emotion is liable, than to expound the immutable laws on which it is based. Mr Dallas, in his admirable work abore quoted, has some excellent observations on the nature of pleasurable emotion generally, after discussing which, he defines Poetry to be ' the imaginative, harmonious, and unconscious activity of the soul ; ' which definition I accept. ' But though this be trile, it forms no ground for introducing such phrases as a beautiful theorem, a beautiful demonstration, into a discourse on the principles of taste. Beauty in science appeals to a totally different function of mind from beauty in art, and, indeed, is only a sort of derivative and abusive application of the term. Beid, Alison, Jeffket, employ this abusive phi'aseology, coming, I presume, by inheritance from Hutcheson, who has a whole section (iii.) on the ' Beauty of Theorems.' It is hopeless, as Mr Ruskin says, to argue with men who would be philosophers, and use lan- guage so carelessly. ' Every poem, as Aristotle says, must be of a definite magni- tude, easily comprehensible by the mind, eiavuo'sr'ro;.— Poetics, c. 7 and 23. 30 ON BEAUTY. middle, according to Aristotle's well-known defini- tion, ' oXov d'sar! rh 'iym apyjv xai /m'kSov xal TsXeurris :' ' A WHOLE IS THAT WHICH HAS A BEGINNIXG, A MID- DLE, AND AN END.'^ Simple as this remark may ap- pear in theory, nothing is more difficult sometimes than to realize it in practice. In the first place, every work of art must be one self-included, self-concentrated thing. It must not be scattered, dissipated, rambling, like an army of clouds. It must have a definite out- line, pointing out where it begins and where it ends, and marking it distinctly to the eye as a separate com- pact object of contemplation.'' Hence the propriety of those mouldings in architecture which bound off the different parts of a building or a room ; they are not merely beautifiil in themselves, but tend to keep more apart things which ought never to be allowed to run into one another, and give a decisive air of complete- ness to each individual member. Hence every pillar ' Poetics, 7, with which compare Plato : I'hsedrus, 264 c, and the following — ' Didst never, thinking of the fate of man. His wisdom and his ignorance, discern The threefold nature of his mortal life, The balance and the perfect harmony Of THREE, the holy number of the xrorld ? Past, Present, Future, merging into one, And one for ever in the eternal Mind ? Beginning, middle, end, the sum of things.' — Mackay. '^ ' In der organischen Natur macht Abgeschlossenheit der Gestalt das Prinzij) ihrer Existent: aiis. Iliirniii ist die Folge dass die SchSnheit sich aus der traumerischen Zufalligkeit losmacht die ihr in der unor- ganischcn Niitiir anheftet. Das organische Gebilde hat sofort einen hesiiinmten cesthetlsrhen Charakter, wdl es ein wirkliches Individuum ist.' — ROSENKBANZ. DISCOURSE THE FIKST. 31 ought to have a capital, and every house a cornice. Hence the necessity of grouping in pictures. A pic- ture, to fix the attention, must be separated fi'om other / objects, and carefully drawn round its own centre of interest. Some of Wilkie's paintings — as, for instance, the 'Village Festival' — have been justly blamed for being too loose and scattered in the figures which com- pose their subject. The strange variety and bustle of a large fair wiU not make a good picture. For why? It is a motley aggregation, not a whole. It has no definite beginning or end. Many pictures in sacred art seem to violate this natural demand that a picture ought to be one ; for are there not two scenes even in Raphael's ' Transfiguration,' — one scene in the, air, and the other on the earth ? But there is a oneness to the de- vout feeling, which easily compensates for the merely me- chanical dualism ; a oneness well indicated by Raphael in the uplifted finger of one of the principal figures of his great picture. Then, again, in literary composi- tion, how triumphantly does the genius of a master shine out in this single matter of the disposition of parts ! How many discourses do we hear, even from men of genius, which have no properly marked and well ba- lanced harmony of parts f I have heard famous preachers spend twenty minutes in introducing their subject, leaving only other twenty for its discussion. ^Next to having plenty of matter, the great art of writing is knowing how to manage it; so that, when finished, it shall leave the impression on the mind of a complete and well-adjusted whole. Every organism in nature has its focus of design, in reference to which it assumes its distinct type, and exhibits a beautiful framework. A poem, a picture, or a philosophical discourse, 32 ON BEAUTY. can achieve excellence on no less intellectual prin- ciple.' I will conclude this first part of the subject by an- swering an objection. If the love of order be a prin- ciple so inherent in the human mind, as here stated, what becomes of all the praises that have been so lavishly heaped on the free range of modern English parks, as contrasted with the stiff regularity of the old French landscape gardening ? And are not many of the things that we admire most in nature the most irregular '. as the peaked summits of great Alpine ridges, the grand sweep of hill and valley, the capri- cious windnigs of rivers, the cot and the church, and the old castle, and the whole vagrant furniture of the landscape. Nay, even in art, who will prefer the regular symmetry of the streets of Berlin, Turin, new Edinburgh, or the long unvaried line of the Lud- wigstrasse in Munich, to the graceful bend of the pictur- esque High Street, Oxford, or the rich and fantastic irregularities of Nuremberg, Augsburg, and so many other famous European cities that were more prosper- ous four hundred years ago than they are now? This objection deserves to be mentioned, but need not detain us long. We have said that order is one element, and the most widely-discernible element of Beauty; but it is not the only thing that man has to admire in ' ' Principles of composition are mere principles of common sense in anything, as well as in pictures and buildings. A picture is to have a principal light. Yes ; and so is a dinner to have a principal dish, and an oration a principal point, and an air of music a prin- cipal note, and every man a principal object. A picture is to have harmony and relation among its parts. Yes ; and so is a speech well uttered, and an action well ordered, and a company well chosen, and a ragout well mixed.' — Ruskin. DISCOURSE THE FIRST. 33 this rich and magnificent world, and, like all other good things, it may he ruuied by very excess of its own excel- lence, and demands both a wise discretion in its use, and a salutary Umitation by the admixture of other impor- tant elements. An irregular range of mountains pleases — why? Not because the mind generally prefers con- fusion to order, but because, in the case of huge rocky elevations, the inaagination is more impressed by the idea of power than by the idea of beauty, and because all forms and forces, whose vast irregularity forbids them to ♦ be measured by the human eye, and which even over- whelm the human conception, are more calculated to give the impression of power than such a cunningh- measured, and therefore thoroughly comprehensible whole, as the Parthenon or Yorkminster. Besides, there are in mountain ranges so many and so striking beauties of light and colour,^ that the mind, perfectly satisfied with the new and ravishing spectacle, has no time to seek the foreign and unnecessary delight of symmetrical form. There is a sort of wild beauty in the eruption of a volcano, though that be one of the most irregular, and, to human ken, incalculable of the phe- nomena of nature ; but who would conclude fi-om this that there is no law in the motions of nature generally, or that it is a mere matter of taste, and in the essential nature of things altogether indifierent, whether a player on a musical instrument keeps time, or a wheeler in the waltz trips the ground in harmonious response to his partner's foot ? The beating of any healthy pulse ' ' Rocky scenery commonly owes its severe and grand character less to angularity of outline, than to the sharply contrasted light and shade arising from the prevalence of plain surfaces and cuboi- dal nooks and edges.' — Garbett, ch. ilL C 3t ON BEAUTY. may convince a man that such objections, if seriously urged, are nonsense. As shade is sometimes delight- ful, and even darkness has its charms, though light is the essential positive power in nature to which all creatures turn with joy ; so irregularity, in some cases, may be overlooked, or even cause a special pleasure, without in thg slightest degree shaking the miud from its faith in its great primordial instinct of order.* It is quite true also that order may be overdone:* the eternal repetition of the same chord, however beauti- ful in itself, will so oppress the ear as to make even discord desiral)le by way of variety. Besides, there is a tame species of order which is the product of a meagre fancy, and a barren invention ; and no well- constituted mind can approve of that, any more than a hungry stomach can relish a spare dinner. Herein, no drcabt, along with other considerations, lies the secret of the charm with which the fantastic and graceftilly lawless architecture of the medieval towns, just al- luded to, acts on the mind, as contrasted with the regularity of the principal streets of the New Town of Edinburgh. It is not alone that the streets are straight and parallel, — which in itself certainly were no offence, — but that the houses are bald. One sees that the men who erected these long rows of bare walls and square holes were Puritans and Presbyterians of the ancient unmitigated severity ; or meagre-minded per- ' A good example of a work of art, which, though irregular and capricious, pleases, without establishing any general principle in favour of irregularity, is found in Ariosto's Orlando ; on which Hume, in his Essay on the Standard of Taste, has some admirable remarks. ' ' Uniformity is singular in one capital circumstance, that it is apt to disgust by excess.' — Lord Kahes. DISCODKSE THE FIRST. r,5 sons of an altogether utilitarian stamp, who, if thej- had been consulted in the creation of the vegetable world, would have caused the potato to grow in the fields without blossom, because the root is the only part eaten. But neither with regard to Nuremberg, nor any of the famous medieval towns, is it true that the mind, when contemplating the rich irregularity of their curiously-carved gables and turrets, delights positively in mere lawlessness and confusion. There is a style, amid all the variety, which is always congruous with itself: the gables and turrets with which the houses are topped, though individually different, always pos- sess the same light grace and the same quaint free- dom. There is identity of character : not unifor- mity of ty^e.' And this observation brings me, by an easy transition, to the second great element of Beauty in nature and in art : I mean,^ CONGKUITY.' Let us consider how mind, dehghting by its essential constitution in symmetry and rhythm, is by the same constitution forced to delight in Congruity. Every order, or arrangement, as we have seen, whether of ' The same observation applies to landscape. — ' A picturesque landscape is the object in nature which exhibits Beauty most divorced from sj»nmetry ; and hence picturesqueness has been not inaptly termed " a beauty of parts." But there is more in it than this : for a picturesque scene, however seemingly unsymmetrical, will be found, in its best aspect, to be symmetrized at least aerially, by the influence of light, shade, and colour, which bind together the isolate^ beauty-spots by a subtle but most visible bond of union.' — Patterson in Blackwood's Magazine, December, 1853. An origi- nal and ingenious paper, and well worth reading. ' See Appendix. ' Called by Plato sm-rourrj Tzoi-jzovuctu. — Pha:drus. 268, D. .-!« ON BEAUTY. the particles of matter in space, or the moments of progressive time, is the result of the energy of the impe- rial force called Mind, submitting the multiplicity of otherwise confused elements to the marshalling power of that unity which is its essential characteristic. But in order to be thus marshalled, the things of which we have spoken as receiving this impress from the master}- of a plastic power, must be in their character homo- geneous. The pillars that surround the walls of a Oreek temple; the long pointed wdndows that admit the dim, solemn light into the arched aisles and vaulted transepts of a Christian cathedral; the movements of the feet in a dance; the pulsations of the blood in a healthy person; the segments of a flower; the revolu- tions of a planet; or the intervals between concordant notes in a musical scale, — all these are associations of like with like, according to a fixed law, imposed by mind and perceptible to mind. But how shall that unity of idea, by which intellect asserts its innate lord- ship over matter, be manifested in the cases of a com- ])lex assortment of things that are essentially different, so as not to admit of being marshalled according to the two most general forms which embrace all exist- ence, viz., space and time? How shall mind assert its supremacy so as to establish an order between things belonging to such different domains, as a pillar, a song, a colour, and a smile? Under what mysterious art of mastery shall we comprehend the thought that stirs a man's heart, tlie swelling wave that breaks at his feet, and the minster bell that travels over the green mea- dow, and wreathes itself with irndsible pulsations through the curiously convolved chambers of his ear? There are only two ways possible by which the mind DISCOURSE THE FIRST. 