$225. On Uniformity. Shall we admit uniformity into our list of beauty, or first examine its real merits? When we look into the works of nature, we cannot avoid observing that uniformity is but the beauty of minute objects. The opposite sides of a leaf divided in the middle, and the leaves of the same species of vegetables, retain a striking uniformity; but the branch, the tree, and forest, desert this familiarity, and take a noble irregularity with vast advantage. Cut a tree into a regular form, and you change its lofty port for a minute prettiness. What forms the beauty of country scenes, but the want of uniformity? No two hills, vales, rivers, or prospects, are alike; and you are charmed by the variety. Let us now suppose a country made up of the most beautiful hills and descents imaginable, but every hill and every vale alike, and at an equal distance; they soon tire you, and you find the delight vanishes with the novelty.

There are, I own, certain assemblages that form a powerful beauty by their union, of which a fine face is incontestible evidence. But the charm does not seem by any means to reside in the uniformity, which in the human countenance is not very exact. The human countenance may be planned out much more regularly, but I fancy without adding to the beauty, for which we must seek another source. In truth, the finest eye in the world without meaning, and the finest mouth without a smile, are insipid. An agreeable countenance includes in the idea thereof an agreeable and gentle disposition. How the countenance, and an arrangement of colours and features, can express the idea of an unseen mind, we know not; but so the fact is, and to this fine intelligent picture, whether it be false or true, certain I am, that the beauty of the human countenance is owing, more than to uniformity. Shall we then

say, that the greatest uniformity, along with the greatest variety, forms beauty? But this is a repetition of words without distinct ideas, and explicates a well-known effect by an obscure cause. Uniformity, as far as it extends, excludes variety; and variety, as far as it reaches, excludes uniformity. Variety is by far more pleasing than unifor mity, but it does not constitute beauty; for it is impossible that can be called beauty, which, when well known, ceases to please: whereas a fine piece of music shall charm after being heard a hundred times; and a lovely countenance makes a stronger impression on the mind by being often seen, because there beauty is real. I think we may, upon the whole, conclude, that if uniformity be a beauty, it is but the beauty of minute objects; and that it pleases only by the visible design, and the evident footsteps of intelligence it discovers.

226. On Novelly.

Ibid.

I must say something of the evanescent charms of novelty. When our curiosity is excited at the opening of new scenes, our ideas are affecting and beyond life, and we see objects in a brighter hue than they after appear in. For when curiosity is sated, the objects grow dull, and our ideas fall to their diminutive natural size. What I have said may account for the raptured prospect of our youth we see backward; novelty always recommends, because expectations of the unknown are ever high; and in youth we have an eternal novelty; unexperienced crudulous youth gilds our young ideas, and ever meets a fresh lustre that is not yet allayed by doubts. In age, experience corrects our hopes, and the imagination cools; for this reason, wisdom and high pleasure do not reside together.

I have observed through this discourse, that the delight we receive from the visible objects of nature, or from the fine arts, may be divided into the conceptions of the sublime, and conceptions of the beautiful. Of the origin of the sublime I spoke hypothetically, and with diffidence; all we certainly know on this head is, that the sensations of the sublime we receive from external objects, are attended with obscure ideas of power and immensity; the origin of our sensations of beauty are still more unintelligible; however, I think there is some foundation for classing the objects of beauty under different heads, by a correspondence or similarity, that may be observed between several particulars. Ibid.

but slowly; and the greatest men have but gradually acquired a just taste, and chaste simple conceptions of beauty. At an immature age, the sense of beauty is weak and confused, and requires an excess of colouring to catch its attention. It then prefers extravagance and rant to justness, a gross false wit to the engaging light of nature, and the shewy, rich, and glaring, to the fine and amiable. This is the childhood of taste; but as the human genius strengthens and grows to maturity, if it be assisted by a happy education, the sense of universal beauty awakes; it begins to be disgusted with the false and mishapen deceptions that pleased before, and rests with delight on elegant simplicity, on pictures of easy beauty and unaffected grandeur.

The progress of the fine arts in the human mind may be fixed at three remarkable degrees, from their foundation to the loftiest height. The basis is a sense of beauty and of the sublime, the second step we may call taste, and the last genius.

A sense of the beautiful and of the great is universal, which appears from the uniformity thereof in the most distant agcs and nations. What was engaging and sublime in ancient Greece and Rome, are so at this day and, as I observed before, there is not the least necessity of improvement or science, to discover the charms of a graceful or noble deportment. There is a fine but an ineffectual light in the breast of man. After nightfall we have admired the planet Venus; the beauty and vivacity of her lustre, the immense distance from which we judged her beams issued, and the silence of the night, all concurred to strike us with an agreeable amazement. But she shone in distinguished beauty, with out giving sufficient light to direct our steps, or shew us the objects around us. Thus in unimproved nature, the light of the mind is bright and useless. In utter barbarity, our prospect of it is still less fixed; it appears, and then again seems wholly to vanish in the savage breast, like the same planet Venus, when she has but just raised her orient beams to mariners above the waves, and is now descried, and now lost, through the swelling billows.

