chooses to exercise his imitative func- circumstance attaching to the realized tion. If, therefore, the child or the savage scheme, which did not enter into the cal chooses to imitate order rather than dis- culation of the theorist. For a practical order, it is a distinct evidence that the art like architecture, the influences that mind of the imitator delights in order; disturb the calculations of the pure theoand in this order we have, in fact, the rist are many and various; besides, we most necessary, the most simple, and the must consider that in some countries, as most universal element in the framework in Great Britain, the border-line that disof all beautiful structures.* If you ask tinguishes the architect from the mere whence this love of order proceeds, the builder has not been distinctly traced. plain answer is that it lies in the mind, The so called architect, in many cases, is just as the belief that two and two make like an empirical mathematician, who has four lies in the mind. The mind can no never been trained scientifically to prove more choose to delight in confusion than by severe deduction the truth of his init can choose to believe that two and two ductions, but who merely makes empirical make five. And this leads us to make a plunges into them, and has no security, single remark on the excellence generally even with the finest instincts, against the believed to inhere in mathematics-that grossest blunders; while the general pubit is the only science which deals in neces- lic either looks on the grossest violations sary and incontrovertible truth. Mathe of the eternal laws of the beautiful with matics is of two kinds, pure and applied. perfect indifference, or flings out hastily a That absolute certainty should be predi- mere I like or I dislike, as a sufficient subcable of the former lies on the surface; stitute for a reasonable verdict. Were the for, as pure mathematics is a science that elements of pure æsthetics as thoroughly consists of mere abstract suppositions and as systematically taught in the schools clearly defined, to the exclusion of all as the elements of arithmetic and mathepossible causes of disturbance, it is plain matics, no man could doubt of the absothat the category of necessity must belong lute certainty of the one class of primary to any chain of propositions which lies intellectual intuitions any more than of shut up in the definition. Each part of the other. But the fine arts are a luxury Euclid is merely a detached evolution of which only a few can enjoy, and only a what lies in the definite figure with which very few scientifically appreciate. Let us it starts, say, a triangle, a circle, a sphere, now revert to the consideration of order. a cone, or what you please. But in ap- Order, which is, as we have said, the plied mathematics which is the only fundamental element in all beautiful strucreal science as pure mathematics are tures, implies unity; and unity implies mere thinkable limitations of a reality-mind. In the formation of a circle or a disturbances and variations of various square, or any regular figure, there is a kinds constantly interfere, for which al- definite relation of every individual part lowance requires to be made. The infal- of the figure, to a definite point or points, libility of the science, therefore, ceases say the centre in a circle, or the two foci the moment it is applied to the measure in an ellipse; the parts are many, but the of a real thing; as we see every day that plan is one; and if in the drawing of such two and two eggs, for example, consider a figure the hand of the draughtsman shall ably smaller than the normal standard will at any time waver— - that is, cease to act not make four, but something notably in continuous consistency with the unity less, perhaps, only three. Now, this is of the idea from which it started, there is exactly the case with the theory of the a flaw in the figure. Now, it is an operafine arts. It happens any day that an tion performed every day in the arts and architect shall draw out the scheme of a in the conduct of life, to create order by building, to which no objection can be the subjection of various naturally inde made so long as it remains on paper, but pendent materials to a unity of plan and which, the moment it is transmuted into purpose, dictated by an intelligent unity stone and lime, becomes full of offence - which we call mind. In unity, therefore, an offence arising, it may be, from the and order as the result of unity, and both material, from the situation, or it may be as the necessary manifestation of mental from mere deficiency of cash, or any other action, we recognize the first fundamental principle of all æsthetical science, as inthe first book of Euclid. Of order in the fallibly as in the axioms and postulates of fine arts, symmetry and proportion are familiar names; of unity in objects of • Tò kaλóv év μɛyé0ɛl kaì tágel is the well-known dictum of Aristotle, where, of course, the μeyeoos is only the quantitative element, order the essential and constitutive. diverse nature, congruity or