37 can impress a common character of unity upon things so diverse: either by finding in the things themselves some common element, by virtue of which, notwith- standing their diversity, they impress the soul in a similar way, or by subjecting these things to a com- mon influence of thought or emotion proceeding from its own activity; and the common character, amid diversity, so recognised or so impressed, will be called Coagruity, or, if you please. Harmony. An instance or two will make this clear. A colour is plainly a very different thing from a sound: deep blue im- pressed on the retina of the eye, and F sharp on the key-board of a pianoforte, seem, at first sight, to have absolutely nothing in common, and, of course, to be utterly incapable of being marshalled, under any one category used by that mind of which it is the essential character to act by recognising the common element in separate things; but it is not so. More nicely con- sidered, it wUl appear that the whole of nature is full of analogies, and that it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to find any object in the animate or inani- mate world, that, in the midst of the most striking diversity, does not contain some element of intercom- munity with some other thing, or with every other thing; and thus a colour and a note of music may be like, not in one way only, but in many ways, in the method of their action upon sensuous beings, for in- stance, in respect of pleasui'e and pain, or in the essen- tial laws by which that impression is produced. That the pleasing effect of concordant notes in music upon the ear, depends not on mere subjective association, as some have ignorantly asserted, but on a series of well- ordered ratios, capable of the nicest mathematical cal- 38 ON BEAUTY. dilation, is certain. It is not in any wise improbable, also, that the pleasing effect of certain combinations of colour may proceed fundamentally upon a similar law; but, without going into these remote regions of curious science, every one feels that bright crimson colour affects the eye in the same way that high and shrill notes affect the ear: the action of each on its proper sense is sharp and strong, and, if long-continued, overpower- ing. As artillerymen have become deaf by the force of continuous cannon overstretching the drum of the ear, so industrious females have been known to work their eyes blind by assiduous toil over a piece of vermilion needlework. We find here a congruity be- tween the shrill blast of the martial trump, and the scarlet coat which the British soldier wears, — a con- gruity not accidental, adventitious, or superimposed, but inherent and permanent, and immutably inter- woven with the outer framework, and tlie secret forces of the universe. Another example : Between a rock and a thought, abstractly considered, there may seem no analogy ; but whenever we march out of the region of abstractions — which are, in fact, nonentities (for no man can prove that a mere abstraction ever did exist or can exist) — into the wide domain of concrete realities, we are struck with the greatest and most striking resemblances. A great rock and a great thought are like in the element of greatness : both rise above the surrounding level, and both strike the beholder with awe. So it is through all nature. Between things the most diverse, there is a continued play of the most rich, varied, and subtle sympathies; the recognition of which affinity forms indeed one of the great intel- lectual employments of all nations, especially in their DISCOUKSE THE FIKST. 39 earliest stage of development : whence are bom all varieties of imaginative religions and mjrthologies, which are, in fact, only grand anthropomorphic ex- hibitions of the fundamental congruities of the forms and phases of nature, with the thoughts and feelings of the human soul. Hence also poetry : first, in its most broad and popular lines, as exhibited in Homer; then its more subtle and refined delicacies, as elaborated by Wordsworth, Shelley, Goethe, Tennyson, and the other curious word-builders of an age, when the mere lovely play of the imagination could no longer satisfy minds, schooled by all the scientific niceness, and exer- cised in aU the meditative subtlety of a highly dej- veloped social state. The poetic art, indeed, may be defined as that which is employed in the cunning dis- •eovery and harmoniously-ordered disposition of all the most interesting and striking points of resemblance that exist between the external world of form and colour, and the internal world of thought and feeling; these congruities being founded, for the most part, on the essential and unalterable nature of things — as when life, for instance, harmonizes with light, death with darkness, sorrow with cloudiness, and so forth. But it may, on the other hand, sometimes be the case, that the mind, which is the more powerful of the two fac- tors, may so strongly assert itself, as to create a unity among diverse external things, not by selecting and giving prominence to their congruous elements, but by projecting from within a shade or hue, so strong, as to give a unity of character to the elements of the composite imaginative picture, consisting only in that projection. The violence of individual passion, or the strong bent of eccentric genius, may find out likenesses -MJ ON BEAUTY. in things, where minds in a nonnal state can see nothing but diversity; and a fancy full of wanton and quirkish conceits, may often delight itself in witching out a strange aspect of congruity between two things essenti- ally incongruous, or even opposite. The ingenuity of this mental exercise vrill always give pleasure; and they who excel in it are called witty. Now in this case, the congruity, of which we are talking, exists nothing the less really for the strangeness of the elements of contrast out of which it is so clearly ehcited ; only the mind here plays a more prominent part than the frame of things in conjunction vsdth which it is acting, and the whole exercise of the mental fimction assumes more the character of a wilful sport than of a serious busi- ness. So also sorrow, when very vehement, may tyrannize over nature, and not merely, like the de- moniac in the Gospels, walk amongst tombs (which is a very admirable congruity), but look upon life itself as a mere walking death, and the great bustling world as a battle-field, where all noble hopes are mowed down, and all base imaginations stand. Thus has the lonely wanderer amongst mountains often seen a land- scape, fall of all shapes of green loveliness, suddenly overcast as with the blackness of darkness, from the rapid strides of the electric storm ; and yet the land- scape, in its essemtially beautifiil features, remained unchanged : there was no transformation in its soft matted grass — in its rich waving leafage — ^in its broad swelling hills — in its gently rising knoll, crowned with the graceful village church; — only as when, as a spectre enters a banqueting-room, the banqueters in^ deed remain as they were, but the sounds of mirth cease, and the lamps burn dim. Now, this unity of DISCOURSE THE FIRST. 41 character impressed upon a complex multiplicity of external things by the mind under a particularly strong excitement, will no doubt have its proper place, in dramatic and lyric poetry, where such states of mind are portrayed ; and the spectator, reader, or hearer, will recognise a congruity between this tem- porary %-iolence offered to nature, and the violent passion by which the mind is moved ; but no sensible man will imagine, that because superficial, momen- tary, and altogether imaginary congruities, are in these cases created by the mind, there is therefore no such thing as real and inherent congruity between external nature and the internal emotions of the soul. The permanent feehngs of the human mind stand in a relatioa of necessary accordance with the permanent features of the kindred cosmical mind, just as cer- tainly as the quality of flower and fruit in a plant stands in a similar relation to the influences of rain and sunshine from heaven, by which it is nourished. This stable and stately frame of things, of which man is a part, is not made up of irregular gusts and evanes- cent whims, however entertaining, but it is a cunning and well-compacted system of ineradicable analogies and indestructible proprieties. We shall now illustrate this principle of congruity by a few obvious examples from poetry and the fine arts. A house of four stories, presenting a front of plain stone wall, with five parallelograms cut out for the admission of light in each story (one of the parallelo- grams, of course, in the ground-floor being used as a door), and having their shortest and longest sides parallel to the ground and the perpendicular rising cwM^teiine respectively, is sjonmetrical in its disposition, 42 ON BEAUTY. but nothing more. It possesses that one single funda- mental element of all beauty in form, which is so uni- versal in the art of building that it is hardly recog- nised as a beauty at all;' and yet the want of it would be a glaring deformity in the meanest style of building that one can conceive. Let us attempt to elevate this bare skeleton of architectural beauty into some sem- blance of that graceful garb and rich garniture with which plastic Nature, energized by the Divine intelli- gence, everywhere delights to invest herself. In the ground-floor, suppose that I arch off the head of three of the windows into the early English or lancet type, and place a small cojiing with Doric mouldings over the fourth, and, making the fifth ground parallelogram smaller than the other four, give it no ornament at all, except on one side a single twisted pillar, like those which frequently appear in clustered colonnades of Byzantine and other medieval workmanship. Let the second story have four windows adorned with rich Co- rinthian pillars, and one window with plain Tuscan. Upon this, imagine the third story raised, with three windows in the plainest old Egyptian style, and the other two according to the richest type of florid or de- corated Gothic. Then remains the fourth or topping story, which we shall suppose decorated in this way: let one window be ornamented with pillars of those graceful lady-Uke proportions which we find in the Greek Ionic order, and with the appropriate orna- ments; let the second window have a circular arch above in the Byzantine fashion; let the third be divided ' See the statement of the difference between mere buMing and architecture, in Fehcsuson's Tllmtrated Hand-Book of Architecture. London, 1855. Introduction, p. xxrii. DISCOURSE THE FIRST. 43 with mullions and transoms into various thin-slitted apertures, admitting scanty light, in the manner gene- rally found in the ancient apartments of academical gentlemen in Oxford and Cambridge; let the fourth be worked over with curiously-flowered stone work, leaving open only two small apertures, one in the form of a cinque foil, and the other in the form of a triangle, and let it be topped with two small arches, one in the shape of a Moorish or horse-shoe arch, and the other in the shape of an ellipse; and let the fifth window remain quite plain. To crown all, let the roof be con- cealed over two of the windows by a triangular pedi- ment, having its bounding lines notched into small curvilinear sections, as is seen in Ghent and other Flem- ish towns ; let the third window be crowned by a piece of balustrade; let the fourth be crowned by an arched elevation, formed so as to present the heavy type of an old Norman doorway; and let the roof over the fifth window remain blank, the wall being shaven off" without even the simplest moulding for a cornice. We have thus put together a grand conglomeration of incongruity in hevra stone. Is there any sane man that could admire a building constructed so systemati- cally on the principle of heterogeneousness?'