GRADUAL VARIATION.
But as perfectly beautiful bodies are not composed of angular parts, so
their parts never continue long in the same right line.[25] 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 a 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 for 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.