keeping is the expression most familiar to the popular ear. Nine in ten of the common objections that we daily hear made to a building, or to a lady's dress, or to the decoration and furnishing of a house, are examples of incongruity—that is, of the qualities in the parts which imply the absence of a presiding unity of conception in the carrying out of the original scheme. It is at bottom a want of thought and a want of mind; just as if, in a critical moment of a game, the player, not having his eyes open, should fail to play the stroke on which the success of the game depended; or, as if at a decisive moment in a great battle the commander-in-chief should become nervous and get into a flutter, and allow his line to be broken at a fatal point. But some one here will perhaps say, and say justly, are not this unity and congruity as necessary in the useful arts as in the fine arts, in an ugly bridge as much as in a beautiful bridge? and how can that be called a primary principle of the beautiful which is equally a primary principle of the plain and the ugly? The answer to this is twofold. Order and symmetry may no doubt be présent in an ugly body as well as in a beautiful one, but they are not present as constituent elements of ugliness; on the contrary, when contrasted with the same body in a state of perfect disorder, the bare elements of order which they possess would justly appear beautiful. It is not the order in a well-ordered, ugly object that made it ugly, but the ugliness of the materials to which the order is applied; as when we call a necklace, for instance, ugly of which the beads are of a dull, dirty, unkindly aspect, while the pattern according to which they are strung together may even be graceful. And when certain objects, whether necklaces or bridges, are generally presented to the eyes with an amount of tasteful decoration superadded to that constituent order and symmetry without which they could not exist at all, they will be called ugly, or at least plain, simply from the want of the embellishments with which they are normally accompanied. Mind there must be everywhere, in all intellectual products, whether beautiful or ugly; therefore, in some wise, wherever mind acts, unity and congruity cannot be absent; but the mind has various sides, various faculties, and various susceptibilities, and has to be addressed in various ways in order to appeal to those faculties and to stir those sus ceptibilities. The demand for the useful, which is primary in the practical mind, is satisfied when the structure produced by the plastic intellect attains its object as completely as possible; the utilitarian demand in a bridge is satisfied when the bridge is firm and solid, and affords an easy passage across the gap which it overspans. The faculty appealed to here is simply the constructive intellect, desiring practical means for a practical purpose. But a beautiful bridge or any beautiful object appeals to the imagination and the emotions connected with the imagination; there must be, therefore, in nature and in the constitution of things certain qualities which, being superinduced upon the useful, or mere fitness to achieve a practical end, create in the mind the pleasant sensations which arise spontaneously on the perception of a beautiful object. Now, the first fact we have to deal with here is that the imagination is a faculty which receives the forms of its action and occasions of its operation primarily through the senses; the senses are, as it were, the vestibule of the temple, in the inner shrine of which the aesthetical goddess dwells; and the primary form of the matter which she deals with, or her secret workshop of select construction, are pictures. What kind of pictures? Pictures, of course, of the various forms and states of external nature and human life, which are perpetually working their way up to the sensitive tentacles of the human creature in its course of expansion from babyhood into manhood; limited, no doubt, by the capacity of the recipient, but not therefore false: the limitation affecting the degree and the adequacy, not the certainty of the perception. Like the view of a landscape or a building from a par ticular point, it is the truth of the thing or of that part of the thing which the point of view renders possible. What we call vision, to speak with the metaphysician, is neither subjective truth wholly, nor objective truth wholly, but a harmony resulting from the concord of the two truths, as in music. Well, then, the pictures which the sense admits into the inner shrine of the imaginative sanctuary are, under this necessary limitation, all real, but not therefore natural in the artis tic sense of the word, much less beautiful. By natural in art we mean the normal type of things which nature always strives to achieve, but from various causes does not always attain; by the beautiful we mean the perfection of the normal type. Now, if there be anything essentially and by the divine constitution of things beau- | internal agency are proportionate to the tiful in nature-which we shall for the extraordinary