^ Is there ' And yet so inconsiderate sometimes are builders, and snch Is the tyranny of fashion, that partial perpetrations of such gross incon- gruities are by no means rare. In the age, for instance, when Gothic architecture was esteemed an inferior style, repairs, or addi- tions, or monumental decorations to Gothic cathedrals, were regu- larly made in the Italian style, — a barbarism of which frequent examples are to be found in England, and in many continental churches, as in St Stephen's Vienna, the cathedral Prague, and generally in Austria, where a corrupt, flaunting, Italian style of de- coration prevails. As an instance of systematic deformation, we may notice also the process now going on in the finest streets of i4 ON BEAUTY. any nation, however savage, that ever raised an edifice so dehberately outraging every feeling that even the most uncultivated human being possesses in common with the most refined? Congruity, therefore, or the subjection of a composite mass in architecture, or any other congeries of materials, to a common idea or law dictated by imperial mind, is essentially demanded by the very constitution of human nature, or rather, as I already stated with regard to symmetry, by the very notion of intellect. What sort of congruities, there- fore, to continue our illustration, must exist in a pile of shapely stone, in order that it may be not merely a commodious and a stable, but a beautiful building, and a magnificent building? It must, in the first place, manifestly have a meaning; it must express something; and every part of its structure must be so formed and so placed, as to combine with the adjacent parts, and with the whole, in conveying to the mind of the spectator the desired expression, in the highest degree of which the materials are capable. It must, in fact, be like a piece of music, a cunning coijibina- tion of sounds, not ugly in themselves, but achie^^ng a grand intellectual and emotional eff^ect, only when arranged with such subtle delicacy, as that every note Edinburgh, whereby, when the ground-floor of a tenement is con- verted into a shop, it is brought out beyond the general front of the building, and built up with all sorts of obtrusive decoration, while the upper part of the building remains in all its original baldness; just as if a Quaker lady should bedizen the skirt of her gown with tiers of flounces and furbelows, while the body and the head-tiring remain in all their Puritan plainness. In a well- ordered state, such unlicensed building would not be allowed ; but in England, our boasted freedom has purchased for us the privilege of practising all sorts of architectural deformity with impunity. DISCOURSE THE FIKST. 45 bears a certain calculated ratio to that which precedes and that which follows, as well as to another dominant note called the key-note, and through that to the whole.' It is, therefore, no easy thing to erect a per- fect building, however obvious it may be to perceive the absurdity of such a systematically discordant congeries of architectural types as that which we have imagined. To avoid gross faidts is always possible to a circumspect man, especially in an art where, as in architecture, the means placed at the disposal of the artist are often so scanty; but in pro- portion as the materials are rich, and the combina- tions complex, does the diificulty of placing them all under the dominancy of a single uniform idea increase. The simplest form of architecture that we commonly use in public buildings which affect ornament, is the Doric. The character of a Doric pillar, as con- trasted with an Ionic, a Corinthian, or the clustered pillars of the Gothic style, is strength, stability, and plainness. This character, therefore, and this only, ought to be expressed by an edifice in this style ; for as it is impossible for a soul to be both gay and grave at the same moment, — to be as light as a Frenchman ' The want of such a common tone, proceeding from the inspira- tion of one dominant, constantly present Master Mind, is the cause of the unsatisfactoiy impression made by the painted windows in the Sew Greyfriars Church, Edinburgh. The windows were, in fact, made by different artists, -without being subject to any common harmonizing influence; and even in those windows which are the work of the same artist, there is a decided want of unity of charac- ter, and therefore a failure in total effect. This defect is the more noticeable on account of the small size of the church. In large cathedrals, similar incongruities occur not seldom; but they justly escape notice, not being in a position to invade the eye at one and the same moment of distinct regard. 46 ON BEAUTY and as serious as a German, while performing the same function, — so no work of art which is confined to the expression of a single moment, can be both simple and florid ; it must either he this or that, for in at- tempting to be both, it becomes neither. But to show how many and very delicate considerations enter into the structure of the simplest building, tliat will have a decided character, we shall mention one or two other congruities, besides that of mere stony mass and shape, which the arcliitect must attend to, — otherwise a failure, to a certain extent at least, is inevitable. A building must, for one thing, manifestly be in harmony with its site. If you have a hiU, for instance, like the Calton Hill in Edinburgh, rising into various irregular craggy points, and if you were to erect on such a finely varied elevation a large, many-tiered, monotonous edi- fice, like a Manchester manufactory, a Prussian bar- racks, or the palace of Otho, king of Greece, in Athens, you would be committing a great offence. But top these irregular craggy projections with a series of irregularly - rising light towers, and monumental shrines, and you bring your pile of shapely stones into a kindly congruity with the forms of nature, which even an unpractised eye, by the fidelity of natural instinct, will recognise. In the second place, a build- ing iriust be in harmony with the materials which are at the architect's command. Granite, which is always an element of the sublime in art (witness the three great pubhc monuments in Vienna, and the interior of the British Linen Company's Bank OiSce, Edin- burgh), demands one style of architecture; brick, another, and a very different style. The English, who labour in many places under a great lack of good DISCOURSE THE FIRST. 47 stones, have as yet done very little in bringing out the sesthetical character of brick-work. Again, a building must be in harmony with its purpose. Fit- ness for a purpose, indeed, is not beauty ; but unfit- ness for a purpose, especially in such a utilitarian art as architecture, always mars beauty, by mmghng sharp discord with the general harmony of the ex- pression.* We cannot admire a building, however beautifiJly shaped, if ill adapted for its purpose, any more than we can admire a wine-glass which could not be raised to the mouth without cutting the lips of the drinker. A school, for instance, is not an Egyp- tian temple, where a veiled Isis is worshipped, and in ' Let this be enough to have said of that loose use of language, in which some modem writers have indulged, who have confounded three things so essentially different as fitness, utility, and beauty. It has always appeared to me exceeding strange, that philosophers will not accept the plain dictates of healthy human understanding in these matters, which command us to believe that ideas, if essen- tially the same, could never have been represented in all languages by words which the untutored instinct of every boor feels to be dis- tinct. In theSippias iWo/orof Plato (which Jeffrey ignorantly quotes for Plato's notions on Beauty, instead of the PhUebits") there is a great deal of tentative talk about this subject of Beauty, from which, though the positive result that comes out is almost nothing, it is at least pretty plainly indicated that the to x.a.'h 61/ is neither the to xf ^ff'/^o, nor the to ■prpiTrou : this latter word being used in the dialogue to signify _^in««s for an end, and not comeliness, seemliness, and pro- priety. The distinction of the three ideas is so plain, that it were waste of words to employ more than a single sentence, in showing the im- pertinence of a whole chapter in the work of Hutcheson , otherwise not without value. Of twenty bridges that may be built, all are fitted for crossing rivers, and aU are useful to the public ; but only one, or not even one, may be a beautiful bridge ; and if it be also pictur- esque (a sub-species of the Beautiful, of which afterwards), it will be indebted, in all likelihood, to anything rather than to the skill of the architect. With utility and fitness the artist has nothing to do, except to take care that the beauty which he impresses on his 48 ON BEAUTY. which shaven priests mumble in religious solemnity the mysteries of an unknown creed : therefore, the close, unwindowed, narrow-gated, sombre, old Egyp- tian style of architecture, will not be suitable for a school; but rather the expression of school architecture, and the character of school grounds, must be like that of healthy boyhood, free, open, expansive, and cheer- ful. A Quaker meeting-house, in the same way, Avith a portico of rich composite columns, and an entabla- ture blossoming with flaunting festoons, would speak like a sort of stone sarcasm against the plain bonnets and the unfringed tippets of the simple worshippers within ; and as little, on the other hand, would the work, shall not be inconsistent with the plain and obvious fitness or utility which is imjiUed in the very conception of the work. A good architect will make a beautiful building ; but to achieve that beauty, he will not require to sacrifice convenience. A shoe may have fine leather and fine buckles ; but it must fit in the first place. The distinction between beauty and fitness Jlr Euskin has treated admirably, under the head of Proportion Apparent and Constriictice (^Modern Painters, vol. ii.. On TJnitt). Vischeb distinguishes between das Gute and das Gut, very justly, thus : ' Der sick verwirklichende Selbist~weck heisst das Gute, die Fiilh der erwirkten Mittel des aussern zirecks, sofern der ifensch als Sinnenu-esen in ihr sich yeniesst heisst d.vs GnT.' — Vol. i., sect. 23. This is exactly what Augustin says, in a passage which I noted many years ago from the Confessions : ' Num amamus aliquid nisi pulchrom ? Quid est ergo Pulchrum ? ef quid est Pulchkitddo ? Quid est quod nos allicit et conciliat rebus qua amamus? Nisi enim esset in eis Deccs et Species, nullo modo nos ad se moverent. Et animadvertebam et videbam in ipsis corporibus aliud esse quasi TOTUM et ideo pulohkum, alind autem quod ideo deceret qnoniain APTE ACCOMMOD.iKETUR alicui, sicut pars corporis ad universum suum, aut calceamentum ad pedem et similia.' — Confess, iv. 13. The ludicrous consequences of confounding Beauty with a mere vulgar utility or fitness for direct material uses, will be found also admirably touched in the dialogue between Critobulus and Socrates — Xenophon, Sympos. v. DISCOURSE THE FIRST. 49 rich solemnity and graceful propriety of an English cathedral service appear to dwell comfortably mthin the four naked square walls of some Presbyterian meeting-house.' Yet more : a building must be in harmony with the cUmate of the country to which it belongs, and with the character and habits of its inha- bitants. For this reason, though I can fiiUy compre- hend the propriety of rehe^nng the sternness of the old Doric style in ancient Greece by polychromatic decora- tions, I should doubt very much the good taste of at- tempting — ^if, indeed; it were practicable — any such gay embeUishment in sober Scotland ; nay, I doubt much whether even in Berlin or Munich, where the sun shines much more brightly than in Edinburgh, the public buildings be not somewhat over-decorated and over- painted, with reference to the character both of the people and of the atmosphere.^ Lastly, a building ' In harmony with the above remarks, Hogaeth says, ' I can't help thinking but that churches, palaces, hospitals, prisons, com- mon houses, and summer houses, might be built more in distinct characters than they are, by contriving orders suitable to each ; whereas, were a modem architect to build a palace in Lapland or the West Indies, PaUadio must be his guide, nor would he dare to stir a step without his book.' — Analysis, c. viiL The best illustra- tion of this that I know, is the Domkirche in Berlin, the interior of which represents a fine dancing saloon, in which the cross, the candlestick, and the pulpit, are the only objects that are completely out of keeping with the general aspect of the architecture. The ornamentation of the frieze in the church of the Sladeleine, in Paris, falls under a simUar censure ; but it is a comparatively small matter. The Bavarian architects have bungled Modem Athens by not considering the luxury of shade, and the propriety of courts and porticoes in that hot region. 