Modern Painters, Volume 2 (of 5)
by John Ruskin · English · Gutenberg #29906 · 587,469 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Modern Painters, Volume 2 (of 5)
Author: John Ruskin
Release date: September 4, 2009 [eBook #29906]
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/29906
Credits: Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Marius Borror and the Online
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Transcriber's notes: A few typographical errors have been corrected: they
are listed at the end of the text.
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[Illustration: LANDSCAPE FROM A PAINTING BY J. M. W. TURNER]
Library Edition
THE COMPLETE WORKS
OF
JOHN RUSKIN
MODERN PAINTERS
VOLUME II--OF TRUTH AND THEORETIC
FACULTIES
_Volume III_--OF MANY THINGS
NATIONAL LIBRARY ASSOCIATION
NEW YORK CHICAGO
MODERN PAINTERS.
VOLUME II.,
CONTAINING
PART III.,
SECTIONS I. AND II.
OF THE IMAGINATIVE AND THEORETIC FACULTIES.
SYNOPSIS OF CONTENTS.
PART III.
OF IDEAS OF BEAUTY.
SECTION I.
OF THE THEORETIC FACULTY.
CHAPTER I.--Of the Rank and Relations of the Theoretic Faculty.
PAGE
Sec. 1. With what care the subject is to be approached. 1
Sec. 2. And of what importance considered. 2
Sec. 3. The doubtful force of the term "utility". 3
Sec. 4. Its proper sense. 4
Sec. 5. How falsely applied in these times. 4
Sec. 6. The evil consequences of such interpretation. How connected
with national power. 5
Sec. 7. How to be averted. 6
Sec. 8. Division of the pursuits of men into subservient and objective. 8
Sec. 9. Their relative dignities. 10
Sec. 10. How reversed through erring notions of the contemplative
and imaginative faculties. 10
Sec. 11. Object of the present section. 11
CHAPTER II.--Of the Theoretic Faculty as concerned with Pleasures of
Sense.
Sec. 1. Explanation of the term "theoretic". 12
Sec. 2. Of the differences of rank in pleasures of sense. 12
Sec. 3. Use of the terms Temperate and Intemperate. 13
Sec. 4. Right use of the term "intemperate". 13
Sec. 5. Grounds of inferiority in the pleasures which are subjects of
intemperance. 14
Sec. 6. Evidence of higher rank in pleasures of sight and hearing. 15
Sec. 7. How the lower pleasures may be elevated in rank. 16
Sec. 8. Ideas of beauty how essentially moral. 17
Sec. 9. How degraded by heartless reception. 17
Sec. 10. How exalted by affection. 18
CHAPTER III.--Of Accuracy and Inaccuracy in Impressions of Sense.
Sec. 1. By what test is the health of the perceptive faculty to be
determined? 19
Sec. 2. And in what sense may the terms Right and Wrong be attached
to its conclusions? 20
Sec. 3. What power we have over impressions of sense. 21
Sec. 4. Depends on acuteness of attention. 21
Sec. 5. Ultimate conclusions universal. 22
Sec. 6. What duty is attached to this power over impressions of sense. 22
Sec. 7. How rewarded. 23
Sec. 8. Especially with respect to ideas of beauty. 23
Sec. 9. Errors induced by the power of habit. 24
Sec. 10. The necessity of submission in early stages of judgment. 24
Sec. 11. The large scope of matured judgment. 25
Sec. 12. How distinguishable from false taste. 25
Sec. 13. The danger of a spirit of choice. 26
Sec. 14. And criminality. 27
Sec. 15. How certain conclusions respecting beauty are by reason
demonstrable. 27
Sec. 16. With what liabilities to error. 28
Sec. 17. The term "beauty" how limitable in the outset. Divided
into typical and vital. 28
CHAPTER IV.--Of False Opinions held concerning Beauty.
Sec. 1. Of the false opinion that truth is beauty, and vice versa. 30
Sec. 2. Of the false opinion that beauty is usefulness. Compare
Chap. xii. Sec. 5. 31
Sec. 3. Of the false opinion that beauty results from custom. Compare
Chap. vi. Sec. 1. 31
Sec. 4. The twofold operation of custom. It deadens sensation, but
confirms affection. 31
Sec. 5. But never either creates or destroys the essence of beauty. 32
Sec. 6. Instances. 32
Sec. 7. Of the false opinion that beauty depends on the association of
ideas. 33
Sec. 8. Association. Is, 1st, rational. It is of no efficiency as a
cause of beauty. 33
Sec. 9. Association accidental. The extent of its influence. 34
Sec. 10. The dignity of its function. 35
Sec. 11. How it is connected with impressions of beauty. 36
Sec. 12. And what caution it renders necessary in the examination of
them. 36
CHAPTER V.--Of Typical Beauty:--First, of Infinity, or the Type of
Divine Incomprehensibility.
Sec. 1. Impossibility of adequately treating the subject. 38
Sec. 2. With what simplicity of feeling to be approached. 38
Sec. 3. The child instinct respecting space. 39
Sec. 4. Continued in after life. 40
Sec. 5. Whereto this instinct is traceable. 40
Sec. 6. Infinity how necessary in art. 41
Sec. 7. Conditions of its necessity. 42
Sec. 8. And connected analogies. 42
Sec. 9. How the dignity of treatment is proportioned to the expression
of infinity. 43
Sec. 10. Examples among the Southern schools. 44
Sec. 11. Among the Venetians. 44
Sec. 12. Among the painters of landscape. 45
Sec. 13. Other modes in which the power of infinity is felt. 45
Sec. 14. The beauty of curvature. 46
Sec. 15. How constant in external nature. 46
Sec. 16. The beauty of gradation. 47
Sec. 17. How found in nature. 47
Sec. 18. How necessary in Art. 48
Sec. 19. Infinity not rightly implied by vastness. 49
CHAPTER VI.--Of Unity, or the Type of the Divine Comprehensiveness.
Sec. 1. The general conception of divine Unity. 50
Sec. 2. The glory of all things is their Unity. 50
Sec. 3. The several kinds of unity. Subjectional. Original. Of
sequence, and of membership. 51
Sec. 4 Unity of membership. How secured. 52
Sec. 5. Variety. Why required. 53
Sec. 6. Change, and its influence on beauty. 54
Sec. 7. The love of change. How morbid and evil. 55
Sec. 8. The conducing of variety towards unity of subjection. 55
Sec. 9. And towards unity of sequence. 57
Sec. 10. The nature of proportion. 1st, of apparent proportion. 57
Sec. 11. The value of apparent proportion in curvature. 60
Sec. 12. How by nature obtained. 61
Sec. 13. Apparent proportion in melodies of line. 61
Sec. 14. Error of Burke in this matter. 62
Sec. 15. Constructive proportion. Its influence in plants. 63
Sec. 16. And animals. 64
Sec. 17. Summary. 64
CHAPTER VII.--Of Repose, or the Type of Divine Permanence.
Sec. 1. Universal feeling respecting the necessity of repose in art.
Its sources. 65
Sec. 2. Repose how expressed in matter. 66
Sec. 3. The necessity to repose of an implied energy. 66
Sec. 4. Mental repose, how noble. 67
Sec. 5. Its universal value as a test of art. 68
Sec. 6. Instances in the Laocoon and Theseus. 69
Sec. 7. And in altar tombs. 70
CHAPTER VIII.--Of Symmetry, or the Type of Divine Justice.
Sec. 1. Symmetry, what and how found in organic nature. 72
Sec. 2. How necessary in art. 72
Sec. 3. To what its agreeableness is referable. Various instances. 73
Sec. 4. Especially in religious art. 73
CHAPTER IX.--Of Purity, or the Type of Divine Energy.
Sec. 1. The influence of light as a sacred symbol. 75
Sec. 2. The idea of purity connected with it. 75
Sec. 3. Originally derived from conditions of matter. 76
Sec. 4. Associated ideas adding to the power of the impression.
Influence of clearness. 76
Sec. 5. Perfect beauty of surface, in what consisting. 77
Sec. 6. Purity only metaphorically a type of sinlessness. 78
Sec. 7. Energy, how expressed by purity of matter. 79
Sec. 8. And of color. 79
Sec. 9. Spirituality, how so expressed. 79
CHAPTER X.--Of Moderation, or the Type of Government by Law.
Sec. 1. Meaning of the terms Chasteness and Refinement. 81
Sec. 2. How referable to temporary fashions. 81
Sec. 3. How to the perception of completion. 81
Sec. 4. Finish, by great masters esteemed essential. 82
Sec. 5. Moderation, its nature and value. 84
Sec. 6. It is the girdle of beauty. 84
Sec. 7. How found in natural curves and colors. 84
Sec. 8. How difficult of attainment, yet essential to all good. 85
CHAPTER XI.--General Inferences respecting Typical Beauty.
Sec. 1. The subject incompletely treated, yet admitting of general
conclusions. 86
Sec. 2. Typical beauty not created for man's sake. 87
Sec. 3. But degrees of it for his sake admitted. 87
Sec. 4. What encouragement hence to be received. 87
CHAPTER XII.--Of Vital Beauty:--First, as Relative.
Sec. 1. Transition from typical to vital Beauty. 89
Sec. 2. The perfection of the theoretic faculty as concerned with
vital beauty, is charity. 90
Sec. 3. Only with respect to plants, less affection than sympathy. 91
Sec. 4. Which is proportioned to the appearance of energy in the
plants. 92
Sec. 5. This sympathy is unselfish, and does not regard utility. 93
Sec. 6. Especially with respect to animals. 94
Sec. 7. And it is destroyed by evidences of mechanism. 95
Sec. 8. The second perfection of the theoretic faculty as concerned
with life is justice of moral judgment. 96
Sec. 9. How impeded. 97
Sec. 10. The influence of moral signs in expression. 97
Sec. 11. As also in plants. 99
Sec. 12. Recapitulation. 100
CHAPTER XIII.--Of Vital Beauty:--Secondly, as Generic.
Sec. 1. The beauty of fulfilment of appointed function in every
animal. 101
Sec. 2. The two senses of the word "ideal." Either it refers to
action of the imagination. 102
Sec. 3. Or to perfection of type. 103
Sec. 4. This last sense how inaccurate, yet to be retained. 103
Sec. 5. Of Ideal form. First, in the lower animals. 104
Sec. 6. In what consistent. 104
Sec. 7. Ideal form in vegetables. 105
Sec. 8. The difference of position between plants and animals. 105
Sec. 9. Admits of variety in the ideal of the former. 106
Sec. 10. Ideal form in vegetables destroyed by cultivation. 107
Sec. 11. Instance in the Soldanella and Ranunculus. 108
Sec. 12. The beauty of repose and felicity, how consistent with such
ideal. 108
Sec. 13. The ideality of Art. 109
Sec. 14. How connected with the imaginative faculties. 109
Sec. 15. Ideality, how belonging to ages and conditions. 110
CHAPTER XIV.--Of Vital Beauty:--Thirdly, in Man.
Sec. 1. Condition of the human creature entirely different from that
of the lower animals. 111
Sec. 2. What room here for idealization. 111
Sec. 3. How the conception of the bodily ideal is reached. 112
Sec. 4. Modifications of the bodily ideal owing to influence of mind.
First, of intellect. 113
Sec. 5. Secondly, of the moral feelings. 113
Sec. 6. What beauty is bestowed by them. 115
Sec. 7. How the soul culture interferes harmfully with the bodily
ideal. 115
Sec. 8. The inconsistency among the effects of the mental virtues on
the form. 116
Sec. 9. Is a sign of God's kind purpose towards the race. 116
Sec. 10. Consequent separation and difference of ideals. 117
Sec. 11. The _effects_ of the Adamite curse are to be
distinguished from signs of its immediate activity. 118
Sec. 12. Which latter only are to be banished from ideal form. 118
Sec. 13. Ideal form is only to be obtained by portraiture. 119
Sec. 14. Instances among the greater of the ideal Masters. 119
Sec. 15. Evil results of opposite practice in modern times. 120
Sec. 16. The right use of the model. 121
Sec. 17. Ideal form to be reached only by love. 121
Sec. 18. Practical principles deducible. 122
Sec. 19. Expressions chiefly destructive of ideal character. 1st,
Pride. 122
Sec. 20. Portraiture ancient and modern. 123
Sec. 21. Secondly, Sensuality. 123
Sec. 22. How connected with impurity of color. 124
Sec. 23. And prevented by its splendor. 124
Sec. 24. Or by severity of drawing. 125
Sec. 25. Degrees of descent in this respect: Rubens, Correggio, and
Guido. 125
Sec. 26. And modern art. 126
Sec. 27. Thirdly, ferocity and fear. The latter how to be distinguished
from awe. 126
Sec. 28. Holy fear, how distinct from human terror. 127
Sec. 29. Ferocity is joined always with fear. Its unpardonableness. 127
Sec. 30. Such expressions how sought by painters powerless and impious. 128
Sec. 31. Of passion generally. 129
Sec. 32. It is never to be for itself exhibited--at least on the face. 130
Sec. 33. Recapitulation. 131
CHAPTER XV.--General Conclusions respecting the Theoretic Faculty.
Sec. 1. There are no sources of the emotion of beauty more than those
found in things visible. 133
Sec. 2. What imperfection exists in visible things. How in a sort by
imagination removable. 134
Sec. 3. Which however affects not our present conclusions. 134
Sec. 4. The four sources from which the pleasure of beauty is derived
are all divine. 134
Sec. 5. What objections may be made to this conclusion. 135
Sec. 6. Typical beauty may be aesthetically pursued. Instances. 135
Sec. 7. How interrupted by false feeling. 136
Sec. 8. Greatness and truth are sometimes by the Deity sustained and
spoken in and through evil men. 137
Sec. 9. The second objection arising from the coldness of Christian
men to external beauty. 138
Sec. 10. Reasons for this coldness in the anxieties of the world. These
anxieties overwrought and criminal. 139
Sec. 11. Evil consequences of such coldness. 140
Sec. 12. Theoria the service of Heaven. 140
SECTION II.
OF THE IMAGINATIVE FACULTY.
CHAPTER I.--Of the Three Forms of Imagination.
Sec. 1. A partial examination only of the imagination is to be
attempted. 142
Sec. 2. The works of the metaphysicians how nugatory with respect
to this faculty. 143
Sec. 3. The definition of D. Stewart, how inadequate. 143
Sec. 4. This instance nugatory. 144
Sec. 5. Various instances. 145
Sec. 6. The three operations of the imagination. Penetrative,
associative, contemplative. 146
CHAPTER II.--Of Imagination Associative.
Sec. 1. Of simple conception. 147
Sec. 2. How connected with verbal knowledge. 148
Sec. 3. How used in composition. 148
Sec. 4. Characteristics of composition. 149
Sec. 5. What powers are implied by it. The first of the three
functions of fancy. 150
Sec. 6. Imagination not yet manifested. 150
Sec. 7. Imagination is the correlative conception of imperfect
component parts. 151
Sec. 8. Material analogy with imagination. 151
Sec. 9. The grasp and dignity of imagination. 152
Sec. 10. Its limits. 153
Sec. 11. How manifested in treatment of uncertain relations. Its
deficiency illustrated. 154
Sec. 12. Laws of art, the safeguard of the unimaginative. 155
Sec. 13. Are by the imaginative painter despised. Tests of imagination. 155
Sec. 14. The monotony of unimaginative treatment. 156
Sec. 15. Imagination never repeats itself. 157
Sec. 16. Relation of the imaginative faculty to the theoretic. 157
Sec. 17. Modification of its manifestation. 158
Sec. 18. Instances of absence of imagination.--Claude, Gaspar Poussin. 158
Sec. 19. Its presence.--Salvator, Nicolo Poussin, Titian, Tintoret. 159
Sec. 20. And Turner. 160
Sec. 21. The due function of Associative imagination with respect to
nature. 161
Sec. 22. The sign of imaginative work is its appearance of absolute
truth. 161
CHAPTER III.--Of Imagination Penetrative.
Sec. 1. Imagination penetrative is concerned not with the combining
but apprehending of things. 163
Sec. 2. Milton's and Dante's description of flame. 163
Sec. 3. The imagination seizes always by the innermost point. 164
Sec. 4. It acts intuitively and without reasoning. 165
Sec. 5. Signs of it in language. 165
Sec. 6. Absence of imagination, how shown. 166
Sec. 7. Distinction between imagination and fancy. 166
Sec. 8. Fancy how involved with imagination. 168
Sec. 9. Fancy is never serious. 169
Sec. 10. Want of seriousness the bar to high art at the present time. 169
Sec. 11. Imagination is quiet; fancy, restless. 170
Sec. 12. The detailing operation of fancy. 170
Sec. 13. And suggestive, of the imagination. 171
Sec. 14. This suggestiveness how opposed to vacancy. 172
Sec. 15. Imagination addresses itself to imagination. 173
Instances from the works of Tintoret. 173
Sec. 16. The entombment. 174
Sec. 17. The Annunciation. 174
Sec. 18. The Baptism of Christ. Its treatment by various painters. 176
Sec. 19. By Tintoret. 177
Sec. 20. The Crucifixion. 178
Sec. 21. The Massacre of innocents. 179
Sec. 22. Various works in the Scuola di San Rocco. 181
Sec. 23. The Last Judgment. How treated by various painters. 181
Sec. 24. By Tintoret. 182
Sec. 25. The imaginative verity, how distinguished from realism. 183
Sec. 26. The imagination how manifested in sculpture. 184
Sec. 27. Bandinelli, Canova, Mino da Fiesole. 184
Sec. 28. Michael Angelo. 185
Sec. 29. Recapitulation. The perfect function of the imagination is
the intuitive perception of ultimate truth. 188
Sec. 30. Imagination how vulgarly understood. 190
Sec. 31. How its cultivation is dependent on the moral feelings. 190
Sec. 32. On independence of mind. 191
Sec. 33. And on habitual reference to nature. 191
CHAPTER IV.--Of Imagination Contemplative.
Sec. 1. Imagination contemplative is not part of the essence, but only
a habit or mode of the faculty. 192
Sec. 2. The ambiguity of conception. 192
Sec. 3. Is not in itself capable of adding to the charm of fair
things. 193
Sec. 4. But gives to the imagination its regardant power over them. 194
Sec. 5. The third office of fancy distinguished from imagination
contemplative. 195
Sec. 6. Various instances. 197
Sec. 7. Morbid or nervous fancy. 200
Sec. 8. The action of contemplative imagination is not to be expressed
by art. 201
Sec. 9. Except under narrow limits.--1st. Abstract rendering of
form without color. 201
Sec. 10. Of color without form. 202
Sec. 11. Or of both without texture. 202
Sec. 12. Abstraction or typical representation of animal form. 203
Sec. 13. Either when it is symbolically used. 204
Sec. 14. Or in architectural decoration. 205
Sec. 15. Exception in delicate and superimposed ornament. 206
Sec. 16. Abstraction necessary from imperfection of materials. 206
Sec. 17. Abstractions of things capable of varied accident are not
imaginative. 207
Sec. 18. Yet sometimes valuable. 207
Sec. 19. Exaggeration. Its laws and limits. First, in scale of
representation. 208
Sec. 20. Secondly, of things capable of variety of scale. 209
Sec. 21. Thirdly, necessary in expression of characteristic features on
diminished scale. 210
Sec. 22. Recapitulation. 211
CHAPTER V.--Of the Superhuman Ideal.
