§ 5. Variety. Why required.

§ 6. Change, and its influence on beauty.

ture commonly seems based on the principle of the unity of two things by a third, as Plato states it in the Timæus. § 11.

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 colours is by no means so agreeable as one of a single and continuous hue; the splendid colours of many birds are eminently painful from their violent separation, and inordinate variety, while the pure and colourless swan is, under certain circumstances, the most beautiful of all feathered creatures.1 A forest of all manner of trees is poor, if not disagreeable in effect; 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.3

2

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. § 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

2

1 Compare Chap. ix. § 5. note. Spenser's various forest is the Forest of Error. 3 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.

is the cause of it. For neither familiarity nor strangeness has 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, become a necessity:1 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 thews 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 § 7. The love of change. How found that they are the weakest-minded and the hardest-hearted men morbid and evil. 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

1 Καὶ τὸ ταὐτὰ πράττειν πολλάκις ἡδὺ — τὸ γὰρ σύνηθες ἡδὺ ἦν. καὶ τὸ μεταβάλλειν ἡδύ· εις φύσιν γὰρ γίγνεται μεταβάλλειν.-Arist. Rhet. I. II. 20.

§ 8. The conducing of va

jection.

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, riety towards or makes it perceived, its operation is found to be very precious, both in Unity of Sub- 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 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 con

2

ceived. Hence, in the cloister of St. Mark's, the intense, fixed, statuelike 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; and in St. Domenico of Fiesole, 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 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 colour, 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 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.

In Unity of Sequence, the effect of Variety is best exemplified § 9. And towards Unity of the melodies of music, wherein by the differences of the notes, Sequence.

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 § 10. The na

ture of Proportion. 1st. of

1 Fra Angelico's fresco, in a cell of the upper cloister. He treated the subject fre- apparent Proquently. Another characteristic example occurs in the Vita di Christo of the Academy, a portion. 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.

* The Predella of the picture behind the altar.

place between quantities 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; and this

1 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 thought