2 'In the pyramidal part of the steeple of St Vedast's, London, by Sir Christopher Wren, the plan is a figure of four concave quad- rants, repeated on a diminished scale. The depth of hollowing in this figure does not, in an English climate, form a sufficient suhsti- T> 50 ON BEAUTY. ought to be congnious with the character and tastes of its inhabitants, living or dead. Abbotsford, with its irregular turrets and 'pepper-boxes,' as they are called by persons of a vulgar imagination, was a fitting abode for Walter Scott. What reader of tlie Lady of the Lake could have trodden, with any feeling of satisfac- tion, the threshold of the great Scottish poet's manorial home, if lie must have entered to a hall hung with all the quaint symbolism of medieval life through a por- tico of magnificent Corinthian columns, where, from walls painted in the light and graceful Greek style seen in Pompeii, a golden Aphrodite and a silver-bowed Apollo had smiled him welcome ? Walter Scott built his own house, and was guided in its decoration by the instinct of the poet, equally potent to trim a villa or to turn a verse; but not every architect, being left to him- self, would in this case have followed the guidance of so very natural a congruity. He might have followed the dictation of his own classical crotchet, devoted with an intense one-eyed admiration to the forms of some undeviating traditional type ; not knowing that the man who would achieve excellence in poetry or the arts, must, above all things, strive to get beyond the narrow horizon of his own favourite notion, — that his main business must be to know and to appreciate the notions of his fellow-men ; for much of the grand secret of his skill lies in his abUity to identify himself with their position, and to express their feelings, as each separate case may require, with a happy tact and a wise propriety. tute for thorough piercing or detached members, so that the whole is too solid and flat, but would answer well in Italian sunshine.' — Rudi- mentary Architecture, by T. Talbot Bdkt, architect, London, 1853. DISCOURSE THE FIRST. 51 A decorative art of a very different kind maj- next furnish some apt illustrations — I mean the art of Dress. On this subject a large book might easily be vFritten ; for as the diversity of human appearance and character is remarkably great, and the diversity of various-threaded and many-coloured vestments is no less striking, the congruous and incongruous combina- tions of which the clothed figure of man is capable must be proportionally numerous. But a few of tlie most general categories, under which these numerous varieties are comprehended, may be stated shortly; and their appKcation would be sufficiently easy, were not this whole region so usurped by the rage for novelty in some points, and the slavery of custom in others, that the laws of tastefiil human clothing may be stated with the most imperative evidence, and yet altogether without hope that reasonable men will dream of acting reasonably in a matter where freak and fancy have so long exercised their lawless sove- reignty.' The outline of the human frame unques- tionably offers the starting-point fr-om which all con- siderations of vestiary congruity must proceed; and yet we know that some dresses seem to have been ' ' In this age men hare ceased to think on dress as an orna- ment ; and it has, in consequence, become a mere matter of con- ventional convenience ; and though women spend half their lives in thinking of and vrorking at nothing else, it would be difficult to discover what object they have in vifew except getting rid of the greatest possible amount of cash, and trying practically to carry out the precepts of the second commandment, hy making them- selves as unlike as possible to anything in heaven above, or in the earth beneath, or in the waters under the earth ; and, it must be confessed, with wonderfnl success.' — ^FEKGtrsoN, p. 98. Strongly said, though, it must be confessed, not without strong provocation. :,'> ON BEAUTY. made for the purpose of burying the human frame, and not for displaying it, while others seem to have been fashioned by some ingenious trifler making ten- tative approaches towards the identification of the out^ ward show of the great unfeathered biped with a swallow or a cockatoo. Again, the dress of a human being ought manifestly to be in harmony with his character and occupation, and the service which he has to perform ; and yet we know that when our sol- diers first landed on the shores of the Dardanelles, in the late Crimean war, it appeared plainly, in the very first exercise of a hot day, that some part"? of their dress seemed to have been made systematically on the principle of adding as much discomfort as possible to their otherwise hard life, and making those motions of the body difficult and fatiguing, which nature had wished, and soldiership demands, to be accomplished with ease. The dress of the Christian priesthood in the Romish and Greek churches is no less objectionable ; not indeed on account of any incongruity of those flow- ing robes with the service which they have to perform, Lnt from the discordant aspect which both service and decoi-ations present to the character of the rehgion which they profess. No doubt there is a sort of chaste ornament, or even rich embellishment, if tempered by certain sobering influences, with which Christian wor- ship may be made to h armonize. An instance of this we have in the Gothic architecture of Christian cathedrals, in wliich, though the ornamentation be sometimes ex- tremely rich, and even profuse,^ there is in the general ' Some of the continental churches are painted all over inter- nally, as Notre Dame in Paris, and the singularly rich and very effective little chapel of the Justice in the same city. DISCOURSE THE FIRST. 53 tone and style of the architecture, lofty towers, long- drawn aisles, air-home vaultings, deep sombre shadows, and windows not bright with the glare of vulgar day, a combination of sobering powers that puts all light imaginations to flight even in the hearts of the most frivolous. But the dress of the priests, as its tawdry pomp was fashioned by the gross sensuousness of the corrupted Christian faith in the middle ages, has no mitigating element. To pass from the Lord's Supper, as it is imprinted on our imagination by the simple narrative of the Apostle John, to a procession of Romish or Greek priests circumambulating the church in every variety of richly-flounced stole and brocaded cassock, all crisp with silver and rigid with gold, is a most strange transition, ftdl of startling incongruity to a thinking mind. But let us pass on to the dress of private persons, in which the tyranny of hereditary custom is less severe, and a greater scope is left to the instinctive play of a healthy fancy. ' A woman, to dress well,' says a graceful wi'iter of the present age,^ ' should know three things : her age, her position, and her points.' Wisely spoken. A woman certainly ought to know her own age, though it may be often expedient that other persons should not know it ; and if she numbers her years truly, she ought to know the dress that becomes them. Nevertheless, persons of the female sex are sometimes governed by very perverse whims in this matter. A natural de- sire to compensate for the decay of bodily charms bv exhibiting to the greatest advantage the bloom that yet remains, leads not a few fair ones to dress ' The Art of Dress ; reprinted from the Quarterly Review. Lon- don: Murray, 1854. .'4 ON BEAUTY. in a more juvenile style at fifty than at five and t^^•enty. And this principle of compensation ought to have a certain play, no doubt ; but it must be used with moderation, and watched with jealousy. A flirt of nineteen, with broad rustling silks, and a gaily pictured French fan, and a bright eye restless with tmnkling vanity, may give innocent amusement even to a grave man for an hour ; but a flirt of flfty, tagged with the gayest trappings of youth, discommends her- self by her mere appearance, alike to the foohsh spec- tator and to the wise. Again, a young widow of thirty, walking about in grave-clothes after the months of her mourning are over, appears to me incongruous : those who live in the sun's light, should not wear the weeds of the sunless dead for ever ; but this discord is small compared with the feeling which a gaudy widow in- spires, arrived at the age when, to use the phrase of an apostle, all widows ought to be ' widows indeed.' So much for age. The second thing necessary for appropriate dress, which the sentence we have quoted lays down, is Position. On this nothing need be said. Fine silks and chapped hands ■snll never har- monize ; neither ought the parson's daughter to emu- late the pearls and laces of her ducal ladyship at the last county ball, even though her father could aflbrd it. But there is something that goes deeper into the philosophy of a woman's dress than station or even age, and that is, as our sentence expresses it, her Points. Now a woman's points are of two kinds, physical and moral ; and with both of these she must observe a nice congruity : otherwise no expense will teach her to embellish her person in such a way as to catch a lover, or please a husband of refined taste. DISCOUESE THE FIRST. 55 Bj physical points, I mean stature, figure, complexion, and such like ; by moral points, I mean character — sweetness, gentleness, animation, pensiveness, hilarity, and so forth. As to stature, it is manifest that a large and somewhat unwieldy woman should not wear a chintz or muslin of a small and frittered pattern, which would only make the grossness of her proportions more offensive by contrast ; nor, reversely, should a small pretty woman be seen flauBting about in an envelop- ment of huge triple flounces, or large danghng flowers ; nor, again, should a lady of easy flowing con- tour, and a graceful manner, display a gown stamped with a stiff and formal pattern, as rigid as the lines of a sour schoolmaster's face. Then, as to the congruity of habiliments with character, the simplicity of the Quaker dress, for instance, has been much admired, and justly ; for the Quaker matron generally carries with her that serene atmosphere of moral repose, to which a gay and flaunting vesture would be a discord; but a young Quaker lady, in the most sportive season of life, fiill of laughing fancies and fluttering sensi- bilities, being pinned up in a plain gray bodice, is as great a mistake, in its way, as a minister of the Gospel or a grave philosopher in a harlequin's coat ; and, therefore, I have observed that young ladies of that sect, especially when they are pretty and lively, do not at all affect the severe costume of the placid people ; and handsome young gentlemen, of the same persua- sion, naturally assume to themselves a like license. So much stronger is nature in her lustihood, than the conceits of prim religionists. In hair, and in hair- dressing also, there lies a great element of beauty, which few women are so stupid as not to know ho-*; to 56 ON BEAUTY. use effectively. Ladies of a quiet disposition and a calm manner, especially if to the gentleness of their sex they can add a certain sedate dignity, having also a good forehead and profile, should dress their hair very simply with a smooth unadorned braiding ; for thus the pure statuesque character of their beauty will come forth with a more undisturbed totality ; and symmetry of form, combined with a chaste serenity of expression, and a graceful dignity of gait, will exer- cise an easy sway over all beholders. On the other hand, females of great vivacity of spirits, and mobility of expression, should let their hair flow loose in free curls or ringlets ; the flashing of dark eyes, and the scattering of bright thoughts, suit well with the flutter- ing grace of this adornment. There is another reason also why ladies with quick and electric eyes (the Homeric eXixuimdes) should wear their tresses in ring- lets, roving freely as much before the face as possible. For their dark and dangerous glances are thus sent out like the shot of a body of tirailleurs from a thicket ; and the power in both cases being but partly revealed, and more than half concealed, strikes with a more startling effect than a force that stands distinctly before us, and can be measured by inches. But it is un- necessary to pursue this illustration ftirther. The in- stinct of women, unless when perverted by some tyrannous fashion, will generally lead them to a fitting decoration of their fair forms, as surely as a poetic^ genius will lead a poet to choose that sort of measure which is most suitable for the special inspiration by which he is possessed. The precept of the philosopher may indeed give a useful regulative hint to both, but the motive power must come from within ; and it is a DISCOURSE THE FIRST. 