ANCIENT THEORIES.

15

Socrates first suggests that beauty may consist in the fitness or suitableness of any object to the place it occupies; and afterwards, more generally and directly, that it may consist in utility, -a notion which is ultimately rejected, however, upon the subtle consideration. that the useful is that which produces good, and that the producer and the product being necessarily different, it would follow, upon that supposition, that beauty could not be good, nor good beautiful. Finally, he suggests that beauty may be the mere organic delight of the eye or the ear; to which, after stating very slightly the objection, that it would be impossible to account upon this ground for the beauty of poetry or eloquence, he proceeds to rear up a more refined and elaborate refutation, upon such grounds as these: If beauty be the proper name of that which is naturally agreeable to the sight and hearing, it is plain, that the objects to which it is ascribed must possess some common and distinguishable property, besides that of being agreeable, in consequence of which they are separated and set apart from objects that are agreeable to our other senses and faculties, and, at the same time, classed together under the common appellation of beautiful. Now, we are not only quite unable to discover what this property is, but it is manifest, that objects which make themselves known to the ear, can have no property as such, in common with objects that make themselves known to the eye; it being impossible that an object which is beautiful by its colour, can be beautiful, from the same quality, with another which is beautiful by its sound. From all which it is inferred, that as beauty is admitted to be something real, it cannot be merely what is agreeable to the organs of sight or hearing.

There is no practical wisdom, we admit, in those finedrawn speculations; nor any of that spirit of patient observation by which alone any sound view of such objects can ever be attained. There are also many marks of that singular incapacity to distinguish between what is absolutely puerile and foolish, and what is plausible, at least, and ingenious, which may be reckoned among the

characteristics of "the divine philosopher," and in some degree of all the philosophers of antiquity: but they show clearly enough the subtle and abstract character of Greek speculation, and prove at how early a period, and to how great an extent, the inherent difficulties of the subject were felt, and produced their appropriate effects.

There are some hints on these subjects in the works of Xenophon; and some scattered observations in those of Cicero; who was the first, we believe, to observe, that the sense of beauty is peculiar to man; but nothing else, we believe, in classical antiquity, which requires to be analysed or explained. It appears that St. Augustin composed a large treatise on beauty; and it is to be lamented, that the speculations of that acute and ardent genius on such a subject have been lost. We discover, from incidental notices in other parts of his writings, that he conceived the beauty of all objects to depend on their unity, or on the perception of that principle or design which fixed the relations of their various parts, and presented them to the intellect or imagination as one harmonious whole. It would not be fair to deal very strictly with a theory with which we are so imperfectly acquainted but it may be observed, that, while the author is so far in the right as to make beauty consist in a relation to mind, and not in any physical quality, he has taken far too narrow and circumscribed a view of the matter, and one which seems almost exclusively applicable to works of human art; it being plain enough, we think, that a beautiful landscape, or a beautiful horse, has no more unity, and no more traces of design, than one which is not beautiful.

We do not pretend to know what the schoolmen taught upon this subject during the dark ages; but the discussion does not seem to have been resumed for long after the revival of letters. The followers of Leibnitz were pleased to maintain that beauty consisted in perfection; but what constituted perfection (in this respect) they did not attempt to define. M. Crouzas wrote a long essay, to show that beauty depended on these five elements, variety, unity, regularity, order, and proportion;

ENGLISH THEORIES OF BEAUTY.

17

and the Père André, a still longer one to prove, that, admitting these to be the true foundations of beauty, it was still most important to consider, that the beauty which results from them is either essential, or natural, or artificial, and that it may be greater or less, according as the characteristics of each of these classes are combined or set in opposition.

Among ourselves, we are not aware of any considerable publication on the subject till the appearance of Lord Shaftesbury's Characteristics; in which a sort of rapturous Platonic doctrine is delivered as to the existence of a primitive and Supreme Good and Beauty, and of a certain internal sense, by which both beauty and moral merit are distinguished. Addison published several ingenious papers in The Spectator, on the pleasures of the imagination, and was the first, we believe, who referred them to the specific sources of beauty, sublimity, and novelty. He did not enter much, however, into the metaphysical discussion of the nature of beauty itself; and the first philosophical treatise of note that appeared on the subject, may be said to have been the Inquiry of Dr. Hucheson, first published, we believe, in 1735.

