What is obscure in plants, is utterly incomprehensible in animals, owing to the greater number of means employed and functions performed. To [§ 16. And animals.]judge of expedient proportion in them, we must know all that each member has to do, all its bones, all its muscles, and the amount of nervous energy communicable to them; and yet, forasmuch as we have more experience and instinctive sense of the strength of muscles than of wood, and more practical knowledge of the use of a head or a foot than of a flower or a stem, we are much more likely to presume upon our judgment respecting proportions here, we are very apt to assert that the plesiosaurus and camelopard have necks too long, that the turnspit has legs too short, and the elephant a body too ponderous.
But the painfulness arising from the idea of this being the case is occasioned partly by our sympathy with the animal, partly by our false apprehension of incompletion in the Divine work,[[21]] nor in either case has it any connection with impressions of that typical beauty of which we are at present speaking; though some, perhaps, with that vital beauty which will hereafter come under discussion.
I wish therefore the reader to hold, respecting proportion generally. First, That apparent proportion, or the melodious connection of [§ 17. Summary.]quantities, is a cause of unity, and therefore one of the sources of all beautiful form. Secondly, That constructive proportion is agreeable to the mind when it is known or supposed, and that its seeming absence is painful in a like degree, but that this pleasure and pain have nothing in common with those dependent on ideas of beauty.
Farther illustrations of the value of unity I shall reserve for our detailed examination, as the bringing them forward here would interfere with the general idea of the subject-matter of the theoretic faculty which I wish succinctly to convey.
[14] Compare [Chap. ix. § 5], note.
[15] Spenser's various forest is the Forest of Error.
[16] 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.
[17] Καὶ τὸ ταὐτὰ πράττείν πολλάκις ήδὺ`—τὸ γὰρ σύνηθες ᾑδὺ ᾒν` καὶ τὀ μετα βάλλειν ᾑδύ` εις φυδιν γὰρ γίγεται μεταβάλλειν.—Arist. Rhet. I. II. 20.
[18] Fra Angelico's fresco, in a cell of the upper cloister. He treated the subject frequently. Another characteristic example occurs in the Vita di Christo of the Academy, a series now unfortunately destroyed by the picture cleaners. Simon Memmi in Santa Maria Novella (Chapelle des Espagnols) 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. Ambrogiot at Florence, close by Cosimo Rosselli's fresco, there is a beautiful example in marble.