57 power which, Hke everything vital, has the marvellous virtue of fashioning forth its own machinery. Let us now take an illustration from Poetry. Mr Alison, in his elegant and ingenious, but sophistical work on Taste, has the following criticism on Homer : — ' In the speech of Agamemnon to Idomeneus, in the fourth book of the Iliad, a circumstance is introduced altogether inconsistent both with the dignity of the speech, and the majesty of Epic Poetry — Divine Idomeneus ! what thanks we owe To worth like thine, what praise shall we bestow ! To thee the foremost honours are decreed, First in the fight, and every gracefnl deed : For this, in banquets, when the generous howls Restore our blood, and raise the warriors' souls. Though all the rest with stated rules be bound, Unmixed, unmeasur'd are thy gohUts crowr^d. Instances of the same defect may be found in the com- parison of the sudden cure of Mars's wound to the coagulation of curds, — in that of Ajax retreating be- fore the Trojans, to an ass driven by boys from a field of com, — in the comparison of an obstinate combat between the Greeks and the Trojans, to the stubborn struggle between two peasants about the limits of their respective grounds, — in that of Ajax -flying from ship to ship to encounter the Trojans, to a horseman riding several horses at once, and sliowing his dexterity by vaulting from one to another.' Now, plausible as these remarks appear, they are altogether false, being made from a point of view that does not belong to that species of composition on which the critic is commenting. The Eiad is not a poem to which ' the majesty of Epic Poetry,' as we now conceive 58 ON BEAUTY. it, in this age of super-refinement and highly-potentiated culture, could possibly belong. There are many things in the Old Testament, also, altogether inconsistent with the dignity of modern speech; but they are not, there- fore, in bad taste, or out of keeping with the author's subject, with his purpose, or with his position. We must distinguish between the essential dignity of na- ture, which is as immutable as the Divine attributes, and the mere artificial ideas of dignity which belong to men at particular stages of civilization, and with sensibilities made elegantly morbid by over-culture. The coagulation of curds may be a vulgar idea to a modern Episcopal clergyman ; but it is uot so in the nature of things, or to an audience who could call a swineherd divine (S/bs i^opZog), and whose kings had no more honourable title than that of ' shepherds of the people.' The incongruity pointed out by jMr Alison between Homer's metaphors and the imagination of modern gentlemen, is a real one; but it is not this sort of disharmony by which the merit of such a work as the Iliad can be affected. Any work of the poetic art can be scientifically estimated only when read in the same spirit in which it was written.' He who has not first learned to seize this spirit should hold his tongue; but critics are a forward-witted generation, and hasty to plant themselves between the writer and the reader, as a separate object of attention ; whereas their only really valuable fnnction is that of the keeper of a pic- ' Thomas a Kbmpis gives this rule specially with regard to the interpretation of Scripture; ' Omnis scriptura sacra eo spiritu legi de- bet quo facta est.' — Imitat. Christi. i. 3, 1. — A maxim, how simply beautiful to enunciate; but, alas! with all how difficult, with many how impossible to realise! DISCOURSE THE FIRST. 59 ture gallery, who draws the curtain aside, and tells you from what point of view the artist meant that you should contemplate his work. Only thus will the natural congruities inherent in a great work be dis- played, and the impertinences gagged of a would-be- wise beholder, eager to speak before he has learnt to look. These examples may serve to illustrate the opera- tion of a principle founded so essentially in the nature of mind, and in the inmost constitution of things, that there is no kind of composite excellence of any kind, in nature, or art, or human life, that can be achieved without it. From the humblest fence that encircles a mountain farm, to the proudest cornice that crowns an imperial palace, there is nothing so mean that the presence of congruity may not ennoble, nothing so high that its absence may not disfigm-e. From the binding of a book to the preaching of a sermon; from the tittle-tattle of a tea-table to the oration that, being launched forth in the senate of a great nation, carries a thunder on its wing that is to shake the foundations of civil society hi more than half the world; in everv^ movement, in every voice, in every garb, in every look, in every symbol, of which the complex play of life is made up, there are, at every moment, uncounted secret harmonies at work, necessary in some degree for the doing of the thing at all, necessary in a high degree for the doing of the thing well. And herein plainly Hes the cause why it is so difficult in this world to do any great work in a finished style. For not only must all the materials employed in a perfect work be of the best quality, but they must all be organized into a whole by the presiding power of a 60 ON BEAUTY. conception, at once grand in its outline, and con- sistent in every minntest detail; and this work of so many diverse elements charmed into a sweet concord by the force of genius, must not merely be congruous with itself, but with the situation and the living en- vironment to which it belongs, ^^'hat great natural gifts, for instance, and what rich and well-husbanded acquisitions, are necessary to the making of a great orator ! ' A voice that, as occasion requires, shall be sweet as the tinkling sUver, or terrible as the pealing thunder ; a calm, clear, kingly eye, that surveys, without confusion, every realm of nature, and compre- hends every form of human life ; a heart responsive in its every beat to the wide heart of humanity, and ready, at the slightest move, now to darken into severest indignation, now to burst into tears of the tenderest pity ; — all this combined with the most ready and serviceable memory — with the most vigorous muscle of throat and chest — with the firmest nerves — with the most dexterous agility of fancy, and the easiest grace of bodily movement ; — and yet all this may fail to produce a great speech. For, besides these necessary elements of rhetorical congruity be- longing to the speaker, there is the occasion and the audience, both which must stand to the speaker in a certain harmonious relation, before an effective speech ' What is the characteristic element that distinguishes eloquence from poetry ? Apart from yerse, which may be dispensed with, the two sorts of compositions differ essentially in their aim, — that of the orator being to stir the wiU, and to urge to action, that of the poet, to delight the imagination, and to harmonize the emo- tions. From this fundamental difference of immediate purpose, the most important laws of criticism that regulate excellence in oratory and poetiy may be scientifically deduced. DISCOURSE THE FIRST. 61 can be delivered. The man may have spoken much wisdom, and glowed with noble passion, and his sen- tences may have been rolled off with the easy weight of accomplished mastership; nevertheless the effect was petty, and the speech was a mistake. Why? Because the speaker did not know his audience ; be- cause, even if he had known it, he might not have been able to tune his soul into harmony with it ; and for this lack of congruity, the vivid power of thought, and the grand flow of diction, that would have com- manded unbounded applause at Oxford, is received with cold indifference, or may even provoke sneers in Glasgow. Further, there are certain moral harmonies in a man's life, which, if they be not observed, will tend seriously to mar the effect of the highest display of oratorical talent.^ ^ Nemo bonus orator, nisi vir bonus,' says QniNCTrLiAN ; a maxim which we may translate into a larger form, and say : No artistic har- mony, however high, can please the aesthetic faculty, if it be accompanied with moral discords. Any- work of art, though addressed directly to the imagination, does, in fact, affect the whole man ; for the man is not composed of separate bundles, but he is one and in- separable, and cannot cease to have moral feelings, merely because you wield a skilfiil brush or a nimble tongue. The moral congruities being the deepest seated and most ineradicable, must be assumed as a necessary substratum by all artists and exhibitors, ' Plato, in fact, felt strongly, and has distinctly stated, that morality and beauty are only different applications of the same principle of hamtumy, and constantly run into one another. ' Sin Zii Ka.Tavi(piuf.r wiirdigste Gehalt des Schonen liegt in den sittUchen iliirliten des qffentUchen Lebens. iJicJetzifjf Zeitfordert geschicklichenpolitiscken Gehalt.' — ViscHEK, vol. i., sect. 20. It is pleasant to hear these words from a countryman of Goethe, whose great mind was not free from a certain weakness, that tended to separate art too much from the healthy control of moral laws, and from the invigorating atmosphere of social life. But this is a vice which helonged to him as a German, and a child of the eighteenth centnry ; a vice, there- fore, in reference to which it were but reasonable, that English critics should exercise a little of that charity which is so promi- nently praised in the New Testament, and so systematically ne- glected by the English in the hasty judgments which they pass on the character and genius of foreign nations. DISCOCESE THE SECOND, In the previous discourse, I hope I have sufficiently established that the world, in so far as it is a cosmos, and not a chaos, — in so far as it is manifestly made upon a plan, and not shaken into shape by a blind fortuitous force, — is necessarily an ordered system ; that this order proceeds, and can proceed only, from an imperially-disposing Mind ; that in virtue of this mind-created order, the frame of things by which we are surrounded becomes cognoscible to the kindred mind of man, whose ftinction it is first to recognise order in the great world of God, and then to create it in a certain small world of his own ; and finally, that this order, when, after penetrating through the sen- suous inlets, it is recognised by the mind, produces in the emotional part of our nature a feeling of satisfac- tion, pleasure, dehght, rapture, according to the ex- cellence of the order perceived, and the sensibility of the intellect perceiving ; and the order so recognised, even in the lowest degree, is, when compared with mere chaps and confusion, a species of Beauty. But as this order is so universal — ^the world being, in fact, as we have said, impossible without it — in the common use of speech, those only are called beautiful objects which contain this primal element of all Beauty in an 64 ON BKAUTV. eminent degree, accompanied also with certain other elements of Beauty, of which presently.' More espe- cially, Beauty is increased when the unifying principle of order asserts itself proudly, in giving a oneness of character to elements that are naturally diverse and apparently incompatible. The sort of order thus pro- duced is, as we have seen, congruity ; and as the pro- duction of this harmony among things of the most diverse type, is possible only by the exercise of a high intellectual force, great in proportion to the quantity of materials to be marshalled under the same relation- ship, it follows that the highest manifestations of intellect will always be in the production of congruitj-, and the most glorious triumph of the soul with itself, and its most serene satisfaction, must e^er spring from the exercise of such productiveness. If so, it neces- sarily follows, that the perception of the incongruous must be a pain and a grievance to the soul, just as a musical instrument out of tune is a vexation to a cul- tivated ear. How, then, does the fact stand ? Does incongruity actually inflict this great pain upon us 1 or does it not rather, in many obWous cases, produce pleasure ? What is the meaning of Laughtek '^ Do we not laugh, then, when we perceive a striking ' The prominence given by me to the principle of Okdek and Regularity, contrasts strongly with the cheap manner in which that element is talked of by Hogakth, in his Analysis of Beauty, chap, iii. ; but had he been as anxious to set forth the firm metaphysical foundations of simple Beauty, as to comment on the complex practice of the arts, he would have used very different language. All the other elements of Beauty on which he dilates, will be noted by me in their proper places ; but I should only confuse the reader, if I were to exhibit complex modifications and variations, before laying a firm basis of what is most scientific and certain. DISCOURSE THE SECOND. G5 manifestation of something absurd? and is not an ab- surdity always an incongruity — an a.ro':r:a, as tbe Greek has very signiiicantly termed it — an out-of-^lacedness — a want of harmony between the thing and its en- vironment ? This leads me to make a few remarks on the nature of the Cosiical, and the Humoeo0S, and their place in a scientific classification of the elements of Beauty. THE LUDICROUS. Strictly speaking, the incongruous does not belong to the doctrine of the Beautiful at all ; and it is only in a secondary way, from the manifold imperfec- tion of aU human things, and for the sake of variety also, it may be, that the Humorous finds a place in the temple of Apollo. There are nine Muses, as we know : of these, one, Melpomene, looks grave, and another, Polyhymnia, thoughtful, — in the others, quiet cheerfulness and serene contemplation give the do- minant expression ; but there is no laughing Muse, even Thalia being kept in a tone of very tempered hilarity. Olympus, indeed, which was peopled by old Pelasgic men after the likeness of our terrestrial population had its Momus, whose ungracious func- tion it was to expose incongruity where it existed, and (like petulant critics below) to imagine it where it did not exist. But he was a divinity of the very lowest class ; and the ancient Boeotian theologer very signifi- cantly indicates his aflinity, by making him the son oi Xight, and the brother of Deceit and Strife, and other ill-favoured sisters.