Sec. 1. The subject is not to be here treated in detail. 212
Sec. 2. The conceivable modes of manifestation of Spiritual Beings
are four. 212
Sec. 3. And these are in or through creature forms familiar to us. 213
Sec. 4. Supernatural character may be impressed on these either by
phenomena inconsistent with their common nature (compare
Chap. iv. Sec. 16). 213
Sec. 5. Or by inherent Dignity. 213
Sec. 6. 1st. Of the expression of inspiration. 214
Sec. 7. No representation of that which is more than creature is
possible. 215
Sec. 8. Supernatural character expressed by modification of
accessories. 216
Sec. 9. Landscape of the religious painters. Its character is
eminently symmetrical. 217
Sec. 10. Landscape of Benozzo Gozzoli. 217
Sec. 11. Landscape of Perugino and Raffaelle. 218
Sec. 12. Such Landscape is not to be imitated. 218
Sec. 13. Color, and Decoration. Their use in representations of the
Supernatural. 219
Sec. 14. Decoration so used must be generic. 220
Sec. 15. And color pure. 220
Sec. 16. Ideal form of the body itself, of what variety susceptible. 221
Sec. 17. Anatomical development how far admissible. 221
Sec. 18. Symmetry. How valuable. 221
Sec. 19. The influence of Greek art, how dangerous. 222
Sec. 20. Its scope, how limited. 223
Sec. 21. Conclusion. 224
ADDENDA. 225
LIST OF PLATES TO VOLUME II.
_Page._
Court of the Ducal Palace, Venice 10
From a drawing by Ruskin.
Tomb of the Ilaria di Caretto, Lucca 72
From a photograph.
The Adoration of the Magi 158
From a painting by Ruskin, after Tintoret.
Study of Stone Pine, at Sestri 198
From a drawing by Ruskin.
PART III.
OF IDEAS OF BEAUTY.
SECTION I.
OF THE THEORETIC FACULTY.
CHAPTER I.
OF THE RANK AND RELATIONS OF THE THEORETIC FACULTY.
Sec. 1. With what care the subject is to be approached.
Although the hasty execution and controversial tone of the former
portions of this essay have been subjects of frequent regret to the
writer, yet the one was in some measure excusable in a work referred to
a temporary end, and the other unavoidable, in one directed against
particular opinions. Nor are either of any necessary detriment to its
availableness as a foundation for more careful and extended survey, in
so far as its province was confined to the assertion of obvious and
visible facts, the verification of which could in no degree be dependent
either on the care with which they might be classed, or the temper in
which they were regarded. Not so with respect to the investigation now
before us, which, being not of things outward, and sensibly
demonstrable, but of the value and meaning of mental impressions, must
be entered upon with a modesty and cautiousness proportioned to the
difficulty of determining the likeness, or community of such
impressions, as they are received by different men, and with seriousness
proportioned to the importance of rightly regarding those faculties over
which we have moral power, and therefore in relation to which we
assuredly incur a moral responsibility. There is not the thing left to
the choice of man to do or not to do, but there is some sort of degree
of duty involved in his determination; and by how much the more,
therefore, our subject becomes embarrassed by the cross influences of
variously admitted passion, administered discipline, or encouraged
affection, upon the minds of men, by so much the more it becomes matter
of weight and import to observe by what laws we should be guided, and of
what responsibilities regardful, in all that we admit, administer, or
encourage.
Sec. 2. And of what importance considered.
Nor indeed have I ever, even in the preceding sections, spoken with
levity, though sometimes perhaps with rashness. I have never treated the
subject as other than demanding heedful and serious examination, and
taking high place among those which justify as they reward our utmost
ardor and earnestness of pursuit. That it justifies them must be my
present task to prove; that it demands them has never been doubted. Art,
properly so called, is no recreation; it cannot be learned at spare
moments, nor pursued when we have nothing better to do. It is no
handiwork for drawing-room tables; no relief of the ennui of boudoirs;
it must be understood and undertaken seriously or not at all. To advance
it men's lives must be given, and to receive it their hearts. "Le
peintre Rubens s'amuse a etre ambassadeur," said one with whom, but for
his own words, we might have thought that effort had been absorbed in
power, and the labor of his art in its felicity.--"E faticoso lo studio
della pittura, et sempre si fa il mare maggiore," said he, who of all
men was least likely to have left us discouraging report of anything
that majesty of intellect could grasp, or continuity of labor
overcome.[1] But that this labor, the necessity of which in all ages has
been most frankly admitted by the greatest men, is justifiable in a
moral point of view, that it is not the pouring out of men's lives upon
the ground, that it has functions of usefulness addressed to the
weightiest of human interests, and that the objects of it have calls
upon us which it is inconsistent alike with our human dignity and our
heavenward duty to disobey--has never been boldly asserted nor fairly
admitted; least of all is it likely to be so in these days of dispatch
and display, where vanity, on the one side, supplies the place of that
love of art which is the only effective patronage, and on the other, of
the incorruptible and earnest pride which no applause, no reprobation,
can blind to its shortcomings nor beguile of its hope.
And yet it is in the expectation of obtaining at least a partial
acknowledgment of this, as a truth influential both of aim and conduct,
that I enter upon the second division of my subject. The time I have
already devoted to the task I should have considered altogether
inordinate, and that which I fear may be yet required for its completion
would have been cause to me of utter discouragement, but that the object
I propose to myself is of no partial nor accidental importance. It is
not now to distinguish between disputed degrees of ability in
individuals, or agreeableness in canvases, it is not now to expose the
ignorance or defend the principles of party or person. It is to summon
the moral energies of the nation to a forgotten duty, to display the
use, force, and function of a great body of neglected sympathies and
desires, and to elevate to its healthy and beneficial operation that art
which, being altogether addressed to them, rises or falls with their
variableness of vigor,--now leading them with Tyrtaean fire, now singing
them to sleep with baby murmurings.
Sec. 3. The doubtful force of the term "utility."
Only as I fear that with many of us the recommendation of our own
favorite pursuits is rooted more in conceit of ourselves, than affection
towards others, so that sometimes in our very pointing of the way, we
had rather that the intricacy of it should be admired than unfolded,
whence a natural distrust of such recommendation may well have place in
the minds of those who have not yet perceived any value in the thing
praised, and because also, men in the present century understand the
word Useful in a strange way, or at least (for the word has been often
so accepted from the beginning of time) since in these days, they act
its more limited meaning farther out, and give to it more practical
weight and authority, it will be well in the outset that I define
exactly what kind of utility I mean to attribute to art, and especially
to that branch of it which is concerned with those impressions of
external beauty whose nature it is our present object to discover.
Sec. 4. Its proper sense.
That is to everything created, pre-eminently useful, which enables it
rightly and fully to perform the functions appointed to it by its
Creator. Therefore, that we may determine what is chiefly useful to man,
it is necessary first to determine the use of man himself.
Man's use and function (and let him who will not grant me this follow me
no farther, for this I purpose always to assume) is to be the witness of
the glory of God, and to advance that glory by his reasonable obedience
and resultant happiness.
Whatever enables us to fulfil this function, is in the pure and first
sense of the word useful to us. Pre-eminently therefore whatever sets
the glory of God more brightly before us. But things that only help us
to exist, are in a secondary and mean sense, useful, or rather, if they
be looked for alone, they are useless and worse, for it would be better
that we should not exist, than that we should guiltily disappoint the
purposes of existence.
Sec. 5. How falsely applied in these times.
And yet people speak in this working age, when they speak from their
hearts, as if houses, and lands, and food, and raiment were alone
useful, and as if sight, thought, and admiration,[2] were all
profitless, so that men insolently call themselves Utilitarians, who
would turn, if they had their way, themselves and their race into
vegetables; men who think, as far as such can be said to think, that the
meat is more than the life, and the raiment than the body, who look to
the earth as a stable, and to its fruit as fodder; vinedressers and
husbandmen, who love the corn they grind, and the grapes they crush,
better than the gardens of the angels upon the slopes of Eden; hewers of
wood and drawers of water, who think that the wood they hew and the
water they draw, are better than the pine-forests that cover the
mountains like the shadow of God, and than the great rivers that move
like his eternity. And so comes upon us that woe of the preacher, that
though God "hath made everything beautiful in his time, also he hath set
the world in their heart, so that no man can find out the work that God
maketh from the beginning to the end."
Sec. 6. The evil consequences of such interpretation. How connected with
national power.
This Nebuchadnezzar curse, that sends us to grass like oxen, seems to
follow but too closely on the excess or continuance of national power
and peace. In the perplexities of nations, in their struggles for
existence, in their infancy, their impotence, or even their
disorganization, they have higher hopes and nobler passions. Out of the
suffering comes the serious mind; out of the salvation, the grateful
heart; out of the endurance, the fortitude; out of the deliverance, the
faith; but now when they have learned to live under providence of laws,
and with decency and justice of regard for each other; and when they
have done away with violent and external sources of suffering, worse
evils seem arising out of their rest, evils that vex less and mortify
more, that suck the blood though they do not shed it, and ossify the
heart though they do not torture it. And deep though the causes of
thankfulness must be to every people at peace with others and at unity
in itself, there are causes of fear also, a fear greater than of sword
and sedition; that dependence on God may be forgotten because the bread
is given and the water is sure, that gratitude to him may cease because
his constancy of protection has taken the semblance of a natural law,
that heavenly hope may grow faint amidst the full fruition of the world,
that selfishness may take place of undemanded devotion, compassion be
lost in vain-glory, and love in dissimulation,[3] that enervation may
succeed to strength, apathy to patience, and the noise of jesting words
and foulness of dark thoughts, to the earnest purity of the girded loins
and the burning lamp. About the river of human life there is a wintry
wind, though a heavenly sunshine; the iris colors its agitation, the
frost fixes upon its repose. Let us beware that our rest become not the
rest of stones, which so long as they are torrent-tossed, and
thunder-stricken, maintain their majesty, but when the stream is silent,
and the storm passed, suffer the grass to cover them and the lichen to
feed on them, and are ploughed down into dust.
Sec. 7. How to be averted.
And though I believe that we have salt enough of ardent and holy mind
amongst us to keep us in some measure from this moral decay, yet the
signs of it must be watched with anxiety, in all matter however trivial,
in all directions however distant. And at this time, when the iron roads
are tearing up the surface of Europe, as grapeshot do the sea, when
their great sagene is drawing and twitching the ancient frame and
strength of England together, contracting all its various life, its
rocky arms and rural heart, into a narrow, finite, calculating
metropolis of manufactures, when there is not a monument throughout the
cities of Europe, that speaks of old years and mighty people, but it is
being swept away to build cafes and gaming-houses;[4] when the honor of
God is thought to consist in the poverty of his temple, and the column
is shortened, and the pinnacle shattered, the color denied to the
casement, and the marble to the altar, while exchequers are exhausted in
luxury of boudoirs, and pride of reception-rooms; when we ravage without
a pause all the loveliness of creation which God in giving pronounced
good, and destroy without a thought all those labors which men have
given their lives, and their sons' sons' lives to complete, and have
left for a legacy to all their kind, a legacy of more than their hearts'
blood, for it is of their souls' travail, there is need, bitter need, to
bring back, if we may, into men's minds, that to live is nothing,
unless to live be to know Him by whom we live, and that he is not to be
known by marring his fair works, and blotting out the evidence of his
influences upon his creatures, not amid the hurry of crowds and crash of
innovation, but in solitary places, and out of the glowing intelligences
which he gave to men of old. He did not teach them how to build for
glory and for beauty, he did not give them the fearless, faithful,
inherited energies that worked on and down from death to death,
generation after generation, that we, foul and sensual as we are, might
give the carved work of their poured-out spirit to the axe and the
hammer; he has not cloven the earth with rivers, that their white wild
waves might turn wheels and push paddles, nor turned it up under as it
were fire, that it might heat wells and cure diseases; he brings not up
his quails by the east wind, only to let them fall in flesh about the
camp of men: he has not heaped the rocks of the mountain only for the
quarry, nor clothed the grass of the field only for the oven.
Sec. 8. Division of the pursuits of men into subservient and objective.
All science and all art may be divided into that which is subservient to
life, and which is the object of it. As subservient to life, or
practical, their results are, in the common sense of the word, useful.
As the object of life or theoretic, they are, in the common sense,
useless; and yet the step between practical and theoretic science is the
step between the miner and the geologist, the apothecary and the
chemist; and the step between practical and theoretic art is that
between the bricklayer and the architect, between the plumber and the
artist, and this is a step allowed on all hands to be from less to
greater; so that the so-called useless part of each profession does by
the authoritative and right instinct of mankind assume the superior and
more noble place, even though books be sometimes written, and that by
writers of no ordinary mind, which assume that a chemist is rewarded for
the years of toil which have traced the greater part of the combinations
of matter to their ultimate atoms, by discovering a cheap way of
refining sugar, and date the eminence of the philosopher, whose life has
been spent in the investigation of the laws of light, from the time of
his inventing an improvement in spectacles.
But the common consent of men proves and accepts the proposition, that
whatever part of any pursuit ministers to the bodily comforts, and
admits of material uses, is ignoble, and whatsoever part is addressed to
the mind only, is noble; and that geology does better in reclothing dry
bones and revealing lost creations, than in tracing veins of lead and
beds of iron; astronomy better in opening to us the houses of heaven
than in teaching navigation; botany better in displaying structure than
in expressing juices; surgery better in investigating organization than
in setting limbs; only it is ordained that, for our encouragement, every
step we make in the more exalted range of science adds something also to
its practical applicabilities; that all the great phenomena of nature,
the knowledge of which is desired by the angels only, by us partly, as
it reveals to farther vision the being and the glory of Him in whom they
rejoice and we live, dispense yet such kind influences and so much of
material blessing as to be joyfully felt by all inferior creatures, and
to be desired by them with such single desire as the imperfection of
their nature may admit;[5] that the strong torrents which, in their own
gladness fill the hills with hollow thunder and the vales with winding
light, have yet their bounden charge of field to feed and barge to bear;
that the fierce flames to which the Alp owes its upheaval and the
volcano its terror, temper for us the metal vein and quickening spring;
and that for our incitement, I say not our reward, for knowledge is its
own reward, herbs have their healing, stones their preciousness, and
stars their times.
Sec. 9. Their relative dignities.
Sec. 10. How reversed through erring notions of the contemplative and
imaginative faculties.
It would appear, therefore, that those pursuits which are altogether
theoretic, whose results are desirable or admirable in themselves and
for their own sake, and in which no farther end to which their
productions or discoveries are referred, can interrupt the contemplation
of things as they are, by the endeavor to discover of what selfish uses
they are capable (and of this order are painting and sculpture), ought
to take rank above all pursuits which have any taint in them of
subserviency to life, in so far as all such tendency is the sign of less
eternal and less holy function.[6] And such rank these two sublime arts
would indeed assume in the minds of nations, and become objects of
corresponding efforts, but for two fatal and widespread errors
respecting the great faculties of mind concerned in them.
The first of these, or the theoretic faculty, is concerned with the
moral perception and appreciation of ideas of beauty. And the error
respecting it is the considering and calling it aesthetic, degrading it
to a mere operation of sense, or perhaps worse, of custom, so that the
arts which appeal to it sink into a mere amusement, ministers to morbid
sensibilities, ticklers and fanners of the soul's sleep.
The second great faculty is the imaginative, which the mind exercises in
a certain mode of regarding or combining the ideas it has received from
external nature, and the operations of which become in their turn
objects of the theoretic faculty to other minds.
[Illustration: COURT OF THE DUCAL PALACE, VENICE. From a drawing by
Ruskin.]
And the error respecting this faculty is, that its function is one of
falsehood, that its operation is to exhibit things as they are _not_,
and that in so doing it mends the works of God.
Sec. 11. Object of the present section.
Now, as these are the two faculties to which I shall have occasion
constantly to refer during that examination of the ideas of beauty and
relation on which we are now entering, because it is only as received
and treated by these, that those ideas become exalted and profitable, it
becomes necessary for me, in the outset, to explain their power and
define their sphere, and to vindicate, in the system of our nature,
their true place for the intellectual lens and moral retina by which and
on which our informing thoughts are concentrated and represented.
FOOTNOTES
[1] Tintoret. (Ridolfi. Vita.)
[2] We live by admiration, hope, and love. (Excursion, Book IV.)
[3] Rom. xii. 9.
[4] The extent of ravage among works of art, or of historical
interest, continually committing throughout the continent may,
perhaps, be in some measure estimated from the following facts, to
which the experience of every traveller may add indefinitely:
At Beauvois--The magnificent old houses supported on columns of
workmanship (so far as I recollect) unique in the north of France,
at the corner of the market-place, have recently been destroyed for
the enlarging of some ironmongery and grocery warehouses. The arch
across the street leading to the cathedral has been destroyed also,
for what purpose, I know not.
At Rouen--The last of the characteristic houses on the quay is now
disappearing. When I was last there, I witnessed the destruction of
the noble gothic portal of the church of St. Nicholas, whose
position interfered with the courtyard of an hotel; the greater part
of the ancient churches are used as smithies, or warehouses for
goods. So also at Tours (St. Julien). One of the most interesting
and superb pieces of middle-age domestic architecture in Europe,
opposite the west front of the cathedral, is occupied as a cafe, and
its lower story concealed by painted wainscotings; representing, if
I recollect right, twopenny rolls surrounded by circles of admiring
cherubs.
At Geneva--The wooden projections or loggias which were once the
characteristic feature of the city, have been entirely removed
within the last ten years.
At Pisa--The old Baptistery is at this present time in process of
being "restored," that is, dashed to pieces, and common stone
painted black and varnished, substituted for its black marble. In
the Campo Santo, the invaluable frescoes, which might be protected
by merely glazing the arcades, are left exposed to wind and weather.
While I was there last year I saw a monument put up against the
lower part of the wall, to some private person; the bricklayers
knocked out a large space of the lower brickwork, with what
beneficial effect to the loose and blistered stucco on which the
frescoes are painted above, I leave the reader to imagine; inserted
the tablet, and then plastered over the marks of the insertion,
destroying a portion of the border of one of the paintings. The
greater part of Giotto's "Satan before God," has been destroyed by
the recent insertion of one of the beams of the roof.
The tomb of Antonio Puccinello, which was the last actually put up
against the frescoes, and which destroyed the terminal subject of
the Giotto series, bears date 1808.
It has been proposed (or at least it is so reported) that the church
of La Spina should be destroyed in order to widen the quay.
At Florence--One of its most important and characteristic streets,
that in which stands the church of Or San Michele, has been within
the last five years entirely destroyed and rebuilt in the French
style; consisting now almost exclusively of shops of bijouterie and
parfumerie. Owing to this direction of public funds, the fronts of
the Duomo, Santa Croce, St. Lorenzo, and half the others in Florence
remain in their original bricks.
