able to persist." And so it will be found that they are the weakestminded 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 beauty than its surviving or annihilating the love of change; a test which the best judges of art have need frequently to use; for there is much 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 for ever on the increase, a bread of the soul for which the hunger is continual.

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, are best seen by varied operation of them 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 differences, if removed, 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

§ 7. The love

morbid and evil.

of change, how

§ 8. The con

ducing of va

riety towards Unity of Subjection,

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 1; and in St. Domenico of Fiesole 2, that whirlwind rush of the angels and the redeemed souls round about Him at his resurrection, in which we hear the blast of the horizontal trumpets mixed with the dying clangour 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 any where 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 colour, vacant in invention, void in light and shade, a heap of cumbrous nothingness, 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 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

1 Fra Angelico's fresco, in a cell of the upper cloister. He treated the subject frequently. Another characteristic example occurs in the Vita di Cristo of the Academy, a series now unfortunately destroyed by the picture cleaners. Simon Memmi in Santa Maria Novella 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. Ambrogio at Florence, close by Cosimo Rosselli's fresco, there is a beautiful example in marble.

2 The predella of the picture behind the altar.

others turn their backs upon Him, to show their unagitated faces

to the spectator.

wards Unity of

Sequence.

In Unity of Sequence, the effect of variety is best exemplified § 9. And toby 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. Proportion is of two distinct kinds: Apparent when it takes place § 10. The nabetween quantities for the sake of connection only, without any tion. 1st. of ultimate object or casual necessity; and Constructive, when it has apparent Proreference 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 amongst 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

ture of Propor

portion.

the building. The proportions of a wooden column are wrong in a stone one, and of a stone building wrong in a large one 1; and this owing solely to mechanical considerations, which have no more con

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. Admiration has often been thoughtlessly claimed for the strength, supposed gigantic, of insects and smaller animals; as being 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 bulk 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; some allowance being made for the greater resistance of the air to the smaller animal, and other slight disadvantages. Hence all small animals can, proportionally, perform feats of strength and agility, exactly so much greater than those possible to 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 slender frames to the smaller tribes, and ponderous strength

::

nection 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 artificer 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, takes cognizance. The second is, the attribution of beauty to the appearances of Constructive Proportion. The third, denial, with Burke, of any value or agreeableness in Constructive Proportion.

§ 11. The value Proportion in

of Apparent

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 curvature. its nature.

We have already asserted that all curves are more beautiful than right lines. All curves, however, are not equally beautiful,

:

to the larger. So in vegetables, compare the stalk of an ear of oat, and the trunk of a pine, the mechanical structure 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 constructively, and ought to be so apparently even where the constructive expedients are capable of disguise and I have no hesitation in calling that unmeaning exaggeration of parts in St. Peter's, of flutings, volutes, friezes, &c., 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.