^ We must, therefore, consider ' Hesiod, Theogony, i., 214. E tC ON BEAUTY. that, according to the beautiful mythology of the nicely sensitive Greeks, laughter was not a divine virtue of any potency ; for though the lofty-pealing Father, and the golden-throned Hera, and the other supreme gods, amid the light festivities of a celestial Lanquet, might shake the starry roof of Olympus with inextinguishable cachination, when the divine smith limped about the azure hall, an awkward cup-bearer,' yet we find no special patron of absurdity in the Greek heaven ; even Dionysus, the god of wine, re- presenting a divine rage, and superhuman excitement of passion, rather than a wanton play of freakish and incongruous ideas. And if this fundamental serious- ness pervaded the whole legend and art even of the merry and sensual Greek, how much more must the comical element be utterly banished from the domain of high Christian poetry and art ! The pure serenity of seraphim and cherubim in heaven, may perhaps, if occasion offer, be now and then dilated into a smile ; but an angel cannot laugh. The two most Christian of all poems are also the gravest: — Dante's Divine Comedy, and Milton's Paradise Lost. The same severe gravity is maintained in the Christian art of the early German, Flemish, and Italian schools, and of the most recent Germans. In England, in propor- tion as material Mammon is worshipped, and ideal Beauty misprised, common and comical subjects are allowed to occupy the painter's canvass, and clever books are written, of which the only distinct object seems to have been to make people grin. But if a benignant grin have any place at all in the domain of the Beautiful, it must only be in that very subordinate ' ' Iliad, i., 599. DISCOURSE THE SECOND. (i7 way which we see in our old cathedrals. No one thinks of laughing in Lincoln or Sahsbury Cathedral ; yet if, in passing beneath one of those groined old vaultings, your eye shall be struck by some quaint mask leering down from a row of projecting corbels, by all means enjoy the conceit. It will harm the pious congruity of your thoughts no more than a pass- ing fly can mar the beauty of the Parthenon. Do we, then, place the humorous so very low ? Is it ftilly represented by such an altogether dispensable matter as a grinning corbel in a cathedral, — a vague whim, idly thrown out to amuse a single moment in a long life labour of seriousness, — a mere coloured ribbon, to flaunt in the window for an hour upon a hoHday, — a frothy bubble upon the surface of the deep ocean, to make a passing play of iridescent light in the sun, and twinkle, and expire ? Is this all that is meant by such world-famous names as Aristophanes and Plautus, Ariosto and Mohere, Jean Paul Rich- ter, Dickens and Thackeray 1 I can only answer by saying, that if these names mean only the ludi- crous, nothing more certainly could be signified by them than such mere accessory trifles as I have men- tioned. Bat in fact, as is weU known, the world's i greatest humorists were always the world's most seri- ous thinkers ; and their comical productions may be looked on as sermons, preached, for the sake of variety, in a language with which every tinkhng fool may be dehghted; while the vs-isest man may feast upon it with profound delight. Mere laughter, let it be strongly repeated, is the most frothy, empty, and con- temptible thing in the world. Any witless boy can laugh at an accidental twist in his schoolmaster's 68 ON BEAUTY. wig ; any green girl can giggle at the smallest oddity in the dress, in the phraseology, or in the manner of a philosopher, of whose discourse, sweet as honey to the wise, she is not competent even to guess a sen- tence. The ridiculous, as Aristotle well says,^ lies al- together on the surface, and is the natural property of the superficial. But there is something more than Com- mon LAUGHTER in that significant and expansive play of sportive light in the soul, which we call humoue. There is deep thought. Nor is it difficult to see how the richest and the profoundest intellects will, if they are not altogether destitute of the playful eleraent,- be most able to create those original combinations of ideas, naturally far asunder, which affect the humour- ous sensibility. For only richness of observation can supply the mind with the materials that are to be used by frolicsome fancy in forming such new combina- tions ; and profundity of thought will alone be capa- ble of suggesting those pregnant analogies between ^ ^'EwixoAa^OtfTOf rov ysAo/of, x.at tuv 'jr'Kiltirtaii xutpovruu rn ■KniiiU xai ^u nMmnm fiSiTOiov sj Ssi.' — Ethic. jSlcom., iv., 8, 4. The superficial nature of the ludicrous has been also well ex- pressed by the great German thinker, ' Der verstandige findetfast aJles lacherlich, der vemiinftige fast nidits.' — Goethe. Plato, like a true philosopher, says, ' fcaTccio; 6; yiKciioii oiKKo ri rtyit-ra.i ij to xotxoV.' — Repub. \. 452, D. ' That the pleasurable perception of the incongruous which produces laughter, depends fundamentally upon the presence of a sportive element in the soul, seems as certain as that the flow of tears depends upon a pathetic element. Sookates, therefore, in the Philebus, 50, A, misses the mark very far, when he brings the element of cp66uos, or envious ill-nature, into the yfXo7o». Laugh- ter is essentially good-natured ; and humour is exceeding kind. But Plato, as a genuine Greek, could not help fooling himself, with in- genious, though unsound analogies, on occasions. DISCOURSE THE SECOND. 69 the very great and the very small, in which the humorous genius deKghts. The essential pettiness of any affectation of greatness, when the reality fails, can in nowise be more clearly shown, than by kicking down the scaffolding, and tearing off the robes of official dignity,' and exhibiting the drama which the human creatm-e is enacting with such assumption in the analogical doings of some animal, — an ass, or a goose, or a bantam-cock, — which is, by its very na- ture, incapable of inspiring reverence or esteem. On this principle is founded the extensive and well- merited popularity of such works as ^jEsop's Fables and Reynard the Fox. If humour be, as Richter has weU expressed it, ' the inverted sublime,' ^ it can only exist in lofty souls, who know what the sublime is. For an idea will not appear comical by inversion, un- less to him whose soul has been first fiUed by the essential grandeur of the idea inverted. For which reason it is that the best humour of a profound thinker is not appreciable by a vulgar mind ; for the humorist, as the same Kichter has ably shown, even when he is dealing with things apparently the most trivial and accidental, deals with them only as being to his deeper thought tjrpes of the great system of the world, and exponents of universal humanity ; hence, as only a philosopher can write, so only a thinker can read what is profoundly humorous. Whenever, therefore, there is a healthy foundation of serious- ' Ab in that comical conception of Carlyle, in the Sartor Ee- sartus, according to which all the rohed and mantled dignities of high life are supposed suddenly denuded of their tissued cover- ings, and made to stand before gods and men in puris naturalihus ! ' ' Das Umgekehrte Erhabene.' — ^sihetik. sect. 32. 70 ON BEAUTY. ness in the character, the comical element, even in professional writers of comedy, will always remain in its natural accessory and subordinate position; and laughter, even the loudest, will only be the lighter face of thought. So it was doubtless with Aristophanes, who, if in Socrates he had laughed at virtue and wisdom, would have been a contemptible buffoon ; but his aim being the very serious one of exposing the vain-glorious emptiness of the rhetorical hirelings called sophists, with whom Socrates was con- founded, we not unwillingly allow his frolicsome mad- ness free wings, for the sake of the earnest thought which it stimulates ; even as darkness may, by a wise artist, be cunningly used to make light more visible. So it is with Shakespeare; so with Moliere ; so with our British Aristophanes, Punch, in his best humours. The humorous faculty, when it is of any value, ex- ists for the sake of what is serious ; not the serious for the sake of the humorous. If, in any mind, the tendency to perceive the ridiculous becomes so pre- dominant as to trouble in any way the calm, satisfying enjoyment of what is beautiful, that mind has made a step back out of cosmos into chaos ; and the dissolu- tion and death of all that is noblest in the human soul is not far distant. For why ? Just because there are no solid positive contents in the ridiculous, such as may permanently satisfy a creature, forced by a thousand impulses from within, and goadings from without, to feel daily that Ufe is something very different from a jest. ' Ernst ist das Leben,' Life is a very serious thing, as the German poet sings ; and plainly, so far as we can see, even because it is so serious, hath God given us this pleasant faculty of smiling DISCODESE THE SECOND. 71 and laughing, to accompany us in our hard adventures, as some impish dwarf did the knights of medieval romance, that we may not be oppressed in spirit bv excessive solitary brooding over the weighty duties of which we" are the champions. We live in a world full of imperfections, and, therefore, full of incongruities. Xay, things in themselves the most perfect, when brought, as they will be on occasions, into hasty and unconsidered relationship, will cause the grossest dis- harmony in this multitudinous world. A caterpillar may be a beautiful animal on a gooseberry bush, but on a fair lady's bonnet, in a prominent pew at church during public worship, it is incongruous, and may disturb seriously the devotions of him who sees it. A gay, well-dressed youth, mounted on skates, and wheeling on the compact surface of the frozen flood with various lines of graceful curvature, is a beautiful object ; so also is the glittering smoothness of the ice on which he makes his evolutions ; but if he should sud- denly lose his balance, and come plump down on his back, the charm is gone. Between his Mercury-like grace, the moment previous, and his present posi- tion, all besmeared with mud, it may be, from the broken puddle, and looking stupidly around to make himself sure that his head is on his shoulders, and his thigh well socketed in his hip-joint, there has arisen a striking disparity; and the spectators will laugh.^ It might have been otherwise. We might have been constantly fretted by every small incon- gruity, just as we are now disgustefl, when the ab- ' 'When improper or incompatible excesses meet, they alwa_T< excite laughter.' — Hogarth. 72 ON BEAUTY. Munce of every element of beauty overpowers us by a concentration of the ugly. Why does not every exhi- bition of incongruity cause unmingled vexation ? Obviously because not misery, but happiness, is the constant aim of creation; and the sense of the humorous is brought in, as a grand shield of instinctive self- defence, against the constant annoyance to which we should have been exposed, from hourly collision with some kind of absurdity and incongruity. To weep were too espensdve a tribute to pay to every petty im- propriety that crosses our path in the many-mingled intercourse of various life ; therefore, we must even make a virtue of necessit}-, and, without lowering our demand for the utmost possible perfection in all things, condescend to make a S]X)rt with the necessary imperfection that surrounds us. And if we do so, drawing our main nutriment always, by admiration and love, from the contemplation of the greatest beauty, we shall be great gainers by our laugh, and confirm our virtue by our jest ; for no man respects what is ludicrous; and the comic element in our emotions can only then degrade the soul when it has usurped the throne of reverence, and disturbed the fountains of love. What was meant by nature as a convenient trick for getting rid of a troublesome enemy, has no virtue to engender the deeper feelings of delicate love and permanent esteem. Like the arabesque paintings on a palace wall, witty fancies will please the idle spectator in an idle moment ; but they are not the building. The building is made of well-hewn and well-compacted stones ; and so also was the under- standing of Sydney Smith. No wit and humonr will exercise any permanent influence that is not some- DISCOURSE THE SECOND. 