The old refectory of Santa Croce, containing an invaluable Cenacolo,
if not by Giotto, at least one of the finest works of his school, is
used as a carpet manufactory. In order to see the fresco, I had to
get on the top of a loom. The _cenacolo_ (of Raffaelle?) recently
discovered, I saw when the refectory it adorns was used as a
coach-house. The fresco, which gave Raffaelle the idea of the Christ
of the Transfiguration, is in an old wood shed at San Miniato,
concealed behind a heap of faggots. In June, last year, I saw
Gentile da Fabriano's picture of the Adoration of the Magi,
belonging to the Academy of Florence, put face upmost in a shower of
rain in an open cart; on my suggesting the possibility of the rain
hurting it, an old piece of matting was thrown over its face, and it
was wheeled away "per essere pulita." What fate this signified, is
best to be discovered from the large Perugino in the Academy; whose
divine distant landscape is now almost concealed by the mass of
French ultramarine, painted over it apparently with a common house
brush, by the picture cleaner.
Not to detain the reader by going through the cities of Italy, I
will only further mention, that at Padua, the rain beats through the
west window of the Arena chapel, and runs down _over_ the frescoes.
That at Venice, in September last, I saw three buckets set in the
scuola di San Rocco to catch the rain which came _through_ the
_canvases_ of Tintoret on the roof; and that while the old works of
art are left thus unprotected, the palaces are being restored in the
following modes. The English residents knock out bow windows to see
up and down the canal. The Italians paint all the _marble_ white or
cream color, stucco the fronts, and paint them in blue and white
stripes to imitate alabaster. (This has been done with Danieli's
hotel, with the north angle of the church of St. Mark, there
replacing the real alabasters which have been torn down, with a
noble old house in St. Mark's place, and with several in the narrow
canals.) The marbles of St. Mark's, and carvings, are being
_scraped_ down to make them look bright--the lower arcade of the
Doge's palace is whitewashed--the entrance porch is being
restored--the operation having already proceeded so far as the
knocking off of the heads of the old statues--an iron railing
painted black and yellow has been put round the court. Faded
tapestries, and lottery tickets (the latter for the benefit of
charitable institutions) are exposed for sale in the council
chambers.
[5] Hooker, Eccl. Pol. Book I. chap. ii. Sec. 2.
[6] I do not assert that the accidental utility of a theoretic
pursuit, as of botany for instance, in any way degrades it, though
it cannot be considered as elevating it. But essential utility, a
purpose to which the pursuit is in some measure referred, as in
architecture, invariably degrades, because then the theoretic part
of the art is comparatively lost sight of; and thus architecture
takes a level below that of sculpture or painting, even when the
powers of mind developed in it are of the same high order.
When we pronounce the name of Giotto, our venerant thoughts are at
Assisi and Padua, before they climb the Campanile of Santa Maria del
Fiore. And he who would raise the ghost of Michael Angelo, must
haunt the Sistine and St. Lorenzo, not St. Peter's.
CHAPTER II.
OF THE THEORETIC FACULTY AS CONCERNED WITH PLEASURES OF SENSE.
Sec. 1. Explanation of the term "theoretic."
I proceed therefore first, to examine the nature of what I have called
the Theoretic faculty, and to justify my substitution of the term
"theoretic" for aesthetic, which is the one commonly employed with
reference to it.
Now the term "aesthesis" properly signifies mere sensual perception of
the outward qualities and necessary effects of bodies, in which sense
only, if we would arrive at any accurate conclusions on this difficult
subject, it should always be used. But I wholly deny that the
impressions of beauty are in any way sensual,--they are neither sensual
nor intellectual, but moral, and for the faculty receiving them, whose
difference from mere perception I shall immediately endeavor to explain,
no term can be more accurate or convenient than that employed by the
Greeks, "theoretic," which I pray permission, therefore, always to use,
and to call the operation of the faculty itself, Theoria.
Sec. 2. Of the differences of rank in pleasures of sense.
Let us begin at the lowest point, and observe, first, what differences
of dignity may exist between different kinds of aesthetic or sensual
pleasure, properly so called.
Now it is evident that the being common to brutes, or peculiar to man,
can alone be no rational test of inferiority, or dignity in pleasures.
We must not assume that man is the nobler animal, and then deduce the
nobleness of his delights; but we must prove the nobleness of the
delights, and thence the nobleness of the animal. The dignity of
affection is no way lessened because a large measure of it may be found
in lower animals, neither is the vileness of gluttony and lust abated
because they are common to men. It is clear, therefore, that there is a
standard of dignity in the pleasures and passions themselves, by which
we also class the creatures capable of, or suffering them.
Sec. 3. Use of the terms Temperate and Intemperate.
The first great distinction, we observe, is that noted of Aristotle,
that men are called temperate and intemperate with regard to some, and
not so with respect to others, and that those, with respect to which
they are so called, are, by common consent, held to be the vilest. But
Aristotle, though exquisitely subtle in his notation of facts, does not
frequently give us satisfactory account of, or reason for them. Content
with stating the fact of these pleasures being held the lowest, he shows
not why this estimation of them is just, and confuses the reader by
observing casually respecting the higher pleasures, what is indeed true,
but appears at first opposed to his own position, namely, that "men may
be conceived, as also in these taking pleasure, either rightly, or more
or less than is right."[7] Which being so, and evident capability of
excess or defect existing in pleasures of this higher order, we ought to
have been told how it happens that men are not called intemperate when
they indulge in excess of this kind, and what is that difference in the
nature of the pleasure which diminishes the criminality of its excess.
This let us attempt to ascertain.
Sec. 4. Right use of the term "intemperate."
Men are held intemperate ([Greek: akolastoi]) only when their desires
overcome or prevent the action of their reason, and they are indeed
intemperate in the exact degree in which such prevention or interference
takes place, and so are actually [Greek: akolastoi], in many instances,
and with respect to many resolves, which lower not the world's
estimation of their temperance. For so long as it can be supposed that
the reason has acted imperfectly owing to its own imperfection, or to
the imperfection of the premises submitted to it, (as when men give an
inordinate preference to their own pursuits, because they cannot, in the
nature of things, have sufficiently experienced the goodness and benefit
of others,) and so long as it may be presumed that men have referred to
reason in what they do, and have not suffered its orders to be disobeyed
through mere impulse and desire, (though those orders may be full of
error owing to the reason's own feebleness,) so long men are not held
intemperate. But when it is palpably evident that the reason cannot have
erred but that its voice has been deadened or disobeyed, and that the
reasonable creature has been dragged dead round the walls of his own
citadel by mere passion and impulse,--then, and then only, men are of
all held intemperate. And this is evidently the case with respect to
inordinate indulgence in pleasures of touch and taste, for these, being
destructive in their continuance not only of all other pleasures, but
of the very sensibilities by which they themselves are received, and as
this penalty is actually known and experienced by those indulging in
them, so that the reason cannot but pronounce right respecting their
perilousness, there is no palliation of the wrong choice; and the man,
as utterly incapable of will,[8] is called intemperate, or [Greek:
akolastos].
It would be well if the reader would for himself follow out this
subject, which it would be irrelevant here to pursue farther, observing
how a certain degree of intemperance is suspected and attributed to men
with respect to higher impulses; as, for instance, in the case of anger,
or any other passion criminally indulged, and yet is not so attributed,
as in the case of sensual pleasures; because in anger the reason is
supposed not to have had time to operate, and to be itself affected by
the presence of the passion, which seizes the man involuntarily and
before he is aware; whereas, in the case of the sensual pleasures, the
act is deliberate, and determined on beforehand, in direct defiance of
reason. Nevertheless, if no precaution be taken against immoderate
anger, and the passions gain upon the man, so as to be evidently wilful
and unrestrained, and admitted contrary to all reason, we begin to look
upon him as, in the real sense of the word, intemperate, or [Greek:
akolastos], and assign to him, in consequence, his place among the
beasts, as definitely as if he had yielded to the pleasurable
temptations of touch or taste.
Sec. 5. Grounds of inferiority in the pleasures which are subjects of
intemperance.
We see, then, that the primal ground of inferiority in these pleasures
is that which _proves_ their indulgence to be contrary to reason; namely
their destructiveness upon prolongation, and their incapability of
co-existing continually with other delights or perfections of the
system.
And this incapability of continuance directs us to the second cause of
their inferiority; namely, that they are given to us as subservient to
life, as instruments of our preservation--compelling us to seek the
things necessary to our being, and that, therefore, when this their
function is fully performed, they ought to have an end; and can be only
artificially, and under high penalty, prolonged. But the pleasures of
sight and hearing are given as gifts. They answer not any purposes of
mere existence, for the distinction of all that is useful or dangerous
to us might be made, and often is made, by the eye, without its
receiving the slightest pleasure of sight. We might have learned to
distinguish fruits and grain from flowers, without having any superior
pleasure in the aspect of the latter. And the ear might have learned to
distinguish the sounds that communicate ideas, or to recognize
intimations of elemental danger without perceiving either music in the
voice, or majesty in the thunder. And as these pleasures have no
function to perform, so there is no limit to their continuance in the
accomplishment of their end, for they are an end in themselves, and so
may be perpetual with all of us--being in no way destructive, but rather
increasing in exquisiteness by repetition.
Sec. 6. Evidence of higher rank in pleasures of sight and hearing.
Herein, then, we find very sufficient ground for the higher estimation
of these delights, first, in their being eternal and inexhaustible, and
secondly, in their being evidently no means or instrument of life, but
an object of life. Now in whatever is an object of life, in whatever may
be infinitely and for itself desired, we may be sure there is something
of divine, for God will not make anything an object of life to his
creatures which does not point to, or partake of, Himself. And so,
though we were to regard the pleasures of sight merely as the highest of
sensual pleasures, and though they were of rare occurrence, and, when
occurring, isolated and imperfect, there would still be a supernatural
character about them, owing to their permanence and self-sufficiency,
where no other sensual pleasures are permanent or self-sufficient. But
when, instead of being scattered, interrupted, or chance-distributed,
they are gathered together, and so arranged to enhance each other as by
chance they could not be, there is caused by them not only a feeling of
strong affection towards the object in which they exist, but a
perception of purpose and adaptation of it to our desires; a perception,
therefore, of the immediate operation of the Intelligence which so
formed us, and so feeds us.
Out of which perception arise joy, admiration, and gratitude.
Now the mere animal consciousness of the pleasantness I call aesthesis;
but the exulting, reverent, and grateful perception of it I call
theoria. For this, and this only, is the full comprehension and
contemplation of the beautiful as a gift of God, a gift not necessary to
our being, but added to, and elevating it, and twofold, first of the
desire, and secondly of the thing desired.
Sec. 7. How the lower pleasures may be elevated in rank.
And that this joyfulness and reverence are a necessary part of theoretic
pleasure is very evident when we consider that, by the presence of these
feelings, even the lower and more sensual pleasures may be rendered
theoretic. Thus Aristotle has subtly noted, that "we call not men
intemperate so much with respect to the scents of roses or herb-perfumes
as of ointments and of condiments," (though the reason that he gives for
this be futile enough.) For the fact is, that of scents artificially
prepared the extreme desire is intemperance, but of natural and
God-given scents, which take their part in the harmony and pleasantness
of creation, there can hardly be intemperance; not that there is any
absolute difference between the two kinds, but that these are likely to
be received with gratitude and joyfulness rather than those, so that we
despise the seeking of essences and unguents, but not the sowing of
violets along our garden banks. But all things may be elevated by
affection, as the spikenard of Mary, and in the Song of Solomon, the
myrrh upon the handles of the lock, and that of Isaac concerning his
son. And the general law for all these pleasures is, that when sought in
the abstract and ardently, they are foul things, but when received with
thankfulness and with reference to God's glory, they become theoretic;
and so I can find something divine in the sweetness of wild fruits, as
well as in the pleasantness of the pure air, and the tenderness of its
natural perfumes that come and go as they list.
Sec. 8. Ideas of beauty how essentially moral.
It will be understood why I formerly said in the chapter respecting
ideas of beauty, that those ideas were the subject of moral and not of
intellectual, nor altogether of sensual perception; and why I spoke of
the pleasures connected with them as derived from "those material
sources which are agreeable to our moral nature in its purity and
perfection." For, as it is necessary to the existence of an idea of
beauty, that the sensual pleasure which may be its basis, should be
accompanied first with joy, then with love of the object, then with the
perception of kindness in a superior Intelligence, finally with
thankfulness and veneration towards that Intelligence itself, and as no
idea can be at all considered as in any way an idea of beauty, until it
be made up of these emotions, any more than we can be said to have an
idea of a letter of which we perceive the perfume and the fair writing,
without understanding the contents of it, or intent of it; and as these
emotions are in no way resultant from, nor obtainable by, any operation
of the intellect, it is evident that the sensation of beauty is not
sensual on the one hand, nor is it intellectual on the other, but is
dependent on a pure, right, and open state of the heart, both for its
truth and for its intensity, insomuch that even the right after action
of the intellect upon facts of beauty so apprehended, is dependent on
the acuteness of the heart feeling about them; and thus the Apostolic
words come true, in this minor respect as in all others, that men are
alienated from the life of God, through the ignorance that is in them,
having the understanding darkened because of the hardness of their
hearts, and so being past feeling, give themselves up to lasciviousness;
for we do indeed see constantly that men having naturally acute
perceptions of the beautiful, yet not receiving it with a pure heart,
nor into their hearts at all, never comprehend it, nor receive good from
it, but make it a mere minister to their desires, and accompaniment and
seasoning of lower sensual pleasures, until all their emotions take the
same earthly stamp, and the sense of beauty sinks into the servant of
lust.
Sec. 9. How degraded by heartless reception.
Sec. 10. How exalted by affection.
Nor is what the world commonly understands by the cultivation of taste,
anything more or better than this, at least in times of corrupt and
over-pampered civilization, when men build palaces and plant groves and
gather luxuries, that they and their devices may hang in the corners of
the world like fine-spun cobwebs, with greedy, puffed-up, spider-like
lusts in the middle. And this, which in Christian times is the abuse and
corruption of the sense of beauty, was in that Pagan life of which St.
Paul speaks, little less than the essence of it, and the best they had;
for I know not that of the expressions of affection towards external
nature to be found among Heathen writers, there are any of which the
balance and leading thought cleaves not towards the sensual parts of
her. Her beneficence they sought, and her power they shunned, her
teaching through both, they understood never. The pleasant influences of
soft winds and ringing streamlets, and shady coverts; of the violet
couch, and plane-tree shade,[9] they received, perhaps, in a more noble
way than we, but they found not anything except fear, upon the bare
mountain, or in the ghostly glen. The Hybla heather they loved more for
its sweet hives than its purple hues. But the Christian theoria seeks
not, though it accepts, and touches with its own purity, what the
Epicurean sought, but finds its food and the objects of its love
everywhere, in what is harsh and fearful, as well as what is kind, nay,
even in all that seems coarse and commonplace; seizing that which is
good, and delighting more sometimes at finding its table spread in
strange places, and in the presence of its enemies, and its honey coming
out of the rock, than if all were harmonized into a less wondrous
pleasure; hating only what is self-sighted and insolent of men's work,
despising all that is not of God, unless reminding it of God, yet able
to find evidence of him still, where all seems forgetful of him, and to
turn that into a witness of his working which was meant to obscure it,
and so with clear and unoffended sight beholding him forever, according
to the written promise,--Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall
see God.
FOOTNOTES
[7] [Greek: hos dei, kai kath' hyperbolen kai elleipsin.]
[8] Comp. Hooker, Eccl. Pol. Book i. chap. 8.
[9] Plato, Phaedrus, Sec. 9.
CHAPTER III.
OF ACCURACY AND INACCURACY IN IMPRESSIONS OF SENSE.
Sec. 1. By what test is the health of the perceptive faculty to be
determined?
Hitherto we have observed only the distinctions of dignity among
pleasures of sense, considered merely as such, and the way in which any
of them may become theoretic in being received with right feeling.
But as we go farther, and examine the distinctive nature of ideas of
beauty, we shall, I believe, perceive something in them besides aesthetic
pleasure, which attests a more important function belonging to them than
attaches to other sensual ideas, and exhibits a more exalted character
in the faculty by which they are received. And this was what I alluded
to, when I said in the chapter already referred to (Sec. 1), that "we may
indeed perceive, as far as we are acquainted with the nature of God,
that we have been so constructed as in a healthy state of mind to derive
pleasure from whatever things are illustrative of that nature."
This point it is necessary now farther to develop.
Our first inquiry must evidently be, how we are authorized to affirm of
any man's mind, respecting impressions of sight, that it is in a healthy
state or otherwise. What canon or test is there by which we may
determine of these impressions that they are or are not _rightly_
esteemed beautiful? To what authority, when men are at variance with
each other on this subject, shall it be deputed to judge which is right?
or is there any such authority or canon at all?
For it does not at first appear easy to prove that men ought to like one
thing rather than another, and although this is granted generally by
men's speaking of bad or good taste, it is frequently denied when we
pass to particulars, by the assertion of each individual that he has a
right to his opinion--a right which is sometimes claimed even in moral
matters, though then palpably without foundation, but which does not
appear altogether irrational in matters aesthetic, wherein little
operation of voluntary choice is supposed possible. It would appear
strange, for instance, to assert, respecting a particular person who
preferred the scent of violets to roses, that he had no right to do so.
And yet, while I have said that the sensation of beauty is intuitive and
necessary, as men derive pleasure from the scent of a rose, I have
assumed that there are some sources from which it is rightly derived,
and others from which it is wrongly derived, in other words that men
have no right to think some things beautiful, and no right to remain
apathetic with regard to others.
Sec. 2. And in what sense may the terms Right and Wrong be attached to its
conclusions?
Hence then arise two questions, according to the sense in which the word
right is taken; the first, in what way an impression of sense may be
deceptive, and therefore a conclusion respecting it untrue; and the
second, in what way an impression of sense, or the preference of one,
may be a subject of will, and therefore of moral duty or delinquency.
To the first of these questions, I answer that we cannot speak of the
immediate impression of sense as false, nor of its preference to others
as mistaken, for no one can be deceived respecting the actual sensation
he perceives or prefers. But falsity may attach to his assertion or
supposition, either that what he himself perceives is from the same
object perceived by others, or is always to be by himself perceived, or
is always to be by himself preferred; and when we speak of a man as
wrong in his impressions of sense, we either mean that he feels
differently from all, or a majority, respecting a certain object, or
that he prefers at present those of his impressions, which ultimately he
will not prefer.