The next step is taste, the subject of our enquiry, which consists in a distinct, unconfused knowledge of the great and beautiful. Although you see not many possess ed of a good taste, yet the generality of mankind are capable of it. The very populace of Athens had acquired a good

taste by habit and fine example, so that a delicacy of judgment seemed natural to all who breathed the air of that elegant city: we find a manly and elevated sense distinguish the common people of Rome and of all the cities of Greece, while the level of mankind was preserved in those cities; while the Plebeians had a share in the government, and an utter separation was not made between them and the nobles, by wealth and luxury. But when once the common people are rent asunder wholly from the great and opulent, and made subservient to the luxury of the latter; then the taste of nature infallibly takes her flight from both parties. The poor by a sordid habit, and an attention wholly confined to mean views, and the rich by an attention to the changeable modes of fancy, and a vitiated preference for the rich and costly, lose view of simple beauty and grandeur. It may seem a paradox, and yet I am firmly persuaded, that it would be easier at this day to give a good taste to the young savages of America, than to the noble youth of Europe.

Genius, the pride of man, as man is of the creation, has been possessed but by few, even in the brightest ages. Men of superior genius, while they see the rest of mankind painfully struggling to comprehend obvious truths, glance themselves through the most remote consequences, like lightning through a path that cannot be traced. They see the beauties of nature with life and warmth, and paint them forcibly without effort, as the morning sun does the scenes he rises upon; and in several instances, communicate to objects a morning freshness and unaccountable lustre, that is not seen in the creation of nature. The poet, the statuary, the painter, have produced images that left nature far behind.

The constellations of extraordinary personages who appeared in Greece and Rome, at or near the same period of time, after ages of darkness to which we know no beginning; and the long barrenness of those countries after in great men, prove that genius owes much of its lustre to a personal contest of glory, and the strong rivalship of great examples within actual view and knowledge; and that great parts alone are not able to lift a person out of barbarity. It is further to be observed, that when the inspiring spirit of the fine arts retired, and left inanimate and cold the

breasts

breasts of poets, painters, and statuaries, men of taste still remained, who distinguished and admired the beauteous monuments of genius; but the power of exe cution was lost; and although monarchs loved and courted the arts, yet they refused to return. From whence it is evident, that neither taste, nor natural parts, form the creating genius that inspired the great masters of antiquity, and that they owed their extraordinary powers to something different from both.

If we consider the numbers of men who wrote well, and excelled in every depart ment of the liberal arts, in the ages of genius, and the simplicity that always attends beauty; we must be led to think, that although few perhaps can reach to the supreme beauty of imagination displayed by the first-rate poets, orators, and philosophers; yet most men are capable of just thinking and agreeable writing Nature lies very near our reflection, and will appear, if we be not misled and prejudiced before the sense of beauty grows to maturity. The populace of Athens and Rome prove strongly, that uncommon parts or great learning are not necessary to make men think justly.

Usher.

$229. Thoughts on the Human Capacity. We know not the bounds of taste, because we are unacquainted with the extent and boundaries of the human genius. The mind in ignorance is like a sleeping giant; it has immense capacities without the power of using them. By listening to the lectures of Socrates, men grew heroes, philosophers, and legislators; for he of all mankind seemed to have discovered the short and lightsome path to the faculties of the mind. To give you an instance of the human capacity, that comes more immediately within your notice, what graces, what sentiments, have been transplanted into the motion of a minuet, of which a savage has no conception! We know not to what degree of rapture harmony is capable of being carried, nor what hidden powers may be in yet unexperienced beauties of the imagination, whose objects are in scenes and in worlds we are straugers to. Children who die young, have no conception of the sentiment of personal beauty. Are we certain that we are not yet children in respect to several species of beauties? We are ignorant whether there be not passions in the soul, that have

$230. Tasle how depraved and lost.

Let us now consider by what means taste is usually depraved and lost in a nation, that is neither conquered by barbariaus, nor has lost the improvements in agriculture, husbandry, and defence, that allow men leisure for reflection and embellishment. I observed before that this natural light is not so clear in the greatest men, but it may lie oppressed by barbarity. When people of mean parts, and of pride without genius, get into elevated stations, they want a taste for simple grandeur, and mistake for it what is uncom monly glaring aud extraordinary; whence proceeds false wit of every kind, a gaudy richness in dress, an oppressive load of ornament in building, and a grandeur overstrained and puerile universally. I must observe, that people of bad taste and little genius almost always lay a great stress on trivial matters, and are ostentatious and exact in singularities, or in a decorum in trifles. When people of mean parts appear in high stations, and at the head of the fashionable world, they cannot fail to introduce a false embroidered habit of mind: people of nearly the same genius, who make up the crowd, will admire and follow them; and at length solitary taste, adorned only by noble simplicity, will be lost in the general example.