73 thing more than pleasant. Life is too intensely severe a thing to be seriously influenced by a mere jester, how- ever brilliant. I shall now proceed to state a principle of the beautiful in nature and art, as ineradicably rooted in the nature of aU existence as order ; involving something more ftmdamental even than symmetry, and, when pushed to its consequences, more fertile in significant results. This principle, for want of a better name, I may call the principle of ACTUALITY. Man, as a substantially existing creature, must, by the very law of his being, prefer existence to nonentity, what is positive to what is negative ; and, by neces- sary corollary, must receive delight from everything that exists with decision and vigour, in preference to what exists with indecision and feebleness. That SOMETHING is preferable to nothing ; that reality of every kind must be approved by every real creature, rather than nonentity, requires no proof. It is impossible to enjoy existence, and not sympathise with what is, rather than with what is not. No being can give the lie to itself in this way, any more than con- scious calculating intellect can believe that two and two are not four. The one is a postulate of existence as much as the other is an axiom of thought. This postulate beiing universal, of course applies to every function of the human mind, whether moral, in- tellectual, or emotional ; but, in the present discus- sion, we are concemed.only with the necessary corol- laries that flow from it in reference to our emotions of 74 ON BEAUTY. the Beautiful. Let us see, then, to what aesthetical conclusions this metaphysical principle must neces- sarily l^ad us. In the first place, if something be better than no- thing, an effective something will be preferred to a feeble and inefficient something ; for whatsoever exists and enjoys existence, must desire to exist as fully and efficiently as possible, and must sympathise with all full and efficient existence rather than with the con- trary. Hence, in nature and in art, vigour will be preferred to feebleness ; and how true this is every one feels, \\'ithout any fine cultivation of taste; for there is not an eflective leading article in the Times, or other newspaper, which shapes the public opinion of the day, of which, next to a clear and easily intellig- ible order, vigour is not the grand characteristic. Take any of the great writers whom the world has agreed to look on as patterns of style for all ages — Homer, Pindar, ^schylus, Thucydides, Livy, Tacitus, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Schiller, Byron, Burns, Scott — and you will at once perceive, that while these writers may be remarkable for various and even oppo- site qualities of beautiful composition, yet they are all vigorous : a feeble writer cannot be a classic. In other words, whatever a man is, he must be com- pletely ; and whatever he does, he must do distinctly and thoroughly, if his existence and his deeds are to be admired as beautiful. Not only a poem, written under the influence of a half inspiration, but everything done in the world with half a heart, half a head, or half a hand, fs^ils to produce any beautiful effect. To strike with admiration, the virtue that resides in any thing or being must be potentiated ; a faculty half asleep, or DISCOUKSE THE SECOND. 75 numbed by frigid influences or partially palsied, cannot expect to produce any decided impression. All defect and declension is already half down the ladder^to non- entity; and being so far in league with nothingness, can- not expect to command the sympathy of anything that has a firm root in reality. It were no easy task to point out in detail how very far this principle goes into the very innermost recesses of artistic representa- tion and critical judgment. For, if vigour be always preferable to weakness, and a decided exhibition of any virtue to a wavering one, then unquestionably mere outward show is less beautifiil than that which, along with seeming, possesses also substance ; for every lie is a weakness, and must therefore be an object of natural abhorrence to whatever possesses a sound kernel of undisguised actuality. ^ This principle cuts at the root of all sorts of sounding display and rhetorical glitter in literary composition; of eveiything that is not truly and honestly the well-pronounced outward ex- pression of what is inwardly felt. The world at large has a deep sense of this virtue of honest substantiality in every exhibition that shall command their admira- tion. If a man makes a fine speech, which is felt to be only a curious procession of harmonious sounds, and not what it is meant to be, a true declaration of inward sentiment, the audience will not allow them- selves to be cheated into admiration by such a mere phantasmagoria, any more than the palate will be pleased when the teeth have crushed' a hollow nut; ' To l^h "i'/i ra Sun y^tv^o; ov fiouou v-tco hm oKKa. XMI uw du6pi,vo,« fciiTUTai Plato, Bepublic, ii. 382. c. ' A lie is an ol ject of hatred both to gods and men.' 76 ON BEAUTY. they may possibly make an applausive noise with their hands and feet, if the spgaker occupies a com- manding position, but they will whisper secretly — humbug!^ Farther, if something be better than no- thing, then a unit will be better than a cypher, and two units than a single unit, and a great number of units more excellent than a small number; and wealth generally is, in respect of any good thing, better than poverty. Men upon change, and in the market place, never question this very obvious principle; but it has not always been stated with sufficient distinctness, what a great part the same principle plays in the estimate which we form of natural beauty, and of the beauty of works of art. Given two landscapes of equally plear sant outline, and equally harmonious colouring: that will bfe the more beautiful of the two which possesses the greater number of those various elements of which natural beauty is made up. So of two flower gardens, in which all the same kinds of flowers flourish, there will not be a moment's question between the com- parative beauty of that where the flowers are sown spare and meagre, and that where they grow exube- rant and profuse. In fact, profuseness — that is to say, mere arithmetical superiority — is one of the chief ele- ments of beauty in natural scenery. A single leaf has ' This is another reason, besides our inherent love of reality, why SEEMING without SBBST^vNCB, or out of proportion to substance, destroys the effect of every exhibition, viz., because it disappoints expectation. In practically dealing with the world, I know no principle of more importance to be attended to than this. Tlie title of many a book sins grievously in this way. It is always not only bad taste, but bad policy, when the promise that a public man makes, in any way, exceeds his performance. DISCOURSE THE SECOND. 77 beauty to microscopic inspection; but only a ricb foliage is beautifiil to a freely-wandering eye. Does tbis de- pend upon association? No; it depends upon, it pro- ceeds from, the positive power of much, when contrasted with LITTLE, to fill the soul and to satisfy the emotion. So again in literature; what raises Shakespeare so high above all other writers, ancient or modern ? Is it not the exuberant wealth of his ideas, the redundant richness of his phraseology? Is not Homer praised for quantity as much as quality? Was not Scott rich, was not Goethe liberal and fuU-handed ? Does not a great writer generally produce many great works ? For what is the universe itself so remarkable, as for the exhaustless virtue of its forces and of its forms, — the infinitude, so to speak, of its ever-shifting finitudes ? Beyond all question, in the appreciation of beauty, as in the calculation of political strength, number is power. That woman is not lovely in her expression who smiles feebly, and smiles only once in the four- and-twenty hours. Nature does nothing scantily.^ Let us proceed to further applications of the same fertile principle. If a full development of any force or form be always more beautiful than what is meagre and deficient, then Quantity and Magnitude will al- ways exercise a great influence on our sesthetical > The observations in the text agree entirely with Mr Kdskin's dictum with regard to greatness in art. ' I say that the art is greatest which conveys to the mind of the spectator, by any means whatso- ever, t!ie greatest number of the greatest ideas; and I call an idea great in proportion as it is received by a higher faculty of the mind, and as it more folly occupies, and in occupying, exercises and exalts the faculty by which it is received.'— itfodera Painters, vol. i., part i., eect. i., c. 2. 78 ON BEAUTY, judgments. Homer, in describing a beautiful woman, says,— Beautiful and taH and skilful in cunning works. And rightly; for stature, doubtless, must always be an important element in every woman's impression, were it only that it fills the eye, and carries with it something imposing to the imagination; but, besides this, it satisfies the understanding by the indication which it affords of a vigorous and unhindered growth. Mr Burke indeed said, that a woman, to be beautiful, must be rather little ; but in this he is plainly mis- taken; for a little woman may be pretty, but never can be beautiful.^ Any object, to satisfy the imagination, must at least not fall short of the normal proportions which naturally belong to its genus; if it go a little beyond them so much the better, because this gives an idea of superior power; only let it not go beyond the magnitude marked out for it by nature in the har- monious adjustment of things, otherwise it becomes a monster. A very large woman will certainly not be beautiful; for other reasons, no doubt, as largeness is often accompanied by a certain coarseness ; but for this specially, that a humming bird may not be as large as a hen, nor the female of any animal tower above the just proportions of the male. But within these natural limits, a certain stature and magnitude en- hances greatly the beauty of a fair woman ; and none. ' 'E» fceyihl yxp ^ fi.kya'ho-i^iv^ia.^ aainp khI to xoKho; iv fityoKif trufieiri, oi ftixpoi Se lioreioi Kui avfifierpoi, x«?voi S' oi. — Aristotle, Ethic. Nicom., iv. 3. DISCOURSE THE SECOKD. 79 can think otherwise but certain male triflers, who can think of women only as children think of dolls. It were wearisome to follow out a course of illustra- tion through the fine arts, to show the importance of magnitude. We may remark, however, what an im- portant part it plays in architecture ; so important, indeed, that whoever does not attend to this element in that noble art, will never achieve any striking ex- cellence. Every art has its strong point, which a wise artist wUl make the most of with an easy dexterity, instead of consuming his strength in laborious en- deavours to prop up what is inherently weak. Colour, for instance, is the strong point of painting, as com- pared with sculpture ; and a bad colourist wUl, for this failure alone, be justly esteemed a bad painter, let his invention be ever so grand, and his outline ever so accurate. So mass is the strong point of architecture : a fine building overwhelms by mass, as the mountains do that nod over the plain ; and as a mountain when it ceases to be large loses its nature and its name, and sinks into a hUl or a mere knoll, so architecture without mass may indeed please, but it never can draw out the greatest amount of admiration which belongs to high achievement in that art. jSIany beautiftil pictures are small ; the most beautiful poems are often the shortest ; but all the fair edifices that have a permanent place in the imagination of the world are large. St Peter's and St Paul's, the temples of Egypt and India, the English cathedrals and the palaces of Florence, are all distinguished by bulk. Nay, a mere circle of rude stones — as at Stonehenge — if they are large, and left to make their natural im- pression on the mind, by rising undisturbed fi'om a 80 ON BEAUTY. wide solitary moor, will have more true architectural effect than many a pretty villa, cut and carved into all sorts of fantastic stone-work. For the fantastic is a province that belongs not to solid masonry natu- rally ; and even the epithet, neat, or pretty, applied to a building, as to an oration, while it expresses the presence of a certain amount of positive merit, always implies the want of some element that is necessary to high excellence. And not only real magnitude is to be sought for previously by all building artists, but also, and even more, apparent magnitude ; for Art has always to do as much, and more, with things as they appear, than with things as they are ; and to the passing spectator it can be of no benefit whatever that a public building is large, if, from situation or un- lucky contrast, or any other circumstance, it appears small. No doubt, when a man has time to examine a building minutely, it will always be an agreeable sur- prise if it turns out larger than it seems. This grate- ful feeling is experienced by all persons of common observation in going through the interior of St Peter's at Rome ; but the outward face of buildings is not in- tended to be curiously measured, and must make a great impression at once by mere appearance, otherwise there is a failure. And it is lamentable to observe how com- mon failures of this kind are among architectural monu- ments. If the Houses of Parliament in London, as has been often remarked, could always be viewed from the level of the water, their mass might be suffi- ciently imposing ; but being seen generally from the level of the bridge, they fail of effect ; and this not only from want of real height, but from the excess of ornamental Gothic on the exterior, which breaks DISCOURSE THE SECOND. 