To the second I answer, that over immediate impressions and immediate
preferences we have no power, but over ultimate impressions, and
especially ultimate preferences we have; and that, though we can neither
at once choose whether we shall see an object, red, green, or blue, nor
determine to like the red better than the blue, or the blue better than
the red, yet we can, if we choose, make ourselves ultimately susceptible
of such impressions in other degrees, and capable of pleasures in them
in different measure; and because, wherever power of any kind is given,
there is responsibility attached, it is the duty of men to prefer
certain impressions of sense to others, because they have the power of
doing so, this being precisely analogous to the law of the moral world,
whereby men are supposed not only capable of governing their likes and
dislikes, but the whole culpability or propriety of actions is dependent
upon this capability, so that men are guilty or otherwise, not for what
they do, but for what they desire, the command being not, thou shalt
obey, but thou shalt love, the Lord thy God, which, if men were not
capable of governing and directing their affections, would be the
command of an impossibility.
Sec. 3. What power we have over impressions of sense.
I assert, therefore, that even with respect to impressions of sense, we
have a power of preference, and a corresponding duty, and I shall show
first the nature of the power, and afterwards the nature of the duty.
Let us take an instance from one of the lowest of the senses, and
observe the kind of power we have over the impressions of lingual taste.
On the first offering of two different things to the palate, it is not
in our power to prevent or command the instinctive preference. One will
be unavoidably and helplessly preferred to the other. But if the same
two things be submitted to judgment frequently and attentively, it will
be often found that their relations change. The palate, which at first
perceived only the coarse and violent qualities of either, will, as it
becomes more experienced, acquire greater subtilty and delicacy of
discrimination, perceiving in both agreeable or disagreeable qualities
at first unnoticed, which on continued experience will probably become
more influential than the first impressions; and whatever this final
verdict may be, it is felt by the person who gives it, and received by
others as a more correct one than the first.
Sec. 4. Depends on acuteness of attention.
So, then, the power we have over the preference of impressions of taste
is not actual nor immediate, but only a power of testing and comparing
them frequently and carefully, until that which is the more permanent,
the more consistently agreeable, be determined. But when the instrument
of taste is thus in some degree perfected and rendered subtile, by its
being practised upon a single object, its conclusions will be more rapid
with respect to others, and it will be able to distinguish more quickly
in other things, and even to prefer at once, those qualities which are
calculated finally to give it most pleasure, though more capable with
respect to those on which it is more frequently exercised; whence
people are called judges with respect to this or that particular object
of taste.
Sec. 5. Ultimate conclusions universal.
Now that verdicts of this kind are received as authoritative by others,
proves another and more important fact, namely, that not only changes of
opinion take place in consequence of experience, but that those changes
are from variation of opinion to unity of opinion; and that whatever may
be the differences of estimate among unpractised or uncultivated tastes,
there will be unity of taste among the experienced. And that therefore
the operation of repeated trial and experience is to arrive at
principles of preference in some sort common to all, and which are a
part of our nature.
I have selected the sense of taste for an instance, because it is the
least favorable to the position I hold, since there is more latitude
allowed, and more actual variety of verdict in the case of this sense
than of any other; and yet, however susceptible of variety even the
ultimate approximations of its preferences may be, the authority of
judges is distinctly allowed, and we hear every day the admission, by
those of unpractised palate, that they are, or may be wrong in their
opinions respecting the real pleasurableness of things either to
themselves, or to others.
Sec. 6. What duty is attached to this power over impressions of sense.
The sense, however, in which they thus use the word "wrong" is merely
that of falseness or inaccuracy in conclusion, not of moral delinquency.
But there is, as I have stated, a duty, more or less imperative,
attached to every power we possess, and therefore to this power over the
lower senses as well as to all others.
And this duty is evidently to bring every sense into that state of
cultivation, in which it shall both form the truest conclusions
respecting all that is submitted to it, and procure us the greatest
amount of pleasure consistent with its due relation to other senses and
functions. Which three constituents of perfection in sense, true
judgment, maximum sensibility, and right relation to others, are
invariably co-existent and involved one by the other, for the true
judgment is the result of the high sensibility, and the high sensibility
of the right relation. Thus, for instance, with respect to pleasures of
taste, it is our duty not to devote such inordinate attention to the
discrimination of them as must be inconsistent with our pursuit, and
destructive of our capacity of higher and preferable pleasures, but to
cultivate the sense of them in that way which is consistent with all
other good, by temperance, namely, and by such attention as the mind at
certain resting moments may fitly pay even to so ignoble a source of
pleasure as this, by which discipline we shall bring the faculty of
taste itself to its real maximum of sensibility; for it may not be
doubted but that health, hunger, and such general refinement of bodily
habits as shall make the body a perfect and fine instrument in all
respects, are better promoters of actual sensual enjoyment of taste,
than the sickened, sluggish, hard-stimulated fastidiousness of
Epicurism.
Sec. 7. How rewarded.
So also it will certainly be found with all the senses, that they
individually receive the greatest and purest pleasure when they are in
right condition and degree of subordination to all the rest; and that by
the over cultivation of any one, (for morbid sources of pleasure and
correspondent temptations to irrational indulgence, confessedly are
attached to all,) we shall add more to their power as instruments of
punishment than of pleasure.
We see then, in this example of the lowest sense, that the power we have
over sensations and preferences depends mainly on the exercise of
attention through certain prolonged periods, and that by this exercise,
we arrive at ultimate, constant, and common sources of agreeableness,
casting off those which are external, accidental, and individual.
Sec. 8. Especially with respect to ideas of beauty.
That then which is required in order to the attainment of accurate
conclusions respecting the essence of the beautiful, is nothing more
than earnest, loving, and unselfish attention to our impressions of it,
by which those which are shallow, false, or peculiar to times and
temperaments, may be distinguished from those that are eternal. And this
dwelling upon, and fond contemplation of them, (the anschauung of the
Germans,) is perhaps as much as was meant by the Greek theoria; and it
is indeed a very noble exercise of the souls of men, and one by which
they are peculiarly distinguished from the anima of lower creatures,
which cannot, I think, be proved to have any capacity of contemplation
at all, but only a restless vividness of perception and conception, the
"fancy" of Hooker (Eccl. Pol. Book i. Chap. vi. 2). And yet this
dwelling upon them comes not up to that which I wish to express by the
word theoria, unless it be accompanied by full perception of their being
a gift from and manifestation of God, and by all those other nobler
emotions before described, since not until so felt is their essential
nature comprehended.
Sec. 9. Errors induced by the power of habit.
But two very important points are to be observed respecting the
direction and discipline of the attention in the early stages of
judgment. The first, that, for many beneficent purposes, the nature of
man has been made reconcilable by custom to many things naturally
painful to it, and even improper for it, and that therefore, though by
continued experience, united with thought, we may discover that which is
best of several, yet if we submit ourselves to authority or fashion, and
close our eyes, we may be by custom made to tolerate, and even to love
and long for, that which is naturally painful and pernicious to us,
whence arise incalculable embarrassments on the subject of art.
Sec. 10. The necessity of submission in early stages of judgment.
The second, that, in order to the discovery of that which is best of two
things, it is necessary that both should be equally submitted to the
attention; and therefore that we should have so much faith in authority
as shall make us repeatedly observe and attend to that which is said to
be right, even though at present we may not feel it so. And in the right
mingling of this faith with the openness of heart, which proves all
things, lies the great difficulty of the cultivation of the taste, as
far as the spirit of the scholar is concerned, though even when he has
this spirit, he may be long retarded by having evil examples submitted
to him by ignorant masters.
The temper, therefore, by which right taste is formed, is first,
patient. It dwells upon what is submitted to it, it does not trample
upon it lest it should be pearls, even though it look like husks, it is
a good ground, soft, penetrable, retentive, it does not send up thorns
of unkind thoughts, to choke the weak seed, it is hungry and thirsty
too, and drinks all the dew that falls on it, it is an honest and good
heart, that shows no too ready springing before the sun be up, but fails
not afterwards; it is distrustful of itself, so as to be ready to
believe and to try all things, and yet so trustful of itself, that it
will neither quit what it has tried, nor take anything without trying.
And that pleasure which it has in things that it finds true and good, is
so great that it cannot possibly be led aside by any tricks of fashion,
nor diseases of vanity, it cannot be cramped in its conclusions by
partialities and hypocrisies, its visions and its delights are too
penetrating, too living, for any whitewashed object or shallow fountain
long to endure or supply. It clasps all that it loves so hard, that it
crushes it if it be hollow.
Sec. 11. The large scope of matured judgment.
Now, the conclusions of this disposition are sure to be eventually
right, more and more right according to the general maturity of all the
powers, but it is sure to come right at last, because its operation is
in analogy to, and in harmony with, the whole spirit of the Christian
moral system, and that which it will ultimately love and rest in, are
great sources of happiness common to all the human race, and based on
the relations they hold to their Creator.
These common and general sources of pleasure are, I believe, a certain
seal, or impress of divine work and character, upon whatever God has
wrought in all the world; only, it being necessary for the perception of
them, that their contraries should also be set before us, these divine
qualities, though inseparable from all divine works, are yet suffered to
exist in such varieties of degree, that their most limited manifestation
shall, in opposition to their most abundant, act as a foil or contrary,
just as we conceive of cold as contrary to heat, though the most extreme
cold we can produce or conceive is not inconsistent with an unknown
amount of heat in the body.
Sec. 12. How distinguishable from false taste.
Our purity of taste, therefore, is best tested by its universality, for
if we can only admire this thing or that, we may be sure that our cause
for liking is of a finite and false nature. But if we can perceive
beauty in everything of God's doing, we may argue that we have reached
the true perception of its universal laws. Hence, false taste may be
known by its fastidiousness, by its demands of pomp, splendor, and
unusual combination, by its enjoyment only of particular styles and
modes of things, and by its pride also, for it is forever meddling,
mending, accumulating, and self-exulting, its eye is always upon itself,
and it tests all things around it by the way they fit it. But true
taste is forever growing, learning, reading, worshipping, laying its
hand upon its mouth because it is astonished, casting its shoes from off
its feet because it finds all ground holy, lamenting over itself and
testing itself by the way that it fits things. And it finds whereof to
feed, and whereby to grow, in all things, and therefore the complaint so
often made by young artists that they have not within their reach
materials, or subjects enough for their fancy, is utterly groundless,
and the sign only of their own blindness and inefficiency; for there is
that to be seen in every street and lane of every city, that to be felt
and found in every human heart and countenance, that to be loved in
every road-side weed and moss-grown wall, which in the hands of faithful
men, may convey emotions of glory and sublimity continual and exalted.
Sec. 13. The danger of a spirit of choice.
Let therefore the young artist beware of the spirit of choice,[10] it is
an insolent spirit at the best and commonly a base and blind one too,
checking all progress and blasting all power, encouraging weaknesses,
pampering partialities, and teaching us to look to accidents of nature
for the help and the joy which should come from our own hearts. He draws
nothing well who thirsts not to draw _every_thing; when a good painter
shrinks, it is because he is humbled, not fastidious, when he stops, it
is because he is surfeited, and not because he thinks nature has given
him unkindly food, or that he fears famine.[11] I have seen a man of
true taste pause for a quarter of an hour to look at the channellings
that recent rain had traced in a heap of cinders.
Sec. 14. And criminality.
And here is evident another reason of that duty which we owe respecting
impressions of sight, namely, to discipline ourselves to the enjoyment
of those which are eternal in their nature, not only because these are
the most acute, but because they are the most easily, constantly, and
unselfishly attainable. For had it been ordained by the Almighty that
the highest pleasures of sight should be those of most difficult
attainment, and that to arrive at them it should be necessary to
accumulate gilded palaces tower over tower, and pile artificial
mountains around insinuated lakes, there would have been a direct
contradiction between the unselfish duties and inherent desires of every
individual. But no such contradiction exists in the system of Divine
Providence, which, leaving it open to us, if we will, as creatures in
probation, to abuse this sense like every other, and pamper it with
selfish and thoughtless vanities as we pamper the palate with deadly
meats, until the appetite of tasteful cruelty is lost in its sickened
satiety, incapable of pleasure unless, Caligula like, it concentrate the
labor of a million of lives into the sensation of an hour, leaves it
also open to us, by humble and loving ways, to make ourselves
susceptible of deep delight from the meanest objects of creation, and of
a delight which shall not separate us from our fellows, nor require the
sacrifice of any duty or occupation, but which shall bind us closer to
men and to God, and be with us always, harmonized with every action,
consistent with every claim, unchanging and eternal.
Sec. 15. How certain conclusions respecting beauty are by reason
demonstrable.
Seeing then that these qualities of material objects which are
calculated to give us this universal pleasure, are demonstrably constant
in their address to human nature, they must belong in some measure to
whatever has been esteemed beautiful throughout successive ages of the
world (and they are also by their definition common to all the works of
God). Therefore it is evident that it must be possible to reason them
out, as well as to feel them out; possible to divest every object of
that which makes it accidentally or temporarily pleasant, and to strip
it bare of distinctive qualities, until we arrive at those which it has
in common with all other beautiful things, which we may then safely
affirm to be the cause of its ultimate and true delightfulness.
Sec. 16. With what liabilities to error.
Now this process of reasoning will be that which I shall endeavor to
employ in the succeeding investigations, a process perfectly safe, so
long as we are quite sure that we are reasoning concerning objects which
produce in us one and the same sensation, but not safe if the sensation
produced be of a different nature, though it may be equally agreeable;
for what produces a different sensation must be a different cause. And
the difficulty of reasoning respecting beauty arises chiefly from the
ambiguity of the word, which stands in different people's minds for
totally different sensations, for which there can be no common cause.
When, for instance, Mr. Alison endeavors to support his position that
"no man is sensible to beauty in those objects with regard to which he
has not previous ideas," by the remark that "the beauty of a theory, or
of a relic of antiquity, is unintelligible to a peasant," we see at once
that it is hopeless to argue with a man who, under his general term
beauty, may, for anything we know, be sometimes speaking of mathematical
demonstrability and sometimes of historical interest; while even if we
could succeed in limiting the term to the sense of external
attractiveness, there would be still room for many phases of error; for
though the beauty of a snowy mountain and of a human cheek or forehead,
so far as both are considered as mere matter, is the same, and traceable
to certain qualities of color and line, common to both, and by reason
extricable, yet the flush of the cheek and moulding of the brow, as they
express modesty, affection, or intellect, possess sources of
agreeableness which are not common to the snowy mountain, and the
interference of whose influence we must be cautious to prevent in our
examination of those which are material and universal.[12]
Sec. 17. The term "beauty" how limitable in the outset. Divided into
typical and vital.
The first thing, then, that we have to do, is accurately to discriminate
and define those appearances from which we are about to reason as
belonging to beauty, properly so called, and to clear the ground of all
the confused ideas and erroneous theories with which the misapprehension
or metaphorical use of the term has encumbered it.
By the term beauty, then, properly are signified two things. First, that
external quality of bodies already so often spoken of, and which,
whether it occur in a stone, flower, beast, or in man, is absolutely
identical, which, as I have already asserted, may be shown to be in
some sort typical of the Divine attributes, and which, therefore, I
shall, for distinction's sake, call typical beauty; and, secondarily,
the appearance of felicitous fulfilment of function in living things,
more especially of the joyful and right exertion of perfect life in man.
And this kind of beauty I shall call vital beauty.
Any application of the word beautiful to other appearances or qualities
than these, is either false or metaphorical, as, for instance, to the
splendor of a discovery, the fitness of a proportion, the coherence of a
chain of reasoning, or the power of bestowing pleasure which objects
receive from association, a power confessedly great, and interfering, as
we shall presently find, in a most embarrassing way with the
attractiveness of inherent beauty.
But in order that the mind of the reader may not be biassed at the
outset by that which he may happen to have received of current theories
respecting beauty, founded on the above metaphorical uses of the word,
(theories which are less to be reprobated as accounting falsely for the
sensations of which they treat, than as confusing two or more
pleasurable sensations together,) I shall briefly glance at the four
erroneous positions most frequently held upon this subject, before
proceeding to examine those typical and vital properties of things, to
which I conceive that all our original conceptions of beauty may be
traced.
FOOTNOTES
[10] "Nothing comes amiss,--
A good digestion turneth all to health."--G. HERBERT.
[11] Yet note the difference between the choice that comes of pride,
and the choice that comes of love, and compare Chap. xv. Sec. 6.
[12] Compare Spenser. (Hymn to Beauty.)
"But ah, believe me, there is more than so,
That works such wonders in the minds of men."
CHAPTER IV.
OF FALSE OPINIONS HELD CONCERNING BEAUTY.
Sec. 1. Of the false opinion that truth is beauty, and vice versa.
I purpose at present to speak only of four of the more current opinions
respecting beauty, for of the errors connected with the pleasurableness
of proportion, and of the expression of right feelings in the
countenance, I shall have opportunity to treat in the succeeding
chapters; (compare Ch. VI. Ch. XVI.)
Those erring or inconsistent positions which I would at once dismiss
are, the first, that the beautiful is the true, the second, that the
beautiful is the useful, the third, that it is dependent on custom, and
the fourth, that it is dependent on the association of ideas.
To assert that the beautiful is the true, appears, at first, like
asserting that propositions are matter, and matter propositions. But
giving the best and most rational interpretation we can, and supposing
the holders of this strange position to mean only that things are
beautiful which appear what they indeed are, and ugly which appear what
they are not, we find them instantly contradicted by each and every
conclusion of experience. A stone looks as truly a stone as a rose looks
a rose, and yet is not so beautiful; a cloud may look more like a castle
than a cloud, and be the more beautiful on that account. The mirage of
the desert is fairer than its sands; the false image of the under heaven
fairer than the sea. I am at a loss to know how any so untenable a
position could ever have been advanced; but it may, perhaps, have arisen
from some confusion of the beauty of art with the beauty of nature, and
from an illogical expansion of the very certain truth, that nothing is
beautiful in art, which, professing to be an imitation, or a statement,
is not as such in some sort true.
Sec. 2. Of the false opinion that beauty is usefulness. Compare Chap. xii.
Sec. 5.
That the beautiful is the useful, is an assertion evidently based on
that limited and false sense of the latter term which I have already
deprecated. As it is the most degrading and dangerous supposition which
can be advanced on the subject, so, fortunately, it is the most
palpably absurd. It is to confound admiration with hunger, love with
lust, and life with sensation; it is to assert that the human creature
has no ideas and no feelings, except those ultimately referable to its
brutal appetites. It has not a single fact nor appearance of fact to
support it, and needs no combating, at least until its advocates have
obtained the consent of the majority of mankind, that the most beautiful
productions of nature are seeds and roots; and of art, spades and
millstones.
Sec. 3. Of the false opinion that beauty results from custom. Compare Chap.
vi. Sec. 1.
Somewhat more rational grounds appear for the assertion that the sense
of the beautiful arises from familiarity with the object, though even
this could not long be maintained by a thinking person. For all that can
be alleged in defence of such a supposition is, that familiarity
deprives some objects which at first appeared ugly, of much of their
repulsiveness, whence it is as rational to conclude that familiarity is
the cause of beauty, as it would be to argue that because it is possible
to acquire a taste for olives, therefore custom is the cause of
lusciousness in grapes. Nevertheless, there are some phenomena resulting
from the tendency of our nature to be influenced by habit of which it
may be well to observe the limits.
