All these theories which refer beauty to order, harmony, and proportion, are at foundation only one and the same theory which in the beautiful sees unity before all. And surely unity is beautiful; it is an important part of beauty, but it is not the whole of beauty.
The most probable theory of the beautiful is that which composes it of two contrary and equally necessary elements, unity and variety. Behold a beautiful flower. Without doubt, unity, order, proportion, symmetry even, are in it; for, without these qualities, reason would be absent from it, and all things are made with a marvellous reason. But, at the same time, what a diversity! How many shades in the color, what richness in the least details! Even in mathematics, what is beautiful is not an abstract principle, it is a principle carrying with itself a long chain of consequences. There is no beauty without life, and life is movement, is diversity.
Unity and variety are applied to all orders of beauty. Let us rapidly run over these different orders.
In the first place, there are beautiful objects, to speak properly, and sublime objects. A beautiful object, we have seen, is something completed, circumscribed, limited, which all our faculties easily embrace, because the different parts are on a somewhat narrow scale. A sublime object is that which, by forms not in themselves disproportionate, but less definite and more difficult to seize, awakens in us the sentiment of the infinite.
There are two very distinct species of beauty. But reality is inexhaustible, and in all the degrees of reality there is beauty.
Among sensible objects, colors, sounds, figures, movements, are capable of producing the idea and the sentiment of the beautiful. All these beauties are arranged under that species of beauty which, right or wrong, is called physical beauty.
If from the world of sense we elevate ourselves to that of mind, truth, and science, we shall find there beauties more severe, but not less real. The universal laws that govern bodies, those that govern intelligences, the great principles that contain and produce long deductions, the genius that creates, in the artist, poet, or philosopher,—all these are beautiful, as well as nature herself: this is what is called intellectual beauty.
Finally, if we consider the moral world and its laws, the idea of liberty, virtue, and devotedness, here the austere justice of an Aristides, there the heroism of a Leonidas, the prodigies of charity or patriotism, we shall certainly find a third order of beauty that still surpasses the other two, to wit, moral beauty.
Neither let us forget to apply to all these beauties the distinction between the beautiful and the sublime. There are, then, the beautiful and the sublime at once in nature, in ideas, in sentiments, in actions. What an almost infinite variety in beauty!
After having enumerated all these differences, could we not reduce them? They are incontestable; but, in this diversity is there not unity? Is there not a single beauty of which all particular beauties are only reflections, shades, degrees, or degradations?