forth-putting of divinely present assume — then, it is manifest that inspired creative energy from which they the divinely implanted instinct for the proceed. Such overwhelming manifestabeautiful, which we have shown to exist tions of divine force from within show at in the love of symmetry, lying in wait, as a stroke the vanity of attempting to exit were, to extend its sphere of enjoyment, plain the forces that shape the moral will, when stimulated into full action by world by any results derived from the the impressions of cognate forms from slow process of fingering induction. Inwithout, eagerly seize upon and select, duction can never prove anything conand with complacency dwell on, the ob- trary to the dictates of a well-regulated jects which produce these impressions, moral enthusiasm; on the contrary, the and in due season, by its own plastic en- external servant when wisely questioned ergy, begin to act creatively upon them. will always confirm the dictates of the Of course, we can imagine, and there may internal master; but induction can no exist, souls capable of perceiving only the more create morals than registered talent real that is carried to them through the of any kind can create genius. There is senses, without distinction between the a magazine of moral thunder and lightbeautiful and the ugly; but those who are ning in men of high moral genius, such utterly incapable of receiving delight from as Martin Luther and John Knox, which beauty as distinguished from reality, in can no more be born of the cold process some shape or other, are so few that they of induction, than out of the cawing of must be classed with the born blind, and rooks, the cooing of, doves, the purling of with the deaf and dumb, as incomplete brooks, and the roar of tempests could be creatures. But normally the intellectual manufactured the artistic creativeness of appetite for beauty is as universal and as a Mozart or a Beethoven. uniform as the appetite for healthy food; and as in the case of food the digestive functions must be in constant and vigorous action, in order to utilize the food; so in art the finely selecting and plastically moulding function of artistic genius must ever be present, in order to make the creation of a work of art possible. It is interesting to remark here how differently in different arts the parts played by the internal and external factors are apportioned. In landscape painting, the beauty presented to the artist in real nature is often so striking, so subtle, and so magnificent, that he has little to do in the way of selection or rejection; his art becomes purely imitative; and the more close the imitation, the more perfect the production. In music, how otherwise!-how little the stimulus of a few sweet sounds, which a holy Mozart may have received from without through the expectant avenue of the ear, compared with the Titanic force, ocean roll, and fairy-like subtlety of significant harmonies, which his awak ened soul poured forth from within! The part which the internal factor, the moulding mind, here plays in the case of a great musical genius, is precisely similar to the part played by some special apostleship in the moral world. Such an apostleship, as history shows, appears on the stage of social progress, once, it may be, only in a hundred or a thousand years; but, when it does appear, the changes wrought on the outward face of society by its mighty The question comes now to be asked, what are those elements in detail which, when superadded to unity and congruity, and appealing to the imaginative faculty, elevate a mere useful product of mechanical art into the region of the beautiful? The answer to this question involves no mystery. Let us take our original example, the bridge. the plain, solid bridge, the ugly bridge, the bridge of the railway contractors, how shall we make it beauti ful? First, we shall make it of a fair material, not dark and funereal, like the lava of which the German towns in the volcanic district behind Coblentz are constructed; for darkness is naturally hateful both to gods and men, and light is not only a joy in itself, but a divine necessity, absolutely requisite to make all things enjoyable. Then, you conceive a type of bridge, whether light or weighty, whether with plain or rich decoration, which may best form a natural congruity with the landscape, or the urban situation with which it comes into comparison; then, by what the architects call mouldings, you satisfy a demand of nature by distinctly marking off one part of the erection from another, so that the special existence and significance of each falls with more marked emphasis on the eyes. As to further decorations they will be pleasing in proportion as they are in perfect congruity with the general type; in so far as they are not overdone and do not overwhelm the principal in the accessory; in so far as they are delicately and nicely executed, | go a step further in my conclusions withfor all sorts of fineness and dexterity in out bringing in new and altogether differexecution afford pleasure to the mind