All these observations are just, and fully confirm the fact that natural beauty is simply a stimulus to æsthetic reproduction, which presupposes previous production. Without the previous æsthetic intuitions of the imagination, nature cannot awaken any at all. As regards natural beauty, man is like the mythical Narcissus at the fountain. Leopardi said that natural beauty is "rare, scattered, and fugitive": it is imperfect, equivocal, variable. Each refers the natural fact to the expression in his mind. One artist is thrown into transports by a smiling landscape, another by a rag-shop, another by the pretty face of a young girl, another by the squalid countenance of an old rascal. Perhaps the first will say that the rag-shop and the ugly face of the old rascal are repulsive; the second, that the smiling landscape and the face of the young girl are insipid. They may dispute for ever; but they will never agree, save when they are supplied with a sufficient dose of æsthetic knowledge to enable them to recognize that both are right. Artificial beauty, created by man, supplies an aid that is far more ductile and efficacious.
Mixed beauty.
In addition to these two classes, æstheticians also sometimes talk in their treatises of a mixed beauty. A mixture of what? Precisely of natural and artificial. Whoever fixes and externalizes, operates with natural data which he does not create but combines and transforms. In this sense, every artificial product is a mixture of nature and artifice; and there would be no occasion to speak of a mixed beauty, as of a special category. But it sometimes happens that combinations already given in nature can be used a great deal more than in others; as, for instance, when we design a beautiful garden and include in our design groups of trees or ponds already in place. On other occasions externalization is limited by the impossibility of producing certain effects artificially. Thus we can mix colouring matters, but we cannot create a powerful voice or a face and figure appropriate to this or that character in a play. We must therefore seek them among already existing things, and make use of them when found. When, therefore, we employ a great number of combinations already existing in nature, such as we should not be able to produce artificially if they did not exist, the resulting fact is called mixed beauty.
Writings.
We must distinguish from artificial beauty those instruments of reproduction called writings, such as alphabets, musical notes, hieroglyphics, and all pseudolanguages, from the language of flowers and flags to the language of patches (so much in vogue in the society of the eighteenth century). Writings are not physical facts which arouse directly impressions answering to æsthetic expressions; they are simple indications of what must be done in order to produce such physical facts. A series of graphic signs serves to remind us of the movements which we must execute with our vocal apparatus in order to emit certain definite sounds. If, through practice, we become able to hear the words without opening our mouths and (what is much more difficult) to hear the sounds by running the eye along the stave, all this does not alter in any way the nature of the writings, which are altogether different from direct physical beauty. No one calls the book which contains the Divine Comedy, or the score which contains Don Giovanni, beautiful in the same sense in which the block of marble which contains Michæl Angelo's Moses, or the piece of coloured wood which contains the Transfiguration, is metaphorically called beautiful. Both serve the reproduction of the beautiful, but the former by a far longer and more indirect route than the latter.
Free and non-free beauty.
Another division of the beautiful, still found in treatises, is that into free and not free. By not-free beauties have been understood those objects which have to serve a double purpose, extra-æsthetic and æsthetic (stimulants of intuitions); and since it seems that the first purpose sets limits and barriers in the way of the second, the resulting beautiful object has been considered as not-free beauty.
Architectural works are especially cited; and just for this reason, architecture has often been excluded from the number of what are called the fine arts. A temple must above all things be for the use of a cult; a house must contain all the rooms needed for the convenience of life, and they must be arranged with a view to this convenience; a fortress must be a construction capable of resisting the attacks of given armies and the blows of given instruments of war. It is therefore concluded that the architect's field is restricted: he may embellish to some extent the temple, the house, the fortress; but he is bound by the object of those edifices, and he can only manifest that part of his vision of beauty which does not impair their extra-æsthetic but fundamental objects.
Other examples are taken from what is called art applied to industry. Plates, glasses, knives, guns and combs can be made beautiful; but it is held that their beauty must not be pushed so far as to prevent our eating from the plate, drinking from the glass, cutting with the knife, firing off the gun, or combing one's hair with the comb. The same is said of the art of typography: a book should be beautiful, but not to the extent of being difficult or impossible to read.
Criticism of non-free beauty.