81 down those broad and simple masses that naturally belong to unadorned stone. In order to avoid errors of this kind, the congruity of situation, spoken of in the previous discourse, is above all things to be at- tended to. The size of the area in which a building is to be placed, and the quantity of open ground left in front of it, is a main consideration. Only a really large building will look large in the midst of a large open space ; and for architectural effect, though cer- tainly not for convenience, it is extremely difficult to say which of the two extremes is worse, that streets, as in the old town of Vienna, should be too narrow, or, as in the new town of Edinburgh, too wide. In pro- portion to the width of the streets, the houses, in the modern part of this city, should be at least one story higher ; at present they have an extremely poor and mean aspect,^ being equally destitute of the simple grandeur of mass, and the grace which proceeds from a rich and skilfully varied embellishment.^ ' This is now made strikingly apparent in Princes Street, by the building just erected by the Life Association of Scotland Insurance Company at the bottom of the Mound, which, though overladen with ornament, and liable, perhaps, to other objections, has cer- tainly the great virtue of being almost the only building in the street that, in point of mass aijd pomp, is worthy of so splendid a situation. ^ My space does not allow me to pursue this subject further; but I cannot deny myself the pleasure of transcribing the following remarks on the effect of Quantity in Beauty from Hogakth : — ' Forms of magnitude, although ill-shaped, will, however, on ac- count of their vastness, draw our attention, and raise our admira- tion. ' Huge shapeless rocks have a pleasing kind of horror in them, and the wide ocean awes us with its vast contents ; but when forms of beauty are presented to the eye in large quantities, the F 82 ON BEAUTY. There remain yet one or two special applications of natural Actualism or Positivism (since teclinical phrases must be coined sometimes), which we are now considering. If everything positive is naturally prefer- able to what is merely negative, then motion, in the case of things that move, will be preferable to stagna- tion ; fi'eedom will be preferable to constraint ; self-de- pleasnre increases on the mind, and horror is softened into re- verence. ' How solemn and pleasing are groves of high grown trees, great chnrclies, and palaces ! Has not even a single spreading oak, grown to maturity, acquired the character of the venerable oak ? ' Windsor Castle is a noble instance of the effect of quantity. The hugeness of its few distinct parts strikes the eye with uncom- mon grandeur at a distance as well as nigh. It is quantity, with simplicity, which makes it one of the finest objects in the kingdom, though void of any regular order of architecture. ' The Fagade of the old Louvre at Paris is also remarkable for its quantity. This fragment is allowed to be the finest piece of building in France, though there are many equal, if not superior to it, in all other respects, except that of quantity. ' Who does not feel a pleasure when he pictures in his mind the immense buildings which once adorned the Lower Egypt, by ima- gining the whole complete, and ornamented with colossal statues ? ' Elephants and whales please us with their unwieldy greatness. Even large personages, merely from being so, command respect. Nay, quantity is an addition to the person, which often supplies a deficiency in his figure. ' The robes of state are always made large and full, because they give a grandeur of appearance suitable to the oflnces of the greatest distinction. The judges' robes have an awful dignity given them by the quantity of their contents ; and when the train is held up, there is a noble waving line descending from the shoulders of the judge to the hand of his train-bearer. So, when the train is gently throvra aside, it generally falls into a great variety of folds, which again employ the eye, and fix its attention. ' The grandeur of the Eastern dress, which so far surpasses the European, depends as much on quantity as on costliness. ' In a word, it is quantity which adds greatness to grace.' DISCOUESE THE SECOND. 83 pendence to dependence on an extrinsic power ; ' and light will be preferable to darkness. There is, indeed, in things naturally stable a beauty of rest and repose, to which the beauty of mass and of symmetry principally applies ; but the effective and creative principle in the world is not rest, but motion ; and the exhibition of this Divine energy, according to the innate laws of its own harmony, must be alone capable of producing the highest impressions of beauty. Here, indeed, we get into a region altogether intangible and immeasurable, and at the same time so rich and varied in its expres- sion, that those who seek for one simple element of the Beautiful (like Socrates in the Platonic dialogue^), amid such a complex dance of fair forces, are naturally not a little puzzled, and even wise men -nill be befooled by a strange play of " association of ideas," and other ingenious juggleries. But there are principles certain enough here, as in the more simple world of forms. And the difficulty of laying hold of them does not prove that they do not exist, or exist without certain laws, but only that they are too rich, and too curiously inter- twined, for every five-fingered virtuoso ia mental curio- sities to make an inventory of their harmonies. Never- theless, the ultimate elements of aesthetical pleasure in this subtle and ever-shifting world of forces, also, are distinctly recognisable. The mind, in the first place, necessarily delights in motion, because, according to the old and alone true doctrine of Plato in the Phsedrus, 'Aou 5 Trpoaing oKhuy. — ^Plato, TimCBUS, 33, D. * 'itfAsls yacp SKsivo ^irroufisi/ ^ -jroiiiTet roc x.ct'Koi. irpny^a/riA KctT^ac ieriv, Sff-sep a iraina t« layaKoi, imi fityaT^ec, r^ vatpi^mi. — Hippias Major, 294, B. 81 ON BEAUTY. mind is essentially motive, and the originator of mo- tion;' so that we are fully warranted in saying, that all the motions in the universe, being manifestly not blind impulses, but ordered forces, are merely the methods of the operation of the Supreme Mind, and the beautiful active thoughts, so to speak, of Him in whom all things that are, live, and move, and have their being. Further, if the mind, as a great motive force, delights in the mere aspect of energetic forces rather than in lethargy and stagnation, it will be the more delighted the more that these forces have a free and unhindered play — always, of course, with due regard to that primary law of order, to which, under the name of rhythm, as we have already shown, all lovely forces are necessarily subordinated. The mind, therefore, by its very nature, and not in vir- tue of any association with anything else, will dehght in all displays of free activity ; - and this is so very true, that poetry and the fine arts might be defined to be the embodiment of the most free activity of a quick imagina- tion according to the law of harmony. And any person who ever wrote a stanza, or relished it when wTitten, will be able to bear witness to the truth of this defini- tion. In the art of writing poetry, the soul, which, in ^ In the famous passage (245, D) beginning, " i^vxil srseo-a 'atfa- ascro;, to yelp liincii/rrrov oiSdvaroii :" on wliich see Bunsex's re- marks in his last work, Gott in der Geschichte, vol. i., p. 40. - Wherefore Aristotle defines pleasure, hipycia. dusffTroliarog. Ethic. Nicnm., vii. 12. In accordance with which, but more fully and accurately, in reference to oesthetical emotions, Mr Dallas, as we have already mentioned, defines pleasure to be the ' harmonious tmd unconscious activity of the soul;' the unconsciousness arising from the fact, that a pleasure which fully occupies and satisfies the soul, establishes a centre of instinctive action which excludes the possibility of a simultaneous act of self-reflection. No man analyses an existing pleasure, except with the mad lust of destroying it. MSCOTJKSE THE SECOND. 85 the prosaic state, may be called pedestrian, receives as it were wings, and soars freely through a region of hai-- monious fancies, which it shapes into audible music as it floats — ' Laurea donandus Apollinari Cum per audaces nova dithyramhos Verba devolmt^ numerisque fertur Lege solutis." Do you desire a sure test, by which you may dis- cern bad poetry from good, a false inspiration from a true one 1 — there are many tests ; but there is none surer than this — in poetry there is no constraint. Nothing moves stiffly ; nothing lumbers uncomfort- ably ; nothing halts ; nothing lags ; nothing is forced into a position which it would not naturally assume. There is great force everywhere present ; and perfect freedom in the disposal of that force. Every line is marked by the elasticity of instinctive vital joy, and the ease of assured power. There is a charm in the mere grace of poetic movement, quite independent of the ideas which the march of sweet articulate sounds conveys ; and if you wish to know how mighty a thing this element is in a good poem, read a bad translation. The wildest freedom, combined with the sovereignty of the most curious law — herein lies the mystery of that plastic genius which has always been esteemed the special gift of God to mortal men ; because, when its magical virtue is denied, no accumulation of human learning, or concentration of human talent, can pre- vail to appropriate even the simplest of its witcheries. A single word now remains to be said on that other grand contrast of nature on which aesthetic judgments are founded — Light and Darkness. All creatures 86 ON BEAUTr. rejoice in the light. Is this necessary ? Is it a law or a whim? Does it depend on the essential sub- stance of the Divine Being, and His attributes, or on the association of ideas in the brain of an Episcopal clergyman, or an Edinburgh Reviewer?' It is really sad that a reasonable man should be obliged to put such questions; but it is an old disease of philosophy, falsely so called, to work itself, by help of the cunning legerdemain of vague language, into a position of direct hostility to the instincts of all healthy-minded men; which, however, being once achieved, the malady has already worked its own cure ; and one is driven back to nature by the mere aspect of the ab- surdity of men who, by a false show of wisdom, ex- plain away nature, just as the Spartans used to teach their sons temperance by the exhibition of consum- mated beastliness in drunken Helots. Light is not a necessary thing; that is to say, not absolutely necessary in conception ; for we may conceive an ordered world without it, though it were a very dull and joyless world certainly. But a cognoscible world — a system of well-assorted things, that could be known, and appreci- ated, and admired, without light, is not easily conceiv- able ; for experience practically teaches how few the points of connection between mind and matter are, 1 Even DuGALD Stewart, who treated the association-sophists with a respect which they did not deserre, could not but stagger at the manifest absurdity of referring the pleasure felt in such a primitive cosmical power as light, to association. ' With the greater part of Mr Alison's remarks,' says he, ' on the beauty of colours, forms, and motion, I perfectly agree; although, in the case of the first, I am disposed to ascribe more to the mere organic impres- sion, independently of any association whatever, than he seems willing to allow.' — Essat/ on the Beautiful, c. 2. DISCOURSE THE SECOND. 87 which the other senses reveal, in comparison of sight. - This is, indeed, pre-eminently the intellectual sense ; insomuch, that to see and to know, are in most lan^ages only different applications of the same word.^ All knowledge of the highest kind is, there- fore, by human feeling practically identified with light; and much more so, all happiness and joy; as we may see in the language of all life, and of all poetry, and of all religion, particularly in the description of the new Jerusalem in the Book of Revelations, of which the foundations are garnished ^ath all manner of bril- liant precious stones, and pearls, and gold, and glass, and every lucid and luminous material ; and yet there was neither sun nor moon there, for the primal source of all light, whence the sun borrows his radiance, even the essential glory of God, did lighten it ; and there was no night there.^ What shall we say then ? Light, so far as we can imagine, is a thing absolutely necessary to all correspondence between the cognos- ' Thus vidi in Latin is, uha, in Greek ; and vita, to consider, in later Greek, means to «ee or obserm in Homer; and our word theoTy, or intellectual contemplation, is derived from ^ioe, vision. So the word intuition from intueor ; as in English insight, and in German Einsidtt. It is noticed by Plato (in the Hippias Major, 299, A.), that sight and hearing are the only two senses to which the word xmKos, beantifnl, can be properly allied, the predicate of the other senses being ijSi/, sweet ; which distinction is certainly founded in nature, though no doubt there is a difference of coarse- ness and refinement in the appreciative power of the lowest as of the highest senses. « The essential divinity of light is clearly indicated by Plato in the Timmus (40, A), where he says that the Great Cause of all formed the race of the gods of luminous and fiery matter, ore-; ot( ■Kafin fin 0X011 Uu» te 7i.aKKi