Sec. 4. The twofold operation of custom. It deadens sensation, but confirms
affection.
Sec. 5. But never either creates or destroys the essence of beauty.
Custom has a twofold operation: the one to deaden the frequency and
force of repeated impressions, the other to endear the familiar object
to the affections. Commonly, where the mind is vigorous, and the power
of sensation very perfect, it has rather the last operation than the
first; with meaner minds, the first takes place in the higher degree, so
that they are commonly characterized by a desire of excitement, and the
want of the loving, fixed, theoretic power. But both take place in some
degree with all men, so that as life advances, impressions of all kinds
become less rapturous owing to their repetition. It is however
beneficently ordained that repulsiveness shall be diminished by custom
in a far greater degree than the sensation of beauty, so that the
anatomist in a little time loses all sense of horror in the torn flesh,
and carous bone, while the sculptor ceases not to feel to the close of
his life, the deliciousness of every line of the outward frame. So then
as in that with which we are made familiar, the repulsiveness is
constantly diminishing, and such claims as it may be able to put forth
on the affections are daily becoming stronger, while in what is
submitted to us of new or strange, that which may be repulsive is felt
in its full force, while no hold is as yet laid on the affections, there
is a very strong preference induced in most minds for that to which they
are not accustomed over that they know not, and this is strongest in
those which are least open to sensations of positive beauty. But however
far this operation may be carried, its utmost effect is but the
deadening and approximating the sensations of beauty and ugliness. It
never mixes nor crosses, nor in any way alters them; it has not the
slightest connection with nor power over their nature. By tasting two
wines alternately, we may deaden our perception of their flavor; nay, we
may even do more than can ever be done in the case of sight, we may
confound the two flavors together. But it will hardly be argued
therefore that custom is the cause of either flavor. And so, though by
habit we may deaden the effect of ugliness or beauty, it is not for that
reason to be affirmed that habit is the cause of either sensation. We
may keep a skull beside us as long as we please, we may overcome its
repulsiveness, we may render ourselves capable of perceiving many
qualities of beauty about its lines, we may contemplate it for years
together if we will, it and nothing else, but we shall not get ourselves
to think as well of it as of a child's fair face.
Sec. 6. Instances.
It would be easy to pursue the subject farther, but I believe that every
thoughtful reader will be perfectly well able to supply farther
illustrations, and sweep away the sandy foundations of the opposite
theory, unassisted. Let it, however, be observed, that in spite of all
custom, an Englishman instantly acknowledges, and at first sight, the
superiority of the turban to the hat, or of the plaid to the coat, that
whatever the dictates of immediate fashion may compel, the superior
gracefulness of the Greek or middle age costumes is invariably felt, and
that, respecting what has been asserted of negro nations looking with
disgust on the white face, no importance whatever is to be attached to
the opinions of races who have never received any ideas of beauty
whatsoever, (these ideas being only received by minds under some
certain degree of cultivation,) and whose disgust arises naturally from
what they may suppose to be a sign of weakness or ill health. It would
be futile to proceed into farther detail. I pass to the last and most
weighty theory, that the agreeableness in objects which we call beauty
is the result of the association with them of agreeable or interesting
ideas.
Sec. 7. Of the false opinion that beauty depends on the association of
ideas.
Frequent has been the support, and wide the acceptance of this
supposition, and yet I suppose that no two consecutive sentences were
ever written in defence of it, without involving either a contradiction
or a confusion of terms. Thus Alison, "There are scenes undoubtedly more
beautiful than Runnymede, yet to those who recollect the great event
that passed there, there is no scene perhaps which so strongly seizes on
the imagination." Here we are wonder-struck at the audacious obtuseness
which would prove the power of imagination by its overcoming that very
other power (of inherent beauty) whose existence the arguer denies. For
the only logical conclusion which can possibly be drawn from the above
sentence is, that imagination is _not_ the source of beauty, for
although no scene seizes so strongly on the imagination, yet there are
scenes "more beautiful than Runnymede." And though instances of
self-contradiction as laconic and complete as this are to be found in
few writers except Alison, yet if the arguments on the subject be fairly
sifted from the mass of confused language with which they are always
encumbered and placed in logical form, they will be found invariably to
involve one of these two syllogisms, either, association gives pleasure,
and beauty gives pleasure, therefore association is beauty. Or, the
power of association is stronger than the power of beauty, therefore the
power of association _is_ the power of beauty.
Sec. 8. Association. Is, 1st, rational. It is of no efficiency as a cause
of beauty.
Nevertheless it is necessary for us to observe the real value and
authority of association in the moral system, and how ideas of actual
beauty may be affected by it, otherwise we shall be liable to
embarrassment throughout the whole of the succeeding argument.
Association is of two kinds. Rational and accidental. By rational
association I understand the interest which any object may bear
historically as having been in some way connected with the affairs or
affections of men; an interest shared in the minds of all who are aware
of such connection: which to call beauty is mere and gross confusion of
terms, it is no theory to be confuted, but a misuse of language to be
set aside, a misuse involving the positions that in uninhabited
countries the vegetation has no grace, the rock no dignity, the cloud no
color, and that the snowy summits of the Alps receive no loveliness from
the sunset light, because they have not been polluted by the wrath,
ravage, and misery of men.
Sec. 9. Association accidental. The extent of its influence.
By accidental association, I understand the accidental connection of
ideas and memories with material things, owing to which those material
things are regarded as agreeable or otherwise, according to the nature
of the feelings or recollections they summon; the association being
commonly involuntary and oftentimes so vague as that no distinct image
is suggested by the object, but we feel a painfulness in it or pleasure
from it, without knowing wherefore. Of this operation of the mind (which
is that of which I spoke as causing inextricable embarrassments on the
subject of beauty) the experience is constant, so that its more
energetic manifestations require no illustration. But I do not think
that the minor degrees and shades of this great influence have been
sufficiently appreciated. Not only all vivid emotions and all
circumstances of exciting interest leave their light and shadow on the
senseless things and instruments among which or through whose agency
they have been felt or learned, but I believe that the eye cannot rest
on a material form, in a moment of depression or exultation, without
communicating to that form a spirit and a life, a life which will make
it afterwards in some degree loved or feared, a charm or a painfulness
for which we shall be unable to account even to ourselves, which will
not indeed be perceptible, except by its delicate influence on our
judgment in cases of complicated beauty. Let the eye but rest on a rough
piece of branch of curious form during a conversation with a friend,
rest, however, unconsciously, and though the conversation be forgotten,
though every circumstance connected with it be as utterly lost to the
memory as though it had not been, yet the eye will, through the whole
life after, take a certain pleasure in such boughs which it had not
before, a pleasure so slight, a trace of feeling so delicate as to
leave us utterly unconscious of its peculiar power, but undestroyable by
any reasoning, a part, thenceforward, of our constitution, destroyable
only by the same arbitrary process of association by which it was
created. Reason has no effect upon it whatsoever. And there is probably
no one opinion which is formed by any of us, in matters of taste, which
is not in some degree influenced by unconscious association of this
kind. In many who have no definite rules of judgment, preference is
decided by little else, and thus, unfortunately, its operations are
mistaken for, or rather substituted for, those of inherent beauty, and
its real position and value in the moral system is in a great measure
overlooked.
Sec. 10. The dignity of its function.
For I believe that mere pleasure and pain have less associative power
than duty performed or omitted, and that the great use of the
associative faculty is not to add beauty to material things, but to add
force to the conscience. But for this external and all-powerful witness,
the voice of the inward guide might be lost in each particular instance,
almost as soon as disobeyed; the echo of it in after time, whereby,
though perhaps feeble as warning, it becomes powerful as punishment,
might be silenced, and the strength of the protection pass away in the
lightness of the lash. Therefore it has received the power of enlisting
external and unmeaning things in its aid, and transmitting to all that
is indifferent, its own authority to reprove or reward, so that, as we
travel the way of life, we have the choice, according to our working, of
turning all the voices of nature into one song of rejoicing, and all her
lifeless creatures into a glad company, whereof the meanest shall be
beautiful in our eyes, by its kind message, or of withering and
quenching her sympathy into a fearful, withdrawn, silence of
condemnation, or into a crying out of her stones, and a shaking of her
dust against us. Nor is it any marvel that the theoretic faculty should
be overpowered by this momentous operation, and the indifferent appeals
and inherent glories of external things in the end overlooked, when the
perfection of God's works is felt only as the sweetness of his promises,
and their admirableness only as the threatenings of his power.
Sec. 11. How it is connected with impressions of beauty.
But it is evident that the full exercise of this noble function of the
associative faculty is inconsistent with absolute and incontrovertible
conclusions on subjects of theoretic preference. For it is quite
impossible for any individual to distinguish in himself the unconscious
underworking of indefinite association, peculiar to him individually,
from those great laws of choice under which he is comprehended with all
his race. And it is well for us that it is so, the harmony of God's good
work is not in us interrupted by this mingling of universal and peculiar
principles; for by these such difference is secured in the feelings as
shall make fellowship itself more delightful, by its inter-communicate
character, and such variety of feeling also in each of us separately as
shall make us capable of enjoying scenes of different kinds and orders,
instead of morbidly seeking for some perfect epitome of the beautiful in
one; and also that deadening by custom of theoretic impressions to which
I have above alluded, is counterbalanced by the pleasantness of acquired
association; and the loss of the intense feeling of the youth, which
"had no need of a remoter charm, by thought supplied, or any interest,
unborrowed from the eye," is replaced by the gladness of conscience, and
the vigor of the reflecting and imaginative faculties, as they take
their wide and aged grasp of the great relations between the earth and
its dead people.
Sec. 12. And what caution it renders necessary in the examination of them.
In proportion therefore to the value, constancy, and efficiency of this
influence, we must be modest and cautious in the pronouncing of positive
opinions on the subject of beauty. For every one of us has peculiar
sources of enjoyment necessarily opened to him in certain scenes and
things, sources which are sealed to others, and we must be wary on the
one hand, of confounding these in ourselves with ultimate conclusions of
taste, and so forcing them upon all as authoritative, and on the other
of supposing that the enjoyments of others which we cannot share are
shallow or unwarrantable, because incommunicable. I fear, for instance,
that in the former portion of this work I may have attributed too much
community and authority to certain affections of my own for scenery
inducing emotions of wild, impetuous, and enthusiastic characters, and
too little to those which I perceive in others for things peaceful,
humble, meditative, and solemn. So also between youth and age there will
be found differences of seeking, which are not wrong, nor of false
choice in either, but of different temperament, the youth sympathizing
more with the gladness, fulness, and magnificence of things, and the
gray hairs with their completion, sufficiency and repose. And so,
neither condemning the delights of others, nor altogether distrustful of
our own, we must advance, as we live on, from what is brilliant to what
is pure, and from what is promised to what is fulfilled, and from what
is our strength to what is our crown, only observing in all things how
that which is indeed wrong, and to be cut up from the root, is dislike,
and not affection. For by the very nature of these beautiful qualities,
which I have defined to be the signature of God upon his works, it is
evident that in whatever we altogether dislike, we see not all; that the
keenness of our vision is to be tested by the expansiveness of our love,
and that as far as the influence of association has voice in the
question, though it is indeed possible that the inevitable painfulness
of an object, for which we can render no sufficient reason, may be owing
to its recalling of a sorrow, it is more probably dependent on its
accusation of a crime.
CHAPTER V.
OF TYPICAL BEAUTY:--FIRST, OF INFINITY, OR THE TYPE OF DIVINE
INCOMPREHENSIBILITY.
Sec. 1. Impossibility of adequately treating the subject.
The subject being now in some measure cleared of embarrassment, let us
briefly distinguish those qualities or types on whose combination is
dependent the power of mere material loveliness. I pretend neither to
enumerate nor perceive them all, for it may be generally observed that
whatever good there may be, desirable by man, more especially good
belonging to his moral nature, there will be a corresponding
agreeableness in whatever external object reminds him of such good,
whether it remind him by arbitrary association or by typical
resemblance, and that the infinite ways, whether by reason or experience
discoverable, by which matter in some sort may remind us of moral
perfections, are hardly within any reasonable limits to be explained, if
even by any single mind they might all be traced. Yet certain palpable
and powerful modes there are, by observing which, we may come at such
general conclusions on the subject as may be practically useful, and
more than these I shall not attempt to obtain.
Sec. 2. With what simplicity of feeling to be approached.
And first, I would ask of the reader to enter upon the subject with me,
as far as may be, as a little child, ridding himself of all conventional
and authoritative thoughts, and especially of such associations as arise
from his respect for Pagan art, or which are in any way traceable to
classical readings. I recollect that Mr. Alison traces his first
perceptions of beauty in external nature to this most corrupt source,
thus betraying so total and singular a want of natural sensibility as
may well excuse the deficiencies of his following arguments. For there
was never yet the child of any promise (so far as the theoretic
faculties are concerned) but awaked to the sense of beauty with the
first gleam of reason; and I suppose there are few, among those who love
nature otherwise than by profession and at second-hand, who look not
back to their youngest and least-learned days as those of the most
intense, superstitious, insatiable, and beatific perception of her
splendors. And the bitter decline of this glorious feeling, though many
note it not, partly owing to the cares and weight of manhood, which
leave them not the time nor the liberty to look for their lost treasure,
and partly to the human and divine affections which are appointed to
take its place, yet has formed the subject not indeed of lamentation,
but of holy thankfulness for the witness it bears to the immortal origin
and end of our nature, to one whose authority is almost without appeal
in all questions relating to the influence of external things upon the
pure human soul.
"Heaven lies about us in our infancy,--
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing boy.
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows
He sees it in his joy.
The youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is nature's priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended.
At length the Man perceives it die away
And fade into the light of common day."
And if it were possible for us to recollect all the unaccountable and
happy instincts of the careless time, and to reason upon them with the
maturer judgment, we might arrive at more rapid and right results than
either the philosophy or the sophisticated practice of art have yet
attained. But we lose the perceptions before we are capable of
methodizing or comparing them.
Sec. 3. The child instinct respecting space.
Sec. 4. Continued in after life.
One, however, of these child instincts, I believe that few forget; the
emotion, namely, caused by all open ground, or lines of any spacious
kind against the sky, behind which there might be conceived the sea. It
is an emotion more pure than that caused by the sea itself, for I
recollect distinctly running down behind the banks of a high beach to
get their land line cutting against the sky, and receiving a more
strange delight from this than from the sight of the ocean: I am not
sure that this feeling is common to all children, (or would be common if
they were all in circumstances admitting it), but I have ascertained it
to be frequent among those who possess the most vivid sensibilities for
nature; and I am certain that the modification of it, which belongs to
our after years, is common to all, the love, namely, of a light
distance appearing over a comparatively dark horizon. This I have tested
too frequently to be mistaken, by offering to indifferent spectators
forms of equal abstract beauty in half tint, relieved, the one against
dark sky, the other against a bright distance. The preference is
invariably given to the latter, and it is very certain that this
preference arises not from any supposition of there being greater truth
in this than the other, for the same preference is unhesitatingly
accorded to the same effect in nature herself. Whatever beauty there may
result from effects of light on foreground objects, from the dew of the
grass, the flash of the cascade, the glitter of the birch trunk, or the
fair daylight hues of darker things, (and joyfulness there is in all of
them), there is yet a light which the eye invariably seeks with a deeper
feeling of the beautiful, the light of the declining or breaking day,
and the flakes of scarlet cloud burning like watch-fires in the green
sky of the horizon; a deeper feeling, I say, not perhaps more acute, but
having more of spiritual hope and longing, less of animal and present
life, more manifest, invariably, in those of more serious and determined
mind, (I use the word serious, not as being opposed to cheerful, but to
trivial and volatile;) but, I think, marked and unfailing even in those
of the least thoughtful dispositions. I am willing to let it rest on the
determination of every reader, whether the pleasure which he has
received from these effects of calm and luminous distance be not the
most singular and memorable of which he has been conscious, whether all
that is dazzling in color, perfect in form, gladdening in expression, be
not of evanescent and shallow appealing, when compared with the still
small voice of the level twilight behind purple hills, or the scarlet
arch of dawn over the dark, troublous-edged sea.
Sec. 5. Whereto this instinct is traceable.
Let us try to discover that which effects of this kind possess or
suggest, peculiar to themselves, and which other effects of light and
color possess not. There _must_ be something in them of a peculiar
character, and that, whatever it be, must be one of the primal and most
earnest motives of beauty to human sensation.
Do they show finer characters of form than can be developed by the
broader daylight? Not so; for their power is almost independent of the
forms they assume or display; it matters little whether the bright
clouds be simple or manifold, whether the mountain line be subdued or
majestic, the fairer forms of earthly things are by them subdued and
disguised, the round and muscular growth of the forest trunks is sunk
into skeleton lines of quiet shade, the purple clefts of the hill-side
are labyrinthed in the darkness, the orbed spring and whirling wave of
the torrent have given place to a white, ghastly, interrupted gleaming.
Have they more perfection or fulness of color? Not so; for their effect
is oftentimes deeper when their hues are dim, than when they are
blazoned with crimson and pale gold; and assuredly, in the blue of the
rainy sky, in the many tints of morning flowers, in the sunlight on
summer foliage and field, there are more sources of mere sensual
color-pleasure than in the single streak of wan and dying light. It is
not then by nobler form, it is not by positiveness of hue, it is not by
intensity of light, (for the sun itself at noonday is effectless upon
the feelings,) that this strange distant space possesses its attractive
power. But there is one thing that it has, or suggests, which no other
object of sight suggests in equal degree, and that is,--Infinity. It is
of all visible things the least material, the least finite, the farthest
withdrawn from the earth prison-house, the most typical of the nature of
God, the most suggestive of the glory of his dwelling-place. For the sky
of night, though we may know it boundless, is dark, it is a studded
vault, a roof that seems to shut us in and down, but the bright distance
has no limit, we feel its infinity, as we rejoice in its purity of
light.
Sec. 6. Infinity how necessary in art.
Now not only is this expression of infinity in distance most precious
wherever we find it, however solitary it may be, and however unassisted
by other forms and kinds of beauty, but it is of that value that no such
other forms will altogether recompense us for its loss; and much as I
dread the enunciation of anything that may seem like a conventional
rule, I have no hesitation in asserting, that no work of any art, in
which this expression of infinity is possible, can be perfect, or
supremely elevated without it, and that in proportion to its presence,
it will exalt and render impressive even the most tame and trivial
themes. And I think if there be any one grand division, by which it is
at all possible to set the productions of painting, so far as their
mere plan or system is concerned, on our right and left hands, it is
this of light and dark background, of heaven light or of object light.
For I know not any truly great painter of any time, who manifests not
the most intense pleasure in the luminous space of his backgrounds, or
who ever sacrifices this pleasure where the nature of his subject admits
of its attainment, as on the other hand I know not that the habitual use
of dark backgrounds can be shown as having ever been co-existent with
pure or high feeling, and, except in the case of Rembrandt, (and then
under peculiar circumstances only,) with any high power of intellect. It
is however necessary carefully to observe the following modifications of
this broad principle.
