inly
the pursuit of this ideal by a process of selecting the best features
from many models and constructing a figure out of them as an ideal type,
was productive of very dead and lifeless work. No account was taken of
the variety from a common type necessary in the most perfect work, if
life and individual interest are not to be lost, and the thing is not to
become a dead abstraction. But the danger is rather the other way at the
moment. Artists revel in the oddest of individual forms, and the type
idea is flouted on all hands. An anarchy of individualism is upon us,
and the vitality of disordered variety is more fashionable than the calm
beauty of an ordered unity.

Excess of variations from a common type is what I think we recognise as
ugliness in the objective world, whereas beauty is on the side of unity
and conformity to type. Beauty possesses both variety and unity, and is
never extreme, erring rather on the side of unity.

Burke in his essay on "The Sublime and the Beautiful" would seem to use
the word beautiful where we should use the word pretty, placing it at
the opposite pole from the sublime, whereas I think beauty always has
some elements of the sublime in it, while the merely pretty has not.
Mere prettiness is a little difficult to place, it does not come between
either of our extremes, possessing little character or type, variety or
unity. It is perhaps charm without either of these strengthening
associates, and in consequence is always feeble, and the favourite diet
of weak artistic digestions.

The sculpture of ancient Egypt is an instance of great unity in
conception, and the suppression of variety to a point at which life
scarcely exists. The lines of the Egyptian figures are simple and long,
the surfaces smooth and unvaried, no action is allowed to give variety
to the pose, the placing of one foot a little in front of the other
being alone permitted in the standing figures; the arms, when not
hanging straight down the sides, are flexed stiffly at the elbow at
right angles; the heads stare straight before them. The expression of
sublimity is complete, and this was, of course, what was aimed at. But
how cold and terrible is the lack of that play and variety that alone
show life. What a relief it is, at the British Museum, to go into the
Elgin Marble room and be warmed by the noble life pulsating in the Greek
work, after visiting the cold Egyptian rooms.

In what we call a perfect face it is not so