in- ent elements from the existing world outspired by the God-given instinct of delight-side of my original point of view. For a ing in excellence; and in so far specially as the ornamental grows out of the structure and is not, as it were, stuck upon it; for all adventitious ornament is not only an untrue thing, in not being able to show any natural reason for its presence, but it destroys the feeling of unity, which we have already stated as primordial in all artistic creations; for a genuine work of art must always imitate the wisdom of the Creator in the compagination of that miraculous structure, the human body, from which no member can be taken and to which no member can be added, without destroying both the beauty and the serviceability of the whole. As a topping ornamentation of bridges, statues deserve particular mention; for, as the sphere of expression in pure architecture is much more confined than in the other fine arts, that ornament is particularly fitting which adds the interest of heroic achievement to the charm of aesthetic delight. On the bridge of the Main at Frankfort the statue of Charlemagne is in its proper place. Considerations of this kind make it amply evident how cheaply the pure mathematician purchases the boasted certainty of his conclusions. He owes his superiority to the meagreness, or say rather, the inanity of his material; he systematically excludes all actuality from his reasonings; and so can have no share in the richness, the variety, the luxuriance, and the marvellous concordant contrarieties of the existing frame of things. He lords it magnificently over his domain of abstract thought; but is weighed in the balance and found wanting the moment he has to do with the conflicting claims of manifold facts, spiritual and material. He is in this respect like the mere logician; and, as the logician from want of a rich experience of moral and intellectual life is often a poor philosopher, so mathematics, as Voltaire said, leaves the esprit where it found it. By deduction pure and simple from his primary assumption, the mathematician finds his way from point to point of his curious conclusion, without looking to the right hand or to the left; his intellect is in the position of a ball sent to roll down in a winding groove, which must go where the groove leads it. But when, in æsthetical science, I say that the primary postulate of all beauty is mental unity, and from that deduce order, or symmetry, and again congruity, I cannot man may justly say that there may be a unity and congruity of ugly things, as in a dunghill, or in a woman whose wryness of features perfectly harmonizes with the baseness of her character. Well, then, as we have just been showing, to the law of unity and congruity must be added the complete complement of things naturally and essentially, and, by divine right, excellent and noble; and it is precisely the richness and variety of these additions from without that confounds the untrained judgment, and causes the hasty thinker to despair of certainty in a science where the principles that can be laid down are constantly interfered with by contrary claims. But a very slight consideration will show that the contraries in æsthetics are not contradictions. There is no contradiction between the beauty of a rose and the beauty of a lily, between the gentle wimpling of an English brook and the impetuous sweep of a Highland cascade, between the soft roseate glow of a cloudless Egyptian sunset and the variously flecked beauty of a sunset in the vapor-laden sky of the west Highlands. But however great the variety be of existing objects that are all beautiful, and are adapted by natural kinship to please diverse tastes, there will be found in all of them some of those elements of things naturally noble and excellent, which elevate plain masopry into elegant architecture, or pedestrian prose into winged poetry. Light, as we have already noted, is naturally preferable to darkness; skill and dexterity to coarseness and crudeness of execution; decoration to bareness; strength to weakness; truth to falsehood; love to selfishness; luxuriance to meagreness; variety to monotony; significance and suggestiveness to unmeaningness of feature and shallowness of conception. But over and above these elements of natural nobility, there are certain great laws in the constitution of the universe, in its relation to human perception, which, if they are not constitutive elements of the beautiful, are at least so essential to its effective presentation in art that no masterpiece in poetry, painting, sculpture, music, or architecture can be produced without them. Of these the most notable are the law of novelty, the law of contrast, and the law of modera tion. That novelty, however impotent as a productive cause, is a potent spur to the appreciation of the beautiful, every-day knew that humanity without God is a monstrous conception, which, like a flower without a root, can have only an imaginary existence. To the wise Greek the exclusion of the beautiful from theology in its most comprehensive sense would have