Sec. 7. Conditions of its necessity.
The absolute necessity, for such indeed I consider it, is of no more
than such a mere luminous distant point as may give to the feelings a
species of escape from all the finite objects about them. There is a
spectral etching of Rembrandt, a presentation of Christ in the temple,
where the figure of a robed priest stands glaring by its gems out of the
gloom, holding a crosier. Behind it there is a subdued window light seen
in the opening between two columns, without which the impressiveness of
the whole subject would, I think, be incalculably brought down. I cannot
tell whether I am at present allowing too much weight to my own fancies
and predilections, but without so much escape into the outer air and
open heaven as this, I can take permanent pleasure in no picture.
Sec. 8. And connected analogies.
And I think I am supported in this feeling by the unanimous practice, if
not the confessed opinion, of all artists. The painter of portrait is
unhappy without his conventional white stroke under the sleeve, or
beside the arm-chair; the painter of interiors feels like a caged bird,
unless he can throw a window open, or set the door ajar; the landscapist
dares not lose himself in forest without a gleam of light under its
farthest branches, nor ventures out in rain, unless he may somewhere
pierce to a better promise in the distance, or cling to some closing gap
of variable blue above;--escape, hope, infinity, by whatever
conventionalism sought, the desire is the same in all, the instinct
constant, it is no mere point of light that is wanted in the etching of
Rembrandt above instanced, a gleam of armor or fold of temple curtain
would have been utterly valueless, neither is it liberty, for though we
cut down hedges and level hills, and give what waste and plain we
choose, on the right hand and the left, it is all comfortless and
undesired, so long as we cleave not a way of escape forward; and however
narrow and thorny and difficult the nearer path, it matters not, so only
that the clouds open for us at its close. Neither will any amount of
beauty in nearer form, make us content to stay with it, so long as we
are shut down to that alone, nor is any form so cold or so hurtful but
that we may look upon it with kindness, so only that it rise against the
infinite hope of light beyond. The reader can follow out the analogies
of this unassisted.
Sec. 9. How the dignity of treatment is proportioned to the expression of
infinity.
But although this narrow portal of escape be all that is absolutely
necessary, I think that the dignity of the painting increases with the
extent and amount of the expression. With the earlier and mightier
painters of Italy, the practice is commonly to leave their distance of
pure and open sky, of such simplicity, that it in nowise shall interfere
with or draw the attention from the interest of the figures, and of such
purity, that especially towards the horizon, it shall be in the highest
degree expressive of the infinite space of heaven. I do not mean to say
that they did this with any occult or metaphysical motives. They did it,
I think, with the child-like, unpretending simplicity of all earnest
men; they did what they loved and felt; they sought what the heart
naturally seeks, and gave what it most gratefully receives; and I look
to them as in all points of principle (not, observe, of knowledge or
empirical attainment) as the most irrefragable authorities, precisely on
account of the child-like innocence, which never deemed itself
authoritative, but acted upon desire, and not upon dicta, and sought for
sympathy, not for admiration.
Sec. 10. Examples among the Southern schools.
And so we find the same simple and sweet treatment, the open sky, the
tender, unpretending, horizontal white clouds, the far winding and
abundant landscape, in Giotto, Taddeo Gaddi, Laurati, Angelico, Benozzo,
Ghirlandajo, Francia, Perogino, and the young Raffaelle, the first
symptom of conventionality appearing in Perugino, who, though with
intense feeling of light and color he carried the glory of his luminous
distance far beyond all his predecessors, began at the same time to use
a somewhat morbid relief of his figures against the upper sky. Thus in
the Assumption of the Florentine Academy, in that of l'Annunziata; and
of the Gallery of Bologna, in all which pictures the lower portions are
incomparably the finest, owing to the light distance behind the heads.
Raffaelle, in his fall, betrayed the faith he had received from his
father and his master, and substituted for the radiant sky of the
Madonna del Cardellino, the chamber-wall of the Madonna della
Sediola--and the brown wainscot of the Baldacchino. Yet it is curious to
observe how much of the dignity even of his later pictures, depends on
such portions as the green light of the lake, and sky behind the rocks,
in the St. John of the tribune, and how the repainted distortion of the
Madonna dell' Impannata, is redeemed into something like elevated
character, merely by the light of the linen window from which it takes
its name.
Sec. 11. Among the Venetians.
That which by the Florentines was done in pure simplicity of heart, was
done by the Venetians with intense love of the color and splendor of the
sky itself, even to the frequent sacrificing of their subject to the
passion of its distance. In Carpaccio, John Bellini, Giorgione, Titian,
Veronese, and Tintoret, the preciousness of the luminous sky, so far as
it might be at all consistent with their subject, is nearly constant;
abandoned altogether in portraiture only, seldom even there, and never
with advantage. Titian and Veronese, who had less exalted feeling than
the others, affording a few instances of exception, the latter
overpowering his silvery distances with foreground splendor, the other
sometimes sacrificing them to a luscious fulness of color, as in the
Flagellation in the Louvre, by a comparison of which with the unequalled
majesty of the Entombment opposite, the whole power and applicability of
the general principle may at once be tested.
Sec. 12. Among the painters of landscape.
But of the value of this mode of treatment there is a farther and more
convincing proof than its adoption either by the innocence of the
Florentine or the ardor of the Venetian, namely, that when retained or
imitated from them by the landscape painters of the seventeenth
century, when appearing in isolation from all other good, among the
weaknesses and paltrinesses of Claude, the mannerisms of Gaspar, and the
caricatures and brutalities of Salvator, it yet redeems and upholds all
three, conquers all foulness by its purity, vindicates all folly by its
dignity, and puts an uncomprehended power of permanent address to the
human heart, upon the lips of the senseless and the profane.[13]
Sec. 13. Other modes in which the power of infinity is felt.
Sec. 14. The beauty of curvature.
Now, although I doubt not that the general value of this treatment will
be acknowledged by all lovers of art, it is not certain that the point
to prove which I have brought it forward, will be as readily conceded,
namely, the inherent power of all representations of infinity over the
human heart; for there are, indeed, countless associations of pure and
religious kind, which combine with each other to enhance the impression,
when presented in this particular form, whose power I neither deny nor
am careful to distinguish, seeing that they all tend to the same Divine
point, and have reference to heavenly hopes; delights they are in seeing
the narrow, black, miserable earth fairly compared with the bright
firmament, reachings forward unto the things that are before, and
joyfulness in the apparent though unreachable nearness and promise of
them. But there are other modes in which infinity may be represented,
which are confused by no associations of the kind, and which would, as
being in mere matter, appear trivial and mean, but for their
incalculable influence on the forms of all that we feel to be beautiful.
The first of these is the curvature of lines and surfaces, wherein it at
first appears futile to insist upon any resemblance or suggestion of
infinity, since there is certainly in our ordinary contemplation of it,
no sensation of the kind. But I have repeated again and again that the
ideas of beauty are instinctive, and that it is only upon consideration,
and even then in doubtful and disputable way, that they appear in their
typical character; neither do I intend at all to insist upon the
particular meaning which they appear to myself to bear, but merely on
their actual and demonstrable agreeableness, so that, in the present
case, while I assert positively, and have no fear of being able to
prove, that a curve of any kind is more beautiful than a right line, I
leave it to the reader to accept or not, as he pleases, that reason of
its agreeableness, which is the only one that I can at all trace,
namely, that every curve divides itself infinitely by its changes of
direction.
Sec. 15. How constant in external nature.
That all forms of acknowledged beauty are composed exclusively of curves
will, I believe, be at once allowed; but that which there will be need
more especially to prove, is the subtilty and constancy of curvature in
all natural forms whatsoever. I believe that, except in crystals, in
certain mountain forms admitted for the sake of sublimity or contrast,
(as in the slope of debris,) in rays of light, in the levels of calm
water and alluvial land, and in some few organic developments, there are
no lines nor surfaces of nature without curvature, though as we before
saw in clouds, more especially in their under lines towards the horizon,
and in vast and extended plains, right lines are often suggested which
are not actual. Without these we could not be sensible of the value of
the contrasting curves, and while, therefore, for the most part, the eye
is fed in natural forms with a grace of curvature which no hand nor
instrument can follow, other means are provided to give beauty to those
surfaces which are admitted for contrast, as in water by its reflection
of the gradations which it possesses not itself. In freshly-broken
ground, which nature has not yet had time to model, in quarries and
pits which are none of her cutting, in those convulsions and evidences
of convulsion, of whose influence on ideal landscape I shall presently
have occasion to speak, and generally in all ruin and disease, and
interference of one order of being with another, (as in the cattle line
of park trees,) the curves vanish, and violently opposed or broken and
unmeaning lines take their place.
Sec. 16. The beauty of gradation.
What curvature is to lines, gradation is to shades and colors. It is
_there_ infinity, and divides them into an infinite number of degrees.
Absolutely, without gradation no natural surface can possibly be, except
under circumstances of so rare conjunction as to amount to a lusus
naturae; for we have seen that few surfaces are without curvature, and
every curved surface must be gradated by the nature of light, which is
most intense when it impinges at the highest angle, and for the
gradation of the few plane surfaces that exist, means are provided in
local color, aerial perspective, reflected lights, etc., from which it
is but barely conceivable that they should ever escape. Hence for
instances of the complete absence of gradation we must look to man's
work, or to his disease and decrepitude. Compare the gradated colors of
the rainbow with the stripes of a target, and the gradual concentration
of the youthful blood in the cheek with an abrupt patch of rouge, or
with the sharply drawn veining of old age.
Sec. 17. How found in Nature.
Gradation is so inseparable a quality of all natural shade and color
that the eye refuses in art to understand anything as either, which
appears without it, while on the other hand nearly all the gradations of
nature are so subtile and between degrees of tint so slightly separated,
that no human hand can in any wise equal, or do anything more than
suggest the idea of them. In proportion to the space over which
gradation extends, and to its invisible subtilty, is its grandeur, and
in proportion to its narrow limits and violent degrees, its vulgarity.
In Correggio, it is morbid and vulgar in spite of its refinement of
execution, because the eye is drawn to it, and it is made the most
observable and characteristic part of the picture; whereas natural
gradation is forever escaping observation to that degree that the
greater part of artists in working from nature see it not, (except in
certain of its marked developments,) but either lay down such
continuous lines and colors, as are both disagreeable and impossible,
or, receiving the necessity of gradation as a principle instead of a
fact, use it in violently exaggerated measure, and so lose both the
dignity of their own work, and by the constant dwelling of their eyes
upon exaggerations, their sensibility to that of the natural forms. So
that we find the majority of painters divided between the two evil
extremes of insufficiency and affectation, and only a few of the
greatest men capable of making gradation constant and yet extended over
enormous spaces and within degrees of narrow difference, as in the body
of a high light.
Sec. 18. How necessary in Art.
From the necessity of gradation results what is commonly given as a rule
of art, though its authority as a rule obtains only from its being a
fact of nature, that the extremes of high light and pure color, can
exist only in points. The common rules respecting sixths and eighths,
held concerning light and shade, are entirely absurd and conventional;
according to the subject and the effect of light, the greater part of
the picture will be or ought to be light or dark; but that principle
which is not conventional, is that of all light, however high, there is
some part that is higher than the rest, and that of all color, however
pure, there is some part that is purer than the rest, and that generally
of all shade, however deep, there is some part deeper than the rest,
though this last fact is frequently sacrificed in art, owing to the
narrowness of its means. But on the right gradation or focussing of
light and color depends in great measure, the value of both. Of this, I
have spoken sufficiently in pointing out the singular constancy of it in
the works of Turner. Part II. Sect. II. Chap. II. Sec. 17. And it is
generally to be observed that even raw and valueless color, if rightly
and subtilely gradated will in some measure stand for light, and that
the most transparent and perfect hue will be in some measure
unsatisfactory, if entirely unvaried. I believe the early skies of
Raffaelle owe their luminousness more to their untraceable and subtile
gradation than to inherent quality of hue.
Sec. 19. Infinity not rightly implied by vastness.
Such are the expressions of infinity which we find in creation, of which
the importance is to be estimated, rather by their frequency than their
distinctness. Let, however, the reader bear constantly in mind that I
insist not on his accepting any interpretation of mine, but only on his
dwelling so long on those objects, which he perceives to be beautiful,
as to determine whether the qualities to which I trace their beauty, be
necessarily there or no. Farther expressions of infinity there are in
the mystery of nature, and in some measure in her vastness, but these
are dependent on our own imperfections, and therefore, though they
produce sublimity, they are unconnected with beauty. For that which we
foolishly call vastness is, rightly considered, not more wonderful, not
more impressive, than that which we insolently call littleness, and the
infinity of God is not mysterious, it is only unfathomable, not
concealed, but incomprehensible: it is a clear infinity, the darkness of
the pure unsearchable sea.
FOOTNOTES
[13] In one of the smaller rooms of the Pitti palace, over the door,
is a temptation of St. Anthony, by Salvator, wherein such power as
the artist possessed is fully manifested, with little,
comparatively, that is offensive. It is a vigorous and ghastly
thought, in that kind of horror which is dependent on scenic effect,
perhaps unrivalled, and I shall have occasion to refer to it again
in speaking of the powers of imagination. I allude to it here,
because the sky of the distance affords a remarkable instance of the
power of light at present under discussion. It is formed of flakes
of black cloud, with rents and openings of intense and lurid green,
and at least half of the impressiveness of the picture depends on
these openings. Close them, make the sky one mass of gloom, and the
spectre will be awful no longer. It owes to the light of the
distance both its size and its spirituality. The time would fail me
if I were to name the tenth part of the pictures which occur to me,
whose vulgarity is redeemed by this circumstance alone, and yet let
not the artist trust to such morbid and conventional use of it as
may be seen in the common blue and yellow effectism of the present
day. Of the value of moderation and simplicity in the use of this,
as of all other sources of pleasurable emotion, I shall presently
have occasion to speak farther.
CHAPTER VI.
OF UNITY, OR THE TYPE OF THE DIVINE COMPREHENSIVENESS.
Sec. 1. The general conception of divine Unity.
"All things," says Hooker, "(God only excepted,) besides the nature
which they have in themselves, receive externally some perfection from
other things." Hence the appearance of separation or isolation in
anything, and of self-dependence, is an appearance of imperfection: and
all appearances of connection and brotherhood are pleasant and right,
both as significative of perfection in the things united, and as typical
of that Unity which we attribute to God, and of which our true
conception is rightly explained and limited by Dr. Brown in his XCII.
lecture; that Unity which consists not in his own singleness or
separation, but in the necessity of his inherence in all things that be,
without which no creature of any kind could hold existence for a moment.
Which necessity of Divine essence I think it better to speak of as
comprehensiveness, than as unity, because unity is often understood in
the sense of oneness or singleness, instead of universality, whereas the
only Unity which by any means can become grateful or an object of hope
to men, and whose types therefore in material things can be beautiful,
is that on which turned the last words and prayer of Christ before his
crossing of the Kidron brook. "Neither pray I for these alone, but for
them also which shall believe on me through their word. That they all
may be one, as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee."
Sec. 2. The glory of all things is their Unity.
And so there is not any matter, nor any spirit, nor any creature, but it
is capable of an unity of some kind with other creatures, and in that
unity is its perfection and theirs, and a pleasure also for the
beholding of all other creatures that can behold. So the unity of
spirits is partly in their sympathy, and partly in their giving and
taking, and always in their love; and these are their delight and their
strength, for their strength is in their co-working and army fellowship,
and their delight is in the giving and receiving of alternate and
perpetual currents of good, their inseparable dependency on each other's
being, and their essential and perfect depending on their Creator's: and
so the unity of earthly creatures is their power and their peace, not
like the dead and cold peace of undisturbed stones and solitary
mountains, but the living peace of trust, and the living power of
support, of hands that hold each other and are still: and so the unity
of matter is, in its noblest form, the organization of it which builds
it up into temples for the spirit, and in its lower form, the sweet and
strange affinity, which gives to it the glory of its orderly elements,
and the fair variety of change and assimilation that turns the dust into
the crystal, and separates the waters that be above the firmament from
the waters that be beneath, and in its lowest form; it is the working
and walking and clinging together that gives their power to the winds,
and its syllables and soundings to the air, and their weight to the
waves, and their burning to the sunbeams, and their stability to the
mountains, and to every creature whatsoever operation is for its glory
and for others good.
Now of that which is thus necessary to the perfection of all things, all
appearance, sign, type, or suggestion must be beautiful, in whatever
matter it may appear. And so to the perfection of beauty in lines, or
colors, or forms, or masses, or multitudes, the appearance of some
species of unity is in the most determined sense of the word essential.
Sec. 3. The several kinds of unity. Subjectional. Original. Of sequence,
and of membership.
But of the appearances of unity, as of unity itself, there are several
kinds which it will be found hereafter convenient to consider
separately. Thus there is the unity of different and separate things,
subjected to one and the same influence, which may be called
subjectional unity, and this is the unity of the clouds, as they are
driven by the parallel winds, or as they are ordered by the electric
currents, and this the unity of the sea waves, and this of the bending
and undulation of the forest masses, and in creatures capable of will it
is the unity of will or of inspiration. And there is unity of origin,
which we may call original unity, which is of things arising from one
spring and source, and speaking always of this their brotherhood, and
this in matter is the unity of the branches of the trees, and of the
petals and starry rays of flowers, and of the beams of light, and in
spiritual creatures it is their filial relation to Him from whom they
have their being. And there is unity of sequence, which is that of
things that form links in chains, and steps in ascent, and stages in
journeys, and this, in matter, is the unity of communicable forces in
their continuance from one thing to another, and it is the passing
upwards and downwards of beneficent effects among all things, and it is
the melody of sounds, and the beauty of continuous lines, and the
orderly succession of motions and times. And in spiritual creatures it
is their own constant building up by true knowledge and continuous
reasoning to higher perfection, and the singleness and
straight-forwardness of their tendencies to more complete communion with
God. And there is the unity of membership, which we may call essential
unity, which is the unity of things separately imperfect into a perfect
whole, and this is the great unity of which other unities are but parts
and means, it is in matter the harmony of sounds and consistency of
bodies, and among spiritual creatures, their love and happiness and very
life in God.
Sec. 4. Unity of membership. How secured.
Now of the nature of this last kind of unity, the most important whether
in moral or in those material things with which we are at present
concerned, there is this necessary to be observed, that it cannot exist
between things similar to each other. Two or more equal and like things
cannot be members one of another, nor can they form one, or a whole
thing. Two they must remain, both in nature and in our conception, so
long as they remain alike, unless they are united by a third different
from both. Thus the arms, which are like each other, remain two arms in
our conception. They could not be united by a third arm, they must be
united by something which is not an arm, and which, imperfect without
them as they without it, shall form one perfect body; nor is unity even
thus accomplished, without a difference and opposition of direction in
the setting on of the like members. Therefore among all things which are
to have unity of membership one with another, there must be difference
or variety; and though it is possible that many like things may be made
members of one body, yet it is remarkable that this structure appears
characteristic of the lower creatures, rather than the higher, as the
many legs of the caterpillar, and the many arms and suckers of the
radiata, and that, as we rise in order of being, the number of similar
members becomes less, and their structure commonly seems based on the
principle of the unity of two things by a third, as Plato has it in the
Timaeus, Sec. II.
