The definite principles of the art of music founded upon this law have been for ages so systematised that those who are instructed in them advance steadily in proportion to their natural endowments, while those who refuse this instruction rarely attain to any excellence. In the sister arts of form and colour, however, a system of tuition, founded upon this law, is still a desideratum, and a knowledge of the scientific principles by which these arts are governed is confined to a very few, and scarcely acknowledged amongst those whose professions most require their practical application.
THE SCIENCE OF BEAUTY AS APPLIED TO FORMS.
It is justly remarked, in the “Illustrated Record of the New York Exhibition of 1853,” that “it is a question worthy of consideration how far the mediocrity of the present day is attributable to an overweening reliance on natural powers and a neglect of the lights of science;” and there is expressed a thorough conviction of the fact that, besides the evils of the copying system, “much genius is now wasted in the acquirement of rudimentary knowledge in the slow school of practical experiment, and that the excellence of the ancient Greek school of design arose from a thoroughly digested canon of form, and the use of geometrical formulas, which make the works even of the second and third-rate genius of that period the wonder and admiration of the present day.”
That such a canon of form, and that the use of such geometrical formula, entered into the education, and thereby facilitated the practice of ancient Greek art, I have in a former work expressed my firm belief, which is founded on the remarkable fact, that for a period of nearly three centuries, and throughout a whole country politically divided into states often at war with each other, works of sculpture, architecture, and ornamental design were executed, which surpass in symmetrical beauty any works of the kind produced during the two thousand years that have since elapsed. So decided is this superiority, that the artistic remains of the extraordinary period I alluded to are, in all civilised nations, still held to be the most perfect specimens of formative art in the world; and even when so fragmentary as to be denuded of everything that can convey an idea of expression, they still excite admiration and wonder by the purity of their geometric beauty. And so universal was this excellence, that it seems to have characterised every production of formative art, however humble the use to which it was applied.
The common supposition, that this excellence was the result of an extraordinary amount of genius existing among the Greek people during that particular period, is not consistent with what we know of the progress of mankind in any other direction, and is, in the present state of art, calculated to retard its progress, inasmuch as such an idea would suggest that, instead of making any exertion to arrive at a like general excellence, the world must wait for it until a similar supposed psychological phenomenon shall occur.
But history tends to prove that the long period of universal artistic excellence throughout Greece could only be the result of an early inculcation of some well-digested system of correct elementary principles, by which the ordinary amount of genius allotted to mankind in every age was properly nurtured and cultivated; and by which, also, a correct knowledge and appreciation of art were disseminated amongst the people generally. Indeed, Müller, in his “Ancient Art and its Remains,” shews clearly that some certain fixed principles, constituting a science of proportions, were known in Greece, and that they formed the basis of all artists’ education and practice during the period referred to; also, that art began to decline, and its brightest period to close, as this science fell into disuse, and the Greek artists, instead of working for an enlightened community, who understood the nature of the principles which guided them, were called upon to gratify the impatient whims of pampered and tyrannical rulers.
By being instructed in this science of proportion, the Greek artists were enabled to impart to their representations of the human figure a mathematically correct species of symmetrical beauty; whether accompanying the slender and delicately undulated form of the Venus,—its opposite, the massive and powerful mould of the Hercules,—or the characteristic representation of any other deity in the heathen mythology. And this seems to have been done with equal ease in the minute figure cut on a precious gem, and in the most colossal statue. The same instruction likewise enabled the architects of Greece to institute those varieties of proportions in structure called the Classical Orders of Architecture; which are so perfect that, since the science which gave them birth has been buried in oblivion, classical architecture has been little more than an imitative art; for all who have since written upon the subject, from Vitruvius downwards, have arrived at nothing, in so far as the great elementary principles in question are concerned, beyond the most vague and unsatisfactory conjectures. For a more clear understanding of the nature of this application of the Pythagorean law of number to the harmony of form, it will be requisite to repeat the fact, that modern science has shewn that the cause of the impression, produced by external nature upon the sensorium, called light, may be traced to a molecular or ethereal action. This action is excited naturally by the sun, artificially by the combustion of various substances, and sometimes physically within the eye. Like the atmospheric pulsations which produce sound, the action which produces light is capable, within a limited sphere, of being reflected from some bodies and transmitted through others; and by this reflection and transmission the visible nature of forms and figures is communicated to the sensorium. The eye is the medium of this communication; and its structural beauty, and perfect adaptation to the purpose of conveying this action, must, like those of the ear, be left to the anatomist fully to describe. It is here only necessary to remark, that the optic nerve, like the auditory nerve, ends in a carefully protected fluid, which is the last of the media interposed between this peculiarly subtle action and the nerve upon which it impresses the presence of the object from which it is reflected or through which it is transmitted, and the nature of such object made perceptible to the mind. The eye and the ear are thus, in one essential point, similar in their physiology, relatively to the means provided for receiving impressions from external nature; it is, therefore, but reasonable to believe that the eye is capable of appreciating the exact subdivision of spaces, just as the ear is capable of appreciating the exact subdivision of intervals of time; so that the division of space into exact numbers of equal parts will æsthetically affect the mind through the medium of the eye.
We assume, therefore, that the standard of symmetry, so estimated, is deduced from the simplest law that could have been conceived—the law that the angles of direction must all bear to some fixed angle the same simple relations which the different notes in a chord of music bear to the fundamental note; that is, relations expressed arithmetically by the smallest natural numbers. Thus the eye, being guided in its estimate by direction rather than by distance, just as the ear is guided by number of vibrations rather than by magnitude, both it and the ear convey simplicity and harmony to the mind without effort, and the mind with equal facility receives and appreciates them.