Also when a nation is much corrupted; when avarice and a love of gain have seized upon the hearts of men; when the nobles ignominiously bend their necks to corruption and bribery, or enter into the base mysteries of gaming; then decency, elevated principles, and greatness of soul, expire; and all that remains is a comedy or puppet-shew of elegance, in which the dancing-master and peer are upon a level, and the mind is understood to have no part in the drama of politeness, or else to act under a mean disguise of virtues which it is not possessed of. Ibid. $ 231.

$231. Some Reflections on the Human

Mind.

Upon putting together the whole of our reflections you see two different natures laying claim to the human race, and dragging it different ways. You see a necessity, that arises from our situation and circumstances, bending us down into unworthy misery and sordid baseness; and you see, when we can escape from the insulting tyranny of our fate, and acquire ease and freedom, a generous nature, that lay stupified and oppressed, begin to awake and charm us with prospects of beauty and glory. This awaking genius gazes in rapture at the beauteous and elevating scenes of nature. The beauties of nature are familiar, and charm it like a mother's bosom; and the objects which have the plain marks of immense power and grandeur, raise in it a still, an inquisitive, and trembling delight: but genius often throws over the objects of its conceptions colours finer than those of nature, and opens a paradise that exists no where but in its own creations. The bright and peaceful scenes of Arcadia, and the lovely descriptions of pastoral poetry, never existed on earth, no more than Pope's shepherds or the river gods of Windsor forest: it is all but a charming illusion, which the mind first paints with celestial colours and then languishes for. Knight-errantry is another kind of delusion, which, though it be fictitious in fact, yet is true in sentiment. I believe there are few people who in their youth, before they be corrupted by the commerce of the world, are not kuighterrants and princesses in their hearts. The soul, in a beauteous ecstasy, communicates a flame to words which they had not; and poetry, by its quick transitions, bold figures, lively images, and the variety of efforts to paint the latent rapture, bears witness, that the confused ideas of the mind are still infinitely superior, and be yond the reach of all description. It is this divine spirit that, when roused from its lethargy, breathes in noble sentiments, that charms in elegance, that stamps upon marble or canvass the figures of gods and heroes, that inspires them with an air above humanity, and leads the soul through the enchanting meanders of music in a waking vision, through which it cannot break, to discover the near objects that charm it.

How shall we venture to trace the object of this surprizing beauty peculiar to

genius, which evidently does not come to the mind from the senses? It is not conveyed in sound, for we feel the sounds of music charm us by gently agitating and swelling the passions, and setting some pas sions afloat, for which we have no name, and knew not until they were awaked in the mind by harmony. This beauty does not arrive at the mind by the ideas of vision, though it be moved by them; for it evidently bestows on the mimic representations and images the mind makes of the objects of sense, an enchanting loveliness that never existed in those objects. Where shall the soul find this amazing beauty, whose very shadow, glimmering upon the imagination, opens unspeakable raptures in it, and distracts it with languishing pleasure? What are those stranger sentiments that lie in wait in the soul, until music calls them forth? What is the obscure but unavoidable value or merit of virtue? or who is the law-maker in the mind who gives it a worth and dignity beyond all estimation, and punishes the breach of it with conscious terror and despair? What is it in objects of immeasurable power and grandeur, that we look for with still amaze ment and awful delight ?-But I find, madam, we have been insensibly led into subjects too obstruse and severe; I must not put the graces with whom we have been conversing to flight, and draw the serious air of meditation over that countenance where the smiles naturally dwell.

Be

I have, in consequence of your permission, put together such thoughts as occurred to me on good taste. I told you, if I had leisure hereafter, I would dispose of them with more regularity, and add any new observations that I may inake. fore I finish, I must in justice make my acknowledgments of the assistance I received. I took notice, at the beginning, that Rollin's Observations on Taste gave occasion to this discourse. Sir Harry Beaumont's polished dialogue on beauty, called Crito, was of service to me; and I have availed myself of the writings and sentiments of the ancients, particularly of the poets and statuaries of Greece, which was the native and original country of the graces and fine arts. But I should be very unjust. if I did not make my chief acknowledgments where they are more peculiarly due. If your modesty will not suffer me to draw that picture from which I borrowed my ideas of elegance, I am bound

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