ap experience teaches; and, therefore, as the | Pythagoras to Hegel and Goethe, who best things in the world are amongst the oldest and the most trite, the great writer has been said to be the man who can say old things in a new way with the greatest effect, when and where and to whom he appears. Mere novelty, of course, divorced from "the eternal canons of love-peared unnatural. In modern times this liness," as Ruskin calls them, can produce only oddity of various kinds, as we see in the world of fashion, where a morbid love | of change is always at hand to usurp the throne of reason, and to juggle nature out of her most comely graces and most healthful proprieties. Of contrast we need say nothing; it is impossible in the nature of things that the effect produced by any acting influence upon any susceptible recipient should be as great when working in its pure absoluteness as with the simultaneous or closely consecutive presentation of its contrary. Moderation, again, or the nice balance between too much and too little, which Aristotle uses so effec-health and comfort. Nevertheless, the tively in his practical treatise on morals, is equally the law of the beautiful as of the good. In art, as in archery, the arrow which overshoots the mark misses as decidedly as that which falls short. There remains only one other remark to make, if we would place the science of the beautiful on its true pedestal alongside of the other sciences. The science of æsthetics, if founded, as we have endeavored to show, in the essential constitution of things in nature and in in the mind, must have its root in theology, is in fact, when traced to its fundamental principles, a part of theology, as all absolute science necessarily is. The true, the good, and the beautiful, the three categories under which the whole objects of human cognition are subsumed, are all equally human or equally divine: equally human in the estimation of those whose narrow speculation, from poverty of reverential sympathy, begins and ends with themselves; equally divine in the belief of all complete men, from Moses and • It is an unmistakable sign of the poverty of thought in the region of pure aesthetics prevalent among the writers of the last century, that they treat the whole subject under the three heads of novelty, beauty, and grandeur, placing novelty in the front, whereas, as we have shown, novelty is no constituent element of beauty at all, and grandeur is merely beauty-plus magnitude and power. The humorous again, valuable as it is for certain accessory effects, and especially powerful in certain departments of literature, being only an ingenious sport with significant incongruities, is altogether outside of the domain of beauty, though, no doubt, in the manner of representing the incongruous, there will be one sort of humor, which is graceful in its feature, and delicately suggestive in its conception, and another which is coarse and clumsy, exaggerated and shallow. exclusion has arisen, on the one hand from the unæsthetic character of modern European compared with ancient Hellenic culture, on the other hand from the prominence given in the Christian Church to the holy and the good, as the phasis of divine excellence through which Christian teaching has brought about the purification of the moral world from the sensualism into which the imaginative theology of the Greeks so naturally declined. This, of course, was quite necessary; the good being the element, the very atmosphere rather, which society must breathe in order to maintain itself in any degree of world is beautiful, nay flowing and overflooded with superfluous beauty in all directions; and the aboriginal savage, with whose germing aesthetics we started these remarks, whether he reasoned or not on the subject, would unquestionably be possessed by a healthy instinct that the same sort of law for decoration, which had compelled him to adorn his hut, was at work in the well-ordered garniture of flowers and fruits and stars, with which he found himself surrounded. He would feel, if he could not formulate, the identity of the plastic design which marshalled the stars, and diapered the fields, with the imitative and secondary art with which he had studied to clothe the bareness of his original place of shelter. Savages are in some respects better off than the devotees of special sciences in the advanced stages of social culture. That systematic divorce of the beautiful from the holy and the good, which has marked some modern Christian sects, could not have occurred to a healthy-minded human animal in the Homeric or pre-Homeric stage. In carrying out this unnatural divorce, the Scotch, as we stated at the outset, have been the most systematic offenders; an extreme section of them, even at the present day, having handed over the fine arts wholesale to. the Devil, or at least, with a rigid repulsion, insisted on keeping them out of the Church. The evil of this narrow policy is double; for, while on the one hand it renders the baldness of the Church service unpalatable to a considerable section of the middle and |