Gradual VariationBUT as perfectly beautiful bodies are not composed of angular parts,
so their parts never continue long in the same right line. [1] They
vary their direction every moment, and they change under the eye by
a deviation
continually carrying on, but for whose beginning or end you will find
it difficult to ascertain a point. The view of a beautiful bird will
illustrate this observation. Here we see the head increasing insensibly
to the middle, from whence it lessens gradually until it mixes with
the neck; the neck loses itself in larger swell, which continues to
the middle
of the body, when the whole decreases again to the tail; the tail takes
a new direction; but it soon varies its new course: it blends again
with the other parts; and the line is perpetually changing, above,
below,
upon every side. In this description I have before me the idea of a
dove; it agrees very well with most of the conditions of beauty. It
is smooth
and downy; its parts are (to use that expression) melted into one another;
you are presented with no sudden protuberance through the whole, and
yet the whole is continually changing. Observe that part of a beautiful
woman where she is perhaps the most beautiful, about the neck and breasts;
the smoothness; the softness; the easy and insensible swell; the variety
of the surface, which is never for the smallest space the same; the
deceitful maze, through which the unsteady eye slides giddily, without
knowing
where to fix or whither it is carried. Is not this a demonstration
of that change of surface, continual, and yet hardly perceptible at
any
point, which forms one of the great constituents of beauty? It gives
me no small pleasure to find that I can strengthen my theory in this
point, by the opinion of the very ingenious Mr. Hogarth; whose idea
of the line of beauty I take in general to be extremely just. But the
idea of variation, without attending so accurately to the manner of
the variation, has led him to consider angular figures as beautiful:
these figures,
it is true, vary greatly; yet they vary in a sudden and broken manner;
and I do not find any natural object which is angular, and at the same
time beautiful. Indeed few natural objects are entirely angular. But
I think those which approach the most nearly to it are the ugliest.
I must add too, that, so far as I could observe of nature, though the
varied
line is that alone in which complete beauty is found, yet there is
no particular line which is always found in the most completely beautiful,
and which is therefore beautiful in preference to all other lines.
At
least I never could observe it. 1 |
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