Sec. 5. Variety. Why required.
Hence, out of the necessity of unity, arises that of variety, a
necessity often more vividly, though never so deeply felt, because lying
at the surfaces of things, and assisted by an influential principle of
our nature, the love of change, and the power of contrast. But it is a
mistake which has led to many unfortunate results, in matters respecting
art, to insist on any inherent agreeableness of variety, without
reference to a farther end. For it is not even true that variety as
such, and in its highest degree, is beautiful. A patched garment of many
colors is by no means so agreeable as one of a single and continuous
hue; the splendid colors of many birds are eminently painful from their
violent separation and inordinate variety, while the pure and colorless
swan is, under certain circumstances, the most beautiful of all
feathered creatures.[14] A forest of all manner of trees is poor, if not
disagreeable in effect,[15] a mass of one species of tree is sublime. It
is therefore only harmonious and chordal variety, that variety which is
necessary to secure and extend unity, (for the greater the number of
objects, which by their differences become members of one another, the
more extended and sublime is their unity,) which is rightly agreeable,
and so I name not variety as essential to beauty, because it is only so
in a secondary and casual sense.[16]
Sec. 6. Change, and its influence on beauty.
Sec. 7. The love of change. How morbid and evil.
Of the love of change as a principle of human nature, and the
pleasantness of variety resulting from it, something has already been
said, (Ch. IV. Sec. 4,) only as there I was opposing the idea that our
being familiar with objects was the cause of our delight in them, so
here, I have to oppose the contrary position, that their strangeness is
the cause of it. For neither familiarity nor strangeness have more
operation on, or connection with, impressions of one sense than of
another, and they have less power over the impressions of sense
generally, than over the intellect in its joyful accepting of fresh
knowledge, and dull contemplation of that it has long possessed. Only in
their operation on the senses they act contrarily at different times, as
for instance the newness of a dress or of some kind of unaccustomed food
may make it for a time delightful, but as the novelty passes away, so
also may the delight, yielding to disgust or indifference, which in
their turn, as custom begins to operate, may pass into affection and
craving, and that which was first a luxury, and then a matter of
indifference, becomes a necessity:[17] whereas in subjects of the
intellect, the chief delight they convey is dependent upon their being
newly and vividly comprehended, and as they become subjects of
contemplation they lose their value, and become tasteless and
unregarded, except as instruments for the reaching of others, only that
though they sink down into the shadowy, effectless, heap of things
indifferent, which we pack, and crush down, and stand upon, to reach
things new, they sparkle afresh at intervals as we stir them by throwing
a new stone into the heap, and letting the newly admitted lights play
upon them. And both in subjects of the intellect and the senses it is to
be remembered, that the love of change is a weakness and imperfection of
our nature, and implies in it the state of probation, and that it is to
teach us that things about us here are not meant for our continual
possession or satisfaction, that ever such passion of change was put in
us as that "custom lies upon us with a weight, heavy as frost, and deep
almost as life," and only such weak back and baby grasp given to our
intellect as that "the best things we do are painful, and the exercise
of them grievous, being continued without intermission, so as in those
very actions whereby we are especially perfected in this life we are not
able to persist." And so it will be found that they are the
weakest-minded and the hardest-hearted men that most love variety and
change, for the weakest-minded are those who both wonder most at things
new, and digest worst things old, in so far that everything they have
lies rusty, and loses lustre for want of use; neither do they make any
stir among their possessions, nor look over them to see what may be made
of them, nor keep any great store, nor are householders with storehouses
of things new and old, but they catch at the new-fashioned garments, and
let the moth and thief look after the rest; and the hardest-hearted men
are those that least feel the endearing and binding power of custom, and
hold on by no cords of affection to any shore, but drive with the waves
that cast up mire and dirt. And certainly it is not to be held that the
perception of beauty and desire of it, are greatest in the hardest heart
and weakest brain; but the love of variety is so, and therefore variety
can be no cause of the beautiful, except, as I have said, when it is
necessary for the perception of unity, neither is there any better test
of that which is indeed beautiful than its surviving or annihilating the
love of change; and this is a test which the best judges of art have
need frequently to use; and the wisest of them will use it always, for
there is much in art that surprises by its brilliancy, or attracts by
its singularity, that can hardly but by course of time, though assuredly
it will by course of time, be winnowed away from the right and real
beauty whose retentive power is forever on the increase, a bread of the
soul for which the hunger is continual.
Sec. 8. The conducting of variety towards unity of subjection.
Receiving, therefore, variety only as that which accomplishes unity, or
makes it perceived, its operation is found to be very precious, both in
that which I have called unity of subjection, and unity of sequence, as
well as in unity of membership; for although things in all respects the
same may, indeed, be subjected to one influence, yet the power of the
influence, and their obedience to it, is best seen by varied operation
of it on their individual differences, as in clouds and waves there is a
glorious unity of rolling, wrought out by the wild and wonderful
differences of their absolute forms, which, if taken away, would leave
in them only multitudinous and petty repetition, instead of the majestic
oneness of shared passion. And so in the waves and clouds of human
multitude when they are filled with one thought, as we find frequently
in the works of the early Italian men of earnest purpose, who despising,
or happily ignorant of, the sophistications of theories, and the
proprieties of composition, indicated by perfect similarity of action
and gesture on the one hand, and by the infinite and truthful variation
of expression on the other, the most sublime strength because the most
absorbing unity, of multitudinous passion that ever human heart
conceived. Hence, in the cloister of St. Mark's, the intense, fixed,
statue-like silence of ineffable adoration upon the spirits in prison at
the feet of Christ, side by side, the hands lifted, and the knees bowed,
and the lips trembling together;[18] and in St. Domenico of Fiesole,[19]
that whirlwind rush of the Angels and the redeemed souls round about him
at his resurrection, so that we hear the blast of the horizontal
trumpets mixed with the dying clangor of their ingathered wings. The
same great feeling occurs throughout the works of the serious men,
though most intensely in Angelico, and it is well to compare with it the
vileness and falseness of all that succeeded, when men had begun to
bring to the cross foot their systems instead of their sorrow. Take as
the most marked and degraded instance, perhaps, to be anywhere found,
Bronzino's treatment of the same subject (Christ visiting the spirits in
prison,) in the picture now in the Tuscan room of the Uffizii, which,
vile as it is in color, vacant in invention, void in light and shade, a
heap of cumbrous nothingnesses, and sickening offensivenesses, is of all
its voids most void in this, that the academy models therein huddled
together at the bottom, show not so much unity or community of attention
to the academy model with the flag in its hand above, as a street crowd
would be to a fresh-staged charlatan. Some _point_ to the God who has
burst the gates of death, as if the rest were incapable of
distinguishing him for themselves, and others turn their backs upon him,
to show their unagitated faces to the spectator.
Sec. 9. And towards unity of sequence.
In unity of sequence, the effect of variety is best exemplified by the
melodies of music, wherein by the differences of the notes, they are
connected with each other in certain pleasant relations. This connection
taking place in quantities is proportion, respecting which certain
general principles must be noted, as the subject is one open to many
errors, and obscurely treated of by writers on art.
Sec. 10. The nature of proportion. 1st, of apparent proportion.
Proportion is of two distinct kinds. Apparent: when it takes place
between qualities for the sake of connection only, without any ultimate
object or casual necessity; and constructive: when it has reference to
some function to be discharged by the quantities, depending on their
proportion. From the confusion of these two kinds of proportion have
arisen the greater part of the erroneous conceptions of the influence of
either.
Apparent proportion, or the sensible relation of quantities, is one of
the most important means of obtaining unity between things which
otherwise must have remained distinct in similarity, and as it may
consist with every other kind of unity, and persist when every other
means of it fails, it may be considered as lying at the root of most of
our impressions of the beautiful. There is no sense of rightness, or
wrongness connected with it, no sense of utility, propriety, or
expediency. These ideas enter only where the proportion of quantities
has reference to some function to be performed by them. It cannot be
asserted that it is right or that it is wrong that A should be to B, as
B to C; unless A, B, and C have some desirable operation dependent on
that relation. But nevertheless it may be highly agreeable to the eye
that A, B, and C, if visible things, should have visible connection of
ratio, even though nothing be accomplished by such connection. On the
other hand, constructive proportion, or the adaptation of quantities to
functions, is agreeable not to the eye, but to the mind, which is
cognizant of the function to be performed. Thus the pleasantness or
rightness of the proportions of a column depends not on the mere
relation of diameter and height, (which is not proportion at all, for
proportion is between three terms at least,) but on three other involved
terms, the strength of materials, the weight to be borne, and the scale
of the building. The proportions of a wooden column are wrong in a stone
one, and of a small building wrong in a large one,[20] and this owing
solely to mechanical considerations, which have no more to do with
ideas of beauty, than the relation between the arms of a lever, adapted
to the raising of a given weight; and yet it is highly agreeable to
perceive that such constructive proportion has been duly observed, as
it is agreeable to see that anything is fit for its purpose or for ours,
and also that it has been the result of intelligence in the workman of
it, so that we sometimes feel a pleasure in apparent non-adaptation, if
it be a sign of ingenuity; as in the unnatural and seemingly impossible
lightness of Gothic spires and roofs.
Now, the errors against which I would caution the reader in this matter
are three. The first, is the overlooking or denial of the power of
apparent proportion, of which power neither Burke nor any other writer
whose works I have met with, take cognizance. The second, is the
attribution of _beauty_ to the appearances of constructive proportion.
The third, the denial with Burke of _any_ value or agreeableness in
constructive proportion.
Sec. 11. The value of apparent proportion in curvature.
Now, the full proof of the influence of apparent proportion, I must
reserve for illustration by diagram; one or two instances however may be
given at present for the better understanding of its nature.
We have already asserted that all curves are more beautiful than right
lines. All curves, however, are not equally beautiful, and their
differences of beauty depend on the different proportions borne to each
other by those infinitely small right lines of which they may be
conceived as composed.
When these lines are equal and contain equal angles, there can be no
connection or unity of sequence in them. The resulting curve, the
circle, is therefore the least beautiful of all curves.
When the lines bear to each other some certain proportion; or when, the
lines remaining equal, the angles vary; or when by any means whatsoever,
and in whatever complicated modes, such differences as shall imply
connection are established between the infinitely small segments, the
resulting curves become beautiful. The simplest of the beautiful curves
are the conic, and the various spirals; but it is as rash as it is
difficult to endeavor to trace any ground of superiority or inferiority
among the infinite numbers of the higher curves. I believe that almost
all are beautiful in their own nature, and that their comparative beauty
depends on the constant quantities involved in their equations. Of this
point I shall speak hereafter at greater length.
Sec. 12. How by nature obtained.
The universal forces of nature, and the individual energies of the
matter submitted to them, are so appointed and balanced, that they are
continually bringing out curves of this kind in all visible forms, and
that circular lines become nearly impossible under any circumstances.
The gradual acceleration, for instance, of velocity, in streams that
descend from hill-sides, as it gradually increases their power of
erosion increases in the same gradual degree the rate of curvature in
the descent of the slope, until at a certain degree of steepness this
descent meets, and is concealed by the right line of the detritus. The
junction of this right line with the plain is again modified by the
farther bounding of the larger blocks, and by the successively
diminishing proportion of landslips caused by erosion at the bottom, so
that the whole line of the hill is one of curvature, first, gradually
increasing in rapidity to the maximum steepness of which the particular
rock is capable, and then decreasing in a decreasing ratio, until it
arrives at the plain level. This type of form, modified of course more
or less by the original boldness of the mountain, and dependent both on
its age, its constituent rock, and the circumstances of its exposure, is
yet in its general formula applicable to all. So the curves of all
things in motion, and of all organic forms, most rudely and simply in
the shell spirals, and in their most complicated development in the
muscular lines of the higher animals.
This influence of apparent proportion, a proportion, be it observed,
which has no reference to ultimate ends, but which is itself, seemingly,
the end and object of operation in many of the forces of nature, is
therefore at the root of all our delight in any beautiful form
whatsoever. For no form can be beautiful which is not composed of curves
whose unity is secured by relations of this kind.
Sec. 13. Apparent proportion in melodies of line.
Not only however in curvature, but in all associations of lines
whatsoever, it is desirable that there should be reciprocal relation,
and the eye is unhappy without perception of it. It is utterly vain to
endeavor to reduce this proportion to finite rules, for it is as various
as musical melody, and the laws to which it is subject are of the same
general kind, so that the determination of right or wrong proportion is
as much a matter of feeling and experience as the appreciation of good
musical composition; not but that there is a science of both, and
principles which may not be infringed, but that within these limits the
liberty of invention is infinite, and the degrees of excellence infinite
also, whence the curious error of Burke in imagining that because he
could not fix upon some one given proportion of lines as better than any
other, therefore proportion had no value nor influence at all, which is
the same as to conclude that there is no such thing as melody in music,
because there are melodies more than one.
Sec. 14. Error of Burke in this matter.
The argument of Burke on this subject is summed up in the following
words:--"Examine the head of a beautiful horse, find what proportion
that bears to his body and to his limbs, and what relations these have
to each other, and when you have settled these proportions, as a
standard of beauty, then take a dog or cat, or any other animal, and
examine how far the same proportions between their heads and their
necks, between those and the body, and so on, are found to hold; I think
we may safely say, that they differ in every species, yet that there are
individuals found in a great many species, so differing, that have a
very striking beauty. Now if it be allowed that very different, and even
contrary forms and dispositions, are consistent with beauty, it amounts,
I believe, to a concession, that no certain measures operating from a
natural principle are necessary to produce it, at least so far as the
brute species is concerned."
In this argument there are three very palpable fallacies: the first is
the rough application of measurement to the heads, necks, and limbs,
without observing the subtile differences of proportion and position of
parts in the members themselves, for it would be strange if the
different adjustment of the ears and brow in the dog and horse, did not
require a harmonizing difference of adjustment in the head and neck. The
second fallacy is that above specified, the supposition that proportion
cannot be beautiful if susceptible of variation, whereas the whole
meaning of the term has reference to the adjustment and functional
correspondence of infinitely variable quantities. And the third error is
the oversight of the very important fact, that, although "different and
even contrary forms and dispositions are consistent with beauty," they
are by no means consistent with equal _degrees_ of beauty, so that,
while we find in all the presence of such proportion and harmony of
form, as gifts them with positive agreeableness consistent with the
station and dignity of each, we perceive, also, such superiority of
proportion in some (as the horse, eagle, lion, and man for instance) as
may best be in harmony with the nobler functions and more exalted powers
of the animals.
Sec. 15. Constructive proportion. Its influence in plants.
And this allowed superiority of some animal forms to others is, in
itself argument against the second error above named, that of
attributing the sensation of beauty to the perception of expedient or
constructive proportion. For everything that God has made is equally
well constructed with reference to its intended functions. But all
things are not equally beautiful. The megatherium is absolutely as well
proportioned, with the view of adaptation of parts to purposes, as the
horse or the swan; but by no means so handsome as either. The fact is,
that the perception of expediency of proportion can but rarely affect
our estimates of beauty, for it implies a knowledge which we very rarely
and imperfectly possess, and the want of which we tacitly acknowledge.
Let us consider that instance of the proportion of the stalk of a plant
to its head, given by Burke. In order to judge of the expediency of this
proportion, we must know, First, the scale of the plant (for the smaller
the scale, the longer the stem may safely be). Secondly, the toughness
of the materials of the stem and the mode of their mechanical structure.
Thirdly, the specific gravity of the head. Fourthly, the position of the
head which the nature of fructification requires. Fifthly, the accidents
and influences to which the situation for which the plant was created is
exposed. Until we know all this, we cannot say that proportion or
disproportion exists, and because we cannot know all this, the idea of
expedient proportion enters but slightly into our impression of
vegetable beauty, but rather, since the existence of the plant proves
that these proportions have been observed, and we know that nothing but
our own ignorance prevents us from perceiving them, we take the
proportion on credit, and are delighted by the variety of results which
the Divine intelligence has attained in the various involutions of these
quantities, and perhaps most when, to outward appearance, such
proportions have been violated; more by the slenderness of the campanula
than the security of the pine.
Sec. 16. And animals.
What is obscure in plants, is utterly incomprehensible in animals, owing
to the greater number of means employed and functions performed. To
judge of expedient proportion in them, we must know all that each member
has to do, all its bones, all its muscles, and the amount of nervous
energy communicable to them; and yet, forasmuch as we have more
experience and instinctive sense of the strength of muscles than of
wood, and more practical knowledge of the use of a head or a foot than
of a flower or a stem, we are much more likely to presume upon our
judgment respecting proportions here, we are very apt to assert that the
plesiosaurus and camelopard have necks too long, that the turnspit has
legs too short, and the elephant a body too ponderous.
But the painfulness arising from the idea of this being the case is
occasioned partly by our sympathy with the animal, partly by our false
apprehension of incompletion in the Divine work,[21] nor in either case
has it any connection with impressions of that typical beauty of which
we are at present speaking; though some, perhaps, with that vital beauty
which will hereafter come under discussion.
Sec. 17. Summary.
I wish therefore the reader to hold, respecting proportion generally.
First, That apparent proportion, or the melodious connection of
quantities, is a cause of unity, and therefore one of the sources of all
beautiful form. Secondly, That constructive proportion is agreeable to
the mind when it is known or supposed, and that its seeming absence is
painful in a like degree, but that this pleasure and pain have nothing
in common with those dependent on ideas of beauty.
Farther illustrations of the value of unity I shall reserve for our
detailed examination, as the bringing them forward here would interfere
with the general idea of the subject-matter of the theoretic faculty
which I wish succinctly to convey.
FOOTNOTES
[14] Compare Chap. ix. Sec. 5, note.
[15] Spenser's various forest is the Forest of Error.
[16] It must be matter of no small wonderment to practical men to
observe how grossly the nature and connection of unity and variety
have been misunderstood and misstated, by those writers upon taste,
who have been guided by no experience of art; most singularly
perhaps by Mr. Alison, who, confounding unity with uniformity, and
leading his readers through thirty pages of discussion respecting
uniformity and variety, the intelligibility of which is not by any
means increased by his supposing uniformity to be capable of
existence in single things; at last substitutes for these two terms,
sufficiently contradictory already, those of similarity and
dissimilarity, the reconciliation of which opposites in one thing we
must, I believe, leave Mr. Alison to accomplish.
[17] [Greek: Kai to tauta prattein pollakis hedy;--to gar synethes
hedy en; kai to metaballein hedy; eis physin gar gignetai
metaballein.]--Arist. Rhet. I. II. 20.
