t for many uses, nor
capable of expressing many ideas. The heroic couplet, now too
much derided, is a form of this kind. Its compactness and
inevitableness make it excellent for an epigram and adequate it for
a satire, but its perpetual snap and unvarying rhythm are thin for an
epic, and impossible for a song. The Greek colonnade, a form in
many ways analogous, has similar limitations. Beautiful with a
finished and restrained beauty, which our taste is hardly refined
enough to appreciate, it is incapable of development. The
experiments of Roman architecture sufficiently show it; the glory
of which is their Roman frame rather than their Hellenic ornament.

When the Greeks themselves had to face the problem of larger and
more complex buildings, in the service of a supernatural and
hierarchical system, they transformed their architecture into what
we call Byzantine, and St. Sophia took the place of the Parthenon.
Here a vast vault was introduced, the colonnade disappeared, the
architrave was rounded into an arch from column to column, the
capitals of these were changed from concave to convex, and a
thousand other changes in structure and ornament introduced
flexibility and variety. Architecture could in this way, precisely
because more vague and barbarous, better adapt itself to the
conditions of the new epoch. Perfect taste is itself a limitation, not
because it intentionally excludes any excellence, but because it
impedes the wandering of the arts into those bypaths of caprice and
grotesqueness in which, although at the sacrifice of formal beauty,
interesting partial effects might still be discovered. And this
objection applies with double force to the first crystallizations of
taste, when tradition has carried us but a little way in the right
direction. The authorized effects are then very simple, and if we
allow no others, our art becomes wholly inadequate to the
functions ultimately imposed upon it. Primitive arts might furnish
examples, but the state of English poetry at the time of Queen
Anne is a sufficient illustration of this possibility. The French
classicism, of which, the English school was an echo, was more
vital and human, because it embodied a more native taste and a
wider training.

_Aesthetics of democracy._

Sec. 27. It would be an error to suppose that aesthetic principles apply
only to our judgments of works of art or of those natural objects
which we attend to chiefly on account of their beauty.