In this work, the notion of a peculiar internal sense, by which we are made sensible of the existence of beauty, is very boldly promulgated, and maintained by many ingenious arguments: Yet nothing, we conceive, can be more extravagant than such a proposition; and nothing but the radical faults of the other parts of his theory could possibly have driven the learned author to its adoption. Even after the existence of the sixth sense was assumed, he felt that it was still necessary that he should explain what were the qualities by which it was gratified; and these, he was pleased to allege, were nothing but the combinations of variety with uniformity; all objects, as he has himself expressed it, which are equally uniform, being beautiful in proportion to their variety, and all objects equally various being beautiful in proportion to their uniformity. Now, not to insist upon the obvious and radical objection that this is not

18

THEORY OF HUCHESON.

true in fact, as to flowers, landscapes, or indeed of anything but architecture, if it be true of that,-it could not fail to strike the ingenious author that these qualities of uniformity and variety were not of themselves agreeable to any of our known senses or faculties, except when considered as symbols of utility or design, and therefore could not intelligibly account for the very lively emotions which we often experience from the perception of beauty, where the notion of design or utility is not at all suggested. He was constrained, therefore, either to abandon this view of the nature of beauty altogether, or to imagine a new sense or faculty, whose only function it should be to receive delight from the combinations of uniformity and variety, without any consideration of their being significant of things agreeable to our other faculties; and this being accomplished by the mere force of the definition, there was no room for farther dispute or difficulty in the matter.

Some of Hucheson's followers, such as Gerard and others, who were a little startled at the notion of a separate faculty, and yet wished to retain the doctrine of beauty depending on variety and uniformity, endeavoured, accordingly, to show that these qualities were naturally agreeable to the mind, and were recommended by considerations arising from its most familiar properties. Uniformity or simplicity, they observed, renders our conception of objects easy, and saves the mind from all fatigue and distraction in the consideration of them; whilst variety, if circumscribed and limited by an ultimate uniformity, gives it a pleasing exercise and excitement, and keeps its energies in a state of pleasurable activity. Now, this appears to us to be mere trifling. The varied and lively emotions which we receive from the perception of beauty, obviously have no sort of resemblance to the pleasure of moderate intellectual exertion; nor can anything be conceived more utterly dissimilar than the gratification we have in gazing on the form of a lovely woman, and the satisfaction we receive from working an easy problem in arithmetic or geometry. If a triangle is more beautiful than a regular

polygon, as those authors maintain, merely because its figure is more easily comprehended, the number four should be more beautiful than the number 327, and the form of a gibbet far more agreeable than that of a branching oak. The radical error, in short, consists in fixing upon properties that are not interesting in themselves, and can never be conceived, therefore, to excite any emotion, as the fountain-spring of all our emotions of beauty and it is an absurdity that must infallibly lead to others, -whether these take the shape of a violent attempt to disguise the truly different nature of the properties so selected, or of the bolder expedient of creating a peculiar faculty, whose office it is to find them interesting.

The next remarkable theory was that proposed by Edmund Burke, in his Treatise of the Sublime and Beautiful. But of this, in spite of the great name of the author, we cannot persuade ourselves that it is necessary to say much. His explanation is founded upon a species of materialism,- not much to have been expected from the general character of his genius, or the strain of his other speculations,- for it all resolves into this,- that all objects appear beautiful, which have the power of producing a peculiar relaxation of our nerves and fibres, and thus inducing a certain degree of bodily languor and sinking. Of all the suppositions that have been at any time hazarded to explain the phenomena of beauty, this, we think, is the most unfortunately imagined, and the most weakly supported. There is no philosophy in the doctrine, and the fundamental assumption is in every way contradicted by the most familiar experience. There is no relaxation of the fibres in the perception of beauty, and there is no pleasure in the relaxation of the fibres. If there were, it would follow, that a warm bath would be by far the most beautiful thing in the world and that the brilliant lights, and bracing airs of a fine autumn morning, would be the very reverse of beautiful. Accordingly, though the treatise alluded to will always be valuable on account of the many fine and just remarks it contains, we are not aware that there is