[18] Fra Angelico's fresco, in a cell of the upper cloister. He
treated the subject frequently. Another characteristic example
occurs in the Vita di Christo of the Academy, a series now
unfortunately destroyed by the picture cleaners. Simon Memmi in
Santa Maria Novella (Chapelle des Espagnols) has given another very
beautiful instance. In Giotto the principle is universal, though his
multitudes are somewhat more dramatically and powerfully varied in
gesture than Angelico's. In Mino da Fiesole's altar-piece in the
church of St. Ambrogiot at Florence, close by Cosimo Rosselli's
fresco, there is a beautiful example in marble.
[19] The Predella of the picture behind the altar.
[20] It seems never to have been rightly understood, even by the
more intelligent among our architects, that proportion is in any way
connected with positive size; it seems to be held among them that a
small building may be expanded to a large one merely by
proportionally expanding all its parts: and that the harmony will be
equally agreeable on whatever scale it be rendered. Now this is true
of apparent proportion, but utterly false of constructive; and, as
much of the value of architectural proportion is constructive, the
error is often productive of the most painful results. It may be
best illustrated by observing the conditions of proportion in
animals. Many persons have thoughtlessly claimed admiration for the
strength--supposed gigantic--of insects and smaller animals; because
capable of lifting weights, leaping distances, and surmounting
obstacles, of proportion apparently overwhelming. Thus the Formica
Herculanea will lift in its mouth, and brandish like a baton, sticks
thicker than itself and six times its length, all the while
scrambling over crags of about the proportionate height of the
Cliffs of Dover, three or four in a minute. There is nothing
extraordinary in this, nor any exertion of strength necessarily
greater than human, in proportion to the size of the body. For it is
evident that if the size and strength of any creature be expanded or
diminished in proportion to each other, the distance through which
it can leap, the time it can maintain exertion, or any other third
term resultant, remains constant; that is, diminish weight of powder
and of ball proportionately, and the distance carried is constant or
nearly so. Thus, a grasshopper, a man, and a giant 100 feet high,
supposing their muscular strength equally proportioned to their
size, can or could all leap, not proportionate distance, but the
same or nearly the same distance--say, four feet the grasshopper, or
forty-eight times his length; six feet the man or his length
exactly; ten feet the giant or the tenth of his length. Hence all
small animals can, _coeteris paribus_, perform feats of strength
and agility, exactly so much greater than those to be executed by
large ones, as the animals themselves are smaller; and to enable an
elephant to leap like a grasshopper, he must be endowed with
strength a million times greater in _proportion_ to his size. Now
the consequence of this general mechanical law is, that as we
increase the scale of animals, their means of power, whether muscles
of motion or bones of support, must be increased in a more than
proportionate degree, or they become utterly unwieldy, and incapable
of motion;--and there is a limit to this increase of strength. If
the elephant had legs as long as a spider's, no combination of
animal matter that could be hide-bound would have strength enough to
move them: to support the megatherium, we must have a humerus a foot
in diameter, though perhaps not more than two feet long, and that in
a vertical position under him, while the gnat can hang on the window
frame, and poise himself to sting, in the middle of crooked stilts
like threads; stretched out to ten times the breadth of his body on
each side. Increase the size of the megatherium a little more, and
no phosphate of lime will bear him; he would crush his own legs to
powder. (Compare Sir Charles Bell, "Bridgewater Treatise on the
Hand," p. 296, and the note.) Hence there is not only a limit to the
size of animals, in the conditions of matter, but to their activity
also, the largest being always least capable of exertion; and this
would be the case to a far greater extent, but that nature
beneficently alters her proportions as she increases her scale;
giving, as we have seen, long legs and enormous wings to the smaller
tribes, and short and thick proportion to the larger. So in
vegetables--compare the stalk of an ear of oat, and the trunk of a
pine, the mechanical relations being in both the same. So also in
waves, of which the large never can be mere exaggerations of the
small, but have different slopes and curvatures: so in mountains and
all things else, necessarily, and from ordinary mechanical laws.
Whence in architecture, according to the scale of the building, its
proportions must be altered; and I have no hesitation in calling
that unmeaning exaggeration of parts in St. Peter's, of flutings,
volutes, friezes, etc., in the proportions of a smaller building, a
vulgar blunder, and one that destroys all the majesty that the
building ought to have had--and still more I should so call all
imitations and adaptations of large buildings on a small scale. The
true test of right proportion is that it shall itself inform us of
the scale of the building, and be such that even in a drawing it
shall instantly induce the conception of the actual size, or size
intended. I know not what Fuseli means by that aphorism of his:--
"Disproportion of parts is the element of hugeness--proportion, of
grandeur. All Gothic styles of Architecture are huge. The Greek
alone is grand." When a building _is_ vast, it ought to look so; and
the proportion is right which exhibits its vastness. Nature loses no
size by her proportion; her buttressed mountains have more of Gothic
than of Greek in them.
[21] For the just and severe reproof of which, compare Sir Charles
Bell, (on the hand,) pp. 31, 32.
CHAPTER VII.
OF REPOSE, OR THE TYPE OF DIVINE PERMANENCE.
Sec. 1. Universal feeling respecting the necessity of repose in art. Its
sources.
There is probably no necessity more imperatively felt by the artist, no
test more unfailing of the greatness of artistical treatment, than that
of the appearance of repose, and yet there is no quality whose semblance
in mere matter is more difficult to define or illustrate. Nevertheless,
I believe that our instinctive love of it, as well as the cause to which
I attribute that love, (although here also, as in the former cases, I
contend not for the interpretation, but for the fact,) will be readily
allowed by the reader. As opposed to passion, changefulness, or
laborious exertion, repose is the especial and separating characteristic
of the eternal mind and power; it is the "I am" of the Creator opposed
to the "I become" of all creatures; it is the sign alike of the supreme
knowledge which is incapable of surprise, the supreme power which is
incapable of labor, the supreme volition which is incapable of change;
it is the stillness of the beams of the eternal chambers laid upon the
variable waters of ministering creatures; and as we saw before that the
infinity which was a type of the Divine nature on the one hand, became
yet more desirable on the other from its peculiar address to our prison
hopes, and to the expectations of an unsatisfied and unaccomplished
existence, so the types of this third attribute of the Deity might seem
to have been rendered farther attractive to mortal instinct, through the
infliction upon the fallen creature of a curse necessitating a labor
once unnatural and still most painful, so that the desire of rest
planted in the heart is no sensual nor unworthy one, but a longing for
renovation and for escape from a state whose every phase is mere
preparation for another equally transitory, to one in which permanence
shall have become possible through perfection. Hence the great call of
Christ to men, that call on which St. Augustine fixed essential
expression of Christian hope, is accompanied by the promise of rest;[22]
and the death bequest of Christ to men is peace.
Sec. 2. Repose how expressed in matter.
Repose, as it is expressed in material things, is either a simple
appearance of permanence and quietness, as in the massy forms of a
mountain or rock, accompanied by the lulling effect of all mighty sight
and sound, which all feel and none define, (it would be less sacred if
more explicable,) [Greek: heudousin dioreon koruphai te kai pharanges],
or else it is repose proper, the rest of things in which there is
vitality or capability of motion actual or imagined; and with respect to
these the expression of repose is greater in proportion to the amount
and sublimity of the action which is not taking place, as well as to the
intensity of the negation of it. Thus we speak not of repose in a stone,
because the motion of a stone has nothing in it of energy nor vitality,
neither its repose of stability. But having once seen a great rock come
down a mountain side, we have a noble sensation of its rest, now bedded
immovably among the under fern, because the power and fearfulness of its
motion were great, and its stability and negation of motion are now
great in proportion. Hence the imagination, which delights in nothing
more than the enhancing of the characters of repose, effects this
usually by either attributing to things visibly energetic an ideal
stability, or to things visibly stable an ideal activity or vitality.
Hence Wordsworth, of the cloud, which in itself having too much of
changefulness for his purpose, is spoken of as one "that heareth not the
loud winds when they call, and moveth altogether, if it move at all."
And again of children, which, that it may remove from them the child
restlessness, the imagination conceives as rooted flowers "Beneath an
old gray oak, as violets, lie." On the other hand, the scattered rocks,
which have not, as such, vitality enough for rest, are gifted with it by
the living image: they "lie couched around us like a flock of sheep."
Sec. 3. The necessity to repose of an implied energy.
Thus, as we saw that unity demanded for its expression what at first
might have seemed its contrary (variety) so repose demands for its
expression the implied capability of its opposite, energy, and this even
in its lower manifestations, in rocks and stones and trees. By comparing
the modes in which the mind is disposed to regard the boughs of a fair
and vigorous tree, motionless in the summer air, with the effect
produced by one of these same boughs hewn square and used for threshold
or lintel, the reader will at once perceive the connection of vitality
with repose, and the part they both bear in beauty.
Sec. 4. Mental repose, how noble.
But that which in lifeless things ennobles them by seeming to indicate
life, ennobles higher creatures by indicating the exaltation of their
earthly vitality into a Divine vitality; and raising the life of sense
into the life of faith--faith, whether we receive it in the sense of
adherence to resolution, obedience to law, regardfulness of promise, in
which from all time it has been the test as the shield of the true being
and life of man, or in the still higher sense of trustfulness in the
presence, kindness, and word of God; in which form it has been exhibited
under the Christian dispensation. For whether in one or other form,
whether the faithfulness of men whose path is chosen and portion fixed,
in the following and receiving of that path and portion, as in the
Thermopylae camp; or the happier faithfulness of children in the good
giving of their Father, and of subjects in the conduct of their king, as
in the "Stand still and see the salvation of God" of the Red Sea shore,
there is rest and peacefulness, the "standing still" in both, the
quietness of action determined, of spirit unalarmed, of expectation
unimpatient: beautiful, even when based only as of old, on the
self-command and self-possession, the persistent dignity or the
uncalculating love of the creature,[23] but more beautiful yet when the
rest is one of humility instead of pride, and the trust no more in the
resolution we have taken, but in the hand we hold.
Sec. 5. Its universal value as a test of art.
Hence I think that there is no desire more intense or more exalted than
that which exists in all rightly disciplined minds for the evidences of
repose in external signs, and what I cautiously said respecting
infinity, I say fearlessly respecting repose, that no work of art can be
great without it, and that all art is great in proportion to the
appearance of it. It is the most unfailing test of beauty, whether of
matter or of motion, nothing can be ignoble that possesses it, nothing
right that has it not, and in strict proportion to its appearance in the
work is the majesty of mind to be inferred in the artificer. Without
regard to other qualities, we may look to this for our evidence, and by
the search for this alone we may be led to the rejection of all that is
base, and the accepting of all that is good and great, for the paths of
wisdom are all peace. We shall see by this light three colossal images
standing up side by side, looming in their great rest of spirituality
above the whole world horizon, Phidias, Michael Angelo, and Dante; and
then, separated from their great religious thrones only by less fulness
and earnestness of Faith, Homer, and Shakspeare; and from these we may
go down step by step among the mighty men of every age, securely and
certainly observant of diminished lustre in every appearance of
restlessness and effort, until the last trace of true inspiration
vanishes in the tottering affectations or the tortured insanities of
modern times. There is no art, no pursuit, whatsoever, but its results
may be classed by this test alone; everything of evil is betrayed and
winnowed away by it, glitter and confusion and glare of color,
inconsistency or absence of thought, forced expression, evil choice of
subject, over accumulation of materials, whether in painting or
literature, the shallow and unreflecting nothingness of the English
schools of art, the strained and disgusting horrors of the French, the
distorted feverishness of the German:--pretence, over decoration, over
division of parts in architecture, and again in music, in acting, in
dancing, in whatsoever art, great or mean, there are yet degrees of
greatness or meanness entirely dependent on this single quality of
repose.
Sec. 6. Instances in the Laocoon and Theseus.
Particular instances are at present both needless and cannot but be
inadequate; needless, because I suppose that every reader, however
limited his experience of art, can supply many for himself, and
inadequate, because no number of them could illustrate the full extent
of the influence of the expression. I believe, however, that by
comparing the disgusting convulsions of the Laocoon, with the Elgin
Theseus, we may obtain a general idea of the effect of the influence, as
shown by its absence in one, and presence in the other, of two works
which, as far as artistical merit is concerned, are in some measure
parallel, not that I believe, even in this respect, the Laocoon
justifiably comparable with the Theseus. I suppose that no group has
exercised so pernicious an influence on art as this, a subject ill
chosen, meanly conceived and unnaturally treated, recommended to
imitation by subtleties of execution and accumulation of technical
knowledge.[24]
Sec. 7. And in altar tombs.
In Christian art, it would be well to compare the feeling of the finer
among the altar tombs of the middle ages, with any monumental works
after Michael Angelo, perhaps more especially with works of Roubilliac
or Canova.
In the Cathedral of Lucca, near the entrance door of the north transept,
there is a monument of Jacopo della Quercia's to Ilaria di Caretto, the
wife of Paolo Guinigi. I name it not as more beautiful or perfect than
other examples of the same period, but as furnishing an instance of the
exact and right mean between the rigidity and rudeness of the earlier
monumental effigies, and the morbid imitation of life, sleep, or death,
of which the fashion has taken place in modern times.[25] She is lying
on a simple couch, with a hound at her feet, not on the side, but with
the head laid straight and simply on the hard pillow, in which, let it
be observed, there is no effort at deceptive imitation of pressure. It
is understood as a pillow, but not mistaken for one. The hair is bound
in a flat braid over the fair brow, the sweet and arched eyes are
closed, the tenderness of the loving lips is set and quiet, there is
that about them which forbids breath, something which is not death nor
sleep, but the pure image of both. The hands are not lifted in prayer,
neither folded, but the arms are laid at length upon the body, and the
hands cross as they fall. The feet are hidden by the drapery, and the
forms of the limbs concealed, but not their tenderness.
If any of us, after staying for a time beside this tomb, could see
through his tears, one of the vain and unkind encumbrances of the grave,
which, in these hollow and heartless days, feigned sorrow builds to
foolish pride, he would, I believe, receive such a lesson of love as no
coldness could refuse, no fatuity forget, and no insolence disobey.
FOOTNOTES
[22] Matt. xi. 28.
[23] "The universal instinct of repose,
The longing for confirmed tranquillity
Inward and outward, humble, yet sublime.
The life where hope and memory are as one.
Earth quiet and unchanged; the human soul
Consistent in self-rule; and heaven revealed
To meditation, in that quietness."
WORDSWORTH. Excursion, Book iii.
But compare carefully (for this is put into the mouth of one
diseased in thought and erring in seeking) the opening of the ninth
book; and observe the difference between the mildew of
inaction,--the slumber of Death; and the Patience of the Saints--the
Rest of the Sabbath Eternal. (Rev. xiv. 13.)
Compare also, Chap. I. Sec. 6.
[24] I would also have the reader compare with the meagre lines and
contemptible tortures of the Laocoon, the awfulness and quietness of
M. Angelo's treatment of a subject in most respects similar, (the
plague of the Fiery Serpents,) but of which the choice was justified
both by the place which the event holds in the typical system he had
to arrange, and by the grandeur of the plague itself, in its
multitudinous grasp, and its mystical salvation; sources of
sublimity entirely wanting to the slaughter of the Dardan priest. It
is good to see how his gigantic intellect reaches after repose, and
truthfully finds it, in the falling hand of the near figure, and in
the deathful decline of that whose hands are held up even in their
venom coldness to the cross; and though irrelevant to our present
purpose, it is well also to note how the grandeur of this treatment
results, not merely from choice, but from a greater knowledge and
more faithful rendering of truth. For whatever knowledge of the
human frame there may be in the Laocoon, there is certainly none of
the habits of serpents. The fixing of the snake's head in the side
of the principal figure is as false to nature, as it is poor in
composition of line. A large serpent never wants to bite, it wants
to hold, it seizes therefore always where it can hold best, by the
extremities, or throat, it seizes once and forever, and that before
it coils, following up the seizure with the twist of its body round
the victim, as invisibly swift as the twist of a whip lash round any
hard object it may strike, and then it holds fast, never moving the
jaws or the body, if its prey has any power of struggling left, it
throws round another coil, without quitting the hold with the jaws;
if Laocoon had had to do with real serpents, instead of pieces of
tape with heads to them, he would have been held still, and not
allowed to throw his arms or legs about. It is most instructive to
observe the accuracy of Michael Angelo in the rendering of these
circumstances; the binding of the arms to the body, and the knotting
of the whole mass of agony together, until we hear the crashing of
the bones beneath the grisly sliding of the engine folds. Note also
the expression in all the figures of another circumstance, the
torpor and cold numbness of the limbs induced by the serpent venom,
which, though justifiably overlooked by the sculptor of the Laocoon,
as well as by Virgil--in consideration of the rapidity of the death
by crushing, adds infinitely to the power of the Florentine's
conception, and would have been better hinted by Virgil, than that
sickening distribution of venom on the garlands. In fact, Virgil has
missed both of truth and impressiveness every way--the "morsu
depascitur" is unnatural butchery--the "perfusus veneno" gratuitous
foulness--the "clamores horrendos," impossible degradation; compare
carefully the remarks on this statue in Sir Charles Bell's Essay on
Expression, (third edition, p. 192) where he has most wisely and
uncontrovertibly deprived the statue of all claim to expression of
energy and fortitude of mind, and shown its common and coarse intent
of mere bodily exertion and agony, while he has confirmed Payne
Knight's just condemnation of the passage in Virgil.
If the reader wishes to see the opposite or imaginative view of the
subject, let him compare Winkelmann; and Schiller, Letters on
Aesthetic Culture.
[25] Whenever, in monumental work, the sculptor reaches a deceptive
appearance of life or death, or of concomitant details, he has gone
too far. The statue should be felt for such, not look like a dead or
sleeping body; it should not convey the impression of a corpse, nor
of sick and outwearied flesh, but it should be the marble _image_ of
death or weariness. So the concomitants should be distinctly marble,
severe and monumental in their lines, not shroud, not bedclothes,
not actual armor nor brocade, not a real soft pillow, not a
downright hard stuffed mattress, but the mere type and suggestion of
these: a certain rudeness and incompletion of finish is very noble
in all. Not that they are to be unnatural, such lines as are given
should be pure and true, and clear of the hardness and mannered
rigidity of the strictly Gothic types, but lines so few and grand as
to appeal to the imagination only, and always to stop short of
realization. There is a monument put up lately by a modern Italian
sculptor in one of the side chapels of Santa Croce, the face fine
and the execution dexterous. But it looks as if the person had been
restless all night, and the artist admitted to a faithful study of
the disturbed bedclothes in the morning.
CHAPTER VIII.
OF SYMMETRY, OR THE TYPE OF DIVINE JUSTICE.
Sec. 1. Symmetry, what and how found in organic nature.
Sec. 2. How necessary in art.
We shall not be long detained by the consideration of this, the fourth
constituent of beauty, as its nature is universally felt and understood.
In all perfectly beautiful objects, there is found the opposition of one
part to another and a reciprocal balance obtained; in animals the
balance being commonly between opposite sides, (note the
disagreeableness occasioned by the exception in flat fish, having the
eyes on one side of the head,) but in vegetables the opposition is less
distinct, as in the boughs on opposite sides of
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